Abstract
Previous work on student alienation in schools has emphasized alienation as either a source or consequence of students’ lack of achievement. We show, in contrast, how alienation is common to a wide range of students’ experiences in school, including among “high-achieving” students. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two disparate suburban high schools, we show how students’ experience of alienation is linked to an exacting achievement narrative in U.S. schooling. We describe four forms of alienation: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else’s story, with the first three each connected to a different narrative element (character, setting, plot) and the fourth a more existential sense of narrative disconnect. We highlight the importance of alienation as a reason to de-emphasize schooling in solutions to inequality, making space for more radical politics of redistribution.
Keywords
The study of alienation is central to the study of education, all the way back to Durkheim ([1925] 1973), Dewey ([1916] 2024), and Du Bois (2001). Yet the word “alienation” has fallen out of favor in recent decades (Yuill 2011), even if sociologists of education still use synonyms to describe what might have previously been called alienation. In their systematic review of school alienation research, Hascher and Hadjar (2018:173) argue that alienation is “somewhat neglected in the current discussion of school failure,” although the concept could provide important understandings of “oppositional, disruptive, and irregular behavior” and the relative prevalence of school dropouts (see also Mau 1992; Morinaj and Hascher 2019). Along these lines, education scholars who do use the term usually do so in reference to the causes or consequences of underachievement (Conchas 2006; Demerath 2009; Rios 2011; Taines 2012).
In contrast, we draw on over two years of Drake’s (2022) ethnographic fieldwork in two disparate high schools in an affluent Los Angeles suburb to show the relationship between student alienation and what we call the “achievement narrative” (Ayala-Hurtado 2022; Zavala and Hand 2019). Our findings suggest that alienation in U.S. schools does not necessarily stem from insufficient support; instead, it is students’ inability to identify themselves within the achievement narrative that leads to alienation, affecting students at multiple levels, from those who hope to finish high school to those who plan to enter a prestigious university.
We are not claiming that all forms of school-based alienation stem from this achievement narrative, and we acknowledge that as with any ethnographic claim, this study provides a vivid example of a locally identified mechanism (Small and Calarco 2022). We are also cautious about making broad causal claims about the origins of alienation, something we discuss further in the conclusion. However, we do argue that various forms of academic alienation are connected to the achievement narrative. Given that the “good” of schooling increasingly centers individual status attainment (Labaree 1997; Mehta and Davies 2018), it seems plausible that the achievement narrative is a source of alienation in education, affecting students in a variety of educational contexts. In what follows, we outline our theoretical contributions, explaining what we mean by the achievement narrative and alienation. We then draw on Drake’s (2022) ethnographic research to describe four forms of alienation in schools: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, 1 and someone else’s story. We close with the sociological, economic, and political implications of our argument alongside ways in which it might be further developed.
Theoretical Considerations
The Achievement Narrative, Alienation, and Meritocracy
Guhin and Duran (2024) describe how alienation can best be understood through narratives, positing that alienation can occur when there is a mismatch between “structural narratives” and individuals’ sense of themselves and their future. In this theory, structural narratives relate to individual lives much as other social structures do. The social structure most similar to a structural narrative is probably an institution, especially in the sense of institutions as providing rules for action (Meyer and Rowan 2006). 2 Indeed, as Guhin and Duran argue, powerful institutions, such as family, marriage, and career, are often experienced as structural narratives, providing not only generally agreed-on expectations about certain elements of social life but, most importantly, a narrative understanding of those expectations fleshed out in who is involved (characters), where it happens (setting), and how it plays out temporally (plot). Alienation can happen when someone does not align with the structural narratives that shape (or are expected to shape) that person’s life, often through a disconnect with one of the narrative’s three constituent parts (character, setting, plot). Alienation can also happen when despite aligning, a person does not experience that link as meaningful. 3
For example, a high school student might be told she must go to college and is regularly provided a story about college that her teachers and fellow students both agree with and seek to enact: “Good students go to college, where they thrive and then go on to successful careers.” Yet this student cannot imagine herself in that setting and is unable to identify with the character in that narrative. The narrative does not feel like her own. Or perhaps another student, who is already in college, recognizes—in her superficially successful daily experience—all the various characters, settings, and plot points of a narrative about college, yet the narrative never quite feels right to her (similar to Hochschild’s [2012:59–63] disconnected bride on her wedding day). Neither of these students can connect to the structural narrative of college, the first as a future and the second as a daily experience. That first student’s disconnect has been described by sociologists of education (Carter 2005; Wallace 2023), but they pay considerably less attention to the second student, the one doing well in college but for whom the experience is “mute” rather than “resonant,” as Rosa (2019) might describe it with his theory of alienation.
The structural narrative of college contains within itself various other structural narratives, just as the institution of education (Meyer 1977) contains other institutions within it (e.g., sports, literature, mathematics). For our purposes, we focus on the structural narrative of achievement in school rather than the broader structural narratives of education. U.S. narratives about achievement extend well beyond school, going back at least as far as Benjamin Franklin’s rags-to-riches autobiography and other mythmaking about “the American dream” (Cullen 2003). 4 At its simplest, the U.S. version of the achievement narrative describes how anyone who works hard can get ahead. This story’s optimism paradoxically invites scathing moral judgments about individuals who have insufficiently achieved, explaining personal or societal problems as problems of individual achievement or lack thereof (Katz 2013). As MacLeod (2018) and others argue, these achievement stories can lead low-income students to expect great success, only to then blame themselves when their anticipated achievements never happen (Hill and Torres 2010).
