Read e-book online Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture PDF

The key to luck, our tradition tells us, is a mix of expertise and tough paintings. Why then, do excessive faculties that supposedly join this view ship scholars to school at such dramatically diversified rates?  Why do scholars from one university be successful whereas scholars from one other fight? To the standard answer—an imbalance in resources—this publication provides a much more sophisticated and complex clarification. Defining scholar Success indicates how varied colleges foster distinct and infrequently conflicting principles approximately what it takes to succeed—ideas that do extra to maintain the established order than to advertise upward mobility.

Lisa Nunn’s examine of 3 public excessive colleges finds how scholars’ ideals approximately their very own luck are formed through their specific tuition setting and bolstered through curriculum and instructing practices. whereas American tradition commonly defines luck as a made of exertions or expertise (at tuition, intelligence is the expertise that concerns most), Nunn exhibits that every institution refines and adapts this American cultural knowledge in its personal specified way—reflecting the sensibilities and issues of the folk who inhabit every one college. whereas one university fosters the assumption that attempt is all it takes to be triumphant, one other fosters the assumption that arduous paintings will in simple terms get you to this point since you must be clever sufficient to grasp path innovations. finally, Nunn argues that those school-level variations of cultural rules approximately good fortune turn into invisible benefits and downsides for college kids’ college-going futures. a few colleges’ definitions of good fortune fit seamlessly with elite collage admissions’ definition of the proper collage applicant, whereas others extra heavily align with the expectancies of center or low-tier associations of upper education.

With its insights into the transmission of rules of good fortune from society to varsity to pupil, this provocative paintings may still steered a reevaluation of the tradition of secondary schooling. basically with an intensive realizing of this method can we ever locate extra constant technique of inculcating good fortune, by means of any degree.