In order to understand thee barriers to educational equality faced by lw-income cultural and linguistic minority youth, we need to undertand the ways in which social class an dethnicity interact with language and culture. This paper examines various aspects of te relationship between students' cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgound and thier unequal access to educational opportunities.

Cultural capitial. Familiets that occupy differen places in society deploy different resources in school. The school rewards the language and socialization practices of upper- and middle-income families while systematically devaluing those of low-income families.

Classroom discourse. Students who enter school from linguistic and ethnic minority families often have had no experience at home with the special features of classroom discourse. This presents them with a special challenge; thier academic success depends on thier acquiring this special code.

School sorting practices. Students from low-income and linguistic minority backgrounds are often placed in low-ability groups and slow (general or vocational education) academic tracks, where they do not receive the same quantity or quality of instruction as students in high-ability groups or college bound tracks.

Educatiors and researchers are calling for change. Any attempts at cuuricular innovation, however, mut take into account the "culture of the school." The history of educational reform shows that attempts to change schools from the top down have met with resistance form educaitonal practitioners. To be successful, innovations must take the everyday working life of teachers into consideration. This means relationship between old practices and new ideas.

The prevailing way of conceptualizing multiple pathways to college and career segregates or “tracks” students into college prep or voc-ed curriculum. Recent research and public commentary have shown that tracking neither provides students with equal educational opportunities nor serves the needs of employers for a well-educated workforce. Recognizing that tracked schools are both inequitable and ineffective, educators have been exploring alternatives to tracking practices since the 1980s.

This paper focuses on one attempt to redefine and restructure the academic curriculum, pedagogy, and course structures of California schools into “multiple pathways” to college and career. The Preuss School at UCSD “detracks” its curriculum, i.e., establishes high instructional standards and presents rigorous curriculum to all students while varying the supports available to enable all students to meet high the school’s academic standards.

Detracking high schools can provide students with access to multiple pathways when they complete high school. By gaining access to a rigorous academic curriculum, they are well prepared for both college and career. This approach requires a school district to assemble a portfolio of schools, each with a different theme or focus (such as performing arts, science academies, interactive technology, etc.). When a district assembles a portfolio of theme-based schools, each of them rigorous, then students (and their parents) are enabled to choose from an array of possibilities. This form of curriculum differentiation aligns well with the democratic project of providing equal opportunities for all students to learn and to have significant life choices when they complete high school.

As inequality and segregation increase within the United States, schools are also becoming

partitioned off by social class in a way that reflects the spatial segregation of the local

neighborhoods they are drawing from. Several states have maintained creative efforts to

desegregate schools using programs to bus in students living further away, but low-income

students are arriving only to find they are often minorities in increasingly wealthy spaces.

Furthermore, low-income students, though few in number in these primarily wealthy schools,

are not a monolithic group, and should not be treated as such. This dissertation uses

structural characteristics of their friendship networks – particularly heterophily – as a

categorizing device with which to better understand the diversity of the low-income

experience for students who are attending wealthy schools.

I combine qualitative methods (in-depth interviews, focus group results) with quantitative ones

(surveys, network analysis) to study not only how low-income students’ experiences and

outcomes might differ from those of their wealthier peers’, but also how those experienced by

low-income students in heterophilous networks might differ from those experienced by

low-income students in homophilous networks. Over and over again, I find that low-income

students in heterophilous networks access information (presumably via their diverse

networks) that allow them to look like, sound like, and otherwise pass as some of their

wealthier friends by incorporating aspects of their peers’ cultural capital into their own toolkits,

thus demonstrating that social class is more plastic and malleable than previously assumed.

Low-income students in homophilous networks, meanwhile, are able to develop a

class-consciousness that allow them to not only talk more freely about their class injuries and

the classism they encounter on campus, but also to think critically about the structural ways

class and race play a role in their lived realities. In the end, however, the agency and

creativity low-income students exhibited in cultivating and maintaining different network-types,

and the consequent information they gleaned and acted upon from those networks, could only

take them so far; for bigger decisions that involved a significant financial outlay, social class

reasserted itself as a powerful force in limiting and curtailing their choices.