The achievement narrative is only possible within a meritocracy (Guinier 2016), a term invented to describe a dystopic social order (Young 2017) in which inequality serves as its own justification. Contemporary scholars of meritocracy describe how its winners experience the “merit” of their success: The best people get the best jobs because they “achieved” them through talent and hard work (McNamee and Miller 2009; Warikoo 2016). But note the contrapositive that follows: If the best deserve their best outcomes, then those with the worst outcomes must themselves be the worst. Of course, status as related to achievement need not be inextricably tied to overall moral worth, yet meritocracy makes this separation of status from worth much more difficult, especially via the achievement narrative that meritocracy both strengthens and draws strength from (Ford 1992; Sandel 2020). Alienation often ensues, both for those who are not achieving enough and for those who are (Lampert 2013).
Alienation in Schools
Following Guhin and Duran’s (2024) argument about narrative alienation, we describe how alienation occurs when someone cannot connect to the achievement narrative. This argument extends two recent theories of alienation: those of Rosa (2019) and Jaeggi (2014), both of which emphasize its relationality (see also Silver 2019). We briefly mentioned Rosa (2019:174) earlier, whose description of alienation as “muteness” stands in contrast to resonance, which, like the positive feedback loop of resonating musical instruments, is marked by “intrinsic interest and self-efficacy, in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed.” Rosa argues that neither alienation nor resonance are emotions, even if they evoke emotional responses; they are, instead, ways of relating to the world. Jaeggi’s project is more centered on alienation itself, a “relation of relationlessness” in which someone fails to “appropriate” the world in the Marxist sense of making it your own. Jaeggi’s work on alienation echoes earlier Marxian analysis of student alienation, especially Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles and Gintis 2011) and Learning Capitalist Culture (Foley 2010), both of which emphasize how schools turn low-class students into laborers for capitalism, thereby preventing them from appropriating their own labor (Marx 1988). Jaeggi builds on similar Marxist analyses of alienation, combining them with phenomenology and critical theory to show how people come to feel unconnected to their own lives.
Both Jaeggi (2014) and Rosa (2019) are interested in the institutions and organizations that make alienation (or resonance) possible, yet neither emphasize narrative in the way we do here, and although both also emphasize temporality, it not as central to their arguments. Indeed, this emphasis on temporality helps distinguish alienation from suffering. 5 For example, Guhin and Duran (2024) describe how students in medical school might hate the experience even as they are able to narrate their stress and sleepless nights as difficult plot points toward becoming doctors. In contrast, Guhin and Duran describe alienation as “suffering without telos,” a sense that one’s inability to connect to a wider structural narrative is neither a means toward a better end nor even necessarily temporary. This lack of telos is captured by Skotnicki and Nielsen’s (2021:841–42) definition of alienation as “futurelessness.” By this they do not mean death (a literal lack of future) but, rather, a sense there is no longer anything “possible or outstanding in this life.” It is this sense of temporal loss—alongside the relationality Rosa describes—that separates alienation from negative emotion. 6
We develop both this temporal distinction and this emphasis on relationality by connecting alienation to structural narratives, especially the achievement narrative. Alienated students experience a disjuncture between their own experience of themselves and the expectations put on them by the achievement narrative, especially as expressed in characters, settings, and plots. Yet because this is a connection to a narrative, that experience is always temporal, in the sense that a narrative always has a past, present, and future (Polletta 2009). When students wonder if they can fit into a narrative, it is always in the sense of wondering whether they could move forward through time as the narrative’s characters, in the narrative’s settings, and surviving the narrative’s plot. 7
We describe four forms of alienation that stem from the achievement narrative: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else’s story. We are not arguing these are the only forms of alienation or even the only forms of alienation experienced within the achievement narrative. These are, however, the forms of alienation identified in our data, and they cover disconnects between the three elements of narrative we describe here (character, setting, plot) and the alienation of following the narrative but not sensing it as one’s own.
Students with “precarious character” are unable to identify themselves as characters in the achievement narrative. They are worried about their character in two senses (Guhin and Duran 2024): character in the sense of a figure in a story and character in the sense of one’s moral worth, with academic failure rendering both precarious. As such, students find it hard to identify as a character in (or as having the character for) the achievement narrative despite a belief that the achievement narrative is the only relevant narrative through which to structure a meaningful life.
Students with “unsound settings” might identify with the characters of the achievement narrative and even agree with the suggested plot. Yet they find themselves in a location, whether physical or social, that simply does not permit the achievement narrative, no matter how much they agree that the achievement narrative describes how their lives should go.
For students with “impossible plots,” the story they want to live out is not a story that can fit into the achievement narrative. These students might find something “resonant” in their lives, in Rosa’s (2019) sense of the term, yet that resonance is attached to a plot line that is untenable within the achievement narrative. For students with “someone else’s story,” their current lives contain all the markers called for by the achievement narrative, and there is a straightforward connection between their current situations and their projected future selves. Yet these lives feel inauthentic; they are not appropriated in Jaeggi’s (2014) sense: The activities, achievements, and aspirations feel like someone else’s story, not their own.
Three additional themes merit theoretical clarification—race, gender, and discipline. Each has been engaged in the sociology of education, sometimes all at once, as in Ferguson’s (2020) Bad Boys and Blume Oeur’s (2018) Black Boys Apart. First, countless studies have shown how people of color, women, and sexual minorities are more likely to experience alienation, often in intersectional ways (Collins and Bilge 2020; Harris 1993; Winkle-Wagner 2009). Although we do not center the study of race and sex here, we are often writing about students of color and female students.
