INTRODUCTION
In U.S. culture, few institutions evoke as great a sense of privilege and elitism as boarding schools. However, over the past thirty to forty years such schools have—parallel with selective colleges and universities—attempted to diversify their previously all White, wealthy, and single-gender student bodies in terms of race, class, and gender (Powell Reference Powell1997). Since the 1960s, such efforts have included, but are not limited to, the A Better Chance (ABC) program, which was followed by other programs, such as Prep for Prep, that identify low-income students and/or students of color, and then provide them academic and social training. Over the past twenty years, at the same time that enthusiasm for traditional affirmative action efforts has decreased, third-party nonprofits like ABC and Prep for Prep have multiplied and now play a prominent role in diversifying the elite private school sector.
This case study looks at one program that recruits high-achieving low-income students from the urban areas of one northeastern state. Throughout a fourteen-month program, students in the RISEFootnote 2 program are trained not only to pass academic muster on entrance exams but also to impress admissions officers in interviews, manage time in elite schools, and interact with their future classmates. This program provides an opportunity to explore how students adapt to the social environment of elite schools and how third parties may intervene in defining that role.
I argue that students of color enrolled in the program consider themselves “diversifiers” of their new prep schools and find a sense of worth and pride in their position as the Other. After reviewing the pertinent literature, the article will explore how the program prepares students for the rigors of elite private high school and how students respond to that environment through what I call “the diversifier mindset.” As proud diversifiers, students perceive themselves as particularly mature individuals who find satisfaction in representing their class and racial background in predominantly wealthy, White schools. After considering how students explain and interpret their environments, I conclude by considering how the diversifier mindset may both support students in their educational institutions and at the same time limit their ability to challenge or critique these institutions.
LITERATURE REVIEW
The Elite Private High School and Racelessness
Literature on boarding schools in sociology practically begins and, one could argue, practically ends with Peter Cookson and Caroline Persell's survey of boarding schools performed during the early 1980s (Cookson and Persell, Reference Cookson and Persell1985; for some earlier sociological insight into boarding school and elites, see Baltzell Reference Baltzell1964). Cookson and Persell argued that the highly structured, pressure-filled, and privileged boarding school is an example of Erving Goffman's (Reference Goffman1961) “total institution,” in which students' days are controlled almost entirely by the institution. Students are being trained by the schools to fit an asceticism idealized by previous generations as properly elite (Kuriloff and Reichert, Reference Kuriloff and Reichert2003; Cookson and Persell, Reference Cookson and Persell1985), even though many students fail to achieve the ascetic ideal. In fact, prep students are often portrayed as especially hedonistic in popular culture (in recent literature, see Prep Reference Sittenfeld2005; in film, see Cruel Intentions 1999).
When they analyzed the overall ethos of boarding school, and in particular the top echelon of schools, Cookson and Persell left issues of racial and class divisions among the students for later work, arguing that African American students are “doubly marginalized” by both their home culture and the culture of prep school (Cookson and Persell, Reference Cookson and Persell1991). Du Bois's concept of double consciousness may be particularly advantageous to understanding the nuances of the experience of being a student of color in an elite school because of the prep school's intense social and academic expectations (Du Bois [1903] Reference Du Bois1989; Torres and Charles, Reference Torres and Charles2004). Students at elite private high schools may be especially likely to feel conflicted by their position as insider (as a recipient of elite schooling) and outsider (due to their racial and/or class status). Using double conscious as her theoretical base, Signithia Fordham (Reference Fordham1991) argued that private schools push their Black students toward a sense of “racelessness.” She argued that racelessness has three components: a denial of racial barriers in the larger society, the removal of any “aspects of [the students'] group identity that might be associated with their African and African American ancestry,” and any “attempts to reconstitute African Americans in the image of the Other” (Fordham Reference Fordham1991, p. 471). In short, in order to achieve academic success in private school, students must show no “commitment to a changing yet familiar African American identity” (Fordham Reference Fordham1991, p. 471). To be successful and non-White in a private school would be to deny one's position as non-White, to commit a “quintessential violation of the Self” (Fordham Reference Fordham1991, p. 481).
The racelessness hypothesis has been challenged by findings that Black students in White colleges and universities use a range of strategies that do not require negations of their racial identity to gain a sense of belonging in a predominantly White educational institution (Brower and Ketterhagen, Reference Brower and Ketterhagen2004; Sidanius et al., Reference Sidanius, Van Laar, Levin and Sinclair2004; Willie Reference Willie2003). One strategy is the exact opposite of racelessness—some students consciously “perform” Blackness via cultural symbols in majority White schools as a protective response to their minority status (Willie Reference Willie2003). However, these studies were undertaken at the postsecondary level and do not limit themselves to the elite sphere. Further, racial and ethnic identity is fluid and age is often critical to that fluidity (Howard Reference Howard2000). In fact, looking at Hispanic immigrants, Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut (Reference Portes and Rumbaut2001) argued that high school is a particularly important moment of racial and ethnic identity development.
If Fordham is correct, RISE graduates should report that their experiences involved either struggling against the school's culture or de-emphasizing their own racial and ethnic identities as a price of success. However, Sarah Susannah Willie's (Reference Willie2003) study at the college level indicates that the opposite may actually happen: students may instead exaggerate a performance of racially identified cultural symbols in their schools. In addition, because RISE graduates have been prepared by insiders from the boarding school community, they may—even before entering boarding school—be especially at risk for feeling the negating pressures of “racelessness.”
Empirical Findings on Race and Class in the Private High School
Since Cookson and Persell's (Reference Cookson and Persell1985, Reference Cookson and Persell1991) and Baltzell's (Reference Baltzell1964) studies, and even Fordham's (Reference Fordham1991) earlier studies, boarding schools have undergone continual change (Hicks Reference Hicks1996; Powell Reference Powell1997) while furthering their efforts to enroll a more diverse student body. One of the main mechanisms for many boarding and day private schools to attract low-income students and students of color is through nonprofit programs such as A Better Chance or Prep for Prep. Many of these programs were founded or expanded after Cookson and Persell's (Reference Cookson and Persell1985) pioneering study, which may explain the absence of race and class diversity from the original study's purview.