Tracking contributes significantly to the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. Ethnic and linguistic minority students from low-income backgrounds frequently remain in general and vocational education classes. As a result, they do not become eligible for college enrollment. Achievement Via Individual Determination (AVID), an educational reform program based in San Diego, "untracks" low-achieving ethnic and language minority students by placing both low- and high-achieving students in the same rigorous academic program. The program gives students explicit instruction in the hidden curriculum of the school–the implicit educational rules and expectations, such as knowledge about what courses to take for the college-bound, what teachers to take or avoid, the importance of tests, and how to study– and helps the students make the transition to college. The AVID program has successfully prepared under-represented students for college: from 1988 to 1992, 94% of AVID students enrolled in college, compared to 56% of all high school graduates (AVID Center, 1999). African Americans and Latinos enrolled in college in numbers that exceeded local and national averages (Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996; Mehan, Hubbard, Lintz, & Villanueva, 1994).

As AVID is being adopted by school districts through-out the country, researchers at the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) are examining the process by which a "design team," in this case AVID Center, exports its prototype of educational reform to new settings–three schools in California, two in Kentucky and two in Virginia. This "scaling up" study focuses on a) the interrelationship between multiple contexts of implementation, b) the degree of variation in the implementations of AVID guidelines at the new sites, and c) the contribution of institutional processes that facilitate or inhibit academic success.

This research builds upon work in the sociocultural tradition, especially Rogoff (1995) and Tharp (1997), who identify personal, interpersonal, and community levels or "planes" of interaction, and McLaughlin & Talbert (1993), who depict organizations in concentric circles, where the classroom is in the center, surrounded by the school, the district, and the community. It extends this work by explicitly calling attention to political and economic conditions that enable possibilities and impose constraints on education in general and school reform in particular.

In the late 1990s, less than a decade after feminist scholars directed attention towards girls’ educational disadvantage, public discourse in the United States began to comprise claims that boys are victims of educational inequality. Commentators argued that boys rather than girls are disadvantaged in schools. In this thesis I examine how two arguments construct boys’ “disadvantaged” status in schools and the impact of such constructions on definitions of and efforts for educational equality. I approach discourse as constitutive and political. I treat arguments about boys’ academic status as “gender projects,” ideological projects that construct gender dynamics in particular ways. Gender projects give particular meanings to gender, which shape understandings of equality and thereby ideas of how resources should be distributed. Further, gender projects compete to become dominant and therefore employ widespread meanings, beliefs and values to appeal to a broader audience. I employ Toulmin’s model of argumentation to analyze these gender projects, which allows me to examine how each argument’s components appeal to such widespread meanings, beliefs and values.

I identify the neoconservative gender project, which conceives of gender as biologically determined, and liberal gender project, which conceives of gender as primarily socialized. I find that neoconservative and liberal boy advocates’ different conceptions of gender contribute to different visions of gender relations. Neoconservative boy advocates maintain that boys and girls cannot and should not be the same, whereas liberal boy advocates maintain that boys have the same emotional needs as girls and should be socialized in ways that honor such needs. I critically analyze these gender projects in the context of contemporary sociological theories of gender as fluid, multiple and intersectional, and find that both articulations of gender center white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity. They also articulate masculinity as necessarily dominant. In doing so, they appeal to widespread beliefs in gender essentialism, values of freedom and equality, and meanings of educational equality as equity. This shows that ideological projects can and do employ progressive values and meanings (equity) along with other widespread beliefs (gender essentialism) and values (freedom) in ways that, if translated into concerted action, may ultimately dismantle progressive achievements.

We seek to understand the process by which a school incorporates or enacts an externally developed reform design. An externally developed school reform design is a model for school improvement that is developed by an outside design team. This team generally conceives the reform design; develops the principles, implementation strategy, and materials that accompany the reform; and sometimes provides training and supports that enable local schools to prepare educators to implement the reform. When implementation of a tested prototype program or design expands to many schools, the process is known as replication or, in the current educational reform literature, scaling up (Elmore, 1996; Stringfield & Datnow, 1998). Scaling up has proven to be a vexing and seldom successful endeavor (Elmore, 1996). We argue that this is due to a lack of understanding of the co-constructed nature of the implementation process.