Second, regarding discipline, we describe a variety of contexts in which students are alienated through explicit disciplinary mechanisms; the entire existence of “Crossroads High School,” one of our field sites, manifests a disciplinary regime. We draw on Foucault (1995) to argue that structural narratives are continuously disciplinary in that they are forming students as subjects—developing within them a sense not only of what they should study but also who they should be. In this broader, more Foucauldian sense, alienation’s relationship to discipline extends well beyond explicit punishment and behavioral reprimands.
Data and Methods
Research Sites
“Valley View,” the Los Angeles suburb where Drake conducted fieldwork, is an affluent suburban community. In 2020, the median household income was over $120,000, and 66 percent of adult residents had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. Valley View’s 2020 population of nearly 300,000 residents represented an increase of over 30 percent since 2010. The ethnoracial composition of the city reflects broader contemporary immigration flows in middle-class California cities: Valley View is predominantly Asian (44 percent) and White (41 percent); it has a modest Latinx population (9 percent) and a small Black population (2 percent).
Valley View has six public high schools. “Pinnacle High School,” our first field site, is the city’s flagship high school, consistently ranked as one of California’s top public schools. The curriculum offers 29 honors and advanced placement courses; dozens of sports, clubs, and student government opportunities; and a robust peer tutoring program. Pinnacle enrolls roughly 2,000 students each year. Of Pinnacle’s graduates, 96 percent enroll in postsecondary institutions, and roughly 80 percent enroll at four-year colleges and universities. Prestigious schools, such as those in the University of California system and the Ivy League, are popular among Pinnacle’s college-goers.
Crossroads High School, our second field site, is the district’s continuation school—students are sent to Crossroads when they have fallen so far behind on their course credits they are no longer on pace to graduate with their class. Crossroads provides a starkly different experience for its students, whose number shifts across the school year from around 150 to 220. At back-to-school night, the school sold t-shirts that read “Crossroads Athletics: Undefeated Since 1974,” which was meant as a joke because Crossroads has no sports teams. The school also has no music program, no drama program or student clubs, and no parent-teacher association.
Crossroads also lacks material resources: The school has no library, and the curriculum is limited to classes necessary for obtaining a high school diploma in California. This truncated curriculum means that even if Crossroads students earn straight As, they are ineligible to enroll in a four-year college or university and must instead choose a community college or trade school. 8 Students can return from Crossroads to their neighborhood high school once they have recovered enough credits, but return is rare. From 2014 to 2016, when the data were collected, only 17 percent of Crossroads students who were eligible to transfer back at the end of the school year did so.
Pinnacle and Crossroads also differ dramatically in the racial composition of their student populations, particularly in terms of students of color. As Table 1 shows, Asian individuals comprise 44 percent of Valley View’s population; Asian students make up 52.2 percent of the student body at Pinnacle but only 9.5 percent at Crossroads. Black and Latinx students are overrepresented at Crossroads at 9.4 percent and 36.5 percent, respectively, compared to 2 percent and 9 percent of Valley View’s population and 2.4 percent and 7.1 percent of Pinnacle’s student body. These disparities illustrate the extent to which the Valley View Unified School District’s continuation school model disproportionately affects Black and Latinx students.
Racial Compositions of Valley View, California, Pinnacle High School, and Crossroads High School.
Sources: Valley View Unified School District, 2014–2015; 2014 U.S. census.
Students are transferred to Crossroads because of academic underperformance, not behavioral problems. Nevertheless, the school’s physical space appears punitive: an imposing seven-foot metal fence, low ceilings and flat roofs, floodlights dotting the courtyard, and a squad car parked by the main entrance. A Valley View police officer, armed with a yellow taser and a pistol, is a conspicuous presence on campus during arrival, passing periods, lunch period, and dismissal. In contrast, Pinnacle High School, like all comprehensive high schools in the district, is an “open campus” without fences on its perimeter and students coming and going from all sides; indeed, Pinnacle students are free to leave campus during lunchtime and free periods. Crossroads students do not have free periods, and they cannot leave campus for lunch. In summary, whereas Pinnacle students enjoy ample academic resources, extracurricular opportunities, and spatial freedom, Crossroads students’ experiences are characterized by relative deprivation and disadvantage. The radical differences between Pinnacle and Crossroads provide numerous leverage points for qualitative comparison, including this article’s focus on how alienation is not simply a problem of low resources, underachievement, or behavioral problems.
Data Collection and Analysis
Drake’s data collection, which began in 2014, included over 400 hours of observation and 122 in-depth interviews with a variety of institutional actors at both schools. He made repeated observations in multiple spaces and events, including classrooms, assemblies, faculty meetings, back-to-school nights, and awards ceremonies (e.g., trophy presentations and graduations). Observing in a wide variety of school settings allows the ethnographer to minimize the extent to which important aspects of the settings and situations under study are inadvertently excluded from the analysis (Duneier 2011). Drake took copious field notes by hand in a notebook, supplementing these notes with analytic memos to provide a “running record of [his] early analytic musings and proto-conceptions” (Lofland et al. 2022:114). He also gathered data through “interviewing by comment” (Snow, Zurcher, and Sjoberg 1982) via dozens of informal conversations with teachers, administrators, students, and parents.
In the first six months of field work, Drake only observed, gradually building rapport with institutional actors. Only then did he begin conducting formal interviews, with an established familiarity that provided candid conversations with members of each school community. To obtain student interview subjects, he introduced himself to each class he was observing and passed around a signup sheet for students to indicate their interest. Drake made such introductions to students in a wide variety of classes, securing additional interviews with students, teachers, staff, and parents via snowball sampling (Biernacki and Waldorf 1981).
