Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School

by Peter Demerath

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as Producing Success makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead.

 

Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. Producing Success reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, Producing Success is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

Genres: Education, Sociology, Teaching

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2009

Reviews

[Eduardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as part of my graduate school program. I live in the suburbs and I have taught at suburban high schools so I read this as an academic as well as a practitioner. I could see students of mine that echoed the sentiments of Demerath's focus students. I am disturbed by how easy it is to want to defend the teachers in the book. And yet, Demerath is right. I could defend the teachers but I shouldn't. His research shows that the culture drives us all as we perpetuate the classes, the divisions, as well as the culture.

When we talk about any -ism as being systemic, it seems like a way to make it a problem that is bigger than us and, therefore, unsolvable by us. Demerath shows us that systemic problems are us. As with most good research, there isn't a solution, just the facts laid bare and the dots connected.