780: How Educational Categories Create Inequality⁠ - with Dr. Thurston Domina, Dr. Andrew M. Penner, & Dr. Emily K. Penner, Authors of ⁠Schooled & Sorted

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Good day everyone and welcome to the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. I am your host, Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson, higher education leadership consultant and trustee for the board of trustees at San Jacinto College in Southeast Houston, Texas. I am so excited to bring you not one, not two, but three amazing guests today. Joe and Elvin have given me permission to run the show for a full eight hours. I'm kidding.

I have an hour with three guests, so we'd better get started. We are talking today to the authors of the book, "Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality". I know listeners that this title piqued your interest, especially if you have children or a background in K through 12, as I do. So let me briefly introduce the authors and then we will allow them some time to chat with you about their why regarding this book. 

We first have Dr. Thurston Domina and you go by Thad. Dr. Domina is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Director of Graduate Studies and a Robert Wendell Eaves Senior Distinguished Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And this was a recent promotion, I think this summer. Congratulations. Let's not say congratulations, but thank you. So Thad is a sociologist by training. He works with educational practitioners to better understand the relationship between education and social inequality in the contemporary US. 

We also have Dr. Andrew Penner, who is a professor of sociology for the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. Now, do you say Irvine? I'm in Texas. We only know Michael Irvin.

Dr. Andrew Penner: Yeah, Irvine.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Irvine, okay, very good. Dr. Penner has research interests that lie broadly within the field of inequality. His work has focused on race, gender, family inequality in education and the labor market. 

We also have Dr. Emily Penner, Associate Professor for the School of Education at UC Irvine. And Dr. Penner's research interests include educational inequality and policy and considers the ways that policies, districts, schools, teachers, peers, and parents can contribute to or ameliorate educational inequality. 

Folks, welcome and welcome to the show. It's so nice to meet you and to discuss something that honestly is personally relevant to me. So let's get started in a non-traditional way for our show. Can each of you tell me why, why this work on equity? Why is this so meaningful to you that you would spend your life and time researching it, writing about it, talking about it, and trying to make change?

Dr. Thurston Domina: Thanks so much for having us. It's really a pleasure. You ask a big question. So we should answer the question in a big way for each of us and then maybe talk about why this book after that. That's what I propose. 

Gosh, why would you spend a life like this? To me, I think that schools and education broadly is this really fascinating organization where it takes people from all across our incredibly diverse and unequal society, puts them in a relatively common set of experiences, and then sends them back out into this incredibly unequal and diverse society of ours. And from the perspective of someone who cares about inequality and wants to see a more just society, it seems to me like schools, both K-12 and higher ed, represent this incredible opportunity to build the world, a world that's more like the world that we'd like to see. And so that's been the organizing principle for my work in this field.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Very good. And you said incredibly diverse and unequal, I think that's fascinating. I like that phrase. It is very powerful. Thank you so much.

Dr. Emily Penner: So my interest in this really stems from my experiences as a classroom teacher. I taught in Oakland, California in the Bay Area and Vista, California in the San Diego area. And I taught in these schools in the period that was the height of the No Child Left Behind era. And so it was a moment when our nation was thinking a lot about the kinds of educational experiences students were having and realizing after a lot of efforts, that a lot of the things we had been trying before weren't working. And so there was a lot of federal attention on what teachers were doing in the classroom to the point that we were really intensely monitored, making sure we were on the right page at the right time of a scripted curriculum. 

I was working with students and families who also were struggling with lots of other factors outside of schools that were influencing everything about their educational experiences and also being communicated different kinds of messages about what school was and wasn't providing for them and how much they could and couldn't expect of their schools. And I had grown up in a town right next door and the kinds of opportunities my students were afforded relative to the ones that I had been given as a student were drastically different. The kinds of resources we had were drastically different and the kinds of expectations they had for how teachers and students would spend their time were drastically different.