At Crossroads, Drake interviewed 59 students (30 girls and 29 boys), 9 teachers, 3 administrators, and 6 parents, and he participated in a focus group discussion with 12 additional parents. At Pinnacle, he interviewed 28 students (15 girls and 13 boys), 7 teachers, 4 administrators, and 6 parents. All students were asked to identify their race as part of the interview (see Table 2). The number of each racial group in the Crossroads student sample roughly corresponds to the percentage of each racial group in the entire student body at Crossroads. In the Pinnacle student sample, Black and Latinx students are overrepresented compared to their percentages of the student body because Black and Latinx students were overrepresented among those who transferred to Crossroads.
Self-Identified Race of Student Interviewees.
The interviews ranged from 24 to 67 minutes, with a mean of 39 minutes. Drake interviewed students at lunch, outside of class (with teacher approval), or after school, always on campus. He interviewed teachers during free periods or after school, typically in their classrooms. He obtained consent to audio-record each interview, with each recording transcribed verbatim either by him or by an undergraduate research assistant he trained.
Alienation 1: Precarious Character
Students at Pinnacle High learned to see themselves in the achievement narrative, or at least they learned to try. They experienced the achievement narrative all around them, gaining a sense of the characters who achieve, the settings in which these achievements occur, and the plot through which people move from present to future, from Pinnacle to an elite college. Yet some students never quite connected to the achievement narrative, failing to become the kinds of characters who “achieve” and to move through the plot points that would be recognizable as achievements.
At Pinnacle High School, like other high-achieving schools (Dhingra 2020; Weis, Cilollone, and Jenkins 2014), the achievement narrative was a constant presence on campus. Academic excellence was the expectation: Students felt compelled to enroll in multiple honors and AP classes, attain at least a 4.0 GPA, excel on standardized tests, participate consistently in extracurricular activities, and gain admission to a prestigious four-year college or university. This academic prowess is a part of the school’s architecture, with “California Distinguished School” and “National Exemplary School” permanently affixed to an arch in large font at eye level at the main entrance. These school commendations are bestowed annually in California, and although Drake saw other schools display these awards—typically as pennants or banners indicating which year they were won—he never saw them placed so prominently. Pinnacle tattooed these titles as immutable components of institutional culture and identity.
Reminders of the achievement narrative also showed up in classrooms. For instance, Mr. Ventura taught biology in a room with dozens of college pennants lining the upper walls. These pennants represented Mr. Ventura’s “personal pride,” a selection of the colleges and universities his former students chose to attend, each of them a future that current students might achieve: Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA, among many others. These pennants reveal how the achievement narrative situates a certain character type (the academically excellent student) along a certain plot (moving through Pinnacle’s rigors toward the future at one of these colleges).
Leveraging the Achievement Narrative as a Pedagogical Tool
This rigorous commitment to student success might produce a resonant experience of achievement for some students. Yet for others, it simply shows them what they are not. The precariousness of achievement—and through achievement, worth—is reinforced by pedagogical practices that call out students who are struggling while privileging the highest achievers.
Consider Ms. King’s algebra class. Once a week or so, after passing back graded exams, she would begin class by opening a spreadsheet on her computer that listed each student’s ID number and their cumulative grade in the class. Displaying the spreadsheet through an overhead projector, she read down the list, commenting aloud on the scores of various student ID numbers: “22915, you just barely made the cutoff for an A”; “22513, you just made the cutoff for a B, but if you slip up you might get a C. You don’t want to ever get a C”; “22398, do you want to take algebra again next year? Because that’s the path that you’re on right now”; “22887, you are in the wrong class. Your performance so far makes that clear.” Ms. King then focused on the three students who had failing grades, using a laser pointer to highlight their scores on the spreadsheet. “These three kids will not survive, plain and simple,” she announced. The use of the word “survive” highlights what teachers and students understand as existential stakes.
It was not clear whether any of the students Ms. King singled out that day were identifiable to their classmates. Ms. King used ID numbers to avoid embarrassing students by name, but some level of shame was clearly intended. She hoped that comparing their grades in a public fashion would, as she put it after class, “inspire improvement.” Yet here, success at math is framed not as a creative capacity with numbers or the enjoyment of interesting equations we might solve; instead, success is a position on a list, linked either to praise or more commonly, precariousness, with a risk of receiving the sort of grade that would mark someone perhaps in the right setting, perhaps in the right plot, but as the wrong kind of character.
If Ms. King was hoping to inspire, her tactics backfired, at least with some students. A few weeks later, Cindy (White, 15 years old, and Student 22887 in Ms. King’s class) described how it felt to be told she was “in the wrong class”: You already feel like you don’t belong because everyone else is doing better, and then on top of that to be straight up told that by a teacher just really sucks. You feel like you don’t belong and then your teacher confirms it. Last year, in eighth grade, I thought I was pretty smart, but this year I’m not so sure.
Ms. King’s approach did not motivate Cindy to improve; instead, it made her question her intelligence and whether she belonged at Pinnacle. Cindy’s experience was emblematic of Pinnacle students who passed their classes but received below-average grades. In her sense of who she was and where she was going, she was not able to connect to Pinnacle’s achievement narrative. To be below average, indeed, even to be average, was to feel out of place. In this scene and in others, students were constantly and publicly compared to each other, developing a consensus opinion among students, teachers, and parents that the Pinnacle environment was relentlessly competitive and unforgiving. If you did not have the grades for the schools on Mr. Ventura’s wall, then to quote Cindy, you “don’t belong” at those schools, and by extension, you might not belong at Pinnacle either. And if you do not belong at Pinnacle or in the elite locations that mark many Pinnacle students’ projected futures, then you also do not belong in the achievement narrative: You are not the right kind of character.
