Customer Reviews

Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring

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Dr. Valenzuela's research compels me to continue my work in critical theory and ethnography. SUBTRACTIVE SCHOOLING contributes to the dialogue on the education and schooling of U.S.-Mexican youth. Moreover, the study can extend to the schooling and education of Latinas and Latinos in the United States. Our schooling demands struggle for survival both within and beyond the classroom/school setting, especially when the curriculum is lifeless and irrelevant to students' immediate reality.

Clearly, Dr. Valenzuela spent time with the students and school culture at Seguin High, documenting the push and pound urban students encounter to succeed. Researchers in education rarely document the daily struggles of U.S.-Mexican high school students, but Dr. Valenzuela succeeds in presenting their story, their plight, their journey, their turmoil against uncaring bureaucracies. She does this with respect for the students' voices and naming of their schooling experiences as expressed through critical research and an insightful ethnographic equation. Dr. Valenzuela's research reminds educators, learners, and researchers that they must reconsider their politics and practices of caring when working with young students and thinkers of Mexican origin.

Valenzuela presents us with a study of both U.S. born and Mexican born students within American public schools. She is sincere, honest, and thorough. She studies teacher-student dynamics, and how many students are given the impression that teachers do not care how they fare in school. She also studies rifts between U.S. born and Mexican born students and the effect it has on both groups. She also brings up a very important issue about Mexican students who refuse to excel academically. She is the first person I've read who accurately labels this as "passive resistance". This is VERY IMPORTANT, because a lot of people have misconceptions about why many of us Mexicans do not perform well in school.
She uses student quotes and classroom observations to illustrate what these students are feeling and experiencing. It's obvious that the students trusted and respected her, and that she felt the same about them. Valenzuela does an excellent job here and I think all teachers should read this to get a better understanding of their students.

From the other reviews, you know her book won an award and what it's about, so let me also say in case you're debating about buying it that it's written in a very readable style. I feel it's more interesting (or easier to keep going in) than a lot of sociology books that get tiring after a while. She has plenty of interestingly written snapshots of conversations and details of life in the school, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that she tended to give us the student responses in both Spanish and English. I learned a lot of cool nuances in the language that way!

OK, I have to start out by saying that I get the whole ethnic studies thing. I majored in liberal studies and am actually pretty sympathetic to the dialogue on class/race/gender/culture politics dynamics. It's much of why I got into teaching. There is a lot of inequality and oppression in society, with poor schools as the front lines. I blog about it frequently, and live it daily in my science class at an alternative education school, where most students are poor, minority and otherwise disadvantaged.

But the problem with this book, and the mentality behind it that was so in vogue 20 years ago, is that it misses larger issues in society, and ironically contributes to those problems not getting addressed. This school of thought basically believes that racism and cultural imperialism are what are keeping minority students down. Now, if you take a hugely macro view, and look at history going back centuries, yes, it does originate in active racism. But the problem today is not racism, or biased teachers, or biased curriculum. It is a lack of human and social capital development. Minorities are not disproportionately failing in school, in prisons, or stuck low paying jobs because of discrimination. They are there because of a structural inertia that has sapped their communities of social resources for so long that children are growing up without the kind of cognitively rich and stimulating, loving environments that create successful adults.

This isn't about their culture (well, mostly - there is an issue of identity and defiance there, but it is rooted in larger structural impediments). Black or Hispanic culture is perfectly suited for academic, middle class success. The ethnic studies school from which Valenzuela hails actually has more in common than it realizes in the actual white cultural conservative nationalists who would denigrate minority ethnicities by blaming their lack of success on an intrinsic incompatibility with middle-class, "Western" values. This is poppycock. The lack of success isn't to do with ethnicity, but lack of knowledge and social capital with which to leverage their families out of the ghetto. When 16 year old girls get pregnant and the dads run away, and the grandmother can't offer much support, the child gets raised in a woefully inadequate household. I see this daily in my classroom.

