In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

About the Author
Jessica McCrory Calarco is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University.

Reviews
The productiveness of Calarco's work in raising fundamental questions is clear. By highlighting the agency of young children in navigating ambiguous social interactions, Negotiating Opportunities should encourage us all to push for accounts of inequality that recognize that mobility projects often entail navigating structural contexts in the absence of clear rules or guidance. * Michelle Jackson, Stanford University, American Journal of Sociology *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2020 Bourdieu Best Book Award Winner of the 2019 North Central Sociological Association's Scholarly Achievement Award.



Book Information
ISBN 9780190634445
Author Jessica McCrory Calarco
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 386g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 15mm