Children usually learn about their own relative smartness in school. Overwhelmingly, it is poor and/or students of color who are unjustly left feeling not good enough.
Jean Anyon discovered in her work concerning knowledge construction in schools that, "[Working class] children already 'know' that what it takes to get ahead is being smart, and that they themselves, are not [book smart]."
Additionally, Black and Latino students have been overly-represented in special education programs and gifted programs often result in re-segregating schools, where the White students attend the gifted program while students of color are tracked into 'regular' educational programming.
Black children as early as pre-school begin to be over-represented in what is perceived as "low ability" classes and/or classes for the "educable mentally retarded."
As mentioned above, assignments to these classes can be devastating to the students' self-perception and they may even begin to think of themselves as not smart.
Consequently, this can lead these students to have low achievement, a lack of motivation, and a desire to drop out of school altogether. The failures of many of these children are often attributed to their own abilities rather than their school's.
As Dr. Beth Hatt said, the youth think the symbols of smartness within schools include grades, diplomas, labels, standardized tests, and participation in college prep courses.
These things are what make smartness appear "real" rather than as something socio-culturally produced. They make smartness especially powerful because it becomes extremely difficult for students to challenge the ways it gets defined and how they are constructed as smart or not smart in school.
Simultaneously, these symbols begin to influence students' perceptions of themselves and their own abilities over time.
Students who struggle to acquire the before-mentioned symbols of smartness are left to either perceive themselves as not smart or to reinterpret smartness.
When Dr. Hatt asked what they thought it meant to be smart, the youth responded with definitions that included learning what is being taught at school and how not to get caught by the police when selling drugs.
"However, two key themes overwhelmingly were present in their responses," Dr. Hatt said. "First, they clearly made a distinction between being book smart and street smart. Second, they refused to define smartness in a narrow way."
"At first, this appeared contradictory because the youth seemed to be simultaneously defining street smart as the ultimate form of smartness while also defining smartness in a way that allowed everyone to be defined as smart."
"Eventually, I realized that these were not necessarily contradictory definitions. Instead, they were both attempts at agency in speaking back to the narrow definition of smartness that had been imposed upon them in school and an attempt at reinterpreting their own identities," Dr. Hatt said.
