Despite all the jokes this week about Steven Slater, there’s something important about his exit from his flight-attendant job: he left the way he dreamed. Not gracefully, and not with a happy ending, but with the drama he may have imagined.
In many ways, Slater’s exit is close to the stereotype of the high school graduate that became popular in the 1960s: a self-indulgent male who has no self-discipline and doesn’t understand the long-term consequences of his actions. In my 1996 book Creating the Dropout I trace the development of the stereotype, which didn’t exist in the 1950s, or at least not connected to dropping out (though it existed in media portrayals of “the delinquent”). Slater’s spectacular slide out of his job is unlike the reality of dropping out, generally a change of status that is the accumulation of attrition rather than a dramatic break in status. What’s the difference between 15% attendance and none? Or between someone who left school for a few months and came back who is thinking of leaving and the same person a day later who will not be coming back?
We don’t really have a clear way of thinking about this process other than the common-sense recognition that the end of attachment to school attendance is a complex process. But that’s not of much use to teachers and principals when it’s happening: “Hi, you’re in the middle of a complex process. It’s been nice knowing you.” Much academic research focuses on distinctions between the obvious end states: graduation or non-graduation after attendance has clearly ended. There are regular attempts to predict those “at risk” of dropping out, and those efforts are fraught with difficulties, from sensitivity/specificity errors to excusing dropout-to-GED paths to focusing on the individual and ignoring context.
I’m afraid I don’t have any clear answers to the complexity involved, just an awareness that Slater’s exit is almost the adolescent fantasy that Fred and George Weasley’s was, and that we still don’t have a good way of thinking about the reality.
Is a well-run student retention program a hallmark of a well run secondary school as it is in upper division institutions?
“Despite all the jokes this week about Steven Slater, there’s something important about his exit from his flight-attendant job: he left the way he dreamed. Not gracefully, and not with a happy ending, but with the drama he may have imagined.”
I am not privy to Slater’s imaginary world, nor have you identified what is important about his abrupt exit. In fact, invoking this as quasi-explanation only obscures the *extent* to which his behavior is the result of workplace conditions.
Sampling on the dependent variable has its problems. “The idea of deviance conceived as individual propensity hides this unevenness in the way people interact with others” (Roger V. Gould 2003: 6). But Gould’s sociological approach to conflict has broad application, including “dropouts” like Fred and George Weasley, and is already hinted at in your book title: “Creating the Dropout”. And this is why we are interested in schools as social institutions.
Roger Gould has an interesting temporal/phenomenological approach to socialization that can be applied to dropouts (Gould 2003: 176-181). I am extracting it from Gould’s chapter on honor, which mirrors Peter L. Berger’s 1970 essay “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor” by distinguishing traditional or honor based societies from contemporary non-honor based social reality.
“It is typically quite a challenge,” Gould begins, “to convince children to be patient, even when doing so will increase the enjoyment of whatever they are waiting for: From their point of view, the person who will benefit from dessert postponed until after dinner might as well be someone else.”
Gould argues that, for analytical purposes, the future self is, in fact, a separate self, as is the past self.
“The links among children’s momentary selves are bunched pretty tightly around the present self, with essentially no connection to distant ones in either direction. Socialization, in particular that of children, endeavors to mold selves into a network that is stretched more smoothly across time, and usually in one direction more than the other.”
For obvious reasons, society is interested in avoiding a “shortfall in the number of future selves to which the present self is loyal or in the [declining] strength of these loyalties. As a result, Western states impose forced savings programs to protect people from their own present-oriented spending habits. They control the availability of drugs that make people line in the present, such as narcotics, and liberally permit consumption of drugs that make people productive and functional … Defenses against weak attachments to future selves go further. Laws oblige people to attend school, buy liability insurance, wear seatbelts, and don motorcycle helmets — all to counteract the tendency to care more about one’s present self than the well-being of future selves or that of anyone else.” (176-177)
Traditional societies, says Gould, are much more anchored in the past, and consequently are focused on maintaining past selves. The present expresses that past, as do roles and honor due a person living in traditional society. This is in sharp contrast with modern society, whose present reaches forward to selves in the future, sometimes in contradictory ways (see below).
It is in the tension between these differing temporal orientations that Gould locates contemporary rebellious youth:
“Consider the behaviors with which young people reject the effort of the mainstream to socialize them: they avoid school, indulge in drugs, alcohol, cigarettes (the more toxic, the better), drive recklessly, and assume a range of risks most people would find unacceptable. These acts of rebellion are not chosen at random: Each one, in a different way, demonstrates the rebel’s refusal to consider the well-being of future incarnations of himself or herself. Prominent tattoos and other permanent body mutilations are perhaps the most telling of these acts, in that they express something momentarily important to the rebel that must be borne by his or her successors regardless of their preferences. … They signal utter disregard for, even exaggerated hostility toward, future selves. Mere violation of norms is not sufficient to establish a behavior as rebellious: deviance must take the specific form of subordinating future selves absolutely to the whims of the present one. No adolescent ever rebelled against her parents by overinvesting in bonds.”
Commitments made to future selves can also be surprising.
Promotions, the promise of higher pay and higher rank, are essentially part of “a peculiar bargain: Accept your current subordinate position eagerly or at least with dignity, follow directions dutifully and perhaps beyond, and you shall eventually be rewarded with a new position in which you may ask the same of others (while your new superiors continue to do the same with you). In other words, organizations extract work from people — those, at least, who see themselves as having careers as opposed to jobs — by asking them to accept low-ranking positions in the present in return for the promise of higher rank, and accompanying rank-related rewards, later on. They succeed only to the extent that there is a steady supply of people willing to make this trade, out of commitment to the well-being of successor selves ten or more years into the future. … For the bargain to sustain itself, people must vary in their ability to absorb years of demeaning treatment on behalf of future, higher-ranking selves.” (180-181)
“The problem is that not everyone can be promoted, even if short-sighted managers (and before them, kings) sometimes try to achieve this by manufacturing titles to accomodate the demand for advancement. Some people have to learn that their efforts have fallen short, that they have turned out not to have ‘what it takes’ to merit further advancement …” or worse.
“In low-wage jobs with transparently little prospect for advancement … [e]mployers are for some reason puzzled when such employees fail to show a willingness to do extra work or to cheerfully accept scoldings and other forms of symbolic degradation; in contrast, senior partners in law and accounting firms, high-level managers in large companies, and senior members of many other career-based organizations are frequently delighted to see how much humiliation their underlings seem willing to accept. Not surprisingly, years of such treatment often make newly promoted people eager to recoup the losses in pride they have suffered as subordinates, perpetuating the pattern.” (180)
All this, of course, is precisely what urban youth cannot do; nor can they be expected to. “Youth in poor urban neighborhoods in North American and Europe,” Gould writes, “inhabit a setting much like honor contexts,” that is, traditional, honor-based society in which insults and slights such as these do not fade away until they are avenged.
High school completion requires a commitment to 4 years of future selves, in Gould’s analysis, and very likely commitments made beyond another 4 years, made to unknown persons, who, at any point along the way, will have no hesitation telling you that “you do not have what it takes” when the time comes. And the completion rates reflect this.
Goffman well understood the difficult problem posed for social systems by the necessity to inflict defeat and failure on some persons — a necessity that is now handled in the US by our education system.
And youth know this as well.
No “retention plan” can hope to compete with this reality because it is powerless and unable to make the kinds of guarantees that are required to make a difference.
But at least this analysis gives us a place to start if we are serious about addressing the problem.