And so even from early ages, I mean, I taught first and second grade, students were being given messages about the opportunities they have in life and the kind of spaces they should expect in schools. And moving through all of these different educational spaces, I got really interested in the ways that schools communicate to students about their worth, about their value, about the kinds of things they can and can't expect to get to do in their lives. And found that some students really have the world open to them after just being in school for a few short years. And that kind of carries them all the way through toward aspirations for higher education. And other students are often communicated really different things about what they get to do in school and what kinds of paths that should lead them on as they get older and complete high school and maybe go to higher education. But there's more question marks around that. And this work for me is really about thinking about the ways we encourage students throughout that process to keep them on that path of the world being wide and open to them rather than doors closing and pushing them toward paths that are really limiting.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yeah. As a K through 12 practitioner, you had a front row seat to what happens when we do what this book addresses. So thank you.

Dr. Andrew Penner: Yeah. I love what Thad and Emily have said. It's, I should just say for me, it's like such a treat to work with them because it's just, it's amazing. And I think I love the question that you started us off with thinking about why not just from an intellectual perspective, right? But why do we do this? Why do we spend our lives doing this? 

I think a lot about categories and how categories shape our world and answering why is a really tricky question. I'm going to tell you why I think I do this. And that is I grew up with a brother who was categorized as disabled. And so I saw the educational system reward me and value me and devalue my brother and dehumanize my brother. And I think that was a really profound experience, right? Just watching society celebrate my accomplishments in this space and not my brother's. 

And so I often do this thought experiment. What would happen if you switched myself and my brother? My brother never developed expressive language. And so what would it mean to have my brother in front of my classes in a university setting? I think my students would learn so much, but I don't think the university knows how to value it. I don't think our society knows how to value what students would learn from my brother being there. Right. And so I think a lot about sort of the way that these categories shifted how we understand who I am and who my brother is and was - he passed away a couple of years ago. 

And yeah, so I think like for me, that's really the personal why. And then I'll say from an academic perspective, one of the working titles we had for the book included the subtitle "and what we can do about it". And I think so often we write books that diagnose inequality, but we don't provide entree into what we can do about it. And I think out of our conversations, we really wanted to engage productively in thinking about how we can make a difference, right? If we think about education as a huge enterprise, it can feel like there's no way to change anything, but it's also profoundly local, right? And I think that is something we'll probably talk a lot more about, but I think that provides all kinds of opportunities to really make a difference in the way we categorize students, who gets sorted into what categories, what the different categories mean. And there's a lot of space to make changes there. And so that I think was a really profound motivation academically and intellectually.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Thank you for sharing that. I think that, first of all, I'm so sorry for the loss of your brother. It sounds like he was very much loved. And I'm sure that your family is very proud of you for making this focus. I want to say that leading with that, with your personal why, I think is so necessary in higher education. I just don't think we do it enough. I think as researchers, if we connected our why to the research, people would grab onto it. It'd be a much better scaffolding experience for them. And secondly, I appreciate what your book does, which is far more than just admire the problem, which we can't afford to do when it comes to public education. We cannot. Now we know higher education moves more slowly and is more bureaucratic, but if we're going to solve the problems of the world, we have to start with our youngest and providing like you do in the very last chapter, I think at 10 points or 12 points, providing a jumping off point is so important. 

So let's go backwards a little bit and talk to me just about the idea of tracking and sorting. Tell me, tell the listeners, especially because they are higher ed oriented. What does it mean to have categories in public education? Give examples of what those categories are, and then we can go from there on what that means for students in their lived experiences in K through 12.

Dr. Emily Penner: Well, so in K through 12 experiences, there's different kinds of tracking that emerge from very early grades. A lot of times when students start in kindergarten or first or second grade, teachers are evaluating students' skills in a variety of different subject areas, especially around reading and math skills. And it had been frequent practice to group students into reading groups based on where students' reading fluency was. Sometimes it also occurred in math spaces. And in different times, people have done that in more rigid ways, perhaps having a reading group that lasts for an entire year. I think it's a lot more common now for some of that grouping to be a little more flexible and for people to be encouraged to target specific reading skills or math skills and recombine those groups and reassess.