Others have begun to study the experience of students of color during and after boarding school. Scholars have interviewed early ABC graduates about their boarding experience twenty-five to forty years later (Zweigenhaft and Domhoff, Reference Zweigenhaft and Domhoff2003). Those graduates reported having difficulties with their racial identities, but mostly described a sense of appreciation for the opportunity to join the elite (for an autobiographical look at that experience, see Carey Reference Carey1991). However, these studies addressed an earlier generation and are retrospective in nature. Students entering boarding school today, as Richard Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff (Reference Zweigenhaft and Domhoff2003) have noted, are likely to face a very different experience. Pessimistically, after the racial retrenchment of the 1980s and the recent efforts to dismantle affirmative action, these students may enter with less support from the elite school. Optimistically, these schools now have had decades of experience with non-White and low-income students and that experience may have improved the schools' ability to welcome such students.
Those changes are not without their critics, however. Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu and Clough1996) argued that French elite educational institutions admit students of color and low-income students who already fit into the elite habitus in important ways. He hypothesized that the same mechanism is at work in U.S. boarding schools, but he did not empirically examine that hypothesis. David Hicks (Reference Hicks1996) argued the opposite—that the push for a more diverse student body is making the schools less elite and thus less attractive to their traditional, privileged market. To this date, I know of no research that has addressed which hypothesis (if either) is correct about the effects of diversification on elite boarding schools. This project should provide some preliminary evidence as to whether or not preparatory programs are socializing students into the elite habitus—and thus not preparing them to challenge that habitus—before sending them to elite schools.
Bourdieu's Analytic Framework in Elite Schools
Though Cookson and Persell (Reference Cookson and Persell1985) used Goffman's (Reference Goffman1961) idea of the “total institution” to analyze the private high school, it is not the only analytic framework researchers have used to conceptualize the elite private school. Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu and Clough1996) cultural sociology has recently been adapted to provide interesting insight into the U.S. elite school. Erin McNamara Horvat and Anthony Lising Antonio (Reference Horvat and Antonio1999) studied the experience of nine African American seniors at an elite girls school in California and argued that the girls willingly struggled with the organizational habitus of the school in order to receive the benefits of an elite education. The students expressed a constant battle with the “oblivious entitlement” of the school and their fellow students. Similar to the struggle with racelessness that Fordham (Reference Fordham1991) described, Horvat and Antonio (Reference Horvat and Antonio1999) found that the students faced repeated and sustained acts of symbolic violence (that is, symbolic acts that marginalized the student from the organizational habitus) and psychological trauma. In one particularly poignant quotation, one of the students told Horvat, “You try to want to be what would be more comfortable [like being] a White child in a predominantly White elementary school. You just have to be a different person” (Horvat and Antonio, Reference Horvat and Antonio1999, p. 335). Horvat and Antonio's work, however, did not address the mediating work of nonprofit preparation programs and used a sample of mostly upper- and middle-class students who were all seniors. The early intervention of a nonprofit might provide students with an alternative method for adapting that would avoid both the sense of racelessness that Fordham described and the symbolic violence that Horvat and Antonio described.
On the other coast, at an elite boys school near Philadelphia, other researchers found that low-income students of all racial backgrounds faced similar social difficulties (Kuriloff and Reichert, Reference Kuriloff and Reichert2003). However, because African American boys created a sense of group identity as Black students, they were able to navigate the school experience more easily than low-income White students who did not create a group identity as low-income students. The African American boys used race to create an alternative social and academic network that insulated them from the symbolic violence of elite private schooling. White low-income students, unfortunately, had no such alternative network. This finding is the opposite of racelessness—being racially marked allowed these students to create a social niche in opposition to the elite habitus of the school; the Black students did not feel marginalized because they were able to find a social niche that provided an opportunity for success in an elite school. That oppositional social group may be related to that of high-achieving Nation of Islam students, which provides some NOI students a route to academic success in a troubled urban school (Akom Reference Akom2003). An outsider—even oppositional—stance does not inherently mean low achievement in schools; opposition can be protective. A preparation program may offer a network of fellow students who can provide support for an oppositional achievement ideology. On the other hand, the preparation program might provide an early entrance into the mainstream network, leaving those students to struggle like the White low-income students.
Prudence Carter's (Reference Carter2003, Reference Carter2005) work, using Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, pointed to a potential middle ground. In her earlier work, she found that students can use multiple different types of cultural capital in different settings. As she argued, some students perform a “balancing act of maintaining both dominant and non-dominant cultural capital … to acquire valued status positions within both their lower status community and the wider society” (Reference Carter2003, p. 139). Carter further cautioned that such an act is indeed precarious as it requires “continuous negotiations” for the student (Reference Carter2003, p. 139).Footnote 3 Students from a preparation program are likely going through such negotiations constantly, but little is known about how such programs prepare students for those negotiations or whether or not such negotiations create or deny opportunities to non-White students in elite educational institutions. In her later work, Carter (Reference Carter2005) described individuals—generally older students or professionals—who negotiate both communities as multicultural navigators. Multicultural navigators had gained some dominant cultural and social capital and returned to the neighborhood to provide access to those networks and knowledge. Preparation programs—though not from the neighborhood—might fulfill the multicultural navigator role that prepares the students to most easily adapt to the elite school environment. If that is an appropriate analogy, then we should expect students from these programs to have fewer problems adapting to the elite environment due to that preparation.
Even within Bourdieu's framework, multiple potential hypotheses emerge and conflict. Does the organizational habitus force students toward racelessness or an oppositional stance? Might a nonprofit provide cultural capital so that students do not suffer in the face of symbolic violence, or is that violence too overwhelming even for a prepared student? In this study I will focus on the transition to elite boarding schools from a preparatory nonprofit program as a way to answer those questions. Students in these programs not only are being taught the academic skills necessary for elite education, but also are being socialized into that environment, which previous studies indicate may be the program's most important lesson. How do these students make sense of the boarding school and their unique social position in it?
