Mind the Gap: How Economically Disadvantaged Students Navigate Elite Private Schools in Ontario

MIND THE GAP: HOW ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS NAVIGATE ELITE PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN ONTARIO

William George Peat

A dissertation submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

MIND THE GAP: HOW ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS NAVIGATE ELITE PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN ONTARIO William George Peat Doctor of Philosophy Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education University of Toronto 2020

Abstract

“Mind the gap” is a qualitative study rooted in the sociology of education, dealing with educational inequality in Canada. It asked: what is the experience of working-class students in elite secondary schools, and are the benefits of achieving social mobility worth the costs? In a country whose populace has long seen itself as middle class, but where social inequality is a growing concern and social mobility increasingly rare, the study examined the journey of three working-class students seeking to become upwardly mobile by attending elite private schools in

Ontario. The study examined their experiences, and employed a combination of semistructured, in-depth interviews, and follow-up conversations. It also drew on relationships that formed as a result of them, as well as on the researcher’s knowledge of the culture of the schools the students attended. In addition, it drew upon the lived experience of the researcher, who shares similar elements of the participants’ socioeconomic background. The data produced was used to develop literary and visual portraits. The process was collaborative and enabled the participants to become co-creators in the creation of their portraits, which were subject to analyses.

More broadly, the study examined the ways in which the participants acquired social capital, and the role this capital played facilitating the acquisition of the Three C’s (credentials, connections, confidence), and personal agency. It explored the ways the participants’ social networks evolved.

It revealed that the unconditional support of the participants’ families mediated their experience

of habitus clivé, and that elite private schools provided a pathway to become socially mobile.

The study affirmed that the benefits of achieving social mobility outweighed the costs, whether they were psychic, social, or financial. It also identified trace elements of class status that endured, and demonstrated that elite schools served as incubators of innovation. It revealed that the policies, practices, and cultures that characterize elite private schools in Ontario are worthy of consideration for policy makers and practitioners, as they seek to assist students to become socially mobile, wherever they may be.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and express my thanks to Brenda Zwolak and Bob Neibert, my fellow practitioners, whose support was invaluable, particularly in the early stages of the project. I wish to thank Dr. Reva Joshee, my supervisor, for her enduring belief in both the importance of the study and in my ability to carry it out. My thanks go to Dr. Joe Flessa and Dr.

Carol Campbell for being willing to serve on my committee and for their encouragement throughout the process. In addition, heartfelt thanks to my daughter, Lauren, for her providing detailed feedback on various drafts of the thesis, and to my wife, Barbara, for her enduring support, as well as to Meryl Greene, my editor and APA guru, for her comments on the manuscript. Finally, it is important to note, I did not take this journey alone. To my fellow PhD travelers, thank you for undertaking the journey with me.

As I believe this study illustrates, we ultimately succeed or fail together.

Dedication

To Barbara, Lauren, and Heather, the three most important people in my life.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv Dedication ...... v List of Figures ...... xii List of Appendices ...... xiii Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1 The Rationale for This Study ...... 1 The Context of This Study: Canada ...... 3 Rationale for Study: Strangers in a Strange Land ...... 4 Where I Situate Myself as the Researcher...... 6 Narrative Inquiry: Portraiture ...... 15 Overview of the Structure of the Thesis ...... 19 Chapter 2 Elite Private Schools in Canada ...... 20 Elite Independent Secondary School Defined: A Thumbnail Sketch ...... 20 Private Vis-à-Vis Independent Schools ...... 21 Further Defining Elite Secondary Education ...... 22 A Canadian Private School Mosaic ...... 24 Parent Motivations for Attending Private Schools ...... 25 Private Education in Canada by the Numbers ...... 27 Diversity in Private Schools in Canada ...... 29 Private School Culture ...... 31 Chapter 3 Literature Review: An Episodic Conversation ...... 33 Bourdieu on Reproduction and Transformation ...... 33 Hobsbawm and the Prism Through Which We Approach the Field Under Study...... 36 The Determinates of Achievement in Canadian Schools ...... 37 Private Schooling: The Greater Divide, and the Public School Effect ...... 38 Social Capital and Social Class: Concepts for Explaining Academic Success and the Failure to Achieve ...... 41 The State of Educational Reform ...... 46 Exposure to Better Neighbourhoods ...... 47 A Model of Social Mediations, Unwitting Agents of the System, and the Symbolic and Emancipatory Role of Credentials ...... 47

Relatively Disadvantaged Children in Private Schools: Evidence From Their Experience ...... 49 The Increasingly Slender Pathway Towards Social Mobility ...... 50 An Emergent, Modest Body of Literature on Individual Social Mobility Journeys ...... 51 Recent Literature on Social Class and Education in Canada ...... 52 Chapter 4 Theoretical and Conceptual Framework: A Broad-Based, Interdisciplinary Approach ...... 56 Theoretical Foundations ...... 56 Definition of Key Terms ...... 58 Social Mobility ...... 59 Social Capital...... 60 Social Class ...... 62 Canadian Notions of Social Class ...... 63 Conceptual Framework ...... 64 Personal Agency ...... 68 Confidence ...... 70 Credentials ...... 72 Connections ...... 75 Chapter 5 Painting with Words: Portraiture as a Methodological Approach ...... 78 Narrative Inquiry and Life Story as Methodologies ...... 78 Portraiture ...... 79 Context ...... 84 The Attitude of the Researcher ...... 86 The Schools Featured in This Study...... 87 Data Collection ...... 89 Snowball Sampling Method ...... 92 Selection of Participants ...... 93 A Note on Gender and Ethnic Composition of Participants in the Study ...... 94 The Interview Process, Transcripts, and Portraits ...... 95 Portraits...... 97 Repetitive Refrains and Emergent Themes ...... 100 Analysis and Discussion ...... 101

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Chapter 6 Portrait One: Monica ...... 104 General Impressions and Timelines ...... 104 Family Circumstances and Cultural Context...... 107 Attending Metropolitan and Navigating the Curriculum ...... 108 Transition to Work ...... 111 Financial Realities ...... 113 A Sense of Belonging and Social Networks ...... 114 Key Relationships, Turning Points, and Challenges ...... 117 Aspirations and Definitions of Success ...... 118 General Observations and School Recommendations...... 119 Start Doing...... 119 Stop Doing ...... 120 Continue Doing ...... 120 Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc ...... 121 A Summary of Monica’s Journey...... 123 Chapter 7 Portrait Two: Andrea ...... 126 General Impressions and Timelines ...... 126 Family Circumstances and Cultural Context...... 127 Attending Metropolitan and Navigating the Curriculum ...... 128 Financial Realities ...... 133 Sense of Belonging and Social Networks ...... 133 Key Relationships, Turning Points, and Challenges ...... 136 Transition to Work ...... 140 Aspirations and Definitions of Success ...... 142 General Observations and School Recommendations...... 144 Start Doing...... 144 Stop Doing ...... 145 Continue Doing ...... 147 Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc ...... 148 A Summary of Andrea’s Journey ...... 149 Chapter 8 Portrait Three: Nate ...... 151 General Impressions and Timelines ...... 151 Family Circumstances and Cultural Context...... 154

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Attending The Academy and Navigating the Curriculum...... 157 A Sense of Belonging and Social Networks ...... 159 Financial Realities ...... 165 Key Relationships and Turning Points ...... 168 Transition to Work ...... 171 Aspirations and Definitions of Success ...... 171 General Observations and School Recommendations...... 173 Start Doing...... 173 Stop Doing ...... 174 Continue Doing ...... 174 Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc ...... 175 A Summary of Nate’s Journey ...... 176 Chapter 9 The Three C’s, Personal Agency, and Major and Minor Themes ...... 178 The Participants’ Three C’s Personal Agency Journeys and their Evolving Definitions of Success ...... 178 Major Themes...... 179 Schools ...... 180 Family and Culture ...... 183 Giftedness ...... 187 Finances ...... 189 Social Capital...... 194 The exchange of social capital through school networks ...... 198 Teachers ...... 201 Minor Themes ...... 202 Extracurricular Activities ...... 203 Success and Opportunity ...... 204 A brief note on the costs of social mobility and trace elements ...... 207 Chapter 10 Metaphors: “Mind the Gap,” “The Show Must Go On,” and Dissonant Themes ...... 211 Mind the Gap ...... 212 The Freedom Pass and Subsidized Ridership ...... 218 Moving Between Worlds ...... 219 Taking the Journey Alone ...... 221

Proximity ...... 222 The Show Must Go On ...... 225 Performance, Rehearsal, and Backstage Pass: Monica and the Show ...... 225 Nate’s Olympic Dreams ...... 228 Andrea’s Backstage Pass ...... 229 Institutional Rituals and the Role of the School ...... 230 Camps, trips, and the house system ...... 230 Academic rigour, extracurricular participation, and overscheduling ...... 232 The morning commute and school uniforms ...... 234 Bursary conventions and structure or lack thereof ...... 235 Dissonant Themes ...... 238 Chapter 11 Study Limitations, Conclusions, Recommendations, Areas for Future Research, and Concluding Comments ...... 241 Study Limitations ...... 241 Conclusions Regarding Major Themes ...... 243 School: Proximity to Elite Education ...... 243 Family and Culture: Socially Aspirant Parents ...... 244 Giftedness: Self-Fulfilling Prophesies and Timing ...... 245 Self-fulfilling prophesies ...... 245 Timing ...... 247 Finances: The Importance of Comprehensive Funding ...... 250 Social Capital: Guidance Departments, School Climate, Role Models, and Network Connectors ...... 250 Guidance departments ...... 250 School climate, role models, and network connectors ...... 253 Teachers: Unconventional Teachers and a Diverse Faculty ...... 255 Conclusions Regarding Minor Themes ...... 256 Extracurricular Activities ...... 256 Success and Opportunity ...... 256 Recommendations Regarding Major Themes ...... 257 Practitioners ...... 257 Practitioners and Policy Makers ...... 257 Parents ...... 258

Students ...... 258 Discussion of Recommendations to Practitioners ...... 258 Facilitate engagement of parents within the school community ...... 258 Encourage the matriculation of fellow travelers ...... 259 Develop social capital within the school community ...... 260 Discussion of Recommendations to Practitioners and Policy Makers ...... 262 Adopt elite school practices that assist students in reimagining their own educational experiences and lives ...... 262 Provide bussing and transportation ...... 263 Provide comprehensive funding ...... 263 Invest in guidance departments and support their role in facilitating postsecondary attendance...... 265 Encourage and employ entrants to the profession from nontraditional backgrounds ...... 266 Discussion of Recommendation to Parents ...... 267 Seek elite education at the earliest possible age (only to those parents considering elite education for their students) ...... 267 Discussion of Recommendations to Students...... 267 Recommendations: Minor Themes ...... 268 To Practitioners ...... 268 Facilitate participation in extracurricular activities ...... 268 To Practitioners and Policy Makers ...... 269 Tune into students aspirations, facilitate opportunity, and success ...... 269 Areas for Further Research...... 269 Concluding Comments ...... 270 References ...... 274

List of Figures

Figure 1. The interrelated nature of Credentials, Connections, and Confidence (Copyright, William George Peat, 2020), and their role in facilitating Personal Agency within an elite private school...... 65 Figure 2. Monica’s word cloud...... 104 Figure 3. Andrea’s word cloud...... 126 Figure 4. Nate’s word cloud...... 151 Figure 5. Map of the London, England, Underground (Transport for London, 2019)...... 213 Figure 6. Map of the Toronto Transit Corporation (TTC) system (Kupferman, 2013)...... 214

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List of Appendices

Appendix A Introductory Telephone Script (Third Party/Indirect Introduction) and Follow-Up Email ...... 297 Appendix B Telephone Script (Direct Introduction) and Telephone Script (Third Party/Indirect Introduction) ...... 298 Appendix C Information Letter for Participants (To be on OISE letterhead) ...... 299 Appendix D Consent for Participation in Interview Research...... 301 Appendix E Interview Guide ...... 303

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The Rationale for This Study

An enduring dilemma afflicts education—a dilemma that appears impervious to school improvement or reform. It is this: children of the working poor generally do poorly in school and less well in life. In contrast, the progeny of the better-off middle and upper classes fares relatively well. In fact, the more affluent children are, the better they appear to do, and so the gap between the two becomes wider. Tramonte and Willms (2009) described it this way: “youth from high SES backgrounds tend to do well in any jurisdiction, while those with low SES backgrounds tend to vary considerably in their proficiency among jurisdictions” (p. 212). When speaking about this state of affairs to his fellow Members of Parliament in 2010, former British

Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, put it his way: “’Rich, thick kids’ do much better at school, than ‘poor clever ones’” (as cited in Shepherd, 2010, para. 1). This is particularly evident when richer students attend public schools in affluent neighbourhoods or elite private schools.

Bearing this in mind, this study asks how the experience of working-class students would be different if they were the recipients of an elite private education. Might it help them to reimagine their own educational experience, influence their aspirations, and enable them to become socially mobile? In brief, it examines what in another context Willms (2010) described as “school effects,” that is, things schools do to produce better schooling outcomes, even after taking account of student’s family background and their ability upon entry to school (p. 1009).

Moreover, it asks do the benefits outweigh the costs incurred in attempting to gain access to a different economic stratum, and with it, a different habitus? Ultimately, apart from the

1 2 experience of those particular students, does it matter? Elite private education is by definition highly exclusive and not intended for all, not least the working masses of any country. “Mind the

Gap” is an attempt to answer these questions. The conclusions it draws, I argue, are worthy of considerations for policy makers, practitioners, parents, and students, alike.

Gove’s comments were made a decade ago, but sadly, the situation is little changed; the phenomenon remains long-term, chronic, and durable (Canny & Hamilton, 2018; Crozier, 2015;

Guppy, Mikicich, & Pendakur, 1984; OECD [The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development], 2013; Perry & Francis, 2010; Porter, 2015). Indeed, more recently, Reay (2017a) wrote: “We are still educating different social classes for different functions in society” (para. 1).

Reay’s reference was of course to the English education system, where she noted the country was at “the bottom of the league table for working-class children achieving high academic levels” (2017a, para. 2). However, although Canada fares better than both the United States

(U.S.) and Britain, the evidence bears out both Reay’s (2017a) and Gove’s statements (as cited

Shepherd, 2010, para. 1). Like many of its OECD (2011, 2013) counterparts, children of the working classes do less well in Canada than both their middle- and upper-class peers. These categories are defined in the sections on Social Class, and Canadian Notions of Social Class on pages 58-61. However, by way of briefly introducing them here, for my purposes, social class is defined in relationship to one’s income, values, and connections to others, or what I refer to as social networks, and the opportunities the combination of these things provide. The collection these constructs are referred to here as social capital.

Thus, although not all children of the poor are destined to academic underachievement for the vast majority, it remains an abiding truth that their socioeconomic status (SES) continues to serve as the most reliable predictor of academic success—or, sadly, failure.

Moreover, as societies across the OECD evolve and move beyond their industrial and manufacturing bases into post-industrial, knowledge-driven societies, the social-class gap for educational achievement is likely to grow still further (Broadbent Institute, 2014, 2016;

Kornbluth, 2013; Putnam, 2000, 2015; The Boston Consulting Group Sutton Trust, 2017). In an era of neoconservative influence over education policy and the increasing adoption of market approaches to educational choice, these trends are set to continue (Ball, 2003, 2016; Bourdieu,

1989, 1990; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Florida, 2014; Putnam, 2000, 2015; Ungerleider, 2006;

Weis, Cipollone, & Jenkins, 2014).

The Context of This Study: Canada

A spirited academic discourse about education inequality and more broadly, about income inequality exists in both Britain (Hobbs, 2016; Parsons, 2019; Perry & Francis, 2010;

2006, 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Shepherd, 2010), and the United States (Gaztambide-Fernández,

2009; Isenberg, 2016, Jack, 2016, 2019; Khan, 2011; Putnam, 2000, 2015; Reich, 2013; Vance,

2016), two jurisdictions that inform this study. However, although the same discussions take place in Canadian academe (Davies & Rizt, 2018; Nonoyama-Tarumi, Hughes & Willms, 2015;

Davies, Maldonado & Zarifa, 2014; Broadbent, 2014, 2016, and Caro, Mcdonald & Willms,

2009, Ungerleider, 2006), they are not a part of a public discourse to quite the same degree.

In part, this is because Canadians largely see themselves as communitarian and middle class (Cazzin, 2017). This is the result of a much weaker historical sense of class identification

(Marchak, 2011; Pammett, 1987; Proudfoot, 2019a; Schreiber, 1980). Nevertheless, bearing in mind how difficult it is “to draw the line between working, middle and upper classes … the most powerful conceptual armoury available to us [remains] social class” (Reay, 2018, p. 454). This dilemma is particular pertinent when one examines the Canadian experience. Indeed, when the

50th anniversary edition of The Vertical Mosaic was published in Canada, in 2015, its introduction stated, “the book retains vast significance both for its powerful critique of social exclusivity in a country that prides itself on equality and diversity and for its influence on generations of sociological researchers” (Porter, 2015, p. 1). I am one of those researchers, albeit

50 years on: a Canadian immigrant of British, working-class origins, who through an unanticipated journey of twists and turns, like Porter (1970) before me, came to believe that

“social science scholarship [must] have an ethical purpose” (1970, p. 2). For me, a concern for ethical principles is a “dominant part of my outlook” (Porter, 1970, p. 152) and informs my research. As such, my study aims to further a national conversation about educational inequality in Canada—an attempt to nudge that conversation further towards center stage, and with it the hope of change.

When writing about the barriers that exist to achieving upward mobility for the poor,

Apple (1995) posited that, “Structural conditions cannot be thought ‘away’. They must be thought ‘through’ in order to be ‘acted’ away” (p. iv). As such, my study is a theoretical attempt to think ‘through’ in order to assist practitioners to act ‘away’ some of those conditions. It is in this regard that the work furthers the conversation and suggests the means by which practitioners might recognize and challenge those conditions, making it easier for poor students across Canada or wherever they may be found to become socially mobile, if that is what they desire.

Rationale for Study: Strangers in a Strange Land

The reference, I have been a “stranger in a strange land” is found in the Old Testament

(Exodus 2:22, King James Version) and refers to Moses’s son Gershom who uttered the phrase referring to the experience of growing up as a child in Egypt, rather than Israel, the so-called promised land. Robert A. Heinlein (1961) also used the idea in his dystopian novel, Stranger in a

Strange Land, referring to the angst that is a part of modern life. Within my study’s context, the phrase refers to the experience of working-class young people in elite environments, which can often feel alien to them—that they are strangers in a strange land.

There now exists an increased interest in social inequality and the role education plays in the processes of social mobility. However, the interest, driven by organizations such as the

Boston Consulting Group Sutton Trust (2017), Education Endowment Foundation (n.d.), the

Broadbent Institute (2014, 2016), and The Equality of Opportunity Project (2018), by and large focuses on outcomes—that is, the difference between the income (however it is measured) of an individual and that of their parents. This is entirely appropriate as in Britain, the United States, and Canada, arguably, success in life is largely seen in terms of social mobility (Broadbent

Institute, 2014, 2016; Carnegie Corporation and the Sutton Trust, 2012; Chetty & Hendren,

2018; Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016; The Boston Consulting Group Sutton Trust, 2017).

Moreover, as Becker (1993) posited, educational achievement is widely accepted as being linked to increased earnings and improved career and life trajectories. As such, such studies are essentially quantitative in nature, examining key economic measures, such as educational achievement, income, employment status and the possession of durable goods (Gutiérrez, 2012).

In contrast, I explore the inner journey—that is, the experience—of individuals trying to become socially mobile using education as a means to achieve this end. In doing so, my study interrogates the notion of educational inequality through a very particular lens.

As a student, I attended a failing secondary modern school in an impoverished area, and yet I went on to attend an elite private university and to serve as an administrator in two elite private schools. In my role as a vice principal and principal, I have observed the triumphs and disappointments of students of lesser means in those environments. Thus, as an individual who

6 has grappled with my own otherness, albeit rooted in my own socioeconomic status, I have been concerned with the plight of others facing similar challenges.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, I have often asked whether or not attending an elite secondary school might have made my journey easier, and whether such institutions might also be able to transform the experience of other students like me. As an administrator, I have attempted to foster a diverse student body and taken a special interest in those, who, like me, were in the process of negotiating the educational terrain in what can often feel like an alien land.

As Er, Orfield, and Teitell (2018) maintained, the sector’s diversity still lags behind that found in public schools across Canada and the United States; however, this is particularly true in terms of socioeconomic diversity.

Although this thesis does not examine the merits of private schools and their role in the

Canadian education system, it does explore the experience of working-class students in such schools and the ways in which they navigated the culture of those institutions. In fact, the study was borne of an unpublished work I wrote exploring the experience of First Nations students in an elite private school (Peat, 2015a). As such, my work privileges the experience of those whom society marginalizes. It also honours the notion of lived experience, both mine as well as that of the participants of this study.

Where I Situate Myself as the Researcher

Thus, at its most fundamental level, my thesis is concerned with educational inequality.

In doing so, it contributes to a conversation that first drew my attention in the summer of 1992, while I was completing a master’s degree in education policy at Harvard University. It was then that I encountered Willis’s (1977) seminal work, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids

Get Working Class Jobs. Willis’s study spoke to me on a personal level and came to have a

7 significant impact on where I now situate myself as an educational researcher. In our time,

Willis’s work (1977) echoes with that of Vance’s (2016) Hillbilly Elegy and Jack’s (2019) The

Privileged Poor. Both Willis and I were raised in the industrial English Midlands; both he and I are of working-class origins. After Willis passed the Eleven-Plus, an examination that was administered in the last year of primary school to determine admission to selective secondary schools, he went on to attend a relatively elite grammar school, which provided him with a privileged education (Dolby & Dimitriadis, 2004). Passing–or not passing–the exam was a defining moment in Willis’s and many other students’ lives, with education being viewed by many as “the silver bullet for enhanced social mobility” (Kynaston, 2014, p. 182). His father, whom he described as petit bourgeois, supported Willis in his educational journey. In contrast, my dad, a proletarian, was a staunch socialist and somewhat suspicious of academic pursuits, which he saw as effeminate and not particularly useful, certainly not for people like us.

Unfortunately, I failed the Eleven-Plus and went on to attend a nonselective secondary modern school, the same kind of school in which Willis (1977) conducted his study. Thus, in

Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), which documented the lives of the lads—resistant, lacking academic aspirations, and destined to leave school at 16—I saw myself. Where Willis succeeded,

I failed. As Willis (1977) argued, I too had colluded in my own damnation. Like the lads, I only gained a partial understanding of my reality. On an unconscious level, I understood the ideology—and the false promise of meritocracy—that determined my educational experience.

Rightly or wrongly, I believed that no matter the effort I made, lacking cultural capital and unable to achieve the “right” qualifications, somewhat predictably I ended up in a life described by Wotherspoon (1998) as one of “deadening routine” (p. 36).

Secondary modern schools provided their students with certificates of secondary education (CSEs), which were offered in vocational and academic subjects. CSEs, however, did not lead to Advanced Level (AL) exams that served as a prerequisite to university and white- collar, middle-class work. Although it was possible to transfer and take general certificates of education (GSE’s), in practice this rarely happened. Thus, the CSE, did indeed, identify students as the children of secondary modern schools, who were seen as best suited to manual work. The

CSE served as marker of socioeconomic status, rather than of students’ intellectual capacity

(Dent, 1982, discussed in Peat, 1994). For me, school was an experience that reinforced, rather than transformed, the social inequality to which I was subject.

As I explore in this study, albeit in a Canadian context, I was unable to achieve a sense of efficacy, that might have ultimately reflected in a real sense of confidence, or personal agency, other than to resist, a phenomenon Willis (1977) described as “creativity” (p. 120). As Willis wrote, there were “no guns, no obvious means of collusion” (1977, p. 1), and yet, like the lads, I too chose poorly. As a child of the working classes living within the context of a larger capitalist project, I held no aspirations, a notion Stahl (2015) explored amongst White working-class boys in our time. I dreamt of nothing other than that which was on offer (Hart, 2013). In this sense, I too learned to labour and began work as a factory labourer. As a child—indeed, for much of my adult life—I saw myself as being responsible for my educational failure and the life that followed. As it turns out, the reality was a great deal more complex. Hence, for me, in the absence of Willis’ “guns [or] obvious means of collusion” (1977, p. 1) or Apple’s (1995) “overt mechanisms of domination,” (p. 3), I kicked against the system and became a disengaged, troublesome student. I learned little or nothing in school.

Predictably, my CSE results were poor and I left school and at the end of Grade 11 (year

5 in the British system). I then entered the workforce as a labourer, where my responsibility was to sweep the floor. My father, who was a foreman in the factory, facilitated the job. It was, however, a beginning and I was thankful. Indeed, after several months in the position, I was accepted as a machinst into the firm’s trade apprenticeship programme. I completed the apprenticeship in 3 years, after which time I secured a job as a fourth engineer on a Canadian shipping line. HMS Harfluer, the ship to which I was assigned, brought me to North America. At the conclusion of my tour of duty on the merchant ship, I was at liberty, that is, I was not required to join another vessel for several months, whilst also paid by the shipping line. As such,

I had the time and the resources to travel across the United States. It turned out to be a fortuitous set of events. I met my future wife, Barbara, a Registered Nurse (RN), who is Canadian, in New

York. I also encountered an American college professor. As a result of my conversations, which ranged from politics, to philosophy, to economics, which were largely a result of my own reading, both encouraged me to pursue post-secondary education as a way to capitalize on what they clearly saw as my potential. The professor recommended the State University of New York

(SUNY) Regents College Program. Barbara and I married in 1982, and four years later, I enrolled in the program. I was able to do so, not simply because of their belief in the transformative power of education—or even in my capacity to complete the degree program— but also because as a full-time RN, my wife was in a position to be able to support me financially. Her kindness is a debt of gratitude I will always cherish.

The Regents program welcomed students from unconventional backgrounds and through a combination of coursework, which I completed at the SUNY New Paltz, campus in the Hudson

Valley, and Graduate Record Examinations (GREs), I completed the program in approximately

19 months. After the completion of my Bachelor of Science (BS) in what turned out to be another fortuituous encounter, I met a graduate from Harvard University’s Extension School

(HES). The gentlman, an Englishman like myself, was also a product of working-class origins, who recommended I consider applying to the Extension School program. I applied.

Along with a written application, and a personal statement, somewhat unexpectedly, my

Bachelor’s degree served as an entrance qualification for HES. I was, however, required to complete three graduate-level courses and maintain a B+ grade point average or above, whilst at the same time commuting from the Hudson Valley to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I did twice weekly for approximately 18 months. After completing the probationary coursework, my wife and I moved to the Boston area, where she was able to secure a job at a major Harvard teaching hospital. At that time, and throughout the remainder of my time at Harvard, my wife’s support was enduring, both financially and emotionally. However, her support went futher. In fact, although at one point I had determined to leave the program because I could no longer afford the fees, my wife’s mother, a life-long seamstress, provided the funds to continue. In short, through a variety of fortuitous encounters, I was a recipient of Granovetter’s (1973) strength of weak ties: I simply met people who had resources, information, or connections that were essential to changing my life’s trajectory. I was also able to benefit from the social capital that was a part of the social networks to which both they and my wife belonged.

Through attending night classes and summer school on the Harvard campus, over the course of a four-year period, I completed my Master’s degree (ALM). However, with a young family (our first daughter was born whilst I was a graduate student), money was scarce. Indeed, not unlike this study’s particpants, before going to class, whether at night or during the day at summer school, I picked up whatever odd jobs I could find.

It was at Harvard that I met Baroness Shirley Williams, a former British Secretary of

State for Education and Science (1976-1979) and visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of

Government (1988-2001). Williams was one of the architects of Britain’s comprehensive school movement, which was a national attempt to change the plight of students like me. Williams became my thesis supervisor and so I began the process of trying to understand my own educational experience in an intentional, systematic way. It is important to note, however, that it was the encouragement of three key individuals, most notably my wife, as well as the openness of the American post-secondary system, that in large part transformed my fortunes. Education was decisive in transforming my life’s trajectory.

Following the completion of my Master’s, after several attempts at a career in business, I became a teacher, eventually gaining my certification in the English Midlands, where I had been raised and where my wife, my family (now two children), had returned. My first teaching placement was in the region’s poorest school, which was close to the bottom the nation’s league table for academic achievement, but perhaps not surprisingly, was at the top of the country’s list of impoverished schools. In short, I began my career teaching students in secondary school settings almost exactly like that in which I had been educated. I was, however, hired as a full- time teacher in my second placement school, which while being publically funded, was a great deal more affluent. After several years, my wife and I decided to return to Canada to raise our children in Ontario, where I resumed teaching career in one of Canada’s most established and most prestigious private schools, where I remained for almost two decades. As a result, both my own educational and professional experience took me from some of the developed world’s most impoverished education settings, to its most privileged. Bearing in mind my own autobiography, perhaps somewhat inevitably, I began to consider further how the one might be related to the

12 other. Throughout this time, questions around good fortune, privilege, opporunity, and the absence thereof, have preoccupied my life and work.

Whilst working as a teacher and later administrator at Canada’s largest independent co- ed, day school, I encountered teachers who had not only completed PhDs, but had done so through the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) full-time flex program, the program in which I was a student. In fact, I learned my school was prepared to support this kind of professional development financially, covering 50% of successful applicants’ tuition costs. As such, I applied, was accepted, and returned to graduate school at the University of Toronto, albeit

18 years later, and thus continued to build on work I had begun at Harvard. It had been my hope to pursue PhD studies at Harvard, but even with the support of my wife, I was not in a position to do so financially. Nevertheless, over time came the dawning realization that my secondary school—indeed, the educational system itself and more broadly the capitalist system (Willis,

1977)—had achieved precisely what it had been engineered to do: to foster in me a type of demeanour, a mode of self-presentation, a self-image, and a social-class identification. I had been labelled as and, therefore, became a working-class lad bound for menial work.

Ironically, I neither relished, nor even enjoyed physical work, but as a youngster the system had assigned me to my place. My “failure,” it seemed, was an essential part of the larger mechanism’s exquisite success, a result of careful human sorting. I was segregated, placed in a low-achieving and an often violent secondary school; and once there, was streamed into courses designed to prepare me for factory work, and factory work alone. With precipitous decline of the manufacturing in Britain and North America in our era, it is unlikely that I would have been able to secure even a factory job. This, of course, is a dilemma many working-class people now face in the modern North America. Nevertheless, my parents, good people though they were, were

13 helpless, unable to help me navigate the bewildering hegemony with which they were confronted. Thus, one might argue, they too colluded in the process. Mandatory attendance at secondary modern schools for children like my siblings and me was simply the way things were, a nonchoice.

Although, in contrast, Willis benefitted greatly from a grammar school education (Dolby

& Dimitriadis, 2004), recent evidence suggests that in our time grammar schools do not boost social mobility, as they are largely “stuffed full” of middle-class students (BBC News, 2013, para 1). In fact, research has repeatedly demonstrated that educational reforms intended to assist the underprivileged, like me, whether they aim to provide increased access, school choice, or are concerned with curriculum design, are often exploited most effectively by society’s most affluent

(Reeves, 2017). As Wilby (2008) noted, the more advantaged tend to be “more mobile, more knowledgeable, more confident [and] more determined to get the best for their children” (pp.

350–351). My journey began in a secondary modern school and it has ended at the Ontario

Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), what in part I consider an elite institution. At each step along the way, whether it was as a secondary school student, at Harvard, as a teacher in both poor and extraordinarily privileged settings, or now in my present incarnation as a school principal in an elite school, or a PhD student, like the participants of my study I have had to navigate habiti very different to that in which I was raised and with which I most strongly identify. Indeed, it is why I am drawn to the field of struggle—indeed, to them. As an individual who became socially mobile using education as a tool to do so, I believe, like mine, their journeys are instructive. Just as it was for the participants’ of this study, achieving social mobility has been hard, an often interrupted journey, an interrupted conversation.

One must constantly navigate the social and educational terrain, which can be bewildering, and often appear as an overwhelmingly a middle-class enterprise. At times, it takes cunning, fortitude, resilience, infinite patience, and the enduring belief—and support—of others, all of which test one’s soul, but, critically, are determined by one’s financial resources or lack thereof. In fact, for me, not unlike other PhD students in similar circumstances, even with the financial support offered by my school, being able to pay tuition fees remained a perennial challenge in precisely the same way it did for my study’s participants. My personal circumstances were similarly compounded by the need to work full-time. Indeed, there has never been a time when I did not work full-time in order to support my family and pay tuition fees.

Although this is not the focus of my study, it is a critical reason so few working-class people pursue higher education. As such, the vantage point from which I approach the study, provides me with not only a deep knowledge of the field, but also a profound sympathy, and empathy, for the plight of the participants of this study. Albeit in my own way, I have walked in their shoes.

My lived experience enabled me to document theirs.

By examining these students’ experience, I highlight the plight and experience of working-class people who want to become socially mobile through school achievement. Their journeys are instructive. We can learn from them, as well as from the institutions they attended.

Thus, in a Robin Hood-like fashion (both the English Midland’s and my greatest childhood mythical hero) I aimed to “steal” from the rich and give to the poor. By understanding the methodologies and institutional practices used by elites, and where applicable seeking to deploy them in other educational settings, I hope this study might help the great mass of children learn from the experience of the few. Thus, although the study encourages elite private schools to broaden their intake of poorer students and become more diverse, as when done so with an ethic

15 of care (Portelli, Shields, & Vibert, 2007), it is good for students and good for those schools, I posit that it is more efficacious to invest in better public education that is cognizant of the practices that elite institutions use to preserve and facilitate privilege. To pay heed to the

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) findings that suggested, we see elite private schools as incubators of innovation and best practice (OECD, 2011).

Narrative Inquiry: Portraiture

In order to examine the phenomenon, I have used a form narrative inquiry called portraiture that was developed by Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis

(1997). It is important to note, however, which elements of portraiture I employed, as well as those I did not. A full discussion of the study’s methodological approach takes place in Chapter

5. However, by way of a brief introduction, Lawrence-Lightfoot’s approach was first developed in The Good School (1983). Her study extended over a three-year period, during which time she observed several schools as an ethnographer. Whilst her work included participant observations, document analysis, as well as the process of developing relationships with school communities, mine did not. This was in large part due to the time constraints under which I conducted my study.

I am highly cognizant of Lawrence-Lightfoot’s methodology (1983, 2016) and

Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) and my approach also placed an enormous emphasis on the importance of developing relationships with the participants, which were genuine. In addition, I was acutely aware that I wanted to assist my participants to tell evocative and compelling stories, and, like her, I wanted to tell their stories not only to academicians and practitioners, but also to a wider, more eclectic audience. Similarly, I did not take an entirely critical view of their experiences. Like her, I placed great emphases on the essential goodness of

16 the individuals and their motivations, rather than their pathologies. Indeed, I hope that telling their stories will provide a means to transport that goodness to other educational settings. As such, I used a series of open-ended, semistructured, in-depth interviews. The interviews were characterized by respect and trust, and continued by means follow-up conversations and correspondence, which extended over a period of several months, rather than several years.

The participants in my study were, similarly, given an opportunity to review and amend their portraits, enabling them to share in their creation. In the same way that Lawrence-Lightfoot

(1983) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) brought their own sense of otherness to bear on the work they were doing, so have I. In doing so, I was also able to frame the participants’ experience with reference to my own as a working-class young person, who also had the privilege of attending an elite institution. Moreover, my own intimate knowledge of elite private schools in Ontario as a teacher, coach, and administrator, assisted me to interpret each of the participants’ experiences. In short, I was uniquely placed to be able to map the terrain in which the participants were educated and had to navigate on a daily basis (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2016), and although I have foreshadowed their experience, it is important to recognize that mine exists in the background. However, Mind the Gap is not a self-study.

Thus, my approach draws upon the work of Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983, 2016) and

Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) methodology, but is unique and derivative, rather than being entirely filial to the approach taken by Lawrence-Lightfoot, one of methodology’s earliest pioneers. In contrast, my approach was limited by circumstance and the conditions on the ground. It does, however, bear significant similarities to her work for which I am indebted. As an active school administrator, whose time was limited by circumstance, a greater emphasis was placed on the interview processes, the on-going follow-up conversations, the relationships that

17 developed as a result of them, and an in-depth knowledge of the terrain, as well as my own lived experience. However, I cannot overstate the importance of the input the participants made, particularly in the process of reviewing their own portraits, when they were asked to confirm, challenge and amend their content. As such, there was a member-check for accuracy and authenticity of each of the participants’ portraits. Finally, it is important to note that the means by which I analyzed the data found in Chapters 9 and 10 is filial to Lawrence-Lightfoot’s methodology. I too analyzed the data, examining repetitive and dissonant themes, as well as drawing out metaphors that illuminate the individuals’ experience. In my study, all of these are framed within the participants’ ability to acquire a sense of personal agency.

Portraiture, deployed in whatever form, is a marriage between science and art. So, although I conducted a detailed exegesis of the texts derived from the participants’ experience, some of the language and references I employed lie within the realm of poetry and metaphor. As a result, my analysis contains a degree of subjectivity. Many of the judgments I have made are grounded and interpreted through my own lived experience. As noted above, I have worked as an administrator and teacher elite private schools for two decades. I did so in Ontario for more than three quarters of that time. As a result, I benefited from an “insider’s view” and enjoyed an intimate knowledge of the culture and processes of such institutions. Indeed, I have spent much of adult life navigating habiti different than my own. It is this background that frames the lens through which I investigated the data, which enabled me to offer a unique perspective that, I argue, provides new knowledge. The unit of analysis is thus the lived experience of each of the participants.

In the years between the completion of my master’s degree and the beginning of my

Ph.D. program, issues of race, ethnicity, and gender moved centre stage in debates about access

18 and achievement. As such, the discussion had shifted to the experiences of marginalized students

(Chitty, 2002). Nonetheless, affected by the optimism of my inter-school period and anticipating that progress had been made with regards to working-class underachievement, I had (perhaps naively) expected conversations in academia to remain focused on issues concerning race, ethnicity, and gender. Instead, I found that social class was once again in the process of moving back towards centre stage: astonishingly, practically an entire generation later, a child’s socioeconomic status remains the strongest indicator of educational success (Reay, 2017a,

2017b).

Thus, I explore the experience of poorer students who aim to make academic achievement and, more importantly, the lives it might make possible a real choice. Each of the participants were expected to attend schools with a quite different ethic and picture of achievement (Goodman, 2010). And, yet, together with their families, they chose a different path. What follows is an exploration of their motivations, the challenges they faced, and the impact they had as individuals on the institutions they attended. As Glatter (2012) noted,

“increasing the social mix in schools is the way to close performance gaps” (p. 1). A notion,

Maeroff (1998) also supported. Being in a more socially diverse environment assists students to re-imagine their lives in different ways, and by extension their educational experience. Working- class children are rarely exposed to the children of professionals in schools. In such environments, they too might imagine becoming a doctor, a lawyer or a business consultant.

Being in such an environment enables them to sit alongside students who aspire to such roles in society in a competitive environment, where fellow students see themselves attending university and even graduate school, as a nonchoice. All three participants in this study were living examples of the benefits—and challenges—of increasing that social mix.

Overview of the Structure of the Thesis

By means of framing the setting in which this study takes place, Chapter 2 provides the reader with an overview of elite private education in Canada and Ontario, the jurisdiction in which the study is located. It does not provide an analysis of elite private schools, but rather an overview from an insider’s perspective. Chapter 3 provides an academic context to the work in the form of a review of literature concerning educational inequality both in Britain, the United

States, but most critically in Canada. Chapter 4 lays out the study’s theoretical and conceptual framework, which takes a unique approach, examining the participants’ social mobility journey through evaluating the means by which they achieved a sense of personal agency. Chapter 5 discusses the methodology used to interrogate the subject. Chapters 6, 7, 8 contain the portraits of each of the participants, Monica, Andrea, and Nate, the pseudonyms given to each of them, respectively. Each of the portraits includes a graphical representation of the literary portrait that was developed from the transcripts that were the result of the interviews between the study’s subjects and me. Chapter 9 offers part one of a two-part analysis. Whereas Chapter 9 discusses major, minor, and dissonant themes derived from the text, Chapter 10 looks at the data in terms of the metaphors it suggests, which enable the reader to understand in a deeper, more poetical sense, the experience of participants. The study’s concluding chapter, Chapter 11, offers suggestions for both policy and practice that schools might adopt wherever they are found, regardless of their social and governance structures, be they public or private. It also makes recommendations to parents considering an elite educational experience for their children, as well as to the students themselves.

CHAPTER 2

ELITE PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN CANADA

This introduction to elite private schools is not intended to be an analysis of the phenomenon. Rather, it is a brief overview designed to serve as a means of framing this research.

Ultimately, the study is not an investigation of private schools or their role in society. However, as the experience of social mobility described herein takes place within this setting, it is important to define the terms, elite, private, and independent, as well as to place elite secondary schools into a larger context. In addition, although the policies and practices, and cultures of the schools the participants attended are discussed throughout in the chapters that follow, I have also provided an understanding more broadly of the culture of elite private schools, as well as some intelligence about the schools the participants attended.

It is important to note that in our time there has been an increased interest in elite private school education. In part, this phenomenon is fuelled by the public perceptions of provincially funded education in Canada (Hart & Kempf, 2018), but also by sophisticated advertising campaigns conducted by elite schools. Although this kind of advertising is largely directed at

Canada’s most affluent demographic groups, increasing numbers of children of lesser means do, in fact, find their way into such schools. Indeed, as Elliot (2014) noted, some schools in less competitive educational markets see it as their mission to enable more economically disadvantaged students to join their ranks, to take a more communitarian approach.

Elite Independent Secondary School Defined: A Thumbnail Sketch

According to Gaztambide-Fernández (2009), an elite independent secondary school is defined as an institution accorded “high status among social groups that have the power to make

20 21 such judgments and with which [...] such schools correspond as educational institutions” (p. 26).

Hence, the notion of elite as it applies in this study is a construct. Simply offering private education, does not necessarily accord a school this status. It is only when they are acknowledged as such within elite circles, that schools achieve this somewhat rarefied status.

Like beauty, elite status is in the eye of the beholder. This notion contains an important truth: it is the consumer who defines the quality and durability of a product, not the provider, however, well intended. Thus, it is those who are able, prepared to pay, and/or may have been the beneficiaries of such an education, who ultimately define its value.

This construct serves as a framework through which one can place elite schools within a social context. In addition, Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) offered five criteria, which are located in a numbered list on the next page. However, before exploring these criteria, it is important to understand the way in which both the terms private and independent are used in the elite educational circles. The distinction provides some additional context.

Private Vis-à-Vis Independent Schools

In Canada, private schools are generally understood to be for-profit organizations established and controlled by one or more individuals. Most often, the title independent signifies a not-for-profit school that is accountable to a board of trustees, which operates at arm’s length from the school’s administration. Schools referred to as independent often allude to relationships with larger organizations or peer-review bodies (Our Kids Media, 2018), such as Canadian

Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS), or the Conference of Independent Schools of Ontario

(CIS Ontario). In the United States, schools belonging to the National Association of

Independent Schools are clearly identified as not-for-profit. This distinction is less clear in

Canada. Whereas the NAIS website (NAIS, 2020) is clear about their member status, this

22 distinction is not made on either the CAIS (2019), or the CIS Ontario (2019) websites, or in their promotional literature. Thus, although a school may refer to itself as private, it is not necessarily independent in terms of its funding or board structure.

However, because neither the Ontario Ministry of Education (MoE), nor the general public make the distinction between the terms private and independent, neither do I. In my professional experience, it is practitioners working within them who use these terms. Similarly, I cannot recall a conversation where a student, a parent, or a member of any of the schools’ alumni/ae has made this distinction. Almost universally, these constituents refer to them as private schools. This designation does, however, have an impact on the way in which schools are funded and governed. For the purposes of my study, the word private means that the school does not receive federal or provincial funding, although this arrangement differs by province. Private schools in the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Quebec each receive some form of provincial funding, although in each case provincial ministries of education determine it. Ontario does not provide funding for private schools. Within certain limits private schools in Ontario are able to determine their own curricular offerings and hiring practices.

Further Defining Elite Secondary Education

Having drawn a distinction between the terms private and independent, I now turn back to the additional criteria Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) used to define elite private schools. In addition to being identified as elite by elites, in my study such institutions must meet at least three of the following five of Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009, p. 37) criteria:

1. typologically elite, by virtue of their identification as “independent schools” 2. scholastically elite, by virtue an extensive and sophisticated curriculum they offer;

3. historically elite, by virtue of the role that elite social networks have played in their historical development 4. demographically elite, by virtue of the population that attends elite boarding schools and 5. geographically elite by virtue of their physical characteristics and location

Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) criteria-type approach provides a way to understand the contexts in which the participants were educated. To be typologically elite in Ontario means that schools do not receive funding from the provincial government through the Ministry of

Education (MoE)—that they are independent and are identified as such. Of course, the level of sophistication of schools’ various academic programs vary. However, almost universally, elite secondary schools offer enriched academic programming, whether it is the International

Baccalaureate (IB), Advanced Placement (AP) courses or exams, or a combination of the two, as well as provincial or national certifications. Indeed, schools often create enriched academic streams, offering reach-ahead, and/or unique credits designed with their student populations in mind. Whatever form they take, all are offered as part of a coherent strategy to prepare students for university admissions, rather than for entry into the community colleges, trade schools, or direct entry into the workplace. Without exception, every student is expected to graduate. In sum, their modus operandi is as university prep schools, which identifies them as scholastically elite.

Almost universally, elite schools also tend to tout the successes of their alumni/ae, highlighting the roles they have played in the development of their institutions. Such achievements might include academic, business, law, medical, or philanthropic accomplishments—that is, scholarships awarded, milestones achieved, such as passing the bar, attending medical school, or donating to one’s alma mater. In many ways, the notion of being historically elite is intimately related to the idea of being demographically elite. For it is often

24 those whose achievements mark them for distinction in society who send their children to elite schools, where they believe such achievement will be encouraged. Indeed, many elite secondary schools are characterized by high-achieving alumni/ae, whether their achievements are in business, the arts, the media, or academia, almost all have their “poster children,” who are often deployed extensively in their promotional materials. Such individuals serve as kind of North Star that suggests what might be possible if one’s child were able to secure a place in such a school.

Finally, in the popular imagination, elite schools are defined by their appearance, whether their physical characteristics include ancient buildings, ivy-covered walls, or state-of-the-art facilities, there is something unmistakable about the look of an elite prep school, what

Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) referred to as geographically elite. These are institutions that are richly resourced, boast cutting-edge science and computer labs, and athletics and arts facilities that rival those of leading universities, as well as learning centres that are the envy of many public schools and universities.

A Canadian Private School Mosaic

Each province is responsible for education in its own jurisdiction and determines the regulatory framework in which schools operate. As part of its mandate, the Ministry of

Education plays an oversight role with regards to private schools across the province. Private schools in Ontario are inspected annually. Inspections consist of a one-day visit, which is accompanied by an exchange of supporting documentation, which is focused on academic structures, programming, and ultimately a school’s capacity to issue academic credits. Failure to comply means that a school may lose its right to issue credits, which as one might imagine would be devastating to its brand, as elite.

Private schools also benefit from accreditation visits from teams assigned from within their professional associations. These teams are largely made of up administrators from similar schools across Canada. In Ontario, accreditation visits are conducted by CAIS, whose visits take place on a 5-year cycle and are collegial in character. CAIS accreditation teams are tasked with making recommendations and thus play an important consultative role, highlighting areas of policy, practice, or culture that may require attention. In short, they are focused on school improvement, rather than compliance.

Private schools do not require teachers to be certified by the Ontario College of Teachers

(OCT), the profession’s governing body, nor, with very few exceptions, are they unionized. It is, however, an increasing expectation that members of teaching faculties in private schools are

OCT certified. In fact, in my experience, which is supported by a review of both CAIS and CIS

Ontario recruitment web pages, this is now almost universally the case. Generally, pay, working conditions, and benefits are less generous than in public education. A typical teaching day at The

Academy, for example, involves an 8:15 a.m. start, an obligatory 5:00 p.m. end to the day, and an expectation that faculty members will be involved in extracurricular activities throughout the school year. However, many private school teachers attest to the fact that they deal with fewer disciplinary issues and enjoy smaller class sizes, a fact that can be confirmed by an examination of their websites and promotional materials. The academic and supervisory expectations of private school parents can be challenging to deal with, and in my professional experience, drive private school programs.

Parent Motivations for Attending Private Schools

In its “Parent Motivations Survey,” the most recent iteration of which was published in

2011 (NAIS, 2011) is instructive as many CAIS schools are also members of NAIS; regularly

26 attend professional development provided by NAIS, and deal with similar challenges, whether they are cultural, academic or demographic in nature. To date, no such survey has been undertaken by CAIS. The NAIS survey (McGovern & Torres, 2011) identified 10 reasons for considering a private school. In order of significance, they are: small class sizes (78%), excellent academic program (76%), high-quality teachers (67%), emphasis on character and values (64%), safe environment (64%), preparation for college (59%), extracurricular activities (40%), arts and music programs (38%), and a diverse study body (24%) (p. 4). The survey also examined the types of high-income parents private schools attract. They fell into five categories: Parents who push (10%), Success-driven parents (28%), Special kids’ parents (26%), Character-building parents (17%), and Public school proponents (19%) (McGovern & Torres, 2011, p. 9).