But it's still very much part of practice happening in lots of classrooms. And as students move up in grades, a lot of times the tracking starts to take on a more concrete space in terms of students' visible identities in school. So in earlier grades, it might be that you're part of a reading group and a math group, and maybe that reconstitutes itself or changes over time. But by the time you're moving toward higher grades, I'm thinking middle school especially, it might start to emerge that students are tracked into different classes with different levels. You and I might be in different math classes because you have demonstrated some stronger math skills than I did when we got moved from maybe seventh to eighth grade. And somewhere around that eighth grade to ninth grade, 10th grade transition, many of those tracking spaces end up determining the kinds of courses students can and can't take throughout their high school career. And that also then sets the stage for their eligibility for higher ed opportunities in many cases. And that can translate into the kinds of colleges students can get into and maybe the kinds of majors they might be eligible for too.

Dr. Thurston Domina: So I was going to add, and we think about this as a K-12 process, and that's the story that Emily just told, but we also, these kinds of categories also exist in higher education in really profound ways. And in fact, in ways that we use language about scope. So the categories that operate in higher education are really higher scope from a student's perspective because I'm either at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill or I'm down the street at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and there is a status differential and there's a differential in the sorts of learning opportunities that I have access to. And so those categories in our higher education system and that's taking a pretty narrow slice from a very broad diverse higher education system. Those categories are all in many ways, more all-encompassing than the categories that students are exposed to in K-12.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: I would agree. And what I was thinking about was just for our audience, I'm sure that we have an old enough audience that they can remember those reading groups that were, had, the names had connotations, right? We had the turtles and we had the blue jays, right? And we had, there were meanings assigned to the categorizations and the tracking that occurred was sometimes for a lifetime, right? 

So my background real quick in K through 12 is I was an ESL bilingual aide. I was a third, fourth and fifth grade bilingual teacher. I was an eighth grade English teacher. I taught ESL. I was a college professor for developmental education. So those remedial courses for students who are not college ready in English. And so I'm fully aware of the tracking that goes into those students who have been historically underrepresented in education.

What I want you to explain for our readers or our listeners is give me more specific categories of that that we see in public education today that you feel are detrimental and or need some remediation themselves, if you will.

Dr. Andrew Penner: Yeah, I think one thought experiment that I like to do and that we engage in the book is when we start in higher education, like Thad mentioned, there's the status differential, right? And we see it's very clear in higher education that there is this status gradient. And sometimes in our elementary reading groups, there are, it is equally clear, but other times we try to hide it, right? And if we say, here's this person from this elite college, they deserve more of the better things in life. This is not, we bristle at it, but in society writ large, it's not seen as deeply problematic in the sense that people will get into a fist fight with you or something like this. 

And so you can think about taking that one step back and say, we know in high school, who's going to be sort of roughly into which kinds of elite versus non-elite educational spaces in higher education. Would we feel comfortable treating people differently there? And people start to get a little bit more uncomfortable. And if you were to trace that back to elementary school reading groups or kindergartners on their first day of school, now I think people start to get profoundly uncomfortable. And if you trace it all the way back to, because we know this is not just about what happens in education, but what happens in the neighborhoods that you're born into and things like this. And so if we trace it all the way back to students at birth, at this point, people would say, no, this is an anathema to everything that we hold dear, right? And somehow at the end, it's seen as problematic, but at the beginning of someone's life, would be seen as problematic, but by the end, our society treats it as just the most natural thing in the world. 

And I think that sort of the interlinking of these different categories is one of the things that we really want to problematize, right? And back to the question of scope, right? Like we don't want the math class that Emily was talking about that you're in to determine what your English language opportunities are, right? We don't want your science class to determine whether you can take all these other different kinds of classes.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: You make me think of an experience I had with my kids the other day. I have three, 17, 14, and 11. And my oldest, 17 year old Emma, she's, "Mama, why are the streets so bad over here?" I couldn't even because as I do because of your book, that is a much bigger conversation than, than it's look at all the fast food stores that are around and look at all the check cashing and the pawn shops. And it's a bigger issue.

