Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture

Afterword

127 Afterword The ideas that formed this project bgean long before I was an academic sociologist . Freshly out of college, I joined the Peace Corps to teach English in Latvia on the Baltic Sea. In a small town called Limbaži I set about trying to learn teaching norms in a Latvian high school. It was not easy. I was faced with an entirely new set of ideas about how to grade student work. My Latvian colleagues believed that it was important to assess the knowledge that students carried around in their heads all the time, not just on test day after they had been cramming ideas into their short-term memories. This struck me as terribly unfair. Raised in California public schools and steeped in U.S. norms of how to grade schoolwork, I wanted to grade my Latvian students as I had always been graded. But I gradually realized that grading, like almost everything else, is culturally relative and that the American way is not necessarily the best way. These experiences pushed me to ask questions about the meaning of school grades that I had not thought about before. If Latvian grades captured the information that you actually retained, those ideas and details that you could pull up at any moment in a discussion, were those grades better, more holistic measures of your learning? Did receiving good grades in school in Latvia versus the United States make students feel different about themselves? What about bad grades? Growing up, I understood that good grades conferred positive moral status on a student, a status I enjoyed throughout my educational career. Not only were straight As a signal to the world that you were smart, they also meant you were a good kid. Conversely, bad grades signaled a moral failing. Someone who got Ds and Fs was not just a bad student but also a bad person. Now I started to wonder if this was everyone’s understanding of grades in the United States or if it might be limited to people like me who got straight As. These questions stayed with me after I returned from the Peace Corps and began graduate work in sociology. 128 DEFINING STUDENT SUCCESS I wanted to study grades from students’ perspectives. What did grades say about who they were as people? As my project developed, I learned that high school students’ success identities are often tied to their future aspirations for college. This was uncertain territory for me because I realized that my own college-going experience had been shamefully uninformed. Although I had attended a lovely small liberal arts college and received an excellent education, I had actually stumbled upon that happy outcome instead of carefully and purposely pursuing my best college options as most other people apparently had. My decisions were not haphazard; they made the most sense at the time, given the college knowledge that I had access to. I simply did not have any people in my life to guide me. Yet I was not the first person in my family to go to college. My mother has a bachelor’s degree and my older sister was a sophomore on a UC campus. As a high-achieving student in a middle-class neighborhood school, I was surrounded by friends and classmates who were planning to go to college. Yet somehow I missed all the insider knowledge that (I found out later) my friends all knew. For example, no one explained the importance of visiting college campuses. It sounded expensive and difficult to arrange, so I did not do it. Applications were also expensive, so I applied to only three schools: UC San Diego and Stanford (both based on reputation) and Whittier College, which I had never heard of before but which sent me great promotional material and really seemed to want me there. No one helped me with my applications. This was a mistake. I was rejected from UC San Diego because I did not submit a transcript. My guidance counselor (whom I had never met before that day) pulled me out of class to tell me that she had found out about the missing transcript and was faxing one over right away. I stood in her office, watching as she frantically stamped the school seal onto a large blue paper. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I did not know what a transcript was. I just nodded and thanked her. The application had undoubtedly instructed...