As the reader will note, the two largest demographic groups are Success-driven parents

(28%) and Special kids’ parents (26%), although these are sometimes referred to as “Right fit” parents in the survey (McGovern & Torres, 2011, p. 9). The survey noted that this group is seen as having high-growth potential “because public schools may not be able to address special learning and discipline needs of these children” (NAIS 2011, p. 11). Apparently, in very many cases, these parents are looking for “the highest quality education at the lowest cost. ... [In addition], they’re looking for individualized student instruction” (NAIS, 2011, p. 12). This is informative, as historically private schools have catered to Success-driven parents, and parents who push. And although over the long-haul enrolment numbers in private schools in Canada have increased over time, within that overall trend, they have ebbed and flowed according public attitudes toward education in Ontario (Hart & Kempf, 2018).

In Ontario, satisfaction with public schools has been in decline since 2012 (Hart &

Kempf, 2018). However, although fully two-thirds of the general public say they would send

27 their children to private schools if they could afford it (Maharaj, 2015a), according to the survey, there is no widespread appetite to fund private schools in Ontario from the public purse (Hart &

Kempf, 2018). There is, however, an appetite for more special education teachers and smaller class sizes, the latter a major selling point for private schools. In Ontario, there is a noticeable increase in the numbers of students with special needs enrolling in private schools. My own role overseeing guidance departments attests to this fact. Indeed, there is now a sizable group of private schools that caters specially to this need (Our Kids Media, 2019a).

Private Education in Canada by the Numbers

As discussed more extensively in Chapter 10, some of the oldest schools have been in operation since the early 1800s (Our Kids Media, 2019b). Apart from a dip in the 1980s when full funding was offered to Catholic secondary school students effectively bringing them in to the public school system, there has been a marked increase in the number of students opting for a private school education. The percentage rising from around 1% in the 1960s to 4.5% in 2005

(Ministry of Education, 2005, as cited in Van Pelt, Allison, & Allison, 2007, p. 7) to private schools currently educating approximately 6% of the population nationwide (Ministry of

Education, 2019). This trend continues into the present. By the 2016–2017 school year, the number increased from 119,000 to over 138,000 (Ministry of Education, 2019), a total that includes schools that serve Canada’s First Nations population. In that year, there were 1,179 private schools, of which 48 are listed on the CIS Ontario website (CIS, 2019) and which are considered elite according to Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) criteria. There are 92 schools that can be identified this way across Canada.

However, the picture is a nuanced one. Although the overall trend is that of growth, not everyone within the private school community in Canada echoes this sentiment. By way of

28 providing some additional context, it is worthy of noting that in a speech to CAIS (formerly known as Standards in Excellence and Learning (SEA+L), a former executive director, Ann-

Marie Kee (SEA+L, 2010) discussed the challenges that lay ahead of the elite school community.

At that time, she noted that CAIS school fees had outpaced the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by a factor of four to one. She added that in the previous decade school fees, which were largely driven by administrative initiatives, such as human resources, communications, marketing and learning resources, had increased by 30%. She also alluded to the fact that schools were trying to achieve compensation parity with public schools, as well as the challenges presented by various online learning platforms.

Kee’s (SEA+L, 2010) speech largely focused on the notion of financial sustainability; however, she also alerted the group to the reality of declining enrolments in all schools, which meant that the challenge of competing for students was likely to be increasingly difficult in tighter education markets. As such, many private schools, she noted, were looking at nontraditional markets to replace the potential loss in students as well as the lost revenue they would incur. Apparently, at that time, 21 Canadian schools had seen reductions in student enrolment.

Kee (SEA+L, 2010) also spoke of the need to increase financial aid to adjust for the fact that private schools would need to raise their fees over the coming decades to compensate for rising costs. In short, Kee presented a somewhat dire picture of private schools ultimately going out of business. Indeed, that private education was under threat. It is important to note that Kee’s comments came in the wake of the 2007–2009 “Great Recession” (Duignan, 2019, para. 1).

Thus, although the broader trend illustrates an increased interest in private education and declining support for public education, the private sector clearly faces challenges, which will

29 undoubtedly affect private schools in Canada and their ability to provide financial aid to poorer students.

Diversity in Private Schools in Canada

While the number of students attending private schools has grown, this growth also reflects an increasingly diverse population, a diversity that is reflected in an increasingly assorted set of educational interests (Allison, Hasan, & Van Pelt, 2016; Strauss, 2014). It is important to note, however, that the private sector as a whole still lags behind that found in public education in the United States and Canada (Er, Orefield, & Tietell, 2018). In the United States, where students’ ethnicity and race are reported, approximately 33% of private schools’ total enrolment comprises students of color (NAIS, 2019). Currently, in Canada, neither public nor private schools report the ethnic or racial composition of their student populations. Information that is available (Allison et al., 2016) largely describes diversity in private schools in terms of the types of schools within the system, that is, that 27% are specialty schools and that 48.6% are religious in character, whether they were Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, for example, rather than in terms of ethnicity, race, or socioeconomic status.

Having said that, in reviewing the reasons parents choose Canadian private schools, a similar list to that of the NAIS “Parent Motivations Survey” (McGovern & Torres, 2011, p. 4) is presented by Our Kids Media (2019b). It includes smaller class sizes, parental involvement, dedicated teachers, a safe environment, community environment, ample resources, extracurricular activities, and a shared educational philosophy. However, Our Kids Media

(2019b) also refers to schools with a discrete educational philosophy such as Montessori,

Waldorf, or Reggio Emilia inspired schools. The organization’s website also includes a section that discusses socioeconomic diversity, where it asks the question of school heads: “How does

30 your school maintain socioeconomic diversity in your student population?” Of a possible list of respondents that might have included more than over 90 elite schools, seven responded. In their comments, The Sterling Hall School (Our Kids Media, 2019a) noted, for example, that individual benefactors provide funds for “exceptional students who lack the financial means to attend our school” (para. 11). Holy Trinity School, in Toronto, stated that “although HTS does not have unlimited resources … those we have enable students from lower-income households to enrol. … Using a system of means-tested financial support, we are able to widen participation and increase socioeconomic diversity with the school community” (Media, 2019b, para. 10).

Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School, located in Alberta, wrote:

We continue to build our scholarship and financial aid program to ease the financial commitment of our families. We make a conscious effort in our marketing to be more broad ranging. We hope the concept of “Closer than you think” will appeal to families that feel the school is out of reach for their children. (Our Kids Media, 2019b, para. 12)

However, some schools—not unlike Metropolitan—aim to make financial aid a differentiator. In fact, Trinity College School, in Port Hope, goes as far as to say, “Our strategic plan also places a priority on building endowment so that we can offer more bursaries” (Our

Kids Media, 2019b, para. 13). In a similar vein, Upper Canada College expressed a similar commitment:

Accessibility is a priority. The number of students who receive some form of tuition assistance recently increased from six to eight per cent of the student body, and the year of eligibility dropped to Grade 5. The number will soon increase to 11 per cent, with a strategic plan to reach 20 percent (220 boys) in the coming years. (Our Kids Media, 2019b, para. 14)

In sum, the diversity picture is a mixed one. For a large majority, economic diversity would not seem to be a high priority. For some, evidenced by the comments above, it clearly is. It is nonetheless revealing that although some elite private schools in Canada are becoming more

31 aware of the value of socioeconomic diversity, as the head of Queen Margaret’s School, famed for its equestrian program, in Duncan, British Columbia, noted,

No matter our size or location, independent schools represent privilege— entitlement to education with smaller classes, more activities.… [As such,] it comes with our responsibility to contribute to a stronger and healthier society. To do that, we need to think about socio-economic diversity as an important part of our schools. (Our Kids Media, 2019b, para. 9)

Private School Culture

In the same way that schools reflect the communities in which they find themselves, every private school is unique and is the result of its own history and demography. Some schools have developed their reputations through their athletic prowess, an illustrious history, their academic achievements, or the achievements of their alumni/ae. Each strives for an identifiable brand. As such, although in some locales, such as in Toronto, private schools are obliged to compete with each other, which can shape their particular school cultures (Elliot, 2014). In other contexts, they are not. Indeed, because some are boarding schools, who draw their students from overseas (Ridley College, in St. Catherine’s, Ontario); or offer extensive outdoor education programs (Rousseau Lake, Ontario, located in the affluent Muskoka’s north of Toronto); or are single sex boys’ schools, like St. Clements or Royal St. George’s College; or single sex girls’ school, like Branksome Hall or Havergal College (all of which are also located in Toronto); or are Catholic, like Holy Trinity School (HTS), or day schools like Country Day School (CDS), each appeal to a particular kind of family, whether the decision to enrol the student was based on familial, social, financial, gender, academic, boarding or athletic, arts, or academic priorities. For some, school choice is made based on geographic location. In a relatively small marketplace, each seems to have carved out its own niche and has thus endured.

In short, although cognizant of each other, most schools compete within their own niche and are fiercely protective of their own brand. Bearing in mind one’s financial resources, there is quite literally something for everyone. However, although each school appeals to a different kind of family, they all share commonalities, which are distinct. As the head of Queen Margaret’s

School noted, they are defined by privilege. They are expensive, with tuition fees ranging from

$12,000 to $60,000 a year for prestigious boarding schools (Our Kids Media, 2019b), and for the most part they overwhelmingly serve financial elites. It is also noteworthy that these schools’ websites bear a remarkable similarity, which emphasizes the notion of opportunity, a frequent refrain on almost all of them, personified by Upper Canada College, where the word is used frequently and coupled with the adjective transformational (Upper Canada College, 2019).

Reviewing the range opportunities provided, it is hard not to believe in their promise.

Nonetheless, although there is a degree of ethnic and racial equality, there is a paucity of socioeconomic diversity. The minorities, whatever their ethnicity or race, who do attend are overwhelmingly from affluent backgrounds, which in many cases are characterized by extreme affluence, where campus parking lots exist like proxy showroom for the world’s most expensive automotive brands. Within this context, school climates are defined by high academic expectations, world-class facilities, a strong sense of community, and an abundance of opportunity. They remain schools for the few, rather than the many, and with very few exceptions elite private school students in Ontario are headed to university.

CHAPTER 3

LITERATURE REVIEW:

AN EPISODIC CONVERSATION

Bourdieu on Reproduction and Transformation

Having understood my own oppression (Peat, 1994, 2015b) as well as that of the lads— indeed, that the tendency of schools is to reproduce social-class status—one is inevitably led to question the degree to which transformation is possible given the reproductive nature of schools.

Bearing this in mind, the role personal agency, which is central to this study, plays in facilitating transformation is of some import. In addition, the project also seeks to unpack the ways in which student’s socioeconomic, familial, and cultural contexts shape students’ experience in elite private schools, as they seek to transcend their own social class-status and achieve social mobility. The conversation, which for my purposes embraces both public and private education

(but is focused on the latter) in Great Britain, and to some degree the United States, ultimately narrows in and focuses in on the Canadian experience and elite private schools in Ontario.

However, it is important to note that whereas in Britain, and the United States, there is a plethora of literature and a lively public discussion dealing with the role of social class in education, this discourse in Canada tends to be somewhat more peripheral. The reasons for this are discussed below.

Bourdieu first documented his theory in The Forms of Social Capital (1986) and

Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1990). His analysis, however, was seen as extremely deterministic. It is true that in very many respects Bourdieu never presented his ideas with “a bright beam of hope” (English & Bolton, 2017, p. 533). But, at the same time, it is also important to note that he saw the way in which his work was regarded as an “extraordinary

33 34 oversimplification,” if not an outright distortion of the scientific thesis he propounded (Bourdieu,

1989, p. 16). Thus, many theorists have taken a reductionist view of Bourdieu’s analyses of sophisticated mechanisms by which school systems reproduce the existing social order. In doing so, they implied that transformation was not really possible, an idea to which Bourdieu himself never fully subscribed.

In contrast, Bourdieu (1989) challenged the idea that “society reproduces itself mechanically, identical to itself, without transformation or deformation, by excluding all individual mobility” (p. 16). Indeed, when responding to the advocates of what he saw as a grossly oversimplified interpretation of his ideas, he referenced the “theoretical mood of the

1960s and the 1970s, [a time] when many proclaimed the hope that class differences might vanish altogether … [and] when reproductive works [particularly in the United States] proliferated” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 16). Most likely, Bourdieu (1989) was referring to Bowles’s and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), as well as to Collins’s The Credentialed

Society (1979). Although writing in a French setting, the reality of social mobility in the New

World clearly influenced his thought. Davies and Ritz argued that Bourdieu developed his theory

“in the 1960s and 1970s by mixing French intellectual traditions with ideas from American social science” (2017, p. 331). As such, one might speculate that would it not be implausible to imagine that the Canadian experience of social mobility might have similarly been of interest.

After all, it was during this period that Porter wrote about social hierarchies and their impact on social mobility in his seminal work, The Vertical Mosaic (2015).

“The idea that it is impossible to change schools unless the wider social and economic relations of wider society are transformed first” (Apple, 1996, p. 107, as cited in Gewirtz &

Cribb, 2002, p. 500) was also challenged by Gewirtz and Cribb (2002) who suggested that

35 theorists and practitioners, alike, should resist a kind of “critique from above” (p. 500) and thus come to adopt a fatalistic approach. This idea was explored by in an elite private school setting by J. D. Maxwell and Maxwell (1995). When they interrogated the processes of social reproduction in Canada’s elite independent schools, they found that the processes of reproduction were labour intensive in that schools went (and in my professional experience continue to go) to extraordinary lengths to ensure the success of their students—whether it was concerning the preservation of their social-class status or the ability to achieve social mobility. In modern independent school parlance, this phenomenon is referred to as the value-added and is seen as an essential element of a private school education, that which distinguishes such schools from their publicly funded counterparts. The value-added is simply another way of describing school effects (Willms, 2010) that impact student outcomes, all be they in an elite school setting.

J. D. Maxwell and Maxwell (1995) affirm the notion that personal agency and schools’ efforts to cultivate it, was and remains a feature of elite private education. Their study, however, contained a caveat: the authors also noted also that even in such rarefied settings, the outcomes of the processes of social mobility were unpredictable J. D. Maxwell and Maxell (1995), which suggests that both the preservation and/or acquisition of elite status are never entirely guaranteed even in such contexts, despite the herculean efforts of parents, teachers and schools alike. But, this does not entirely discount the idea that social mobility is possible. Although my study refers to and discusses public education, it ultimately focused on private education, the field examined by Bourdieu and Clough (1996) in their monograph, The State of Nobility: Elite Schools in the

Field of Power.

Hobsbawm and the Prism Through Which We Approach the Field Under Study

When writing about Bourdieu (1987, 1992), Hobsbawm (2016) suggested that a fatalist critique was somewhat predictable, framing his analysis within the psyche of the researcher:

When we read an author, we set off in a search of our own points of interest, not theirs. Thus, when non-French historians read Bourdieu’s work—which flows to such an enormous extent from his intellectual context, that of post-war France—it is not his thought and its development they are considering, but their own. (p. 38)

Hobsbawm (2016) went on: “the path towards the reality we are seeking to understand passes inevitably through the dense and dark forest of the assumptions and desires that the researcher carries with him” (p. 40). Of course, I am no exception, nor is this review of literature: “We approach our work not as pure minds but as men and women educated in such and such as society, in a specific part of the globe at a given moment in history” (Hobsbawm, 2016, p. 40).

This is “especially true of sociology” (Hobsbawm, 2016, p. 40), the primary lens through which I have chosen to evaluate the field of struggle. The sociologist approaches the subject through the idea of social class structures to which we all belong and are shaped. I approached this work in

Canada by an examination of processes by which working-class students become socially mobile in elite private schools. However, I also approach the field through my own historical and lived experience. I am the child of working-class parents who attended a failing school in England’s industrial midlands, but went on to attended university in America’s Ivy League, who has since spent the majority of his adult professional career as teacher and an administrator in an elite secondary school setting, throughout which I struggled to established a sense of personal agency and transcend my social-class status. As such, over the course of my professional life, I have watched as working-class students strove to gain important credentials, make connections with those of a different social order, and gain the confidence that might enable within them a sense of the power to shape their own lives. However, I am—and, most likely, will remain—one of

Willis’s “lads,” forever curious about how my educational experience and that of others of a similar disposition might be different. Unlike Willis’s lads (1977), I was able to transcend my own social origins.

The Determinates of Achievement in Canadian Schools

When examining school achievement more broadly, using a cohort based on a Canadian mobility survey, Guppy, Mikicich, and Pendakur (1984) explored the effect parent education and occupation (a high level of which is a distinguishing characteristic of independent school parents) has on school achievement. They discovered that although the influence remained strong, it also had a tendency to weaken over time. Most apparent in high school, the effect diminished in postsecondary education. As such, their work reinforces the importance of secondary education as a crucible through which social transformation can be accomplished. It does, however, beg the question: what import does parent education have on working-class students in elite private schools? Interestingly, the authors also made reference to the idea that there is no guarantee that even the parent who was a high-achieving student in secondary school or in a postsecondary setting will necessarily produce offspring who can achieve a similar outcome: the child of the doctor, the dentist or the heart surgeon may not possess the wherewithal, the grades, or even the inclination to reproduce their parents’ academic achievement.

In 2008, Edgerton, Peter, and Roberts examined the disparities in Canada’s educational system and found that socioeconomic background, gender, and region continue as fundamental sources of educational inequality. They argued that if schools were to improve the life chances of students regardless of their particular socioeconomic background, educational policy aimed at mitigating these outcomes remained an ongoing imperative. As such, my thesis argues that elite

38 private schools might provide some clues as to how to navigate these processes. Thus, up unto the present, whether discussing private or publicly funded school in Canada and across the

OECD, it remains true that the single most reliable predictor of academic success remains a child’s socioeconomic status (Anyon, 2005; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Coleman & Hoffer, 1987;

Collins, 1980, 2009; Perry & Francis, 2010; The Carnegie Corporation and the Sutton Trust,

2012). Yet, despite this somewhat dire prognosis, the fact remains that transformation is possible regardless the propensity of schools to reproduce social status.

Private Schooling: The Greater Divide, and the Public School Effect

Although “the work of reproduction theorists has primarily had a proletarian focus”

(Maxwell & Maxwell, 1995, p. 323)—that of working-class children in large public education systems, arguably the greatest cleft in education is that between public and private schools. I have spent my professional life in the latter. In fact, it is also worthy of noting that there has been increased public discourse about Canadian public education being a two-tiered system: one for those living in affluent neighbourhoods, and another for those who do not (Maharaj, 2015b).

These increasingly evident patterns have also been confirmed by the demographer Florida

(2014), who argued that due to increased gentrification major Canadian cities, such as Toronto,

Vancouver, and Montreal, are now increasingly divided by social class. However, it is also true that affluent and impoverished schools both cultivate and reinforce a sense of class- consciousness, habitus, and ultimately what Bourdieu (1990) described as weight—first in the educational field, and in the case elite private schools also within the realm of middle- and upper-class employment.

When writing about the first PISA Survey, which was conducted in 2001, Chitty (2002) reaffirmed many of Coleman’s (1966, 1988), and Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore’s (1982)

39 findings, noting that not only can schools make a difference, but that education policy and the policies of “schools themselves can moderate the impact of socioeconomic background on student performance” (Chitty, 2002, p. 210), which I argue is intimately bound to the notion of personal agency. When examining this phenomenon, Coleman, Hoffer and Kilgore (1982) and

Coleman and Hoffer (1987) argued that differences in achievement rose not simply because children attending private schools were from more affluent backgrounds, it was also because private schools were able to remain at arm’s length from district oversight, collective bargaining arrangements, and political governance (Frenette & Chan, 2015), all of which are associated with lower student achievement (Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014), and are representative of the political field of struggle to which education and all others are subordinate. I would argue that students’ socioeconomic, familial, and cultural contexts also play important roles in school achievement.

When Coleman (1966) published his survey of educational opportunity, he also identified the notion of social capital as being a key to understanding educational success and failure. His survey was unique in that it aimed to explore not only equality of opportunity in education, but also—and more critically—equality of outcomes in educational achievement. The findings were seminal and shaped the research that was to follow as well as establishing a correlation between a child’s socioeconomic status and her or his school achievement. The report also affirmed the correlation between a student’s background and the kind of school she or he attended. In short, not only did a student’s social background impact their achievement, it was also affected by the kind of students with whom they attended school, the child one sat next to in class. As this study demonstrates, the communities students belong to by attending school, enable them to developed social capital in important ways, providing role models, support, and encouragement. In fact, elite private schools processes tend to lend themselves to facilitating important relationships and

40 unique opportunities, which in large part are due to their proximity to rich social networks.

Although at the time this effect was seen as positive, it was not seen as being as significant as a child’s socioeconomic status. Thus, in our time, this suggests a critical feature of private education. That not only are a child’s chances of educational success heavily weighted in favour of her or his socioeconomic status, but these processes can be supercharged by being amongst a preponderance of students of similar socioeconomic status.

Coleman’s (1966) study dealt primarily with race, but by extension it also dealt with social class. The poorest, most disadvantaged students were most often African-American.

Coleman’s conclusion: minority students perform better in socially mixed environments, particularly when placed alongside a high percentage of white, more affluent students. This conclusion remains unchallenged (Coleman, 1966). This fact when combined with being with students of a similar socioeconomic status, as well as, the notion of existing outside local, state, or even national political control, is a major influence on why many parents choose an elite educational experience for their children (McGovern & Torres, 2011; NAIS, 2011).

As discussed in Chapter 2, polling in 2012 indicated that given a choice fully two-thirds of Canadian parents would send their children to private schools if they could afford it (Maharaj,

2015a). However, the essential difference between the two systems lies not necessarily in the quality of education, nor in the socioeconomic make of the student body alone, but also in two additional areas: the first, elite private schools do a very good job marketing themselves to parents, promising to get their children into universities, which are an essential ingredient of upward mobility; the second, and I argue the more critical, is that private schools tend to have better educational outcomes. Indeed, whereas 6% of Canadian children attend private schools, a third of the top-ranking schools on the Fraser Institute’s (2012) rankings are private. Private

41 school students also score higher on the PISA assessments (2010, 2011) and attain more advanced educational credentials as adults. However, this is primarily because those students tend to come from higher socioeconomic status homes, which suggests that parents select them as a means of having their children become a part of high-status social networks that are rich in social capital, and which might provide them with credentials, and confidence as well as useful connections. Interestingly, Elliot (2014) noted that schools located in highly competitive markets tended to be managed along more managerial or more strongly business-oriented lines; whilst in contrast schools in less competitive markets encouraged a much more welfarist, or communitarian-type of approach. Inevitably, such approaches affect students’ experience in schools, but also the willingness of those schools to recruit and embrace working-class students, taking an increased interest in the welfare of students beyond their traditional demographics.

It is important to note, however, that Frenette and Chan (2015) concluded that students in public schools in similar socioeconomic contexts as private schools tend to do as well and that there is no evidence to suggest that private schools help to raise the performance of the school system as a whole. In fact, after controlling for socioeconomic status, Lubienski and Lubienski

(2014) confirmed that such public schools in the United Statues often outperform their private counterparts. As such, it would seem fair to assume the author’s thesis would hold for other jurisdictions, including Canada, which until very recently has not collected data that controls for race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Social Capital and Social Class: Concepts for Explaining Academic Success and the Failure to Achieve

Clearly, apart from the education provided, what students of elite private school students also benefit from is the social networks to which they belong, networks that are rich in social

42 capital and which inevitably impact their life outcomes. Kupfer (2015) explored a similar theme in Educational Upward Mobility, integrating structural dimensions that inform how working- class youngsters become aspirational—that is, developed as a sense of personal agency, and then transition to higher education, aspirations that can often take flight in private schools. Bourdieu

(1989), Daly (2010), Gaztambide-Fernández (2009), Iyengar (2012), McDonough (1997),

McGraw (1992), Maeroff (1998), and Putnam (2000, 2007, 2015) and Putnam and Feldstein

(2003) all attested to the importance of social capital and its crucial importance not only in facilitating school achievement, but also in the ways it helps to foster the relationships and social connections that are beneficial for longer-term success in life. To paraphrase Cleverdon (Paikin,

2014) of the Prince’s Trust, a charity working in underprivileged communities in north Toronto, enabling students to become connected to the connected.

In fact, building on the work of Coleman and Hoffer (1987), McGraw (1992) in a somewhat similar vein, attempted to establish social capital as a new explanation for the failure to achieve. McGraw aimed to move beyond traditional conceptions of failure, whether they lay with the institution and the educational system; were because of a cultural discontinuity where achievement was due to conflicts caused by cultural and linguistic competencies and schools’ expectations; or a cultural deficiency, where underachievement was due to a deficit in the family or the community. In brief, whether or not the problem lay with school, the child, or the family.

Coleman and Hoffer (1987), and McGraw (1992) aimed to replace these constructs with a new conception.

McGraw (1992) interrogated the relationship between social and human capital, which she defined as the time and effort spent by parents on a student’s education and wealth and social status. Even so, she still found that high quality schools were more effective for children with

43 family backgrounds that enjoyed greater cultural capital, just as Coleman and Hoffer (1987) had done before her, and as Willms (2009) affirmed, as they come from homes richer in the kind of cultural capital that is valued in schools and facilitates school success. Cultural capital is comprised of an individual’s education (whether gained in the home, community, or an educational institution), styles and patterns of speech or dress, particular sensibilities and preferences, all of which promote and reinforce social mobility in socially stratified societies.

Unlike property, cultural capital is not transmissible, but is acquired over time, as it becomes impressed upon the person's habitus (character and way of thinking). Cultural capital and the habitus it cultivates, makes one more receptive to similar cultural influences (Bourdieu &

Passeron, 1990). Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) and Coleman and Hoffer (1987), however, understood that schools were not necessarily able to overcome what Willis (1977) described as

“cultural deprivation” (p. 119). Willis (1977) posited that working-class culture is fundamentally different than middle- or upper-class culture. As a result, middle- and upper-class children are able to acquire cultural capital by observing their parents, whereas working-class children are not. This phenomenon facilitates school achievement and employability. Thus, the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. Children from homes rich in cultural capital are able to acquire more of it in school. Both McGraw (1992) and I reject the notion that working-class culture is inferior to middle- or upper-class culture. However, it is this reality that makes the examination of working-class students in an upper-middle class milieu so interesting. Working-class culture is not the culture of the school. Herein lies the rub. Willis (1977) argued that schools are fundamentally designed for the middle- and upper-classes, whether intentionally or not.

Ali and Grabb (1998) treated education as in important dependent variable in its own right and then using a representative national survey compared the effects of both ethnicity and

44 class on educational outcomes. Their research revealed that although ethnicity had a significant effect that effect was the weakest of three class-related phenomena: mother’s education, father’s education and occupation. In fact, it was the class variables that accounted for a large part of the ethnic differences in educational outcomes. For this reason, my study is focused on social class above and beyond ethnicity or even gender. It is important to state there were, however, significant differences between foreign- and native-born respondents, with foreign-born respondents, particularly those coming from south Asia and Asian students, more generally, outpacing their counterparts who may see education as intrinsically linked to social mobility.

Thus, again, it would appear that children of the better educated enjoy multiple advantages— both cultural and social capital assets—whether they are manifested as opportunities to travel, access to professional role models and even the work-place cultures their parents inhabit. Ali and

Grabb (1998) also noted, however, that in their view these outcomes were largely linked to academic processes in schools, what Willms (2009) called school effects, and perhaps more importantly to the more affluent student’s ability to take advantage of them.

More recently, the notion the exchange of social capital was explored by Gaztambide-

Fernández (2009), who wrote about this phenomenon when discussing the processes of becoming elite in an American private school. He noted that children from advantaged homes attend schools with higher per-student spending ratios, better quality teachers, an abundance of learning materials, resources, and enriched programming in athletics, music, drama and the visual arts. Thus, like Willis (1988) before him, he understood that they too are able to further build on the cultural capital they already possess, often making them employable in upper- middle class domains. Reinforcing this notion, Rivera (2015) stressed that providing access in high school to well-staffed counselling offices with durable links to postsecondary institutions is

45 one of the most importance ingredients in securing independent school students’ postsecondary trajectory, a phenomenon to which I can attest in my role as a private school administrator.

Indeed, the role counselling offices plays provides an important form of social capital, which enables working-class students to exploit any sense of person agency they may feel growing within them.

In Class warfare: Class, race, and college admissions in top-tier secondary schools,

Weis, Cipollone and Jenkins (2014), also examined this phenomenon from a similar perspective.

Thus, in brief, privileged students enjoy a kind of compound advantage, which enables them enjoy an elite school experience, and also to envision an elite future beyond that experience

(Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009). This is one of the benefits of being a member of what Jack

(2019) described as the privileged poor in university—that is, working-class students who went on to attend elite universities, who do well there because of the social capital they gained by attending an elite private secondary school. More broadly, Diwan (1987, as cited in Joshee,

2012, pp. 77–78) offered a useful framework for understanding the notion of privilege:

non-accountability (or the reality that those in positions of power rarely have to account to those lower in the hierarchy); ease of opportunities (the reality that those who have more wealth and power are able to translate this into opportunities to extend or sustain their wealth and power); and higher levels of income and consumption.

In Privilege: The making of an adolescent elite at St. Paul’s School (2011), Khan described this notion as “ease” (p. 67). Both the notions articulated by Diwan (1987) and Khan (2011) are apropos to discussions of student experience with elite environments. At the same time, they become members of social networks that are rich in resources, which enable them to develop critical connections with others and, by extension, social capital. In very large part, this is a process is unavailable to working-class children. In the final analysis, Bourdieu (1989) believed

46 that schools were effectively created to make all children middle class, the problem being that only the middle class themselves (and some among the high-achieving working class) have the cultural capital to perpetuate or achieve this end (Bourdieu, 1989; Webb, Schirato, & Danaher,

2002).

The State of Educational Reform

In the literature surrounding the social gap for educational achievement, Perry and

Francis (2010) found that the social-class gap had not significantly closed and that many of the reforms that have been introduced to improve the lot of the less advantaged were ill-conceived and produced deficit-kinds of initiatives, initiatives that suggested if only poorer students were more motivated and willing to work harder they might succeed. This did not speak to critical elements of social capital and personal agency. Evidence confirms that such reforms, however well meaning, did not lead to the kind of systemic change that might foster widespread success for entire populations. Such efforts included Excellence in Cities, Aim Higher and Extra Mile

(Perry & Francis, 2010, p. 5), which by their names imply the problem lies with the student, not the system or the obstacles it presents to economically disadvantaged student. The RSA report also acknowledged that the achievement gap is “complicated by other factors, such as gender and ethnicity” (p. 5), a notion I fully endorse. Such approaches do not address issues around social status, habitus, field, and social capital and instead take a kind of “bootstraps” approach, personified by the work of Duckworth (2016), an approach that was ironically aimed at upper- middle class students in affluent settings, not society’s disadvantaged, who I one might reasonably argue often exhibit a well-developed sense of grit or toughness.

In 2016, Isenberg placed the phenomenon in an historical contest. Isenberg argued that a class hierarchy has always been pervasive in the United States as well as in very many advanced

47 democracies and that social mobility has always been limited by the unwritten codes of social class behaviours, echoing the work of both Bourdieu (1986, 1989, 1990) and Willis (1988).

Porter documented this phenomenon in Canada, in 1965. Porter identified the same trends, also placing them in an ethnic and racial context, with White European immigrants falling at the top of the socioeconomic pile and more-recent non-White and indigenous peoples at the bottom.

Indeed, the rise of social inequality in Canada is what made the publishing of Porter’s 50th anniversary edition The Vertical Mosaic (2015) so poignant in our time. Providing additional

Canadian context, Ungerleider (2006) also documented the educational, and social consequences of inequality.

Exposure to Better Neighbourhoods

Interestingly, however, Chetty and Raj’s (2018) Equality of Opportunity project documented the reality of both economic and educational inequality and the effect of exposure to better neighbourhoods in terms of both educational and life outcomes. They demonstrated that for poorer students of whatever race and/or ethnicity, moving to a better neighbourhood, particularly at a young age, does indeed make a difference to students’ educational outcomes and employment prospects. Unfortunately, moving into a better neighbourhood with better schools is often prohibitively expensive. The participants in this study were generally unable to do so.

However, because of the existence of reliable transportation links, they were able to attend very good schools.

A Model of Social Mediations, Unwitting Agents of the System, and the Symbolic and Emancipatory Role of Credentials

Bourdieu (1989) clearly comprehended the processes of reproduction that take place in schools; however, he also proposed:

a model of the social mediations and processes that—unbeknownst to the agents of the school system and oftentimes against their will—tend to ensure the transmission of cultural capital across generations and to stamp pre-existing differences in inherited cultural capital with the meritocratic seal of academic consecration [that is, the credential]. (p. 16)

“Functioning in the manner of a huge classificatory machine” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 16)—what I alluded to above as a kind of exquisite sorting—“the school helps to make and to impose the legitimate exclusions and inclusions that form the basis of the social order” (Bourdieu, 1989, p.

16). Or, as Krivosheeva (2016) put it, pedagogical communication is built with the preservation of social inequality in mind: “The most prepared understand more, the least prepared realise that there are things unavailable to them, [and] so the often refuse to continue their education” (p.

81). This was my experience as a student. The phenomenon is the educational equivalent of the

“Matthew Effect,” after the passage in The gospel according to Matthew about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer (as cited in Wexler, 2019, p. 21). Like many of my peers, I too realized there were lives—even if I might have aspired to them—that were simply unavailable to me. And, yet, had I been in a different school, independent, grammar or otherwise, perhaps I might have imagined otherwise. The participants of this study were able to imagine their education in such ways and their imaginations were fuelled by opportunities to exploit them.

Although as a student, I was vaguely conscious of the reproductive process at work in my own life, in the years since, like Bourdieu, “I’ve never stopped using sociology against my determinants and limits” (Bourdieu, as cited in Hobsbawm, 2016, p. 41). According to Johnson

(2002), Bourdieu hoped his work would be emancipatory—not least one might reasonably assume for himself—although he was “never entirely at ease as an intellectual” (Fowler, 2000, para 2). Yet, his work serves as a model of transcendence. For me, the work of Apple (1995),

Bourdieu (1986, 1989, 1990), Bowles and Gintis (1976), and Willis (1988), were revelatory and

49 emancipatory. Through them, I understood the reality of my own educational journey in determining my own life outcomes. Thus, I too am determined to use my education as a tool not only in my own interests, but also for that of others. Ultimately, it is my credentials, hard won as they have been, that have helped me to transform my own class status. Indeed, it is my hope that my adaptation of Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983, 2012, 2016) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’s

(1997) portraiture might read similarly to the subjects of this study and those who chance upon it.

Relatively Disadvantaged Children in Private Schools: Evidence From Their Experience

As it turns out, however, for the bright but relatively disadvantaged student to attend a private school may be the easy part (Jack, 2019). Conducting a policy review of Britain’s assisted places scheme, which was an attempt by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government

(1979–1990) to fund children from poor backgrounds to attend private schools, Tapper and

Salter (1986) found that although the scheme provided funds to attend school and even a small bursary for travel, it provided no money to fund participation in extracurricular activities. Thus, while the program purportedly succeeded in its aims to help some disadvantaged students become socially mobile, it did not foster social capital in the sense that my study explores.

Power, Whitty, and Wisby (2006) and Power, Curtis, Whitty, and Edwards (2010) examined the educational and career trajectories of the assisted placeholders. Their analysis explored the relationship between home and school. They also explored the ways in which the most disadvantaged participants in the scheme experienced it. Of particular note were issues surrounding the intersections between home background, friendship networks, and school cultures, which are also the concern of this study. Feelings of detachment, estrangement and

50 even alienation proved to have lasting effects on the participants, even if and when they became socially mobile. Indeed, Friedman (2016) examined the emotional cost of social mobility, which he said was the result of a divided habitus, what he described as “habitus clivé” (p. 132). The cultural capital of a person is ultimately linked to his or her habitus and field, that is, one’s social position within a particular domain; together the two are configured as a kind social structure

(King, 2005). Depending on the particular social field, one type of cultural capital can simultaneously be legitimate and illegitimate. In that way, the legitimization, or societal recognition, of a type of cultural capital can be somewhat arbitrary. The habitus of a person is composed of the intellectual dispositions inculcated to her or him by family and the individual’s familial environment (Harker, 1990). The habitus of a person can also change when he or she changes social positions within the field. (Harker, 1990). Friedman (2014) concluded that mobile individuals remain alienated between habities, which impacted their notions of self, and can have a profound effect only on not their sense of self, but also their power to act with confidence in their own interests.

The Increasingly Slender Pathway Towards Social Mobility

This theme was taken up by Putnam (2015), who explored the experiences of both advantaged and disadvantaged students vis-à-vis the presence of social capital in their lives.

Putnam’s work built upon his previous efforts (2000, 2007), but its most salient finding was that fewer Americans—and if one accepts that the trends he discussed extend beyond the United

States, fewer young Canadians have the opportunity to achieve upward mobility. This finding was reinforced by The Wealth Gap: Perceptions and Misconceptions in Canada (2014) and

Income inequality (2016), both published by the Broadbent Institute, which discussed similar

51 trends in Canada. Due to rapidly increasing income inequality in Canada, the pathway leading to social mobility has become increasingly slender and fraught with difficulty.

Like my study, Putnam’s (2015) work retells the stories of individuals and illustrates the structural barriers that families and children face as they try to navigate educational systems both public and private. The work of Putnam (2015), Harker (1990), Nash and Harker (1992), J. D.

Maxwell and Maxwell (1995), as well as this study all discuss the “immense investments”

(Putnam, 2015, as cited in Perhocs, 2016, p. 138) parents are now required to make in support of their children’s success, investments that are palpable in the lives of the participants of this study.

In short, with increasing income disparities between social-class groups, it is ever more difficult to achieve mobility through education. Putnam (2015) was not optimistic. His prescriptions lay in the realm of social policy, suggesting more progressive taxation and an increased minimum wage, prescriptions that rest within the realm of the political. It is also worthy of including that two years after the publication of his book, an article appeared in the

Huffington Post in Canada, entitled, “The American Dream is Easier to Achieve in Canada”

(Rieger, 2017), a sentiment that suggests that there may well be time to address the challenges

Canadians face educationally and ensure that the pathway towards educational achievement and social mobility remains viable and well-travelled.

An Emergent, Modest Body of Literature on Individual Social Mobility Journeys

There is an emerging, if somewhat modest, body of literature documenting the experience of individuals from lower socioeconomic strata who aimed to become socially mobile through education, although this literature is somewhat scarce in Canada. Vance (2016) explored his

52 journey from Appalachian poverty to Yale. His work did so within a post-industrial society in an isolated community, a community in which many of inhabitants had few connections to others beyond their own immediate environs. By extension, the people referred to in his book, also enjoyed fewer employment opportunities, that is, apart from low-paying, unpredictable and often temporary work, which tends to be characteristic of the plight of those cut off from educational opportunity. Similarly, in The Privileged Poor (2019), Jack, documented his journey from poverty in Miami’s inner city to the world of Gulliver, a privileged private school from where he went on to Amherst College and ultimately to graduate school at Harvard University. Jack’s

(2019) experience echoes that of Reay’s (2017a, 2017b, 2018). Reay grew up as a coal miner’s daughter living on a council estate. She then went on to attend the London School of Economics

(LSE), and eventually became an esteemed professor at Cambridge University. All three stories are instructive. Hargreaves (2020) Moving: A memoir of Education and Social Mobility is also an important addition to this body of literature. The book traces Hargreaves’s experience growing up in working-class community in the Northwest of England in the 1950s up unto to his university experience in the following decades. In the memoir, Hargreaves, now a leading international scholar discusses the challenges of moving between cultures whilst at the same time, speaking to the current challenges faced by working-class children should they hope to become socially mobile.

Recent Literature on Social Class and Education in Canada

As noted in the opening paragraph to this chapter, there is a paucity of literature interrogating the intersection between the roles social class plays in education and social mobility in Canada. In part this is because culturally Canadians have always seen themselves as members of an egalitarian, communitarian, and middle-class society (Cazzin, 2017; McMahon,

2014; Proudfoot, 2019a, 2019b). And, yet, as documented by Broadbent (2014, 2016), Willms

(2009), Ungerleider (2006), and Florida (2014), the same patterns of social inequality found elsewhere are increasingly evident. But, to some degree, it may be a taboo to speak of them

(Proudfoot, 2019b).

As far back as 2014, Beltrame noted that Canada’s income-gap was amongst the fastest growing in the OECD. A short time after that, in 2017, Carmichael suggested that Canada needed to get serious about income inequality. At that time, Carmichael (2017) argued that society’s wealthy need to contribute more to society, not least by means in paying a larger share of their wealth in income tax, positing a similar refrain to that of Putnam south of the border.

This notion is widely supported by the findings of The Canada Project (2017), a joint undertaking of Maclean’s and Abacus Data, the results of which were intended to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Canada’s confederation. Indeed, it is worth making note of the fact that the Prince’s Trust, which had historically worked to connect disadvantaged young people in

Britain to possible employers, is now actively working in the Toronto area to help similar individuals in Canada to develop social capital and make vital connections to those who hold resources, which when accessed might change their life trajectory (Treble, 2013), and assist them to become socially mobile.

Although more recently there is an increased interest in income inequality in Canada and the importance of education in securing upward mobility, the phenomenon is by no means new.

When drawing on OECD data, Edgerton, Peter, and Roberts (2008), highlighted the uneven distribution of education achievement on socioeconomic lines over a decade ago, echoing the work of Guppy, Mikicich, and Pendakur (1984), and clearly demonstrated that the influence of students’ social origins still exerts a strong influence on school attainment in Canada. Davies,

Maldonado, and Zarifa (2014) noted that advantaged groups still dominate access to the best- positioned institutions in Canada. Their work sounds eerily reminiscent of Porter (2015). Their study noted that entry into the university hierarchy tends to mirror the socioeconomic realities of the province: students from higher socioeconomic neighbourhoods are more likely to enter higher-ranked and better-resourced institutions. Weis, Cipollone, and Jenkins (2014) referred to

“the lengths to which parents of middle- and upper-middle-class children are willing to go to in light of the increasingly competitive college admissions process” (p. 1) as a kind of class warfare. I posit that a similar dynamic increasingly characterizes the university applications’ process in elite private schools and affluent public schools in Canada, and is likewise assault on

Canadian schools in the same way it is in the United States.

Inevitably, educational institutions and their processes are subject to broader economic and social trends. Not surprisingly the sociology of Canada bears remarkable similarities to our

OECD counterparts’ (Wotherspoon, 2018), albeit despite the ways in which many Canadians see themselves. When discussing the current situation, the federal Minister of Finance, Bill Morneau, in a speech given to INSEAD (formerly referred to as Institut Europeen D’Administration Des

Affaires) alumni in April 2017, said, “middle class anxiety is real” (Morneau, 2017). This anxiety fuels interest in the role education plays in social mobility in Canada and perhaps inevitably the role of private education in our society. Trends that have been evident in the

United States and Europe, which have changed the political landscape in those jurisdictions, are now a part of the Canadian zeitgeist. Thus, although the conversation has been episodic, at times interrupted, and somewhat halting, it has moved on migrating from European class-based societies to the United States to Canada, and Ontario, the stereotypical bastion of the middle class, where interest in private schooling—even within the context of an egalitarian society with

55 a strong public education—has grown. Sadly, there is very little discussion of the plight of the working class in Canada, not least in education.

Bourdieu (1989) believed that transformation was possible, but it appears that many

Canadians believe that it may well be most likely to occur in private school settings. It is in these schools that these parents believe their children are most likely to develop the sense of agency required to determine their own life outcomes. This is certainly true of the participants of this study. As the portraits and their analyses reveal, all three individuals did became socially mobile, albeit on their own terms. What follows interrogates this phenomenon, aiming to understand the ways in which reproductive processes play out in elite school settings in Canada. The chapter that follows articulates both the theoretical and conceptual frameworks, which serve as a framework through which to examine these processes.

CHAPTER 4

THEORETICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:

A BROAD-BASED, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Theoretical Foundations

This qualitative study deals with educational inequality (Guppy, Mikicich, & Pendakur,

1984) and, as discussed in the review of literature, it is grounded in the sociology of education

(Barakett & Cleghorn, 2000; Davies and Guppy, 2006; Porter, 2015; Wotherspoon, 2018). As noted, previous studies exploring social mobility have largely been economic and quantitative in character (Corak, 2013; Chetty & Hendren, 2018; Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016; The Boston

Consulting Group Sutton Trust, 2017). Such studies have aimed to measure the phenomenon, its demographics and its broader impact on society, all of which are seen as positive. This research deals with the experience of social mobility about which there is very little literature (e.g.,

Friedman, 2014, 2016; Miles, Savage, & Bühlumann, 2011). It explores particular social mediations that by and large determine our social status, and thus the ways in which schools reproduce and transform the social order (Bourdieu, 1989, 1990; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2019;

Harker, 1984, 1990; Maxwell & Maxwell, 1995; Porter, 2015; Willis, 1988).

However, because my study deals with the attempt to transcend one’s social circumstances and thereby improve the human condition (The Boston Consulting Group Sutton

Trust, 2017, Corak, 2013; Petrelli, 2016; Wilby, 2008), I also interrogate how aspirations are formed (Hart, 2013; Stahl, 2015). As such, this study draws upon other academic disciplines that inform the processes by which schools conduct their affairs—even if these processes are unknown to their architects and practitioners (Bourdieu, 1989). As the undertaking privileges a sociological approach, discussing social production and reproduction, as well as ideas about

56 57 social capital and social networks, it also draws upon works in those areas, such as Borgatti and

Ofem (2010), Christastakis and Fowler (2009), Daly (2010), Granovetter (1973), McGraw

(1992), Maeroff (1998), Phelan, Davidson, and Cao (1991), Putnam (2000, 2007, 2015), and

Putnam and Feldstein (2003). As educational processes are shaped by governmental policies

(Gewirtz & Cribb, 2002)—which are in turn influenced and determined by political and economic considerations—I also refer to them as a means of providing additional context and perspective (Aydemir, Chen, & Corak, 2013; Broadbent, 2014, 2016; Chetty & Hendren, 2018;

Chetty, Hendren, & Katz, 2016; Corak, 2013; Lubienski & Lubienski, 2014).

The aim of this approach is to provide the richest possible examination of the field. As

Anyon (2005) argued, education policy must become broader and grow to encompass wider societal and political concerns, including income, housing, transportation, and other family supports. In fact, Sampson (2013) notes that the effects of living in an underserved neighbourhood tend to be enduring. Indeed, he argues that building capacity in such neighbourhoods is likely more efficacious that simply trying to change their composition.

However, although my study addresses the notion of neighbourhood effects on school achievement tangentially, it is primarily concerned with the participants’ experience in school, that is, what happened once they were there. Nonetheless, taking such an approach establishes a new paradigm for policy makers and practitioners alike, not unlike that taken by Duncan &

Murnane (2011) in their seminal work, Whither Opportunity (2011) in which as editors they facilitated an examination of the notion of school effects which are the concern of this study from a number of different perspectives in an interdisciplinary way. Although, like them, I acknowledge there are limits to what schools can achieve alone. It is in this spirit that I have adopted a broad-based approach.

In addition, I aim to shed light on social reproduction in a North American context, which, as Bourdieu (1989) wrote, has been characterized by an extraordinary degree of social mobility. In this respect, Canada—and Ontario, its largest educational jurisdiction—is uniquely placed compared to both its southern neighbour and British counterpart, now being hailed as a place in which social mobility is more likely to occur (Babad, 2018; Gilmore, 2017; Rieger,

2017). Moreover, while the analysis in Chapter 9, which follows the presentation of the portraits, deals with the themes that emerge from the data and the conceptual framework, Chapter 10 takes a somewhat different approach. As the data is exceedingly layered and is ultimately an examination of the strata of their experience, it became clear in the course of analysis that the framework did not entirely capture all the elements of their experience way I had hoped. As such in keeping with the methodology of portraiture, the chapter employs an additional lens as a means of illuminating the elements that emerged beyond the initial framework. This supplementary level of analysis, which remains tethered to the framework, provides the reader an additional way of understanding the data and further excavates the layers of their experience.

The chapter begins by explaining how the metaphors used relate to the conceptual framework.

Finally, in arguing that we ultimately construct our own meanings, I find myself sympathetic to a constructivist/interpretivist approach to educational administration (Greenfield,

1978). I do, however, take a critical stance to the discipline: I see the notion of praxis as central to such administration, and believe that theory must transcend analysis in order to inform practice and ultimately lead to [social] justice (Foster, 1986).