And so what you're talking about, this idea of the neighborhoods and the communities being predictors of the ultimate success that somehow we generalize when people become adults. I think you're right on it. We're missing the meat of it. We are just rapidly moving past the disadvantages and the real systemic issues that we see our children facing these days. And then just go to a, that mentality of pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get going.

Dr. Thurston Domina: We tell ourselves that the places that people get to in life is earned, that our education system rewards merit, and so it recognizes earned and natural ability, right? And I think that some of what thinking about our lens around categorical inequality is to say, no, there are hundreds of thousands of choices that we make as educators or as a society along the way that produces those successes and the failures that we naturalize with our system. 

Now we talk about how some categories can be problematic. And so some of the categories that we see in public education are like gifted and talented. We see ESL, we see students who are in self-contained special education classrooms versus mainstream. And I'm using air quotes here, listener, mainstream classes, which can be damaging unto itself. We have the athletes, we have the honors kids. So these are the types of categories that we're discussing here and how they help or hurt.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: So personally, if I had not been labeled GT in third grade, the way that I was in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, in what was considered one of the poorest top 10 poorest cities in the nation, Brownsville, Texas, I would not have had the opportunities that I had. I would have not have been noticed because we're a monolith in the Valley in that the majority of us are Latino, right? We are amazing, of course, but there are so many of us in the classroom and we all have different backgrounds and a lot of us were disadvantaged. 

Talk to me about what that means, this idea of GT in elementary education and how it can help the way that it did for me, but how it can also hurt the way that you discuss because what you say in your book is these categories are based on who they exclude. We make winners, we make losers. That's right. And you can't have one without the other. So talk about that.

Dr. Emily Penner: I think you've also highlighted a couple of other categories. Some of these instructional categories, like being in ESL or being in special education and gifted and talented. All of these come with different allocations of resources and often different instructional environments. And what's complicated - so let's back up and just say that schools are doing a lot. Teachers are working a lot with limited resources and really high expectations. And we keep piling those expectations on top of teachers to help a variety of students with lots of different language needs, different learning needs, different interests, and different paces of skill acquisition. 

And a strategy that we've used to try to deal with this is to try to sort students into some of these different groups to give them often with very good intentions, extra support of some kind, either because we've figured out that they've been developing rapidly academically and maybe get labeled with a gifted and talented kind of label, or because they come into school speaking some languages other than English, or because they have kind of unequal skill development and we think they need special supports to try to help them find ways to access learning because of the different disabilities they might have, or to make up for some skills that they haven't developed early on.

A lot of the times what we're asking educators to do that with fewer resources than would be ideal. And we're asking them to do that with less time to prepare than would be ideal if we could cultivate the best case scenario for every student. And we're also asking schools to do that across a large number of students. And so then often what ends up happening is students are given these different funds for accessing learning that come with a label. And sometimes those labels are not things that students know about themselves or think about themselves until they're even in a classroom and school setting. Those may not be aspects of their own identity that are even a reality to them until they're told that because they are sent to this other classroom or put into this different instructional environment. 

And the motivation behind it is often to give students access to something that they need or that the school feels that they need. But the way that's carried out is often in a way that really stigmatizes students or gives them this like exclusive experience so that the students who are left behind in the general ed classroom feel its absence. And that may be something they don't clue into initially, but eventually it becomes very clear that some students are getting different experiences than others.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: But it's so hard for them to articulate that, I think.

Dr. Emily Penner: That's right. So it's so hard for students to articulate that sense of unease and awareness and inequity because they don't always know how to express that they feel they're being othered, but they don't always know what that means.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: You bring me to this intersection of the student's perception in regards to sorting, whether or not they have it and when they do, how damaging it could be, but also the parents desire. We're talking about your brother, Andrew, right? And what your parents desired for your brother to be able to accomplish and achieve in regards to language development or cognitive ability, things like that. We have that. Then we have the reality of the teacher workload, which you brought up, Emily, right? And I've been in a classroom where I had to differentiate instruction for a whole host of student categories, if you will. And it's very hard. And it does mean that some students are going to get more attention and some students are going to get less, which then impacts the parent desire, right?

