When Success Makes Me Fail: (De)constructing Failure and Success in a Conventional American Classroom

Abstract

This article examines the case of Laura, a 9-year-old Mexican immigrant who officially “failed to learn English” in an American school. It may be more accurate to say that schooling failed Laura, and in ways that went beyond language learning. This diagnosis of failure is criticized, along with the individualistic and essentialist assumptions about success and failure that support it. My analysis, based on a sociocultural notion of agency, suggests that Laura and her teachers uncritically shared an institutionally mediated agenda for school success, rooted in contradictory institutional demands and lack of access to each others' subjectivities. As a result, Laura unintentionally and ironically participated in her own failure construction.

Notes

¹The names of all children, teachers, and the school are pseudonyms.

²LAB (Language Assessment Battery) was the district test used to determine eligibility to pass out of the Limited English Proficient program. Each child was tested upon entry to the program and again at the end of the school year.

³It is important to keep in mind that Laura's Spanish reading abilities were never assessed and, perhaps more important, this potential was never mentioned by either teacher. It seemed that the strong English-only focus of both the ESL and mainstream classrooms rendered invisible anything other than English.