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CHAPTER 1 Introduction At 20 !years old] how do I picture myself? Married, going to law school, wearing my tight black pants, my hair pouffed out. I want to have a son by then. -Doreen, age 15, Italian American I want to be successful (in the futureJ. I do want to get married, but like I want to be successful. First I want a college degree, then a good job. I ain't gonna think about getting married. I could have a boyfriend here and there. -Aurea, age 14, Puerto Rican descent I'm going straight to college [after high school]. I'll be living in a dorm. Everything will be alright. I'll have my car. I'll be preparing for my career. J won't have no kids. -Saundria, age 14, African American I think you have to be an example [to your children]. When they grow up you're nOT gonna be sining around the house waiting for the husband to bring whatever you want. I'll have a steady job so I could bring home the money and my kids could learn that. ~Lucy, age 15, Colombian descent Above are the voices of young working-class women enrolled in an alternative high school in New York City.' This book is about them and their female classmates who made up the entering ninth-gtade class at Alternative High School (A.H.S.) in 1988. Since that time, all have entered adulthood, some bearing a high school diploma and entering higher education , and others leaving school prior to graduation to enter an increasingly unequal and contracting urban labor market. The focus of this book is not about why some of the young women graduated from high school while others did not, but rather how in one historical moment in time-a time in which the massive restructuring of the U.S. economy was resulting in profound changes in gender relations as women's labormarket participation increased, and at the same time, exacerbating existing disparities in resources between rich and poor and African Americans and Latinos and whites-young working-class women of different 1 2 CODES AND CQNTRADICfIQNS racial/ethnicl origins define the possibilities for themselves as adult women.J How did these young working-class women at this historical juncture (in which messages about women's economic potential compete with the realities of declining urban markets), understand the possibilities for their future adult lives and how did they construe the use of schooling in atraining those future goals? But most importantly, how are understandings of and possibilities for the future shaped by young women's experiences within various racial/ethnic communities and economic contexts? And, what is the role of their school in shaping and creating those understandings and possibilities? The answers to these questions and others raised in this book contribute to a small but growing body of knowledge on youth development from which new questions can be generated. For example, how do young adults at the end of the 1990s, especially white working-class and young adults of color, reconcile and understand the disjunction between their teenage aspirations and the realities of declining opportunities in adulthood? Only by documenting the lived experiences of different groups of young working-class women at one unique historical moment can we move forward toward a fuller understanding of how race, ethnicity , and social class shape the particular experiences of women throughout their lifetime. THE DROPOUT "PROBLEM" It has been well documented that urban working-class and minority youth drop out of school at disconcertingly high rates. In urban areas, approximately 50 or 60 percent of adolescents leave high school prior to graduation (Fine, 1989). In New York City, the percentage is even higher: youth advocacy organizations estimate that in some African American and Latino communities, up to 80 percent do not graduate from high school. Much that has been written about the dropout "problem" has atrempted to identify background characteristics predicting who will drop out, and to analyze schooling practices contributing to student "push out" before graduation. Very little research, however, has sought to understand either the students' perspective on dropping out or the social forces influencing their decisions to stay or leave. Ogbu (1978, 1982, 1994) has posited an explanatory framework (discussed later in this chapter) that links students' responses to schooling to larger sociocultural forces outside of school. Ogbu argued that the black students he studied were apt to construct beliefs about their future job opportunities by...

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