And then we have the reality of the community workforce needs. So how good are we at serving the students so that they can turn around and serve the community and grow and thrive in the workforce? So just that observation, because what we're asking is a lot of teachers and we are also not centering the students awareness of this and how it impacts their trajectory into higher ed, possibly for me, like out of extreme poverty, right? Out of domestic violence situations, out of broken homes, out of - this is real. This is an imperative, what you're talking about. But it seems really complicated. Can we simplify it? How do we explain to our listeners what it is that you're trying to do with categories in schools?

Dr. Thurston Domina: Yeah. So maybe it's helpful to say that there is a happier story also to be told.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Let's tell a happy story.

Dr. Thurston Domina: When we do school and we bring someone into school and make that, we build this category of student and the category of student is really a very beautiful, validating category. It tells somebody and we're telling ourselves, this is a person who's educable, they can learn, right? And so as we've expanded this institution of education, we've been drawing more and more people into that category. And that category is central to liberal democracy, right? A student can become a citizen, can become a full member of a society. And that's why there've been battles over access to education and full inclusion in education throughout American education, world educational history. So there's that category. 

Then the next thing that we do when we sort kids in schools is we do another, I think really just amazingly egalitarian thing because we sort them at first based largely on their age. So within your school, you're putting the five-year-olds together into a kindergarten and the six-year-olds together into a first grade and so on. And that's, so that's a primary way of categorizing students that to me feels extremely equitable in part because everybody's got, right? Like the age crosses all of the other boundaries in our society and people grow up. So the kindergartners, they get different educational experiences than the first graders, but nobody worries about that because they're going to be first graders next year. Right?

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: That advancement. Exactly.

Dr. Thurston Domina: So I mean, I think there are two ways, two reasons I say that. One is that I don't think our argument is we should stop categorizing. I think when we think about education as a mass institution, this category, this is a process, an organizational process that we can't get away from. We're going to have to build categories. Second is we can, we know how to build categories that we feel good about. And the question is to figure out how to build those categories and then how to implement them, how to put them into practice in ways to reflect our values.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Are you kidding me? No, I'm just kidding. Emily, any thoughts on this?

Dr. Emily Penner: Yeah, I think to pick up on a thread that Thad was weaving together earlier, a benefit of what we do in schools is give students opportunities to meet one another in spaces and in activities where they probably wouldn't otherwise. And so giving, we bring students together from across different kinds of households, from across different language and religious communities, from across different neighborhoods in some cases and in other cases not. And giving students opportunities to think hard thoughts together is a fundamental way that we help people develop an identity together as common residents of Brownsville or as common residents of Texas or California or the United States or as citizens of a global community.

And so giving students more opportunities to do that together is something that I think is a fundamental goal of our work. And while having, giving parents opportunities to pursue learning environments that are the right fit for their students is important. The downside of some of those policies, especially a voucher that might give students the opportunity to move to a more exclusive schooling environment. Also that takes away an opportunity for them to learn from students from another community or learn with them. And it might be the space that they're going to develop those robotic skills that they just can't wait to get. But it also limits their ability to learn about some of the cultural and linguistic features and values that other students might be bringing to the classroom.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: That's an interesting impasse because you're saying, you're highlighting the idea that these interactions, these personal human interactions that we have so much value. These resources we can get have so much value. How do we weigh that? Especially as parents when we're increasingly in independent ways where we send our children to school. And you made me think of an article that I read this morning. I think it was Inside Higher Ed. It was wild to me because the author was saying, I can predict that what's going to happen is we're going to have a decrease in liberal arts education and there's going to be an increased focus legislatively on STEM and workforce and because critical thinking is seen as such a danger. Not in our eyes in higher education, but in another sphere, right? And it just, it's laughable, gosh, I'm sorry, but that's so laughable because what you said is exactly what I think all parents want. How many times, I don't know if you're parents, but how many times did your parents say to you, "Think. Think for yourself." Not only think for yourself, think about the kind of like delight in the fact that your peers think differently than you.

