Behavioral Catch-22: When Educational Expectations Conflict with Cultural and Racial Norms

Ann Arnett Ferguson came to RosaParks Elementary School as part of a team that was evaluating an intervention program for “at-risk” (of failing) students. When she saw that all of the students in the program save one were African-American, and that 90 percent of them were male, she began a study to find out how this had come to pass. In her book Bad Boys, she looks at how institutions (schools in particular) can shape one’s identity, concentrating on how elementary-school-age black males construct their senses of self with the help and hindrance of the public school system. She also examines why, in an educational system that is supposed to provide advancement based on merit rather than race or social class, such a disproportionate number of black males were so severely disciplined on a regular basis. In her fieldwork, she spent time with approximately twenty fifth- and sixth-grade African-American boys at Rosa Parks, as well as interviewing administrators, teachers, disciplinary staff, and some of the boys’ parents.

In reading Bad Boys, the phrase that continually popped into my head was “Catch-22,” a concept defined by Joseph Heller in his book of the same name. Essentially, a Catch-22 is a paradoxical, circular reasoning that catches its victim in its illogic and serves the purposes of those who made the law. This seems to be exactly what happens to both the Troublemakers and the Schoolboys in the book: they are constantly put into situations where none of the choices available to them are optimal, and choosing any of them can destroy a major aspect of their lives.