The Program
RISE is a nonprofit program that aims to prepare low-income, urban students, from throughout a Northeastern state, regardless of race, for entrance into private high schools. RISE does not provide financial aid, but it has a long history with many private schools and places about 95% of its students into private high schools with financial-aid support. Roughly 800 students apply for 200 places in the program each year. As Table 1 shows, those 200 students participate in the first part of the RISE program, a daily academic enrichment program for students during the summer after seventh grade. Approximately 100 of the students then are selected to continue on to the second part of the program, the Scholars Academy, which includes a week of outdoor leadership experience just before students enter eighth grade; Saturday academic sessions focused on preparation for the SSAT;Footnote 4 and leads to the Boarding Experience, the third part of the program. The Boarding Experience is a five-week academic program that runs from late June to early August each summer at a boarding school that imitates a condensed version of private school with small classes, a highly scheduled day, and scheduled study hours. All of the programs are held on private school campuses in the state served by RISE.
Table 1. The RISE Program
METHODOLOGY
The data for this study were collected in two waves. The first wave of data collection occurred in the summer of 2006 at the Boarding Experience, the final third of the RISE program. The main methods of data collection were participant observation; in-depth, semistructured interviews;Footnote 5 and an online survey (N = 40).Footnote 6 The second wave of data collection, in January and February 2007, included in-depth, semistructured interviews and a second online survey (thirty-three of the original forty students responded). Eleven students were interviewed during the second wave, five in person during visits to their boarding schools, and six over the phone due to geographical distance. Ten of those students were attending boarding schools as boarding students.Footnote 7 The online survey focused on issues of racial and class identity, school belonging, and educational expectations. The primary data that inform this paper will be from the interviews and ethnographic observations.
I had previously worked with RISE as a chaperone for their annual Leadership Week and as a writing teacher in their 2005 Boarding Experience, and had been invited to return in 2006. As such, I had already built a relationship with many of the staff at the program as well as some of the students the summer before the research began. I conducted research while teaching and living in the dormitory with the male students. As with any qualitative researcher, my background shapes my research questions and interactions with the students and staff of the program. I am a single White male who grew up in a wealthy college town in the state served by RISE. With my background, I expected some difficulty building a rapport with the students. However, because of the privileged position in which students place RISE and the RISE staff, the positive reviews my teaching received from the previous cohort of RISE students, and some shared interests (soccer, hip-hop, and dancing were often the subject of many early conversations), I quickly gained the trust of many students. With some students, trust was difficult to gain due to class and racial differences or because of disciplinary duties I had as a teacher living in the dorm. With most students, trust appeared early in the summer in the sharing of personal histories, asking for my participation in activities outside of class, and spending free time in my classroom. As a further sign of openness, students eagerly contacted me after the summer ended over Internet social-networking sites, such as Facebook, or through instant messenger services.
A BRIEF NOTE ON THE STUDENTS
Students at RISE are a racially and ethnically diverse group and express pride in the diversity of the program. The program's one hundred students are divided almost evenly between non-Hispanic White students, Hispanic students, and students of African descent, with some Asian students as well. About half of the students are immigrants or children of immigrants (i.e., second-generation students)—a clear point of pride for many students, who often swapped slang terminology and compared favorite foods throughout the summer. In the questionnaire of forty students, 43% of the students who responded identified themselves as immigrants. Including students who identified their parents as immigrants brings the percentage up to 48%. The ten students interviewed were split in the same percentage as the larger group. Considering Waters's (Reference Waters1999) findings on immigrant identities, immigrant students may have a different response to their role as diversifiers of elite schools. However, in reviewing my field notes and interview transcripts, no noticeable difference between immigrant students, children of immigrants, and native students appeared.Footnote 8
Immigrant and second-generation students are overrepresented within the student of color population in elite postsecondary educational institutions (Massey et al., Reference Massey, Mooney, Torres and Charles2007). The overrepresentation of immigrants in elite education may start early in the academic career, as students with immigrant backgrounds were similarly overrepresented in the RISE program, and, by extension, are likely to be overrepresented in elite private high schools as well.
The Boarding Experience
Students in the Boarding Experience face a daily routine designed to replicate that of most boarding schools. Students are required to attend breakfast between 7:30 and 8:00 am. Classes last fifty minutes, with ten-minute breaks to walk across the large campus between the science building and the humanities/social sciences building. After classes, a required all-program announcement/assembly period, and lunch, students have required activity periods and electives, with roughly one hour to one- and-a-half hours of free time before dinner. Following dinner, students have another short amount of free time before study hall, after which they are required to stay in the dorm before lights out. Often, the day also includes special presentations on adjusting to private school, college admissions, race and sexuality, and special study-abroad options available only to private school students. In interviews over the summer, students were frustrated by the strictness of the schedule, claiming that they came to the Boarding Experience to have fun with fellow RISE students.Footnote 9 As one student complained to me after her cell phone was confiscated at lunch, “There are just too many rules here! Too many rules!”
For the staff, the social and the time-management preparation the program offers are the key components of the summer, even though the program is advertised as academically focused. The summer and full-time staff of RISE believe that the social experience is the primary goal of the Boarding Experience. As the assistant dean told me, “It's not the academics; it's about the social preparation.” To prepare the students for the total institution that is elite private education, RISE actively creates its own total institution for the students.
The Boarding Experience is held at one of the top boarding schools in the country, a member of the “selective sixteen” (Cookson and Persell, Reference Cookson and Persell1985). The school was founded in the early nineteenth century, has an endowment as large as those of many selective colleges, and has an impressive and manicured campus—complete with over thirty separate buildings and eighteen athletic fields. During observations the campus was filled with other students, of all ages, attending a variety of athletic and day camps. RISE students were impressed by the campus and noted how different it was from their middle schools in a variety of ways. As one student told me while walking to lunch, “The squirrels in the 'burbs aren't scared of people. I would have thought it would be the opposite, that the squirrels in the city wouldn't be scared.”