Dr. Andrew Penner: Yes. I love that. That's beautiful. Say that again.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: A delight in the fact that your peers think differently than you.

Dr. Andrew Penner: And say that to the entire country again.

Dr. Emily Penner: Exactly. And as we get more polarized and as we have a harder time talking to people who don't share our values or experiences, schools are one of those places where we could and often do get a chance to hear from someone who doesn't think the way we do. Taking away those kinds of experiences, I think is ultimately reducing a learning opportunity for students. Even if it's uncomfortable and even if it is hard and scary sometimes or just takes an extra dose of courage. That's something that we don't want our kids to miss out on.

Dr. Thurston Domina: Definitely not. Definitely. And even though we may want them to have that robotics opportunity, we also wish that students in any school could have that robotics opportunity and that it wasn't a choice between those two things. And so I think a second thing that we wish for coming out of the book is that people will think fundamentally about the idea that it shouldn't be that only some schools get robotics and other schools get to have dialogue across difference. It should be that all schools are trying to do both of those things. And we should be conscious of the fact that making certain choices might really target them toward one thing and not both.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to agitate all of you and myself here, because I'm going to mention the resources that we pour into athletics. Yeah. My husband gets to work this morning and he is a high school teacher and he says, "No, it seems like the AC is not working as well as it normally does. It's a little damp in here" and he's an engineering teacher. So he can't have damp in there. He's got saws and stuff, but he just happened to mention it as he said, "Have a great day y'all." My daughter, the 17 year old who is becoming very aware of the world looks at me and she goes, "Does the athletics department have AC? How much money are they spending on the gym?" Right, because we're having these conversations at home because I was an assistant principal. And I can tell you that we built the master schedule based on first period and eighth period athletics. And then we looked at the honors classes and when we needed to offer those. And then we looked at orchestra and band and then we filled in the general classes. There were things that drove master schedule and it was not the general population. It was categories. 

It's interesting that we're talking about scarcity of resources for me and for you having just finished watching Saturday college football, knowing that there is no scarcity of resources when it comes to football or basketball or baseball or arenas, right? Or swag. It's sickening. It really is. I say that as a lifelong educator in K through 12 and community college, someone needs to make it make sense to parents whose children need one-on-one teaching, who need a translator, an interpreter, who need wheelchairs, who need eyeglasses, their basic needs. Yeah.

Dr. Thurston Domina: So I'm going to be the contrarian again for a second though.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: I love you for that, Thad. I'm going to call you when I'm feeling down and saying something.

Dr. Thurston Domina: I do regularly. I'm sitting here in Chapel Hill where our football team finally lost for the first time this season. And I'm going to say this quietly, but I was really, the last thing we need is a top-flight football program and a top-flight basketball program on this campus. So I agree with you, but I'll say that when we're in education, we often get so fixated on one kind of human ability, right, whether it's test taking or essay writing. And at least I think sports are an example of a place where we're recognizing and making space for other and celebrating another kind of human ability. So good on us for that. And the other thing that I think we do with sports to Emily's point about learning together is we build places for us to build and celebrate our togetherness. What's happening in a football stadium? That is a celebration, a solidarity. I love my football. I will tell you that. And so building that community is a really great thing.

Some of what I think we're talking about is taking those to realize, and so I pointed out because education is able to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? We're able to teach educational, the basics, reading and writing, and we're able to celebrate the great talents on the football field. And we ought to keep on doing that. We ought to celebrate, build more and more different kinds of capacities and celebrate more and more different kinds of capacities. We can do that. We can broaden our scope and the way we build categories can help us do that if we bring people to the table and make spaces for all the many things that people can do and can learn how to do together.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Very nice. That was beautiful.

Dr. Andrew Penner: And one of the things that I think, I don't want to speak for Thad, but I think one of the things that we wrestled with in the book is you have college sports or high school sports, sort of school sports as this great example of solidarity. And I think all of us would agree that solidarity is oftentimes neglected in our educational system. Earlier you had alluded to, there's like sorting kind of logic and there's this helping individuals thrive kind of logic. One of the points you make is the sort of the solidarity logic that governs oftentimes gets lost. So we love that gets amplified. But I think we struggle with the fact that it does so in ways that create its tribalism. And that I think is really frustrating.