Definition of Key Terms

Within this context, the definition of several key terms will be useful for the reader.

Together with the theoretical discussion, the definitions that follow provide a foundation on

59 which to discuss the experience of working-class children in elite, independent schools as it has been conceptualized. The definitions include social mobility, social capital, and social class.

Together with the discussion of Bourdieu’s (1986, 1990) notion of reproduction, as discussed in

Chapter 3, this nomenclature informs the conceptual approach that follows.

Social Mobility

Studies that aim to understand economic social mobility generally evaluate changes in incomes between parents and their children. Sociological studies mostly do the same, albeit with regard to occupational status (Friedman, 2014). Corak (2013), Aydemir, Chen, and Corak

(2013), Chetty and Hendren (2018), and Chetty, Hendren, and Katz, 2016, and The Boston

Consulting Group Sutton Trust (2017) are important examples of these efforts. Indeed, as work of The Boston Consulting Group Sutton Trust (2017) states:

Social mobility is about breaking the link between an individual's parental background and their opportunities to reach their full potential in terms of income and occupation. [However, social mobility] is also about better opportunities for each generation and making access to these opportunities fairer, regardless of background. (p. 6)

In yet another dimension, social mobility explores whether or not individuals are in the same social class as their parents, a difference defined by children’s employment being of a professional nature or routine manual work, albeit in contrast to their parents (The Boston

Consulting Group Sutton Trust, 2017). However, it is also about re-establishing the link between previous mobility interrupted by ill fortune and changing economic fortunes, and current mobility.

Social mobility can also be understood in terms of “life chances, which are measured by a range of outcomes including education, health and [social] justice” (The Boston Consulting

Group Sutton Trust, 2017, p. 6). While the former indicators, particularly those that concern

60 income are easier to measure, they impact other measures, such as the nature of one’s work; one’s notion of social status; the social networks to which one belongs, and the opportunities

(and/or resources) that are available as a result of one’s membership in such networks—even one’s notion of self. As such, this study aims to understand the ways in which individuals navigate the process of social mobility itself, albeit in schools, as well as the individual’s more prolonged experience of mobility. Thus, this study examines both the benefits and the costs of social mobility (Friedman, 2016, 2014; Goldthorpe, 1980; Hey, 1997; Ingram, 2011; Miles,

Savage, & Bühlmann, 2011; O’Hearn, 2015; Power, Curtis, Whitty, & Edwards, 2010; Power,

Whitty, & Wisby, 2006; Reay, Crozier, & Clayton, 2009; Srinivasa, 1995; Stacey, 1967).

Social Capital

Here, social capital is defined as the collective value of all social networks—that is, people who know people—and the way such networks mobilize to do things for people they know (Putnam and Feldstein, 2003). For my purposes, social capital is also defined as the capacity to develop trusting relationships that are borne of shared experiences. Within the context of this study more specifically, they refer to shared experiences that are a product of an elite secondary school experience, which when coupled with other similar elite experiences that elite secondary schools facilitate, occur in a postsecondary setting or in an upper-class work milieu. Each of these phenomena is evidenced in chapters 6, 7, and 8. Such relationships provide a matrix of support and can shape one’s identity, sense of personal agency and even behaviour.

In all three of the portraits that follow the critical importance of relationships characterized by trust is a central—even, pivotal—feature of their social mobility journey. Indeed, when reviewing the portraits, one will observe that each participant was able to develop trusting relationships with a key figure(s) who also attended or worked at their particular school.

For Bourdieu (1986), social capital is a way of describing resources, whether actual or potential, that may become available to an individual as a result of membership in and relationships that result of one’s participation in elite groups. These kinds of “assets are provided by appurtenance to a network as a consequence of one’s socioeconomic status as well as one’s participation in and membership in certain institutions” (p. 56). For Bourdieu (1986, 1990), by and large this form of capital reproduces inequality. In contrast, for Putnam (2000, 2007, 2015) and Putnam and Feldstein (2003), social capital is linked to the success of communities, and, nowadays, in its absence, to their precipitous decline as society becomes increasingly divided by income and social inequality.

For McGraw (1992), social capital is indicated by the quality of relationships between adults and children, and “is the result of the time and effort parents expend on behalf of their child’s achievement” (p. 368). The reader will note this phenomenon in all three portraits. Each of participants’ parents went to remarkable lengths to support their children’s success in school.

For Coleman (1988), it is the “norms, social networks and relationships that are of real value when growing up and … can be highly productive in shaping a child’s life trajectory. Social capital exists in the home and community” (p. 9; see also Coleman, Hoffer, & Kilgore, 1982). In many respects this is a largely positive view, similar to that of Putnam (2000, 2007). For each of the theorists I have discussed, however, social capital is present within institutional relationships.

Such relationships are highly concentrated in elite private schools (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977;

Bourdieu & Clough, 1996).

Although not easily defined—or, at the very least, defined in different ways by different theorists—social capital is a precious commodity transferred through one’s membership to a social network or a group. However, almost universally, it is defined by the relationships that

62 exist among and between people (Bourdieu, 1990; Christakis & Fowler, 2009; Coleman, 1988;

Daly, 2010; McGraw, 1992). For all theorists it has real value on both a personal and societal level. Critically, this study draws most heavily from Bourdieu’s (1986, 1990) and Bourdieu and

Passeron (1996) and Putnam’s (2000, 2007) conceptualizations of social capital. In doing so, it further acknowledges that although Bourdieu’s view is more pessimistic than that of Putman

(2000, 2007), McGraw (1992), or even Coleman (1988), all attest to its durable efficacy. I use the work of those theorists to mediate the work of Bourdieu. Thus, I explore notions of reproduction, but also seriously entertain the possibility social capital enabling transformation.

Social Class

Like Willis (1988) before me, I draw upon some Marxist conceptions of class and employ the language of Marx, particularly with regard to his fundamental categories: the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, the petite bourgeoisie, who own businesses but do not necessarily employ others (in modern parlance, often self-employed small business owners), and the proletariat, who sell their labour for wages (Marx and Engels, 1931), not unlike my father.

When discussing class identifications, this study is, however, rooted in Weberian typology, the conceptions of which are grounded in one’s occupational status and, more importantly, one’s “life chances”—that is, the “opportunit[y] to acquire rewards one shares in common with others by virtue of one’s possession of property, goods, or opportunities for income” (Weber, 1969, as cited in Little, 2016, p. 371).

Having lain what I believe is a meaningful intellectual foundation for this study, I wish to note that defining social class in a Canadian context is extremely complex. The way in which social class formation operates within a Canadian context is different from the way it works within British, European, or even American contexts. The United Kingdom, for example,

63 remains highly segregated along class lines (Perry & Francis, 2010), and a national discourse continues around the role education plays in social mobility (Corak, 2013; The Boston

Consulting Group Sutton Trust, 2017). This is less true of the Canadian experience: no national debate has discussed these issues in quite the same way.

Canadian Notions of Social Class

Like their American counterparts—although one could argue that this is changing—

Canadians generally tend to see themselves as “middle class.” For a broader discussion of this phenomenon, see Putnam (2000, 2007), Chetty and Hendren (2018) and Chetty, Hendren and

Katz, (2016), as well as Reeves (2015, 2017). Each of these works implies that the United States is increasingly becoming a class-based society. Isenberg (2016) argued that it has always been thus. The idea of Canadians seeing themselves as fundamentally middle class has been true for some time. In 1987, 60% of Canadians defined their class affiliation in terms of their occupation,

40% in relation to their level of income, and a similar size (41%) in relation to personal qualities

(honesty, niceness, etc.); both then and now, a majority self-identify as middle class (Pammett,

1987). Moreover, class-consciousness in Canada has historically been weak (Hunter, 1981, as cited in Pammett, 1987, p. 274; Marchak, 2011; Schreiber, 1980). Nor does there exist a deeply rooted class structure (Marchak, 2011). In fact, within political discourse across Canada, phrases such as “working class,” “class struggle,” “class conflict,” and even “class” itself—with the exception of being “middle class”—are rarely used (Pammett, p. 272).

Further complicating the picture is the fact that social class appears to mean different things to different people (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005). In addition, there are both subjective and objective elements to class (Pammett, 1987). Some theorists use income as their key indicator.

As such, Thurow defined the “middle class” as including those who earned between 75% and

125% percent of the median income (Thurow, as cited in McMahon, 2014, para. 5). For

Canadians in 2014, this meant families earning between $35,000 and $75,000 per year. Around the same time, Galston (2013) argued that it included those earning between two-thirds and twice the median income, which included families with a household income of $32,000 and $95,000 a year, or approximately 40 percent of the Canadian population (Galston, 2013, as cited in

McMahon (2014, p. 2); other theorists use notions of disposable income (McMahon, 2014, p. 2).

For still others “it is rank [or] tribe ... [as well as] culture and taste. [Some theorists even see] it as attitudes and assumptions, a source of identity, a system of exclusion ... an accident of birth that can influence the outcome of a life” (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005, p. 3).

Nonetheless, regardless of the absence of a well-defined class consciousness or any generally agreed upon class structure, “classes are groups of people of similar economic and social position; people who ... share political attitudes, lifestyles, consumption patterns, cultural interests and opportunities” (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005, p. 4). Most importantly for this study, classes also share “opportunities to get ahead” (Scott & Leonhardt, 2005, p. 4). Social class is defined here in three dimensions: in relation to incomes, values systems, and sets of relationships, or what I refer to here as social networks. These constructs are also beginning to emerge in Canadian, national political discourse. Justin Trudeau, Canada’s current Prime

Minister, has been increasingly using the term “middle class” in his speeches and policy statements (Lum, 2019; Urback, 2019). However, as noted, there has been very little discussion of the plight of the working-class.

Conceptual Framework

My conceptual framework (see Figure 1) places the notion of personal agency at the centre of the enterprise. The acquisition of the Three C’s credentials, connections, and

65 confidence—which are all forms of social capital, are the foundation upon which personal agency is achieved. For the participants of this study, they do so within the context and culture of an elite private school.

Figure 1. The interrelated nature of Credentials, Connections, and Confidence (Copyright, William George Peat, 2020), and their role in facilitating Personal Agency within an elite private school.

The Venn diagram above encompasses the Three C’s, which exist within the broader context of social networks, socioeconomic, familial and cultural backgrounds. They are also impacted by

66 one’s proximity to schools, as well as the notion of timing: that is, the distance at which the family is located vis-à-vis the elite school, and the age at which the student was identified as gifted and/or when he or she first enrolled in the school. Inevitably, the culture of, and processes within schools themselves also affect students’ ability to achieve agency. Opportunity and

Personal Agency manifest themselves within this framework.

The “Three C’s” and are comprised of:

1. Credentials: academic and professional qualifications

2. Connections: one’s connections to others who may possess valuable resources

3. Confidence: as a result of achieving self-efficacy, which is needed to exploit one’s credentials and connections

The model is dynamic in that it is also informed by students’ geographical proximity to high- quality, elite educational institutions, as well as the age at which students are identified as gifted, and/or seek access to these institutions, as well the school’s processes, which are complex.

As the framework illustrates, the aspirant student must also navigate their own socioeconomic circumstances, their familial and cultural context, as well as become deft at negotiating complex social networks. As such, a student’s ability to establish personal agency is contingent upon navigating these additional constructs, which frame the model and are noted on its periphery. In short, the essential elements of social mobility, credentials, connections and confidence, which are acquired as a result of achieving self-efficacy, take place within a given context. All ultimately inform a student’s ability to achieve a sense of personal agency

Above and beyond the Three C’s and the context in which they exist, however, the model asserts that bright but disadvantaged young people require meaningful opportunities within their environment through which to exercise their agency. Indeed, the reader will note that

“Opportunity” (represented by the slightly off-centre yellow circle) suggests possibilities present themselves in unpredictable ways: they might, for example, present via one’s connections, through the strength of “weak ties,” as Granovetter (1973, p. 1360) posited, whether these connections exist in school or beyond its gates, as a result of one’s qualifications, or as one acquires the confidence to act in one’s own interests.

Inevitably the framework begs larger economic questions, such as the availability and quality of opportunity within the larger economic system, which although only discussed tangentially, is ultimately beyond the scope of this study. This study is concerned with the interrelated nature of these phenomena. Thus, I argue that when coupled with successful transitions (both into and out of school), these constructs define the essential ingredients of upward mobility in modern society.

With regards to transitions, Phelan, Locke, and Cao’s (1991) Students’ Multiple Worlds discussed the realities and obstacles disadvantaged students’ face when transitioning between home and school, which ultimately involves moving between social settings and navigating the boundaries between the two. They proposed four types of transitions:

1. congruent worlds/smooth transitions

2. different worlds/boundary crossing managed

3. different worlds/boundary crossing hazardous

4. borders impenetrable/boundary crossing insurmountable

They argued that cultural knowledge acquired within one’s family, peer groups and school worlds inform and shape the way students navigate the boundaries between home and school. As their typology illustrates transitions can be smooth or insurmountable, with two gradients in between. The participants of this study were required to cross the boundary between the worlds

68 they inhabited before joining an elite school. Their portraits discuss this experience and they ways in which they navigated the worlds and habitus they migrated between, and are discussed in more detail in the study’s analyses of the data. However, suffice to say, their portraits attest to the fact that they were able to navigate these boundaries successfully.

In short, the processes that facilitate upward mobility are at once complex and unpredictable. The conceptual framework aims to capture this complexity. Its key terms are explained below. Proximity, timing, school process, as well as a socioeconomic, familial and cultural context, and elite school processes, are discussed in Chapter 9 The Three C’s, Personal

Agency, and Major and Minor Themes.

Personal Agency

Personal agency is conceptualized as the capacity to make choices and to act on them in ways that are transformative (Bandura, 2006; Covert, 2013; Martin, 2004). The application of agency enables individuals–and, indeed, the human species—to “transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and uniquely (sic) to shape their life and circumstances and the course of their lives” (Bandura, 2006, p. 164). Its characteristics are intentionality, forethought, and the ability to construct appropriate courses of action, as well as to motivate and regulate their implementation. Critically, the notion also includes the ability to make corrective adjustments: what Bandura describes as self-reflectiveness (2006). Personal agency is affected by broader contextual and structural factors as they coalesce in particular situations (Beista & Todder,

2007). It is, however, important to note that the model does not assume that exercising agency necessarily leads to positive outcomes, but instead can result in negative or unexpected consequences (Bandura, 1997, as cited in Covert, 2013). The portraits that follow reveal both the

69 positive and unexpected twists and turns that occurred as a result of the agency all three acquired within the context of their experience.

An example of personal agency might be planning a journey, which might ultimately be beneficial, or designed to achieve a particular purpose. One must decide that the journey is worth taking—that it will ultimately achieve a valuable purpose, and even change one’s life circumstances. Perhaps one might aspire to attend a family reunion, and in so doing to build or repair familial bonds. One must design the trip, anticipate its outcome, consult a map, and plan the journey. Such a journey may involve taking time off work, consulting with one’s employer, saving the funds, and deciding on a route, whether by air, road, rail or automobile. Once on the journey, one might need to adjust one’s plans due to inclement weather, or road closures—and yet still remain motivated throughout. Likewise, one might also learn to drive a car, become a cartoon animator, learn to play a musical instrument, or become a police officer, a teacher, or a hedge-fund manager. In this model, all are the result of an internalized sense of personal agency.

For the study’s participants, the analogy is akin to completing high school, securing credentials, and making successful transitions between school and university, as well as into the workplace, all of which involve the processes discussed above.

Very much of what we do in life—whether traveling to a reunion, or working to secure a grade, university place, or a new job—takes place within a social context and involves intention, forethought, the ability to make plans, remain motivated and being able react to challenges one might face along the way. This is important to consider, as each of the participants faced numerous set backs and challenges. As Bandura (2006) noted, all human activity is socially situated and involves cooperation with others—hence, the importance of the notion of confidence, which is achieved through a sense of self-efficacy. Education for the students in the

70 study did not simply involve taking classes and securing grades, it also involved navigating a complex social world.

Confidence

The notion of self-efficacy is closely related to the notion of confidence, but in this model, the former gives rise to the latter. In short, the feeling of efficacy is reflected in a real sense of confidence. Indeed, I argue here that self-efficacy is manifested in confidence, the belief a student holds—or has grown to hold—that she can succeed if she is willing to make the effort and feels supported in doing so. Confidence is closely related to the idea of personal agency.

However, while confidence is foundational, a prerequisite, if you will, personal agency is transformational. Conceptualized as the belief in one’s ability to influence positive incomes in one’s own life, personal agency assumes that success (however defined) is possible, and that it is within the locus one’s own control. It is highly unlikely that a student will aspire, or make plans, unless she or he believes that there is at least the likelihood of them succeeding. Otherwise, why bother? As such, self-efficacy as it reflects and ultimately gives rise confidence (Bandura, 1977,

1986, 1997) is seen as a precondition for achieving a sense of agency, the place where a student’s aspirations might begin in a realistic form. As Ayllón, Alsina, and Colomer (2019) noted “self-efficacy raises students’ confidence in their ability to succeed in academic tasks” (p.

1). For Fallan and Opstad (2016), it was the degree to which “the student is capable of solving tasks” (p. 37), albeit related to the subject matter at hand. Ultimately, one must believe action is worth taking if one is to act. Thus, not only is this notion supported by the literature, it is also evident in my professional experience, as well as in both my educational journey and that of participants. In fact, observing students reach this critical inflection point is one of the great rewards of being an educator, and the phenomenon is evident in the school journeys of the

71 participants. One can quite literary observe their growing confidence. It is palpable in each of the portraits. This is a powerful notion for students, particularly for disadvantaged young people

(Bandura, 1994, 1997), and it is an important element of this study.

Within the literature, self-efficacy and its correlate, confidence, has largely been limited to the study of teachers (Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001) and undergraduates (Covert, 2013).

This study extends the notion to disadvantaged students, who as adolescents seeking to define themselves in an elite academic setting already face challenges (Zimmerman & Cleary, 2006).

The four foci of Bandura’s theory of self-efficacy (1994, as cited in Ramachaudran, 1998, pp. 2–3) and the experiences through which this develops in students are:

1. mastery experiences, as “successes build a robust belief in personal efficacy,” while “failures undermine it, especially if [they] occur before a sense of efficacy is firmly established”

2. vicarious experiences provided [by] social role models

3. social persuasion: sometimes students need to be convinced by others (whether peers, teachers, mentors, or mentors) that they have what it takes to succeed

4. reducing students’ stress and “negative emotional proclivities”

In this study, these are explored as I seek to unpack the role that self-efficacy and its correlate, confidence has on students’ ability to exploit their credentials and the social networks to which they belong. As it is deployed here, the notion is also the feeling or belief that one can rely on one’s own abilities as well as upon others. It is important to distinguish this notion from over- confidence, which can be the result of not achieving an authentic sense of efficacy, a failure to achieve mastery, exposure to inauthentic role models, and false praise.

Hart (2013) explored the notion of aspirations and argued that they may be laten or actual. She also examined students’ willingness to reveal their aspirations to others, or even whether or not their aspirations were contrived and/or had been initiated by others. It is interesting to note, however, that in the elite environments in which the students were educated, it was acceptable to reveal one’s aspirations. Nonetheless, more broadly, Garth (2015) noted that for working-class students, “The study of aspirations is in no way straightforward, as it is a complex intermeshing of agency/investment, hegemonic discourses, available opportunities, generational history, current economic climate, adaptability/trade-offs, resistance, labels/categorisation, awareness/ignorance and mentoring/guidance” (p. 153). In short, for the children of the working class, there may well be a great deal more to overcome in order to achieve a sense of confidence, and ultimately personal agency.

Credentials

There is an important body of literature surrounding the notion of credentialism (Andres,

2013; Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020; Collins, 1979, 2002; Fallows, 1985, 2015; Gaddis, 2015;

McClelland, 1961). Some of it even predicting health outcomes for older people (Liu, Chavan, &

Glymour, 2013); others examining the role teacher credentials play in student achievement

(Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007). For my purposes, credentials include traditional qualifications, such as high school diplomas, teaching certificates and degrees, advanced or otherwise, but in this study, they also include documented participation in certain kinds of activities. Such activities include programs found in the portraits of this study’s subjects, such as

DECA, a provincial organization for high school and university business students and their advisors, the Model United Nations (MUN), and even coop placements, internships, and membership to certain clubs or teams.

In certain environments, such as elite schools, credentials can facilitate relationships, provide access to social networks, and develop skills and confidence. Such credentials are markers of achievement and of social status, and have a lasting influence in terms of their efficacy and the relationships they foster. In the current era, it is often only the most affluent schools, whether public or private, that can afford to facilitate such opportunities, which as

Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Bourdieu and Clough (1996) noted, then accelerate the acquisition of greater social capital, cultural production, and reproduction in the field of upper- middle class education and employment. This is important to consider as one reviews the portraits: participation on a wrestling team, DECA, or the university counselling program matters, as it helps to facilitate the acquisition social capital, which is central to the study’s conceptual framework. For a fuller discussion of the role of these kinds of credentials, see: Weis,

Cipollone, and Jenkins (2014). Chapters 2 and 5 are particularly instructive.

It is, however, not only access to the social networks that is efficacious. Social mobility also occurs at a macro level, by means of connections that are often somewhat more removed from an individual’s immediate social network (Granovetter, 1973). Opportunity can also be facilitated as a result of less embedded networks. This notion implies that one’s associations— and, indeed, one’s credentials—facilitate both micro- and macro-level connections, which signal one’s suitability and compatibility to those able to offer opportunity and employment. In brief, they provide a kind of cultural currency in a cultural marketplace. Thus, candidates for upper- middle class jobs [are] able to present a narrative, “which capitalizes on background, extracurricular activities, social networks, and other life experiences that demonstrates a good

‘fit’ with colleagues and the organizations’ ethos” (Brown & Souto-Otero, 2020, p. 109). Elite

74 schools consider these process critical to the success of their students, and each of the participants benefitted from this phenomena.

Although they can, and often do, provide access to networks and the resources contained with them, credentials do not necessarily attest to an individuals’ ability, capacity, or even intelligence, and can simply attest to their background and socioeconomic status. Nevertheless, credentials provide access to the marketplace and do so with various degrees of weight.

(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, and Bourdieu (1999). In Canada—which, in 2018, had the highest tertiary school enrolment as a percentage of its graduating population (Statistics Canada,

2018)—a degree from a particular university may have carry more weight in certain social networks than in others.

As such, a bright, capable who student attended a particular university for financial reasons, or perhaps because it was closer to home and thus incurred fewer costs, may be disadvantaged because he or she did not attend a more so-called prestigious university, at least as defined by the popular press. See, for example, the world university rankings (Times Higher

Education, 2020), as well as Maclean’s (2020) university rankings in Canada. In the same way, universities may perceive students applying from secondary schools with strong academic records (often located in more affluent areas) as more likely to succeed in their programs. As such, these credentials may simply be markers of socioeconomic status, rather than of ability.

One must, thus, inevitably consider the university programmes the participants applied to matriculated and graduated from as part of this equation.

In the 1939 motion picture, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends, the Lion, the

Scarecrow, and the Tin Man, traveled to see the Wizard, each seeking correctives for their

75 various problems or dilemmas. When the Scarecrow explained his particular problem—he lacked a brain—the Wizard replied:

Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s very a mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls the earth—or slings through the shiny sea has a brain! … Back where I come from we have great universities, seats of great learning—where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts—and with no more brains than you have…. But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma! (Langely, Ryerson, & Allen, 1939, as cited in Davies & Guppy, 2006, p. 45)

The Wizard ultimately presented the Scarecrow with a diploma, and of course, the Scarecrow was transformed. As this scene suggests, the magic of schooling is directed toward and concentrated within in a simple, but all-powerful piece of paper. Regardless of the degree to which one endorses the value of credentials, such diplomas hold powerful sway in societies that are increasing mechanized and competitive, particularly with regards to middle- and upper- middle-class employment. Each of the participants gained a high school diploma, but the larger question is what else they also acquired through their attendance at an elite private secondary school.

Connections

The concept of connections speaks to an individual’s position within a social network, as well as an individual’s ability to exploit the relationships within it for the purposes of achieving social mobility. Social networks, and the connections found within them, are the vehicles through which confidence and by extension personal agency are exercised. If confidence is the prerequisite by which one acquires forethought, intention, and the wherewithal to makes plans and act upon them, the social networks in which one exists are the milieu by which one achieves these ends. Once an individual believes that their aspirations are possible to achieve and that taking concerted action, as Bandura (2006) noted, will produce the desired result—the individual

76 must then exploit their relationships, albeit recognizing that all human activity takes place within a social context. Even with a strong sense of confidence, and ultimately of personal agency, success cannot be achieved alone. The connections made available through social networks— even if remote—provide opportunities, demands, and even threats. The disenfranchised often lack connections to those with key resources. Attending The Academy and/or Metropolitan gave the participants a venue in which to exercise their sense of confidence.

Of course, as referred to above, each of these constructs operate within a larger structure of opportunity. Disadvantaged students seeking to become socially mobile in elite settings are shaped by and must navigate their own socioeconomic, familial and cultural context, their geographic proximity to access to high quality, independent education, as well as the age at which they are prepared to apply and if successful enter the school. Moreover, they must navigate and deal with school processes, which can be complex, bureaucratic, unfamiliar, and even daunting. They must able to successfully gain access to and become members of important social networks, and then be able to exploit those networks, without alienating themselves from them. And, finally, they must also be able to grasp and exploit opportunities as they manifest themselves in unpredictable ways.

In summary, the relatively disadvantaged student must learn to survive and thrive in a challenging and dynamic environment if they are to succeed and achieve their purpose and by extension the aspirations of their parents. Thus, the constructs of credentials, connections, confidence, and personal agency, operate with a complex milieu. Personal agency enables social mobility, but it does so by means of a process: confidence facilitates academic success and the acquisition of credentials; within the context of a rich social network, one’s connections provide the means to extract value from one’s achievement and ultimately to transcend one’s

77 socioeconomic status. These processes, I argue, are the means by which social mobility is facilitated in elite school settings.

CHAPTER 5

PAINTING WITH WORDS:

PORTRAITURE AS A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

Narrative Inquiry and Life Story as Methodologies

This study employed a form of portraiture, a “life story” method of inquiry developed by

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1983, 2009, 2012) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997). The approach was narrative in nature because it dealt with “educational storysharing” (Barone, 1995, p. 64), which can have an emancipatory effect for both for readers and participants. It applied essential elements of the approach to the educational journey of three students from working- class backgrounds who attended elite private secondary schools in southern Ontario—the overwhelming majority of whose students belong to Canada’s upper-middle and upper-class.

Narrative life story, along with synonymous terms such “autobiography, biography, interpretive biography, autobiographical narrative, life history narrative, oral narrative, life narrative, personal narrative, stories, life stories, self stories, personal experience stories, auto- ethnography … personal history … [and] case study” (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995, p. 124)—all speak to the phenomenon of capturing the stories of a particular individual in a particular setting at a particular moment in time. For my purposes, these stories were a means of mapping a particular terrain, and thus of providing clues about how it might be navigated. The process was a means of gaining local knowledge from individuals who have walked the path. These kinds of stories help us understand the larger social phenomenon. As noted, this approach was genre- blurring. It explored issues that involved social mobility, but also anthropology, psychology, politics, economics, and philosophy. However, epistemologically, the study is most indebted to a sociological approach to how we know what we know about a given reality. This preference was

78 79 discussed fully in Chapters 3 and 4. As such, the portraiture employed in this study came closest to what Bertaux described as “sociologically read biography” (Bertaux, as cited in Measor &

Sikes, 1992, p. 210).

In this context, narrative inquiry embraces notions of “scene by scene construction, characterization through dialogue, point of view, full rendering of details, interior monologue and composite characterization” (Hatch & Wisniewsky, 1995, p. 2). It can also include the notion of plot, which traditionally culminates in an outcome. In the case of my participants, the outcome—the story’s terminus point—was their graduation from high school, and transition into a life path that was altered in some way. Both narrative inquiry and life story have been used in a variety of forms, and the literatures related to both are diverse. They speak, for example, to

“teachers’ lives” (Hatch & Wisniewsky, 1995, p. 124); teacher education (Xu & Connelly,

2009); curriculum making (Cuiffetelli Parker, Pushor, & Kitchen, 2011); and educational leadership (Damiani, Rolling, & Wieczorek, 2017). Reid and West (2015) employed a narrative approach to awakening a sense of self and personal agency in young people.

Portraiture

In educational settings, portraiture has been used to document the lived experience and professional practice of teachers (Anderson, 2011); classrooms (Down & Choules, 2017;

Quigley, Truth-Nuare, & Beeman-Cadwallader, 2015); and even of schools themselves, with

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983) seminal study, The Good School. It has also been utilized in the creation of middle school student self-portraits, as a means of exploring their emerging identities

(Lord, 2011). In addition, it is found in studies of educational leadership (Hackman, 2002); community-based pedagogies (Sharkey, Clavijo Olarte, & Rameriz, 2016); the implementation of new curriculum (Koopman, Le Grange, & de Mink, 2016); the ways in which teachers make

80 sense of race in their professional practice (Taylor, 2017); race in the classroom (Chapman,

2007; Petchauer, 2015); gender in the classroom (Giraldo & Colyar, 2012); schooling for the poor in rural China (Xiang, 2018); community portraits of young people in flexible learning settings (Baker, 2016); the schooling experiences of Cherokee youth (Rogers & McLendon,

2015); young people in the process of reengaging with education (Smyth & McInerney, 2013); and, similarly, in the pedagogy of engagement for disengaged and disadvantaged young people

(Smyth, McInerney, & Fish, 2013). It has also been used in studies dealing with identity and motivation (Andrezejewski, 2011); co-teaching, inclusion, and diversity (Klein & Magiera,

2015); gifted and normal intelligence social science students (Selvi & Demir, 2017); teachers understandings of educational change in Taiwan (Ke, 2008), as well as in the challenges of first year preservice teaching experience (Cacciattolo & Gilmore, 2016).

The uses of portraiture as a methodology, which aims to locate the essential character or identity of an individual, institution or process, however, can be seen as problematic in the postmodern and poststructuralist era. At a time when character, identity, and even educational processes are seen as impermanent, in flux, evolving, and inherently unstable, defining the identity or character of a person (even at a particular moment in time), a process, or an institution can be troubled with complexity. Similarly, from a poststructuralist perspective, any attempt to understand human experience in relation to broader, overarching institutional or social structures is fraught with challenges. For the poststructuralist, history and cultural phenomena are themselves subject to bias and misunderstanding. Nevertheless, it remains true that portraiture provides participants not only with the opportunity to articulate their stories, but also the means to reflect upon them. It affords participants both perspective and insight into their experience, placing it in a larger context. For my purposes it enables a richer “understanding of larger human

81 and social phenomena” (Hatch & Wisniewski, 1995, p. 113). In fact, “by merging rigor and improvisation, and appreciating both the details and the gestalt [,] it seeks to record the experience without distorting its texture” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 6). In short, it aims to reveal the essence of the subject being examined. For the participant, the methodology’s ultimate promise is that its subjects might “report a transformation in their self understandings”

(Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 35). It is a journey of discovery—a journey that one hopes might reveal the truth of a formative school experience, which for very many students across Ontario is seen as decisive in shaping life destiny.

In addition to understanding the essential features of the participants’ experience, I also endeavoured to understand the external or economic benefits of social mobility, as well as the costs incurred to achieve it, whether these were of a practical, economic, relational or, psychic in nature. Portraiture differs from the notion of narrative and storytelling in that its processes are fundamentally collaborative in nature. In portraiture, subjects participate in the creation of their own portrait; they are active participants in the construction of their narrative (Lawrence-

Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Their portraits “are shaped through dialogue between the portraitist,” in this case, me the researcher, “and the subject, each one participating in the drawing of the image” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 3). Thus, the creation of a portrait is ultimately a conversation between two “active meaning makers” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 25) seeking to reconstruct the meaning of a particular experience and understand its influence upon the participant’s psyche, and ultimately, their lives.

The notion of portraiture can readily be applied to both academic and literary contexts.

However, because the analysis of any conversation (and/or the transcripts that are derived from them) is a hermeneutical process that involves interpretation and interpretation is inherently

82 subjective, the portraits presented may in some respects be more figurative than realist in nature.

For although this study aims to portray individuals and their experiences as accurately as possible, it does so in a broader way, exploring the social, economic, cultural, and even political contexts of the individual’s journey as s/he endeavoured to become socially mobile.

In this respect, the renderings that are the result of a collaborative effort reveal essential features of the individual’s experience that may be different (although one hopes not at odds) with the ways in which the individuals see themselves. Like Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis

(1997), I hope each portrait contains “the authority, wisdom and perspective of the participants…but that the portrait, although rendered faithfully, did not in fact look like them, somehow managed to reveal their essence” (p. 4). Like Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, I want my subjects to see their portraits as “both familiar and exotic,” and thus “introduce them to a perspective they had not considered before” (1997, pp. 4–5). For the art historian (portraiture does after all have roots in the traditions of painting artistic representations) the meaning and significance of these kinds of representations [perhaps somewhat inevitably will in some part lie] in the intended reference of the artist, whether or not the viewer (or indeed, the sitter) happens to be aware of it (Brilliant, 1991). What is true of the portrait artist to some degree is true of the academic. It is a process of “painting with words” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 4).

The individual’s histories are here discussed and their antecedents explored; the study’s subjects also discussed the particular artefacts that littered their journey, such as tests and examinations, the awards or acknowledgements they received (or did not receive), and even the clothing, either purchased or provided, that enabled them to participate in extracurricular activities. Participants were likewise asked to discuss their psychic journeys as well as practical realities, and the ways in which they were challenged by issues of social class and social

83 hierarchies within their schools. Of course, their economic circumstances, the way in which political policies and trends influenced, shaped, and defined their experience, as well as the life and culture of the institutions they attended are also examined; all of these elements inform the portraits found in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

As the methodology demanded that participants’ experience be told in hindsight, it dissolved the barrier between past and present and connected individuals’ experiences as high school students with their present circumstances. In short, it connected intention to outcome. As

Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) noted, portraiture aims to gain an insider understanding

“from an outsider’s purview” (p. 25). It seeks to be a critical window, permitting the researcher to access a hidden world rich with meaning and insight.

In crafting these portraits, like Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997), I have attempted to locate a “vantage point [from] which goodness can be apprehended—even as it is marked by mistakes and failure” (p. 37). Moreover, “subjects struggling for success may not on their own have time for the luxury of recognition of achievement, or the perspective of situating struggle within a larger context” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 37). As such, portraiture operates best when narrated in retrospect, because it evolves out of a process of reflection, intuition, and autobiography. The challenge for the researcher is to remain diligent when working to capture the essential experience of the individuals, but to be conscious of their own feelings, perspective and lived experience, as they do so.

As Dewey (1934) suggested in Art as Experience, portraiture is a means of recording and documenting an experience without distorting its richness and texture. In addition, for Lawrence-

Lightfoot and Davis (1997), the methodology aims to merge “aesthetic and empirical approaches” as well as “rigor and improvisation” (p. 6), and thus create an honest and

84 compelling view of social reality. Thus, my project does not seek to unearth a linear rags-to- riches type of story—although for the most part, the participants of this study did indeed become socially mobile and achieved notions of success that were meaningful to them as individuals.

Similarly, it does not seek to romanticize the individual, their journey, or to create what Hatch and Wisniewski (1995) described as a “hero narrative” (p. 117)—although in very many ways the individuals acted heroically. It hoped to avoid this pitfall by placing the individuals’ journey within their particular contexts. As much as possible, the portraits have been rendered in language that will appeal to readers beyond the academy, with my hope being to expand and deepen the conversation surrounding the role of education in social mobility that is an increasing part of our national discourse.

Ultimately, my lived experience has afforded me the capacity to interpret the conversations between the participants and myself. As such, I aim to provide what Geertz (1973) described as “thick description” (p. 3). Of course, when constructing the portrait, a researcher must make decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out and attempt to unify the disparate parts in order to make meaning of the whole. To leave out critical elements is in effect to reshape the whole. As Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) acknowledged, all portraits “are interpretations, [but] not all interpretations are valid” (p. 34). If they do not speak to the essential experience and nature of the individual, they become invalid. Decisions about inclusion and interpretation were made in collaboration with the participants, and inevitably through the filter of the researcher’s lived experience, whether consciously or not (Nicolaïdes, 1941).

Context

One cannot deny the supreme importance of context as one crafts a portrait and attempts to analyze it. As Arnheim (1969) pointed out:

Everything in this world presents itself and is modulated by context. When the image of an object changes, the observer must know whether the change is due to the object itself or to the context or to both, otherwise he understands neither the object or its surroundings. (p. 37)

In this respect, the success of a portrait is primarily determined by the degree to which it is authentic. Does it capture the essence of the individual’s experience within their particular context? Does it resonate with the subject? As Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) noted, the challenge is to listen for the story, rather than listen to a story. It is in trying to understand the singular experience of an individual that the reader might see himself or herself within. If the reader is invited to enter the world of the other, one hopes that they might identify with it and see its themes as universal. For Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997), “portraiture strives to resonate beyond the particular that has so preoccupied science to the universal echoes throughout art” (p. 37). The portrait artist’s key preoccupation, however, is to understand how an

“individual’s actions and interactions are experienced, perceived and negotiated by the people in the setting” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis 1997, p. 15). It is in examining these phenomena that the humanity of the participants—and our own—is made visible.

As an academic archaeologist who excavates data for patterns and broader themes, I am highly cognizant of the importance of dissonant refrains that might provide nuance or shadow

(Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), rather than optimism and light. I seek to read texts as if they were ultimately written by someone other than me (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997).

The researcher comes to the field with an intellectual framework and a set of guiding questions, which include a review of literature, and a general knowledge of the field of inquiry (Lawrence-

Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). Nonetheless, as discussed, it is important to understand that this framework is informed by my own experience and perspective—that is, the position from which

I observe the phenomena and from which I bring to bear my own historical and personal context.

As such, the portrait “resonates with echoes of the researcher’s autobiographical journey—those aspects of his own familial, cultural, developmental, and educational background that relate

(either consciously or unconsciously) to the intellectual themes of the work” (Lawrence-

Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 185). The objective is to generate a theory from the social patterns found in the data, not to prove prior theoretical propositions. Thus, “the process needs to be adaptive, malleable, [and allow] the researcher to follow the compelling question, the nagging puzzle, that presents itself once in the setting” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 81) As the researcher, my lived experience helped me to navigate the roads less travelled.

The Attitude of the Researcher

Lawrence-Lightfoot (1997) posited that the researcher needed to approach the experience of their subjects with an attitude of love. This is a difficult concept to define. Lincoln and Guba

(1987), expressed in a slightly different way:

The interactive nature of the relationship is prized, since it is only because of this feature that inquirers and respondents may fruitfully learn together. The relationship between researcher and respondent, when properly established, is one of respectful negotiation, joint control, and reciprocal learning. (p. 17)

Bearing in mind the voice of both Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) and that of Lincoln and

Guba (1987), my approach was characterized by the idea that the portraits, which are ultimately the product of relationships, were authentic and informed by empathy as well as mutual respect.

We each learnt from each other. I sought to understand their experiences from their perspective whilst interpreting them through my own and that of my conceptual framework. My approach was to examine the intentions of the individual whilst at the same time assuming the best of intentions. The approach was that of an advocate who simultaneously adopts an empathetic and yet critical stance as together we explored the benefits and costs of social mobility. I did so in such a way so as to applaud their efforts and successes, however, they envisioned them.

The Schools Featured in This Study

It is important to provide a brief overview of the schools featured in this study, albeit anonymously. The study takes place in two independent schools, located in southern Ontario.

Established in 1901, The Academy, which is a pseudonym, is located in a large Canadian city. It is one of the largest co-ed, independent day schools in the country. It has a population of approximately 1200 students, ranging from junior kindergarten through Grade 12, around 500 of whom attend its Upper School. The Academy draws only a small minority of its students directly from the city in which it is located, parts of which are characterized by a high degree of poverty.

Instead, much of its population is drawn from surrounding municipalities, which were recently amalgamated, are more prosperous, growing in population, and some distance from the campus, which recently underwent a major building program.

Students commute to The Academy via a fleet of buses from as far as 60 kilometres away; a number of First Nations students also attend the school and commute from the Six

Nations’ reserve and surrounding areas, which are also located some distance away. Hence, The

Academy buses the overwhelming majority of its students in from afar, which means a great deal of social interaction takes place on campus. School begins at 8:45 a.m. and concludes at 3:20 p.m. However, due to the school’s extracurricular and athletic programmes, students regularly remain on campus until 5:00 p.m. when the late bus leaves school.

The Academy is a university prep school offering academic programmes, as well as a wide range of Advanced Placement (AP) courses. The Academy’s Fee Schedule notes that for the 2013–2014 academic year, the fees for a student in the Upper School were approximately

$36,000 per annum. International students are required to pay approximately $50,000 per year.

However, with the addition of various trips, extracurricular activities, and uniform costs these

88 amounts can be significantly higher. International students attending The Academy largely tend to be from elite families in China, who may have already attended international private schools in that country. Historically, the school has not offered financial aid to students, but rather has offered scholarships to those capable of securing them by means of academic or other achievements. The bursary program is limited to providing existing families short-term assistance should they fall on hard times. In short, the environment, both social and architectural, is characterized by affluence and meets all of Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) criteria. Some families of modest means send their children to The Academy, and often make great sacrifices to do so.

Metropolitan, also a pseudonym, is similarly located in a large metropolitan area in the

Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). The school is merit-based, considered highly academic, and boasts Nobel Laureates as members of its alumni/ae. The alumni/ae also includes numerous local dignitaries. Potential students must successfully complete a series of competitive entrance examinations. In the year of writing, Metropolitan admitted 25% of the applicants who applied in Grade 7; 10% were admitted in Grade 9, and 8% of all applicants applying to Grade

10 or 11 gained admission. Metropolitan has around 650 students from Grades 7 through 12 and is affiliated with a major university. Like The Academy, Metropolitan is a day school and students commute from across a larger metropolitan area, often riding public transportation, which includes the Toronto Transit Corporation (TTC).

Whilst there is a dress code, the school has no uniform policy. It does, however, bear all the hallmarks of an elite private school. Metropolitan was founded prior to World War One and although it is going through a major renovation, at the time of writing, the buildings reflect the

89 school’s age. The school is located on a three-acre campus. Annual tuition fees are set at approximately $27,000 and when students enrol, they are required to pay a $5,500 enrolment fee.

Metropolitan aims to make its bursary program a differentiator, and financial aid is supported through an endowed bursary fund to which families may apply. The process is need- blind. If a student is successful in the admissions process regardless of their financial means, they are offered a place at the school. Metropolitan also meets each of Gaztambide-Fernández’s

(2009) five criteria.

Data Collection

The participants were selected using a purposive sampling method. However, being acutely conscious of the potential pitfalls of selection bias creeping into the study due to the use of a more judgmental or subjective data collection method, I employed a number of selection criteria. At the most fundament level, the process involved carefully and thoroughly thinking through how I, the researcher, established a sample population, even though that population was extremely small and not statistically representative of the greater population. Using this as my point of departure, I employed the following criteria.

1. Background knowledge

The selection was informed by my prior knowledge of the subject matter, more

broadly, and my knowledge of the culture of the schools in which the study took place, in

particular. This knowledge helped me to selected eligible candidates who most closely

approximate the required profile, that of working-class students who attended an elite

secondary school, what Jack (2019) described as the privileged poor, who became

socially mobile as a result of doing so.

2. Currency

Participants’ elite secondary school experience must be recent. All three of the final participants graduated within the recent past, making their experiences relevant exemplars worthy of consideration in the present day. Thus, final participants were chosen because they were contemporaneous; all attended high school during the same general window of time—the same era, if you will. Although they attended their respective institutions for varying durations (i.e., Nate began at The Academy as a 3-year old, while Monica and Andrea began at their schools in Grade 7), all three graduated between 2008 and 2012. In addition, enough time had lapsed since their respective high school graduations for the subjects to have graduated from university, and thus to have developed a discernable life and/or career trajectory.

3. Rich data

As my primary aim was to secure the richest possible data that illuminated both the participants inward and outward journeys, the data needed to reveal not only the material outcomes of the subject’s various experiences—such as their academic accomplishments, high-school diplomas, university offers, postsecondary achievements, or even their ability to make successful school-to-work transitions—but also the ways in which they navigated the terrain of elite education in Ontario. Bearing this in mind, it was essential that the participants acknowledged the challenges they faced on a personal and social level and how those experiences were informed by their own cultural, familial and social-class origins. The participants were also required to explore how their background and context eased and/or challenged their life trajectories. As the methodology involved

91 creating literary and visual portraits, each of the portraits needed to be rich in detail, nuanced, and able to reflect the depth and complexity of their experiences.

4. Manageable data

The data produced had to be manageable in scope. In-depth interviews, along with numerous follow-up conversations, produce copious amounts of data. Limiting the volume of data meant that it could be mined and analyzed more effectively.

5. Proximity

The participants must live in relative proximity to the researcher. In order to develop relationships with the participants and be able to meet with them in person, the participants were required to live within a commutable distance from my home. In addition, I needed to be able to meet with the participants in locations, whether at a university, local library, coffee shop, or their alma maters, which were convenient for them.

6. Gender and ethnicity

The participant list must include both male and female alumni/ae and represent different ethnicities. Although, the study acknowledges the profound impact of both gender and ethnicity on educational outcomes and life trajectories, the focus of the study was on the socioeconomic and social class impacts on those outcomes. Hence, although it was important to have some gender and ethnic diversity in what was a very small group as it added nuance and complexity to the study, it was not the study’s main focus. See the section entitled A Note on Gender and Ethnic Composition of Participants in the Study on page 92 for a fuller discussion

7. School diversity and language

The participants must have derived from more than one school, making the study

somewhat balanced and further mitigating the possibility of them recognizing each other

in the study and thus preserving their anonymity. The recruitment of and interviews with

the participants took place in English, as all participants graduated from English-speaking

secondary schools, and attended English-speaking universities in Canada and the U.S., or

were working in an English-speaking environment. This study did not include

international students attending elite private schools whose primary residence was located

overseas. All participants spoke English fluently, even if it was acquired as a second

language. As such, translation of recruitment materials or transcripts from the interview

process was not required.

8. Reflectivity

The participants must have demonstrated the ability to reflect on their experience.

They were required to do this in two dimensions, that is, be able to discuss both the costs

and benefits of their social mobility journeys as they as individuals evolved both in and

beyond their school experience. This was deemed vital, as almost universally potential

candidates were able to express a deep and profound gratitude for being able to attend an

elite private school. The ability to reflect critically, however, was not evident in the

candidate pool to the same degree.

Snowball Sampling Method

Alongside this method, a snowball approach was also incorporated. In order to achieve this, an announcement was posted in various alumni newsletters, which requested that participants contact me if they were interested in participating in the study. The former drew

93 upon my professional network as teacher, administrator, and mentor in an elite institution (2004–

2019) located in the GTHA. The announcements were facilitated through schools’ advancement office. In each case, the approach was made at arm’s length so as to afford potential participants the opportunity to decline.

Elite independent school alumni/ae were contacted via email or telephone. See Appendix

A for the email text sent to potential participants, and see Appendix B for the telephone scripts, both inquired about the individual’s interest in joining the study. If the individuals were interested, they then received an information letter (see Appendix C) and a consent letter

(Appendix D). The selected participants (of which there originally 9) subsequently took part in an initial 90-minute interview. At that time, I reviewed the information and consent letters and asked the individuals to sign the consent letter if they wished to proceed. The consent letter articulated a commitment to a follow-up process, which included additional interview(s) and/or further contact via email, phone, or Skype.

Potential participants were asked to recommend contacts from within their own social network who may also have wished to participate in the study. This method was to be used only if deemed necessary. Ultimately, however, a snowball approach was not deemed necessary, as the initial outreach process produced multiple eligible participants.

Selection of Participants

Of the initial pool of 11 interested participants, two did not respond to follow-up communications and were removed from the pool. The remaining nine were then selected for an initial interview; of that group, one individual chose not to proceed, leaving a potential pool of eight. As the process evolved, in collaboration with my thesis committee, I determined that a group of three participants would be preferable and facilitate my manageable data criterion. In

94 addition, it also became clear that it would much easier to develop meaningful relationships with a group of that size and that as a result of the various encounters and the relationships that developed as a result of them, the participants would be more likely to become co-creators of their own particular portraits.

Through the initial interview process, it was determined that four of the remaining eight participants attended school in the more distant past. As such, those participants were removed from the pool, leaving four finalists. Furthermore, as the participants were required to be available to meet in person, participants were selected who lived within a reasonable proximity to the University of Toronto campus. Being able to observe body language, which within the context of a semistructured interview process might prompt important follow-up questions or lead to entirely different line of questioning, was important. I wanted the conversations between the participants and me to be genuine, spontaneous and as much as possible unguarded. As such, one additional participant was removed, leaving three participants who were selected for the study. A final analysis of each of the remaining participants, which was based on the initial round of interviews, revealed that each was able to demonstrate an ability to reflect on their experience in two dimensions. They were able to reflect on both the benefits as well as the costs of their particular social mobility journeys, that is, to demonstrate a degree of objectively and thereby provide the richest possible data.

