EDUCATION INEQUITABILITY IN THE BROADER SCOPE OF INEQUALITY FOR

HOUSTON AREA LATINOS

Frank Rodriguez

PAM/SOC 4160 – Ethnography of Poverty and Inequality

Spring 2013

Introduction

The largely accepted normative mentality in the United

States of accessible upward mobility fails to acknowledge the

fact that many students grapple with barriers of inequality and

inequitability every day in the classroom. Achievement ideology

and the idea of meritocracy where individuals are expected to be

able to upwardly mobilize by the resources that they are given

arguably rests on the assumption that all individual students

have equal and/or equitable social platforms to frame a future

for achievement and attainment, however, this could not be

further from the truth. Looking into poverty, issues in our

education system, and what broader implications they have for

reinforced, perpetuated inequality seeks to challenge the

achievement ideology by acknowledging the stark differences in

access to quality curricula, critical information for college

preparedness, and meaningful relationships with educators that

students living in poverty are faced with.

The purpose of this paper will be to articulate the ways in

which these detriments to Latino students living in inner-city

Houston at two public, comprehensive high schools continue to

breed inequality and produce underachieving results at these

schools. Based on observations of these two school environments

and assessment of need, policy implications should come about

that promote holistic progressive reform in order to push for

higher educational outcomes for these students in low-income and

working class communities. It is significant to note that

literature review of Whatever It Takes (Holland 2005) and Subtractive

Schooling (Valenzuela 1999) will result in holistic progressive

reform, in that the policy implications do not merely focus on

improving school conditions and curricula, but also the need for

establishing meaningful relationships between educators,

students, and their families alongside community engagement to

utilize school campuses as core community resources that

strengthen the cohesiveness of these two majority Latino

communities. Finally, the paper will look at how creating a solid

sense of trust Davis High School and Milby High School will

further make progressive strides to fight inequality in the

broader scope of the greater Houston area.

Context/Setting

Although this paper will focus on broad themes present

within the Houston Independent School District (HISD), the two

specific communities at hand will be Houston’s Northside and East

End. Both neighborhood are predominately Hispanic and of low-

middle income in relation to the rest of the greater Houston

area. This paper will also look at census data related from

census tracts within two high school attendance boundaries; Davis

High School and Milby High School. According to the 2000 US

Census, these Northside area census tracts had a 1999 overall

average median household income of $24,208 and these East End

area census tracts had a 1999 overall average median household

income of $26,657, both substantially lower than the median

household income at the national level ($41,994), state level

($39,927), and county level ($42,598). It is important to note

that both of these schools are centrally located in two of the

most economically segregated areas of Houston, which happens to

be the nation’s most segregated cities based on income, with a

Residential Income Segregation Index (RISI) Score of 61, highest

out of any of the US ten largest metro areas (Pew 2012). These

neighborhood characteristics are significant to note because they

not only indicate the disadvantaged that the local students face

in their home lives, but placing them in the context with the

rest of Houston illustrates concentrated disadvantage which has

arguable implications for attitudes predominantly represented in

Houston political power which, in turn, have effects on policy

that aims to combat inequality of all types in the Houston area.

Given that these two communities and schools are isolated from

affluence, within highly concentrated low-income backgrounds, one

might argue that not only could this effect their quality of life

in terms of quality housing and access to healthy food, but these

students are geographically and social distant from the resources

that work to ensure achievement in affluent areas, keeping the

high achievement in more wealthy areas.

2000 Census

Northside Census Tract

(Davis HS Area)

Med. Household Income (1999) Avg. Household Income (1999)

2102 $19,405 $51,484

2103 $24,415 $29,011

2104 $21,250 $27,038

Both Davis HS and Milby HS are locatedin predominately Hispanic/Latino communities as demonstrated by a Race Map from the 2000 Census.

GREEN (White)

YELLOW (Hispanic)

BLUE (African-

Davis HS is located in the central part of the Northside, adjacent to Downtown.