Studies that treat the implementation process as uni-directional, technical, mechanical, and rational (Carlson, 1965; Havelock, 1969) do not fully capture how educational innovations play out as social, negotiated features of school life. Organizational models of school improvement that developed in reaction to these technical-rational models also do not suffice for understanding school reform implementation (see, e.g., Fullan, 1991; Louis, 1994). Because their focus is on school-level strategies for self-renewal and improvement, organizational models downplay the actions that initiated the reform and the governmental, community, and district actions that occurred away from the school before it attempted rejuvenation and renewal. Neither technical-rational nor organizational development models help us fully understand educational implementation, which we believe involves a dynamic relationship among structural constraints, the culture of the school, and people's actions in many interlocking sites or settings.

Our research builds upon work in the sociocultural tradition that has helped shape the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE), especially Rogoff (1995) and Tharp (1997, p. 12), who identify personal, interpersonal, and community "levels" or "planes" of interaction; and McLaughlin and Talbert (1993), who depict organizations as successively contextualized layers. We extend this work by explicitly calling attention to the political and economic conditions that enable possibilities and impose constraints on education in general and on school reform in particular. We also try to avoid privileging any one context in our discussion of educational implementation by showing the reciprocal relations among the social contexts in the policy chain.

We believe that formulating the reform implementation process as a "conditional matrix" coupled with qualitative research is helpful in making sense of the complex and often messy process of school reform. To illustrate our formulation, we report on two CREDE projects: a study of the implementation of six reform efforts in one Sunbelt school district1 and a study of the implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) untracking program nationwide.2 We hope that our formulation will be helpful to others studying the school reform process.

Before we trace the implementation of reform efforts in the schools involved in our two studies, we present the assumptions and premises that guide our research.

Latinos now make up the single largest ethnic group in California’s public schools (California Basic Educational Data System, 1997). Unfortunately, they also have the highest dropout rate of any ethnic group (Rumberger, 1991). These facts create an obvious challenge for a state attempting to reform its education system and raise its educational productivity. This paper reports on three projects in California that have attempted to stem the tide of Latino dropouts and increase the college-going rates of this population. The three programs we review here, ALAS, AVID, and Puente, have each tested a set of strategies aimed at increasing the educational achievement of Latino students. While the aims of the programs are similar, their strategies differ according to the segment of the population they target and the ways in which they deploy their resources. There are important lessons to be learned from these programs and their impact on students and their families. Moreover, it is critically important to the future of the state that California capitalize on efforts such as these, which have been systematic, grounded in research and theory, and evaluated under stringent conditions.

Recognizing the inequities caused by compensatory education, tracking, and ability grouping, educators are exploring alternative practices. In San Diego, one effort to break down the barriers erected by school sorting practices is to "untrack" students.

Untracking places previously low-achieving students (who are primarily from low-income and ethnic or language minority backgrounds) in the same college-preparatory academic program as high- achieving students (who are primarily from middle- or upper-middle-income and "Anglo" backgrounds). The "Achievement Via Individual Determination" (AVID) untracking program shifts education policy for underachieving students away from a simplified or reduced curriculum toward a rigorous curriculum with increased support for low-achieving students.

The San Diego untracking program has been successful in preparing its students for college: 48% of the 248 students who completed three years of AVID enrolled in four-year colleges, 40% enrolled in two year colleges, and the remaining 12% are working, traveling, or doing voluntary work. Parents' income and education are not responsible for the impressive college enrollment figures of these untracked students. Students from the lowest income strata enroll in four-year colleges in equal or higher proportion to students who come from higher income strata. Students whose parents have less than a college education enroll in four year colleges more than students whose parents do have a college education.

In our search for the reasons behind AVID's success, we found that AVI D coordinators explicitly teach aspects of the implicit culture of the classroom and the hidden curriculum of the school. They also mediate the relationship between families, high schools, and colleges. In Bourdieu's terms, AVID gives low-income students some of the "social" and "cultural capital" at school that more economically advantaged parents give to their children at home.