A Note on Gender and Ethnic Composition of Participants in the Study

Of the participants who took part in the study, two were female and one male. Of note, the two female participants were of southeast Asian descent—one originally from Taiwan, and the other from Hong Kong, although the latter’s parents were from mainland China. As CAIS schools—and, indeed, Ontario public education at large—did not collect data on “students’ race

95 ethnicity” (Crawley, 2017), Canadian data on the racial and ethnic composition of students is not publicly available. However, U.S. data, exploring the role of independent schools in Canada, confirms that students of Asian descent represent the largest single group minority group in

North American independent schools. In fact, NAIS reported that in the 2017–2018 academic year, 8.5% of students attending private schools were of Asian descent. Students of European descent comprised the largest majority within the student population, numbering at 62.9%

(NAIS, 2019). Moreover, Asian students were likewise over-represented in elite programs in

Toronto’s public schools, such as IB programs (Maharaj, 2016). Within a qualitative study this fact holds little to no significance. However, it may suggest a larger trend in independent education. It is worth mentioning that Canadian independent schools have become more ethnically diverse. This is true of even the most exclusive schools, such Upper Canada College

(UCC) and similar schools, what J. D. Maxwell and Maxwell (1995) described as former

“bastions of the WASP establishment” (p. 320). Indeed, this trend has been afoot for some time.

Reflecting this reality, the Head of the Junior School at UCC wrote:

The school of 1985, reflecting Toronto's changes, resembles the United Nations: China, Japan, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, [and] Central Europe represent between 25% and 30% of the prep population. (Old Times, Upper Canada College, June 1985, p. 26, as cited in Maxwell & Maxwell, 1995, p. 320)

The Interview Process, Transcripts, and Portraits

The interviews took place in locations that were congenial to both parties. On occasion, an interview began on Skype and was then extended by both in-person and phone conversations; all three sets of interviews took place over several sessions, and over several months. Apart from interactions that were conducted on email, the conversations were collected into single transcripts. The process was similar for each of the participants. For Nate, it often involved meeting at his alma mater, where he had secured a job as a supply teacher. This was the most

96 convenient location for him, as he often used the gym at the school or met with alumni/ae friends there. The conversation with Andrea began on Skype and then moved to meeting in a coffee shop close to her former school, Metropolitan. Monica and I met in a local library, which was close to her home and convenient for her. Each location was apropos for the each participant.

However, in all, the processes were remarkably similar.

The interviews generally lasted for approximately 90 minutes, were semistructured, and incorporated a series of open-ended questions (see Appendix E: Interview Guide). On one level, the questions sought to unearth basic information that might shed light on key moments and events, the way stations, if you will, along the participant’s journey, but they were also intended to elicit their intentions. To this end, I adopted a sympathetic approach seeking to support the individual in their articulation of the deeper motivations, which guided the decisions they made as they sought to succeed and achieve a sense of personal agency. With the participants’ permission, the interviews were audiotaped and transcribed, as were any follow-up conversations. Any information—that is, names, geographic locations, and the like—were replaced with pseudonyms or omitted entirely. Upon completion of the study, the raw data was destroyed as per the ethics protocols for this study. Those who were not selected to participate in the study were informed and their data also destroyed.

The portraits found in the following chapters were designed to reflect the natural flow of the conversations and to communicate each individual’s unique experience. Although common themes emerge—what Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) referred to as repetitive refrains— the meaning the participants attached to those experiences was unique and is acknowledged as such. Thus, the interviews and their subsequent analysis are not seen as samples, as would be the case in a quantitative study, but rather as windows into a world of shared themes. It is important

97 to note, however, that although the participants made reference to their familial and cultural ties, and these were important to their success, the portraits focus on them as individuals: the individual is foregrounded, and their familial and cultural ties are backgrounded. Both dimensions are discussed in Chapter 9.

Portraits

All three portraits include a variety of sections, which were derived from the original set of questions posed to participants in each of their interviews, as well as the follow-up conversations. The questions were adapted from an unpublished study I conducted in 2014, titled

Aboriginal Students in Elite Environments, which in part served as the foundation upon which this research was based. Thus, the initial interview questions formed the basis of each of the portrait’s various sections. Both the graphical representations of the portraits and the portraits themselves were filial to those transcripts. The portraits are thus grounded in the transcript data, the primary unit of analysis. The themes are as follows:

1. General Impressions and Timelines 2. Family Circumstances and Cultural Context 3. Attending School and Navigating the Curriculum 4. A Sense of Belonging and Social Networks 5. Financial Realities 6. Key Relationships, Turning Points, and Challenges 7. Transition to Work? 8. Aspirations and Definitions of Success 9. General Observations and School Recommendations 10. Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc

These sections should be seen as broad categories, which were used as a means of framing the discussion to follow, rather than narrow divisions. Moreover, although each portrait and the

98 sections within it bear similarities, they should be been seen as overlapping Venn diagrams, in a similar fashion to the Three C’s found in the conceptual framework found on page 62, the content of the various categories intersecting according to the way in which the conversation unfolded. The quotations cited in the portraits have been edited for clarity; brackets and ellipses have been used throughout. In some instances, the transcripts have been paraphrased, but wherever possible they incorporate direct quotations in an effort to provide the reader with a holistic picture of their story.

In The Good High School (1993), Lawrence-Lightfoot defined the approach, by creating six portraits of six different schools and presented the work’s findings as six different case studies, or portraits. Lawrence-Lightfoot then formulated a cross-case analysis, from which she made a number of inferences about what constituted the good school. In brief, I took a similar approach, offering a single analysis that discusses all three participants’ experience. In completing the process of developing the each of the portraits, I moved between repetitive refrains, metaphors, and rituals, major, minor and dissonant themes. Each of these constructs was woven into each section, whether it was related to the individual’s family circumstances and cultural context, their attempts to navigate the school curriculum, or the highs and lows of their experience.

The transcripts that were a result of each collection of conversations were checked with the participants for accuracy. In addition, each of the participants was asked to review their portraits, which were derived from the transcripts and discuss their authenticity—that is, to confirm to what degree they captured their particular school experience. Following these discussions, the portraits were amended. In all three cases, the amendments were relatively minor, as all three participants said the portraits represented their experience accurately, but also

99 sympathetically. The participants were not asked to amend them themselves. This task was reserved for me as the researcher. This approach was used as the participants had a limited amount of time they could spend on the project.

By way analogy, the process is somewhat akin to the Sky Art’s Portrait Artist Of The

Year (Sky Arts, 2020). Over the course of the television series, aspiring artists were required to produce a portrait of a well-known celebrity. The painters, some amateur, others professional, were invited to the Battersea Arts Centre, in London, were they were introduced to the celebrity and were given four hours to paint the individual, who sat for three artists simultaneously. Each artist brought his or her own talent and sensibility to the sitting. Some took a modern approach, others were more traditional, but all produced paintings, which after the four hours lapsed, the sitters viewed. The participants then selected one of the artists’ renderings they would like to take home and hang on their wall. None of the paintings were caricatures, but were each a particular artist’s rendering of an individual.

The timeframe in which the process took place was compressed, likewise with the sitters input, but each was then given an opportunity, however, brief, to comment on their particular portrait. Their comments were instructive: “I can see myself in all of them” (Sky Arts, 2018), and “It’s me!” (Sky, 2020, mins. 37:25-39). The programme’s hosts used phrases like it captures the essence of the individual; or the painting has captured the celebrity’s public or private persona, etc. (Sky, 2020). My methodology is somewhat similar. I spent time in conversation with the participants, observing them, listening for their story, and then seeking to capture its essence in their particular portrait. In many ways, the defining moment was when I, too, revealed their portraits to them and asked each of them to comment on whether they felt it captured their experience. It was an important moment, because although by necessity our encounter was not

100 protracted, in contrast to the programme, my portraits took months to render, all be they framed by my sensibility and conceptual framework. It was at that time that they were asked to clarify any concerns or misconceptions, which the portrait was amended to reflect. Their input was brief, but critical. However, I held the brush.

My analysis of the portraits, which is found in Chapters 9 and 10, concludes by commenting on the costs of social mobility and what are described as trace elements, those markers of social status that endure and remain part of the individual even after they have achieved social mobility. Chapter 11 goes on to make several inferences about the participants’ journeys that are instructive and concludes by making a number of policy and practice proposals.

Repetitive Refrains and Emergent Themes

As the reader will observe, each portrait was introduced with a word cloud—an artistic representation of the conversation(s) I had with that participant. The words in the clouds are not comprised of the words of the participants alone; they also contain my words, and thus each one became a joint creation. As I sought to represent the portraits visually, it was important to document the conversation(s) themselves. In each case, the word lists that comprise the portraits were used as the raw data to create the cloud. The parameters of each cloud were set to include the greatest number of words. Although some of the words are only visible in the background and in some cases and are not entirely legible, the clouds, nonetheless, provide a representation of those conversations. Each cloud is unique, but collectively they provide clues to broader themes that were most evident in the conversations that took place. The more often a word or phrase was mentioned, the larger it appears in the image. Shapes that resemble the first letter in the participants’ pseudonyms were used to frame each portrait.

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The major and minor themes that are discussed in Chapter 9 were developed as a result of consolidating words of similar meaning, which were originally derived from the portraits themselves. However, because the process of portraiture depended on the rigorous analyses of the data, on intuition and lived experience of me the researcher, a number of other issues that were not wholly apparent in the text, were also included. As the reader will note, the words are grouped together into broader categories that were then used as headings and served as a means to explore the themes. Thus, the term “School” is used as a heading or theme, representing a variety of words that are school related. The themes are divided into two groups, major and minor. Six major themes and two minor themes are articulated and discussed in Chapter 9.

By examining the image and reviewing the portrait, the reader can identify where in the portrait (i.e., the text) the words are located and in what contexts. The frequency of the words school, family, and parents, for example, give one an understanding of how important parents and family were to the participants. The significance of school is clearly another important theme. In short, although the meaning of keywords can mean different things in different contexts (i.e., the word “hard” might refer to working hard, or be a synonym for the words

“difficult” or “challenging”), these themes are derived directly from the text. They form the basis of the thematic textual analysis that follows the portraits.

Analysis and Discussion

The subjects’ educational journeys were analyzed in terms of the importance and influence of gender, race, family of origin, life events and turning-point experiences, as well as other significant people in the participants’ lives (Denzin, 1989). The participants emphasized that which was most important to them. The approach “use[d] stories people tell, and analyzed them in numerous ways, to understand the meaning of the experiences as revealed in the[ir

102 particular] story” (Merriam, 2009, p. 23). Chapter 9, however, begins by revisiting the notion of the Three C’s and explores the ways in which the participants strived to acquire them, as well as whether as their success or lack thereof. The chapter also discusses how these particular constructs interact with and relate with the notion of personal agency, the acquisition of which is central to the conclusion of that particular chapter of their lives.

The analysis then examines each of the four constructs (repetitive refrains, metaphors, rituals, and dissonant themes), and uses these constructs to investigate the conceptual framework.

Notions of family and culture are explored most comprehensively in section two: Family

Circumstances and Cultural Context.

Where this approach differs from a traditional qualitative approach, which would also be characterized by interviews, transcript development, analysis, and an in-depth case and cross analysis, is, as was alluded to previously, the role of the researcher. In this study, I did not simply document the stories and interpret them based on the data, or words, alone, I also utilized a deeper sense of intuition and insight, which is based on my own experience, having walked a similar path and inhabited the elite private school world for almost two decades. In addition, although my methodology, as initially introduced in Chapter One, falls with the glad bag of traditional narrative approaches in that it incorporates a disciplined hermeneutical exegesis of the data, it also includes a sense of poetry that seeks to render the essence of the individual’s experience by reading between the lines, seeking that which may not be entirely evident from the words themselves, but which occurs on a deeper level. Like Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983) and

Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) portraiture, my work combines science and art, rigor, as well as foreknowledge, perceptivity, and instinct. It is why meeting the individuals in person, as well has having an intimate knowledge of their contexts and sharing similar elements of their

103 background was so important and served as a means of framing the process. In short, my methodology was defined by both the objectivity of the social scientist, but also the subjectivity of the artist. Each portrait concludes with a brief summary of the individual’s experience.

CHAPTER 6

PORTRAIT ONE:

MONICA

Figure 2. Monica’s word cloud.

General Impressions and Timelines

My first encounter with Monica was by email. She responded to an announcement, which asked alumni/ae who received bursary assistance or whose family made significant sacrifices in order for them to attend an elite, private secondary school to consider speaking to me. The notice went on to explain that doing so might help other students and families contemplating a similar

104 105 path. She responded to the announcement, which was posted in an alumni/ae newsletter, a few days later, saying that she was of the class of “2008 and received bursary assistance … throughout [her] years” at the school.

Her email was timely and somewhat relaxed, but it was also to the point, characteristics I would learn were very much a part of Monica’s persona. Our first encounter was via Skype, and my overriding impression from that conversation was of an individual who was modest about her achievements but had also overcome a multitude of challenges: academic, social, and financial.

There was also something of the entrepreneur about her. In fact, although her educational path could be interpreted as relatively linear—even conventional—in many respects it was anything but.

Our first face-to-face meeting was at a public library in the North York area of Toronto.

We met on a Thursday evening in November. The library was full of people, students mostly, the majority of whom appeared to be in high school. Tutors were sitting alongside students, explaining math and English grammar; immigrant language groups were discussing their experiences living in Canada, their group leader easily moving between French, Arabic, and

English. There were no free spaces at any of the large study tables set out in the centre of the room.

Above the librarian’s desk, a sign read: Newcomers to Canada Settlement Information. It was situated next to another collection of bookshelves that read ESL (English as a Second

Language). In and around all of these were people, almost all speaking languages other than

English, almost all, it seemed, from places beyond Canada’s shores. It was this setting that provided the backdrop for my portrait of Monica. She, too, was an immigrant, albeit from Hong

Kong, by way of San Francisco. She had been a student who had to learn English outside the

106 family home, which was Mandarin and Cantonese speaking. She could easily have been a student in this library, not a great distance from her home.

Monica graduated from Metropolitan in the spring of 2008, following which she attended the Schulich School of Business at York University. Although she was offered places at the

University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and Western’s Ivey Business School (both prestigious programs) she chose a degree in Marketing and Strategic Management from York because it was the least expensive. Residence fees were “definitely lower than the other schools in Ontario,” she said. Monica lived in residence for her first year, which is not uncommon for many students attending Canadian universities (Prairie Research Associates, 2016). In subsequent years, she lived in student housing, located relatively close to campus in the Jane and

Finch area, also known as “The Village,” which was characterized by the Toronto Sun as

“Canada’s toughest neighbourhood” (Friesen, 2017; Richardson, 2008). Monica often “felt unsafe:” “If I ever stayed late [at school] … [I] would run,” she said, because I was afraid.”

“There was theft every day.” Like numerous others, she often remained in the library until the early hours of morning. Monica was also frugal and industrious, characteristics she learned from her parents:

[Off-campus housing] was a lot cheaper than the school residence options, so that’s what I did and one year, I stayed in a room that was made from the hallway. There was no window, it was very, very small, but I was only paying $300 a month. So, yeah, I did think about not moving out because I didn’t have to. I could have commuted from Markham, but I wanted to still have some independence and my university experience, and so I just made sure that it still was within my ability to afford it, and so I worked [to support myself] throughout the school years, every single year.

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She graduated from York in 2012, and currently works as a private brand manager, dealing with negotiations, customer relationships, packaging and retail design, as well as overseeing recipes for a large multinational retail company. It is a complex, multifaceted role. In addition, Monica recently became a Christian and believes that she has been called to serve Christ in a particular way. Her faith provides greater meaning and a deeper rationale to her life and work. She mentors another individual at her place of employment.

Family Circumstances and Cultural Context

Monica’s parents are immigrants. Her father is from Hong Kong; her mother is from

Mainland China. Although the couple met in Hong Kong, Monica was born in San Francisco.

The family, she said, remained in California until she was 2 months old and then returned to

Hong Kong for approximately 4 years. Therefore, Monica arrived in Canada as an immigrant, in

1990, when she was 4 years old. At that time, her father worked in the fur trade and was drawn to Canada “because of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).” “He was selling fur products,” she said, “coats, scarves, hats, gloves ... and that’s why he would travel around. It was popular in many countries.”. Her father “had a store selling some of the merchandise” in Toronto. However, with the increasingly widespread protests against cruelty to animals in both North America and

Asia in the early 1990s, championed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and with them the precipitous decline in the manufacture and sale of real fur garments, her father’s hope of making his fortune as a fur trader in Canada came to an end.

Following their arrival in Canada, the family lived in a friend’s basement. However, with a modest loan from a paternal grandmother, they purchased a house in a working-class suburb of

Toronto, a neighbourhood Monica described as largely populated by a diverse range of immigrants “from India and other places with whom they related in the early days.” An area,”

108 she went on to explain, “that is now “very Chinese … 90% Chinese.” In the absence of work in the fur trade, her father started to work in flea markets close to their home, “selling various electronics, cutlery, sometimes setting up a table in the Chinese mall on Monday to Friday.”

Currently, her dad works in a warehouse as a forklift operator, as well as doing other “odd duties in shipping and receiving.” Although “he has bounced from job to job, the work] is relatively stable.” Her mother “works in mailing … and puts letters together for a credit card company; she inserts the statements and ads and stuff like that.”

Monica worked alongside her father at the flea markets, “and did so from the time she was 8.” Interestingly, Monica recalls that she “was always interested in the retail space … [in] going into business” and the “creation of something out of nothing.” Even as a child, the notion of “how resources come together to create an experience” held a kind of fascination for her.

However, even though Monica arrived in Canada at the relatively early age of 4, she

“didn’t grow up with English around her.” As Chinese immigrants, her parents watched

Fairchild TV, a Cantonese television network. Based in Vancouver, 80% of the network’s programing is in Cantonese, the remainder in Mandarin. Although Monica speaks Cantonese and

Mandarin, she has since learned to speak Spanish and is in the process of completing a certification as a translator. In reality, she “really struggled in English.” Not growing up with

English being spoken in the home made acquiring the spoken (and written) word particularly difficult for her.

Attending Metropolitan and Navigating the Curriculum

Monica had very few friends prior to her enrolment at Metropolitan, which, she recalls, was largely because it seemed to her that “she was smarter than the rest of the class.” Clearly, she felt she was different from other students, a kind of square peg in a round hole. When asked

109 how she came to know about the school, she explained that “a friend went to Metropolitan,” and that this connection was facilitated by her attendance at one of a cluster of public elementary schools: “at the gifted school lots of parents knew about Metropolitan.” In fact, along with 10 of her Grade 6 peers who also aspired to go the school, Monica attended an open house. By means of a somewhat lengthy admission process that number was reduced to six, and then to four.

When taking the entrance test, she recalled that there were “Lots of kids in the gym.” When asked how she felt about the tests, she said that she “loves tests!” In addition to Monica, one other applicant (who was on a waiting list) got in, meaning that of the original 10 students who attended open houses and who most likely wrote entrance exams, only two eventually gained admittance.

With regards to her own sense of academic achievement whilst at Metropolitan, interestingly, she said that there were not really any subjects in which she excelled, a stark contrast to her experience in Grade 6. She “[would],” she believed, have “to get 100%” and that

“even [getting] 90s [was] not good enough.” To be the “best,” as she put it, one needed to be “the best in the country.” It was, she said, a “very competitive environment.” Moreover, “[students compared] marks,” a phenomenon that further compounded the competitive nature of the school.

Bearing in mind the contrast between her experience in elementary school, where she had been identified as a gifted student, and her perception of herself as a student who did not excel— at least compared to her peers—at Metropolitan, I was curious about how she navigated the curriculum more broadly. She had approached the entrance tests at Metropolitan with a marked sense of confidence, even gusto, which in part propelled her successful application to

Metropolitan from where she had successfully graduated. She had, likewise, graduated from a rigorous university business program. I, therefore, asked her had she received additional supports

110 at any time in her academic journey, such as a tutor, a resource often available to upper middle- class students in elite secondary schools (Rushowy, 2015). She said:

When I was younger, I went to math class on Saturdays [which was] usually 2 or 3 years ahead than the public-school curriculum. I did this until Grade 6. I did not have a tutor or a teacher who particularly helped me with math or English when I struggled with those subjects in Metropolitan. My parents couldn't help out since I exceeded their math and English [ability] in elementary school. My boyfriend in high school excelled at English. He often proofread my writing assignments, taught me proper grammar, and expanded my vocabulary (Personal communication, June 3, 2017).

This is an important point of divergence, where Monica’s academic challenges intersect with her social and cultural experience at Metropolitan.

Nevertheless, despite their lack of financial resources and Canadian cultural capital, or perhaps in some ways because of them, “Her parents were ... supportive. [They] knew she struggled in the competitive environment.” Indeed, she recalled, “I [broke down] a couple of times in front of them,” and that her mother cried with her. ... Always told her to do her best” and said “there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” [and that] there was “No point in comparing.” Even though she reached breaking point several times, Monica now sees those moments as “important growing experience[s].” The comment is characteristic of her ability to view adversity in a positive light. Although it does not aim to diminish their university experience, because like the other participants Monica’s aim was to achieve social mobility and her secondary- and postsecondary education experiences were seen as stepping stones toward that end, this study focuses on the participants’ transition to the work place and the role elite secondary education played in preparing them for success in that domain. Thus, it discusses below it their transition into the workplace, bearing in mind the impact it had on experience their social mobility journey.

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Transition to Work

The university had a career centre, which offered help with interviewing skills and “just how to land the job that you want,” but she “didn’t really use it that much,” as she had previously interviewed for so many jobs (albeit as a student for minimum wage). Her would-be employer had a new grad program and recruited on campus, at which time Monica’s focus shifted from academics to post-graduation employment. The program offered a 1-year rotation in its stores and it was there that she discovered the notion of private brands and of brand managing, a job she did not entirely realize existed before that time.

Arguably, this somewhat fortuitous confluence of events can be traced back to her interest in the retail space; the notion of creating a shopping experience—an “event,” as she described it—developed standing alongside her father at local flea markets, all of which was most likely taking place during a challenging time for her father and their family. And, yet, perhaps somewhat ironically, the experience was later to prove invaluable. Together with the part- and full-time summer jobs she did each year whilst at university, jobs that included door-to- door canvassing, which one year gave her frostbite, she presented as an ideal candidate for the role.

As it happened, careers in brand management turned out to be highly desirable amongst business school graduates. In her words: “It’s weird because when I was at Schulich, everyone in marketing made brand marketing [seem] the ultimate career.” Then, when she “ended up with an offer from [her employer],” she learned that she “had beat out hundreds and hundreds of people who were applying for the position.” Nonetheless, even at this time, she was somewhat reflective about the offer, unsure if it was ultimately right for her:

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When I landed it, I was like do I even want this? I never thought about going into retail; it’s not the marketing I wanted to do, but, yeah, there were so many transferable skills and it made more sense actually to my values … I am a very thrifty person because my family is, so if I had landed a job with [name withheld] or [name withheld] or a type of company that … I don’t know, [name withheld], just had the values.

I was curious about Monica’s comment about her work aligning with her values:

When I went there for my last round of interviews, I entered the building and I saw that they had re-used bookshelves and the quality of their furniture was worse than the stuff that we would sell at the flea markets, and … and I was like, wow, I actually think people here are down to earth. They have to be if they don’t care that their chair is a certain way or that the company doesn’t provide them with new stationary; I think I can actually fit in here whereas at the other companies, I think I would have had to pretend like I had already kind of been pretending at Metropolitan, a little bit, right? To act a certain way, being in the midst of prestige.

I pressed a little more. “It would have been very difficult if you had been at a [name withheld]”

She said, “I would have had to spend money on a new set of clothes and wear more makeup.”

The comments are noteworthy as they reveal Monica’s values, values I learned during the course of our numerous discussions that remain abiding tenets of her life. They also seemed to set her apart from others in a way that made her a desirable brand manager candidate. Thus, I inquired about what set her apart in the eyes of her employer: Did it have something to do with her journey thus far, the flea market, or her employment history at university?

You’re right about the skills, for sure. Having thick skin and dealing with people that want to push you down because you’re a certain way. Like at the flea market, if people saw that my parents were away because they went to the washroom or

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something, and I was looking after the store, of course people would harass me as a kid, or try to steal stuff, right? I played with kids that belonged to other vendors and they came from broken homes and so if ever we got into a fight, they could get very violent. So, I learned to deal with people who wouldn’t be respectful toward me right away. At my employer’s, although I was in a position of power to give business and take away business … on the other side of the table were people older than me, more experienced, men, tall, White, and they could have—and they did—kind of yield their power over me and speak with aggression and just not treat me with professionalism as they would with other people.

To the best of her knowledge, the only other privately educated individual in her workplace was a colleague who went to a private Catholic high school (Private communication, June 3, 2017).

Financial Realities

A number of the decisions both she and her parents made were dictated by their financial circumstances. Although Monica received a bursary throughout her time at Metropolitan, because the support given (approximately 50% of the tuition) was insufficient, the family appeared to be forced to ask an administrator—in her case, a vice principal—for more. As a result of what seemed like a somewhat informal appeal, a further albeit nominal amount was provided. In fact, Monica wrote a letter to the school on behalf of her parents, as their English

“isn’t as proficient.” Nevertheless, as Monica was promoted year after year, because her tuition costs were increasing—increases the family was unable to meet (even with the bursary support)– in Grade 11 the family was asked “to sign a form saying [she] was not coming back.” She remembers being, “extremely upset. ... I just remember freaking out, running up to my room, crying, and then I prayed for the first time in my life, and then the form was submitted.” The story, however, appeared to have a silver lining: “the next morning, the vice principal had looked at the form and then she called me into her office in the middle of class and offered me a summer

114 job.” Evidently, the summer job made enough difference, meaning that although the pay she received from the summer job would not cover the entire deficit, it did make the overall expense manageable. The moment, which was clearly a pivotal turning point in her life, became part of her “testimony to becoming a Christian.”

As a means of providing some additional context, Monica added: “You have to put in

100% at Metropolitan. If you are distracted by family [issues, whether financial or otherwise] it

[one’s academic standing] can plummet,” alongside the prospect of advancement, nullifying one’s rationale for attending in the first place. Monica and her family were plainly under financial pressure. It is therefore not hard to imagine the impact her imminent withdrawal from

Metropolitan must have had, making it increasingly difficult for her to focus on school, and similarly to continue to perform at an academic level that justified her attendance, and with it the financial burden placed on her family. Moreover, these pressures were most likely invisible to her peers and many of her teachers. She notes that “although she received a bursary throughout her entire time at Metropolitan, the remaining amount was still a lot.” Apparently, she did not sleep much the night prior to being offered the summer job. The challenge was ongoing and had been so since joining the school; in fact, as a means of supporting her extracurricular commitments in Grade 7, her “mother got a job downtown working as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant” so that she could escort her home and bring some extra funds into the home.

A Sense of Belonging and Social Networks

I asked Monica whether, as part of the process of developing relationships with her peers and establishing a sense of belonging to the school community, she had been able to participate in any school trips, often a means by which students make lasting friendships. In her trademark,

115 somewhat matter-of-fact way, she said: “[I] didn’t participate in all the school trips,” although she did, however, have an opportunity to attend camp, and to visit Washington DC.

By way of providing some context, an integral part of the education provided in most

CAIS-affiliated schools includes extensive travel opportunities. Such experiences, which are almost always an additional expense beyond tuition costs, might include camps, domestic, as well as international travel. In many schools, such trips are offered in a variety of grades as students proceed through the school. For some schools these opportunities are considered differentiators and are deemed central to building character, global awareness, social responsibility. They also assist students to bond with their peers.

With regards to her broader participation in extracurricular programs, such as athletics,

Monica became a wrestler, as “singlets were provided [by the school];” Monica also participated in volleyball, as, in like manner, it didn’t “require a large outlay of money to purchase equipment. Most kids had Spanx,” she said, a popular, but somewhat expensive, fashion brand.

Monica did not own a pair. She purchased her first pair in Grade 11. For the same reasons, she

“didn’t do tennis, badminton [or] hockey as they involved a great deal of equipment.”

Nevertheless, she did not feel she “[was] lacking” in any way, a sentiment that was consistent throughout our numerous conversations. She improvised, made sacrifices, and was thus still able to participate in some of the activities that were important to her. It is clear, however, that because her funding did not extend beyond her tuition costs, she was forever in a position where she needed to make choices, choices that, in effect, were nonchoices for many of her peers.

However, although it was her intelligence–what she referred to as “being smarter than the other kids”—that created a perception of otherness prior to attending Metropolitan, whilst at

Metropolitan, it was her background and SES that initially set her apart. She felt “different in

116 family background” and lacked cultural capital. Monica recalled she would “go to their homes— they were very wealthy.” Indeed, she had “never seen homes that big, encompassing a ravine.”

The people Monica encountered were, as she put it, “well learned.” Her peers had “parents who were into politics ... [They were] doctors and conversations were not,” she explained, “so innocent anymore. [They] dealt with social justice, science,” which was new to her.

When exploring this theme further, she recalled a conversation at a fellow student’s home. Apparently, they were “chillin’ and the conversation turned to poverty in Africa and the topic of malaria came up.” Monica asked what malaria was, and was acutely embarrassed by their response. She recalled that they were shocked that she didn’t know anything about a topic that, like many others, one might reasonably assume was part of the discourse that took place in the homes of many of her other peers. Monica’s question revealed her unfamiliarity with the subject matter (certainly not unique amongst youngsters of her age), but to some degree it also revealed her social status and cultural disposition as the child of recent Chinese immigrants, who were preoccupied with the economic and social challenges of life in a new country, and therefore did not move in such social circles. For Monica, these conversations were not the kinds of conversations that took place at home. Nonetheless, whilst she had clearly shone as a student in elementary school, being identified as a gifted student in Grade 3, she was now challenged to navigate a highly competitive academic (and affluent) environment in which she was one of many gifted students, selected from across the metropolitan area and even the world.

As our conversation unfolded, I also wanted to understand the changing nature of

Monica’s social network as she pursued her education beyond Metropolitan. I asked if, for whatever reason, she ever needed help in her personal or professional life, whether or not there were alumni/ae (friends and acquaintances from her class, of 2008, or other alumni/ae year

117 groups) she could ask for help. In brief, I was curious about whether or not any sense of shared purpose–or, even, friendship–endured beyond her time at the school. She said that Metropolitan has a very active social network and that she was not limited to reaching out to other people in her particular class, and that she would also be comfortable reaching out beyond that group to others. She added that she was able to build relationships at Metropolitan because she was part of a smaller group. Her graduating class consisted of 104 students, a reasonably small cohort, at least when compared to a majority of other schools found in the “GTHA”.

When reflecting on her university experience, she said that the business school has a network that is like the network of any other school and that she does not “attend Schulich-run events.” She does, however, stay in touch with friends she knew there.”

Key Relationships, Turning Points, and Challenges

Despite some of her initial challenges, on some level Monica came to feel like she belonged. She was “okay at school.” Although she participated in extracurricular activities, such as wrestling, ultimately, she “was able to find a niche as a dancer.” “My family,” she said,

“didn’t have funds to send me to lessons, so I practiced in my room.” The comment is characteristic of her determination to be successful at whatever she chooses to do. Indeed, it is difficult not to appreciate her drive to succeed and take advantage of the opportunities the school provided, as well as to commend the ways in which she to cultivate a sense of her own personal agency. In fact, each year Metropolitan held a cultural event, called Show. It was “an amalgamation of acting, modeling, a myriad of dance styles, costume design, set construction and painting” run entirely by students. The event was a highlight of the school year and included widespread school participation. It was through this activity that she found her place. Show became her niche, but, interestingly, she reflected, the “niches” students inhabited as a means of

118 participating in school life “constantly changed.” As they matured and changed, it appeared, so did their interests, and presumably their social networks. Students also belonged, she added,

“because we were all so driven. Different, but good at school. All so different, but talented in their own way. Everyone had a niche.” Hip-hop was hers. There was also a “very established extracurricular program [which] took place outside of class … [and students] stayed behind until

7:00–8:00 p.m. and on weekends.” For Monica, this often meant taking a subway and two buses, eventually arriving home around 10:00 p.m.

At school, she remembers, there were two key individuals who supported her, who

“genuinely cared. My wrestling coach was like a second dad. He wanted to know how I was doing; how my family was doing.” This was also true of “the principal, vice principal, teachers and counsellors.” Monica also made a general comment about other individuals at the school:

“Many teachers reached out, but [there was] one who let a student live with them.” The individual in question may not have been the only student to whom accommodations were offered, but, by extension, the gesture clearly meant a great deal to her, and spoke to the culture of the school, which was evidently established and reinforced by the willingness of the school’s teaching faculty to go above and beyond their conventional teaching roles. There was, she said simply, “something that was intangible.” Although this is a portrait of Monica, her recollections suggest a portrait on an institution, where she simultaneously experiences roadblocks (i.e., financial and, in some respects, social) juxtaposed against the outreach provided by the school, which made the experience bearable and in very many respects helped to facilitate her success.

Aspirations and Definitions of Success

At this point in our interview, Monica explained that she had become a Christian, and that her higher goal was simply to “glorify God.” As noted, she felt “called to serve Him in a

119 particular way.” She aims, “to achieve a “cheerful obedience that’s genuine,” by her own admission a development that seems to represent an existential shift in her way of life and of being. Her definitions of success are thus rooted in her values and her faith.

By her own admission, Monica has become socially mobile. She makes significantly more money than either of her parents and has done so consistently for some time. She possesses a number of important transferable skills, which one can only assume are desirable to a wide range of employers, meaning that she is highly employable, and will likely remain so. In time,

Monica might easily be able to afford private education for her children, should she ever desire to become a parent. She is effectively in the process of becoming part of Canada’s upper-middle class.

General Observations and School Recommendations

Monica observed that “the student body [at Metropolitan now] looks more and more wealthy. ... the makeup of the student body has changed a lot because the tuition is so high.”

Indeed, she commented that she “saw one girl with a designer bag.” She offered no particular advice to the institution, although a number of her comments may have consequences for

Metropolitan. Nevertheless, I asked Monica what might Metropolitan stop doing, start doing, and continue to do. She responded accordingly.

Start Doing

Even though she had faced her own social and academic challenges at Metropolitan, she urged the school to “keep everyone there on merit.” She repeated that “tuition has gone up,” and that “the student body looks more and more wealthy.” When asked if she had returned to visit the school since graduating in 2008, she said, “we cling to the school,” by which I believe she meant

120 that alumni/ae such as her are attached to the school—indeed, to the broader school community, despite the challenges they may have faced and the changing demographic nature of the school.

Stop Doing

The Metropolitan of her era was not necessarily the school it has since become. Monica’s comment about school fees implies that she hopes the increase in fees can be contained, or even to some degree reversed.

Continue Doing

Monica wanted the leadership camps, where Grade 7 and 8 students are paired with

Grade 12 students and teach younger students “how to be a part of the community in a positive way” (what she called the “social aspects”) to be preserved. In her Grade 7 year she was paired with a Grade 12 student, a practice she believes made an important difference to her educational experience. In a similar vein, she also encouraged Metropolitan to maintain the house system, and thereby preserve a sense of “house spirit.” Through such camps and the house system “there was a lot of mentorship connecting different years.” Essentially, Monica is speaking of the importance of establishing a sense of belonging and community, of which she was clearly a beneficiary.

Similarly, she notes, that teachers facilitated a lot of events. The whole process, she said, was “quite organic.” In the same fashion, participation in extracurricular activities and sports appears to have taken place across school year groups, meaning that students interacted beyond their grade groupings, making for a stronger community overall. In brief, Monica hopes that these kinds of practices can be honoured, nurtured and maintained, being central to the success of the school she attended, as well as an important community-building practice. These comments again paint a picture of the approach the school—and its teaching faculty—took to

121 facilitating the success of students, who otherwise faced significant limitations, financial and otherwise.

Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc

At the time of our initial interviews, Monica was working as a private brand manager for a large multinational company. She has since married, and looking back, added that “through me

[her parents also] learned [and] they are [now] more plugged into the Canadian experience than if I’d just remained in Markham.” Recently, however, after a great deal of reflection, Monica left her place of employment and has since enrolled in a graduate program at the University of

Toronto, studying theology, where she hopes to prepare for some sort of ministry work, albeit of an unconventional kind. It is an enormous change for her, and one that is difficult for her parents and her father, in particular, to comprehend.

[It was] very hard, plus my family, they’re not Christian, so it was very difficult for me to tell my dad … he was like the last person I told in my entire life because I knew that they would not understand. Why would I give this up? They were very much a part of—or actually it was all because of them that I was able to get to where I am. So, it was a struggle and that was partly why it took 3 years of prayer. But my husband is very supportive.

She went on:

I told my mom earlier because, having grown up in Hong Kong, she was exposed to Christianity and so she has a very different [perspective] … she’s just open to it. My dad is closed and hostile toward Christianity, so I knew that she would take it better, but she still asks me every now and then, “So, why are you doing this again?” My in-laws ask me the same thing.

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Clearly, Monica has achieved a kind of social mobility. She completed a university degree and did so with flying colours, and she also held steady employment—a very good job, in fact—in a large multinational company. As such, her prospects were (and are) bright, as she has developed a high degree of expertise in brand management. She has experience, contacts, and skills, making her employable beyond her immediate circumstances, which in contrast to her parents’ experience might serve as a means of establishing employment security.

Monica’s decision to leave the corporate world—which she believes she was “led” to do—and begin the process of preparing a religious ministry was an unexpected one, certainly for her greatest supporters, her parents. In some ways, however, it speaks to the fact that her educational journey—like that of her peers—was a communal one, while also a deeply private and personal experience. Moreover, it led to a sense of personal agency, as well as a kind of inner strength and an ability to persevere. One might also suggest that her ministry, in whatever form it takes, is also rooted in the notion that she seeks to be of assistance to others who may face similar struggles as her own.

Of course, charting her own course was not without costs. Indeed, in many respects, it will most likely always be somewhat mystifying to her parents who invested so much in her educational journey. Her success was also rooted in the value her parents placed on education and its powerful utilitarian affects in their child’s life and reverence they held in the efficacious power of education as a tool that facilitates social mobility. Indeed, because her father haled from communist mainland China, the notion that Monica would reject the promise an upper- middle class life was doubly challenging. Even her mother, who was more open to her pathway, struggled with the notion. Nevertheless, it was their support that helped her to navigate her journey, albeit in a way that made sense to her.

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A Summary of Monica’s Journey

The first participant, graduated from secondary school and based on her accomplishments was offered a place in a competitive business school. She successfully completed that program and went on to secure a position at a Fortune 500 company. Her qualifications enabled her to secure a white-collar, managerial role, which carried profession status. By graduating from

Metropolitan, a highly rated business school, and securing a role in a multinational, she entered a world where she benefitted from a kind of compound advantage. With the experience she gained, she was well placed to remain in that social stratum. Her continued success will also depend on broader economic and political conditions. As Bourdieu noted (1986), we are all subject to the economic and political fields, which mediate all others. However, as Rivera (2015) suggested, because of her so-called “pedigree” (p. 16) as well as the benefits provided by means of the social networks to she belongs, Monica is better placed to weather financial storms and political instability than many.

Educational achievement and social capital helped to facilitate her entry into a promising professional and can be seen as a catalyst, propelling her forwards. Monica was able to accomplish this whilst maintaining her own identity. It was her experiences at the flea market, and her frugality, which made her university residence experience possible, as well as the support of her family and teachers that sustained and drove her on. The company for which she worked reflected her values, which for her served as a North Star.

As part of a journey during in which she overcame a multitude of challenges, she acquired a sense of personal agency. Monica had wherewithal to choose an unconventional pathway.

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In elementary school, she was identified as gifted, which signalled to her that she was different. She felt set apart from the rest of her class because “she was smarter.” Thus, even at an early age, one can identify an emerging sense of mastery. It was from the gifted school that she came into contact with other children whose parents were exploring private education. In effect, there was a pipeline originating from a cluster of schools which were located in relatively close geographic proximity to a number of elite private secondary schools. The fact that she enjoyed taking tests, reinforced her sense of confidence: she believed if she wrote the exams of which the private school admissions process included several she was likely to do well on them.

Around this time, Monica also attended additional math classes on the weekends that were two or three years ahead of the public-school curriculum. This further served to prepare her for the rigour of the Secondary School Admissions Test (SSAT). As Monica recalled this phase of her journey, one can sense that she felt increasingly empowered. This, of course, was in stark contrast to her parents, who were facing challenges finding their way in their adopted country.

Yet, still, her parents were supportive, as was her grandmother who provided a small loan that enabled them to buy a house in a working-class suburb of Toronto. The belief her parents held in her ability acted as a kind of social persuasion. Monica was also around other students who had also been identified as gifted, which similarly reinforced her sense of confidence.

However, where she felt special in elementary school, at Metropolitan school she became a small fish in a bigger, high-achieving, upper-middle-class pond. Even though she did not shine in any of her subjects at Metropolitan, she was competent in them all. When at the home of a fellow student, she was confronted by her lack of cultural capital, or really the revelation that she possessed different cultural capital than that of her peers. This, together with the difficulty she experienced as an English as a second language learner (ELL) and the family’s constant

125 challenge to pay the school’s fees, created stress. However, those stresses were mediated by the support of her family, her boyfriend (who helped her with English), her teachers, and even to some degree the school administration.

Although her journey seems to have been more challenging than that of the other participants, or perhaps challenging in different ways, she was successful in her own right and charted her own course. The fullest expression of her sense of agency was characterized by choice, while all the time she was cognizant that her family may only have had enough money to stay on the train for only so long.

CHAPTER 7

PORTRAIT TWO:

ANDREA

Figure 3. Andrea’s word cloud.

General Impressions and Timelines

I first met Andrea in person at a coffee shop close to Metropolitan, the independent school she attended and from which she graduated in 2013. She had recently completed a Liberal

Arts degree at one of America’s most prestigious universities. This, our second interview, involved a series of follow-up questions. Not unlike her initial answers, shared via Skype, her

126 127 responses were precise and to the point; they portrayed a kind of efficiency–an economy of effort in both her thinking and persona. She wore a dark winter coat. On her shoulder she carried a reddish-brown, Michael Kors clutch purse, which was embellished with gold buckles and detailing. Everything about her was elegant and somewhat understated.

Family Circumstances and Cultural Context

Andrea’s family might be described as what Tapper and Salter (1986) described as

“distressed gentlefolk”—individuals who through no fault of their own fell on difficult times, but who might nonetheless be described in a Canadian context as middle class (Cazzin, 2017). Her parents both studied engineering in the U.S. and gained master’s degrees. Her father was on a

“full scholarship,” Andrea said, “so his family had not spent any money on sending him there.”

He also went on to complete Ph.D. in Canada, following which the family moved to New

Zealand, where he had been offered a position “doing pharmaceuticals for animals.” Although

Andrea was born in New Zealand, her parents are originally from Taiwan.

Whilst in New Zealand, her family lived a “typical suburban middle-class lifestyle.” Her mother was a stay-at-home parent and remained so throughout her elementary and high school experience. Later on, her father completed an MBA in the hope of moving into the “intersection of finance, business, and pharmaceuticals, something more office job than lab job.” Driven by this ambition, her father secured a job in Toronto, and the family returned to Canada, this time with their daughter, who was then 7 years old. The other impetus to move to Canada, however, was the presence of Andrea’s maternal grandmother and an uncle, who had both immigrated to the country some time earlier. Their relocation was therefore both for family and economic reasons.

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After several years of working full time, her father decided to go part-time and became a consultant for the company where he was working. For several years this worked well, but as the broader economic environment deteriorated between 2007 and 2008, there were fewer issues and jobs on which to consult, fewer hours to bill. The work ebbed and eventually came to a standstill.

This turn in the family’s financial fortunes occurred at around the same time Andrea was in the process of applying to Metropolitan. When her grandmother and uncle originally moved into the neighbourhood in which they now live it was much more affluent. High levels of unemployment and social assistance now characterized the area (Doolittle, 2014).

Attending Metropolitan and Navigating the Curriculum

Like many who attended Metropolitan, Andrea was referred to a gifted program by her grade 3 grade teacher, a phenomenon that appears to be pattern for parents aiming to achieve social mobility for their children through school achievement. The school Andrea attended was in a much wealthier neighbourhood: it had “lots of upper middle class [students],” she recalled. It was a small school with a “very involved parent–teacher committee.” However, because the program ended in Grade 5, Andrea then moved to a new school, which was situated on the edge of both a “good and a bad neighbourhood.” She described this moment as one of the critical

“turning points in my educational career.”

The gifted class there stood out like a sore thumb. It was horrible. We had a lot of kids in my class who were coming from ... very well-off [communities] ... and one girl in the class had her Lululemon leggings stolen when we were in gym class because a lot of the local kids knew that as a class ... [they] were coming from a ... [more affluent] background.

She went on to articulate the social divide further:

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[At her new school] there is a very large Black population, [as well as] a very large Southeast Asian immigrant population as well. My gifted class in the sixth grade [however] was primarily Caucasian. We had a number of Chinese Asians, too, but we didn’t have that many Southeast Asians [and only] one or two Black students in the class. … Like you could tell when you saw the class that we were different. ... The other kids had come in from going to elementary school together, and here we were 26 people who kind of hung out as one … we never split up, we never met other students. I think it was very clear that we didn’t know how to interact. … I guess I would add that even in fourth grade and fifth grade back at [my previous school] ... one of the defining recess activities was “giftie vs. normie” soccer and so we had kind of been primed for it, whereas I guess in elementary school, it was a friendly division, but by the time we got to middle school, it became [a] source of tension and the other kids didn’t like us ... we dressed differently. People had nicer clothes. Some people had cell phones. ... There was a difference. Half of the class came in on a school bus. I guess that did not help either.

I inquired further about Andrea’s last the comment on bussing:

So, I was on the cut-off. I was taking the public bus every day. I was taking the TTC to school, but some of the kids who lived in [more affluent neighbourhoods] especially were being bussed in because they were beyond the [school’s traditional catchment area].

As this particular class transitioned to Grade 6, it seems to have become almost de rigueur for students to then apply to an elite, private school:

We were a class of 26 and we had been together basically since fourth grade. All of the parents were familiar with one another. ... Of my class of 26 ... something like 15 people applied to private school[s]. ... so, I had caught onto this trend. Everyone was going to private school open houses and I did not particularly like being [at the school]. … I think knowing that you’re different from other people

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especially at that age doesn’t feel very comfortable, and [so] I said to my parents, “I want to apply to this school,” knowing nothing about it. ... I said, “I think I should apply” and my parents were like, “We have no money, we can’t possibly send you there.”

Andrea recalled the conversation with her parents: “This is a preposterous idea!” but [she] also said that her grandmother ... talked to some of her friends … and she actually came back to my parents and said, “This sounds like a really good school, I think you should let her go and apply” and then my parents were like “Well, we’ll pay the $100 (the application fee), we’ll let you go apply, but we’re not going to send you there, you should know this.”

It is a testament to her fortitude that despite her parents’ resistance, she persisted. In some respects, it seems that she was looking for a way out of her circumstances and the discomfort of being considered different at her current school. At the same time Andrea was preparing to take the entrance exam, she was also taking French classes at a French language school, where she

“met a girl” who encouraged her to prepare for the Secondary School Admissions Test (SSAT).

The SSAT is used to assess the ability of students seeking to enroll in independent schools across

Canada and the U.S. As such, she “had done a little bit of prep,” she recalled, and felt “ready for the exam part.” She was not, however, “ready for everything else about the school.” Nonetheless, as “the finances in the family were still relatively comfortable,” despite their initial objections, her parents were ultimately supportive.

Andrea took the entrance exam, made the cut, and was invited back for round two. She recalls the group that applied from her school was reduced in size by about 40% from 15 to 9.

Interestingly, the students who were not invited back began to consider other private schools, all of which are elite on a number of Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) metrics. Andrea described this process as “beginning to diversify.” The second round involved meeting with a teacher and a

131 member of the school’s alumni/ae. “They would just ask questions and wait for you to answer them. It was very rapid fire,” and she described the experience as “horrifying.” The second round also involved writing an essay and “some extra math exams.”

As a result of her efforts, along with seven or eight of her peers, Andrea was offered a place. By contrast, in the previous year only two students were offered places. Thus, when

Andrea first attended her new school, she did so with a number of students she already knew well. At this point, “my parents were probably staying up late thinking about what to do,” she recalled. However, as admissions process unfolded, her grandmother was to play a pivotal role in her matriculation. She said, “You know I can help out. I think she should go,” and I guess my parents gave up on the fight, and said, “Well, let’s apply for financial aid and see what comes back, and then we’ll talk.”