Fear of Failure and Crossroads High School
For students in the Valley View district, especially those not at Crossroads, there is a wide belief that Crossroads is not the right setting for achievement. To be clear, this is not the same as arguing that the achievement narrative is unimportant at Crossroads. As we show, it is this very paradox of a demanding achievement narrative in a place where achievement is hard to find that can make Crossroads such an alienating place.
Eugene is a 17-year-old Korean American junior and the son of college professors; Patrick is a 17-year-old Chinese American junior whose parents are chemists. In an interview, they summarized the predominant perception of Crossroads held by Pinnacle students:
Crossroads is like the penitentiary for students. If you go to Crossroads, you have failed miserably as a student and a person.
Yeah, Crossroads is the bad school. It’s almost like, if you mess up, then you go there, so it’s almost like a prison. Because if you mess up here [at Pinnacle], then you go over there, and you’re done for life, pretty much.
Note in these responses the elements of alienation we have been describing: the existential stakes for Eugene and the sense of futurelessness (to be “done for life”) that Patrick alludes to. To be sent to Crossroads means one has failed and is incapable of being (or having) the kind of character the achievement narrative requires.
Crossroads students often expressed a great deal of shame and embarrassment simply for being there, reflecting this alienation, and these feelings were frequently echoed by their family members. Juan, a 17-year-old Mexican American 11th-grader at Crossroads, stated that his father, a real estate agent, was dismayed when he found out Juan was being transferred to Crossroads: “My dad believed that Crossroads was a school for bad kids who do drugs and make trouble. He felt that me being here would downgrade our family name.” Juan said his father also feared for his real estate business, worrying that if his clients found out his son was a student at Crossroads, they would not want to do business with him: I usually go with my dad to look at houses with his customers. They’ll ask me, “Where do you go to school?” And I used to say, “Crossroads,” but my dad was like, “Don’t tell them that.” He thought it would be bad for his business and the family. He thought it would downgrade our family name. So now I just say I go to Pinnacle.
Juan’s experience is representative of a clear pattern in our data—the lowly status of Crossroads High School in the local community and concern about the characters in that setting. Character here is understood both as a moral status (“bad kids who do drugs and make trouble”) and as a constituent part of an achievement narrative so important to Juan and his family that he misrepresented his ongoing participation in it (“I just say I go to Pinnacle”).
Note the influence of the achievement narrative in Juan’s account. Along the lines of the “lads” in Willis’s (1981) Learning to Labor, Juan, or any number of students at Crossroads, could have provided another structural narrative from which they drew support. Like the lads, Juan and his peers could have valorized themselves, insisting they were the real winners, even if the bookish, high achievers at Pinnacle might not agree. 9 Yet despite his failure to be the kind of student the achievement narrative demands, Juan still believed its expectations were the ones that mattered.
Precarious Character among High Achievers
Even Pinnacle students who took multiple advanced classes and earned competitive grades and test scores still experienced themselves as precarious characters of the achievement narrative. For example, Yuki, an 18-year-old senior whose parents emigrated from Japan to Valley View two years before he was born, took four honors-level classes during his first year. Despite staying up late on most school nights to study, he “struggled,” earning “a mix of As and Bs” in his honors classes. Yuki’s inability to achieve straight As left him feeling disaffected: “I didn’t get a 4.0. I felt inadequate and left alone because all my friends and everyone around me was succeeding, getting all As, so I sort of felt like I wasn’t really good enough to be even hanging out with them.”
Yuki’s feelings of inadequacy were amplified during the college application process. He took the SAT “several times” during his junior year, eventually achieving a score in the 90th percentile nationally. He took the exam repeatedly because he felt his score was “not worthy” of his friends, all of whom took the exam “once or twice,” scored several percentile points higher than he did, and claimed the test was “easy.” Senior year, when he and his classmates received college admissions decisions, Yuki’s feelings of failure were laid bare. Several friends and classmates gained admission into multiple top-ranked colleges and universities, but he did not. During a brief conversation with him two days after Pinnacle’s annual “college sweatshirt day,” when graduating seniors flaunt sweatshirts and other gear from their college of choice, he stated, “I wish I could be smart, but I’m just not. Maybe I could be smart at another high school, but at Pinnacle I’m probably average. It sucks, but those other kids deserve it more than me.”
Pinnacle’s highest achievers set the bar for academic excellence, and those who fell below often questioned their talent and intelligence. This was true even for accomplished students like Yuki, who achieved “good” grades and test scores and gained admission to several four-year universities. Yet Yuki was unable to see himself as a character in the achievement narrative: The ideal student is “smart” and deserving, earning test scores and gaining college admissions he could not.
Alienation 2: Unsound Settings
If students with precarious character do not see themselves as the kinds of characters the achievement narrative demands, then students with unsound settings cannot connect where they are with where the achievement narrative requires them to be. In this sense, setting is at once physical and social, in the same way “social distance” is often not related to physical distance (Bourdieu 1989; Karakayali 2009). A setting is more than simply where a story happens; a setting also affords the story itself, with its physical or social qualities making more or less possible certain kinds of characters and certain kinds of plots. Different places evoke different narrative expectations; consider the prison-like quality of Crossroads or the impressive facilities at Pinnacle. Yet as different as two school campuses may be, it is also the people and organizations that populate them that give these settings their sensibilities and their potential to alienate.
An Achievement Paradox at Crossroads
One of the largest classrooms at Crossroads was also used as a college counseling office and a place to host orientation sessions for new transfers. This was a place where students thought about their futures. Three of the room’s four walls are covered in colorful pennants representing various four-year colleges and universities, many of them highly ranked and noted for their low undergraduate acceptance rates.
