Q: I’m a high school principal in a pretty economically diverse area, and my school has all the stereotypical cliques — the athletes, the drama kids, the nerds, the Goth kids, and so forth. There really isn’t much mixing among them. But beyond those superficial categories, our rich students seem to hang out with other rich students, and our poor students hang out with other students who are less privileged. This has created such a “have” and “have not” culture that bothers me a lot.
Maybe I’m especially sensitive because I grew up poor and felt excluded from many social and extracurricular activities as a teen. I never felt like I wore the “right” stuff or had the “right” things. It’s painful for me to observe this dynamic play out among my students and do nothing, especially since I’m the principal and I’ve been receiving more reports of unkindness lately. What can I do in my role as an administrator, in a practical sense, to encourage more interaction between rich and poor students?
A: As you recognize, students benefit when there’s less “friending bias,” or social segregation. Research backs that up. I spoke to Johannes Stroebel, David S. Loeb Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, who collected information from every high school and zip code in the country and found that lower-income children who attend schools with more cross-class friendships experience more upward economic mobility.
As a first step, you can search Stroebel’s data, available on the website socialcapital.org. Look for schools that have economic diversity but don’t have much social fragmentation, then contact them to find out what they’re doing and identify best practices. Keep in mind that you can get the ball rolling in the right direction, but you can’t act alone. As Stroebel noted, some practices that lead to social segregation originate at the district or community level. For instance, “sports used to be this unifying thing that brought people together across social classes, but now you have this growth in travel sports, and that gets expensive very quickly,” he said, adding that gifted and talented programs can have a similar effect. “We think that’s because they’re more likely to attract rich students. Any set-up that segregates students based on academic performance tends to segregate based on income” and other identifiers.
Students benefit when there’s less “friending bias,” or social segregation.
If your school is big, you may want to plan more large-scale events that bring disparate groups together. Stroebel noted, “When you go to a small party, you talk to everyone, but when you go to a big party, you tend to hang out with people who are similar to you. There’s more cross-class mixing in schools that hold pep rallies to foster school spirit.” Assess whether the physical spaces in your building foster cohesion, too. At Lake Highlands School in Texas, for instance, several smaller schools and buildings were merged into one school. As a result, the school had multiple cafeterias, only one of which served free and reduced-price lunch. Not surprisingly, students had fewer opportunities for organic, cross-class interactions. When members of the Lake Highlands community realized the school’s physical design was leading to spatial segregation, they brought in an architect and rebuilt the school with a central hub. You may not be able to redesign your building, but you can be mindful of creating spaces that lead to less social fragmentation. And while you can’t do this work alone, you can gather data, drum up enthusiasm for the work, and partner with district leaders, teachers, parents, students, and any other stakeholders.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phyllis L. Fagell
Phyllis L. Fagell is the school counselor at Landon School in Washington, D.C., a therapist at the Chrysalis Group in Bethesda, Md., and the author of the Career Confidential blog. She is also the author of Middle School Matters and Middle School Superpowers, available at https://amzn.to/3Pw0pcu.