Like other private schools in the area, tuition fees were substantial. Around the time she applied, they were $14,000–$15,000 per year. The fees did not include textbooks, the additional cost of participating extracurricular activities, or school trips. Students, however, were not required to buy school uniforms (the school has a no-uniform policy), which for financial reasons appeals to families with fewer resources. The school offered Andrea’s family approximately $8,000, which with the help of her grandmother, the family could afford.

[And] my parents were like, “Okay, you can go.” ... After I actually went to Metropolitan, it was easier for them to feel inclined to renew [that is, continue to pay school fees in subsequent years] because they had seen the academic impact it had.

Once there, her parents were not overly concerned with the social benefits of Andrea attending the school.

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My dad had said before that in sixth grade he was worried that I wasn’t very motivated to try hard. I didn’t feel engaged in my studies, but ... at the end of seventh grade ... I did not make that list [of those being given award scholarships] and I remember being very distraught over that and my parents, I guess, took that as a good sign and they were, like, “Okay, now we don’t have to worry about you anymore.”

If she had not been particularly motivated in Grade 6, she was motivated now. However, the educational environment had changed. Not only was there a shift from the elementary curriculum, along with its attendant expectations (which had not included numerical grades), but also to the significantly greater demands of a highly academic program:

Yeah, I wonder … it is true that the seventh-grade curriculum at Metropolitan stuck out as being much more demanding. … I assume it has to do with the ownership you develop over your work when you have more work to do. I think in sixth grade, it was very much like, oh, research projects and you kind of go home and search up some things and throw them together and make your presentation at school and that was it. Planning at Metropolitan, I became more acutely aware of like, “I get ‘x’ percent on tests” (I also think the letter grade to numbers played into it, like being aware of the difference between a 90 and 100), and [thus] being aware that you can even do something to close that gap, and I think being around people who, for the most part, were trying a lot harder with the work and being in an environment where it was normalized [helped].

Andrea describes this experience as “being dragged into the game”—a game she did not realize existed prior to attending the school. And, yet, she also recalls that “it was the normal thing to do”—that “it felt very normal.” Nevertheless, it is clear that without the help of her grandmother, it is unlikely Andrea may not have enrolled. With her increased engagement and the academic

133 achievement that followed, however, she too, came to believe that the fees were worth it. She also recalled, her parents saying, “Okay we see where our money is going, this is good.”

Financial Realities

After her first 2 years at Metropolitan, her family appealed the amount of financial aid they had received, and her “percentage of financial aid went up … closer to two thirds, but by then tuition had also gone up to between $18,000–$19,000” a year. Up unto that point, the family had been able to pay Andrea’s portion of the fees relatively easily (by Grade 10, the family was paying approximately one-third of the overall cost of tuition—about $6,000 per year, or approximately $500.00 per month). However, with the uncertainty and unpredictability around her father’s job, paying tuition became a much more difficult. In order to compensate, her father

“started working at [a supermarket] on the night shift stacking shelves, “and that became our steady income.” Eventually, he also picked up consulting work on an ad hoc basis, which though intermittent, provided the family with additional income.

Sense of Belonging and Social Networks

It took some time for Andrea to find her place in the school community, and she described the process as being like “a baseball glove that you wear down until it fits your hand.”

In fact, her relatively smooth transition between schools—indeed, between worlds—was also mitigated by a friendship facilitated by her financial circumstances:

Yeah, I think going into it I was aware that, oh, I’m on financial aid, this is kind of weird, but I also had the fortune of the friend that I mentioned earlier who carpooled with me. We had been in the same class since fourth grade. So, going into Metropolitan, I also knew that she was on financial aid, so I guess it wasn’t like I knew a ton of people who were on financial aid, but at least [there was] one

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person close to me whose situation I was aware of. So, I never felt like I was absolutely the only person who was in my situation.

When asked whether or not she ever felt any kind of social distance from her more affluent peers, she answered:

There is some weird subliminal self-selection process when you find people you get close to. I think back now and I don’t quite know how it happened, but the friends that I graduated with, being closest to, are for the most part all people who were on financial aid. I did have one or two friends who came from much wealthier backgrounds, but I think … I would say that I acknowledge I probably had more in common with the friends who came from similar financial backgrounds, but I never felt that it was a barrier to associating with the other people.

I wondered whether the friendships Andrea made endured beyond her time at Metropolitan. For her, unlike Monica, it appears they did:

The closest friends that I have, we still see each other every time I’m back. We keep in touch over Facebook. They’ve been to visit me in the United States once, and actually I would add that even the people who I was not close with during my time at Metropolitan, I have grown a lot closer to in the sense that taken out of the Metropolitan context, if we meet up elsewhere, if we run into someone, it’s suddenly like we have so much in common, although when we were back at [school], it felt like we had very little in common. There is a weird effect that kind amplifies of any shared history when you’re in a new place, I guess, and so I’ve met up with people that I would never have spent time one-on-one with [at school], but now that I’m in university and they happen to be in [the area] and I’ve met up with some of them, too, so I definitely stayed close with them.

I then asked, “If you ... wanted to reach out for support or help whether or not it was to do with your career, or even your personal life … were there people from school that you … could go

135 to?” Andrea’s response was “definitely.” I was also interested whether she had been able to preserve any relationships with other peers who had attended other private schools. She had not.

Her reasons were largely to do with the lack of daily proximity, which, combined with the fact that as a youngster she was not at liberty to “run around everywhere” made staying in touch difficult. Moreover, as a highly motivated student, she had little time to devote to such relationships. She then spoke of essential role older students played in helping new students to feel at home:

The older students, especially the Grade 11s and 12s, have this overwhelming hospitality. I remember [it] distinctly. There is a buddy system, which is where the Grade 7s are paired up…. You get [a] Grade 12 buddy and they can take you out to lunch and you hang out with them at camp (... we all go to camp at the end of September when school has just started) and I think that was a really big part of it because you had a buddy and then you knew how to reach out to someone. [On occasion], you would meet [your] buddy’s friends and sometimes if you were close friends with [another student in] seventh grade ... the four of us would go out together.... I think because the 5-year age gap is a pretty big one and it’s big enough to [appreciate that] brother–sister feel when someone takes care of you. I think that leaves a really strong foundation for ... being part of the community.

I was also curious whether she interacted with a broader range of students at events organized by the school, and in addition whether or not she might have interacted with other students from different social backgrounds in their own homes. She said, “Yes,” but that largely she did so with

“people from within her own grade … [and] primarily [to work together on] projects; if we had a project and we needed to work on it, it would kind of [be] like, “Oh, you should come over,” or I should go over.” She explained further:

A lot of the Metropolitan population lives [a distance from the school], and so it was always a little bit tricky, especially when my dad was working nights, for me

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to figure out how I would get around that. So, my preference actually I think more often was to have people over so that my parents didn’t have to take care of getting me around. But we did go to people’s houses. I would say it was kind of like a 50/50 thing … like if you happened to be working on a project and you were friends with someone, then you would go to their house, but if you were just working with them and you didn’t like them ... you would probably find an excuse and do the work separately at home.

Key Relationships, Turning Points, and Challenges

The relationships Andrea remembers most fondly tended to be with individuals who in some respects were nonconformist:

[One teacher] ... would scrawl words all over the board in nonsensical ways and we were expected to just rapid-fire take notes on everything he said and this is at the age of 12! This was a completely new thing and we would just take pages on pages on pages of notes and then you have to go home and type them out because they would be so messy; otherwise you’d have no idea of what you had learned.... Sometimes he would say the wrong date too, on separate occasions, so you would have to corroborate with your friends to figure out which was the actual date he wanted you to write on a test.... In a lot of ways, it felt like a rite of passage.

Another influential figure was her free-spirited Spanish teacher:

I learned an incredible amount from her classes ... she was one of those teachers who would share personal experiences, not just academics. I think at one point, she spent a whole class telling us about when ... she was a truck driver for a few years, and she would drive across the country.... Then sometimes she would go on these rants about all the problems in Latin America and she had very strong political views, but they were very compelling because she would present them in a very convincing way.

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Her recollections suggest that these teachers were of the exotic, beyond the mainstream, and, as such, influenced her learning experience. It appears both teachers were allowed to be idiosyncratic, and by extension, encouraged the idiosyncrasy of their students. She recalls that her other teachers were “more conventional.”

As per the other participants’ experience in this study, pivotal moments in Andrea’s life tended to occur early. They began in Grade 3 when she was identified as a gifted student; then continued in Grade 6 as her class migrated to a new school, again in Grade 7 when she transitioned to Metropolitan, and then yet again in Grade 9 in the guidance department, where she was given a booklet. The booklet included profiles of members of the school’s alumni/ae, one of its most valuable resources. The profiles included the subjects they had taken at

Metropolitan, their grades, as well as the extracurricular activities in which they had participated:

This [was] weird like … people would point out [and say]I think you would totally be like this person in 2 years, or I think you’d be that person in 2 years and we were kind of mapping ourselves onto these models that were handed to us and thinking about it that way. I think that might have been one of the moments where I started to actually think about where I wanted to go for university and what parts of my resume or student experience[,] I should work on to be better positioned for it.

Because the alumni profiles were of students who had attended elite universities which were largely in the United States, her parents did some research, and reached the conclusion that an

American university supported by the kinds of scholarships and bursary programmes offered— would be “reasonably accessible” financially. This was a key moment that occurred at a time when Andrea was developing further an increasingly powerful sense of agency and coming to terms with the fact that that she was increasingly the master of her own fate. I pressed Andrea

138 about whether there were also students of her own age who were influential in shaping her life course. Interestingly, in response to the question, she discussed the ways in which her parents spoke about the families, and indeed the homes, of peers:

Oh, so-and-so in my class, her parents are both lawyers. My parents would say, “look at where they live” (I guess I would also draw the connections to look where they go on vacation), or “Look what she wears, look what she buys.” At Metropolitan, I feel that a lot of the people I knew, a lot of the people that I was close with had parents with fairly unconventional paths, actually. I had friends whose parents ran a small business, but the family was very well off so it’s unclear whether they ran the business out of interest or sort of a hobby. Actually I can recall that being the case in more than one family in the sense that I would go home and tell my parents, “Oh, so-and-so’s parents own a dry cleaning shop,” and my parents would be like, “Oh, that’s interesting … look at the way they live, like they buy things in a certain way, they live in a certain type of house … they are probably running that for small income but that’s probably not their bread and butter.” Things like that. I would have these sorts of discussions with my parents, or even then with my other peers. To be honest, I remember one person’s parents were doctors and to be honest my most poignant impression is that she was very close with her nanny and not at all close with her parents.

These impressions were equally impactful, and yet those families’ means of employment—or, indeed, wealth—were shrouded in mystery, unlike the role models she saw in the guidance brochure. The booklet, it seemed, served to demystify the very nature of worldly success, achievement, and even wealth. In Grade 10, Andrea’s sense of agency was further reinforced:

[She] started to have closer friends who were going through the process…. I had two very close friends in twelfth grade, and they got into Yale and Harvard that year, and I think that seeing someone you know well and being able to ask them what did you do behind the scenes–that makes it very real for you, for me at least. I was able to say like, “Hey, so what was it that you thought about? What did you

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do in particular to position yourself well to get in?” And I was able to have those conversations with people … I was comfortable with them … comfortable enough to actually ask those questions.

Secured directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, such informants are rare indeed. Andrea was beginning to move in rarefied circles and was now an established part of a social network that had access to critical resources—particularly useful when one aspires to attend an elite postsecondary institution in the United States. Andrea remained in contact with both individuals as a university student. Similarly, she also remains in touch with her Grade 3 teacher—the one who originally referred her to the gifted program and said that “we always joke that it’s all him

… like he set me on this path.” However, that conversation, an affectionate memory, then led to a much deeper conversation about the notion of ambition, and ultimately, personal power—what

Bridges (1991) described as the “coin of the realm” (as cited in Lawrence-Lightfoot, 2009, p. 33) in any socially mobile society.

I think the ambition thing, it’s hard to say whether I would have discovered my ambitious streak … as a 12-year-old had it not been for Metropolitan. Maybe it would have just taken me a few more years, but I do also feel that in the ... educational system if you don’t find your ambitious streak early, by eighth grade, it’s almost too late … to get into the right thing for ninth grade and my parents were not particularly proactive about considering alternative educational paths for me. I think they were like, oh “gifted” sounds good … at one point they considered French immersion and actually even before that, Montessori school, but after that age—after elementary school—I don’t think they ever really thought much about it. They never actively sought out different opportunities, so had I stayed in public school, I have the sneaking suspicion I would have missed every deadline to do a specialized high school program. Probably would have just watched people around me go off to IB [International Baccalaureate] programs, (see following paragraph) whatever else. I probably would have stayed in a

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normal school and that frankly does not position you very well to apply to the U.S. for university.

Talented Offerings for Programs in the Sciences (TOPS, n.d.) is a special high school program for students interested in enrichment in the maths, sciences, and language arts. It offers a leadership programs and encourages students to reach their utmost ability. It is offered as a specialized program at selected secondary schools.

Transition to Work

Andrea is now working for a high-profile consulting firm in a major U.S. city:

I’m working at [name withheld] ... a management-consulting firm. Basically, the firm in its entirety will take on different clients, Fortune 500 companies typically, and then the clients will come with problems that they want to be solved. So maybe one retailer will come in and say we’re thinking of expanding our physical locations or we’re thinking of growing our online presence, and it will be like a pretty broad question usually, and then as consultants, we will take the problem, investigate it, look at opportunities, look at possibilities, and then ultimately give them a recommendation. So, we might actually tell a company like you might want to expand online, but we don’t think that’s the best choice for you now, or we might say like hey … you want to expand into a new industry? This is great, here’s how you should do it. The idea behind it is that as a company, there is a lot of collective experience and knowledge that makes it valuable for these companies to come and hire us to help them. For me, specifically, I will probably be there to do research and pull numbers and data to back up claims, while I bask in all of the knowledge that the people who have been there for longer … can provide.

Her comments not only exude a sense of excitement and possibility, but also confidence. Andrea was capable of doing the job, competing with others, and able do so on her own terms. In brief,

141 she manifests an understated but powerful, sense of agency. In part, she acquired this sense of self as a result of her experience at Metropolitan and as a participant in the DECA (see explanation following the next block quote from Andrea), where despite the fact that initially she did not like public speaking, she appears to have mastered the craft. Nor, incidentally, did

Andrea like speaking to strangers. Her participation in DECA also helped her learn to debate effectively:

[It] exposed me to a lot of people, to a lot of activities, and to the type of competition that forced me to grow at a level of comfort with ... speaking to people, presenting, interacting on a one-on-one basis, and I guess also through DECA, I developed my interest in working in business. That was where the seed of this idea of I want to work in consulting one day kind of grew.

For information purposes, DECA (formerly known as Distributive Education Clubs of America;

2020) is a student leadership program, which as the organization’s website notes, prepares emerging leaders and entrepreneurs in marketing, finance, hospitality, and management in high schools and colleges around the globe.

At the same time Andrea was participating in DECA, she was also a part of

Metropolitan’s mentorship program, where she was coached by an investment banker who was

10 years her senior. In fact, in her Grade 12 year, she was invited to his office for a tour, which provided her with a practical sense of what investment bankers do, as well as an understanding of the world they inhabit. Andrea was eventually to do a summer internship at an investment bank, which clearly built upon the foundation she had laid at DECA.

It is hard to overestimate the value of these kinds of experiences, not simply in providing a window into the world of private equity, a world hidden from an overwhelming number of high school students across Canada—and, indeed the world—but also in helping her to develop

142 intellectually and to become a part of social networks characterized by affluence, wealth, and mobility. Although, her primary passion at university eventually lay in the liberal arts, both her participation in DECA, and her exposure to the world of business was of enduring value. It was undoubtedly beneficial when applying for university, writing a resume, and, eventually, for applying to jobs following university.

Aspirations and Definitions of Success

When defining success, Andrea explained that her view of the topic is now “very different” than when she was in Grade 12. She went on to draw a distinction between the two periods in her life:

I think success to me now is knowing what you want for yourself, knowing what you’re best at, and knowing what makes you happy or what matters the most in the sense that I think at Metropolitan we kind of all bought into the same definition of success, we bought into this idea of good grades, having leadership in different clubs, and ultimately getting into a good university and it was very focused on that. It felt very weird for someone to say, “I don’t care about school work as much, and I’m going to focus on my passions outside of school instead.” That was a very uncommon thing for someone to say. There were people who said it, but they were definitely in the minority.

When I proposed a metaphor that, in effect, they were buying a ticket on a train that was headed towards a prestigious postsecondary destination (that is, a “good university,” however that was defined) he elaborated further, “Yes,” she said:

but you also have to stay on that train and there were some people who jumped off the train and were like, “Oh I’m happy doing something else,” but for the most part, the idea of success was like staying on that train and getting to whatever destination … you wanted for yourself.

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I wanted to understand more fully how this notion, if indeed it did, shaped the learning climate of the school. I asked her “Was it a very competitive environment? Did you talk about grades...?

Yeah, so for the people who bought into it, there was a lot of exchange, there was a lot of discussion. I think towards the end, people tried to keep to themselves because they realized it wasn’t healthy. So, starting in eighth grade, I was very motivated by my lack of being in the top three for highest marks, and, so, in eighth grade, I charged forward, determined to be in the top three. I ranked highest that year and what’s funny is that from then onwards, it was the same three people who would kind of shuffle around each other. We would kind of toss-up between the top three rankings and it would just be the three of us. That was always kind of a weird thing, like you were kind of trying to figure out where the other people were, you were trying to gauge where you stood relative to them. But … there was a weird necessity to be humble, like you would kind of get a grade back and you wouldn’t want to share it with people because you wouldn’t want them to know that you were doing so well, it would make them feel bad or dislike you I guess.

Andrea’s ability to compete was critical to her academic success. It is one thing to aspire, and quite another to achieve top ranking in such a competitive, high-achieving environment. It is also telling that by Grade 12, these realities tended to peter out, as it appears the game, so-called, was already won or lost:

I think it continued through to Grade 11. [But] I think by Grade 12, it very much felt like a lot of the decisions that were going to be made had been made already, particularly with respect to applying to American schools. It felt very deterministic. It was like, oh yeah, there’s nothing you can do at this point.

She described below the same winnowing process—and, probably for many, withering—as being similar to that which occurred some years prior as part of her application to Metropolitan:

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And I think if you had sort of set your sights on it, you would have definitely been close to the people who had gone, you would have heard about their experiences, you would have asked them for advice, you would have been in close contact with that world. That being said, 40 or 50 people would apply to the U.S. every year and maybe only 20 of them would get anywhere with that process.

In her recollection, of this select group interested in attending elite institutions in the United

States, approximately 10 were admitted.

General Observations and School Recommendations

Start Doing

In response to questions about what Metropolitan might begin doing, she spoke first of financial aid and then of the financial support that was, and is, currently offered to students from underserved communities across the city:

There was not a lot of financial aid for anything beyond tuition. My experience was that when I turned 14, I actually went and got a part-time job over the summer so that I could save up for a lot of things and stop asking my parents for money for field trips and activities and random things that would come up. This is something that I have talked to the school about after graduating, and I think they have made efforts; they have made some strides in that space. So, they have started to provide financial aid for field trips, for activities, so that students don’t have to opt out of optional opportunities that are costly, and I think they have done a good job [with maintaining] confidentiality with that too.

However, she continued:

I participated in DECA every year from ninth grade onwards, but in Grade 9 and Grade 10, I qualified for the international competition, which is always in the U.S., and it’s typically a trip that will cost you around $1,300 for the week, so both years that was completely out of question. I did not want to ask my parents

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for that money, and it wasn’t something I wanted to spend my allowance and hard-earned savings on. Instead [in] Grade 10 I opted to go to Washington, DC, because the teacher who was leading that trip had said that they would subsidize half of the trip fee, so it only came out to $300 for me. So that was 2 years of missed opportunities, I guess.

Stop Doing

Clearly in her mind the school has changed since she was a student, evolving into an institution different from that which she attended—an institution which appears to be somewhat more focused on the bottom line. When discussing this question, she said that she wants the school to avoid becoming a place tailored to the elite:

And I think while some of the traditions [remain], the school as a whole I think operates a lot more like any of the other private schools. I don’t know if it’s correct to say that they’re completely all bad, it just feels like a bit of a shame in the sense that Metropolitan used to be like the poor man’s private school, like you could go there, you didn’t have to be very wealthy, you were solely there because you could perform at a certain level for something.

In fact, she tends to see this as a fundamental mission of the school, which seemingly chose to make this approach central to its ethos. In reality, however, preserving, and extending this ethos may not be without challenges:

Yeah … so something that happened last year comes to mind. I had been in touch with one of the teachers there, and I knew that he was sort of spearheading some of the community outreach for admissions, for sort of lower income families and I had been reached out to by a friend whose niece was considering applying to Metropolitan. So, they were coming from a low-income family and I said like, “Oh I actually, I know the perfect person to put you in touch with, I’ve heard that they are doing a lot more in this space.” Then what happened was that I connected

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them and then after a while, my friend’s niece actually said like, “Oh, she didn’t really want to go through with the application process” because she felt like Metropolitan was too much of a private school, like she had these misconceptions... I guess it had somehow come across to her as a snooty and kind of rich people’s place and she didn’t feel comfortable actually going through that process. And that kind of stuck with me because I thought that Metropolitan has come such a long way in trying to make this easier, but now they’re losing people at a later stage in the process. I don’t know if there is an easy answer for how you come across as less of a ‘private’ school. But I do think that maybe it’s a matter of putting the right person out there to convey their experiences. I think some people … I guess it may not help that it’s a Metropolitan teacher who is out there doing this, right? It’s someone who is probably from a privileged background who has gotten to where they are today. It doesn’t quite speak to the integrity of what they’re promoting.

Of course, achieving this end may have something to do not only with policy decisions at the board or leadership level, but also with the make-up and socioeconomic backgrounds of the teachers themselves. Her example seemed to imply that the wrong person was doing the outreach, and that, by extension, Metropolitan should consider deploying staff, teaching faculty, administrators—or, indeed, members of its alumni/ae—who are themselves from less- advantaged backgrounds, and can thus speak to the lived experience of applicants considering at the school. Interested in this phenomenon, I inquired about the socioeconomic make-up of the faculty:

I think it was split. I think it was definitely split. I think some of us were acutely aware that there were certain teachers who had come from well-off backgrounds and there were certain teachers who seemed very normal and like the rest of us. One more thing I would say actually just on the topic … of how they present themselves … so when I was there, we were playing sports with the [public

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school board], and now they play in the private school leagues. It’s either that or it’s the Catholic school board, but it doesn’t feel as democratic. You kind of feel like you’re being one of them, you’re one of the other people. I do think that, as tough as it was for us to compete in the public sports league, I do think it was like a major grounding factor. It kind of brought us down, reminded us that, hey, we’re going to interact with these people that we all know from before Metropolitan and we’re not just going to go be one of those other private schools. There was something about that that felt nice. You were at least like going into these public schools and, for better or for worse, having a reality check. You go there, like, oh hey, kind of looks like what our school looks like and you realize it’s not all that different. It gets your head out of the clouds a little bit.

The comments harken back to Andrea’s time at elementary school, where she also felt separated and apart from her peers, which in her view was an unhealthy experience. Andrea also believes that this ethos—presumably, driven at least in part by increased tuition fees—will impact the perception of the school within the community and particularly within underserved communities, including that of her childhood:

I think it’s going to be the kind of school that people will look at and go, I bet they all wear clean, pressed uniforms inside ... My friend’s niece kind of thought that everyone at Metropolitan wears these stuck-up uniforms and everyone looks the same and is all fancy and I was like, wait, we don’t wear uniforms, that’s not something we do. I don’t know, even advertising that we don’t wear uniforms. Maybe that’s something that they should … to fight the misconceptions.

Continue Doing

She later explained that her alumni/ae peers hold this feeling more broadly:

Yeah, so I guess it’s sort of there are two layers to it. I feel that along with a lot of the other people who graduated in my class, there have been a lot of changes at Metropolitan over the years. The tuition has gone up quite substantially from

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where it was when we graduated. And I guess it is nuanced in a sense that there is the building construction and the renovations that will have to happen and there is a lot of funding that’s needed for that. In a lot of ways, it feels like Metropolitan has become more and more of a generic private school. Because of the price barrier, I feel like a lot of the students there have become more privileged, more entitled, they don’t think that they have to work hard. There’s a lot more of that sort of buying your grades, whether it’s with, I don’t know, tears or parents who call in and sort of weird circumstances like that. It feels that it’s not as meritocratic.

These comments suggested that the notion of higher fees may bring with it students who are more privileged—and, indeed, more entitled—believing perhaps that the fees they pay also serve to purchase the grades to which they aspire, implicating schooling as a kind of service divorced from meritocracy and legitimate achievement. The academic implication of her comments is that

Andrea hopes the school will maintain its standards, characterised by hard work and rigor.

Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc

Andrea’s career trajectory is full of promise, and one might reasonably assume that she will become an active member of yet another prestigious network, whether associated with university or her workplace, not entirely unlike that derived from her affiliation with

Metropolitan. Moreover, although Andrea will enter her new role in a junior position, she will begin her working life with a salary well above the U.S. median income. Andrea will likewise have prospects for advancement and be in a position to develop her expertise and further develop her social network. Indeed, based on Andrea’s trajectory, it is hard not to imagine her succeeding. Andrea will, undoubtedly make more money than her parents and have more opportunity, whether in Canada, the U.S., or even farther afield as companies like the one for which she works have offices and operations across the globe. Andrea’s Ivy League background

149 and connections will hold real value in those contexts. Unlike her economically disadvantaged students, Andrea is connected to the connected, that is, she has relationships with her classmates and also with individuals who have access to resources beyond the school and beyond her own neighbourhood and community.

A Summary of Andrea’s Journey

Andrea also acquired a sense of personal agency, and like Monica, this happened over time. Where in times of extremis Monica gained solace from her emerging religious faith,

Andrea’s agency also underwent an evolutionary process. Initially, she was inspired by and competed with her peers, their goals becoming her own. However, at key turning points, she was introduced to role models that helped her to conceive a future different from that of her parents.

In her own words, she was “mapping [herself] onto these models that were handed to [her] and thinking about it that way.” When reading the pamphlet, she realized that the individuals who were featured were similar to her and that she might achieve the same kinds of ends. She envisioned a life similar to those portrayed. As she became an increasingly competent student,

Andrea she also achieved a sense of mastery. Success built upon success, better marks facilitated even better marks, the positive feedback she received motivated her to do more. She benefitted from the encouragement of her friends: “This [was] weird like … people would point out [and say] I think you would totally be like this person in 2 years, or I think you’d be that person in 2 years.”

The social persuasion acted as a motivator: her peers responded to the mastery she had achieved and to the person she had become. Confidence fostered personal agency, which in turn enabled her to act upon her vision in ways that were transformational. She too become an agent in her own life.

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Like Monica, Andrea believed that if she made the effort, it was possible to achieve her goals. Her achievements involved intention, forethought, making plans, and adjusting those plans. She remained motivated throughout. Although she experienced setbacks, her sense of mastery and emerging sense of confidence was never significantly undermined (Bandura, 1994).

At the same time, she too was able to manage the “stress that can be so detrimental to establishing a genuine sense of self-efficacy” (Bandura, 1994, p. 3). Her stressors did not come from the school itself, but from the uncertainty around her father’s employment. As the school’s fees began to rise, her concerns were about whether or not the family would be able to continue paying her tuition.

Nonetheless, because of her family’s unfailing support Andrea was able to mitigate these stresses, remain at the school, and continue to excel. This support, which is also evidenced in the portraits of both Monica and Nate, has emerged as an important theme that mediates the financial and psychic costs of social mobility.

CHAPTER 8

PORTRAIT THREE:

NATE

Figure 4. Nate’s word cloud.

General Impressions and Timelines

Following the end of the fall term, a high-school reunion is taking place at a local pub, which is located a short distance from the institution in which the alumni/ae present were once students. The reunion covers a 10-year timespan and includes graduates from 2006–2016. The gathering has drawn well over 100 people. Attendees are given beer and wine tickets, and the

151 152 food provided includes fresh seafood, charcuterie, and sliders. The larger group has broken into smaller clusters, which largely represent the years in which the alumni/ae graduated. There is some overlap between the disparate groups, but, by and large, the individuals tend to cleave to people they know best, those with whom they graduated. It is a gathering of elites, the children of doctors, lawyers, successful businesspeople, a few whose families are independently wealthy, and some who made extraordinary sacrifices in aid of their children’s education. All of the participants, however, are now graduates of one of the region’s most prestigious secondary schools.

The parents of the alumni/ae, some of whom are alumni/ae themselves, were willing to pay large tuition fees in the hope of facilitating the success of their children who have become a part of an increasingly influential social network. It is a network that is rich in social capital, well connected, and within reach of variety of critical resources. The evening’s participants have almost universally attended or completed university; a number of them have completed professional degree programs, such as law and medicine; and some are undertaking Ph.D. studies. The vast majority of the group appear to have developed—or are in the process of developing—a kind of career or life trajectory, although some individuals I spoke with had struggled and are unclear about their life path, whatever it may be. However, these individuals appear to be in a very small minority.

In the centre of the room sits Nate, one of the event’s organizers. He is sitting with the president of the Alumni Association, and an elementary teacher (himself a graduate of a similar independent school). Behind the scenes, a well-staffed and well-funded advancement office has helped facilitate their efforts, several of its employees, which are mostly parents of alumni/ae, are also present. As a member of the alumni/ae, Nate is very much a part of the group, and yet, as

153 one of the group’s organizers he also seems somewhat set apart from it. The alumni/ae seems most interested in interacting with each other, rather than with the members of the advancement team. Nate relates to both.

The Alumni Association represents the interests of the alumni/ae and aims to enlist their help in perpetuating the traditions of the institution, which is by far the oldest in the area. It is also one the organization’s key fundraising arms. The group is not simply an alumni/ae gathering; it is also a seedbed of future potential donors. The association also aims to connect young alumni/ae to older alumni/ae who might act as guides and mentors, and likewise, hopes to recruit them to do the same for the school’s current students. In short, the network is a critical part of the institution’s identity and its most fundamental modus operandi: the preservation of the institution.

Nate, as his friends and his teachers know him, is tall, athletic, although the kind of swagger that is normally associated with accomplished athletes is wholly absent. His closely cropped, jet-black hair is reminiscent of another era and he possesses a charm that endears him to those around him. He appears to be almost universally well liked.

Nate was first enrolled in The Academy when he was 3 years old and remained a student until his graduation in 2008. As part of its fee schedule, the school provided a meal plan (lunch, eaten family-style, with students sitting with a teacher around long, rectangular dining tables), and bussing. His commute began around 7:30 a.m. and was 45 minutes long. He generally arrived home at around 5:30–6:00 p.m., and often later. Though most days Nate rode the bus to school, his attendance also required the support of his parents, who made themselves available to drive him to extracurricular activities, both at The Academy and elsewhere. The school offered

154 numerous international travel opportunities, which, for financial reasons, he was often unable to partake in.

Upon graduation, Nate was offered places in concurrent education programs at all three

Canadian universities to which he applied. He chose to attend a private American liberal arts program on in Michigan, and graduated, in 2012, with a 4-year degree in Physical Education

(PE). At the time of writing, Nate is working as an occasional teacher at The Academy, and more recently joined the occasional teacher list of a public board in the local area. He has since completed an Additional Qualification (AQ) in mathematics, making him eligible to teach that subject as well. He aspires to become a full-time teacher in Ontario at his alma mater or elsewhere. He recently applied for a full-time teaching position at his own institution but was not selected for an interview.

Family Circumstances and Cultural Context

Nate is a second-generation Canadian. His grandparents came to Canada in the post-

World War I period. Both sets of grandparents were of European origin: his maternal grandparents from Italy, and his paternal grandparents from Yugoslavia (now Albania) and Italy.

His mother came with her mother and sister at the age of 3. His father was born in Canada. He is blessed to be part of a large extended family. He has 19 cousins and is the only one to have attended an elite private secondary school. The family came in search of economic opportunity and settled in the city’s east end, where, he explained, “my grandmother still lives, to this day.”

At that time, the area became a kind of destination for many European immigrants seeking employment and an escape from the poverty they faced at home. “It’s not the best area,” he went on, “but it’s still an area, and they had a house over there and that’s what mattered.” Nate’s parents were both successful in securing steady, relatively well-paid employment. His mother is

155 a bookkeeper for a local high-end clothing store; his father works at a steel mill. Both have been employed in the same positions since graduating from local college programs. His father, however, was not keen to have Nate follow in his footsteps:

When I was younger, maybe 7 or 8, I said, “I’d like to work at the mill too and follow in you guys’ footsteps,” and he just looked at me and he said, “If you ever worked there, you’re not going to be able to come home that day.”

“I’m the first to go to university in my family,” he says, “So that was a first for my parents, of course.” Whenever he speaks of his parents, he does so with reverence, and seems profoundly aware of his good fortune. “So, a lot of European culture lived in my household … growing up, I really did not get away with anything. ... They were always on top of me about my homework.”

His parents, like their parents before them, have a strong work ethic. Nate readily defers to their wisdom and is fully invested in their aspirations for his success, which he has internalized as his own. In some respects, his achievements seem indivisible from theirs.

Later in our interview, we returned to a discussion of his parents’ attitudes towards school, and his participation in extracurricular activities:

My mom was 100%. My dad wanted me to do well in school, like he was very tough with me about my marks, but it’s going to sound a little harsh, but my mom said it herself ... she was like a drill sergeant. I’d come home, eat my food and then I was right there on the kitchen table. She’d either be cooking something or doing something, or in the vicinity, and she would … sit beside me some nights and help me study, because she knew that I only had a couple of hours before I was off to a hockey game, or ... to a soccer or hockey practice because growing up, I played pretty much every sport you could ever imagine playing.... During the summers, I’d play soccer all year round ... during the winter, I’d play hockey, so I’d have that break from soccer and break from hockey, but they would overlap at

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times, so I was busy every night. ... So, my mom was kind of that push behind me, or the kick in the butt.

Hockey and soccer—indeed, physical activity of any kind—were as important to his parents as they were to him. In fact, together with his commitment to his schoolwork and his devotion to his family, athletics were central to his life:

Dad was really the driving force with athletics. ... [He] played a ton of sports when he was growing up and that was kind of instilled in me at a young age. It was not like they forced me to do any of that, but I was always outside, throwing the ball, playing pass. My mom would say I used to play outside on the stairwell. I would be at the top of the stairs, she at the bottom of the stairs outside, and I would just pass her the ball for hours. I wanted to play and play, and that’s how they kind of had an idea that I liked sports a lot. I liked to do things outside, I wanted to be part of that. ... So, I was always getting a push from somebody.”

Over time, Nate’s playing a multitude of sports gave way to soccer and the potential it held for university scholarships and advancement:

Essentially what happened was when I was 16, I tried out for a PDL team (Player Development League), it’s where all Division 1, Division 2, Division 3 players play. ... This was in Grade 10. It was on my birthday, ironically, the first tryout and … I went to ... shake the coach’s hand and say thank you for practice and hopefully I’ll see you at the next tryout, and he told me right then and there he would like to take me on. ... And at 16, I was competing against 22-year-olds, 23- year-olds, and then I found out that they ran practice from 8:00 in the morning, or 7:30, until 9:30 or 10:00 and that I can’t do, because I was in the middle of school from April until [June], and they ran from May until middle of July because a lot of the athletes leave at the end of July/early August to go back to school and start training with their team ... so a lot of schools started to see me there just because I made the team. ... But I also made a professional team when I was 16 years old....

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At the time it was called the CSL (Canadian Soccer League). I am not too sure if it is still in existence today, but I had to sign an amateur contract so this way I would be able to accept future prospects.

Nate enjoyed a great deal of success as an athlete; it was also evident that he was being groomed:

[A] soccer academy in Mississauga asked me to come play for them. My parents were a little bit sceptical about it at first, and then when he [the academy’s owner] said that you wouldn’t have to pay for anything, you just show up to practice, play, and I only needed to come out to these showcase tournaments. He actually said, “When you get a scholarship, I’d like to put you on my website so I can help promote others to come.” So it wasn’t necessarily that I paid him to get me a scholarship, it was more that he had seen how talented I was and decided for the benefit of his business to let me not pay today in order to see if he could get future athletes to join his program.

Nate possessed talent, but not necessarily the knowledge of the university athletics or professional sports. Nevertheless, the family appeared to negotiate the terrain with some aplomb.

Family, school, and sports defined Nate’s formative years. One can never know quite how strategic Nate and his parents were, only that their ultimate intention was for him succeed and to secure a place at a university in the United States. It was also evident that working together with his parents, he was in the process of developing a sense of agency, not only recognizing his own capacity, but also coming to terms with the university admissions processes and his power to affect them.

Attending The Academy and Navigating the Curriculum

As noted, Nate travelled some distance to attend The Academy, which meant that he belonged to several social networks: that surrounding his home and family, that of the sports teams on which he played, and that of The Academy. Although it is not entirely clear how Nate’s

158 parents selected The Academy as the school he should attend, he was living in an adjacent town, which was part of a broader urban conurbation in which the school is located, and where the school was known to parents interested in pursuing a private education for their children. From

Nate’s perspective, his path appeared as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy:

I think they heard about it from a friend who was either sending their child there or [had] just heard about how great the school was and how great of an education kids were getting, and they have always said this to me—they said they wanted to do better than what their parents did for them, and they have always instilled that in me, that when I have a potential child, that I want to do what my parents did, plus more. So my parents were able to send me to such a fantastic school as this, giving me the best opportunity to learn, get a good education, potentially go to a great university, and from that, I did go to a great university and then I was able to come back as a [occasional] teacher, as something that I really aspire to do, and now I enjoy.

At school, it was often his mother who helped him to navigate the curriculum and The

Academy’s academic standards:

When I was at The Academy, there were times where I just felt like I had been grinding away at my homework for so long, but then my mom would say, “Nate, you’re gonna work hard now [so that] in the future, hopefully [you won’t be] working this hard every single day.” And then in university ... she’d always say, “You’ve only got 3 more years” or “You’ve only got 2 more years,” or “Nate, you only have 3 weeks and then you’re done that course, don’t worry, just work hard for those 3 weeks,” and then she said, “You’re not working, you don’t have another job right now ... your job is the school.”

Later on, at university, some (but not all) of those pressures diminished:

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Because I had a scholarship, I didn’t have to worry about all those extra costs that were incurring, right? So my parents said if you don’t keep up your grades, obviously you’re not going to be able to go back, you won’t have your scholarship that you once had so you’d be coming [back] to Canada, and because of that, it was like I knew I needed to work hard and grind it out.

Nate and his mother believed that there might have been little—or no—margin for error. For him—indeed, for them—it was all or nothing. His academic success was paramount. Nate has an extraordinary work ethic and was often surprised to observe that some of his university colleagues were not quite as self-disciplined, often leaving their work until the very last moment:

I found that because of The Academy ... I always handed my work in the day before. ... I always said before I go to bed, I’m finishing it, I don’t care if I have to stay up until 3:00, and then I’ll sleep from 3:00 to whenever I had to wake up ... because [my mind was clear], I’m done ... nothing else to do, right?

I asked about his work ethic. Again, he largely credits his mother, and her devotion to his success:

My mom’s a really hard worker, obviously. She gets off work and then she comes home, cooks us a meal, and then afterwards, she does the laundry. Obviously, there was a lot of laundry when I was playing so many sports.”

A Sense of Belonging and Social Networks

I asked Nate whether or not he had been able to maintain relationships both within his local neighbourhood, largely comprised of working- and middle-class families, as well as at The

Academy, characterised by upper-middle class families:

I have a mixture of both. ... I still have a few good Academy friends, [and] I still have a good few friends that didn’t attend ... but the majority of the time, it was because I played a sport with them. So during the summer months, I had a couple

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of good friends [I’d] hang out all the time during the daytime, and that was because we had soccer that night … you know, they’re in close proximity, so I think that also helped my relationship with my Academy friend. … I’d call him and his brothers because they are only about a 5-minute bike ride down the street.

Nate talked about other friendships that were important to him but was keen to emphasize that he was able to maintain these relationships even after graduating:

Yeah … it’s probably like once or twice a month we get together, or we try to talk, or give each other a phone call and say, “Hey, how’s it going today? How has your week been?” I think that’s kind of special because how many people can really still say, you know, you still have those few tight buddies that you still tell a lot to … somebody else nice to lean on, especially since I’m an only child. I don’t have those brothers or sisters that I can communicate with or lean on. My brothers and sisters are basically my parents, you know? I became tight with them because I tell them everything and they help me with whatever I needed help with, right?

Because Nate had an active athletic life beyond The Academy, his social circle—although it expanded to include people beyond the neighbourhood in which he might well have gone to school—remained constant. His social circle expanded still further as a result of his attending college in the United States, where he recently participated in a reunion:

They actually had a soccer reunion last year in the springtime. … Fourteen of the guys that I played soccer with actually all went back, and we played the current team. ... It was special to see those guys again, especially just to reunite and [see] how we have been doing and ... what they’re doing in life.

Nate and his parents were strategic when selecting colleges to which he might ultimately apply.

The emphasis for him seemed to be on a smaller college that offered the kind of resources and supports he had received at The Academy, where he had thrived. In Michigan, he found the

161 smaller community that he saw as a good fit because to a large degree it replicated his Academy experience. He also had choices, which was important to both Nate and his parents. Like is

Academy experience, class sizes were relatively small, and he benefitted from being able to form close relationships with his professors. This preference also explains something of his approach to education. As a scholar-athlete, he did not hope to play soccer (or before that, hockey) at a professional level. Although he clearly had an interest, he did not apply to or graduate from, a

Big Ten or a Division I school (National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2020). The Big Ten

(which has since expanded to include 14), Division I, or Tier I, refers to large American universities, like Michigan or Ohio State University, who are eligible to offer students athletic scholarships. Big Ten universities have an average student enrolment of 12,900. Division 3 schools may not offer athletic scholarships, but 75% of athlete–students receive merit or need- based financial aid. The average enrolment in Division III schools is 2,600. The college Nate attended has an enrolment of 1,650 students. As of 2012, the academic success rate at Division

III colleges is higher than Division I, at 87% compared to 81%.

Attending a Big Ten university might have opened doors to play sports at a professional level. Instead, he chose a smaller Division III school, where he might be a starter rather than a larger school where he would have been recruited as a reserve goalie. His priority was first upon academic success, and he believed this could best be achieved in a smaller, more intimate environment:

Our prof would pick us up in the morning and she would drive us to a school that we were going to because we were all Canadians ironically, we did not have a vehicle, right? We were all on scholarships for soccer, hockey, lacrosse, [etc.]. So she would pick us up and then we would all drive to the school together, and then

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we would teach our lessons throughout the day and we all got to critique each other[‘s performance,] which I thought was a really neat experience.

This somewhat personalized approach appealed to Nate’s practical side, a trait that he admires in his father. He felt like he belonged at university, but it would appear that this feeling had it origins in his having related well with others whilst at The Academy:

I always felt like I was part of the family [i.e., the “school family”] in the bigger sense of the word. I wouldn’t say I ever thought of myself as the one person in the middle of the family holding everybody together, or the one person out of the family that didn’t belong, but I think what helped me out a lot was that I was a pretty decent athlete, but I really worked hard in academics. All my teachers appreciated it, they knew that I would go home and I would do my work and if I didn’t get something, I would have the confidence to ask my teachers, and I think that is what a lot of teachers really appreciated about me. I think that’s what a lot of my peers appreciated. … I wasn’t afraid to be myself so that’s why I think a lot of people drew interest in me and surrounded themselves around me.

This recollection provides evidence of an emerging sense of agency. Nate was an athlete who was also committed to being a good student:

Yes. And I think it also helped because a lot of the students that were really focused on academics knew that if I was in their class, I wasn’t going to be fooling around ... because they knew I had a goal in mind. I never thought I’d make it to the NCAA. ... I always figured I’d go to a CIS school (CIS Ontario, 2019) and maybe I’d try out and make one of their teams, but I wanted [a choice] to go wherever I wanted.

He developed the theme:

I wanted to be able ... to choose which university I went to, and not have to pick ... something that I really didn’t get an option [to attend] because I didn’t get

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accepted, because I didn’t have the grades to go into that program. Because at 14 ... I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to become. I was really young ... to be deciding, so it really helped ... that my mom was a driving force and pushing me to get those great grades and then when I was in Grade 12 ... I applied to three schools and I got accepted to every school. I applied to Queen’s, I applied to Windsor, and I applied to ... Trent, and they all had great Con Ed programs ... at least I got accepted to every program I applied to. I even applied to University of Windsor for Math; for Queen’s, I [also] applied for Kinesiology and same for Trent (Kinesiology and Math), so it was just awesome that I got accepted to all three, but then I did not really know how good I was as a ... college athlete because my parents ... screened calls in Grade 10 and didn’t tell me that I was getting calls.

Although he comes across as easygoing and affable, Nate is driven. Supported by his family— particularly his mother—they pursued goals, which were articulated as early as his high-school years with a kind of military precision, the family working as a kind of unit, tasked with supporting him in achieving academic success and university entrance. Both he and his parents believed that education was the key to social mobility.

[They] didn’t want me to get [considered] early or get it in my mind that I didn’t need to work hard. ... Because in the U.S. they still take your Grade 9 and 10 marks, which was really important because I got good marks in Grade 9 and10 and then they factor in your Grade 11 and 12, whereas Canada just factors Grade 11 and 12.

Nate thoughts indicate an increasingly high level of knowledge about university systems in

Canada and the United States. He understood his choices and actions would have consequences.

Indeed, he appeared to be undertaking a kind of cost-benefit analysis. He was highly engaged in the process, which for him had become a kind of nonchoice: It was not a matter of whether or not

164 he would go to university, but rather a matter of which university and what program he would attend, as well as to what degree it would replicate his Academy experience and by extension his chance of success.

I inquired further as to the means by which relationships at The Academy were established. Were his school friends little more than acquaintances facilitated by means of a shared purpose and experience—that is, school—or were they something deeper?

I would say that usually I’d have projects, like we [got] together. It depended on where the other friend lived. ... So sometimes if they lived all the way out in Mississauga for instance ... it didn’t really make sense for us to drive to each other’s house, so we tried to stick at The Academy and do the work together there. Whereas when I was working another friend, he was local, so he actually came out to my house a few times and we worked on a couple of projects. I thought that was really special. There were [also] a lot of trips that we attended, especially in middle school that were really special because that was our whole grade getting to go on little trips, like Ottawa for instance. The whole [of] Grade 8 got to go and you got to really interact with kids that you might not see on a daily basis outside of school.

However, belonging to two worlds, that of the neighbourhood and The Academy, also incurred costs:

For instance, a lot of people who attend The Academy, they often go to cottages in the summer, and unlike my family, we did not have the luxury to afford a cottage and go somewhere away for the whole summer. My parents both worked so when they went to work, I got dropped off at my grandparents’ at 7:30 a.m. or 6:00 a.m. in the morning, and I got to spend the day with them, so I thought that kind of made me more of a family person.

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Again, in concluding his description of his summer experience, Nate weighed the costs and the benefits and placed the emphasis on the benefits: the absence of school friends during the summer facilitated closer ties with his family.

Financial Realities

It is impossible to discuss Nate’s educational journey without discussing the family’s economic reality. By means of providing some context, in an informal conversation with The

Academy’s Director of Admissions I was told the ideal demographic—that is, the household income of prospective families—was approximately $250,000.00 per annum. However, the individual also went on to explain that outreach materials were only sent to homes with an estimated household income of approximately $350,000.00 per annum. This suggests that although families from either financial bracket found it within their means to pay the school’s fees, the latter were also in a position to pay for what are deemed essential extras, such as school uniforms, textbooks, laptops, school trips (overseas and otherwise), as well as donations to various fundraising drives, whether they are for the construction of new buildings, the purchasing of technology, or the hiring administrative or teaching faculty (S. J., personal communication, April 2014).

Although The Academy has a relatively small endowment and does not have a well- developed bursary program, it does offer support to students whose families have fallen on hard times (due to the death of a family member, for example, or other family crises). These supports are not widely advertised. Nate’s family did not apply for and were most likely unaware of such supports, even if Nate had been eligible. Nevertheless, he appears remarkably uncomplaining and almost wholly without a sense of entitlement. When asked about the notion of school trips— which were generally seen as a kind of de facto experience for many of his peers—he explained:

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Yeah, I think that was really tough especially around Grade 7 and 8 because that’s when the big crisis happened in the market, and my dad and mom were a little uneasy about what [was] going to ... [happen] with their jobs. My mom wasn’t so worried, but my dad was really worried because the mill was closing down and that was supposed to be the second biggest steel company in the world, and it was just starting to shut down. And [company name withheld] … yeah, it’s number one, but you know, you never know what [might happen]. ... So, for 4 years, they were always uneasy about where the money [was coming from].