Milby HS is located SE of Downtown, nearthe Port of Houston industrial center.

Both schools are within lower income communities and geographically

2105 $26,814 $38,467

2106 $34,188 $42,507

2107 $27,200 $30,318

2108 $16,186 $19,093

AVERAGE $24,208 $33,988

2000 Census

East End Census Tract

(Milby HS Area)

Med. Household Income (1999) Avg.  Household Income (1999)

3111 $22,803 $32,147

3113 $31,336 $42,460

3114 $26,372 $35,361

3115 $27,557 $40,778

3116 $22,358 $30,361

3203 $29,519 $31,139

AVERAGE $26,657 $35,374

Data

In Holly Holland’s, Whatever It Takes: Transforming American Schools,

she looks at the founding of Project GRAD (Graduation Really

Achieves Dreams) at Davis High School in the Northside and what

efforts still takes today to ensure college readiness in

historically low achieving, low-income communities. GRAD works on

the idea of preparing students holistically for college,

understanding that adequate preparation is crucial in helping

college-bound attitudes and expectations come into full fruition.

GRAD, now a nationwide organization, serving inner-city schools

around the US, not only supports college-bound curriculum in the

classroom, but offers social/emotional support for needy families

to account for home barriers to academic success that stem from

structural issues. Holland speaks with students, administrators,

and district staff in hopes of gaining a sense of how GRAD,

Davis, and the Northside community work in a synthesized way to

increase graduation rates and college preparedness for Latino and

Black students at Davis High School. Holland’s interviews with

Davis students and community members actually began in the late

eighties when the idea of GRAD was first being planned out and

she goes on to look at important intersections of perspectives

come to engage with each other in the classroom and sometimes

clash in a way that disenfranchises students. By discussing the

idea of GRAD and the degree of its need in the Northside

community, Holland’s voicing of students’ values and those of

their families, gives insight to the ways in which their hopes to

pursue higher education are deterred by socio-structural concerns

in the Northside area.

In Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring,

Angela Valenzuela explores the school structural forces at the

micro and macro levels to explain how the curriculum and

environment contributes to low academic attainment at “Juan

Seguin High School” which is actually Milby High School, located

in East End Houston. In her ethnographic approach, Valenzuela

takes a qualitative approach by using surveys and interviews to

bring to the light the students’ voices in looking at how they

view their acceptance in their school. She also shares the views

from the administration and faculty, explaining how and why

certain mentalities exist towards students and their achievement.

Central to Valenzuela’s work is the idea of subtractive schooling

in which Milby neglects to value the social and cultural

resources that students bring with them to campus from their

majority Mexican-American community. This leads to unstable,

vulnerable relationships between educators at Milby and their

students and plays a key role in dropout rates and overall

underachievement. It is important to note that Valenzuela began

her ethnographic work in 1992, at a time of urban instability and

decline for many cities around the United States.

Findings – Whatever It Takes: Transforming American Schools

In her look at the experience for low-income students and

their families at Davis High School in Northside, Houston, Holly

Holland gives substantial context that explains the need for

holistic reform or programs that work to increase educational

success for students. Not only is economic hardship a barrier to

success for students and their families, but Project GRAD

founder, James Ketelsen, understood that structural forces in

schools are to be looked at in order for progression in urban

education: “It’s not the kids… It’s the adults, or rather their

attitudes and actions, that must change.” (Holland 11). A key

idea to the work that GRAD wishes to perform in low-income

communities is providing a well-rounded community engaged

education environment and school educators and administrators

must work to make this a reality for underserved families. It

might be worthy to note that Holland references the work of

schools that seems to make positive impacts on students’ lives,

but falls short eventually, bringing outcomes back to their

dismal states, “Many of the notable practices stem from the work

of dynamic principals and faculties whose initiatives fade when

they leave…” (Holland 13). For Holland making progress is only

half of the battle, but sustaining it with a holistic approach is

a key to ensure sustainable progression overtime. Looking at the

way in which GRAD wished to accomplish this illustrates that this

effort is one that needs different facets of support including

financial support from the most politically influential in the

Houston area; major corporations.