THE RISE PREPARATION—INTRODUCING THE DIVERSIFIER MINDSET
The entire RISE experience, from the early application process to the class sizes and teaching styles, is designed to replicate the boarding and private day school experience. RISE also designs and schedules special workshops to prepare students for the transition to private school, beyond the academic preparation it offers. It is in these programs that students are socialized into a new understanding of their position in society, into what I call the diversifier mindset. The diversifier mindset is defined primarily by finding satisfaction in teaching elite peers how to properly interact with people from different, generally less privileged, backgrounds.
Much of the effort to teach the diversifier mindset to students fell to RISE graduates who visited multiple times over the summer. In one example—an informal discussion between current RISE students and students only one year into private school—the RISE graduates emphasized how important it is to present themselves and the RISE program well: “You guys are a different breed from the other students there…. Others get more leeway than you … [getting in trouble] comes off badly about you, yourself, your family, but also RISE as well.” Students are always seen representing not only themselves but also the program and implicitly their race and class. As representatives, they need to avoid challenging the private school's rules and ethos too aggressively. Unlike the traditional private school student who is representing at most his or her family, RISE students also have to represent the program, their race, and their socioeconomic class. Later in the program another student told the rapt audience, “I know from where I was coming from, if I were disrespected, it would have gotten physical. At boarding school, it's over. You'll be sitting on the sidewalk before you can say, ‘What happened?’” Obviously, boarding school is different from students' home neighborhoods—the graduates of the program speak to the fact that the students cannot expect the boarding school to adapt to them, but rather that they must adapt to the boarding school. But how, exactly, should they adapt?
One three-hour workshop (the longest special program of the summer) during the Boarding Experience was a particularly noteworthy example of how RISE expects students to adapt. After classes one day during the third week of the program, students were split into four different classrooms. In each classroom, two alumni of RISE currently enrolled in high school and one alumnus currently in college ran a series of six short skits mimicking interactions RISE students should expect in high school. In one, the skit was of a RISE student overhearing a fellow private school student making prejudiced statements. The alum playing the RISE student told the audience, “I've spent four years just educating them. We have everyday, we force ourselves to help educate…. Not everything said [in boarding school] is worth fighting [over].” In short, a diversifier does not object nor fight, a diversifier must instead educate—even when faced with openly prejudiced peers.
Educating others was a theme that emerged whenever future high schools were discussed. During the workshop, current Hispanic RISE students mentioned feeling proud that during visits to private schools they were able to help students with their Spanish work; one girl said, “They loved me being there and speaking Spanish!” Already, students were building a sense of ethnic/racial pride based on their knowledge and the ability to educate the traditional private school student that is crucial to the diversifier mindset.
The next skit involved a hypothetical RISE student unjustly accused of stealing an iPod and a cell phone. At this point, the director of programs for RISE came into the room and stayed for the rest of the program. A boisterous student discussion focused on finding evidence to prove that the hypothetical RISE student was not guilty. No student mentioned race or class as a possible reason the RISE student was singled out and accused. Instead, they focused on strategies to avoid confrontation, and the director of programs told them to find allies in school just in case moments such as this happen. Students responded by stating that they planned to “make friends with teachers” and “make a name for myself early as a serious student.” Students focused on the individual case instead of looking for possible signs of racism or classism behind the unjust accusation. Students wanted to carve out an individualized identity as serious and engaged students, who, as the next skit would show, engage their racial/ethnic backgrounds (and, by extension, class backgrounds) primarily as an opportunity to express pride and educate their fellow students.
In the final skit, a private school student asked to feel a RISE student's hair, and then touched it without waiting for an answer, ostensibly because it was so curly.Footnote 10 Students responded with laughter, but also noted that such a moment is “just ignorant. I'd educate her [about hair].” Another student made a racial connection to the skit, noting half jokingly, “Just because I'm Black, I can't have hair? Black people have hair!” The director of programs said after some students mentioned being frustrated by such requests that she was “impressed no one found [it] insulting! White kids want to be friends; they just slip up. It is a chance to educate.” Her sentiment was the most explicit expression of RISE's desire for their students to adapt themselves to their schools and elite peers rather than challenge the schools for not preparing the other students to adapt to the RISE students. A diversifier must suffer personal indignities in order to help the other students avoid insulting people who have not been prepared to be diversifiers.
Another skit focused explicitly on wealth inequality at school. Hypothetical private school students were discussing where “they summered” until the hypothetical RISE student had to respond by saying “nowhere.” The discussion that followed this skit was the only time during the three-hour workshop that the students in the audience did not maintain consensus. One said that the “scene made me feel poor,” while another thought that he could “not say another word, I couldn't feel comfortable” in such a situation. Others, however, had a sense of personal pride in talking about RISE and their summers, because to not do so would “sound like I'd be ashamed of my family, and I'm not ashamed.” Once in high school, the students embraced their positions as diversifiers when responding to these minor indignities. Unlike during the formative stage of the Boarding Experience in which RISE students were still learning how to be diversifiers, once in private school, students did not report feeling discomfort, inadequacy, nor “poor” in any similar situation.
As the above description of the alumni workshop (one of only two major workshops over the five weeks of the program) illustrates, students are told to expect to “educate” their peers in private schools about how to interact with students of color and low-income students. That educational role may lead to emotional or social fatigue for RISE students because they will have to contend with both the Du Boisian double consciousness that comes from being of color and the double duty of their roles as students and educators. Further, they are specifically taught to see themselves as individuals, separate from other students of similar backgrounds who have not gone through a program such as RISE, and therefore learn to not speak for others of their racial group. That advice builds in the students a sense of individualism that compels them to interact with boarding schools as individual peer educators, but not as advocates beyond their own experiences. The alumni quoted is right that students should not be expected to speak for their races, but such an individualistic mentality also may weaken a student's sense of duty toward his/her racial group in and outside of school.
This is not to criticize such activities. As one RISE alumna—who had graduated from a private day school two years earlier and returned to work at the Boarding Experience during her summers at college—told me, students in RISE have no idea how much of a transition they are going to experience in high school. Watching “My Super Sweet Sixteen” while the students were in study hall, she laughed at the protagonists of the program who were throwing extremely expensive (many cost over $150,000) birthday parties. When one wealthy girl got angry about her haircut, the college intern turned to me and said, “They have no idea, but this is the type of girl they are going to be around,” and added how important it is to future success to prepare RISE students for rich girls and that RISE might not even prepare them enough.