In light of this context, I inquired about his participation in sports. Hockey, which he was still playing at the time, can be an expensive sport to play. His father however seems to have resolved this financial challenge by drawing upon his own ingenuity and social capital:

Yes. Where hockey is ... more expensive, especially if you’re growing like crazy, you can go through thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, but my dad … was a team manager, so ... he worked with National Sports ... he was trying [out,] doing this [for teams throughout the area]. He would set up a day for each team to go in and buy equipment [and] National Sports would cut the price by a certain percentage so it would help kids like myself … [as well as] other kids in the community that couldn’t afford the equipment.

Nate’s father made it possible for him to acquire the equipment he needed and thus to participate.

Nate appears not only cognizant of this, but enduringly grateful. Nonetheless, I inquired whether his family’s financial circumstances ever compromised his sense of belonging to the school community, which was largely populated by children from more affluent families. Was there anything in his experience at the school that ever prevented him from feeling like he belonged?

I think sometimes it was a little bit challenging—in the summertime, especially. A lot of my friends would be going up north and I didn’t get to see them, and then the first week or two, we were always out of the school ... and all my friends [who

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went to other schools] weren’t. It was kind of like a feeling-out process, [a] kind of like a self-loathing process, if you may, because that was a time period where you had to really grow because you were by yourself, you had nobody else around to hang out with anymore. ... It also ... opened your eyes because at The Academy everyone lives everywhere. They all live busy lives, but some of the local guys, they don’t live a busy life … and they don’t have cottages or anything like that. ... So it kind of made me … feel like I’m leaving my friends that I know (that I hang out with all the time) in the summer to come back to friends that I haven’t seen in 3 months because my parents couldn’t afford to take a day off work to [drive me] all the way up to Muskoka unless one of their parents would come and pick me up and [drop] me off.

Even though his world was delineated from theirs during the summer, when asked about this feeling of straddling different worlds, he explained that his school friends never excluded him:

Nobody ever acted like … we’re sorry you can’t come because you can’t afford it. I never got disincluded (sic) or included in things just because I didn’t have the resources. ... They always kind of found events that would help me to get to, like we went to a bunch of bowling parties or stuff like that because they knew that it was not something that you have to charge $50 or $100 on, it’s like a $10 thing.

He continued by discussing laundry, which is revealing on two levels; first, it shows his mother’s commitment to his participation, but it also demonstrates the way in which the family navigated their relative economic disadvantage:

I had a lot of undergarments ... so she had to wash [them] because what am I going to do? I’m not going to wear the same ones every day. She didn’t want me to do that, right? She wanted me to have clean things. It wasn’t like I could afford to have three or four pairs of undergarments to wear to hockey, right? I only had one, and sometimes I was lucky I got two, right? So, then I could afford to have one being dirty and then when the other one got dirty, she could wash it. So she

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was washing stuff just so this way I could have it for the next day or the next night, or whatever. … Mom worked hard and then my dad every opportunity he got—I wouldn’t say every opportunity, but a lot of opportunities—he got for overtime, he [took it] because he knew that ... we needed it. At least he had the extra overtime ... and he knew the extra wage would be coming in to help us out.

His more privileged peers were most likely unaware of the financial challenges he and his family faced. Characteristically, even during his university days, without money to buy a cell phone— de rigueur for most college students—Nate improvised. I asked how he remained in contact with the friends he had made at The Academy:

Usually text messages, but I didn’t have a cell phone at the time, so usually it was like through Facebook or email or something like that and then, for instance ... (you’re going to find this funny) for 3 years, I didn’t have a cell phone, so [I] actually [gave] out my friend’s phone number, that I was really good friends with. He was my roommate for 2 years out of the 3, and people would call him when they were looking for me because I didn’t have a cell phone. If they needed to call me, they’d call him and then they’d get me.

This characteristic seems to be a hallmark of Nate’s approach to the world. Whenever he faces some kind of challenge, he seems to rise to the occasion, navigating whatever challenge he is confronted by with poise. It is arguably because of this attitude that others are willing to help him, and often do so enthusiastically. In fact, when I asked him whether or not there were people he could turn to at The Academy for help, whether in his personal or professional life, his answer was an unequivocal “100%.”

Key Relationships and Turning Points

When discussing key relationships that were a part of his experience, Nate repeatedly refers to relationships that were established at school, but largely revolved around sports and

169 hockey, in particular. The most influential relationships seem to have been with a cluster of teachers who were also athletes, or with teachers who strongly encouraged his athletic and/or teaching aspirations:

Mr. A. ... had the biggest impact in my life because in Grade 10 he coached my outside hockey team as well as Academy hockey, so it was pretty special that I got to see a coach inside hockey and know him outside of hockey; the same with Mr. B. He actually coached at my school and outside hockey, too. So, I got to know them a little bit more because ... I got to see him outside of school. I remember sitting in A’s office [at school] ... in Grade 11, and he [says], “So, Nate, what have you thought about becoming...?’ and I said, “I’m not too sure, maybe a firefighter or something along those lines,” and he said, “Why don’t you become a teacher?” And it was just something he kind of said … and then he said, “Come to one of my gym classes on one of your spares and ... help me run warm ups,” and it ... kind of started with that, and then [he] slowly [helped] ... me [realize what teaching involves]. He showed me how ... to create ... lesson plans and I just was so overwhelmed at first and then I realized how much fun it is to teach kids about something I’m passionate about. He knew how much I loved sports and how hard I worked in sports ... so he thought that would be a great thing to show students. Look at Nate [I thought], he works very hard in academics, works hard in sports, and now he can show [that to students], maybe put some of those goals in their minds.

Nate developed relationships with these individuals because he was able to interact with them both within and beyond school, and the suggestion about becoming a teacher was accompanied by both opportunity and ongoing support. He elaborated upon his experience with Mr. C., his math teacher:

In math class, he made me this deal … because I was doing so well in the course. He said, “If you can answer this question,” he gave me the hardest question …

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and if I could answer it at the beginning of class, he would let me go down to Mr A.’s gym class ... [and] I got to help ... out.

Once with Mr. A.’s class, he didn’t disappoint:

So it was pretty interesting that he trusted me and if I missed something, he would kind of just say like, “You want to really give it more detail because these guys have never played it before and you need to go further into detail,” and I think that is partially why when I graduated from The Academy ... I came back to see Mr. A. ... [and began volunteering] because he gave me so many great opportunities.

As an occasional teacher, Nate interacted with the same faculty members. Later, one of those teachers became an administrator who was keen to hire him as an occasional teacher. As a math teacher, that same individual was able to assist him with acquiring an AQ in math.

Nate’s efforts to go to university in the United States were largely his own. Apparently, his guidance counsellor was not particularly enthusiastic, but on learning that he “didn’t have to pay tuition, she was all for wherever I [wanted].” I probed further, asking if there was anything else that had happened—or, indeed, had been offered at The Academy—that inspired him to determine his own pathway:

I think it’s because of the level of professionalism. ... [F]or instance [every Friday] all the students ... would wear a shirt and tie. You don’t see any other schools doing that. That’s showing our professionalism [and] getting us ready for the real world because in the real world you have to wear a shirt and tie in order to look presentable and ... show how high of aspirations (sic) you have and ... stuff like that. Whereas in public schools, some of them wear whatever [they] want, or Catholic schools, you have a uniform, just a polo shirt and then whatever, track pants ... right? But I feel like because The Academy had such high

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professionalism and they set the bar so high, that they always wanted you to do better.

I inquired further: did this particular school expectation appeal to his parents? “Yeah,” he said laughing. “It’s like you’re heading off to the office on Friday.” For Nate, getting dressed up in what is referred to as “Number One Dress” (dark socks, polishable leather shoes, dress pants, white shirt, blazer, and tie) manifested itself as a kind of precursor to the world of work. The mores of The Academy suggested a certain professionalism and sense of purpose, which he appeared to relish and even revere.

Transition to Work

Throughout both our interviews and various conversations, Nate often referred to his determination to become a teacher. His comments are summarized most succinctly in the final section of this portrait, “Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc” (see p. 86). However, although his initial foray into education was successful—through his connections at The

Academy, he was recruited as a supply teacher, which in many ways served as a testament to the efficacy of the social networks he had come to inhabit—he was not successful in securing a permanent position at his alma mater, which he found challenging. Instead, he eventually found a job at nearby elite private elementary school that serves as a feeder school to The Academy.

Aspirations and Definitions of Success

Nate’s aspirations—indeed, the way in which he defines what it means to be successful— were very much tied to his goal of becoming a full-time teacher and acquiring the qualifications and skills required to do so. He explained that he felt he was taking the right steps towards getting a full-time position: he had passed his Additional Basic Qualification (ABQ) entrance test, for instance, which made him eligible to take the ABQ itself. An ABQ is a subject-specific

172 certification, which is completed at university and which enables a teacher to teach a particular subject, in Nate’s case, mathematics in secondary school. In Ontario, would-be teachers are required to have two teachable subjects. Nate’s American college degree qualified him to teach physical education only

Nate also described an experience with a student at a recent camp he attended as an occasional teacher. One of the students had been waking up very early, and in the process then waking up the other students. He pulled the student aside and spoke to him about the dilemma:

You’re just waking up at 6:00 a.m. in the morning when we weren’t going to breakfast until 8:00 and waking up everyone else, I kind of just brought him off to the side. I said, “Can you just do me one favour? … [I]f you get up at 6 I’m up just come walk over to me if you can’t control yourself, go downstairs, we’ll play cards or something and this way you don’t wake up anybody else. But I want you to do me one favour [first], sit in bed, lay down for 10 more minutes, close your eyes or leave them open and think about what you’re going to be doing today. Think about all the awesome things that are going to go through your mind.” And what was the best part about that was that he came over to my cot at the time because we were all in one big room, and he kind of taps on my bed and I was awake already, and I said, “Well Pete, how are you today?” and he goes, “Sir, what time is it?” I said, “It’s 7:20,” he goes, “Oh, really?” I said, “Yeah.” And he goes, “I had a great night’s sleep, I woke up actually a while earlier, but I took your advice and I feel so much better because I fell asleep for an extra hour.”

The encounter demonstrates not only Nate’s capacity for empathy, but also the extent to which his idea or definition of success is bound up with that of others. Such exchanges came to support and clarify his larger goal of becoming a teacher.

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General Observations and School Recommendations

Nat’s first comment was a word of advice for prospective parents, who he believes should “[see] past the numbers … past their [financial circumstances] ... and really take the risk.

They’ll see the rewards for their child and see how much the child gets rewarded for coming to such a prestigious school as this.” He continued with:

For instance, I might not have made it to become a teacher. I might have become something else. I would never know, but because I was at The Academy, I got the education that I needed and it pushed me to become something great, they didn’t ... say, “Oh you can go to the factory, that’s good enough.” It forced me to become something, do something that impacts not only my life, but also impacts the future, in this case, where I want to be a teacher, and it impacts the generations and generations of children, right?

In Nate’s mind, The Academy and his teachers and mentors within it, changed his career— indeed, his life trajectory. Although, his most obvious alternative career choice might originally have been a position in the local steel mill, he was provided with alternatives, and namely the notion of a career in education. For this, he expresses a profound sense of gratitude. His advice to parents is borne of his own work ethic, but also appears to reflect a difference in expectations, indirectly making note of their value to him as a student.

Start Doing

Sometimes [I] wish that for students like me, that they also sometimes realize that we might not be able to afford everything or do everything, but if things are out early enough. ... [For example] in Grade 12, everyone went to the Italy trip and went to that Europe hockey/basketball trip. I never got to attend that because my parents [only] knew about it 6 or 7 months in advance and that didn’t give them enough time to put enough [money] aside in order for me to go. That Italy trip, I would have loved to go, but it’s like $3,000 or $4,000 and my parents don’t have

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$3,000 or $4,000 lying around at the side to say, “Oh, here, you can go to that school, you can go to Italy and have a good time with your friends and family.” It would have been really awesome if I went.

In brief, Nate’s parents would have benefitted from knowing about such opportunities well in advance, giving them time to plan ahead and save the necessary funds.

Stop Doing

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I’d probably say they’re doing a great job with all their students and ... pushing them to ... highest level that they can achieve.

Nate’s comment implies his desire for The Academy to preserve academic and other standards, of which he is proud to have personally maintained. He went on to explain the ways in which his school experience played a role in his securing a university place in the U.S. with the university providing enough financial support to cover all of his costs. His related recommendations, which deal with the notion of homework, and by implication with prioritization and time management, illuminate the critical role they played in his academic success:

Yes. And I’d say for students coming in from Grade 5 or 6, or 4 or 3, they might not have the work ethic right away, but The Academy demands the work ethic. If you’re not working hard outside of school, it’s going to be hard for you to pass inside of school. I’m not saying I was a genius by any means or very high upon an IQ chart or anything like that ... but ... in Grade 6, I did 2 or 3 hours of homework every night where at other schools had maybe 10 minutes. Now that’s a big difference from 10 minutes to 2 hours. I’m not being over presumptuous about time ... the time I spent on my homework and because of that ... when I got home, I knew I’d eat, had to do my homework before I could go out to do these

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extracurricular activities. I think that really instilled values throughout my whole academic career.

Nate’s work ethic—clearly derived from his family—was an essential, even decisive, ingredient of his success at university—one which, and, at least in his recollection, he believes set him apart from many of his peers at university.

Comments on Social Mobility and Narrative Arc

Nate now sees himself as not simply working doggedly to fulfill his own dreams, but also those of his family. He has attended an elite private school and graduated from a private university. In part because his affable nature, he has also developed an enduring social network, which he has the confidence to exploit (as evidenced by his various relationships within and beyond The Academy). Interestingly, he seems to have established such a network without relinquishing community and family, which he loves dearly. In short, Nate seems to have no difficulty maintaining his own social–class roots, whilst existing comfortably with the rarefied social milieu of an elite private school.

Clearly, Nate is in the process of becoming socially mobile, capable of moving in different circles, doing different kinds of work—that is, white-collar professional work, based on his academic achievement and its attendant credentials. The challenge will be to secure a full- time position while reckoning with an oversupply of teachers in Ontario (Galt, 2017; Maharaj,

2016). Even for those with the right qualifications and connections, at the current time it is much more difficult to secure appropriate tenured employment in secondary education. Nate is still in the process of pursuing his dream of becoming a teacher, which remains the modus operandi of his life.

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Since this portrait was written, as noted above, Nate has secured a position as Head of

Physical Education and Athletic Director at an elite, private elementary school in southern

Ontario, which also happens to be a feeder school for The Academy, where at the time of writing he still serves as the on the Alumni Mentorship Committee.

A Summary of Nate’s Journey

Nate achieved a sense of self-efficacy in a different way. Where Monica cried on her mother’s shoulder and turned to her faith and Andrea thrived in the competitive environment of her school, for Nate it was the encouragement of his teachers that was decisive. At a key turning point on his Three C’s and personal agency journey, his math and PE teachers encouraged him to become a teacher. They also modelled what a career in teaching actually looked like and demystified the world of the professional educator. Teachers were his social persuaders. They provided him support and opportunity, both of which assisted him to acquire confidence and informed his sense of personal agency. Helping his teachers to deliver their lessons assisted him to develop mastery. This was reinforced by his success in the classroom and the sense that he too was special. This was true in mathematics and PE, which later became his teachable subjects.1

Like the other participants, his parents supported him unconditionally. He received positive feedback from his coaches, which further buoyed his confidence. Nate’s school experience emphasized “high academic standards and high support” (Flessa, as cited in Pecoskie, 2012, p. 2)

1With very few exceptions (most notably in technology), in order to be become a teacher in Ontario, aspiring teachers must complete a 3-year degree, gain a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.), which at the time of writing was conducted, took 1 year. It now takes 2 years. To be eligible to enroll in a B.Ed., candidates must have completed a significant amount of study in two subject areas, which in turn then become the subjects the individuals are qualified to teach (Ontario College of Teachers, 2020).

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All the elements of Bandura’s model of self-efficacy were present in Nate’s journey: he was supported in achieving a sense of mastery, his teachers acted as role models, modelling what he might one day become, persuading him that it was possible, and, not unlike Monica and

Andrea, the support of his parents and teachers helped to mediate any stress or negative proclivities he might have felt. The teachers at The Academy became a social network he was able to exploit. On his return from university, he was recruited as a supply teacher by one of them.

CHAPTER 9

THE THREE C’S, PERSONAL AGENCY, AND

MAJOR AND MINOR THEMES

My study has investigated the participants’ experience by examining the degree to which the participants were able to acquire the Three C’s. These constructs served as the foundation upon which participants achieved personal agency, which when combined with the Three C’s, I argue, is the engine of social mobility. Chapter 9 analyzes their journeys as they strove to achieve school success, transcend their circumstances, and shape the course of their lives

(Bandura, 2006).

The Participants’ Three C’s Personal Agency Journeys and their Evolving Definitions of Success

Where Andrea had a clear goal to attend an Ivy League school and Nate wanted to become a teacher at his alma mater, Monica did not have a path that was as clear to her, and yet all three developed agency in their lives. In each case, it began and largely ended with academic success. Their academic standing, and their assiduous attempts to maintain it, enabled them each to secure credentials. This process was intimately associated with their ability to gain confidence.

Moreover, within the school environment they were able to develop relationships that helped them to become a part of social networks through which they were able to make important connections, which they exploited in their own interests. Andrea felt challenged to better her peers. The role models she saw in the guidance booklet provided her with a vision for her life.

The ability to participate in an internship demystified the world of elite employment, confirming that she too belong in that rarefied world. Nate’s relationships with his teachers facilitated his aspirations to become a teacher, and provided him the means to secure his first job in education.

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Monica struggled to deal with the academic pressure and the competitive nature of the school, but she, too, also made relationships that were important in her life, helping her to establish a sense of belonging. Like Andrea, she went onto attend business school and also secured a role in a Fortune 500 company, where she could deploy all she had acquired from her family and

Metropolitan. As she noted in her portrait, “we cling to the school.”

For all three participants, success was defined in different ways. For Nate, it was about becoming a teacher. Andrea’s definition of success was transmuted from the collective “we,” to

“knowing what she wanted for herself.” Monica’s aspirations evolved as they became more firmly rooted in her faith. Over time, all three participants’ aspirations developed but did so in unique ways. All three moved beyond inherited, shared, or collectively-held aspirations and internalized them as their own. Having discussed these dimensions of their journeys, the chapter proceeds to discuss what Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) refers to as repetitive refrains, which are presented as six major and two minor themes. Chapter 10 continues the analysis by discussing metaphors, institutional rituals, and dissonant themes, which beg further study.

Major Themes

Six major themes emerged from the research I conducted with my three study participants, succinctly labelled as:

1. Schools 2. Family and Culture 3. Giftedness 4. Finances 5. Social Capital 6. Teachers

I continue with an in-depth discussion of each theme.

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Schools

School was absolutely central to the participants’ lives and their commitment to it was total. The intensity with which they and their schools approached their respective roles demanded a real commitment from both. For the aspirant, high-achieving (and often upper- middle class) student this is not uncommon. What was different for the participants is that their focus was absolute. The notion of school, of getting good grades, of being in class, of teachers being central figures in their lives, of being successful and preparing for university was at the centre of their reality. For them, getting high marks—or, indeed, a failure to do so—was an existential question.

Academic success justified their presence at a fee-paying institution; however, conversely, under-achievement undermined it. The stakes for the economically disadvantaged child are extremely high, a kind of high-stakes poker game, where the family is all-in and at risk of losing their shirt. Of course, in some respects this phenomenon is predictable. The conversations, which form the basis of the portraits, are about school and the participants’ school experience, in particular. However, it is telling that in those conversations, their commitment to their education is palpable. By any measure, they were model students who contributed greatly to the life of the institutions they attend.

This notion is critical to understand, as in some respects it is a somewhat widely held perception that the ultimate beneficiaries of such scholarship arrangements are the scholarship students themselves. The inverse would appear to be true. The institutions themselves benefit enormously from their involvement. They are keen to please, pay attention in class, submit homework on time, play on teams, participate readily in extracurricular programs, and are model school citizens.

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This stands in stark contrast to the lads of Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labour, whose energies, and, indeed, their “creativity” (p. 3) was directed towards nonparticipation in school. In contrast, the participants’ creativity has been inverted, their energies devoted entirely to school and its institutional demands. For the participants, all of whom attended secondary school during the same general time period, graduating between 2008 (Monica and Nate), and 2013 (Andrea), this kind of focus which they personify is a feature of modern life. School is serious business, whether it is rooted in the fear of downward mobility, preserving one’s economic and social status (Guo, 2011; Hahn, 2016; Newman, 1988), or achieving upward social mobility.

In the case of Nate, schooling was virtually conducted like a campaign undertaken with military-style precision. Each hour of each day was accounted for in order that he might finish his homework, fit in his athletic activities, and get good grades. Monica and Andrea were often at school until 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. in the evening, sometimes later. Their nights and weekends were spent preparing for tests. In my own experience as an administrator at an elite institution, this phenomenon is commonplace. Students manage their days the way adult, high-achieving businesspeople manage theirs. The competent and creative scheduling of their time is an essential ingredient of their school experience and is seen as an essential ingredient of mobility.

Student leaders such as prefects, school ambassadors, student council members and a myriad of others can often be seen at school outside traditional bell times, being present for, and participating in various events, whether they centre on welcoming new students, admissions and marketing processes, or facilitating parent evenings.

To facilitate this often means working ahead for classes, reviewing notes, completing homework on time, meeting with teachers and/or attending extra-help sessions before and after school, all of this aided, abetted and often managed and facilitated by their parents, who work

182 assiduously to ensure their success. Such phenomena are present throughout their high school careers, a term frequently used by both students and teachers in elite schools. Within this context, even the use of the word career is revealing, as it suggests something beyond a purely educational experience and implies preparation for the workplace, albeit white-collar professional work, precisely that which Apple (1995) posited.

The pace and intensity of these processes become particularly acute in Canadian independent school students’ grad year when the university guidance process moves to centre stage. For most children of elites, the next stop on their journey is a university place in a competitive program. In fact, to paraphrase a university professor who made a presentation that I observed at Nate’s school, this is an anxious community. Students are not stressed out about whether they will get into university, but whether or not they will get into their first-choice university (Volante, 2017). This process, and the angst it generates, is typical of many students’ experience. Indeed, in my experience, it is an essential part of the value-added, and differentiates elite private schools from their public and Catholic school counterparts. It should also be noted that on numerous CIS Ontario schools’ websites getting more than 95% (in some cases, as high as 100%) of a schools’ graduating students into their first-choice programs is a stated pledge, which is accompanied by exhaustive lists of the premier institutions from which students have received offers. For the vast majority of such institutions in Ontario, university prep is seen as schools’ most fundamental mission, a mission from which all other imperatives follow. In all respects, each of the participants was subject to, and a party to, these processes. Their total focus enabled them to succeed, whilst at the same time modelling good school citizenship for their peers.

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Family and Culture

To whatever degree it was within their means to provide it, the importance of familial support was evident. At the same time, culture, including each family’s native language, was fundamental to each participant’s orientation to life and even to school. The fact that the words

“experience” and “social” are prominent in Monica’s portrait, as are her efforts to navigate the curriculum in English, is significant. At one point in our initial conversation, Monica noted that she felt “different in background.” There are two dimensions to her comment. Before attending

Metropolitan, the kind of otherness Monica experienced was rooted in the fact that she felt “she was smarter than the rest of the class.” However, once at her new school, she felt “different in family background.” The shift was seismic. She lacked the kind of cultural capital that characterized the homes and cultural experiences of her peers. When “chillin’” at the homes of her peers she recalled that “they were very wealthy,” “well learned,” and that she had “never seen homes that big, encompassing a ravine.” “[They] were into politics ... [they were] doctors and conversations were not so innocent anymore. [They] dealt with social justice, science.” In that milieu, Monica felt vulnerable, exposed, “embarrassed,” and out of place, quite the opposite of her feelings as part of a gifted cohort in elementary school.

It was not simply that her peers existed in different economic strata, it was also that they were socially and culturally different. When the conversation turned to malaria in Africa, her question—an entirely innocent one—to the group was, “What is malaria?” The inquiry revealed her ignorance, but on another, deeper, level it also revealed her lack of cultural capital, her social and cultural status. Although she had conversations about all kinds of things at home, they were not conversations about those kinds of issues. The encounter is reminiscent of Pip’s experience with Estella in Dickens’s Great Expectations (Dickens, 1861/1947). The novel traces the

184 protagonist’s ascent through the social class structure of his time, an arc of social mobility that was made possible by the industrial revolution. In one of his first meaningful encounters with

Estella, Dickens narrates Pip’s experience at the home of the adopted daughter of an eccentric, once-jilted heiress, Ms. Havisham, who is of minor of aristocratic origins. Sitting at Ms.

Havisham’s feet, Pip and Estella are playing cards. The first paragraph introduces the scene:

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly seen; but, I have often thought since that she must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick boots!” (Dickens, 1861/1947, pp. 105–106)

Pip then goes on to explain his feelings:

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy. (Dickens, 1861/1947, pp. 105–106)

The moment echoes in Monica’s experience, when she experienced a similarly searing moment as part of her educational journey. For Monica, although not bearing the malevolence of Estella and her mother, the encounter revealed her social status and cultural disposition as the child of recent Chinese immigrants, preoccupied with the economic and social challenges of life in a new country.

For the first time in the novel Pip sees himself as a “stupid, clumsy labouring boy”

(Dickens, 1861/1947, pp. 105-106), who had never thought of being ashamed of anything let

185 alone his hands, which become a marker of his social-class origins. Of course, neither Pip nor

Monica’s background—their particular cultural capital—is less than or in any way reflects a deficit. Actually, their social milieu and all that it bears is rich and full. Indeed, up until that point in the novel, Pip is enormously proud of his family and the work they do. In fact, that evening following the encounter he reports:

My young mind was in that disturbed and unthankful state that I thought long after I laid me down, how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith: how thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common things. (Dickens, 1861/1947, p. 124)

More recently, J. D. Vance’s (2016) Hillbilly Elegy makes a similar point:

Social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel. In my youth, it was the height of fine dining—my grandma’s and my favorite restaurant. With Yale friends, it was a greasy public health crisis. (p. 201)

As Bourdieu (1990) theorized, in both the Victorian age and our own, particular kinds of cultural capital are valued more highly and carry more weight in some domains than others. Confronting this reality is painful. Because it initiates the reality of what Friedman (2016) described as

“habitus clivé” (p. 132), or what I call the dividing of the mind, or the division of the soul.

Friedman (2016) extrapolated his notion from what Bourdieu (1999) described as a “habitus divided against itself, and [thus] doomed to a kind of double perception of self” (p. 511). As one enters a new habitus, which values one form of cultural capital over that of another, the pain can be enduring. The way in which an individual navigates this reality, not just one’s initial encounter with the phenomenon, is a burden of social mobility. Reay and Wiliam (1999) argued

186 that it is akin to a perpetual feeling of being exposed as other or less than, feeling that “I’ll be nothing” (p. 343). Reay and Wiliam’s (1999) reference deals with the notion of assessing students and the fear doing so can engender, but in very many respects the relatively disadvantaged child can feel as if he or she is being assessed all the time.

Apart from the financial benefits of mobility, the experience of social mobility and

“habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132) that can accompany it can undermine the individual’s sense of being and make the effort to achieve mobility seem futile. However, the pain of leaving one’s habitus and the challenges of entering that of the other in the lives of the Monica, Andrea, and Nate, were mediated by the support of each of their parents. The work of Dickens

(1861/1947), Harker (1990), Nash and Harker (1992), Reay (1999), and Vance (2016) revealed an important element of the inner experience of the social climber, what Friedman (2014) called the price of social mobility. In this respect, the role parents play as students undertake such a journey is a critical one. This phenomenon is evident in the portraits of each of the participants.

For Andrea, habitus clivé was also mediated by her relationships with another student—a fellow traveler—who was also on financial aid, and yet all three appear to be free of this phenomenon.

Nevertheless, even as the family observed the lives of her peers and their families, they remained shrouded in mystery. The conversations she had with her mother at home did not necessarily provide any illumination. It was her lived experience that helped her to navigate their reality and the guidance pamphlet, which demystified the nature of the success she was trying to achieve. Andrea was a student of social class. For Nate, the reality of “habitus clivé” (Friedman,

2016, p. 132) was most acute during the summer months when his peers left for the summer and he was forced to confront his own circumstances and to reintegrate into his own life and neighbourhood.

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Giftedness

“Habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132) is also mediated by the fact that in some way each of the participants was identified as being special which, from my perspective, was significant as a social mobility cost mediator. For both women, this was a formal process, when in Grade 3 they were identified as gifted. For Nate, the process was different but equally as efficacious. His parents made a decision to send him to The Academy as a 3-year-old, signalling to him that they believed profoundly in his potential, indeed, that he too was special. This notion was also reinforced by the support of his family and coaches who cultivated his athletic and academic prowess. In many respects, this identification can result in a feeling of being in some way distinctive. This, I argue, is true, whether the identification is ascribed formally by a government institution, educational process, or occurs as result of parents believing strongly enough in a child’s capacity to send him to the area’s most prestigious school. For each of the participants and often for students more broadly, this notion can act as a kind of self-fulfilling process, having the same effect as being streamed into an enriched mathematics class, an oversubscribed academic course, or onto an elite hockey team. Such students become subjects of increased expectations and along with them the recipients of greater support. This dynamic can establish a virtuous cycle, which reinforces and builds upon a child’s previous success, all of which can be undergirded by a more deeply rooted belief in their capacity to succeed.

Coupled with familial support and the various opportunities the schools provided, this, in turn, reinforced the participants' expectations of their own academic success and ultimately of social mobility. The opportunity to attend The Academy motivated Nate and our conversations were littered by this kind of discourse. The fact that he was so motivated also meant that he too was singled out for special treatment; his coaches and teachers working in collaboration to help

188 facilitate his success and eventual career aspirations. The portraits of both women also reinforce the idea of being set apart for some special purpose and thus being treated differently. Monica recalled her experience of feeling that she was different at elementary school and as a result was then treated differently. For her, this discourse is most fully articulated by her experience as part of the admissions process.

As I noted in her portrait, this meant that of the original 10 students who attended open houses from her school and who most likely wrote entrance exams, only two eventually gained admittance. Clearly, she was able to do what other students whose parents aspired for them to attend Metropolitan could not: pass high-stakes tests and perform at a very high level during the intake process, a process that included Multiple Mini Interviews (MMI). MMI’s were developed at McMaster University, as a means of differentiating applicants’ ability to problem solve under pressure, a format that can be challenging and highly stressful for the individuals participating in them. The assessment was initially designed to identify the most able candidates for the university’s prestigious and highly competitive Health Sciences program (Michael G. DeGroote

School of Medicine at McMaster University, 2015). Monica’s self-belief helped her to navigate them successfully. Indeed, she was buoyed by a palpable sense that she was good at taking tests and was smarter than the rest of her peers in elementary school. Working together, the two beliefs helped to facilitate her success. Having triumphed in the admissions area, she was patently a student who was worthy of further investment, a child most likely to succeed.

Andrea was also referred to a gifted program by her Grade 3 teacher, a phenomenon that appears to be a pattern for parents aiming to achieve social mobility. She describes this moment as one of the critical “turning points in [her] educational career.” She rose to the occasion, all the time believing she was capable of doing so, undoubtedly buoyed by an increasingly long track

189 record of success. Andrea described this experience as “being dragged into the game,” a game she did not realize existed prior to attending the school. Of course, the reasons are complex, but clearly being identified in such a way, had consequences and outcomes. The process motivated her to do more and was reinforced by the fact that she was with other students who had also been selected for a similar purpose. Somewhat endearingly, she also remains in touch with her Grade

3 teacher and said that “we always joke that it’s all him … like he set me on this path,” which, if the theory posited by this study is correct, may indeed be true.

Finances

It is clear from each of the portraits that the dominant source of stress, which could have overwhelmed the participants, was financial. When compared to the overwhelming majority of their peers, each of the three participants endured a significant degree of relative economic disadvantage. Being preoccupied with finances added another dimension to the challenges presented by being at the school. This is why all three word clouds feature words like

“challenge(s), difficult, hard, financial, money, bursary, and, fees.” Nevertheless, remarkably all three participants remained highly focused. Indeed, it is a testament to their resilience that they were able to persevere and accomplish so much. Whilst the words that discuss family finances and school fees appear to a significant degree in all three portraits, those words appear least in

Monica’s portrait, even though at one point her family was unable to continue paying the fees.

Even though the crisis was averted in the eleventh-hour by the vice principal’s offer of a summer job, the experience of insecurity and uncertainty left a lasting impression.

On the most basic level, the intervention of the vice principal was to be celebrated. The largesse of spirit the administrator showed was laudable. It enabled Monica to remain at the school, but, whilst all this remains true, the policy—or, indeed, access to such programmes—

190 appears opaque. Was Monica the only recipient of additional support? Did the practice of offering summer work to students on financial aid occur on a regular basis? Was it broadcast to all students, widely understood? Were there other recipients? In what ways was the decision made, by what criteria? Indeed, why Monica? Did gender or ethnicity play a role?

Understandably, Monica saw the intervention as an answer to a prayer, but one might also ask, was Monica selected over another student? The data does not answer these questions.

But, as Isenberg (2016), Bourdieu (1986, 1989, 1990), Willis (1988), and Porter (2015) noted, social mobility has always been determined by the unwritten codes of social class. Without more information, the effort would appear to conform to the ideas expressed more fully in my review of literature, exemplified by those theorists noted in this paragraph. As Diwan (1987, as cited in

Joshee, 2012) noted “that those in positions of power rarely have to account to those lower in the hierarchy” (pp. 77-78). Moreover, it may have been that Khan’s (2011) notion of “ease” (p. 67) was in play; that somehow elites simply find away to make things happen. It is just what they do.

It is impossible not to consider these notions.

However, at the same time, it may be that the gesture was simply that: the school in the person of the vice principal trying to find a way—any way—for Monica to remain at the school, an act of love. Perhaps, there were no other recipients or candidates for the job who were in a similar situation. Perhaps the vice principal somehow “found” the money to pay for the job.

Perhaps it was simply a work-in-kind sort of arrangement, a one-off. It is, however, worthy of further consideration. A detailed analysis of the minutia of elite institutions is really about how they distribute privilege. Monica’s ability to remain at an elite private school is at the heart of that phenomenon.

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Similarly, Nate’s father worried that he might get laid off. Although in time it turned out that the steel company for which he worked managed to weather hard times without layoffs that characterized the industry at that time. Andrea, too, had her struggles. Her father eventually took on unskilled work. As someone who had done graduate work as an engineer, this must have been difficult. Of course, these kinds of phenomena are not unique. Working families often face hard times. The Broadbent Institute (2014, 2016) reports are evidence of that. What is different is that participants’ struggles took place within the context of extreme affluence: each of the individuals featured in this project studied, played, and each day went to school with students who were affluent, often rich. They were in a small minority. The relative poverty all three experienced was ever-present in their worlds. What is also evident, however, is the way in which this particular pressure was mediated by the support of their families.

Of course, on the one hand, the participants themselves worked incredibly hard to justify the sacrifice their parents felt called to make on their behalf. On the other, they were each charged with navigating their circumstances as best they could. Monica participated in wrestling because the school provided the singlet required for the activity. In one of the few studies that explores the experience of underprivileged children in elite environments (Power, Curtis, Whitty,

& Edwards, 2010), it was revealed that although the students’ fees were provided and they were given a modest additional subsidy to fund travel to and from school, the program did not provide funds to enable the participants to participate in extracurricular activities, athletic teams, or school trips. In those school contexts, the inability to participate in extracurricular activities or on school trips meant that although the individuals achieved social mobility, they did not make friendships that were enduring. In short, they were provided an education, but not social capital.

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For it was those extracurricular experiences that were critical in facilitating the friendships that were essential to their wellbeing as young people (Power et al., 2010). They did not get to play on the rugby team or travel with their peers. They simply went to school to do school, even though a critical reason children go to school is because of the social interaction it provides. Lasting friendships are most often formed on the soccer pitch, the school bus when on a school trip, performing in the play, or on the debate team. Indeed, there is a significant body of literature discussing their value in widening students’ social networks, but also in developing self-efficacy and confidence (Bruner, Eys, Wilson, &, Côté, 2014; Coalter, 2013; Giorgio, 2011;

Hendrickson, 2018; Peterson, Dixon, Peterson, Rubie-Davies, & Irving, 2015; Reverdito,

Carvalho, Galatti, Scaglia, Conçalves, & Paes, 2017; Vianna & Lovisolo, 2011).

Power et al.’s (2010) analysis remains true for the participants of my study. To the schools' credit, the participants did get to participate in the camp experience, which was provided by Metropolitan to Monica and Andrea. Nate’s parents paid for his experience. He got to play sports, which was largely facilitated by his father’s ability to exploit his own social network through which he was able to purchase and resell used hockey equipment. This made his participation in an expensive sport possible and in contrast to the participants in the assisted places scheme, it was through hockey that he made his most enduring friendship, a relationship that endures into the present and which is central to his life. Similarly, Monica became extremely close to her wrestling coach, who was “like a second dad” to her. Andrea was able to participate locally in the DECA program, although, for all three, some of the experiences in which they would have liked to participate were clearly off limits.

In each case, their participation was prescribed. Andrea could have gone further with

DECA had she had the resources to do so; Nate would desperately have like to travel with his

193 friends to Italy in his grad year—arguably the experience of a lifetime—but because the trip was announced so late in the day, his parents were unable to raise the funds in time for him to go.

Perhaps for Monica, there might have been other opportunities she might have been able to participate in had the school provided the resources to do so. In a sense, it is hard to not to see these individuals, after whom Jack (2019) titled his book, The Privileged Poor, as second-class passengers, who somehow ended up in a first-class cabin, but who rather awkwardly are not allowed to order the food provided to their more affluent fellow travellers, even though they are all friends. For adolescents in secondary school, the fear of exclusion represents an existential challenge (Warrington & Younger, 2011).

In short, the participants’ experience was characterized by being selective, making do and in some cases, simply doing without, a phenomenon that increases their likelihood of experiencing “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132). In fact, when Monica described her decision-making process and why she chose to work for a company whose values were more in keeping with her own, i.e. because it was not an identifiable brand name, she referred back to her reality at secondary school and what it demanded of her, that she needed to “pretend.” For Nate, it was the alienation he felt and the adjustments he needed to make to reintegrate with the life of his family and neighbourhood. This occurred each summer when his friends left to travel or to spend their summers at cottages in the affluent Muskoka Lake region. This was a time when he too felt a kind of Dickensian self-loathing. As this study’s conceptual framework illustrates, students’ socioeconomic context is the ground on which they stand, their ever-present reality, which supports and frames their experience. It mediates all things: their relationships, school achievement, sense of well-being, even their future prospects. The role parental support plays in mediating an emergent, present, or even enduring, sense of habitus clivé, is critical to mitigating

194 the costs of social mobility, as is the work schools can do facilitate their participation in the full life of the institution. It is thus of paramount importance to understand the way in which additional supports, indeed, the details of privilege are dispensed.

The processes by which it is extended may indeed by benign or calculated, but they have emerged as being of import with regards to all three participants. It is also surprising that more

CIS Ontario have not aimed to provide a greater number of bursaries or scholarships to students from underserved communities. Andrea referred to Metropolitan as the “poor man’s private school,” saying “you could go there, you didn’t have to be very wealthy, you were solely there because you could perform at a certain level for something.” Monica also referred to the changing ethos of the school. She once observed that “the student body [now] looks more and more wealthy.... the makeup of the student body has changed a lot because the tuition is so high.”

Indeed, she said that she “saw one girl with a designer bag.” The reason the comment was salient is because of its singularity. Perhaps, the bag heralds the end of an era, the death knell of a unique institution that aimed to define itself in part by the degree to which it provided an opportunity for the child of lesser means. It is true that many elite schools, despite the fees they charge are not supported by the province of Ontario and must budget accordingly. It is also true however that many schools have large endowments and as yet have not provide opportunities of this kind on a meaningful scale.

Social Capital

The experience of being in school brings young people into inescapable and intimate contact with each other in what for many is one of the most intense social experiences of their lives. This was certainly true for each of the participants. All human activity is socially situated and involves cooperation with others. This degree of proximity presents both opportunities and

195 threats. In the rough-and-tumble world that is often school, children make friends, and, on occasion, get excluded, ostracized, and bullied. Nevertheless, for very many students, it is the social aspects of school that make the greatest impression. As a consensus of theorists, most notably Daly, 2010; Christakis & Fowler, 2009; Putnam, 2000, 2015, Gaztambide-Fernández,

2009, confirm, social networks contain valuable resources. Within their social networks, the participants interacted with individuals who in turn acted as social connectors who connected them to those resources and the opportunities that flowed from them.

Schools reflect the socioeconomic realities of the communities in which they are situated, communities that are often underserved and lack resources. As such, the children of the working poor are generally not connected to others beyond their immediate environs. When speaking of disadvantaged young people in the Toronto area, Cleverdon, who oversees the Prince of Wales

Charities and is working on behalf of the charity to create employment opportunities in underserved communities in Rexdale and North Etobicoke, northwest of Toronto’s downtown core, said that they simply are not “connected to the connected” (Paikin, 2014)—and thus by extension not in touch with resources that are often taken for granted by others. In short, they lack social capital. Undoubtedly, the opportunities available in the participants’ home and neighbourhoods were limited. But by attending the school, each of them became connected to the connected.

Even at an early stage, Nate was clearly motivated to go to the “fantastic school,” and somehow the intelligence got to his family via a social network, most likely through one of

Granovetter’s (1973) weak connections. This kind of information is a critical resource, a form of social capital. Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) described this process, noting that “first, students must somehow know or come to find out that there is such a thing as an elite […] school. This

196 typically involves,” the author explained, “what sociologists call ‘social capital’: networks, relationships, institutional ties, or other kinds of “connections” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009, p.

56).

From my own experience, several examples of this came to mind: the father of one student, who owned a chain of mobile phone stores offered a job to his son’s best friend, in 2008, at a time when there were very few if any jobs available for young people. Similarly, another parent facilitated a volunteer position at a research university working in a lab that was invaluable to understanding the scientific method, the nature of modern research, and clearly provided her an advantage when applying to a university health sciences program; another parent, a board chair, facilitated a job for his son working in the admissions office; yet another in the campus store. These connections occur naturally and can appear effortless within social networks that are characterized by deep social capital and abundant resources. Although they may seem routine to the recipients of such largesse, it is also true that affluent parents often pursue such opportunities assiduously (Kupfler, 2015). One of the participants of my study,

Nate, secured a job as a supply teacher through a similar kind of process.

In fact, as noted in Chapter 2, the most recent NAIS Parent Motivations Survey revealed that although there are myriad reasons parents select elite private schools, they also do so for social advancement, as well as the real or perceived benefits of belonging to influential social networks that are found in “well-known/high-status schools” (NAIS, 2011, p. 9). When combined, “Success-driven parents,” and “Parents who push” make up the largest single category at 38% combined (McGovern & Torres, 2011, p. 9).

Moreover, as communities become increasingly bifurcated along economic lines world’s rich in social capital and those without it, find their experience characterized by what Putnam

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(2015) described as being at a social distance from each other. The schools in which the participants studied were clearly able to reduce and even eliminate this distance, and as a result were able to share social capital in a way that Putnam argued happens less and less in our divided world, where such worlds rarely intersect and where the one is almost entirely unknown to the other. The schools the participants attended compensated for the absence of this particular kind of social capital. Once at such a school, the resources that Daly (2010), for example, needed to develop agency around are present and readily available. However, as Gaztambide-Fernández

(2009) notes, these benefits are only accessible if one has access to the school in the first place.

The parents of the participants in belonged to social networks that held within them knowledge of the elite schools they hoped their children would attend. This was because they not only belonged to those networks, but also because the schools in which they went to school existed in relatively close proximity to those institutions and thus they benefitted mightily from the existence of affordable, accessible, and reliable and transportation links, each of which was critical to their matriculation and eventual graduation.

Chetty et al. (2016) and Chetty and Hendren (2018) noted that children benefit from moving to lower-poverty neighbourhoods and enjoy a significantly greater degree of social mobility than children who remain in high-poverty areas. Children who move from one type of neighbourhood to another enjoy higher rates of university attendance, earn more money, and are less likely to become single parents. They also noted that the positive effects are greater the younger the age at which the child moves, the effects becoming negative due to the disruption moving a teenager can involve. More broadly, while the Moving to Opportunity experiment and the studies that followed it (Chetty, et al., 2016) provide a means to understand the relationship

198 between neighbourhood effects and school effects, this study most focuses most fundamentally on the participants’ experience in schools.

It is not the case that the participants necessarily moved to a lower-poverty area. It was rather that the area in which they attended the gifted school and the neighbourhoods in which

Nate and the girls lived provided access (in Nate’s case by means of the school bus) to more affluent areas in which such an education was available. In this context, each of the families benefitted from being a part of those communities, the proximity they enjoyed to larger metropolitan areas, and thus shared in the social capital that existed there. In brief, although moving to better neighbourhoods has an impact on educational outcomes, it was proximity and access that was decisive for the participants.

The exchange of social capital through school networks

Once at school, each participant benefitted from the education provided. However, they also benefitted from the social capital that existed within them. In an almost routine and institutional fashion, what Khan (2011) described as ease, they developed relationships that helped them along their journey and facilitated their success. A key turning point for Andrea happened in the guidance department when she was given a pamphlet. It contained information about the most precious resources the school had: its alumni/ae network. Alumni/ae are an important asset for any private school that wishes to endure. In fact, as each portrait notes, fellow alumni/ae are amongst the people that all three participants would feel comfortable reaching out to in times of need. As Monica said, despite her difficulties at Metropolitan, the enduring connections she had to the institution were ultimately to her fellow alumni/ae. I first encountered

Nate at an alumni/ae fundraiser. In fact, I later learned there were two fundraisers that evening, the one I attended for younger alumni/ae, as well as another one for older alumni/ae at another

199 more exclusive setting. Although often in the background, the role alumni/ae play in such institutions cannot be overstated. They raise funds for their schools and sit on governing boards.

Should they decide to become teachers, it is not uncommon for them to do so at their various alma maters. Their achievements bring distinction to the school. The child who is Harvard- bound, or becomes a supreme court justice, a leading politician, an influential businessperson, or philanthropist, shapes the image of the school and adds to its prestige and reputation within the community, and sometimes the world. Such individuals feature extensively in schools’ promotional materials. Perhaps somewhat predictably, alumni/ae were the groups I first reached out to conduct this research. Indeed, along with the extraordinary efforts made by guidance departments to ensure students of elite schools receive offers to the universities of their first choice, alumni/ae are one of the most important differentiators that set elite schools apart from their competitors.

The booklet Andrea received contained a surprising amount of detail. The profiles pictured there included the classes former students had taken at school, the extracurricular activities in which they had participated, even their grades. For her, the information was revelatory, a critical turning point, and with the support of her peers—often the most powerful social persuaders—she was able to envision her future in a new way. By mapping herself onto these models, she began to plan and acquired a sense of personal agency that was to prove decisive in her life’s journey. It was her sense of confidence that propelled her to compete for better grades that served as the foundation upon which she ultimately graduated with honours and helped her secure the credentials she needed for her postsecondary application to America’s

Ivy League and become an agent in her own life. She saw a pathway, a route, that might take her

200 to that particular destination. Within the context of the school, she was introduced to the connections she needed to achieve her final ends.

Nate’s experience was different, but also instructive. The social capital he needed most was readily available via a small group of teachers, one of whom later become a vice principal and thus was in a position to offer him a job as a supply teacher. For him, the moment was similarly decisive. Like Andrea, Nate had already acquired confidence. In fact, it was his performance in the class that meant his teachers were willing to make such recommendations and provide the support he needed. His story not only provides evidence of a sense of confidence but also an emerging sense of agency. Nate was an athlete who was also committed to being a good student and was already beginning to make postsecondary plans that would not only shape his high school experience, but his life course in a decisive way. Nate learned to make adjustments.

When it appeared that hockey might not yield the results he desired, he focused on soccer. At the same time, he was realistic about what he might achieve. In the end, rather than matriculating at a tier one American school, he chose a small, tier three college, which offered him a generous scholarship and also gave him an opportunity to play soccer regularly rather than sit on the bench as a reserve goalkeeper. The diverse means in which the participants were introduced to a variety of opportunities within their school communities is evidence of the fact that such opportunities present themselves in unpredictable ways, the notion of which is a feature of the study’s conceptual framework.

Monica was observant and talked about the fact about a student who had left home and apparently had nowhere to live. “Many teachers,” she said, “reached out [and that there was] one who let a student live with them,” a gesture that clearly meant a great deal to her personally and spoke to her of the culture of the school and the social capital that existed there. Monica

201 ultimately found her niche as a dancer in Show, where after hours practicing in her bedroom, she learned to dance. In many respects, it was in Show that she became one with the choreography of the school and found her place within it. For her, there was no decisive moment when her thoughts crystallized, but rather through what were often interpersonal experiences (the word

“relationships” is used 13 times in her portrait), she found her way. Her wrestling coach, the principal, vice principal, teachers and counsellors, were also instrumental. More than anything, it appears she was developing the power to shape her life—to embark on her own unique path whatever that may have been.