So, is it their fault? Hell no! They are completely disadvantaged and caught up in a system which is a direct descendant of racism. But it is also a natural byproduct of capitalism and the tendency for property values to create geographic ghettos, with correlative low levels of human and social capital. All the poor kids get shunted into the same schools. Their parents are struggling. They are struggling. There is stress. There is tension. Parents work crappy jobs. Kids resent society and feels like outsiders. They rebel in any way they can - which for boys often means fighting and gangs, and for girls it means having babies. For everyone it means getting high and not doing their work.

But this is an old story. It is the story of the underclass. Poor minorities are no different from poor whites. Poor whites have it easier in many ways, but many of the exact same disadvantages in human and social capital play out the same way. The old ethnic school doesn't realize it undercuts this larger issue by narrowing its gaze and playing guilt politics.

Look at what is happening to teachers in America today. Conservatives love to blame the government and unions, not to mention poor people themselves, instead of larger structural problems that trap the poor and hold them down. Liberals, having bought into much of the ethnic studies framing, wish to take a sort of noble savage view of minorities, and pretend that if only teachers would "care more", as Valenzuela might have put it, the achievement gap between whites and minorities in education would close. But by far most teachers do care. You wouldn't last more than a year or two in a poor school, dealing with that population of students if you didn't care. Sure, most teachers are still white. But the vast majority of us care deeply for and empathize deeply with our students.

But we can't do it on our own, with budgets slashed, and class sizes ballooning. There needs to be a larger national dialogue. Not on race, or ethnicity. I think we're actually doing OK there. But we still won't talk about class, and how it sets up generation after generation of kids to fail, especially those historically discriminated against and disenfranchised. Poor schools need massive investments that will dramatically reduce class sizes and pay for enrichment activities that their community just can't afford. Poor mothers need home visits from nurses and social workers who will help guide them toward better education and parenting practices. More than anything, poor kids feel like no one outside their community cares about them, and that the world is against them. They take their frustration out on individuals, not understanding the bigger picture of what is really conspiring to force them down. But individuals are actually pretty OK. It is the system we much change, and demand that real policies be put in place that guarantee more help for struggling communities.

[...]

I was so ready to love this book. As a teacher with predominantly Mexican-American students, I am very concerned about their success and I hoped to learn and understand.

Instead, I was exposed to shoddy research and theory. Valenzuela's agenda was so upfront throughout all her research and analysis that she never paused to consider other explanations. In the words of Non Sequitur comics of late, she is a "preconceptual scientist." She makes sweeping generalizations and accusations which are not supported in her data. She leads her informants' answers, she jumps on the anti-school bandwagon, and she doesn't do her background research - such as developing theory of caring.

I like the premise, which is why I was so very disappointed at the extremely weak scholarship that this book represents. Her heart is in the right place, and it's where my heart is, too - but that is never an excuse for such sloppy research and theory.

Subtractive Schooling was written by Angela Valenzuela after she completed an ethnographic study of schooling conditions in an inner-city Houston high school. The high school was majority Mexican and Mexican-American students. She investigated the differences between immigrant student achievement and that of U.S.-born Mexican students to understand why immigrant students consistently out perform their peers. Her study revealed cultural differences between the Anglo and Mexican understandings of what education should be, indicating that white teachers what students to care about school while Mexican students wanted to feel like their teachers authentically cared about them as people. The schooling practices tended to degrade the Mexican culture and Spanish language which has ultimately led to the subraction of culture resources of Mexican students, particularly those students who are later generation U.S.-born and have felt the impact of the dominant culture on their lives longer than recently immigrated students. This book is a worthwhile read as it gives great insight into how schooling practices themselves contribute to the underachievement of certain student groups and shows the impact that true multicultural education can have on the learning environment.

I used this book as an analysis point for a conflict I witnessed at a school where I work. Although it's hard to match the exact circumstances of the school where Valenzuela did her research, a lot of her insights are applicable to Latinos in general. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the disproportionate failure rates of Latino students in America's school. I recommend this book if only it is a starting point for you to better understand what's going on with these particular children.

This book is well written and gives the reader an insight on what it is REALLY like for the kids who can't identify with the school system, and thus end failing. Through its ethnographic account this book demonstrates that some kids might not be making the grade but in reality are just as smart as those who are.

A good read for Sociologist and teachers trying to understand the way students see the school systems that are set up to pass those complying with the rules.