The irony of this display was that Crossroads graduates were ineligible to enroll at any of those schools regardless of their scholastic achievement. While seated in the room, students noted the contradiction. “What’s up with these walls? Why are they reminding us about all the great schools we can’t get into?!” one asked. Another wondered if “they’re straight up trolling us with these college decorations.” These pennants were unintentional symbols of deprivation—a reminder to students of the impossibility of the achievement narrative—at least for where they were.
That impossibility hit hardest for Crossroads’ highest achievers, who did see themselves as the kinds of characters who could live out the achievement narrative. Yet some of these students were unaware of the school’s curricular limitations until after they had begun college applications. Consider the experience of Dominique, a Black, 18-year-old senior:
Why did you decide on [Valley View Community College]?
The decision was pretty much made for me. I went to [the guidance counselor] and told her that I wanted to apply to Long Beach State because my cousin goes there, but she said that my only option for next year was to go to community college. And that was shocking to me because I’ve been doing really well in all my classes here.
Did she say why?
Yeah, because we can’t get all the classes we need here, so I wouldn’t even qualify for a state school.
Unlike the students in the previous section and despite the lousy reputation of the school she attended, Dominique saw herself as a character in the achievement narrative. She had a perfect attendance record and passed all her classes. She was popular among her peers and praised as “hardworking,” “focused,” and “going places” by her teachers. She wanted to attend a four-year college. Yet for students like Dominique, Crossroads was an unsound setting, its skeletal curriculum unable to support the college-going goals they had worked for.
Alienation 3: Impossible Plots
Most students Drake encountered at Crossroads had no plans to attend a four-year college, but this did not mean they lacked ambition or a sense of life as projected into the future. Indeed, perhaps because of their social distance from Pinnacle, it was striking how many Crossroads students could tell an alternative version of the achievement narrative, one that centered other kinds of characters and whose plots described other kinds of achievement. The problem was that Crossroads teachers and administrators did not share this more inclusive understanding of achievement, emphasizing admission to a four-year college or university (even if, as Dominique found, the setting made this impossible). The school’s paradoxical commitment to a narrow version of the achievement narrative made it difficult, if not impossible, for students to give themselves alternative plots.
The Rejection of Miguel’s Achievement
Miguel, a 17-year-old junior, began his high school career at Pinnacle. He was affable, a member of the soccer team, and popular among his classmates. Not really enjoying the academic aspects of school, Miguel did not study much, and his grades reflected it. At the end of his sophomore year at Pinnacle, he was summoned to the counseling office and told he would need to begin junior year at Crossroads to have any hope of graduating on time.
During his orientation at Crossroads the next fall, an academic advisor asked Miguel about his plans. He told her how he loved to cook for his family and how he wanted to be a chef and open his own restaurant. She recommended that he enroll in culinary arts courses through the district’s vocational education program, and he eagerly did.
Miguel excelled in culinary arts. He enjoyed the program because, as he put it, “I get to learn and practice stuff that I’ll need when I get a real job. I know I’ll never use what we’re doing in my other classes, so what’s the point? I really don’t see the point.” Things were looking up for Miguel despite his disinterest in core curriculum subjects, such as math and history. This was an achievement narrative in which he felt the rightness of the setting (a kitchen), the character (himself, a chef in training), and the plot (his culinary education and eventually assuming the responsibilities of a chef). Using Jaeggi’s (2014) terms, Miguel was able to “appropriate” his studies in ways he never had before.
Miguel’s increased sense of belonging and purpose would not last long. During the first year of fieldwork, several Crossroads teachers complained during faculty meetings that too many students were showing up late for first period. Three teachers who had taught Miguel specifically mentioned him as “chronically late.” In response, the principal enacted a policy that students who arrived late for first period eight times in a semester would face a series of penalties, including being pulled from any vocational classes they were enrolled in. He justified this punishment by arguing that vocational classes were “an extracurricular privilege.”
The new policy was devastating for Miguel. Culinary arts was more than “extracurricular” for him; it was a way to follow an alternative plot marked by real achievement but without the academic requirements set out by teachers and high-flying peers. But his counternarrative of becoming a chef became impossible due to a mismatch between narratives of achievement that were recognized and celebrated by the district and Miguel’s sense of himself and his future.
It was not Miguel’s lack of punctuality per se that was out of alignment with the achievement narrative. Indeed, Drake observed high-achieving Pinnacle students arrive late to class from time to time. The problem was that the school saw Miguel’s goal of becoming a chef—his alternative plot—as illegitimate, which helps us understand why the institutional response to his tardiness for a first period math class was to cancel his enrollment in culinary arts. We doubt he would have been pulled from a program that resonated with the district’s achievement narrative, such as Model UN.
Might Miguel go on to enroll in culinary school and then get expelled for being late too many times? Maybe, but probably not. Culinary arts were very important to Miguel. When asked about his removal from the program, Miguel replied, “It was really the only reason I was coming here [to Crossroads]. Now I don’t really have a reason to be here because I just want to be a chef.” Sure enough, without a place in culinary arts, Miguel began skipping school, only showing up occasionally to turn in assignments or to see his friends. He eventually dropped out of high school, and Drake lost contact with him.
Miguel’s case is a vivid example of how a rigid achievement narrative can alienate students who may project futures along alternative plots. Of course, Miguel could have just kept cooking, teaching himself. But a structural narrative, like any social structure, requires communities and organizational forms to maintain it. Miguel was able to develop an alternative plot within the achievement narrative because he could still get certain kinds of training and interact with people like him: people who loved to cook and people who wanted a vocational training distinct from a commitment to college-or-bust (Rosenbaum 2001). When he lost access to that community, his alternative plot became impossible.