Teachers

In all three portraits it was unconventional teachers who became the social connectors.

Indeed, the importance of a diverse faculty is evident throughout their experience. The math teachers and coaches at The Academy inspired Nate to embark on a career in teaching and supported him in practical ways to do so. For Andrea, it was the teacher who “would scrawl words all over the board in nonsensical ways,” and even her Spanish language teacher who told her students stories about driving a truck across Latin America and who freely shared her political views. These educators were influential, widened the participants’ horizons, fired their imaginations, and provided them with different ways to imagine their lives. For Monica, it was her wrestling coach and the teacher who allowed a student to live with them, a practice that was clearly in contravention of the professional practice advocated by the OCT. These individuals signalled to her that her school was a community that cared. It was likewise school counsellors and the vice principals who reached out when she was in need.

Such individuals informed the culture of the school, making it appear to the student more of a community than a bureaucracy that simply provided credits and access to university. It was

202 in these settings that each participant encountered opportunity and/or the support they needed, even if in Monica’s case the sense of personal agency that was emerging not so much around the specifics of a career or attending a prestigious university, but rather manifesting itself in her decision to eventually embark on a career in the ministry. Andrea also addressed the notion of a divergent path when she discussed the school’s and her peers’ expectations of her. It was rare, she noted, that peers would focus on their passions outside of school. There were some, but they were clearly in a minority. Had it emerged earlier, Monica’s sense of agency may have made her a part of such a minority and yet her experience emerges as a critical feature of her journey. The notion of choice is an important feature of personal agency. Even though Nate’s aspirations may have originated with others, at some point he chose to begin the process of actually becoming a teacher. Similarly, Andrea may have been inspired by the pamphlet and the encouragement of her friends, but she too needed to decide to pursue her path to university and beyond. Personal agency is rooted in a legitimate sense of choice.

Minor Themes

Two minor themes were also evident in the portraits: Extra-Curricular Activities and

Success and Opportunity. As discussed, the words that comprised these themes appear less frequently in the text. For example, the words “ability, skill, gifted, or mastery,” appear only infrequently in the portraits of Monica and Andrea. They appear not at all in Nate’s portrait. And yet for each individual, they were evident as a kind of subtext. Whether by means of a formal or informal process, all three were identified as gifted, were intent on succeeding, taking advantage of the opportunities that were available to them and aspired to well-paid, meaningful employment. In addition, for each, the role of extracurricular activities was paramount. They wanted to be involved in the life of the school beyond the classroom. Doing so was central to

203 their school experience, and over time, each participant became increasingly skilled at working alongside elites.

Extracurricular Activities

It is hard to overstate the importance of extracurricular activities in the school experience of each of the three participants. Monica joined the wrestling team through which she formed a close bond with her coach. She also participated in volleyball. Along with Show, these formed an essential part of her school experience and helped her achieve a sense of belonging, which as

Osterman (2000) argued is an essential component of school success. A sense of belonging aids students in the process of developing social networks, that is, friendship groups which help them to belong and bind them to the institution as alumni/ae. In the studies of assisted place holders

(Power et al., 2010; Power, Whitty, & Wisby, 2006), the authors noted that the place holders inability to participate in extracurricular activities exacerbated the challenge of establishing enduring friendships at the schools they attended. Indeed, even though they did become socially mobile, they did not integrate into any other social networks other than their own. This, I posit, had an impact on their sense of self, exacerbated their “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132), and reinforced a sense of otherness. Although their academic achievements increased their income levels and changed their educational and career trajectory, it did not change the social networks to which they belonged. As such, it left them to navigate the worlds of their working, social, and cultural worlds alone. Had the researchers asked the participants in the study whether they would have felt comfortable reaching out to the other alumni/ae, other than the tiny minority of other students in the scheme, it is unlikely that they would have said, yes. Unfortunately, we shall never know.

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The schools referred to in this study did, however, provide opportunity. All three got to participate in camp experiences, which assisted them in establishing the friendships the assisted placeholders were not able to enjoy. Andrea participated in the DECA tournament, although only up-unto-a point. Although Nate participated fully in the sporting life of the school, he was unable to participate in the Italy grad trip, even though he desperately wanted to go. Monica was highly selective when choosing the sports in which she could participate. Although each was making decisions about how and in what activities they might participate, they were by no means entirely left out. They were given opportunities to establish a sense of belonging and to build connections with others, even though they needed to be discriminating when doing so.

Success and Opportunity

Each of the participants’ definitions of success was explored in each of their portraits, but each took a different form. Nate’s were practical. They were about being a teacher, ideally at The

Academy. In time, Monica’s evolved into developing an authentic religious faith and about having the wherewithal to take such a momentous step in her life, even though such a step may have seemed counter to all that she had worked to achieve. Andrea wanted to study in the U.S. and eventually her definition became about “knowing what you want for yourself, knowing what you’re best at, and knowing what makes you happy or what matters the most.” For all three participants, it was also about staying on that proverbial train until they arrived at what they believed at the outset was their predetermined destination, in effect, where they aspired to be.

Andrea said the same thing. It was also about simply staying on that train. As she noted, “there were some people who jumped off […] and were like ‘[..] I’m happy doing something else.’”

They were, however, they were a minority.

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Their journeys underscore the unpredictable nature of opportunity, even, dare I say, luck.

Being assigned to a mathematics teacher who was friends with the physical education teachers who were willing to support his aspirations to become a teacher in hands-on practical ways, even in a relatively small school was an unusual confluence of events. Similarly, the fact that a recent

Metropolitan alumni/ae had attended and graduated from the Ivy League school Andrea hoped to attend and shared a very similar profile, was out of the ordinary. Even for such a high-achieving private school, such achievements are not commonplace. And for Monica, a caring vice principal was able to provide a summer job, which for her seemed like the answer to a prayer. The support and opportunities provided and from which each benefitted from in various ways could only occur on the foundation of several facts.

The guidance department was able to draw upon its alumni/ae. The teachers each of the students encountered on a daily basis were willing to go above and beyond and sometimes do so in unconventional ways, helping the participants to achieve their own sense of personal agency and develop their aspirations. As Monica noted, many of the activities, whether they were extracurricular, sports, or school trips, were facilitated by the faculty, numerous members of which saw their work as a calling. So, although each participant benefitted from the support and opportunities that were provided by the schools they attended, they did so in somewhat unpredictable and unexpected ways. Each participant’s journey was unique. Nevertheless, what appears to be universally true was that each of the participants was treated with compassion. In short, they belonged to what Portelli, Shields, and Vibert (2007), described as community characterized an “ethic of care” (p. 28), where each student is held in “absolute regard” (Starratt,

1994, p. 59). School communities informed by a sense of equity, rather than treating students equally and the same, as larger educational systems might by default sometimes demand.

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It is also important to note, however, that the participants’ families were living proximate to the schools they attended. These parents were “in the know,” so to speak, and it was important to them to provide the best education they were capable of accessing and thus to furnish the opportunities it would provide their offspring. For these families, social mobility appeared as a nonchoice, but one that required their ongoing and at times unconditional support. The location in which they each lived also enjoyed access to affordable public transport links, amenities which Anyon (2005) argued are essential to providing low-income students opportunities for academic success.

As such, even though each of the participants lived some distance from the schools they attended, they were able to attend. The bussing provided to Nate was included as part of his fees, which also made it possible for him to attend. Each was living within striking distance of world- class education or they had moved into those areas at an early enough age to benefit from what those metropolitan areas had to offer, including educational choice, phenomenon that supports

Chetty and Hendren (2018) and Chetty et al. (2016) thesis. If done at an early enough age moving into higher-income neighbourhoods improves educational outcomes, employment prospects, and ultimately life chances.

Although it is not represented as a significant trend in either the portraits or the visual representations of them, it is worthy of mentioning the importance of what is referred to here as fellow travellers. For Andrea, her journey at Metropolitan was mediated by the fact that on some level she took it with another student who received financial support. Nate made friends through his participation in sports and allies through his academic work ethic, but he also made friends with another Academy student who also came from his own neighbourhood and lived only a few minutes away. Indeed, the two have become lifelong friends. Monica received support from her

207 wrestling coach. So, although in large part their existential journey was taken alone, there were others—fellow travellers—who made the journey easier.

A brief note on the costs of social mobility and trace elements

When speaking of the notions of opportunity and success, it is important to discuss the costs of social mobility, whether they are financial, or emotional and psychic. At times, both

Nate and Monica felt alienated from the environments that were characterized by extreme forms of affluence. Almost universally, Nate’s friends spend their summers at cottages or travelling overseas. He went home and worked at road paving with his uncle. Monica’s experience at the homes of her peers revealed her lack of the kind of cultural capital that is so highly valued in educational systems and is a powerful agent in facilitating its success, as both Bourdieu (1986,

1989, 1990), Bourdieu and Clough (1996) and Harker (1990) noted, the one feeding off an reinforcing the other. All of the participants worked throughout the summer. Doing so was not to provide them with independence; it was a matter of necessity.

Surrounded by affluence that characterized the school’s culture, Monica felt like she needed to pretend. In fact, for her, it was a relief to find a company whose backroom office furniture was secondhand and more aligned with her own family’s thrifty values. Andrea felt supported because she commuted to school with another bursary recipient, a “fellow traveller,” who made her feel less alone. Each participant was constantly called to make decisions about what activities in which they could participate. All three dreamt of university, but only of institutions they could afford. In Monica’s case, the university she could attend was the least expensive, For Andrea and Nate, it was those which provided the most generous financial support. The pressure on each was constant and sometimes intense, a pressure that continued into university.

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Indeed, it is hard not to admire their fortitude and resilience. Trace elements of their socioeconomic status endure. Monica will most likely always be more comfortable in modest settings than in opulent ones; learned from his parents, Nathan’s working-class work-ethic has undoubtedly become part of who he is; and Andrea’s understated modesty is likely to endure.

However, all remain with them and inform the people they have become.

For the participants, any sense of “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132) they acquired, and which is a feature of my life and others I know who have taken a similar path, was mediated by the support of their families, which served as a kind of substrate to their existence. It is difficult for working parents to participate in and guide the educational journeys of their children in the same way affluent parents feel compelled to do, often becoming regular features of the schools their children attend. Working-class parents rarely possess cultural capital, time, or resources to be able to do so. As Weis, Cipollone, and Jenkins (2014) have stated, affluent parents often oversee the university counselling processes from which their children benefit.

They often have colleagues or are themselves graduates of the universities their children want to attend. They also possess the means to provide enrichment opportunities, such as overseas travel, access to state-of-the-art technology, quiet places to study, tutors; access to their workplace, as well as part-time jobs and club memberships that afford their children access to exclusive social networks.

At school, children of the well off enjoy access to cars, credit cards, and money to buy lunch treats. Such parents often facilitate sleepovers with the sons and daughters of individuals from similar socioeconomic strata, enabling them to capitalize on cultural capital they already possess. The list is not nearly exhaustive. But all build precious social capital within social networks that are rich with resources. Indeed, they represent a set of privileges that provide

209 advantages that are unavailable to the poor, but bright child unless he or she is invited to join an elite social network, which within the context of this study is an elite Canadian independent school. What the parents of the participants provided was their enduring emotional and practical support. If they were to climb socially, their success would also be that of their parents. This commitment, rooted in their own cultural heritage and ambition for their children, mediated any debilitating sense of alienation and “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132) they may have felt, or, indeed, may feel throughout their adult lives.

This chapter discussed six major themes. First, the notion of total schools and the participants’ total experience with them. The participants’ total commitment facilitated their success, but also made them into role models for other students, and assets to the school. Second, it discussed the impact of the participants’ family and culture, the pain they experienced as they navigated a different habitus than their own, and the role their family’s support played in mitigating habitus clivé. Third, it discussed the notion of giftedness and how the identification as such, acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, propelling each of them upwards. Fourth, it confirmed the central and powerful role of finances played in both the schools and the experience of the participants. Not surprisingly, it shaped and determined each of their experiences. Fifth, the analysis examined the critical role that social networks played in elite private school communities, networks that provided the participants with social capital that enabled them to envision their own education in new ways, and opened up post-secondary and professional pathways for each of them. Sixth, it revealed that the importance of the unconventional teachers, who enabled the Monica, Andrea, and Nate to belong, and to imagine a different kind of future, as well as to see beyond the stifling expectations that can be a high-expectation, total school experience.

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Analysis of the two minor themes revealed the importance of being able to participate in extracurricular activities, which served a means to build relationships, make friends, and develop social capital. Within the milieu of the elite school, they were also able to develop definitions of success that worked for them. Along with the notion of the parental support mitigating habitus clivé, this is also one of the study’s most important findings. Finally, the schools were able to institutionalize the notion of opportunity, whether it was through formal processes, informal social networks, or the schools’ extended alumni/ae network. This made the aspirations the participants’ held appear to them as legitimate choices, rather than those of Willis’ lads (1998), which had they aspired may well have been beyond their reach.

CHAPTER 10

METAPHORS:

“MIND THE GAP,” “THE SHOW MUST GO ON,”

AND DISSONANT THEMES

While Chapter 9 discussed both the Three C’s, personal agency as well as major and minor themes that derived from the participants’ portraits and concluded with an analysis of the costs of social mobility, in keeping with Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) approach, this chapter begins by discussing the metaphors that emerge from the study. The metaphors provide the reader a different way of understanding the participants’ experience. There are two: “Mind the Gap” and “The Show Must Go On.” The former uses the London Underground to frame their experience; the latter notion of performance illustrates their daily reality. Each participant stepped across a threshold between that of his or her own socio-economic, familial and cultural context into the world of an elite private school and once aboard needed to navigate the processes therein. However, it was the opportunity that they believed that world might contain that encouraged them to step across the gap in the first place.

However, their ability to perform ultimately enabled them to gain credentials, both in high school, but also beyond. It was their ability to perform that bolstered their growing sense of confidence and enabled them to exploit the connections that were part and parcel of the social networks they crossed the gap to join. The way in which they performed is ultimately evidence of their sense of personal agency. In short, both metaphors provide another means of understanding the themes that emerge as part of the analysis that preceded in Chapter 9, and I argue enabled me to capture two important dimensions of their experience in a way that the discussion of themes did not, linking them in an important way to the conceptual framework

211 212 articulated in Chapter 4. The metaphors also allow me the means to tell the participants’ stories to a non-specialist general audience, whose lives only intersect with education as a result of the fact that they or their children, should they be parents, attended them. In short, they are simply another way, albeit an important one, of looking at the data.

The discussion of metaphors is followed by an analysis of the institutional rituals that characterized the secondary school experience of the participants. The rituals represent yet another layer of complexity the participants negotiated as part of their journey. The chapter concludes with an examination of dissonant themes that run counter to the participants’ experience, but which because of the incongruity they represent are worthy of note.

Mind the Gap

The first metaphor is that of a train journey, and/or journeys, on London’s underground transit system, referred to colloquially as the “Tube.” The system is characterized by a number of salient features that are useful as a means of comparison. Although I discuss several, for my purposes, two of the most salient are the system map, which is a graphic representation of the system, (see Figure 5), and the public announcement itself, “Mind the Gap.”

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Figure 5. Map of the London, England, Underground (Transport for London, 2019).

It is noteworthy that the announcement on the London underground is not “All aboard!” but rather “Mind the gap.” The idea the phrase suggests begs other comparisons, other metaphors, such as, for example, the train is now leaving the station, or that one might well be left behind if one does not follow the crowd and get with the program—that is, buy-in to the mission of the school. The map of the London Underground, rather than Toronto’s Transit

Commission (TTC), located in the metropolitan area in which the schools featured in the study are located, has been chosen because, unlike the TTC the map, it is simply an artistic representation of the system, a construct (Bryson, 1998). Indeed, it bears little, and in parts, no

214 resemblance to the system itself. It ignores geography, topography, distance, and scale. In contrast, the TTC map provides information about the direction of travel, and to some degree a sense of geography and distance (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Map of the Toronto Transit Corporation (TTC) system (Kupferman, 2013).

The Toronto system map portrays the lines on east-west and north-south axes. Thus, if one is travelling west on a map between two stations, one is, in fact, travelling in a westerly direction.

In contrast, the London Underground map does not allow the rider to orient her or himself in this way. It does, of course, contain clues. If, for example, one is travelling on the Northern Line

(illustrated on the Tube image as a black line) one may indeed be travelling along a north-south axis, but it is impossible to orient oneself simply by the noting one’s position on the map.

Unfortunately, the phrase “You are here,” common to most graphic interpretations of transportation systems, means very little.

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The public service announcement, Mind the Gap, reminds passengers they are to step over the perilous space that exists between the station platforms and the train carriages themselves. The admonition, which blares as each train enters the station, reminds riders to pay attention and thus not to fall between the train and the platform as they step across the threshold and board the Tube. At the very least falling into the gap would mean a serious injury, at worst it could mean death. For the participants, the failure to maintain their academic standing could have meant the death of their dreams, whether they involved attending university or the life they believed doing so might make possible.

The comparison to the notion of students taking a journey towards personal agency and a better life is apt. The journey, at least superficially, may appear straightforward: a student, like

Monica, Andrea, or Nate, may simply have been seeking to travel from one station to another, from one social strata to another. The means by which they aimed to do so was through the vehicle of elite private education and ultimately through academic achievement, the reason it was so important for each of them to maintain their academic standing—indeed, the reason their approach to school was total. But of course, although elite secondary schools provide opportunity, the process of social mobility is unpredictable (Maxwell & Maxwell, 1995). One might well end up at one’s destination of choice, but there are numerous other destinations, some

270 stations on the system in total.

Journeys, of course, are not always straightforward and may involve changes, what are referred to in the system as transfers. The Tube also passes through different environments.

Some stations are located in affluent areas; others in poor ones; some are ethnically diverse; others are not. As the map infers, one may have believed one was headed west, but the direction of travel turned out to be northerly. Some passengers—indeed, some students—change plans and

216 with them destinations; on occasion, some trains go out of service before they reach their destination forcing the passengers to disembark and wait for another train in order to reach their destination. Andrea’s aspirations morphed over time, but eventually she realized what she was best at, what made her happy, what made the most sense for her.

Of the Tube’s numerous stations, 40 are no longer in use. Andrea changed routes to one that was right for her, discarding other possibilities. A delay can mean a change in plans, that perhaps a student’s aspirations might need to be adjusted or may take more time; a closed station might mean that destination, a goal, is no longer attainable, and represent a dream discarded. For

Monica, ultimately, her aspirations lay not in securing a high-powered job, but rather in a religious calling, an aspiration that was counter to the journey she had perhaps anticipated.

Indeed, she ended up in a place a world away from that both she and her parents had originally intended. However, at the same time, it is remarkable to note that according to Andrea, the vast majority of students stuck to the itinerary and stayed on the train until their anticipated terminus point. As she noted in her portrait:

It felt very weird for someone to say, “I don’t care about school work as much, and I’m going to focus on my passions outside of school instead.” That was a very uncommon thing for someone to say.

Indeed, she explained:

We kind of all bought into the same definition of success [...] this idea of good grades, having leadership in different clubs, and ultimately getting into a good university and it was very focused on that.

Of course, this is the reality for most Tube passengers. They travel from A to B. Almost universally, everyone remains on the train until they reach their predetermined destination.

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However, the evolution of both Andrea’s and Monica’s aspirations speaks to J. D. Maxwell and

Maxwell’s (1995) argument that the process of social mobility is unpredictable, times when

“You Are Here” may have meant very little to them.

Built in 1863, the Tube is older than the Paris Metro (1900), the New York Subway

(1904) and the TTC (1921). It has stood the test of time. This is also true of independent education in both Canada and the United Kingdom. The major public schools in England were founded in the middle ages. Similarly, the most established independent schools in Ontario, like those featured in this study, are amongst the oldest schools in the province. The oldest private school in Canada, Kings-Edgehill, was established in 1788, Upper Canada College (UCC) in

1829. Collectively, CAIS and CIS Ontario affiliate schools are the oldest in the country. The

Academy is by far the oldest school in the area; similarly, Metropolitan was established at almost precisely the same time, both predating the establishment of the public system.

More broadly, in the same way that the Tube holds a degree of fascination for people, so does elite private education. Indeed, private schools are seen as exclusive, training grounds for the rich. The current mayor of Toronto is a private school graduate, as is the prime minister of

Canada. At the time of writing, so is the British prime minister. In fact, a majority leading figures in politics, the media, the arts, and academia, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the world, have benefitted from attending elite private schools. This phenomenon has been widely documented (Paxman, 1990; Sampson, 1965, 2004).

The idea of having stood the test of time and of exclusivity suggested to parents of the participants’ of this study and also to a majority of parents with school-age children across

Ontario more widely, that elite schools, like the ones their children attended are reliable vehicles of social mobility and hold out the promise of their children securing high-paying, high-status

218 jobs. Aligned with Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) criterion as historically elite, they are deemed so by those in a position to make such judgments, and by the achievements of their alumni/ae. Indeed, an illustrious history maybe the best kind of marketing of all. As Nate said in his portrait:

So my parents were able to send me to such a fantastic school as this, giving me the best opportunity to learn, get a good education, potentially go to a great university, and from that, I did go to a great university and then I was able to come back as a [occasional] teacher, as something that I really aspire to do, and now I enjoy.

In part, it was also the aura that attracted Monica and Andrea to Metropolitan. In those environments it was not uncomon to see graduates not only go onto to university, but also elite colleges all over the world. The was confirmed by images of notable alumni/ae on the walls, by the nature of alumni/ae gatherings they attended, and the social networks to which they gained membership. Nonetheless, while all elite private schools are marked by privilege (Our Kids

Media, 2019b, para. 9) and each of participants expressed gratitude for the opportunities they were afforded, they also saw their achievements in relatively modest terms, which is entirely consistent with Miles, Savage, and Bühlmann (2011) analysis of the ways in which working men of British origins saw their own achievements.

The Freedom Pass and Subsidized Ridership

Interestingly, some Tube customers travel at a reduced rate on a Freedom Pass; about ten percent of passengers on any given day cheat and pay nothing at all. Others pay full fair, which mitigates the cost of multiple journeys and subsidizes Freedom Pass riders. Relative to their parents’ income and household wealth, students incur different costs to participate in private education. For some the fees are seen as a nominal expense; for others, they are significant and

219 involve enormous personal and collective sacrifice. This is evident in each of the portraits. The financial costs of social mobility are high. Indeed, it is was the ongoing challenge of paying school fees that in many respects defined the experience of all three participants. This is in part what Friedman (2014) described as the price of the ticket.

The Tube system is also relatively safe. In any given year, there is only a 1 in 300 million chance of being in a fatal accident, which suggests that although the experience of private education involves risk, the risks are relatively low, particularly if they are mediated by parental support. Nevertheless, there remains the ever-present “Mind the Gap” (a warning that for the most part is ignored), which suggests that for the disadvantaged student the prospect of falling between the cracks, having not paid enough attention to the gap, is a constant worry. In each of the portraits, this took form in their herculean efforts to maintain their academic standing, being model student citizens, and paying the increasingly rising fees. As long as they kept doing all three, they were unlikely to fall into the gap. The dull, repetition of the Mind the Gap only became audible when they faced real financial and/or academic challenges. This was true for

Nate, who worried that his father might lose his job at the steel mill. Similarly, this was true for

Monica, who was confronted with the reality of being asked to leave the school because her family was unable to keep paying the fees. Even Andrea’s parents made real sacrifices to support her. She also took part-time jobs to become more independent, and perhaps also to support their efforts.

Moving Between Worlds

Moving between social worlds is fraught with challenges, particularly bearing mind the milieu and cultural and family circumstances from which the student came. When one thinks of

“the gap” as a gap as that which exists between social worlds, it is clear the participants were

220 able to successfully navigate the transition between worlds, as Phelan et al. (1991) understood them. Phelan et al. (1991) proposed four models as a means of understanding they way my participants transitioned between their socioeconomic, familial, and cultural contexts—that is, their home life, and that of the elite private school:

1. congruent worlds/smooth transitions

2. different worlds/boundary crossing managed

3. different worlds/boundary crossing hazardous

4. borders impenetrable/boundary crossing insurmountable

While each of the participant’s transition was not entirely smooth, they cannot reasonably be described as hazardous. Hazardous crossings are characterized by when students enjoy little, none, or only patchy academic success. Phelan et al. (1991) argued this is because the teacher’s style closely approximates that of the home, its norms, values, and beliefs. When it does not, disengagement, disorientation, and failure characterizes these kinds of students’ experiences. For similar reasons, students experiencing hazardous boundary crossings are only able integrate into the life of the school in the most superficial way, or not all. Nor were the participants’ crossings insurmountable, where “the values, beliefs, and expectations are so discordant across worlds that boundary crossing is resisted or impossible” (Phelan et al., 19991, p. 240).

More than anything the participants’ crossings were managed both by them and their parents. Phelan et al. (1991) argued that cultural knowledge acquired within one’s family, peer groups, and school worlds inform and shape the way students navigate the boundaries between home and school. This, I argue, turned out to be true for all three participants. Certainly, all three came from different worlds. They each transitioned from working-class homes and communities, which were characterized by thrift, doing without, the value of hard work, and the importance of

221 family. The boundary they crossed was into the world of the upper-middle class, and the rich.

While each of their families rarely visited the school, and, at times, their feelings of being different were palpable, all understood the value of good grades. They remained engaged in their classes, even when other students did not. They constantly adapted to their schools’ particular cultures, and made them the focus of their lives. Phelan et al’s. (1991), boundary crossings managed category “frequently includes academically successful minority students (p. 236).

Although Monica and Nate found their transitions painful at times, all three appeared to navigate them with some aplomb in precisely the same way a majority of people manage a trip on the

Tube, despite the blaring admonition to not to fall between the tracks.

Taking the Journey Alone

The system is also characterized by a number of other features. It is anonymous. For the most part, its passengers exist in private worlds, travelling to destinations that are unknown to their fellow travellers, who likewise exist in worlds of their own, worlds that are entered into through any number of stations or social worlds. Most people reach their destinations trouble free; others sometimes end up in unexpected places; occasionally people meet, but mostly go their separate ways, as did the assisted placeholders of Margaret Thatcher’s scheme (Power et al., 2006). Power et al. (2006) confirmed that after graduating from their respective schools each of the placeholders returned to their own social worlds and rarely, if ever, interacted with their school peers who belonged to different social networks. Even though, according to income levels, the placeholders became socially mobile, they remained within their own social milieu

(Power, et al., 2006). In short, their terminal stop, at least socially, may well have been the station by which they entered the train.

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The stories found in the portraits of Monica, Andrea, and Nate, suggest that the inner journey the participants took was a private one. In this respect, like the passengers cocooned in their own worlds, they too travelled alone. The metaphor is apt. For although elite private education is increasingly a well-travelled pathway, particularly for those who can afford it, in the hustle and bustle of school life, the bursary child may always feel set apart. And, yet, as Andrea noted, they were, indeed, all heading in the same direction, “but,” she said, “for the most part, the idea of success was like staying on that train and getting to whatever destination … you wanted for yourself.”

Proximity

For those who live close enough to a station, the Underground is also relatively cheap.

The participants of this study were fortunate enough to live in communities, which although underserved, were within commuting distance to the city centre, where a plethora of high- achieving schools existed. Monica and Andrea both rode public transportation to and from school. The system, however, also has its limitations. It is crowded, and for the newcomer it is not easy to navigate and can be overwhelming. There are times, as such, when the educational terrain can be as bewildering. As with the Tube, the culture, pace, and expectations in elite private schools can make it hard to find one’s way.

Bearing in mind its limitations, this, the first metaphor, is overarching and frames social mobility through education in a bounded context. It explores the risks and potential rewards of striving to achieve social mobility through private education. Albeit in metaphorical language, it prefigures the journey ahead with all its twists and turns. For all three participants, elite private education enabled them to become socially mobile. The system delivered them to destination, a university education and a middle-class, even upper-middle class life. It made the remarkable

223 seem routine, a notion Khan (2011) endorsed. Nonetheless, as J. D. Maxwell and Maxwell

(1995) noted, its outcomes can be unpredictable, as in the case of Monica’s eventual turn towards an independent path. Similarly, Nate did not begin with aspirations to become a teacher, but hi did. His exit station ended up being different than perhaps he had originally anticipated, as a mill worker like his father before him.

The metaphor frames the participants’ journeys towards personal agency and school success. However, it also illustrates the challenges the participants faced, which on the surface were not necessarily obvious. Once they traversed the gap and entered the world of elite, private education, they confronted the challenges of succeeding in school, as well as that negotiating a different habitus than their own. At the outset, their journeys may have seemed straight forward, simply travelling from one station via a couple of transfers to another. In practical terms, this meant passing the entrance test, matriculating, maintaining their academic standing, graduating, and then getting into university, ideally one that offered a scholarship. The journey’s terminus point, at least initially, a well-paying, white-collar job. In the meantime, all they needed to do was to keep paying the fees, which with the jobs they had and the support they received seemed reasonable.

However, as the study reveals, their journeys were anything but simple. They involved negotiation, adjustment, and patience. As both the major and minor themes illustrate, they needed to make school their total focus. They required the constant support of the families, which made the train journey bearable, but which also reshaped the lives of their parents. They were constantly challenged to make choices about what activities they could participate in based on what they cost or were provided gratis by the school. A more subtle, but interrelated challenge was the degree to which they could successfully integrate into the social networks around them.

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Remember, the train was moving at a pace. Friendships needed to be made while the train was in motion, each participant on their own journey, coming from a different starting point, a different world and the divergent social networks therein. The great blessing for both women was the fact there were fellow travellers who were in a similar financial situation and lived in similar neighbourhoods. And, of course, there were those unconventional teachers, those odd passengers on the train, who told them it was okay to be different, to be themselves. In additional, the administration (the engineers and conductors on the train) enabled Monica, at least, to remain on the train beyond where her ticket alone could take her. But, no matter the rigours of the journey, they stayed the course.

Their journeys were mediated by the fact that they were bright, indeed, that they saw themselves as gifted and that, at least, in this respect they did indeed belong. The conversations and the games (the extracurricular activities) that took place on the train provided them with distraction as well as a means to address the pressure and anxiety they all felt. The occasional stops at over ground stations afforded them vistas of landscapes and worlds different than their own and gave them a vision of what was possible if they remained aboard.

The way in which they performed throughout their high school journeys is by any measure, impressive: They were all-in. And, yet, because they approached their educational journey and the opportunities it provided with gusto, they emerged as role models. They were kind of individuals who were most likely to help out in the event of an emergency on a plane, and, as such, volunteer to sit over the emergency exit, because it provides more legroom for less money. The participants’ socioeconomic, familial, and cultural contexts and the social networks they to which they belonged provided the context of their experience, the environs through which their journeys took place. Mind the Gap frames the journey and illuminates the conceptual

225 framework. It binds each of the participants’ Three C’s journey within its social context and alludes to the interplay between entering a new social network and eventually learning to exploit it. It also provides insight into the ways in which the students navigated their relatively geographic proximity to the school. It also articulates the fact that opportunity presents itself in unpredictable ways. Who knows on what Tube car, or in what activity, one might make a lifelong friend and be exposed to unanticipated opportunity?

The Show Must Go On

The second metaphor, the show must go on, is divided into three parts: rehearsal or practice, performance, and backstage pass. It also provides a means of understanding the experience of social mobility. It compares the sacrifice and the endless hours of practice and preparation involved in a brief but exhilarating athletic or theatrical performance to the effort and devotion the participants needed to achieve academic and school success. The latter, school success, referring to the participants’ social role within the community. In essence, the notion of performance, explores their enduring impact on one’s reputation and the ability to monetize academic and social outcomes in the workplace and beyond.

Performance, Rehearsal, and Backstage Pass: Monica and the Show

Monica found her feet, so to speak, through her participation in an extracurricular activity called “Show.” As the school’s website described it, “an amalgamation of acting, modelling, a myriad of dance styles, costume design, set construction and painting,” which took place at the culmination of the school year. Although the teaching faculty, staff, and the school’s administration supported Show, students organized it. However, the broad participation of so many school stakeholders, not least the parents in the audience, made it an important community event. Show involved providing students with an opportunity to perform in front of their peers

226 and the school community at large. For Monica, Show involved hours of preparation, much of which she did at home in her bedroom as her family could not afford lessons, a phenomenon that is characteristic of her determination to be successful at whatever she chose to do. Indeed, reading through her transcript at the time of writing, it is not hard to appreciate her drive to succeed, take advantage of the opportunities the school provided, and cultivate her own sense of agency.

Successful performance involves preparation. Although Monica’s group’s particular performance—a hip-hop routine—lasted only a few moments, it took a lot of time to prepare.

Such routines involve coordination and the cognizance that a successful performance is a result of not only individual excellence but also of finding one’s place within a group, all of which is compressed in time. This phenomenon has been explored at length in a growing body of literature. Wilson (1992) for example made the comparison to a jazz performance, “Hours of uncompensated practice are required to achieve those creative moments” (p. 241) during a performance. Citing Jim Hall, a guitarist, he also emphasized the importance of “fitting yourself into the right place” (Wilson, 1992, p. 239). The social dynamics of a jazz performance are similar to those of dance. Within a jazz performance, individual moments to shine occur when each player has a chance to improvise. But the improvisation takes place within the context of a group. This was equally true for Monica and her dance routine. She needed to practice and be highly cognizant of the group as a whole and her role within it, the entire performance lasting only a few minutes.

The students themselves choreographed the routine in which she performed. Together with the other members of the troupe, they blocked out their particular positions, quite literary each step in the performance, but still leaving room for individual expression and moments of

227 improvisation. In our conversation, Monica spoke of the need to pretend at Metropolitan, as in

“to act a certain way.” Any kind of performance is a form of theatre. Through Show, she learned how to perform, how to act, the one not entirely dissimilar to the other. Both her performance in

Show and pretending as part of the Metropolitan community were kinds of performances.

Through the latter, she learned how to survive and navigate the school community; through the former, she came to belong, found her niche, and thus became one with her peers, the one mediating the other. For her, Show was a pivotal moment in her journey. When citing yet another jazz player, Wilson (1992) described the way in which he thought about the responsibility of the individual and the group:

I want any group I put together to function on that level, where everybody feels they have a place, that they can be themselves, that they can stretch their imaginations and their creative aspirations as far as they are able. (p. 240)

This is precisely what Monica did. At school, she was tasked to perform all the time, but her performances, whether they were on the stage in a more traditional school setting, enabled her to succeed. The reason Show was so important to her is that it demanded her total focus.

Even though her performance lasted only a few seconds, it was exhilarating and enabled her to see herself as part of a school community, not just an interloper within it. Her devotion to her schoolwork had a similar effect. Preparing for classes, tests and exams, gave her a purpose that sustained her. When compared to her academic peers and alumni/ae (two of whom went on to become Nobel Laureates), as bright as she was, she never really got to shine. On the evening

Show was performed, she did, which I believe was essential to her sense of confidence as a student.

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Nate’s Olympic Dreams

Nate’s experience bears similarities. He too practiced a lot. Like the 100 metre Olympic sprinter who trains for 4 years to race for 10 short seconds, the very notion of preparation is paramount if one is to be successful on the big day. Although the opening ceremonies for the

Olympic games, hosted in China in 2008, were spectacular but not without controversy— apparently, the event was enhanced on our TV screens with computer graphics (The Economist,

2008)—what the viewers really wanted to see was “something utterly beautiful, as the best male and female athletes in the world accomplished feats never before seen” (The Economist, 2008, para. 2). Nate approached his education in the same spirit. In his own way, he was trying to accomplish something only he believed only he could do. Each evening after returning home from school, he ate quickly and finished his homework before being driven to hockey or soccer practise, the combination of which he was convinced would eventually lead a university place and a job as a teacher at The Academy. Each day, each week, indeed, each academic and athletic term was undertaken as a kind of campaign. Interestingly, a great many athletes and sports teams talk about their seasons using the language of the campaign. Nate’s big days were his exhibition games when coaches and recruiters came to see him play, as well as exams when he determined to do well and secure the grades required for university entrance. His mother, perhaps is greatest cheerleader, reminded him of the goals they shared. In fact, her encouragement and faith in him are almost entirely consistent with the way coaches prepare athletes for big events.

To succeed was his job and each day doing so involved careful preparation, curiously for the same four-year period that is characteristic of an athlete’s preparations working towards a slot on the national team. He needed to map out his training regime for each of the four years of his high school career. His so-called Olympic moment was the submission of his university

229 applications. Being in the United States on a soccer scholarship and securing a spot on the roster was the prize, his place on the podium. The way in which he prepared is reminiscent of Monica’s preparation for Show and the hours she spent in her room practicing her moves. They each worked tirelessly preparing for their performances and their exams, both of which were important as a means of consolidating their own sense of belonging, an ancillary but critically important benefit. Both activities, school, as well as sports and Show, helped them form relationships within their social networks, informing the arc of their journey. In their minds, they also needed to continue to perform at the highest level to justify the support of their families. For all three, a lot was at stake.

Andrea’s Backstage Pass

For Andrea the comparison also holds, albeit in a somewhat different way. At a decisive moment, she was given a pamphlet that turned out to be a window into an upper-middle-class world. In it, she saw people with whom she could identify. Her friends reinforced this notion. For the well-connected concertgoer who possesses the means, performance artists offer VIP packages to their performances. Such packages can include backstage passes, which offer access to the performer either before or after the show in what is often a curated experience. Such offerings monetize personal contact with the talent. For the artist and recording company, alike, backstage access provides an additional source of revenue. For the pass holder, it provides an intimate view at processes that are shrouded in mystery. The experience is designed to allow the client to touch magic, so-called, and thus become a part of the performance, albeit vicariously.

Being invited backstage is about as good as it gets.

The backstage process is similar to the way in which students and athletes aim to monetize their rehearsal and training. Ultimately, they also want to be acknowledged for what

230 they do. Indeed, all three participants in this study eventually wanted to be compensated for whatever it was they might end up doing for a living. For Nate, that was as a teacher. For

Monica, it was as a businesswoman, and eventually a cleric. For Andrea, it was to be as a consultant, roles that valued their journey and hard-won expertise. The rehearsals, whether they involved athletics, dance, or a visit to an investment bank for the day, enabled these students to enter the new habitus in which they found themselves, a habitus, which in turn altered their own.

They also helped facilitate a sense of belonging and represented critical turning points that propelled them forwards. The idea of inside access demystified the process, making plane that which Andrea hoped to achieve. It provided a window on the world that is available to very few working-class students hoping to live a middle- or upper-middle class life.

Institutional Rituals and the Role of the School

Lawrence-Lightfoot’s (1983) and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’s (1997) portraiture also demands that the researcher interrogate the ways the institutions in which the participants strove to become socially mobile maintain and preserve their existence and also fulfill their mission.

Both imperatives involve creating a climate that facilitates these ends. Independent schools in

Canada run on strategic and annual plans, schedules, timetables, and endless routines. And, perhaps most inevitably, the most successful students are often those who thrive in such highly structured environments. This section examines these rituals, explores their function, and their impact on the participants. Several rituals were common to the schools in this study.

Camps, trips, and the house system

Nate, Monica, and Andrea all participated in camps and/or trips. Andrea and Monica, both attended an introductory camp in Grade 7 during their first year at the school when they were each paired with a Grade 12 student. Similarly, Nate participated in what he described as

231 the Grade 8 Ottawa trip. Both were important bonding experiences, binding students to their schools and to each other. Nate attended other trips, but the one he alluded to encompassed an entire grade and was designed to form bonds between students, embracing the newcomers. Both sets of experiences facilitated relationships between current students and the future alumni/ae.

When describing the experience being paired with a Grade 12 buddy, Andrea looked back on it as an important way to build community, a community that transcends the experience of matriculating students alone.

Her recollections are similar to those of Monica. When asked about what her school might continue to do in her absence, she too spoke of the camp experience. As I noted in her portrait, Monica was also paired with an older student, a practice she believes made an important difference in her experience. She too spoke about the house system, which fulfilled a similar purpose.

House systems have their origins in the British public-school system. In that jurisdiction, private schools are referred to as public schools (and public schools as state schools). They were called public schools because although their mission was to prepare students for university— mostly Oxford and Cambridge—their primary purpose was to prepare students for public life— that is, government roles in Britain’s then burgeoning empire. As public schools in Britain were initially almost all boarding schools, students lived in houses, which were overseen by a housemaster (or don). Such houses are also a feature of independent schools in Canada. In

Britain, coats of arms, crests, colours, and rituals characterized houses. In our time in Canada, they are mostly used for organizational purposes, bear similar hallmarks, and provide a means to raise funds for charity, facilitate sports days, and encourage school spirit.

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Almost universally, they appear to be a more efficacious in the elementary grades than for high school, when students become more self-conscious and less willing to participate.

Nevertheless, houses help foster a sense of community and belonging, which often persists after graduation. Indeed, in my experience with numerous alumni/ae from a variety of independent schools, whatever their degree of participation when they were students, it is not uncommon for alumni/ae to look back on their house affiliations fondly. Monica also encouraged Metropolitan to maintain the house system and thereby preserve a sense of house spirit. Through camps and the house system “there was a lot of mentorship connecting different years,” she said. More than anything she was speaking of the importance of a sense of belonging and community, of which she was clearly a beneficiary.

Academic rigour, extracurricular participation, and overscheduling

Similarly, all three participants spoke at length of the academic expectations that characterized their schools, describing them as challenging. In contrast to schools located in high-poverty areas, schools that serve the affluent are characterized by very high academic expectations (Goodman, 2010). And, as discussed, Canadian independent schools see their primary mission as preparing students for university and gauge their success by their ability to send students to the most competitive universities in the world. In fact, in an almost ritualistic way, each year schools like The Academy and Metropolitan assiduously amend their promotional materials to make note of the range of such universities to which their students received offers, lists that on occasion include the American Ivy League, Canada’s most competitive business and medical programs, as well as direct-entry engineering and medical programs in the Britain and Ireland. The Academy and Metropolitan advertise that 99% or 100% of their graduates receive offers to their first-choice universities.

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These kinds of phenomena characterize the academic and climate of independent schools in Ontario; they also capture the attention and the imaginations of would-be parents. Assessment and evaluation of students is seen as a central feature of such schools, Mathematics and science tests proliferate. Homework, which extends into the evening and night-time, is likewise an important feature of the school day. Secondary students often stay up late into the night to prepare for tests the following day. Many attend extra-help sessions before the school day begins, during lunchtimes, as well as after school ends. Test results, which are often discussed at length by students and teachers, are seen as barometers of university acceptance and future success—even of intelligence.

In an effort to mitigate students’ workload, assessment calendars are produced monthly, which many parents track and comment on. Parent–teacher nights are oversubscribed, and students often attend with their parents and are sometimes required to lead the conversations that take place. Parents—and sometimes, students—complain about teaching methods and practices, and are acutely aware of their academic standing. Simply put, although high standards and high support, a seemingly ideal model characterize the school climate, it fosters a level of intensity, and of course, anxiety, that at key moments in the year that is palpable.

In addition to the academic focus, students are also encouraged (in some schools, required) to participate in extracurricular activities, wellness sessions, as well as extra-help and flex sessions for those who fall behind or want to reach ahead. Flex sessions at The Academy comprised of daily slots in the school day when students direct their own learning. They might for instance choose to spend time in a math, or an English class to complete outstanding work, or to discuss challenges they are facing in those subjects. In these environments, students are busy.

They participate in activities both within and beyond school, whether they include hockey,

234 soccer, or basketball, music, dance, swimming, rowing, or charity work. In a nutshell, the atmosphere in which Monica, Andrea, and Nate were educated was extraordinarily demanding, characterized by grades, homework, extracurricular activities, and in their senior years, university applications, each activity taking place ritualistically across the school year in an environment that is characterized by making plans, schedules, and routine. In some respects, all three participants were groomed for the modern frenetic, white-collar workplace.

The morning commute and school uniforms

Each Friday morning, Nate put on his uniform: dark socks, polishable leather shoes, polyester dress pants, white shirt, blazer and tie, to go to school. “It’s like you’re heading off to the office on Friday,” he said. The ritual made him feel that what he was doing was important, that he belonged to something larger than himself. The practice motivated him. It also appealed to his parents. By extension, they too were a part of the ritual. For Nate, the uniform presaged the world of white-collar employment, which he relished and even revered. As Davies and Guppy

(2006) noted, “different educational settings prepare students [for] the disciplines of different

[kinds of] workplaces. ... Students taught in these different settings develop distinct types of personal demeanours, modes of self-presentation, self-images and social-class identifications for different kinds of jobs” (p. 32). This was clearly true of Nate’s experience.

For the most part, uniforms are a part of the independent school scene both in Ontario and across Canada. In fact, it is interesting that Metropolitan defined itself in part by the absence of a uniform, one presumes, deploying the absence of a uniform policy as a differentiator, reinforcing its egalitarian ethos as the poor person’s private school. As Andrea said, “like you could go there, you didn’t have to be very wealthy, you were solely there because you could perform at a certain level for something.” In addition, the school’s no-uniform policy appealed to

235 families with fewer resources. When discussing the school’s evolution more broadly Andrea also said, “I think while some of the traditions [remain], the school as a whole … operates a lot more like any of the other private schools.” Interestingly, both the presence and absence of a uniform policy fulfill important institutional functions, the one reinforcing the expectations of the world of work, the other reinforcing its supposed egalitarian ethos.

More recently, Andrea had been involved in the school’s recruiting effort. As a part of the exercise, she reached out to a student she knew from a low-income family about attending

Metropolitan and believed that the changing ethos of the school might indeed become problematic if the school was serious about reaching out to underserved communities, like the one from which the girl came. Apparently, the individual felt like Metropolitan was too much of a private school and that it came across to her as a snooty, a place for rich people. Perhaps, somewhat predictably, she didn’t feel comfortable going through the enrolment process. Hence, although school’s no-uniform policy may have been designed to promote the school's ethos and credentials as egalitarian, in the perception of a child from an underserved community the policy made little or no difference.

Bursary conventions and structure or lack thereof

As noted, public schools have well-articulated policies about how funds are allocated to students. Funds for students with exceptionalities are issued according to educational and legal procedures. Decisions about funding, whether for the gifted child or the student with a learning disability (LD) can be appealed. Although it may be reviewed to provide whatever accommodations are required as the child develops, once the funding has been approved, typically it remains throughout a student’s school tenure in the school system. While characterized by affluence private schools operate differently. Arrangements vary across Canada,

236 but private schools in Ontario receive no public funding. For a more detailed discussion, see

Allison (2015). Because provincial funding is not provided to private schools in Ontario, providing accommodations for students with exceptionalities must be funded through school fees. This places a financial burden on private schools. Each year, such schools produce a budget and adjust their fee schedules accordingly, a practice which almost universally leads to an increase in the fee’s parents pay to send their children to a private school. According to the total number of students enrolled, a budget is created, and staff allocated to teaching positions. Thus, while most elite CIS Ontario schools are stable and in some cases have endured over long periods of time, ironically, they often want for money to provide learning supports. Very few private schools in Ontario operate with a mission that reflects a moral imperative to address inequality. Historically private schools in Canada have attracted the ablest students, which meant that they did not need to cater to students with learning challenges. This, however, is changing, as the NAIS “Parent Motivations Study” attests (NAIS, 2011; McGovern & Torres, 2011)

Metropolitan would appear to be one such school, providing generous bursaries for bright children from modest means who can perform on its entrance exam. The Academy does not, although it does extend funds to full-fee-paying families who have fallen on hard times and are unable to pay fees, a practice not widely publicized. Nate’s family received no such support, nor did they ever appeal for it. The annual increase of Monica and Andrea’s fees year-on-year made it difficult for them to remain at the school. A fee increase was the reason Monica was asked to leave, the reason her mother took a part-time job as a waitress, and the reason Andrea’s father went to work at night. Thus, there would appear to be something ritualistic about the way school funds are disbursed to students in private schools. The bursary system, if it can fairly be described as such, is not transparent and appears to be shrouded in mystery. In short, its informal,

237 idiosyncratic nature, suggests that it operates at the discretion of the school’s administration. One must, thus, question by what criteria are bursary decisions made? If indeed the process is a somewhat arbitrary one, whom might it favour? The affluent student who has fallen on hard times, the student who conforms more closely to the school’s ideal demographic, might even race, ethnicity, or gender play a role? Might it favour the child who hails from a habitus that more closely approximates that of those in a position to bestow patronage? Where the reader may recall, Andrea’s experience in the guidance department served to demythologize her understanding of the world’s she hoped to enter. For all three participants, the processes by which bursaries beyond those originally provided remained somewhat incomprehensible. In many respects, this is the nature of privilege, the rules of which like those of social class, are hidden from view, but have profound implications. This is, of course, the nature of hegemony.

Reality is simply accepted as the way things are, the way things should be. As Isenberg noted, these are the unwritten codes of social class behaviours, echoing Bourdieu (1986, 1989, 1990) and Willis (1988), Porter (2015), Khan (2011), and Diwan (1987, as cited in Joshee, 2012, pp.