THE FIRST SEMESTER OF SCHOOL
Finding Value in Being a Teacher/Student
Students of color and low-income students at boarding schools are the ideal candidates to provide and participate in the type of peer learning expected in a diverse educational environment. Students from a prep program can feel connected to their campus but also different from some of the other students. Further, the students in this study received guidance on how to interact with and educate their fellow students via their preparation programs.
Students all felt that their racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds offered them a chance to educate their fellow students in a manner similar to the role-play discussed earlier. They reported a variety of experiences in which their primary roles switched from student to teacher. These experiences are the type of daily hassle that can lead to high stress, depending on how students react. RISE students, however, overwhelmingly drew from their diversifier mindset to interpret these experiences as opportunities to prove their worth and value to the school. They described these moments with pride because they improved the social and academic experience of their fellow students.
Deron, a Black male of immigrant parents, was the most explicit about his role as educator in the classroom, telling me:
The other groups besides Blacks get a lot from Blacks. Most of us came from public schooling and we didn't learn a lot. But the ideas we come with, shocking them a little bit. They're like, “Oh wow, I didn't think of that!”
When I asked Deron for a specific example, Maria, a Hispanic female, interjected,Footnote 11 describing how students had underestimated the violent impact of gangs in the inner city, “They were saying something like, ‘Oh that doesn't really happen,’ like violence or gangs. They don't really know if it happens because they just don't live there.” Similarly, two other Hispanic students expressed their pleasure at helping fellow students with their Spanish homework, and even being asked for help while visiting schools as prospective students the past spring. When given the chance to add to their classroom experience because of their racial and class background, RISE students did not shy from that burden of representation; they relished the opportunity.
Outside of the classroom, the diversifier mindset also informed RISE students about how to behave in potentially explosive moments. Brittany, an African American female from the state capital attending her second-choice school, expressed a distaste for her school, refusing to call any of her peers there “friends” but rather “acquaintances.” While describing the other students at her school, Brittany focused on one student who was surprised Brittany had never used mousse before in her hair. The girl asked to touch her hair (almost identical to the role-play done over the summer). When asked how she felt, Brittany replied,
I didn't feel anything. I had to get into the mindset where she was. Maybe she had never seen anyone with hair like I do. I took it more as a learning experience not as “get your hands out of my hair cuz I don't like people touching me.” So it was more of that trying to get into her shoes … so the next time she goes up to a Black person and says, “You have really nice hair,” they don't smack her in the face.
Brittany was the only student interviewed who was not enjoying any part of school, so it would have been reasonable to expect her to express anger when presented with ignorant peers. Indeed, she repeatedly expressed frustration with the other students' immaturity during the interview, but that disapproval did not extend to moments of symbolic violence due to her racial and class background. Instead, Brittany saw those moments as opportunities to help her fellow students, even if she did not actually like her peer group.
Ramon, a Black and Hispanic student, believes he constantly has to educate his peers and told me that when confronted with potentially offensive comments he tells people to stop, “Because if you don't say anything to them, then they don't know where the line is, they don't know whether they're going to cross it or not. If you set the line for them, they understand what's going on.” He reported that he does not see that role as a burden and that he repeatedly has to tell people not to cross the line. When asked if he has had to do that less over time, he said no but that “there's no reason ever to be sad. You have to walk around and be happy, so keep going,” and that he often makes racial jokes to help others understand what can and cannot be the subject or punch line of a joke. Students like Ramon were often faced with what Horvat and Antonio described as “symbolic violence,” via the jokes, questions, and actions of their peers. The diversifier mindset led them to respond with a sense of duty to help their peers instead of voicing a struggle with that symbolic violence. Instead of interpreting such acts as symbolic violence or as the school's failure to prevent incidents of racism, they took these moments as opportunities to express their value to their schools as raced members of the student body.
That finding is similar to a moralized ideal self that other elite students expressed to researchers (Lamont et al., Reference Lamont, Kaufman and Moody2000). RISE students moralized their own self-images to bolster themselves in new and often academically and socially challenging educational environments. Comparing themselves to other students, they consider themselves more mature and more successful than their peers. For example, Brittany repeatedly called herself mature and was proud of it. When asked for more details, she replied:
For instance, the teachers know I'm intelligent. I get awards in class for being intelligent and last week … I was top in the class, and it was like, uh huh. I'm Black and don't have as much money as you do, and I'm smarter than you, and I can do things you can't do…. I can do this without this, without the Lacoste and Burberry, etc.
Brittany's award was an affirmation of her academic standing; she also interpreted it as an affirmation of not needing the symbols of privilege and wealth that the other girls in her school cherish. Brittany was proud, not in spite of her lack of wealth but rather specifically because of it.
Malcolm, an Asian American Muslim, was the proudest of his experience in RISE and how other students viewed him:
If it were between RISE and another vacation, I'd take RISE. I'm not here because of chance or because someone liked me, but because I worked hard. And a lot of people respect me for who I am, not because of, you know…. I'm not just another kid to them. I'm—you know, like a role model or an idol. One kid, I think he was just kidding, but he was like, “You know, when I look at you and I see your grades and I see how you're excelling in school and how you came here, you inspire me.” And if I can inspire someone like that every day, I mean, I think I'm getting somewhere.
Intriguingly, Malcolm refused to internalize that difference as a sign of maturity, nor did he ever explicitly discuss his racial, religious, or class background when describing the source of that difference. Rather, he preferred to call it “knowledge” he had because of his background and previous experiences:
I guess you could call it maturity, but I guess you could call it not that you're more mature, but that you have that knowledge, that knowledge base…. It's more about your ignorance level, because everybody is ignorant. There's a lot of things you know, but there's so much you don't know. I just think that when you learn more, get more knowledge, your ignorance level goes down. You could call it maturity, but I'd also call it knowledge.
