Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality
Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality
Foreword
The book, authored by Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explores how educational categories create inequality.
Categorization: How Schools Enact Inequality
Case Study: Stan Sitwell's Color-Coded ID Card Program
Context: Stan Sitwell, principal of Horace Mann High School, faced declining student engagement with the annual California Standards Test (CST), despite its importance for the school.
He observed that students were highly motivated by incentives like varsity letters in sports, but felt that the CST lacked student-level incentives, stating:
The Plan: Sitwell, with a neighboring principal, implemented a color-coded student ID card program based on prior-year CST performance.
Platinum IDs: Awarded to students in the top proficiency bracket on all CSTs.
Gold IDs: Given to students scoring in the top two proficiency brackets.
White IDs: Distributed to all other students.
Requirements: Students were mandated to wear their IDs at all times and carry matching homework planners.
Social & Token Incentives: Banners with slogans like were displayed. Rewards included free admission to school events, lotteries for class rings, and access to in the cafeteria.
Immediate Outcome (Sitwell's Perspective): Test scores significantly increased, students began boasting about scores, and the cards shaped social dynamics (e.g., Platinum students' reactions to White-card students in honors classes, White-card students' frustration over cafeteria food).
Controversy: Two years later, a local newspaper uncovered the program, sparking outrage.
A local professor called the program Community groups threatened lawsuits.
The district disavowed knowledge and denounced the program.
The state department of education ordered its discontinuation, citing student privacy concerns.
Broader Significance: The authors argue that Sitwell's program is not merely an anomaly but illustrates a fundamental role of schools: as Schools create social categories and imbue them with social meaning, producing inequality.
This is akin to how schools use grades or offer admissions to honors programs, shaping identities and assigning labels that affect students' lives.
The creation of inequality may not always be intentional; often, categories are constructed for justifiable educational goals.
Case Study: Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise
Context (April 5, 1968): Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., third-grade teacher Jane Elliott in Riceville, Iowa, sought to teach her all-White students about discrimination.
Her aim was to help students (Peters, 1971, p. ).
The Exercise: Elliott divided her class by eye color, announcing: (Peters, 1971, p. ).
Day 1: Brown-eyed students were given privileges and quickly turned on their blue-eyed peers, creating and believing stereotypes. Blue-eyed children withdrew and their attitudes regressed.
Following Monday: Elliott reversed the roles, and the blue-eyed children, despite having just experienced discrimination, claimed superiority, while brown-eyed children became disadvantaged.
Outcome: Students immediately adopted and enacted group identities, even knowing it was a role-playing exercise. The experience, though painful, fostered a lasting understanding and empathy for discrimination.
Comparison with Sitwell: Both educators used their power to create categorical inequalities. Sitwell sought to create lasting identities for academic engagement, while Elliott aimed for temporary categories to foster understanding of American racism. Both fundamentally shaped student experiences and the social order.
Categories and the Grammar of Schooling
Schools as Category Construction Machines: Beyond teaching skills and knowledge, schools are fundamentally involved in the This work inherently creates inequalities and is crucial to modern educational systems.
Examples of School-Created Categories: Kindergartener, English-language learner, honor roll student, cheerleader, Ivy League material.
Reflection of Societal Categories: Schools also reflect, adapt, and reinforce powerful societal categories such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and religion.
Far-Reaching Consequences:
Citizenship: Formal schooling marks a person's potential for full membership in contemporary communities (functioning as a citizen).
Adult Life: Educational credentials profoundly influence career, earnings, living arrangements, civic participation, and even mortality.
Categorical Inequality Framework: The book utilizes Charles Tilly and Douglas Massey's framework of categorical inequality to understand the link between education and inequality. This framework highlights common social processes underpinning various axes of inequality (race, gender, social class, etc.).
It suggests that categorization and, thus, inequality are inevitable, but their scope can vary significantly, offering hope for building more just educational systems.
Categories: Origins and Implications
Human Tendency to Categorize: People are adept at creating social groups based on trivial differences and acting upon those distinctions, even if initially arbitrary (e.g., eye color in Elliott's experiment).
Social psychology research confirms that individuals identify with their own group and define themselves in opposition to others, even when group assignments are known to be random.