Alienation 4: Someone Else’s Story
The previous three forms of alienation emphasize how students feel a disconnect within some element of a narrative, whether character, setting, or plot. This fourth form of alienation is about a more general sense that the narrative is not one’s own; all the pieces of the narrative are there, but it is not “resonant” in Rosa’s (2019) sense.
Pinnacle High School’s exacting version of the achievement narrative fostered an academic culture of restless striving and stressful peer-group competition that left students feeling alienated no matter their level of achievement (Demerath 2009; Dhingra 2020; Nunn 2014). If precarious character emphasizes the uncertainty of students’ identification with being a character in the narrative, then someone else’s story emphasizes the externality of the narrative itself. For some students, achievement feels like a form of “self-estrangement” (Seeman 1959:790), motivated by obligation and external requirements rather than any meaningful connection. Unlike Yuki in the precarious character section, who did not recognize himself as a character in the achievement narrative, these students see themselves as the right kinds of characters in the right kinds of settings enacting the right kinds of plots. Yet these students are not able to appropriate these achievements as their own; they feel as though they are living someone else’s story.
Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer
Alongside schools, parents also amplify the achievement narrative. Pinnacle parents expected the school to push their children academically, and they expected their children to embrace the challenges and excel. Consistent with other scholars of achievement (Lee and Zhou 2015; Warikoo 2022), we find that these expectations are shaped by a combination of immigrant identity, ethnoracial identity, and socioeconomic status.
Pinnacle has a substantial population of Korean and Chinese American students who are 1.5- and second-generation immigrants, and most of these students come from middle-class and affluent families. As Warikoo (2022) described in her study of immigrant Asian parents, these parents frequently drew on “strategies of action” from their own educational experiences, which emphasize the importance of testing alongside challenging homework from school and additional instruction outside of school. To be sure, not all of Warikoo’s (2022:151) parents would commit their children to what we call the achievement narrative; yet as she puts it, “many Asian immigrants . . . dive into American meritocracy with gusto.” Similarly, Lee and Zhou (2015) describe how many Asian American parents emphasize a “success frame” similar to what we call the achievement narrative, with those unable to keep up often feeling like “ethnoracial outliers.”
At Pinnacle, Korean American and Chinese American students often approach their schoolwork under the weight of intense familial expectations and a rigid reading of the achievement narrative. This unforgiving confluence of expectations from both family and school can alienate even the most academically accomplished students. Drake interviewed 13 Asian American students at Pinnacle with high grades and test scores who were living out the achievement narrative yet did not connect to that narrative as reflecting their own story. Two 17-year-olds—Ryan, the son of Chinese immigrants, and Eugene, whose parents were born in South Korea—offer representative examples.
Ryan and Eugene were enrolled in several AP classes at Pinnacle, including the “hardcore” combination of AP biology and AP chemistry. One day, over coffee at a Starbucks just off campus, the boys talked about Pinnacle’s reputation as a demanding academic institution:
Both of you have said that your parents wanted to move to Valley View, and to this neighborhood in particular, so that you would attend Pinnacle for high school. When you were in middle school, did Pinnacle have a certain reputation that you were aware of?
Amazing, but also formidable. Definitely hardcore.
Yeah, hardcore and intimidating.
So what’s it really been like now that you’re about to be seniors?
It’s definitely a great school for academics, and there are a lot of really good teachers, but it’s not really the teachers that make the school what it is. It’s mainly the stress level. The stress level is through the roof!
Later in the conversation, they each spoke candidly about their academic aspirations and expectations and the alienation that often accompanied the pursuit of those goals. For both boys, their ambitions were fueled by a combination of their parents’ notions of a successful career and their classmates’ sky-high ambitions. Neither was entirely sure how to separate what they wanted from what they felt they were expected to achieve. Perhaps more importantly, both students described a sense in which the good of academic life is marked not by the enjoyment of subject material and student fellowship or even by successful preparation for future college study and careers. Instead, the academic experience is marked primarily by constant academic striving. Achievement is nearly always ranked by status and zero-sum competition among students:
Is there a lot of competition here between students?
Yeah, a ridiculous amount.
Is it common for you to hear from your parents about other students here and how well those students are doing?
Definitely. There’s this kid in our AP chemistry class, and his mom and my mom are friends, and I always have to hear about how high his grades are and how my grades should be just as high.
Have you explicitly been told by your parents that you need to get straight As?
Oh, definitely. Very often, my dad actually says, “If you don’t end up better than me, to me you’re a failure.” And I’m like, “Dad, you have a PhD in chemistry—that’s pretty amazing.” And he’s like, “No, you have to be better than me.”
Do you know what he means when he says, “better than me”?
Yeah, he means monetary income and respectability of the job.
Which pretty much means doctor, lawyer, engineer.
Exactly! Doctor, lawyer, or engineer.
How do you feel about that?
Chemistry and science have been basically force fed into my mouth, but I don’t know if I really like science. I’ve been told that I like it by other people! But I want to keep my options open.
Ryan and Eugene excelled at school even as they routinely felt detached from their accomplishments and any future success they would find by continuing along the achievement narrative:
Both my parents are medical doctors, and my mom is also a really heavy chemistry person. Growing up, I’ve always been taught that to be a successful adult you have to be a doctor or something similar; you have to wear a white coat; you have to be this sort of person. So I really don’t see a future of me not wearing a white coat at all. And I don’t know if it was forced on me, or if I think I’m fitted for it, but I think I’ll be a doctor.
And Eugene, you’re not so sure?