Students actively sought to emphasize their difference from their school peers. They expressed not only a sense of difference but also a sense of superiority—they had overcome intense challenges in life and were stronger for it. Whether that superior status was explicitly based in group identities (such as the one Brittany described) or not (Malcolm's “knowledge base”), it buttressed student pride in being a teacher. Students who have superior talents or backgrounds have something to teach, and having something to teach proves to the student that s/he has something of value to add. The diversifier mindset, then, may be a valuable self-reinforcing cycle.
“It's Not Just Skin Deep”? Conscious and Unconscious Racialized Social Networks
Even in integrated schools, social networks often replicate the high levels of segregation found throughout the United States (Tatum Reference Tatum1997). For RISE students in private high schools, social segregation may or may not be a sign of poor social bonds between themselves and their peers. It may also be, as Beverly Daniel Tatum (Reference Tatum1997) argued, an opportunity for a safe social group within which to present their racial and class identities. Social segregation could act as a protective time away from the elite habitus and symbolic violence of the rest of the elite school.
In my conversations with RISE students, self-segregation was not a common theme. Christina, a mixed Black and Asian student, was the one exception who said that she mostly socializes with other students from similar programs, mainly because they participate in similar sports or live down the hall from her. She added:
Also because we know that we have that special connection with the program, because we know how much harder we had to work than a lot of the kids here who spent the summers going to Italy and not having to work because they're privileged enough to come here and privileged enough without a lot of hard work. We realize that no matter what program we came from, we pretty much had to do the same amount of work, and we realize that there's a lot of us who, like, we don't see our friends anymore who were expecting to get into the same schools as us and didn't and stuff like that.
To Christina, being from a preparatory program at an elite private school is a sign of dedication and of having a mindset similar to others from such programs. Later in the discussion, she talked about how race is also key to her social experience:
I have to represent the minorities in a positive way, and since there are so few of us it makes it that much easier for me to be pinpointed as someone who is trying to do good things in the community or someone who is not.
As a RISE graduate and a racial minority, Christina actively identifies with and socializes with similar students. Reflecting Tatum's (Reference Tatum1997) argument, she does so out of a sense of having to represent that group and to build a social solidarity with students who are also racial outsiders on campus.
Maria was equally explicit in describing the bonds that students of color at her school feel when she discussed an editorial cartoon that many students of color found offensive in the school newspaper. The cartoon depicted the “Black table” in the cafeteria as boisterous, overcrowded, and in a corner. Disputing that description, Maria noted that the “minority table” interacted with White students quite frequently and that it was not only Black students. Frustrated, she told me that she sits at that table, and the White students do not understand why: “They didn't even realize that most of the minority kids here grew up in similar areas, so it's not just skin deep. We have similarities.” Deron agreed, explaining that he sat with the “Black table” at dinner because they sat there after finishing basketball practice together. Both Maria and Deron explained their seating preferences were based on shared interests and experiences either at home (Maria) or at school (Deron), instead of being based on a sense of racial solidarity. Like Christina, Maria and Deron both felt that the cafeteria seating arrangement with its segregated tables was an acceptable and even a beneficial social arrangement. At the same time, Maria and Deron explained social segregation as rising not from shared racial and class status, but vaguely from shared “similarities,” without making an explicitly racial or class-based critique of their school.
Though others echoed Christina and Maria's words, a more common theme emerged in the second wave of the survey, completed during the students' second semester at school. When asked about whether or not they felt like “a part of the school,” 84% either agreed or strongly agreed. Only 5% (two students) disagreed with that statement. In addition, only eight students disagreed with the statement that “other students come from a similar culture to mine.” When asked about having to represent or speak for their racial background outside of the classroom, eight students agreed. Only nine disagreed, while the rest either chose “not applicable” or “neither agree nor disagree.” Identical numbers responded the same way to the same question about representing or speaking for their class background. While these numbers are still low—roughly 25% in each case—they are much higher than expected when compared to the 84% of the students surveyed who reported feeling like part of the school. In addition, in both cases, unlike any of the other questions in that section of the survey, the “neither agree nor disagree” answer was the modal response.
The in-depth interviews echoed the surveys. Students expressed satisfaction in the sense of “community” in their schools early in the interview and told me they believe they socialize with a diverse and representative group of students. Many of the students expressed pride in being a part of the social community, denying that they made friends because of shared racial, ethnic, or class backgrounds. Instead, they socialized with friends they met in the dorm, via sports, extracurricular activities, or in courses. However, these same students, when asked to describe their close friends, listed a group of three to five students who were almost without exception students of color from programs similar to RISE. As Ramon told me:
My friends are most, four of them are from [a similar program to RISE], but you don't pay attention to that. That's not why you become friends, it's because you're from the same dorm or play the same sports.
Considering the low enrollment of students of color in independent schools—only 9% African American and less than 4% Hispanic—the chance of randomly not having a close White friend is quite low (National Association of Independent Schools 2007).
Malcolm's best friend is a good example of this conflict between being a part of the community and surrounding oneself with friends of a similar background. Malcolm described at length his best friend at school with whom he shares many interests. In his words:
His experience is similar to mine. And when I first met him, we just bonded. I didn't know he was from the ABC program, he didn't know I was from RISE, but we just started talking. He was the first person I started talking to here. It was coincidental, but now we're best friends. I'm more willing to open up with someone from another program than someone who is just from here.
Though Malcolm did not seek out his friend because of their shared background, that shared background is critical to their closeness and continued friendship. Importantly, the component of that background that they shared (a preparation program) is a class- and, often, race-based program. “Shared background” may have been a coded way to discuss a racialized and class-based social network without explicitly mentioning race and class—as that would run counter to the diversifier goal of interacting with and helping elite White peers. This contradicts the students' argument that race and class are not behind the social networks they create.
Many RISE students wanted to be seen as part of the community and expressed real pride in having diverse groups of friends that transcended class and race. However, when probed, their friend groups shared a similar pattern of including mostly international students or students from programs like RISE. Though they may have socialized with other students, their closest network followed the pattern laid out by Tatum (Reference Tatum1997), that is, of using their social network as a buttress against the White wealthy majority in their schools. This tension between their close social network and their role as diversifiers may indicate a limit to how deep the diversifier mindset can reach early in students' high school careers. To put it in Maria's terms, their role as diversifiers may be “skin deep” in comparison to their racial, ethnic, and class identities. Whether or not that mindset can last beyond the first semester is an important question very much without an answer.