Why does this expression of solidarity that like celebrates our togetherness happen in such an othering way, right? I had a friend who moved to Texas and when they moved there, they were told you have to pick a team.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: My gosh. Right? That's an understatement.

Dr. Andrew Penner: And this is, can I cheer for Rice? And they're like, yes, but you have to pick a team. Which I thought was amazing. They were in Houston. But yeah, but I think it's like, it is this like very tribal thing. It shapes in these kinds of profound ways. I think the trick is, right, trying to figure out how can we celebrate solidarity? How can we create spaces that help us learn from differences and recognize our commonality without othering in such a profound tribal way?

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yeah, it's necessary. You bring up the socialization aspect, which I think sometimes is undervalued, especially after the pandemic. I know teachers are tired. I see things happening. We're not having recess if one person talks, right? And just, no, don't do that. You're only hurting yourself as a teacher. Don't let them go to recess. But as a junior high teacher, I was the DJ for the dances and dances were so important. The enthusiasm going up to the dance. And then the aspect of we're going to get to see each other and we only get to see each other in scheduled ways.

So that humanistic socialization is such a need. And I agree, there is just going to be a natural tribalism that occurs because we are asked for whatever reason to pick sides, to pick this or that. But you Thad make it seem so much more celebratory that we have things to pick from, right? In ways in which we can identify ourselves in positive ways through positive mechanisms. And when we think about what that means for the future of higher education. And I'm transitioning to our last couple of questions is what does this, what does your work mean for higher ed practitioners? How do they grab onto this? I think it's an excellent read. I know my friends are excited about it. And I think particularly for colleges of education, this is a really good read. But what do you think this work means? And how do you think you can positively impact those practitioners in higher education? And each of you can answer this.

Dr. Andrew Penner: I can start because I feel like I'm going to have the least profound things to say and I'd rather end on them. I love this book. We all wrote a kind of book. It was amazing. It was such a great experience to work together. I do think actually it's somehow the book writing process, the three of us together in a community. I think it's really important for education to realize like nothing happens by an individual, right? It is really about a community and the dialogue. 

And that's a thing that we talk about in the book, right? This is a project that came out of a conversation. But I think like the, I said what's a concrete thing that we can do, I think I go back to the, to what degree are we creating Rolexes versus kale? And I think if everything exists, you know, try not to roll too much, I'm sorry. To what degree are we creating things that are defined by this logic of scarcity, right? Where the value is created by scarcity versus something that can be accessible to all.

And even if there's some places, I think, where we can in small ways make a category less about exclusivity and more about the absolute value it creates. And so there might be like some big things that we feel like are too big to do, but there, I think for each of us, if we look at the categories that we encounter as educators, there are small spaces where we can shift things slightly. And I think that incremental change is really important in the face of this oftentimes daunting set of interlocking categories. How can we make the changes in this huge system? But there are small ways that I think we can make really important and lasting changes. So that's, that I think is my plug for where we can concretely make a difference.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Thank you.

Dr. Thurston Domina: So I'll go next. So you mentioned, Michelle, that I have recently taken on an administrative role, a minor administrative role, I would say. But one thing which I thought I would hate and it turns out I don't as much. And I think the book has helped me realize why are the, and I think it is that the decisions that we make in higher ed leadership, when we're putting together our syllabus, they're all, they are all decisions and we can recognize them as places where we are asking ourselves what kind of educational experiences, what kind of educational categories are we building and how we feel about them and who are we listening to when we make those choices and can we do them differently? And sometimes we can't, we all work with constraints, right? But often we can and I think a future that I would hope for, a hope for higher education is a future in which practitioners across institutions and through the institutions recognize and see their power to lead inclusive processes to build fair categories. So I think if we can just see that every little thing that we do adds up to this big unequal system, and if we be reflective and listen carefully and be inclusive as we make each of those choices. We're going to make a system that's stronger and more equitable and serves education's many goals a lot better.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Thank you. That was lovely. Thank you. Emily.

