Subtractive Schooling: U.S. - Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (SUNY series, The Social Context of Education)

Provides an enhanced sense of what’s required to genuinely care for and educate the U.S.–Mexican youth in America.

Subtractive Schooling provides a framework for understanding the patterns of immigrant achievement and U.S.-born underachievement frequently noted in the literature and observed by the author in her ethnographic account of regular-track youth attending a comprehensive, virtually all-Mexican, inner-city high school in Houston. Valenzuela argues that schools subtract resources from youth in two major ways: firstly by dismissing their definition of education and secondly, through assimilationist policies and practices that minimize their culture and language. A key consequence is the erosion of students’ social capital evident in the absence of academically oriented networks among acculturated, U.S.-born youth.

Angela Valenzuela is Professor in Curriculum and Instruction and Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.