As an incentive to enroll in, and participate in GRAD,

students have been provided with $4,000 scholarships upon high

school graduation that serves to alleviate some of the economic

burden of attending college for these Davis families. Initially,

the scholarship was funded by Tenneco, a major corporate

stakeholder. For Juan Cantu, a Davis student who wished to attend

college, the financial burden was an all too real barrier that

would have otherwise prevented him from pursuing higher education

if the GRAD program had not been implemented during his time as a

student. His mother, Maria, understood her family’s incapacity to

pay for Juan’s education but placed hope in GRAD and Davis as an

avenue to achievement, “We gave you love and discipline… but we

cannot send you to college. These people want to send you to

college.” (Holland 28). While the $4,000 scholarship will not

cover full costs at all colleges and/or universities, pledging to

actively work towards the scholarship keeps students on a

progressive track by asking them maintaining a 2.5 grade point

average and attend at least two GRAD summer institute programs.

The GRAD summer institutes are opportunities for students in

the program to attend workshops, classes, network, and engage

with student life at local college campuses. During these summer

programs, students receive enrichment instruction hat prepares

them for the upcoming academic year while viewing themselves as

college students on an actual campus. For Honduras born

immigrant, Sandy Lopez, attending the summer institute at the

University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) not only fulfilled

requirements for the Tenneco scholarship, it changed his

perception of the campus and allowed him to have higher self-

expectations. “I remember when we used to sit in the middle of

the hall, my friends and I, or we’d just walk around the building

and pretend that we were college students… That was the moment

when we realized, ‘Hey, this could happen.’” (Holland 46). Sandy

expressed sincere gratitude for his 6-week experience at UHD

where he was able to develop skills in English while being

challenged and encouraged from institute instructors. Another

option for summer institute requirements was to attend the Summer

College session at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) with other

high achieving high school students. With hopes of exposing

students to being educated in an away-from-home setting, starting

in 1992, Davis began sending a few students to Cornell’s Summer

College which had substantially positive impacts on their

academic expectations for themselves and for their coming college

experiences after graduation. This initiative came out of

understanding of poor outcomes at the higher education level

where many Latinos do not complete associate degree programs

because of the necessity to drop out and support their families

(Holland 47). Within this idea is the acknowledgement that

commuting to campus does not rid low-income minority students

from social and economic environments that propose harsh

challenges to their college experience.

As we see in Holland’s look at Project GRAD and Davis High

School, there are different avenues of need in order to boost

graduation and college enrollment rates. The scholarship

incentive continues to make students work avidly in the classroom

while the two summer institute requirement brings the college

experience to the students, provides academic enrichment, and

makes going to college appear to be more attainable than before.

The voices of Davis students challenge the idea that these

families do not value education, nor that they do not care to

pursue higher education, rather they illustrate the complexities

that the families are faced with and the essentiality that comes

along with the school serving as a community core where

expectations are raised because of quality resources and

relationships with educators.

Findings – Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring

Students at Milby High School are faced with similar

economic challenges as those at Davis that come along with life

in poverty, including being subject to low expectations from

their educators at school. For Valenzuela, students at Milby have

taken on an approach of “not caring” is a method of dealing with

their position in the school. “What looks to teachers and

administrators like opposition and lack of caring, feels to

students like powerless and alienation.” (Valenzuela 94). Where

one might feel that students at Milby are characterized by a lack

of drive and ambition to do well in school, the literature

suggests that their patterns of achievement have much to do with

the treatment that they receive from their school that makes them

feel socially distant from it as an institution. Due to a lack of

connectedness between the school and these students’ actual lives

and their community, students like Frank at Milby feel

unmotivated because pursuing success at Milby means going along

with a “predetermined set of ideas-equivalent to cultural

genocide.” (Holland 94). As we can see here, students like Frank

whose cultural capital is not of the dominant cultural capital at

school are at a severe disadvantage because success is equated

with foregoing cultural norms of their community and family, and

they are regarded in a deficit model, similar to that of the

culture of poverty theory. Even in the case of some Milby

students becoming ‘good’ students, we see that success at school

means becoming a passive, quiet, subdued learner (Holland 260).

