A summer of distinction: Exploring the construction of educational advantage outside the academic year

ABSTRACT

Sociologists of elite education have argued that understanding educational inequality requires looking beyond persistent class- or race-based gaps in academic achievement at the ways in which privileged youth and families construct their advantages. Meanwhile, scholars focused on summer learning have argued that understanding educational achievement requires looking into what happens to youth learning during the summer months. This paper brings these two literatures into contact, calling for inquiry into the multifaceted ways in which educational advantage is constructed during summer. As an initial contribution to this line of inquiry, I present findings from an ethnographic case study of a six-week summer enrichment program at an elite US boarding school. Focusing on daily routines and the language through which participants articulated the value of the program, I apply several established notions about “elite” schools and educational advantage to the time-space of summer. I then turn to features of Summer Session that suggest unique affordances of a summer program being unlike school, elite or otherwise. This balance – of a summer experience being advantageous when it is both like and unlike school in particular ways – is one of many possible contributions from bringing the sociology of elite education together more fully with out-of-school time research.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational practices
• socio-political conditions
• student and teacher experiences
• summer learning
• elite education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Masking the identity of such a distinctive institution requires rather serious concessions to compositing and vagary; indeed, the singularity of the campus, curriculum, pedagogy, and school history is central to an elite school's very status as “elite” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009). On top of this, these institutions’ summer programs are themselves so unique as to be identifiable based on even basic details about their duration, cost, student demographic, or curriculum. For this reason, the descriptions and data excerpts that follow must include both generalized descriptions and a few particulars altered to be consistent with programs similar to Jarrett's Summer Session but not necessarily with Jarrett itself. The student body – and my sample of youth participants – was sufficiently large that pseudonyms suffice for protecting identities of students below, but the Summer Session staff was small enough that identifying particular administrative positions, teachers’ subject areas, or even the racial identifications of non-white faculty would threaten anonymity in many cases. For that reason, data from adults below will identify individuals simply as “an administrator,” “a teacher and advisor,” and so forth.

2. Scholarship-supported youth were oversampled in the original study, as that study was designed in part to explore youth positioning and insider/outsider status within Summer Session. This paper focuses on the program's history and status as, in the words of one administrator, “a school for rich kids,” despite the program's recruitment and scholarship support of youth – about 30% of the student body – whose families could not afford Summer Session tuition and fees.

3. A fuller picture of what roles summer plays in the lives of privileged youth would involve examining the summer settings and practices that regular session Jarrett students undertake. Their admission to an elite boarding school provides them numerous ways to distinguish themselves from students in nearly all other learning institutions (Cookson & Persell, 1985; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2009; Khan, 2011); what sorts of accumulation and positioning work those students carry on during their summers away from Jarrett is not the subject of this analysis, but it is an important part of the future work I would call for.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Burke Scarbrough

Burke Scarbrough is an assistant professor of English Education at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His research interests include pedagogies and politics of diverse learning contexts, the literacy practices of historically marginalized youth in and out of school, and the role of summer learning in youth development and educational inequality.