Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (review)

Peter Sacks has written an important and compelling book that dares to confront head-on the issue of class in America and its implications for how we are educating (or failing to educate) our young. Through a combination of rich descriptions of particular cases and concise recitations of the findings of major studies on the relationship between class and education, Tearing Down the Gates offers a strong indictment of educational policy and practices today.

Although he does not confine this indictment to colleges and universities, a substantial portion of the book is dedicated to exposing the ways in which "equal opportunity" for advancement through college is stymied at all levels of education. Anyone concerned about higher education must pay attention. Written with passion and clarity, Sacks's book takes us on a tour of the many ways in which lower-income, working-class, and first-generation students are denied a college education.

In the process, he manages to incorporate sociological theories such as Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital in a way that is refreshingly readable. For example, he contrasts the story of Ashlea, a young and talented working-class girl whose father asks, "What's a GPA?" with stories of affluent parents who oversee and effectively manage every step of their children's educational career. Sacks does a commendable job of linking differences in cultural capital—lowered expectations of success, for example—to real material inequalities. In other words, the poor lack a sense of entitlement because they do not have access to the same material resources, social networks, and political power as the rich.

The first part of Tearing Down the Gates is dedicated to these differences of power between rich and poor parents, and how those differences translate into qualitatively different educational experiences for the children. Parents like Ashlea's simply do not have the time or knowledge necessary to make local schools accountable to them in the same ways as more affluent, college-educated parents. Not only do elite parents more often volunteer at their children's schools, but they also have the pull to create new "public" schools to service their children more effectively, while excluding the children of the poor.

The second part of Tearing Down the Gates gives a vivid example of how this works in "liberal" Berkeley. Here, professional parents of students at Berkeley High School have done an excellent job of shielding their children from poorer students by creating elaborate tracking systems and new programs in the high school. Apparently, any time lower-income students manage to succeed in a particular program, the wealthy parents cry foul and move heaven and earth to create a new system that will more effectively ensure that academic tracks remain classed.

Here is one of the core problems uncovered by Sacks—the "two visions" at play in this country. The first, evident above, insists that providing open access to the best educational practices is wasted on the "less intelligent" and will also result in mediocrity. The second, opposing view, and the one that Sacks underscores, argues that public education should be democratic in practice, that there is a "public trust" involved in our educational system, and that tracking and special schools for the rich deeply violate this public trust.

So, too, do public colleges and universities when their admissions policies target rich students at the expense of the academically deserving poor, as described in Part 3 of Tearing Down the Gates. Many colleges, Sacks argues, are playing "the prestige game," using financial aid to lure the type of students they believe will improve their rankings now and perhaps donate money as wealthy alumni in the future. The way to gain prestige in this game is to become more selective, and no one has yet figured out a better way of demonstrating selectivity than using SAT scores, even though these scores have consistently been shown to...