I’m not sure at all. My parents actually forced me to take an internship in a stem cell laboratory last year that I really did not want to do. They’re trying to prepare me for a career that I’m not interested in.
By all numerical measures, Ryan and Eugene were doing extremely well in school; they each held a grade point average above 4.0, and their standardized test scores were in the 99th percentile nationally. However, despite their clear scholastic achievements, both boys experienced an alienation associated with feeling as though the achievement narrative they so scrupulously followed was not a narrative about them or their interests. Ryan was not sure if he liked science, yet he could see no successful future for himself in which he was not a doctor wearing a lab coat. Eugene had no interest in the prestigious science internship and other intensive opportunities his parents demanded he complete, the better to prepare him for the career they expected of him.
Ryan and Eugene were not alone in their alienation. For Pinnacle’s highest academic achievers, achievement was often empty of the triumphant joys traditionally associated with it: the mastery of a skill, the successful completion of a task or challenge. These students strived to live out the achievement narrative even as the story never felt like their own.
Discussion and Conclusions
We described four types of alienation in schools: precarious character, unsound settings, impossible plots, and someone else’s story, each of which is sustained through a disconnect between students’ experiences and an exacting achievement narrative. In contrast to much of the work on alienation in schools, our findings indicate that alienation is not necessarily related to low achievement; indeed, even high-achieving students might find themselves unable to relate to the achievement narrative. Such a disconnect might occur in many ways; here, we provide four explanations, the first three based on a disconnect between an individual and a certain narrative element (character, setting, or plot) and the fourth based on a more general sense that the story is not one’s own. We now discuss how these findings might be further developed and their sociological, economic, and political implications.
At the theoretical level, our argument is part of a resurgence of alienation studies in the social sciences (Jaeggi 2014; Rosa 2019; Silver 2019; Skotnicki and Nielsen 2021). We hope others might find the narrative approach to alienation useful in the study of schools or in other social locations. Our approach is inspired by other sociological accounts of narrative (Jacobs 1996; Polletta 2009), a focus rarely used in the sociology of education but seen in other academic studies of schooling (Craig 2007). We hope that studies of alienation in schools and elsewhere can better clarify the plausible yet undeveloped causal relationship between structural narratives and alienation.
At the empirical level, future research could identify the prevalence of these forms of alienation and their relative correlation with student characteristics. The classed, racialized, and gendered nature of alienation are important themes that are discussed but not centered in this study. Future research could also focus more squarely on the role of specific policies and practices in alienating students, including peer groups (Best 2013) and pedagogy itself.
Other scholars might use this narrative theory of alienation to analyze how discipline and punishment alienate students—or do not. For example, in Bad Boys, Ferguson (2020:9) notes that some of the students she met described time in the “punishing room” with pride rather than disappointment, similar to how Willis (1981) describes the lads. Yet for other students, punishment is devastating, and however one interprets the discipline, it can strengthen the school-to-prison pipeline (Rios 2011). Future research that incorporates this narrative theory of alienation might better clarify these processes.
At a more general level, we hope our study will influence how scholars of education consider alienation in school and by extension, perhaps how we consider school itself. By showing how the achievement narrative can alienate both low- and high-achieving students, we build on work that shows how the centering of achievement can miss much that matters in schools (Guhin and Klett 2022; Mehta and Davies 2018). Our approach to education echoes important work by Cottom (2017) and others to critique the “economic gospel” (Grubb and Lazerson 2007) through which the central good of schooling (Labaree 1997) is a neoliberal focus on individual socioeconomic advancement (Lampert 2013). A move beyond the “stratification paradigm” (Guhin 2021) would still study inequality, but as the practical problem of inequality in schools rather than the solving of inequality through schools. This change in focus might allow for recognition that schooling as the solution to inequality emphasizes individual advancement and meritocracy in a way that unions, housing rights, and wealth redistribution do not.
Finally, this article asks how everyone involved in education might better narrate achievement so that conventional “underachievers” can recognize themselves as characters who can and do achieve. How might commitments to family, community, and the environment be better recognized as achievements—achievements at least as important as GPA, test scores, graduation rates, and earnings? We might start with work that identifies counterhegemonic assets (López 2017), alternative forms of capital (Yosso 2005), differing funds of knowledge (Ramos and Kiyama 2021), and novel ways to measure success (Lee 2014). Of course, as critics of these alternatives argue, counternarratives themselves are insufficient: A new story might be nice, but a nice story does not pay the rent. And yet as scholars of social movements note, stories with structural weight can change, and those changed stories might change much else (Alexander 2006; Polletta 2009).
Consider two of Drake’s former students. The first, a first-generation high school graduate and college dropout, lives and tends bar downtown with her best friends and regularly volunteers at a family homeless shelter. She quit school, and she makes just enough money to get by, but she is happy with the direction of her life. The second, a business school graduate and venture capitalist, makes plenty of money but is unhappy because she never really wanted to go into finance; she did it because it is what her father, an investment banker, wanted. In many of our narratives about education, the second character has achieved, and the first has not. To the extent that the sociological study of education has any effect on the broader experience of schools, then this centering of one kind of achievement over another might strengthen the structural power of the achievement narrative. Perhaps it is time for our stories to change.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank Gretchen Purser for valuable feedback on an early draft and Eduardo Duran for helping to conceptualize alienation. We are also grateful to the editors and reviewers at Sociology of Education for helpful feedback and guidance.
Research Ethics
The research protocol and procedures were approved by a university institutional review board prior to the start of data collection. All human subjects consented prior to their participation in the study, and necessary steps were followed to maintain participants’ confidentiality.
