Theme
How advantaged families and adults quietly reserve the best of a school for their own.
Journal entries
Reading & influences
Article · Krystal Cohen, Princeton University
Race and maternal education showing up as factors in gifted identification. This is opportunity hoarding with a nomination form attached — the same discretion I keep circling in my racialized rigor question, only pointed upward instead of downward.
Book · Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond
The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.
Book · Charles Tilly
Where opportunity hoarding comes from originally. Inequality lasts because it gets built into the ordinary categories organizations use to sort people — not because anyone renews their prejudice each morning. Useful to me because it explains how a school can change every adult in the building and keep producing the same pattern.
Book · Prudence L. Carter & Kevin G. Welner, editors
My reference shelf for the inputs side. Useful counterpressure on my own idea: much of the harm is under-resourcing and low expectations, not over-demanding. Racialized rigor only earns its keep if it names something these chapters do not already cover — that is the test I keep failing to fully pass.