77–78). Each of the participants clearly felt grateful for the support they received; however, it is important to understand that it was mediated by this phenomenon.

The overwhelming disbursement of such funds in CIS Ontario is for scholarships, which are often given to high-achieving students in the arts, mathematics, and science. The Academy has what is referred to, for example, as an Arts Scholar, along with a number of other prestigious academic awards. In fact, a majority of students hoping to attend the school write a scholarship exam, which provides some relief with regards to school fees. Somewhat ironically, a very large majority of students who receive such awards are from affluent families and have been groomed to succeed in these domains. Writing scholarship exams and participating in the interviews that

238 attend them often involves a great deal of self-promotion with which the students of working families have little experience. The process of issuing awards and the ceremonies at which they are presented take place in ritualistic way, whether it involves recognition as an award winner, being selected as a school a prefect, or an arts scholar. In short, the system reinforces privilege, often providing resources to students who may not need them. In addition, the process also fosters a competitive environment at the school that impacts all students, but particularly the participants of this study, who come from homes with less of the requisite social capital required to be competitive.

Each and all of these rituals informed the participants’ experience and served as a means of structuring their journey, but also of defining that experience. Each day when they commuted to school, they were acutely cognizant of the need to perform, even though their final performances were always some ways off in the future. They navigated camps, trips, the house system, the academic program, the schedule and the extra-curricular program. Indeed, they were constantly preparing for an exam, an exhibition game, or a dance routine, whilst at the same time traversing the bursary system. They were, however, each willing to put in the effort required.

Dissonant Themes

Finally, two dissonant themes emerge from the portraits: not buying-in to the program and the paucity of bursary programs offered by elite private schools in Ontario. Inevitably, there were students who did not buy-in to the reproductive processes facilitated by the school. The most salient example of this is when Andrea said, “It felt very weird for someone to say, ‘I don’t care about schoolwork as much, and I’m going to focus on my passions outside of school instead.’ That was a very uncommon thing for someone to say. There were people who said it, but they were definitely in the minority.” Interestingly, after completing her education at

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Metropolitan, Monica ultimately decided not to pursue a career in business. Instead, she chose to begin the process of entering the ministry in the pursuit of a more authentic life. The process of making such decisions was an essential element of her educational experience. But, in the environments in which they were educated, the mission of those institutions was to prepare students for university and the world of upper-middle class, white-collar work with all the demands and rewards it implies. As Apple (1995) noted, each student was being prepared for class-based roles in a complex system of sorting and assignment that is an essential function of schools. Their schools’ ethics were no different. Of course, their experience was mediated by time, changing cultural and societal expectations, and a changing economic climate, but in the period in which this study takes place, the evidence suggests that students’ not buying-in was uncommon.

In the heat of the battle the participants were afforded little time to reflect upon the meaning of what they accomplished. As Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) wrote, “subjects struggling for success may not have time for the luxury of recognition of achievement, or the perspective of situating struggle within a larger context” (p. 37). They were called each day to return to the breach. In fact, the intensity with which they pursued own educational achievement suggests that a single failure might have undermined their entire project. As a person who comes from a similar milieu, I often felt this way—and, sometimes, still feel this way.

While each of the participants worked hard to stay on the train and to perform, they did so against a background of economic uncertainty. This was hard, but was is also noteworthy is that while Monica and Andrea’s school did have a relatively healthy, if limited, bursary program,

Nate’s school did not, which my research indicates is true for most elite private schools in the province. In fact, rather than seeking to offer a bursary program, the school’s resources, like so

240 many others, were used to provide scholarships for those who had been groomed to secure them.

In a time when clearly Canada is increasingly characterized by income inequality, this seems odd, dissonant. In fact, even though some schools do indeed have aspirations to engage in the betterment of society, as a community they appear not to have done so in a meaningful way.

Thus, these two dissonant themes, the uncommon rarity of not buying-in to a conventional pathway and the paucity of CIS Ontario and CAIS schools with meaningful bursary programs for the bright children of lesser means are noteworthy.

The dissonant themes are important because they reveal that these schools are extremely efficient at facilitating social mobility for the students they choose to matriculate, regardless of the socioeconomic background, of getting students to buy-in. At the same time, they have also been effective at preserving their exclusive and relatively narrow mission—that is, at not broadening and extending their remit to include greater numbers of students from lesser means.

In Ontario, private schools remain schools for the elite and therefore do not play a significant role in facilitating social equality, rather it would appear, that apart from isolate schools, such as

Metropolitan, they most likely exacerbate it.

Nonetheless, despite the mind-numbing announcement to mind the gap, rather than the encouraging refrain of all-aboard, the path of social mobility through elite education remains extremely slender, and even those schools whose aim has been to broaden it may well become a thing of the past. This suggests the value of not necessarily expending energy to broaden access to elite secondary schools, but rather to borrow the methods by which elite institutions enable social mobility and where appropriate deploy them in publicly funded settings, particularly in underserved communities.

CHAPTER 11

STUDY LIMITATIONS, CONCLUSIONS,

RECOMMENDATIONS, AREAS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH,

AND CONCLUDING COMMENTS

This study aimed to understand the social mobility experience of bright students of lesser means. In doing so, it examined the role the Three C’s and personal agency played in this process. Within these parameters, it explored an overlooked and understudied pathway: the journeys of three young people who attended two of Canada’s most prestigious private secondary schools. Their portraits provided insight into their inner and outer experience, as well as the role the schools played in assisting them to achieve their aspirations. The study also discussed the practices these schools used to preserve their existence.

Study Limitations

It is true that it did not explore the merits of private education, save to say that PISA

(2011) asserted the value of their role as “incubators of innovation” (p. 1). In an era that is characterized by an increasing tendency to privatize education, whether by means of charter schools, voucher systems, or other educational policies, important though they are, I chose not to explore the merits of these particular approaches. Furthermore, it did not interrogate the impact high-achieving students, such as those in this study, had on the public schools they left to attend private schools. For clearly, their achievement now squarely lies with the institutions they attended, not the schools from which they came, which may well have been impoverished by their absence.

Ultimately, I limited my examination to the perceptions of the participants as adults. But did not explore the perceptions or experience of their parents, extended families, or even their

241 242 peers, which undoubtedly would have provided additional context and produced more useful data. My study was also limited in that it was not longitudinal. It did not follow the progress of

Nate, Monica, and Andrea throughout their lives, somewhat akin to the Up intergenerational documentary study in Britain (Apted, 2013), which followed the lives of 14 children from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds at 7-year intervals throughout their lives.

In addition, my study used a purposive sampling method to identify each of the participants, who would eventually go on to take part in the study. In order to avoid the possibility of bias creeping into the process, a rigorous selection criterion was used. However, I acknowledge that while this approach has enormous benefits in terms of producing a manageable quantity of extraordinarily rich data, it is also subject to bias. To militate against this concern, I did, however, think carefully about not only the benefits of the approach, but also its potential pitfalls. In fact, I would argue, that having acknowledged this concern, the portraits of the participants and the quality of the analysis speak for themselves.

Bearing in mind these limitations, I sought to understand my participants’ experience in two dimensions: the outward manifestations of their experience, that is, the facts of their lives, as well as their inner journey, that which they were willing to share with me, albeit based on the trust we were able to establish. I aimed to honour their journeys in whatever form they took.

Lawrence-Lightfoot employed an ethnographic approach, which involved the use of participant observation, and developed her portraits, particularly those found in The Good School

(1983), over an extended period of time. In contrast, my work was compressed by circumstances.

Undoubtedly, a more extended engagement with my subjects would have provided a still more nuanced picture of their journeys. As such, my derivative use of portraiture imposed additional

243 limitations on the study. However, I would argue, that it remains a genuine attempt to explore the participants’ experience in a thoughtful, disciplined, and unbiased way.

As Hobsbawm (2016) acknowledged, studies of a qualitative nature are somewhat inevitably vulnerable to the subjectivity of the researcher who conducts them. They have their limits. I have acknowledged this, and as such have aimed to further mitigate this concern, by focusing squarely on the experience of my study’s participants. Indeed, what makes the study unique is that their experience was filtered and in part interpreted through my own.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that although my study is limited to the experience of disadvantaged students in elite settings, which I argue is relevant to schools more broadly; the scope of the study presents an additional limitation. Many public schools comport with one or more of Gaztambide-Fernández’s (2009) criteria and would similarly be worthy of study.

Conclusions Regarding Major Themes

School: Proximity to Elite Education

For a family to send their child to an independent school, they need to live within reasonable proximity to that school. In Canada, the majority of such schools are located in and around large urban areas. Being within such proximity provides the means by which to acquire educational credentials, as well as a context in which to exploit them. It can provide the connections and social capital that are critical to students’ success at university and beyond

(Jack, 2019).

However, as Gaztambide-Fernández (2009) noted, one must first know about such schools before one can aspire to attend one. The participants of this study were fortunate enough to live within striking distance of their schools. Nate’s school was close enough for the school to

244 be able to offer him a bus service provided by the school. Both women used public transportation, which similarly was both affordable and accessible.

Family and Culture: Socially Aspirant Parents

For a child to be identified as gifted, or selected to go to private school, and thus seen as being special in some way, the individual’s parents must be cognizant of certain educational processes. In short, they must aspire for their children. Parental aspirations of this sort derive from multiple sources, whether they are the result of ethnic capital (Postepska, 2019; Shah,

Dwyer, & Modood, 2010), social capital (Daly, 2010; Christakis & Fowler, 2009; Putnam, 2000,

2015), cultural capital (Harker, 1990), or even through happenstance. Dana, Gurau, Light, and

Muhammad (2019) have explored this notion albeit within the context of developing an entrepreneurial mindset. Although it does not speak directly to the notion of educational aspirations, it is instructive and provides additional context.

Although the origins of these kinds of capital are not the focus of this study, it remains true that a child’s parents must not only recognize their child’s potential, but also identify and locate schools, private elite, or otherwise, that their children might be eligible to attend. At least initially, they must become their children’s greatest advocates. They must also be willing to make sacrifices. Sending a child to a private school in Ontario, even to a private school that provides financial aid is expensive, as, currently, no provincial or federal financial support is provided.

The support parents provide also needs to be on-going and occur in a number of dimensions. Not only must parents pay school fees (which increase on an annual basis), they must also find the resources to pay for school uniforms, textbooks, computers, trips, as well as all the other extra’s that make up a private school experience. They must also be willing to provide

245 practical support, which, if one owns a car, can mean driving their children to extracurricular activities and visits with their peers, as well as providing additional funds for public transportation, unless of course it is subsidized and/or provided by the school or the state. In addition, students require a quiet place to work. On some level, parents must also possess the capacity to be engaged with their child’s school journey, whether it is with regards to their academic concerns, homework, or extracurricular activities. In my study, two of the participants,

Monica and Nate needed more support than the third, Andrea. This, of course, is true of all students: some need more support than others. However, as discussed, perhaps more than anything else, it is the unspoken expectations of parents that are the most critical form of support

(People for Education, 2008, 2011).

The challenge for many working parents is that they often have so little time and few financial resources. Whereas for upper-middle and upper-class parents, time may be a more accessible commodity, as they often have more control of it. For poorer parents, generally, it is not. Many working parents are shift-workers and may well work several jobs. Others, particularly those from other countries and other cultures, can find educational processes intimidating and sometimes incomprehensible. Even though they possess their own social capital, they are not always equipped to navigate the mores of upper-middle class private education.

Giftedness: Self-Fulfilling Prophesies and Timing

Self-fulfilling prophesies

The age at which children are identified as gifted is critical. Monica and Andrea were identified as gifted students in Grade 3 when they were 8 years old. Nate became a lifer at The

Academy, having attended the school for the entire duration of his school experience. Thus, he

246 was likewise set apart from his local peers at an early age. Being identified as exceptional propelled the participants forward on their journeys. All three benefitted from an exclusive experience that included smaller classes and an abundance of resources.

However, the most salient effect of being identified was that the identification also raised the expectations of those around them—their teachers, peers, and families. In fact, there is a well-established body of literature that affirms the importance of parent expectations in student achievement. Indeed, of all the possible effects, parent expectations are one of the strongest

(People for Education, 2008, 2011). That said, being identified as such also raised their own expectations of themselves. Coupled with the pressure they each felt to justify the investment their families had made in their education, these expectations meant that not doing their homework, or, indeed, not simply doing their best was never really an option. Being seen as gifted signalled to each of them that they were capable. This capability was a result of the ability they each possessed, whether they were labeled as such through a formal or an informal process.

Clearly, there is something different about the way in which gifted children are treated: more is expected, but more is given.

The identification helped them overcome the challenges they faced. Although he acknowledged that at times his parents were harsh with him, Nate also understood that their intensity was due to the belief they held in his ability and by extension his potential. Monica’s experience was littered with difficulty, but, regardless, she kept going, similarly driven by her gifted status, the ability it suggested, and the opportunity it provided. Monica’s belief—that she was smarter than the rest of the class—and the pleasure she took in writing tests propelled her forwards. In the guidance pamphlet Andrea was given, she saw a pathway forward. However, her reaction to the document was based on the foundation of having been seen as gifted for some

247 time. In sum, being seen as gifted became a self-fulfilling prophecy for all three. As youngsters, they were each seen as being special in some way. Perhaps, not surprisingly, they turned out to be so.

Timing

For each of them, being single out took place early in their educational journey and meant that they became the beneficiaries of a particular set of opportunities, such as access to the enriched programs that were available in each of their schools, programs that accelerated their progress. In fact, Andrea noted that developing a sense of ambition needed to happen early, especially for the children of parents who were unable to be active participants in their children’s education. Indeed, if one is not able to access this kind of opportunity at key moments, it may well not present itself again, or may only do so in a different time and form, which may not be as easily accessible. “Time is a game played beautifully by children,” wrote Heraclitus (as cited in

Robinson, 1987, p. 130).

As an immigrant child growing up in a Chinese cultural milieu and for whom English was a second language, Monica had difficulty in adapting to the cultural mores of a new school.

However, like Andrea and Nate, she faced these challenges as a relatively young person in Grade

7. Her process of aclimitization was easier than if she had been an older student. This phenomenon is borne out by Chetty et al. (2016) and Chetty and Hendren (2018), whose work reinforces this notion that for a child to benefit from moving to a better neighbourhood, or even living in one, accrues benefits most efficaciously for the younger child.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the age at which Monica and Andrea were identified as gifted students and the impact this had on their academic trajectory. When discussing why elite hockey players, or for that matter, successful students, who are seen as

248 being more able than their peers and singled out for a preferential treatment, Gladwell (2008) posited that their selection is often the result of being bigger, stronger, faster. Such attributes can serve as proxies for being older, but not necessarily being the possessor of any innate ability as is often presumed.

Regardless of why students are selected, an examination of which is beyond the scope of this study, being identified as gifted has practical consequences. As Gladwell (2008) noted, preselected hockey players get more ice time, more and better coaching, all of which in turn is reinforced with more positive feedback, in a sense the kind of social persuasion Bandura (1997) saw as being so important to developing confidence and agency. The same can be said of education. The gifted child, regardless of whether they are gifted in math, the arts, music, or dance, is often provided with a range of supports and resources, which may include more opportunity, more support, even more encouragement and affirmation. In addition, such resources might include smaller class sizes, better teaching, increased homework expectations, all of which are provided because they are seen as particularly worthy. The label “gifted” and the process it facilitates can afford students the impetus to do more, and provide them with the support to do so. In an unpublished poverty background paper, Goodman (2010) discussed the inverse of positive expectations, and the effect they can have facilitating the low academic expectations that often characterize poorer schools in poorer areas of Ontario.

The identification of Monica and Andrea as “gifted” was a formal bureaucratic procedure. For Nate, it was not a teacher, per se, that identified him as such, but rather his parents. Arguably for him, the effect was somewhat similar. He too benefitted from the smaller class sizes that characterize elite private secondary schools, as well as from a plethora of support and opportunity, all of which shaped the development of his own sense of agency and

249 aspirations. There is a body of literature dealing with the impact of self-fulfilling expectations on young people in educational contexts (Francis, Connolly, Archer, Mazenod, Pepper, Sloan, . . . &

Travers, 2017; Raman, 2011), and it is beyond the scope of this study to explore them further, suffice to say, that they shape and enrich the experience of underprivileged children in elite school settings.

By varying degrees, the parents of all three participants were socially aspirant. Nate’s parents wanted something better for him than the steel mill in which his father worked. Monica’s parents doggedly worked to support her. Their support, whether it was in the form of stuffing credit card envelopes or driving a forklift, was constant. So too was the emotional support of her mother, who, when Monica was in Grade 7, “got a job downtown working as a waitress in a

Chinese restaurant” so that she could escort her home and bring more money into the household.

Although he was an electrical engineer, Andrea’s father stacked shelves to pay the bills and support his daughter. All three participants’ extended families supported them. Andrea’s grandmother helped to pay her fees; Monica’s grandmother bought the family a house in a poorer neighbourhood; and Nate’s uncle provided him with a part-time job on a road crew in the summertime. His grandparents, although unable to entirely transcend their own social origins, came to Canada to provide a better life for their children and grandchildren—all three families valued education. As immigrant families, they possessed what Shah, Dwyer, and Modood (2010) described as “ethnic capital” (p. 1110), a cultural respect for the value of education, authority, and its efficacy in their lives. See also Borjas (1992) and Kim (2018) for a broader discussion of the topic. This confluence of supports in each of the participants’ lives provided them with essential supports that assisted them in navigating their own unique journeys. One might also argue, they provided their support because they saw their child as gifted.

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Finances: The Importance of Comprehensive Funding

For all three participants and their family’s money remained a perennial issue. In fact, one of the most salient aspects of my study is the frequency with which financial concerns are discussed. Nate worried about whether or not his father might lose his job. Monica questioned she whether she should be able to remain at the school. Andrea spoke with affection about the financial support she received from her parents. In short, each family’s finance is present in both the foreground and background of my findings.

Social Capital: Guidance Departments, School Climate, Role Models, and Network Connectors

Guidance departments

Well-resourced guidance departments are a hallmark of elite secondary schools

(Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Rivera, 2015; Weis et al., 2014). They are also a powerful source of social capital. Even from a cursory examination of CIS Ontario school websites, it is plainly apparent that university acceptance is the core mission of their member schools and in part is driven by the intimate knowledge as well as the relationships guidance counselors enjoy with university admissions officers. On these sites, university offers are prominently displayed. The references on these sites allude to the extraordinarily high numbers of their graduates that are accepted into universities of their first choice. In fact, one e-brochure stated that the school

“increase(s) student success by ensuring they benefit from our 100% university acceptance rate, and that they thrive at university once they get there” (Our Kids Media, 2018, para. 33).

An alumnae testimony from a graduate of The Academy offered some insight into the university guidance process at that school:

The university counselling program at The Academy aided in every stage of my university placement. I was supported from when I began to educate myself on

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potential schools, to when I fully accepted my offer. Through guest speakers, information nights and one-on-one university prep I never doubted my chances of reaching my full potential. I do feel as if I was given the appropriate guidance in a timely fashion to apply successfully to my first-choice post-secondary programs. The Academy has an excellent record of students attending post-secondary institutions. I was able throughout the application process to turn to not only my counsellor but teachers, alumni and experts in my field of study. I was able to confidently apply to the top schools in Canada knowing I had a support system. (Our Kids Media, 2018, para. 1)

For these fee-charging institutions, first-choice university acceptance is the Holy Grail. Indeed, numerous studies attest to the herculean effort schools go to ensure the successful graduation of their students (Frenette & Chan, 2015; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Maxwell & Maxwell,

1995; Rivera, 2015; Weis et al., 2014). Weis et al. (2014) went so far as to detail lengths to which parents working in concert with university counsellors in elite secondary schools micromanage the university applications process.

This is all undertaken within the context of a rich alumni/ae community, reinforced by the fact that elite schools often have established relationships with admissions officers at competitive universities. In most schools, this process begins in Grade 10 (in the United States even earlier) when students begin the consultation process and engage in extensive and ongoing conversations with university counsellors. The process continues into Grade 11 and Grade 12 and can often involve last-minute negotiations with teachers regarding test results, retests, alternative assignments, and grades, the final arbiter of university acceptance in Canada.

In addition to college and university counselling, The Academy’s Student Success Centre

(SSC), also hosted numerous workshops, facilitated guest speakers, university fairs, socioemotional counselling, additional academic support, extra help with university applications and supplementary statements, which are often required for competitive university programs.

The SSC has teaching assistants (TAs), who are fully qualified teachers, one of whom has a

252 master’s degree in Engineering, the other a Ph.D. in English literature, both of whom assisted students with writing such statements. TAs also helped students with schoolwork and to create study plans and academic schedules. The guidance department also facilitated Advance

Placement (AP) exams, SATs, PSATs. It also offered support as students embarked on the process of selecting their particular courses, whilst at the same time being mindful of their aspirations.

At the behest of school administrations, early-warning systems or no-surprises policies, are put in place to alert parents to failing or less-than-optimal test results. If students appear destined to fail, the process involves counselling students into alternative pathways. This practice is particularly evident in Grade 11, which some counsellors describe as an experimental year.

Such departments also offer coaching sessions that help students to acquire the skills to be effective in interview settings. Panels of alumni/ae make presentations to students interested in various university programs and careers. University fairs take place on campus, when recruiters come (sometimes en mass) to visit elite schools and promote their programs. University trips are organized for students to visit universities of their choice and are occasions when students have an opportunity to meet university admissions officers and thus gain an intimate understanding of their particular admissions priorities.

Guidance processes are comprehensive, tailored to individual student needs, and consistently produce results, often at the eleventh hour when a counsellor may make the call to a university admissions officer about a student who is on the bubble, but may have mitigating circumstances that warrant a second look. In short, the processes at work are a defining feature of elite schools, and schools do indeed celebrate university acceptances as and when they are received, whether they are to the U.S., Britain, or to prestigious programs across Canada. What

253 these systems also mean is that rarely do students fall through the cracks, as ultimately their educational journey is framed within the context of a university offer. To paraphrase a member of The Academy’s alumni, we were all headed in the same direction, to university.

On some level, each of the participants benefitted from a similar experience, even though they were all extremely independent minded. Rather than a wrap-around service, Nate, Monica, and Andrea simply needed a nudge in the right direction. To their credit, they were as self- directed in the university applications’ process as they were as students. They clearly benefitted from the social and alumni/ae networks of which they were apart, the encouragement and facilitation of their teachers, as well as the fact that they were on the train, travelling together with a group of students who saw university attendance as a nonchoice. It was simply their destiny, their natural pathway, even their right. In short, if a student is motivated, it is difficult for them to fail.

School climate, role models, and network connectors

The way in which role models present themselves in such schools is myriad. In most elite independent schools in Ontario, students are drawn from a narrow socioeconomic stratum and thus share similar social experiences, histories, and habitus. Even though such schools enjoy a degree of ethnic diversity, they are not characterized by economic diversity. And though some schools promote economic diversity and may even go as far as to make it a differentiator, on aggregate this is not the case across the independent school system in Canada. For most schools, the scholarship or bursary student exists as an extremely small minority.

In such settings, there are often a plethora of high-achieving students from whom other students benefit. Classes can include students who are the children of doctors, dentists, academics, successful business leaders, and entrepreneurs, who are intent on reproducing the

254 success of their parents, which in some cases is intergenerational in nature. Without a doubt not all students are a natural fit for the highly academic and high-power social environment of the elite school. However, the presence of those who are has a positive effect on those who come from different kinds of habitus, where they do not necessarily benefit from access to these kinds of white-collar, professional role models. Social mixing in school benefits less-advantaged children (Coleman, 1966; Maeroff, 1998).

This dynamic is evident in all three portraits. Monica worked hard, achieved a very high level of results and gained a place in a competitive business program, but at the same time felt that she was underachieving. “It was, she said, a “very competitive environment.” “[Students compared] marks,” a phenomenon that further compounded the competitive nature of the school.

Andrea was likewise motivated to stay abreast, and even transcend, her immediate competition.

“starting in eighth grade,” she said, “I was very motivated by my lack of being in the top three.”

Nate’s experience shares similar traits. “At 16,” he said, “I was competing against 22-year-olds,

23-year-olds.” The notion of competition, whether for marks, or a spot on an exhibition team, drove the participants onward and had the effect raising their own level of achievement. In part, it characterized the school climate.

However, at the same time, their social networks now also included teachers, who were heavily invested in their success. Indeed, one might reasonably assume these individuals were driven not simply by a passion for excellence, but also by the students’ and parents’ aspirations for their children, expectations that were framed and reinforced by high levels of university admissions that were promoted by the schools’ marketing, recruitment, and advancement departments.

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The presence of high-achieving peers from enriched backgrounds and the participants’ daily interaction with them meant that these students existed in a social environment that was resource rich. In addition, they too had access to role models who were connected to the connected. The combination of these characteristics enabled them to envision their lives in ways that are almost entirely unavailable to most high school students, let alone the poor. All three participants benefitted greatly from access to the environment and the social networks it was comprised of. Indeed, if the reader recalls, the portrait of Nate began by describing a gathering of

Academy alumni/ae, which personified the setting and social networks that shaped his experience.

Teachers: Unconventional Teachers and a Diverse Faculty

Teachers were central to the lives of all three students. Indeed, my study’s findings showed that each of their social-mobility journeys were impacted by their relationships with particular teachers. However, the teachers who were memorable to all three participants tended to be somewhat unconventional, willing to step outside everyday school routines to connect with each of them personally. In some way, all left a mark.

Monica was profoundly moved by the teacher (not identified in her portrait) who let a student live with her because she was experiencing difficulty at home. Nate teachers were willing to let him leave one class and help to teach another, a practice that one can reasonably assume is not a widespread. Andrea was inspired by the Spanish teacher who told stories of her adventures in Latin America and freely espoused her political views. Another teacher wrote dates on the board that students needed to correct as part of the learning experience.

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Conclusions Regarding Minor Themes

Extracurricular Activities

Extracurricular activities were central to the school experience of the participants.

Whether they played soccer, hockey, wrestled, or participated in DECA, their membership in them mattered. In studies of poorer individuals who attended private schools (Power, Whitty, &

Wisby, 2006; Power, Curtis, Whitty, & Edwards, 2010), which I have discussed, although the participants became upwardly mobile, as I noted they did not develop social capital that is a salient feature of this study. In contrast, for some, their experience might best be characterized by the notion of “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132).

Success and Opportunity

Each participant found hope in different places. What animated and excited Andrea would not have inspired or Nate or Monica. Opportunity was where each participant found it: the guidance department, a physical education teacher, or a vice principal who offered a summer job.

The idea is a critical one because although opportunity presented itself in different ways in different contexts, the participants also needed the confidence to exploit it.

There are other contexts in which opportunity and resources present themselves to students in elite school settings: internships, jobs in companies owned by the parents of friends, introductions to individuals working in fields in which students aspire to work, for example, the milieu suggesting and reinforcing a myriad of possibilities that present themselves as legitimate choices. In these environments, university acceptance and upper-middle class, white-collar work present themselves as nonchoices. This is the nature of privilege: the more one enjoys, the less one is aware of it, the opportunities it presents right and true. This is not the case for their counterparts, the economically disadvantaged.

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Recommendations Regarding Major Themes

My recommendations are made to four sets of stakeholders: practitioners, policy makers, parents, and students. The term “practitioners” refers to teachers and administrators in both private and public schools; the term “policy makers” refers to those in government departments, or professional associations who have the power to shape educational policy at a local, provincial, or national level in the public or private sector; the term “parents” refers to parents with children who are either attending a private or a public school, as well as parents who are considering transferring between such schools. The term “students” refers to students who are considering attending an elite private school, or who may be attending one. The recommendations are provided in no particular order. They are, however, addressed to the relevant stakeholders.

Practitioners

• Facilitate engagement of parents within the school community • Encourage the matriculation of fellow travelers • Develop social capital within the school community

Practitioners and Policy Makers

• Adopt elite school practices that assist students in reimagining their own educational experiences and lives

Provide bussing and transportation

• Provide comprehensive funding

• Invest in guidance departments and support their role in facilitating postsecondary attendance

• Encourage and employ entrants to the profession from nontraditional backgrounds

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Parents

• Seek elite education at the earliest possible age (only to those parents considering elite education for their students)

Students

• Seek to secure the full support of one’s family. If this is not available, seek the support of mentors, and/or individuals who can serve as educational advocates (particularly those) who may have traversed similar circumstances and/or share a similar socioeconomic background

• Work consistently to maintain one’s academic standing

• Participate in extra-curricular programs bearing in mind that your participation maybe circumscribed by your financial circumstances

• Become an active member in a variety of social networks

• Serve as a mentor for other students contemplating a similar path, or a career in education

For a full understanding of each of my recommendations, next I provide an in-depth discussion of each one, presented in the order I have listed the stakeholder categories.

Discussion of Recommendations to Practitioners

Facilitate engagement of parents within the school community

Facilitating student and community engagement is an essential part of any school’s mission. In this regard, it is important for schools to provide ways for the parents of children of lesser financial means to participate in the community in ways that work for them. Schools can do this in a multitude of ways: by providing translation services, cultural events, where such families feel welcome, and, perhaps more than anything else, simply including them in the life of the school. School administrators might also consider home visits as alternatives to parent-

259 teacher evenings, which, because of a parent’s work commitments, might be difficult to attend.

Such encounters will facilitate a greater understanding of the child’s home life and cultural heritage.

Encourage the matriculation of fellow travelers

Although one hopes there might be more, in my study, a fellow traveler is one of at least two students who receive financial aid. Andrea benefitted greatly from the presence of another student who was receiving financial aid. Indeed, she later recalled that initially her closest friends turned out to be those on financial aid and described the process by which she became close to them as a kind of subliminal self-selection.

If one is to accept Clark’s (2014) notion that social mobility is indeed a rare thing, bursaries for children from low-income families are to be encouraged. Clearly, according to the testimony paraphrased, having more than one student in an institution on financial aid means that those individuals do not take the arduous journey alone. Unquestionably, fellow travelers are an important support that further mediates the dislocation students sometimes feel as they the move between social worlds. Friends matter. But they are central to the adolescent experience in high school. Thus, I recommend not offering scholarships in isolation, but rather providing them to more than a single student. Such an approach is beneficial to the students as well as to the institutions themselves, as it will improve student outcomes for each of those students, and thus help to ensure they graduate after having had a positive school experience. It may well also turn out to be true that because of the profound gratitude the recipients of bursaries feel, they may well be more likely to contribute to their alma maters’ as adults, whether in terms of their time or supporting the institution financially.

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As part of the process of recruiting students from underserved communities, schools should also adopt an empathetic approach. Individuals tasked with outreach, ideally should have lived experience of economic hardship. In her portrait, Andrea spoke about reaching out to a friend’s niece who she hoped to encourage applying to Metropolitan. This girl’s knowledge of the school was limited. However, she held a stereotypical view of private schools and the kinds of students who attend them. The misconception she spoke of was related to the school’s uniform policy and the perception she had of the uniform acting as a proxy for the school being “stuck up”—the idea that the institution was elitist and certainly not place for a person like her. Andrea attempted to disabuse her of this notion, but the perception remained.

The comments are revealing and suggest that if a school is intent on providing access to economically disadvantaged students, it is imperative they do so sensitively. Andrea’s reflections suggest that this kind of outreach might be more successful if it is done by individuals with a similar socioeconomic background to those they aim to recruit. However, her comments also indicate that in order to achieve such an end, it is important to create a virtuous recruitment cycle that impacts the culture of the school: increased numbers of poorer students being recruited, enrolling, graduating, and eventually going on to become teachers at the school is imperative if there are to be increased numbers alumni/ae from lesser means who have benefitted from the school and thus want to reach out to others who share a similar background. Apparently, the individual who reached out to her friend’s niece had a strong social conscience, but no lived experience of economic hardship.

Develop social capital within the school community

It is by means of a school community that social capital is shared. A school’s most precious resource is not simply its students, but also its teachers, administrators, staff, alumni/ae,

261 and local community members. It is essential that educators wherever they are found see themselves not only as teachers who deliver curriculum and take care of children, but also as members of a community. The more relationships individuals within schools have with members of the local community—and beyond—the more social capital they will have to share with their students. In elite settings, alumni/ae are considered one of the school’s most precious assets. This

I believe is true of all schools. Alumni/ae are community members too, and, thus, by extension, also enjoy relationships—often too numerous to count—with other people within their communities, people who like members of alumni/ae also enjoy relationships with individuals in the broader community, many of whom possess valuable resources. In many respects, it is through these kinds of relationships that Granovetter’s (1973) notion of the “strength of weak ties” (p. 1360) plays out and can facilitate upward mobility.

Hence, I posit, teachers, administrators, staff members, and the like, in all schools must also see as part of their professional practice to develop relationships beyond their particular school gates and thus expand the reach of the social networks to which they—and by extension—their students belong, and thus enrich the repository of social capital from which their students can draw. It would also be beneficial for administrators, school superintendents and directors, alike, to facilitate connections between schools characterized by different socioeconomic strata. Doing so would, similarly, increase the reservoir of social capital available to all.

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Discussion of Recommendations to Practitioners and Policy Makers

Adopt elite school practices that assist students in reimagining their own educational experiences and lives

Elite private schools are most deft at encouraging their students to imagine their lives in ways that align with their aspirations. Indeed, their students’ educational experiences suggest to them that university entrance and the lives that might follow are nonchoices. They are simply the way things are. Thus, using elite education as a model, I propose other schools assist their students in similar ways to reimagine their educational experience and lives, which I argue would not simply involve placing a greater emphasis on post-secondary opportunities, but also more broadly in asserting the value of other options, such as trade schools, entrepreneurship, along with an effort in public policy to ensure they are remunerated appropriately, bearing in mind their value to society.

As discussed in Chapter 10, I propose not simply sending more students of lesser means to elite secondary schools, even though doing so undoubtedly benefits those students fortunate enough be able to attend such schools. In contrast, I posit that publicly funded schools in Ontario and beyond consider adopting some of the approaches taken by elite schools to assist their own students in reimagining their educational experience and lives. Doing so successfully is done most effectively by carefully considering their own demographic and social context, the resources available within their communities, and the needs of their particular students. It is also important to bear in mind that matters of educational achievement and social mobility are further impacted and mediated by issues concerning gender, race, and ethnicity.

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Provide bussing and transportation

Providing bussing or funding transportation to and from school is of paramount importance. Every student’s day begins with the process of getting to school, which is often no easy task. Indeed, the image of the bright yellow school bus pulling up at the door or the end of the driveway is almost a cliché in both Canada and the U.S. As such, whenever they possess the means to do so, I recommend, elite private schools provide bussing for students from underserved or outlying areas. This might, for example involve providing a bus service, a benefit some schools already offer. However, policy makers and practitioners might also consider providing funds so that students can pay for public transportation. As Anyon (2005) posited, policy makers should consider that efficacious education policy should address issues around affordable housing and accessible transportation, as well as educational issues.

Provide comprehensive funding

Providing comprehensive funding to students and their families is critically important, as it facilitates their full participation in the life of the institution. As was revealed in the studies of

Britain’s assisted placeholder scheme (Power et al., 2006; Power et al., 2010), being able to participate in extracurricular activities had a powerful effect on students’ ability to integrate into their schools. The placeholders’ inability to be able to participate in anything other than the schooling, meant they got to attend school, but were not allowed to participate in the activities that followed the school day. Nor did they join together with other students on school trips.

Hailing from a different social milieu, they were provided with few opportunities to develop lasting relationships with others above and beyond those that occurred in a classroom setting.

In contrast, Monica and Andrea received bursary support that enabled them to participate in a variety of activities. Her family paid a third of the overall cost of her school fees; Andrea’s

264 family paid about half. However, each year as the school's fees increased, so did their portion of them, making it increasingly difficult for them to keep up. It is commendable that an administrator stepped in and offered Monica a summer job. Indeed, in her comments about what the school should stop doing, she emphatically endorsed the importance of keeping the escalating fees in check so as to permit students like her to stay in school. Nate’s family did not receive a financial bursary, but had the school been more thoughtful about how much time they gave to families to put aside money for trips, his parents might well have been able to find the funds for him to be able participate in his grad trip. Doing so might have meant scheduling school trips in a more predictable way, perhaps announcing them at the beginning of each school year, or even on a 3- or 4-year cycle. Modest innovations such as these would indeed have made his experience and that of his peers in a similar situation infinitely richer.

For Monica and Andrea, comprehensive funding, which considered annual fee increases and funding for participation in extracurricular activities and school trips, would have similarly improved their experience, enabling them to do more with less stress. It is admirable that within its financial limitations, Metropolitan was willing to offer bursaries to students in need of them.

However, the nature of these arrangements is worthy of consideration. Doing so involves a mindset which is informed by Portelli, Shields, and Vibert’s (2007), ethic of care, while being cognizant of the fact that these students contribute at least as much as they cost. In short, it is an approach informed by a notion of equity rather than equality.

Private schools do indeed facilitate social mobility for the bright child of lesser means, and in no way do I want to discount the efforts they do make. I have personally witnessed the social mobility journeys of many such students. However, like all educational arrangements, they operate within given financial resources and budgets. Nonetheless, making the arrangements

265 more congenial to the students who do attend them is, I argue, an imperative. Because the evidence does not show a collective willingness to extend their remit to increase the enrolment of children from lower SES groups, although I applaud them, again, I believe it is more efficacious to learn from their practices to affect greater social mobility in public education. Nevertheless, I strongly suggest that students who are invited to attend elite private schools are allowed to become full participants in them. The impact of doing so would appear to be immeasurable.

Invest in guidance departments and support their role in facilitating postsecondary attendance

One of this study’s most salient findings is the role guidance departments play in supporting students’ postsecondary attendance. For the most part, these departments in elite settings work with students who are determined to attend university. Nevertheless, it is this kind of on-going, wrap-around approach and assiduous attention to detail that characterizes guidance departments in elite settings. As they strive to remain competitive and offer value for money to their stakeholders, guidance plays a critical role.

All secondary schools have such departments, but the way in which they are staffed, operate and facilitate student success is what sets elite school departments apart from their public counterparts. It is central to their mission, which is driven by student enrolment. The work they do cannot be over-estimated. In the same way that elite secondary schools share intelligence through their professional networks about their guidance policies and procedures, it may well benefit practitioners and policymakers in public schools to explore them more fully and even borrow from elite school departments as a way of trying to further facilitate their students’ social mobility.

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At the same time schools share information about guidance, they also form important relationships with university admissions officers. As such, they are in a position to reach out to those individuals to discuss—and promote—their particular students’ university applications.

This kind of social capital exists as a result of belonging to a social network. The ability to discuss challenges which may have impacted a student’s performance or even their unique qualities may mean that the university is willing to take a second look at a student who might otherwise be rejected. At a time when funding for public education is increasingly in short supply, it may well be unrealistic to increase schools’ guidance department budgets, but as schools go about allocating the funds they have, paying more attention to their policies, staffing, and professional development is worthy of consideration.

Encourage and employ entrants to the profession from nontraditional backgrounds

My study makes evident that is often unconventional teachers from nontraditional backgrounds who played the most important role in the lives of students from lesser means. The outsider assisted the outsider. In an era when independent education is in the process of becoming increasingly professionalized and uniform, although they are not required to do so, schools increasingly aim to recruit teachers certified by the OCT. Indeed, the practice of hiring certified teachers, along with teachers who have master’s and/or Ph.D. degrees is promoted in

The Academy’s promotional materials, even though on aggregate both salaries and benefits are less generous than in Ontario’s public education system. What is interesting, however, is that the teachers who were most impactful were those who by traditional standards were anything but conventional and, yet, in very many ways made these students’ experience infinitely richer, whilst at the same time reinforcing the communitarian ethos of the school. Thus, I posit that to facilitate a sense of belonging for students navigating an alien environment and a different

267 habitus than their own, the presence of the teacher with an unconventional background who may appear like an outsider should be encouraged. Such individuals make a school community more diverse and thus more inclusive. Perhaps, the ultimate challenge is to make public education less bureaucratic and to provide school principals more flexibility in their hiring practices, whilst at the same time striving to maintain important professional standards. Doing so would allow practitioners the discretion to hire such teachers as a means of counter balancing entrants into the profession who have followed more convention pathways, who will undoubtedly always remain in the majority. However, as alluded to above, it is important that elite private schools maintain a rigorous teacher evaluation program, as a means of ensuring the quality and effectiveness teaching faculties more broadly.

Discussion of Recommendation to Parents Seek elite education at the earliest possible age (only to those parents considering elite education for their students)

Because the age at which parents seek elite education for their children is pivotal, I recommend parents who are considering an elite education for their children do so at the earliest possible age. Similarly, parents who are considering moving to be within close proximity of a private or high-achieving school do so when their children are younger, as the work of Chetty et al. (2016) and this study attest.

Discussion of Recommendations to Students

Wherever possible, it is important for aspiring private school students to enjoy the support of their parents and extended family. If this is not available, the support of mentors and/or educational advocates is important as they can help to mediate the costs of social mobility

(Friedman, 2016). Aspiring students should pay close attention to their academic standing, as it serves as the foundation for school success. Academic success also serves to reinforce both the

268 support of one’s family, but also of mentors, advocates, and the institution itself. Participating in extra-curricular activities is important because it facilities belonging, and enables one to build social capital and by extension one’s successful membership in social networks. Finally, I recommend that students who have trodden path serve as the best mentors and advocates for those following in their path. For elite schools to become more socially diverse, they need a more socially diverse faculty and administration. At the very least, I would hope that disadvantaged students who have successfully graduated from elite private schools be willing to serve as mentors to students in those settings and even in a university setting. As members of Jack’s privileged poor (2019), they are uniquely placed to do so.

Recommendations: Minor Themes

To Practitioners

Facilitate participation in extracurricular activities

The notion of extracurricular activities is closely linked the idea of providing comprehensive funding, in most instances the former facilitating the later. Extracurricular activities not only allow students to participate in the full life of the school beyond the classroom, but even more critically they are a means of developing familial bonds and close relationships with their peers. They facilitate friendships—often lasting friendships—and ultimately social capital. In short, they embed students within social networks which contain resources that can assist and sustain them throughout life. As such, I recommend that practitioners wherever they are found make it a priority to enable students to participate extracurricular activities of their choice, whatever they may. Enabling them to do so can be transformative. In my professional experience, it is not typically a student’s experience of a math or English class that ends up being the most memorable. It is much more often their experience

269 on a school trip, the football field, the volleyball court, the Model United Nations (MUN), or the school play that remains with them throughout life.

To Practitioners and Policy Makers

Tune into students aspirations, facilitate opportunity, and success

It is clear that each of the participants defined the notion of success and opportunity in different ways. However, what the schools they attended did so well was to support those aspirations and then provide them with opportunities to exploit them. At the core of this process was The Three C’s, and personal agency. Although this process is complex, I recommend practitioners and policy members seek to inform, shape, propose, and unearth student aspirations and then find creative ways to support them. This can be done in structural and systematic ways such as through guidance departments or established school activities such as DECA, but it can also be done in informal ways by means of the relationships teachers develop with students.

Whatever means are employed, it is important that practitioners and policy makers become attuned to students hopes and dream and actively promote their fulfillment.

Areas for Further Research

Although they were referred to somewhat tangentially, I did not discuss the parents’ experience of their child’s social mobility journey. As such, the experience of the students themselves was foregrounded and the role of their parents was present in the background.

Nonetheless, their role of parents as social-mobility cost mediators, as well as the notion of giftedness, emerged as major findings. Their role was retold only in the third person as each of the participants relayed their perceptions of the part their families played in their journeys.

However, because their role was clearly critical, a further examination of it would undoubtedly reveal more fully the cultural and familial processes of social mobility. Moreover, as the study is

270 not longitudinal in that it does not track the subjects experience beyond being young alumni/ae.

A longitudinal exploration would reveal the long-term impact of their experience on the participants and the long arc of their life’s progress.

Finally, it is pertinent to note that the work of Jack (2019) argued that elite universities fail disadvantaged students because although they increasingly provide access to their hallowed halls, they do not consider the needs of students of lesser means more broadly. Jack (2019) noted that students who have attended elite secondary schools, such as the subjects of this study, tended to do well in elite university settings because it turns out they have secured the necessary social capital to make their postsecondary journey successful. O’Hearn (2015) attested to the fact the social-class divide continues in U.S. universities amongst professors, an observation which underscores my own experience. Clearly, both of these areas are also worthy of further examination.

Concluding Comments

There have been few studies of poorer children who have achieved social mobility through attending elite private schools. Their experiences, I have argued, contain clues to the processes, challenges, and burdens of social mobility. I have described elite private schools in

Ontario as total schools. My study demonstrated that if poorer students are to become upwardly mobile, their focus on school must be absolute. Likewise, I have examined not only the benefits such students receive from attending elite schools, but also the value they add as exemplary student-citizens and role models. All three participants made important contributions to each of their schools on a daily basis, whilst at the same time navigating the practical realities they faced.

They remained positive and also managed the kind of discouragement that could have easily overwhelmed them. Against this background, they chose the ways could participate in the life of

271 the school and maintained their academic standing, both of which justified the precious funds their parents invested in their future. Monica, Andrea, and Nate were inspired in different ways, but all developed a sense of personal agency within the school environment. Without becoming zealous self-promoters, which is increasingly a mark of elite private education (Miles, Savage, and Bühlmann, 2011; Friedman, 2014), they were each able to exploit the opportunities that presented themselves and did so in ways that were agreeable to them. In many ways, this is what makes such schools crucibles of success. As such, I have cautioned against viewing education as simply as a means of reproducing social inequity.

In parallel, the participants each travelled an inner, hidden journey, confronting their own fears, as they sought to navigate the habitus of another world. To their credit, they did so without compromising who they were. Indeed, they honoured the values of their families, their cultures, and their homes. They undertook their education as a kind of campaign, and, over time, each learned to perform and became at one with the production of which they were invited to be a part. To achieve this end, their performances needed to be exceptional. In the final analysis, they stayed on the train until their stop arrived. All three managed to Mind the Gap. Due to the unfailing support of their parents, they bore very few psychic scars and did not end up with the divided soul that is the result of “habitus clivé” (Friedman, 2016, p. 132), a finding that is unique to this study. However, each, participant carries within them trace elements of their life prior to entering The Academy or Metropolitan, a finding that is consistent with the work of other theorists (Friedman, 2014; Miles et al., 2011, and Power et al. 2006).

Although it appeared to be most acute for Monica, for all three individuals, money endured as a source of anxiety. It was, however, mitigated by the support of their parents and their own frugal natures. Indeed, the participants’ ingenuity and creativity enabled them to

272 successfully navigate the terrain with limited financial resources. As a child of similar origins, who has also been exposed to affluent educational settings, like the participants, I too carry trace elements of my socioeconomic origins. In professional settings where food is served, I am loath to see the leftovers thrown away and often find myself taking them home, even though my wife perennially objects to me doing so. Like the participants in this study, I am acutely aware of the costs of education, but also of items on a dinner menu and seem determined only ever to buy things on sale. Although I have friends and work peers who can be described as elite, I feel infinitely more comfortable with working people in working-class settings than I do with elites, or even my middle-class acquaintances.

Indeed, knowing my father was born in poverty, rose to achieve a degree of social mobility as a lower-middle-class factory manager only to fall back and die in poverty, I fear losing whatever social mobility I have achieved. Like the tightrope walker, a single mistake could be ruinous and expel me from the habitus in which I am clearly an interloper, forever a stranger in a strange land. As Peterson and Kern (1996) argued, I am a cultural omnivore, tolerant of almost any cultural taste, political or otherwise. My taste for highbrow culture— literature, jazz, classical music, opera, travel to exotic climes, good food—enable me to form bonds with those of high status, who belong to exclusive social networks. And yet the enjoyment

I take in reality television, fast food, junk food, rock and roll, sports, and various other working- class pursuits—lowbrow pursuits—act for me as a bridging tool, enabling me to maintain relationships with my own social and class origins, whilst at the same time pursuing my own professional interests.

Moreover, the participants, who like me, having “made their way” (Goldthorpe, 1980, pp.

339–340, as cited in Friedman, 2014, p. 335), while not typically burdened by an overweening

273 sense of ambition are generally tolerant, approving, and take a position of gratitude towards our good fortune. Indeed, like the men in Miles et al. (2011) study, theirs too is “a modest story” (p.

422). All three of the participant’s portraits reflect this sentiment, even though their achievements were quite remarkable. As Goldthorpe (1980) noted, the socially mobile, like the participants in this study and those like them in elite settings everywhere, may indeed be a force for reducing social distance, in our time an urgent need.

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Appendix A Introductory Telephone Script (Third Party/Indirect Introduction) and Follow-Up Email

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Appendix B Telephone Script (Direct Introduction) and Telephone Script (Third Party/Indirect Introduction)

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Appendix C Information Letter for Participants (To be on OISE letterhead)

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Appendix D Consent for Participation in Interview Research

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Appendix E Interview Guide

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