Stratification

The children that engage in musicing with me everyday listen to lots of different kinds of musics. Most of the musics are not necessarily the ones we are singing and listening to in music class. Are some? Certainly and I love those moments especially when they are unexpected. In the meantime, however, I worry that I'm not engaging the way I could be. I think too that there certainly is an underlying problem here. While I attempt to shy away from strictly western musical epistemologies, they are still present. I worry that even with this in mind and the attempt to critically engage in a musical framing of our world and naming our world through music it is not enough. I need to be doing more.

The situation as it stands is that the children are mostly all free lunch and racially there are zero Non-Hispanic White students. What does this have to do with anything? Well, the economic, social, and cultural stratification that exists in our system is being replicated here in my school. We work hard and yet I see information like this:


Go here for the full entry on contexts.org

What does this show? This shows that the tie between parental and student income in the United States is still serving to stratify affluent whites. Social mobility is not as possible here as it is elsewhere. And why? Well, why do our kindergarten teachers only have enough level appropriate books to give the children one take home book per week?

What happens when we challenge this data? Is this data telling us that social mobility is tied to parent income? Or is it telling us that students who currently have access to social mobility attend institutions where most parents are middle or upper class? If this is the case, then we have no excuse despite the challenges inherent in current federal and state policy.

But more than anything, this is not an excuse. We must continue to challenge these social mobility data. We must fight the replication of social stratification that exists because of the inherent de facto segregation in our schools spurred onward by district lines, voucher programs, tuition-tax credits, and charter schools. If we are mindful of the existence of these injustices and inequities than we must combat them with our own vigor and practice. I had a wonderful conversation with someone I admire very much a couple of days ago and was reminded that policy writers are not just the people in Albany or Washington D.C. Each rule and expectation is a policy that we ask ourselves and our students to be mindful of. What policies then can we begin examining now? After all, policy regime change comes from intertial forces with the top down AND the ground up.