Formation of Durable Social Inequalities: These group memberships are the
Sitwell's ID cards exemplify this: Platinum card holders saw themselves as academic superstars, while White card holders felt like failures. This led to widening achievement gaps in attendance, behavior, and grades.
Sorting as a Central Task: Sorting students is a core function for nearly all schools, influencing societal inequality.
Reasons for sorting include honoring students (e.g., honor rolls) or facilitating pedagogy (e.g., Elliott's exercise).
Regardless of intent, categorization separates people, and because it inevitably leads to social inequality.
The Paradox of Education and Inequality
Education's Dual Role: Education is deeply involved in constructing categories that contribute to social inequalities, leading to skepticism that simply expanding educational opportunity will counter inequality (e.g., in the U.S., educational expansion has coincided with persistent social and widening economic inequality).
Critical Scholarship: Scholars like bell hooks and Henry A. Giroux highlight how political, social, and historical forces exacerbate social boundaries in education, creating and maintaining inequalities based on race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.
Schools formally enforce distinctions (e.g., segregation) and informally replicate hierarchies.
An intersectional perspective reveals how these axes combine to shape experiences.
International Perspective: The spread of mass education is linked to democratic governance and human rights. This is because basic access to formal education (the distinction between the schooled and unschooled) often correlates with distinctions between rights-bearing individuals and permanent underclasses.
The Paradox: Education is both a source of human rights, democratization, and liberalization, and a driver of profound inequalities.
John Meyer's Explanation: In his 1977 article, Meyer defined education as (Meyer, 1977, p. ).
Institutional Rules (Grammar of Schooling): These include formal policies and unwritten shared expectations, norms, and beliefs (e.g., separating students by classrooms, assigning trained teachers, defining curricula).
The "Great Equalizer" Fiction: Education ideally transforms individuals into capable of growth, asserting a fundamental commonality that transcends social statuses like race or caste. While profound inequalities exist within educational systems, the is powerful because it implies that outcomes accurately reflect individual abilities and merit. The legitimacy of education hinges on maintaining this fiction.
The Long Arm of Educational Inequality
Pervasive Earnings Inequality: Categorical differences in education lead to large, persistent, and well-documented inequalities.
Figure 1.1 (Earnings Distribution for U.S. Adults Ages 38-42, 2015-2019): This figure illustrates earnings distribution by educational attainment, showing clear differences across categories (Less than high school, High school/GED, Some college no degree, AA degree, BA degree, MA degree or higher).
Median Earnings: For workers without a high school diploma, the median annual earnings were approximately . Those with graduate education earned nearly more than high school dropouts.
Trend: Median earnings increase significantly with higher educational attainment.
Theories on Education Premium:
Human Capital Theory (Adam Smith): Education increases human capital (job-relevant skills), making workers more productive, for which employers are willing to pay more.
Signaling Theory (Skeptical View): Educational credentials primarily signal social group membership and legitimate associated advantages, rather than directly indicating skills.
Authors' Conclusion: Both theories likely explain a portion of the education premium, but categories play a central role, either by creating human capital inequalities or by communicating information about them.
Beyond Attainment: Educational attainment is not the only factor in earnings inequality.
Intra-Category Variation: Approximately 5 \text{%} of adults without a high school diploma earn more than the median adult with a graduate degree, highlighting significant variation within categories.
College Prestige: Graduates from highly selective colleges typically earn more than those from non-selective institutions.
Gendered Inequalities: Education also contributes to inequalities seemingly unrelated to it, such as gendered earnings gaps (women earn approximately as much as similarly educated men). Schools play an active role in policing gender boundaries and defining gender roles through practices like gender-specific bathrooms (reinforcing a binary understanding of gender) and gendered role models (e.g., disproportionately male math teachers, female elementary teachers).
What Lies Ahead: Book Structure
The book uses the categorical inequality framework to analyze the relationship between schools and inequality, focusing on categories schools create (e.g., bachelor's degree recipient) or co-create (e.g., gender).
Core Argument: All categories are inherently unequal, and the book prioritizes addressing unjust inequalities, particularly those based on ascriptive characteristics like race and gender.
