Double Shift

By Mike Rose

When I went to high school, students were placed, upon entrance, into one of three or four curricular "tracks." Most readers beyond their 30s will remember them. There were, typically, an academic or college preparatory track (and, in some schools, honors or advanced placement courses); one or two variations of a general education track; and a vocational track. Like many children of the working class, I began my high school career in the vocational track. What makes my story unusual, particularly for the time, is that I was moved out of it and into college prep. I got to see both worlds. Though I had little sense at 16 as to what this move would mean for my future, I could certainly tell that the courses were different and that, well, it somehow felt different to be in school.



We as a society have developed a popular occupational vocabulary that leads us to make substantial distinctions between work of body and brain, of white collar and blue—these days expressed as the new knowledge work versus old-style industry and service work. Neck-up and neck-down. One of the most influential of these dichotomies, particularly in the lives of young people, has been the distinction between the academic and the vocational, which characterized the high school curriculum for much of the past century.

Although the official policy of placing students into an exclusively vocational track has been largely abandoned, there remain patterns of inequality in the courses students take. I certainly see these patterns in the schools I visit as part of my work on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Vocational courses still tend to be the domain of working-class students and students of color, and some of the courses exhibit the same limiting characteristics that I...

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