Valenzuela goes on to explain that subtractive schooling

occurs in a number of educational contexts, troubling African-

Americans, Native Americans, and other disadvantaged groups who

might historically be of lower socioeconomic status (Holland

266). It is important to note that Holland sees these issues

residing within school bureaucracy and in a system of educators

who continue to add to the bridge between students’ schools and

communities.

Discussion

Given that both Holland and Valenzuela’s research works

actively to bring the community voices to the light and show that

these students and families do value education and wish to reach

high achieving outcomes, it is important to point out how their

research challenges achievement ideology and meritocracy, two

important ideas that place agency on the individual. As evident

in both works, pervasive forces have severe implications on

student outcomes at both Davis and Milby. Looking at these

steadfast factors, being beyond students’ control, begins to

challenge the idea in popular discourse that indications of

success and achievement should solely be attributed to individual

autonomy. In general, placing the expectations solely on the

individual to pull themselves out of poverty is kept in place

because of an individualistic approach that those of affluent

backgrounds and who have political power can maintain because

their succession is based on cultural capital that they have

inherited which is the dominant cultural capital in our country

because it is what education and labor markets revolve around.

Looking at these two communities and their families’ culture

as a “culture of poverty” places them in an automatic deficit

model in which they adopt oppositional values and norms which

keeps them in poverty. As the literature indicates, attitudes and

outcomes within education for students at Davis and Milby are

arguably a direct result of systematic systems of oppression and

exclusion that they have faced in their school and in general,

broader systems of inequality that exist. Both sets of students

in the literature come from backgrounds economic hardship and

were entering schools that initially did not acknowledge their

home life and community from either a cultural approach or social

approach. If education, as an institution, continues to hold

these types of students in a deficit regard because of inherent

social sub-standing, it will continue to produce underachieving

outcomes, perpetuating the larger inequality system.

Because the Culture of Poverty theory focuses on the

potential ways that victims of poverty secure themselves into

that position, the work in these two understandings of how

poverty affects life outcomes for these children seeks to

disprove the notion that the fault is on the individual. In fact,

by looking at the strides taken to fight poor outcomes for these

students at Davis and Milby, proponents of the culture of poverty

approach should come to see that the necessity for structural and

social adjustment where education is not only seen as a one-way

institution, rather an active form of engagement that interacts

and serves students and their communities. This places agency on

administrators, policy makers (at the local and state level), and

even teachers, to have a continual drive for social progression

that will seek to dismantle as much historical, systemic

oppression as possible. Continuing to view education as an

institution surrounding middle- and upper-middle class values and

norms will be the driving force that continues to breed

inequality, rather than the values and norms of lower classes. As

demonstrated in the two texts, these families and students aspire

to achieve educational outcomes of middle- and upper-middle class

norms; the issue is not their drive, but their access to support,

information, and tools that allow them to develop college-bound

mentalities and realize their academic potential even when faced

with subtractive schooling.

In general, voicing the struggles and complexities

associated with life in poverty do indeed go against the

pervasive ideas embedded within societies where achievement

ideology and meritocracy are highly valued as means to economic

gain and educational achievement. Whereas the culture of poverty

theory holds the impoverished to blame for their attitudes

towards our institutions, understanding the oppressiveness that

comes along with being in poverty arguably demonstrates how

certain ideas and mentalities develop in communities of need,

when faced with continual failure due to institutional barriers

that privileged society will then hold in a deficit model.