Dr. Emily Penner: I think I'll add that we are at a space where our higher education system has lots of entry points for lots of people, but lots of barriers for getting them all the way through. And I think some of our categories put people into categories around higher education get people stuck along the way. They don't collect the right kinds of credits they need to transfer from a community college. They can't find the right kind of pathway through the educational skills they want to develop because the major requirements aren't available or they're really limited by some of the kinds of categories and identities that they developed from K-12 that carry them through and they're not able to access the same kind of resources as they make it into higher education.

And I think we're at a space where there's like a profound interest in acquiring higher ed degrees. And there's communities that are really motivated. Parents want their students, want their children to get college degrees. And yet there's still so many barriers along the way where people with high intentions and aspirations and vision for themselves can't quite connect all the dots. For those of us who are sitting in higher ed settings, thinking about all the varied pathways that people may take. I think we need to think a lot about how we can ease the burden of those transitions for people, how we can make higher ed a space that communicates clearly folks from different identities belong there, folks who may have had different K-12 experiences belong there. And we should do our best to reach out to those folks and get them involved in this decision-making and communication around it so that it's not a mystery and so that it's not just an exercise in futility and frustration. Because we get so many students who by some luck made it all the way into our kind of more flagship state institutions through some very commendable paths. But it shouldn't take a hero to do all that. And that regular student shouldn't have to solve a 20 step puzzle to make it happen.

I think it's the onus is on us sitting in higher ed institutions in a lot of ways and politicians and communities to think about how to simplify some of those things so that we can get more students to meet the goals that they're hoping for themselves.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Okay, so thank you, Emily. That was a great reflection and observation. And this has been such a great conversation. I appreciate you all and your work so much. And I just want to ask if there's anything that we have not talked about that you want to make sure that you share with our readers, including how to find you, how to connect with you and how to get access to this awesome book.

Dr. Emily Penner: That's good. I don't know that I have much more to add, but I can certainly say where folks can get our book. It is available from Russell Sage Publishing, but it's also anywhere books are sold. A lot of them are going to be online at this point. We haven't yet to see it in the wild in a bookstore. So tell us if you found it somewhere. We'd love to hear about that.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Very good. Okay. How about you, Andrew?

Dr. Andrew Penner: Yeah, nothing to add. I think you did a really wonderful job. It felt like we are back writing the book again, right? Like that sense of talking about ideas and engaging. And I love that. So thank you for having us here and hopefully your listeners enjoy it as much as I have.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Thank you. Thank you very much. I've been, I've certainly enjoyed it. How about you, Thad? Close this out.

Dr. Thurston Domina: It's just been such a pleasure. I don't know. The kids say I'm subscribed by the book, write a review. And yeah, I keep, and I do hope that the tools that are in the book, particularly that last chapter, we're really proud of are ideas that you can carry forward into your work. I think that your listeners, it's important work that we do. And so I think being able to reflect on it and why it matters is a big important thing to do.

Dr. Michelle Cantu-Wilson: Yes, it is. Thank you so much, each of you, for taking time to put something out into the world that is, I think, reach into inclusivity, if you will, because you are higher ed practitioners who are discussing and interested in the public education domain because you understand how close it all is and how important it is that we talk about this issue of categorization and sorting and tracking and the likes. Thank you very much. 

The book listeners is "Schooled and Sorted: How Educational Categories Create Inequality". Our guests have been Dr. Thurston Domina. He goes by Thad. He is at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And then we have Dr. Andrew Penner and Dr. Emily K. Penner who are both at UC Irvine. And we just appreciate them so much listeners. Make sure you get this book, particularly if you run or have colleges of education, this would be a great read as a book study for them. Make sure that you like, follow and subscribe to the EdUp Experience podcast available anywhere you get your podcasts. Make sure that you get the book that Joe Elvin and Kate Colbert have written. And be sure to share this particular episode with those education like-minded folks that you know. Folks, you've just ed-uped.