Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World, and co-editor of The Contexts Reader.
Margaret M. Chin is Professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center. She is the author of the award-winning books Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder and Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry.
They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Peer Effect at the NYU Press website.Latino students at the school is a big deal. It is a big deal for Black and Latino students who will miss out on the benefits of going to this kind of school with these kinds of kids. And it is a big deal for the White and Asian American students who miss out on the benefits of being peers with Black and Latino students. The White and Asian American students we interviewed who graduated in the 1970s and 1980s commonly commented about how one of the most important parts of their Stuyvesant experience was being able to befriend Black and Latino peers, and the ways that made them better, and these friendships were transformative and long-lasting. That is now largely a thing of the past.Page 99 actually lands on the conclusion to a chapter and summarizes pretty well how peers and peer cultures work and affect us—so yeah, it gets pretty much to the heart of the book. It's also a really good summary of what kids learn from each other and how, and it shows why integrated schools are a boon for poor and minority kids, and also for privileged White kids, and it also implicitly shows why segregated schools are so harmful for their students.* * *Most of the upper-middle-class White kids who went to Stuyvesant were going to be fine, and would likely come out on top in life wherever they went to school. From Manhattan, from Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Queens’s Forest Hills and the Bronx’s Riverdale, they had plenty of financial and cultural resources. Their parents were high achievers with educational cachet and retirement funds. The kids went to “feeder” middle schools, assuming they would get into Stuyvesant or whichever elite private school they selected—and they were not wrong. But where Stuyvesant really shone through, where it was at its absolute best, was in the lives of students from the outer boroughs, children of immigrants, Black and Latino students, and poor kids. They went from being the “weirdos,” the odd ones out in their middle schools, from being raised among “provincial” views and tastes, to gathering all kinds of new social and cultural capital, all kinds of belonging. They suddenly had kids around them who shared their interests and who could tell them where and how to further those interests. Take a peer-driven culture of achievement, add structured independence, and start transferring cultural capital, and, well, you have made a mobility machine. Better yet, you have made a durable mobility machine. It has been working for over one hundred years. Kids from humble and racially diverse backgrounds and elite families alike have cycled through Stuyves-
The book more broadly is about how our behavior is shaped directly by peers (we want to be like them) and indirectly by peer cultures, which define social norms for the group, and rewards and punishments for doing things correctly or wrongly. The word "group" is key here. When we're part of bounded peer groups -- day care, high school, offices, retirement communities -- we learn and abide by (or chafe at) their ways. The book looks at a range of situations like this, from schools, to offices, to cops. It also looks at long-term effects of peer influences from Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public high school in Manhattan. There the peer culture was so strong that the effects most people reported lasted well into adulthood. So if you want to know why people act the way they do and turn out the ways they turn out, take a good look at who their peers are.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
