Chapter 17: Poverty and Class Bias in Schools: An Anti-Classist Agenda for Educators

In this chapter, I articulate a multilayered, anti-classist agenda for teachers, teacher educators, and K-12 educational policymakers. While locating the persistence of educational inequality in power differentials, I reject cultural-deficit rationales used to justify why low-income and working-class children so often fare badly in schools. Instead, I advocate for an asset-based approach founded on high expectations for working-class students, one that challenges damaging myths and stereotypes and other pervasive forms of the class bias that permeates schooling. Informed by scholarship on educational “risk” within the intersecting contexts of classism, racism, and other forms of institutional injustice, and mindful of lessons learned over two decades of community-driven, equity-focused educational activism in Toronto, Canada, I recommend that educators adopt a series of anti-classist principles in their work by pursuing strategies ranging from changing how we recruit, educate, and mentor teachers, to critiquing and correcting biased learning materials, to developing robust school board human rights policies. If these recommendations were to be implemented, working-class students would be far more likely to realize their right to socioeconomically just, meaningful, and high-quality schooling.