Hope for Change: Educational categories are seen as malleable, originating from practices that can be altered, though changing them is challenging due to the complexity of the global institution of education.
Target Audience: Educational practitioners (scholars, teachers, leaders, policymakers), students, families, and other stakeholders.
Goal: To help readers understand connections between educational categories and social inequalities, envision different educational futures, and inspire reforms.
Part I: Sorting into School (Chapters 2 & 3)
Role of Schools: Schools gather children into a community of citizens, shaping their identities and teaching them rights and responsibilities.
They cultivate passions, skills, and career interests, forming individual identities and solidarity among peers.
High School Graduate Category: In the U.S., completing roughly and acquiring basic skills leads to the category, a baseline for full societal membership, offering privileges unavailable to individuals who have not been credentialed with a high school diploma.
Chapter 2: Details how schools became central in American society, bestowing the identity of and fostering a collective identity.
Chapter 3: Examines historical and contemporary examples of schools enforcing and expanding societal membership boundaries.
Expansion: Access was extended to women with limited opposition.
Restriction: During the Jim Crow South, access was blocked for Black and other racially minoritized individuals to deny them full citizenship.
Coercion: Native American boarding schools represent coerced schooling.
Ongoing Debates: Current debates over school access (adequate/culturally relevant coursework, literacy levels, transgender youth in sports/facilities) fundamentally concern whose lives matter, showing schools' dual roles in uniting individuals and maintaining social divisions.
Part II: Sorting within School (Chapters 4 & 5)
Pervasive Categorization: Schools divide students into separate and unequal instructional categories, an essential part of the These processes are often taken for granted.
Chapter 4: Argues that seemingly natural categorization processes, like age-based grades, obscure alternative organizational structures (e.g., mixed-age classrooms, skill-based grouping). Recognizing these alternatives reveals the power people within and around schools have over category enactment and related inequalities.
Chapter 5: Explores how educators exercise this power, focusing on math teachers' decisions for accelerated instruction in middle school. Four dimensions explain differing sorting systems and their implications for inequality:
Timing of sorting decisions.
Stakes associated with these decisions.
Criteria used to make and rationalize these decisions.
How resulting inequalities vary by features like category quantity and exclusivity.
Agency vs. Constraints: While educational leaders face constraints (stakeholder interests, external demands, maintaining legitimacy), systems evolve. Stakeholders can cultivate agency to influence the scope and shape of inequalities.
Part III: Sorting into the World (Chapters 6 & 7)
Creation of Meritocracy: Despite mass education's foundation on educability, schools sort students into value-laden, status-conferring hierarchies, forcing competition for distinctions that mark merit and worth. This forms an educational meritocracy that monopolizes merit creation.
Chapter 6: Discusses how education's legitimacy as an arbiter of merit relies on central myths:
All children start with equal chances.
The educational system provides reasonable opportunities to acquire merit.
Sorting processes accurately identify merit.
Schools employ elaborate rituals and adapt category creation to maintain this legitimacy, drawing examples from American higher education and historical civil service examinations in Imperial China.
Chapter 7: Contesting Categorization: Due to the profound impact of educational categories on adult well-being, categorization is constantly contested. Three forms of contestation include:
Individual cheating: (e.g., buying homework answers).
Collective resistance: (e.g., community groups broadcasting exam answers).
Formal rule changes: (e.g., mayors advocating to end test-based admissions).
Cheating, in particular, illuminates the boundaries and political work required to maintain merit-based categories.
Positional Nature of Merit: Merit is inherently positional (implies winners and losers). The authors advocate for investing in —where individual gains do not come at the expense of others—to move toward a more equitable future.
Part IV: Sorting toward a Better Future (Chapters 8 & 9)
Reforming Categories: Understanding schools as category creators is key to building a more just educational system. Changing schools requires changing categories.
Chapter 8: Divergent Visions and Logics: School categories reflect tensions between different stakeholders' visions (logics) for schools:
Solidarity: Fostering community and collective identity.
Self-actualization: Empowering individual growth and talent.
Efficiency: Optimizing resource use and outcomes.
