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L114 Reese, L., Kroesen, K. & Gallimore, R. (2000). Agency and School Performance among Urban Latino Youth. In Taylor, R. & Wang, M (Eds.). Resilience Across Contexts: Family, Work, Culture and Community. (pp.295-332). New Jersey: Erlbaum.
In his classic ethnography of working class youth, Willis (1981) locates the agency of working class "lads" in their resistance to the authority of the school. However, echoing Weber's dismal theme, these youths "creatively develop, transform and finally reproduce aspects of the larger culture" and their dominated class position within it. Other studies of schooling also portray marginalized working class and ethnic youth as resisting their mainstream teachers, curriculum, and classroom routines (Foley, 1991). When members of minority groups cannot discover a positive identity for themselves within the dominant culture, they may search for it in ethnic or peer groups organized in opposition to the images of the dominant culture (Weinberg, 1994). In school, students resist adapting to settings associated with the negative and stigmatizing experiences of mainstream society (Erickson, 1987). Thus, individual agency, when it does emerge, reveals itself exclusively in terms of opposition or resistance to the societal hierarchy. Yet some students in disadvantaged circumstances do succeed, an outcome which they and their families attribute to their agentic efforts. Research on minority successes and within-group variation has ranged from efforts to track upward mobility of the working class (Rodriguez, 1996; Ortiz, 1996) to the specific experiences of Latinos in the educational system and the factors that help them succeed (Achor and Morales, 1990; Mehan, et al., 1996). Other evidence of both youth success and belief in agency has been found over the last ten years as we talked with a sample of immigrant Latino parents and their U.S. raised and educated children (Goldenberg & Gallimore, 1995; Reese, Balzano, Gallimore, and Goldenberg, 1995). Their immigrant parents recognize and experience discrimination in American society, but none express the view that this will prevent their children from getting ahead. Analyzed from the perspective of reproduction theory, these students and families would be viewed as hopelessly accepting of the dominant class ideology. If we look for successful child and parent agency&emdash;that is, intentional and purposeful behavior, and choices which have significance for the individual making them&emdash;through the lens of reproduction theory, we do not find it. In this paper we search for agency in our immigrant Latino sample through the lenses of sociocultural and ecocultural theories by linking group- and individual-level analyses. Agency is conceived not only in individual terms but situated within sociocultural context. Agency is treated as both product and process&emdash;it is not only the choices made, but the process of choosing situated within sociocultural context. This approach casts humans and their social environments in a reciprocal relationship that has been described in several disciplines. Our ten-year longitudinal study has focused on understanding and accounting for academic success as well as under achievement among urban Latino children and youth. Some of the young teens in our sample are exhibiting oppositional behaviors. And it seems likely that as the students move into high school settings more and different types of oppositional behaviors will emerge. With these caveats in mind, our observations suggest it is a greater degree of parent and youth agency&emdash;in the form of co-construction of positive niche environments&emdash;that is associated with better academic outcomes in middle school. When the children have interests and make choices and the parents are also actively involved in structuring activities for and with their children, the academic outcomes are more positive. When children are left to their own devices without much parent control, they tend to flounder. When children are tightly controlled, a parental response driven mainly by environmental threats, they go through the motions of studying but are not observed to be engaged, self-motivated learners. How can an association between this kind of agency and school success be explained? One answer lies in Holland's (1992) combination of the concept of "expertise" with that of levels of cognitive salience for cultural knowledge (internalization). Dreyfus (1984), following Vygotsky, sketched a progression of levels of expertise that nicely dovetail with Spiro's (1982) description of the differential levels at which a person may be emotionally invested in a given domain of culturally constituted knowledge. In a nutshell, Holland suggests that children's emotional investment in activities or knowledge goes hand-in-hand with their expertise in those areas. In our sample, it seems likely that families exhibiting more positive agency tend to contain children who are invested in a wider range of activities and who are familiar with the experience of self-motivation in those activities. This experience spills over into many of the other activities they do, including school work. We are left with the question of why some families are observed to engage in the co-construction of activities which support academic success and others are less likely or able to do so. While a topic for further investigation, our findings suggest several factors that appear to be at work. In some families, although they endorse traditional values (Reese, et al., 1995), parents are unable to exercise the degree of control necessary to implement their values. The families for whom this is true in our sample are those in which fathers are absent and/or heavy users of alcohol and mothers are unsupported in their efforts to guide their adolescent sons. In addition, parental strategies are related to the gender of the child, with girls tending to receive stricter limitations on their activities and friendships than boys do. Lastly, we have observed that families' agentic strategies appear to be linked with the parents' level of education: families in the "co-construction" category have higher levels of mother's schooling than those in the "restrictive" category, who in turn have higher levels than those in the "permissive" category. In the co-construction category, 86% of the parents had finished secundaria (grade 9 in Latin America) or high school, while in the restrictive category 64% of the parents had finished primaria (grade 6) or less. Although for our longitudinal sample parental level of schooling is not directly correlated with children's achievement (due to the restricted range of the education), parents' educational background may exercise its effects indirectly through construction of activities in the daily routine. In general, however, the variance in family agency in our sample is consistent with White's (1982) meta-analysis which suggested considerable variance in practices from home to home within any social class. Our findings echo Bloom's conclusion that "It is what parents do rather than their status that accounts for the learning development of their children (Bloom, 1981, p. 92)."
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