Unhappy Diversifiers
Although the majority of students in the program were satisfied with their academic and social experiences in their first year at private school, some students felt alienated or frustrated at their schools. Within the interview sample, Nura, a South Asian Muslim female, and Brittany both described serious disappointments with their new school. Linda, though still happy with her school, was not nearly as happy as she expected to be. These cases illuminate the importance of both the student completely embracing the diversifier mindset and the institution's response for the student's success.
Nura felt ostracized by the wealthy students. Unlike the other students in the interview sample, Nura did not have a significant social network of students from similar backgrounds, mainly because her school was very small (roughly 200 students total). In addition, Nura had not built a sense of pride from being a peer educator—only in the second semester did she help put together an academic presentation on Islam at her school. It is telling, though, that when presented with that opportunity, even after five months of social semi-isolation, Nura still responded with excitement and optimism. Once the institution responded by offering her a chance to educate her fellow students, Nura felt much more excited and engaged in the community. Even outside of organizing the academic presentation, Nura relished her role as an educator:
Interviewer: How do you feel when people ask you questions [about Islam and how you grew up]?
Nura: I feel kinda good, I feel proud of what I am. It just makes me feel better.
Interviewer: Does it happen in class, or just when you're hanging out? When does that come up?
Nura: It happens in class, when I'm in the room, wherever I am.
Interviewer: Tell me about when it happens in class.
Nura: Sometimes when we're going over certain things, it happens in certain times. Especially in English, the Princess of Jordan came here to lecture and my English teacher, he was really interested, so whenever we're reading a book or something, he's asking questions, and all of a sudden he changes the topic to Middle East countries or something. He asks me and then I have to, like, tell him all these things.
Interviewer: Do you ever feel on the spot or is it always really cool to get to talk about things like that—
Nura: [interrupting] It's cool. It's always so cool.
Even without a social network of similar students, the diversifier mindset still helped Nura enjoy her position as an outsider and express pride in her background as a Muslim student. Though this may appear to be the effect of a “proud” immigrant identity (Waters Reference Waters1999), it is not. Nura enjoys educating even her teachers on subjects only tangentially related to her own identity during class hours. In fact, the implication (all Muslims, even South Asians, should know about the Middle East) is antithetical to the ethnically specific, as opposed to the racialized Black Caribbean, immigrant identity Waters describes. Nura is happy to be raced as “Muslim” writ large, while Black Caribbean immigrants try to avoid such generalizations.
While Nura felt ostracized from her peers, Brittany actively avoided them. Her disappointment came not from social difficulties that arose because of her position as a racial and class minority but rather from the lack of academic challenge and the immaturity of her peers in school. Her reaction to the social realities of her school was typical of the diversifier mindset, and her disappointment could even be attributable to the diversifier mindset. She expected more difficult classes, more intellectual peers, and more opportunities to challenge herself and her peers. As she told me, “One thing I'm kinda upset about is that I wasn't expecting to get into private school and get straight As.” In other words, why bother diversifying if one doesn't gain something as well?
Linda's experience is the most difficult to explain as part of the diversifier mindset. Linda and Peter attended the same school, one Linda was very excited to enter and in which Peter has excelled academically and found a social niche. Linda, on the other hand, was frustrated with her fellow students because they found her odd: “People get overwhelmed with my personality and I get so upset about it. Nobody gets used to me here and it is almost March.” She attributed the disconnect to her Dominican heritage: “Dominicans are loud and in your face and crazy and that's how I am. Sometimes people get overwhelmed.” Linda's experience points to an important limitation to the diversifier mindset—one can only diversify as much as the institution or the social culture allows. For Linda that involved helping students with their Spanish homework and some discussion of culture, but her loud personality also created significant friction that she frustratedly attributed to cultural differences. Here may lie a clue as to why the diversifier mindset was not identified in previous work. Previous work looked at students who had been in their schools for multiple years, and therefore had faced the organizational habitus and symbolic violence longer than those in my study. Over time, students may have more and more experiences like Linda's trouble with “overwhelming” her peers and may become disillusioned with their diversifier role. The diversifier mindset requires the cooperation of the institution, as Nura's experience shows, and the cooperation of one's peers, as Linda's frustration shows. Without both working together, diversifiers are stymied.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Student graduates of the RISE program reported a relatively easy transition into elite, predominantly White private schools. Before school started, students expected a busy academic experience and a socially inviting environment. In general, their expectations were affirmed by their experiences. Though they overestimated the amount of work to be assigned, their grades and enjoyment of school were as positive as they had expected during the past summer. Socially, students were excited to be surrounded by high-achieving peers and that optimism continued to color their view of high school six months into it. Even though some made note of racial ignorance in their school peer groups, they continued to achieve academically and to feel like a member of the school social community. As Linda put it, “It's a roller coaster ride. It's fun though, it's fun. Roller coasters are fun.”
Unlike the students from earlier work and autobiographies, the RISE students did not report a significant amount of difficulty with their school experience. Instead of struggling with the cultural demands or organization habitus of their schools, students embraced their school's ideals and were happy to enhance the school via their relatively unique racial and class backgrounds in the student body. While Peter Kuriloff and Michael Reichert (Reference Kuriloff and Reichert2003) found that African American students in their case study succeeded by embracing some social marginality, RISE students succeed by confidently asserting their racial identity throughout the entire school. Their close-friend networks were racially and class constricted like the networks of the students in Kuriloff and Reichert's study, but they did not use those networks to critique their schools' habitus, only to occasionally critique their fellow students. That individualized understanding of their social network seems to have had a protective value for the RISE students, but it also limited their ability to identify the structural components of any negative experience they might have had. As individual agents of diversity, they might not have been as transformative as they could have been.