Policy Discussion - Open Enrollment & Houston Innovative Learning

Zone (HILZ)

In order to give families some autonomy in their education,

HISD has adopted an open enrollment policy in which students and

their families who live in the boundaries of the district are

able to attend schools in which they are not "zoned" to and

choose to attend a school that they consider to be performing

better than their neighborhood. While this policy is beneficial

in that it promotes greater choice when a neighborhood school

does not appear to serve students and their families, it does not

appear to be all that progressive in that it does not address the

core reasoning behind why these neighborhood schools, in low-

income communities, seem to fail students in the first place. As

we see in Holland's literature, bringing critical resources and

information to low-income communities helps to alleviate poor

outcomes; understanding community need is also an important part

of solving issues for these families in helping to support them

in their educational experience. This is a similar argument that

Valenzuela takes when she uncovers how schools should not detract

from rich community and cultural resources in order to build

meaningful relationships between a community and local education

institution. In both instances we see the importance links

between engagement and service for the communities in need. For

HISD to leave successful outcomes in the hands of families,

again, it is not getting to core forces that reproduce inequality

in low-income schools. This approach, just like the "culture of

poverty", places too much agency on individuals and does not make

progressive strides to understand where the roots of the problems

reside. Fortunately, HISD has recently implemented the new HILZ -

Houston Innovative Learning Zones - that do work to bring

resources to communities in need by providing interactive,

innovative educational experiences for students in communities

with high economic need and at high risk of dropping out of high

school.

The HILZ efforts in HISD strive to expose students of high

economic need to the advancing technological industries and

develop transferrable skills that make them marketable for

careers in Science Technology Engineering & Math (STEM) related

fields. According to HISD, some of the programs offered in HILZ

are: Electronic Engineering, Process Technology, Pharmacy

Technology, Network & Computer Administration, and Logistics &

Global Supply. Not only is this progressive policy benefiting

students by exposing them to these advancing industries, it is

teaching them to think of themselves aligned with professional

and educational goals, already making upward social mobility a

more attainable goal. Central to the HILZ program is the

students’ ability to work towards their high school diploma while

also graduating with an associate’s degree in their field of

study. A final perk of HILZ for students is the mentorship

component in which they are paired with a working professional in

a profession related to their area of study. Finally, HILZ is a

progressive policy because while working towards high educational

gains, students are actually building social capital by

networking their mentors and qualified lecturers who come from

universities and who have real experience, too.

Looking at the classroom as an engaging learning environment

through HILZ, students might even develop attitudes and self-

expectations in which they see themselves as equipped to achieve

in a professional setting and in education. Students in HILZ are

being given tools that not only prepare them academically, these

students do not have to leave their neighborhood school in order

to seek “quality” instruction which actually goes against the

idea of open-enrollment where families in high need areas are

expected to search for quality instruction in ‘better’ schools.

Where the open enrollment policy initially has potential to

dismantle neighborhood ties and cohesiveness with the school,

programs such as HILZ that make neighborhood schools marketable

for all children can be argued as centers to develop the student

in a well-rounded way, boosting their expectations, goals,

academic strengths, and social capital all at no-cost to their

families.

Works Cited

Holland, Holly. 2005. Whatever It Takes: Transforming American Schools,

The Project GRAD Story. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Houston Independent School District. 2013. “Houston

Innovative Learning Zone.” Retrieved April 20, 2013.

http://www.hilz.houstoncte.org/

Fry, Richard and Taylor, Paul. “The Rise of Residential

Segregation by Income”. Pewsocialtrends.org. Retrieved April 22,

2013. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-

residential-segregation-by-income/

U.S. Census Bureau. Average Household Income in 1999

Dollars, 2000. Prepared by Social Explorer.

http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/ReportData/htmlresults.aspx?

ReportId=R10492049&TablesPerPage=50

U.S. Census Bureau. Median Household Income in 1999 Dollars,

2000. Prepared by Social Explorer.

http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/ReportData/htmlresults.aspx?

ReportId=R10492049&TablesPerPage=50

U.S. Census Bureau. Race, 2000. Prepared by Social Explorer.

http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/ReportData/htmlresults.asp

x?ReportId=R10492058&TablesPerPage=50

Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling U.S.-Mexican Youth and

the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.