Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School » (New Edition)

Peter Demerath is associate professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota.

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.

Choice

"This anthropological account provides a detailed, well-documented description of how students, parents, teachers, and administrators negotiated pervasive pressures to succeed at all costs in a prestigious, success-oriented public high school. Demerath draws a troubling portrait of the price students pay in stress and fatigue, and the marginalization and alienation of those unable or unwilling to conform. Few anthropologists have examined cultural tranmission in middle-class high school settings."

Introduction Producing Success 1

Pt. 1 Community, Home, and School Settings

1 The Wilton Way: Middle-Class Culture and Practice 27

2 Parental Support, Intervention, and Policy Manipulation 48

3 The Role of the School: Institutional Advantaging 63

Pt. 2 Student Identity and Practice

4 Identities for Control and Success: The Acquisition of Psychological Capital 85

5 Teaching the "Point-Hungry" Student: Hypercredentialing in Practice 103

Pt. 3 Costs of Personal Advancement

6 "Generation Stress" and School Success 129

7 Alienation, Marginalization, and Incivility 152

8 Conclusions 169

Appendix WBHS 2002 Student Survey 185

Notes 191

References 195

Index 203