In addition, though the overall positive views of the current generation of students echo those of the early generation Zweigenhaft and Domhoff (Reference Zweigenhaft and Domhoff2003) interviewed, they express even less struggle with their own racial identities than the previous generation. In fact, they activate their non-White racial identities and lower socioeconomic class in order to feel like a valued member of the elite institution. Students happily described a duty to educate and help their fellow prep students. In some ways, the experience is flipped—instead of navigating elite cultural capital and offering it to their peers at home (Carter's “multicultural navigators”), students offer their own cultural capital to their elite school peers. As Carter (Reference Carter2003) claims, cultural capital is context specific; however, in this case, the elite context and the diversifier mentality offer a unique value for the “diversifier.” Unexpectedly, in the elite boarding school, the diversifier mindset allows students to activate their nondominant cultural capital to their advantage within the limits provided by the organizational habitus. In other words, the diversifier may be analogized to a translator of different forms of cultural capital for the elite institution.
Fordham's racelessness theory argues that students of color who hope to succeed in boarding schools will feel pressured to negate or hide their racial and, by extension, class backgrounds to succeed. In this case, students of color, including African American students, instead created a cultural adaptation that emphasized their racial identities as a crucial component of their value to the elite school. Instead of trying to hide their racial identity, students created an adaptive outsider stance. As one anonymous reviewer noted, this finding is similar to Antwi Akom's (Reference Akom2003) work on Nation of Islam students in low-achieving high schools but in a radically different setting. As Erin Horvat and Carla O'Connor (Reference Horvat and O'Connor2006) argue, the concepts of “opposition” and “oppositional culture” warrant further complexity. In both low-achieving schools and elite boarding schools, a sense of achievement-oriented opposition or difference appears to be a mindset that helps students academically while also buttressing their individual racial and class identities.
Instead of advocating racelessness, the RISE program helped form a student mindset I call the diversifier mindset that is useful in the elite private school environment. Via the academic and social preparation offered through the Boarding Experience, students learned the important tenets of the diversifier mindset. The diversifier mindset has a number of key components that enabled students to interpret their private school experience in a positive light. RISE students envisioned themselves as more mature or experienced than their fellow students. Though they felt different from other students, the RISE students never expressed the negative feelings of not deserving or being worthy of the personal attention, high demands, and beautiful grounds of elite private schools. They felt the opposite—that their prior experiences and dedication made them particularly prepared to gain from and enhance such schools.
In addition to feeling they had a superior background and better preparation, students were particularly attuned as diversifiers to their roles as representatives to the school community. When students faced racially charged comments or were cast as outsiders due to their class background, their RISE preparation and diversifier mindset led them to respond with patience and by “educating” their elite, predominantly White classmates. Students took pride in helping teach the wealthy White students at their schools to expand their understandings of race and class differences.
The diversifier mindset only goes so far. Students still mentioned feeling frustrated by aspects of private school, including the seemingly universal question of why the students of color sit together. In addition, though students reported having a diverse group of friends and being members of the school community, when asked to describe their friends, the large majority described friends that were from similar programs, or who were other scholarship students. Though the students took pride in diversifying the school and saw the majority wealthy and majority White student body as friendly, their close social networks consisted mostly of low-income students of color.
I argue that students adapted the “diversifier mindset” at least partly because of their interactions with the RISE program. This does not mean that students must go through a program to embrace that role, nor does it mean that only high school students may see themselves as diversifiers. I believe anyone diversifying the gender, racial, or class makeup of an institution may use and benefit from the adaptive values of this mindset. More qualitative work with people in the process of preparing for and entering an elite environment as a racial, gender, or class outsider may show how the diversifier mindset fits different situations. In addition, because all of the students in this sample went through the RISE program, each had been exposed to and trained in the diversifier mindset before going to private school. As a case study, I can only write about the experiences of students from one such program. However, other programs around the country have similar programs and make similar efforts to prepare students. More studies of these programs and how they differ and overlap may shed further light on the value, challenges, and exact contours of the diversifier mindset. Further, and more importantly, research into how similar students who were not prepared to be diversifiers react to private school would identify how important a preparation program is in developing the diversifier mindset.
At the same time, it is important to consider the drawbacks of such a mindset, both in this particular case and more broadly. The RISE students accepted much of the current structure, believed that they were particularly worthy of their individual success, and did not raise structural criticisms of their schools or experiences. If that is a necessary part of the diversifier mindset and not an effect of student age, then it calls into question the value of diversification. Ideally, diversity leads to a changed institutional structure. After decades of diversification, however, the elite private school is still a bastion of wealth, privilege, and Whiteness. These students have learned to adapt to that environment, not how to challenge and change it. Programs such as RISE are not undermining the privilege of elite private schools but rather confirming, accepting, and even strengthening it.Footnote 12
Previous academic literature has focused on the experiences of older high school students. Retrospective research, autobiographies, and pieces of fiction that cover the entire high school experience focus on the later years of high school as more challenging, both academically and socially, to low-income students and students of color. Though RISE students have received extra academic and social training in order to create a mindset or habitus that successfully integrates them into these elite schools initially, over the years that mindset might not continue to work as successfully as it does in their first year in boarding school. Similarly, later in high school, students may receive more negative pressure from peers in public schools at home as their different experiences continue to diverge.
Future longitudinal research would be particularly valuable to understanding whether and how students who enter high school with this diversifier mindset challenge their environment or have that mindset challenged. In both Zweigenhaft and Domhoff's interviews (Reference Zweigenhaft and Domhoff2003) and personal discussions with older graduates of these programs, many graduates express a sense of conflict with their high schools, feelings that the current students did not report. It would be sociologically interesting to see if this diversifier experience grows harder with age in high school. If so, support services, often provided by the nonprofits organizations, may be particularly important for student success. At the same time, if these students integrate without challenging their schools, is that indicative of a successfully diversified school, or of students having decided—or having been trained—not to explore their racial and class identities? As Bourdieu asks, is this what diversity should create? In addition, a more detailed look at how students enter these programs and how families interact with them would add further insight into how programs create the diversifier mindset and provide access to the social mobility that elite schools offer.
