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ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: LEARNING TO DIVIDE IN THE WORLD: YOUTH EXPERIENCES IN A MID-ATLANTIC COMPREHENSIVE HIGH SCHOOL (1950-2000) Caroline Marie Eick, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor Barbara Finkelstein Department of Education Policy and Leadership This history interprets and critically examines the cross-gender, cross-racial, and cross-class relationships of serial generations of students, who attended a Mid- Atlantic comprehensive high school between 1950 and 2000, as revealed in the oral histories of thirty-seven alumni, African-American, white and Eastern European, richer and poorer. Miller High was chosen for its early integration, in 1956, and for its location in a community that transformed, over the last half of the twentieth century, from rural, to suburban, to urban-suburban; and from a predominantly white middle-class town along which lived a small African-American community established since the nineteenth century, to a multicultural population that by the 1990s included Russian immigrants, and African-American youth newly arrived from city schools. Alumni’s recollections revealed three generations of students who, bound in time by different demographic configurations, different levels of school disciplinary measures, and different shades of hierarchy in student-teacher relations, constructed their associations with peers and school authorities markedly differently: “The Divided Generation” (1950-1969), “The Border-Crossing Generation” (1970-1985), and “The Re-divided Generation” (1986-2000). Of the three generations, “The Border-Crossing Generation” most freely crossed class, gender, and race divides. They attended Miller High at a time when school policies were relatively lax, graduating classes were still relatively small, and mostly neighborhood students from integrated feeder schools attended against the national backdrop of the civil rights movements. This analysis identifies how Miller High students across generations and across diverse backgrounds who felt exposed or alienated within school-imposed associations with peers, either when herded in large spaces such as the cafeteria or divided into tracks, or who could not find a place within youth-generated peer-groups that privileged shared interests and affinities over racial, and class identities, sought refuge within communities of shared ethnic, class, or racial backgrounds. It further identifies, within generational time periods, the role played by demographics and school authorities’ disciplinary measures in loosening or reinforcing students’ segregating tendencies. LEARNING TO DIVIDE IN THE WORLD: YOUTH EXPERIENCES IN A MID-ATLANTIC COMPREHENSIVE HIGH SCHOOL 1950-2000 by Caroline Marie Eick Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2005 Advisory Committee: Professor Barbara Finkelstein, Chair Professor Jackie Cossentino Professor Bob Croninger Professor Betty Malen Professor Jeremy Price ©Copyright by Caroline Marie Eick 2005 To Emmanuel, Francesca and Joseph, my family, home and anchor. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply thankful to my children Emmanuel and Francesca, and to my husband Joseph for believing in me, for making room in their lives for my work, and for accompanying me through this journey with unwavering loyalty. I am also deeply grateful to my mother, Lilian, for giving me the courage to dare; to my father, Mirko, for nurturing my love of learning; and to my grandmother, Danica, who with only a third grade elementary education taught me to read and write in her native Croatian. I would also like to thank my dissertation chair and committee for their invaluable teachings: Professor Finkelstein, for inspiring me, through her pioneering work, to dare stretch conceptual frameworks in history of education; Professor Cossentino, for deepening my appreciation for the subtle ways that analytic lenses construct and reconstruct knowledge; Professor Croninger, for steadfastly, with infinite patience, and much needed humor, guiding me through the many challenges of data collection; Professor Malen, for modeling impeccable scholarship, stimulating deep reflection, infusing intellectual work with heartfelt joy, and above all, for helping me trust my scholar’s gut; Professor Price for tirelessly discussing, at a moment’s notice, far beyond the call of duty, and with great generosity, the challenging ideas that rattle the brain, stretch the heart, and make for better thinking. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………............1 Part I: The Divided Generation (1950-1969)………………………………………...20 Chapter 1 / Dimensions of Difference: The small worlds of race, class and gender…………………………………………21 Chapter 2 / “Terrains of Freedom:”1 Exploring beyond small worlds…………………………………….……………….68 Part II: The Border-Crossing Generation (1970-1985)……………………………...90 Chapter 3 / Affiliations: Jocks, Potheads, Fire-Heads, Preps, Musicians, and Others…………………………91 Chapter 4 / Hybrid Communities—Bounded Communities: Expanding associations—Or retreating into small worlds.........................................132 Part III: The Re-divided Generation (1986-2000)………………………………….154 Chapter 5 / Dimensions of Difference: The rigid borders of religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class………………..155 Chapter 6 / Parallel Worlds: Segregating into rule-abiders and rule-breakers, into black and white, rich and poor……………………………….……………………………………….202 Summary...………………………………………………………………………….222 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….237 Addendum: Methodology………………………………………………………………………..250 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..266 1 “Terrains of Freedom” is a term coined by Professor Barbara Finkelstein to express spaces carved by agents within structural constraints whereby they demonstrate autonomy; demonstrate agency. iv INTRODUCTION This work is about serial generations of high school students and their lives in a comprehensive high school over the last half of the twentieth century. It interprets and critically examines the high school experiences of thirty-seven alumni, female and male, African-American, white, and Eastern European, richer and poorer, who attended Miller High, a Mid-Atlantic comprehensive high school, between 1950 and 2000. It explores the meanings that Miller High graduates ascribed to their social relations with peers, teachers, and administrators, and the values they attributed to their education and their diplomas, from their perspectives as females and males of different racial, ethnic, and socio economic backgrounds. It highlights the relational nature of students’ experiences and tracks connections, affiliations, and circulation2 of individuals from diverse backgrounds, across diverse groups, within the institutional spaces of Miller High and at their immediate periphery.3 Finally, it links broader demographic, economic, and cultural forces to the ways that Miller High organized its students, and the ways that students organized themselves. This study not only advances our understanding of student life, but also illuminates features of the history of the comprehensive high school, in particular its role in the evolution of gender, class and race relations in a diverse democratic society. More broadly it contributes to histories of youth by situating students within their cultural time periods, and to histories of desegregation by tracing race relations 2 I borrow the terms “connections, affiliations and circulation” from postcritical ethnographer Susan Talburt. See Susan Talburt, “Time, Space, and Ethnography Without Proper Subjects” in Postcritical Ethnography, eds., George Noblit, Susana Flores, Enrique Murillo (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 2004):107-123. 3 Because Miller High integrated early, in 1956, I was able to follow race relations among students over a substantial forty-four years. 1 over almost a half-century. It is a work, furthermore, that offers possibilities for expanding conceptual frameworks of analysis in histories of education, because it privileges students’ voices and their interpretations of their high school experiences. This study draws directly from the intellectual influences of educational historians who seek to recover the yet unheard or underprivileged voices,4 and more broadly from the intellectual influences of oral historians5 whose works “give back to the people who made and lived history, through their own words, a central place.”6 Since the 1970s, only a handful of historians of education have made use of sources other than the more readily accessible public and official documents,7 and they have not sought systematically to collect and interpret oral histories of school goers. To my knowledge, this is the first effort to generate a history of education that pays close attention to student experiences across diverse backgrounds in one comprehensive school from 1950 to 2000, through the production and analysis of oral historical data. 4 The works cited here are those that have addressed the lives of students in the comprehensive high school: Barbara Finkelstein, “Is Adolescence Here to Stay?: Historical Perspectives on Youth and Education” in Adolescence and Society, eds. T. Urban and F. Pajares (New York: Information Age Press, 2003:1-33); Barbara Finkelstein, Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1979); Kenneth Fish, Conflict and