"The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer--an imbalance in resources--this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed--ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility. Lisa Nunn's study of three public high schools reveals how students' beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way--reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students' college-going futures. Some schools' definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions' definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education. With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure. "-- Provided by publisher.

"Schools build people. Nunn studies students' "success identities" in three high schools, showing us that students' beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment. We learn that different kinds of success identities exist in each school context, and that when students describe their own success, they draw on those identity types that circulate at their school. In her cultural and organizational analysis, Nunn finds that these differences stem from the various ways that each school defines success. While American culture broadly defines success as possible through hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way--reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students' college-going futures. Some schools' definitions of success match seamlessly with the elite college admissions' definitions of an ideal college applicant, while other schools' definitions are more closely aligned with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education. Schools shape their students' futures. Nunn offers a fresh insight into the dynamics of social reproduction by revealing a new cultural mechanism: school-level definitions of success"-- Provided by publisher.