The current system often overemphasizes efficiency and self-actualization while underemphasizing solidarity; balancing these logics is crucial for a better system.
Chapter 9: Ten Principles for a More Equitable System: Recognizing that all categorization involves exclusion and inequality, the focus is on creating incrementally better categories.
Balance Educational Paradigms: Achieve a more desirable balance among the logics of solidarity, self-actualization, and efficiency.
Recognize Political Nature: Acknowledge that all categories and allocation processes are political, not neutral, reflecting past and present decision-makers' interests.
Create Inclusive Processes: Incorporate diverse stakeholder perspectives in category construction and revision.
Redefine Category Meanings: Undertake the long process of changing what categories signify.
Redesign Category Assignment Processes: Implement new ways of allocating students to categories to alter their meanings.
Lower the Scope of Educational Categories: Move away from winner-take-all models and celebrate multiple dimensions of excellence.
Avoid Manufacturing Scarcity: Prevent the creation of bottlenecks and artificial limitations.
Divest from Positional Aspects, Invest in Absolute Goods: Shift resources from institutions focused on advantages gained at others' expense to those providing universal benefits.
Expand Educational Standards: Base definitions of school quality on a broad understanding of contributions to the common good, not solely test scores.
Cultivate Caring, Trusting Relationships: Foster strong relationships between all students and school personnel to create healthy communities.
Conclusion: Schools Can Build Better—and More Equitable—Categories
Central Belief: Deeper understanding of how schools reinforce inequality through categories is vital for building better schools and a more just society.
Mass Education as a Success Story: The authors view mass education as a major global success but believe it can do more to achieve its egalitarian goals.
Radical Hope: The categorical inequality perspective offers an antidote to determinism, highlighting the mutability of social inequality (akin to Malcolm X's aphorism: ).
This implies that sexism, class inequality, and ableism also evolve. The idea suggests that new, less problematic inequalities can be created.
Power of Practice: Educational practices create categories and their meanings. Changing these practices can fundamentally reshape categorical inequalities.
Challenges and Agency: While powerful forces perpetuate inequality, with imagination and understanding, it is possible to work towards a future where each aligns better with collective values.
Educator Responsibility: Educators have a particular responsibility to interrogate their power and develop practices to effectively confront unjust systems, working towards a more equitable future.
The book "Schooled and Sorted" by Domina, Penner, and Penner, argues that schools, through categorization, are fundamental in creating and perpetuating social inequality. Case studies, like Stan Sitwell's color-coded ID cards for test performance and Jane Elliott's eye-color exercise on discrimination, illustrate how arbitrary distinctions can lead to social stratification and impact student experiences. Schools act as "social sorting machines," producing categories (e.g., honor roll students) and reflecting societal ones (e.g., race, gender), which profoundly influence a person's citizenship, career, and life outcomes.
Despite education's role in promoting human rights, it also drives inequality. John Meyer's theory highlights that education classifies and allocates individuals, upholding a "fiction of equal educational opportunity" that legitimizes outcomes as merit-based. This leads to pervasive earnings inequalities tied to educational attainment, even influencing gendered wage gaps.
Part I discusses how schools define societal membership, with the "high school graduate" category being a baseline for full participation, while historically restricting access based on race or compelling it for Native Americans. Part II examines internal school sorting, like age-based grades and accelerated programs, emphasizing that these seemingly natural processes are choices that impact equity. Educators' decisions on timing, stakes, and criteria for sorting significantly shape unequal outcomes.
Part III explores how schools create an educational meritocracy by sorting students into hierarchies that confer status and worth. The legitimacy of this meritocracy relies on myths of equal chances and accurate merit identification, which are often contested through individual cheating or collective resistance. The authors advocate for investing in "absolute goods" rather than positional merit where one person's gain is another's loss.
Finally, Part IV proposes reforms. It suggests balancing the logics of solidarity, self-actualization, and efficiency in education. Ten principles for a more equitable system include recognizing the political nature of categories, creating inclusive processes, redefining category meanings, avoiding artificial scarcity, and fostering caring relationships. The authors conclude with "radical hope," asserting that inequality is mutable and changing educational practices can lead to more just categories and a more equitable society.