Race, Class, and Gender and Abandoned Dreams CARL A. GRANT University of Wisconsin-Madison CHRISTINE E. SLEETER University of Wisconsin-Parkside In 1979, as part of a larger study, we decided to follow longitudinally twenty- four lower-middle-class junior high school students who were of different ra- cial backgrounds. We were interested in understanding their school-life and career-life choices and dreams. We followed (by observation and interview) these twenty-four students over a seven-year period. This article reports on their goals and dreams and the culture they generated within the institutions in which they lived. It also records the failure of the school to help students achieve their dreams. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND School plays a major role in the culture students develop. Like the family and neighborhood, school affects how students understand and pursue their life chances. It provides an institutional ideology, socializing agents, and an ex- periential context within which students define and shape the way they think about their personal dreams. The school context, containing social relations defined by race, social class, and gender, can produce a student culture in which young people accept and live out their parents’ place in a stratified so- ciety, in spite of the school’s espoused mission as equalizer and escalator to a better life. This happened in our study. The study examines student culture as it is produced and lived in a partic- ular community. We wanted to understand why students of color, lower- class white students, and female students, both white and of color, tend not to succeedin school and out, and tend to assume subordinate roles in society in spite of the fact that school is supposed to serve as an equalizer. We did not assume that schools serve all children equally, since there is abundant evi- dence that they do not.’ We did believe it would be insufficient to study the school apart from the lives of students, since students are not passive autom- atons that are simply molded and shaped. Valli points out that too often, in Teachers College Record Volume 90, Number 1, Fall 1988 Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University 0161-4681-88/9001/19$1.25/0