Social Capital: Richardo D. Stanton-Salazar and Douglas Foley

For this critical analysis, the first article I have chosen to evaluate "A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Racial Minority Children and Youths" by Richardo D. Stanton-Salazar. This article surprised me in various ways and gave me mixed emotions. The author details a network-analytic framework to understand the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Stanton-Salazar examined the relationships between youth and institutional agents which plays in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar also provides how students developed cultural strategies to overcome the various obstacles and how they manage to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.

Right in the beginning of the article, Stanton-Salazar used a terminology that surprised me. He referred to African American and Latino children as living in "economically disenfranchised urban communities". I immediately thought, "What is that!? It's just a prettier way of sugar coating the terminology of the truth of where children live...in the ghetto!" For some reason, the terminology he used upset me. Why didn't Stanton-Salazar use vocabulary that the rest of the world is banked to using instead of hiding behind his fancy college degrees? That just bothered me because in reality, there is no nice way of stating the fact and it surely doesn't help the problem in any way.

Moving on, Stanton-Salazar states "contemporary scholars who study minority children and youth have tried to address the lack of attention to racial variations in socialization, bringing light the developmental challenges this group faces..." If I'm reading the statement correctly, I believe that it's quite the opposite. I think that society addresses ethnicity first and foremost. The ethnicity of any minority group is the first to obtain any attention and it descends in a downward spiral from there.

Continuing with the reading, Stanton-Salazar quotes another individual, Sennett and Cobb, "the power of institutional agents lies in their ability to give or withhold knowledge" which results in the institutional playing a game of who's going to be successful in society or fail. People who might withhold information may have something against a student or may think that he/she would benefit from the resource than another student. In reading this statement, it got me thinking about when I was a student in high school. Long story short, I had teachers and counselors hold back information from me that would have been useful to me now. When I think about it today, I resent those individuals and spite them greatly.

In summary, this article, offers a network-analytic framework to understand the socialization and schooling experiences of working-class racial minority youth. Stanton-Salazar examined the relationships between youth and institutional agents which plays in the greater multicultural context in which working-class minority youth must negotiate. Stanton-Salazar provided the conceptual foundations of a framework built around the concepts of social capital and institutional support. He concentrated on informating his readers of institutions and the ideological forces which he believed made access to social capital and institutional support within schools and other institutional. The settings were problematic for the working-class minority children and adolescents. Stanton-Salazar provides some clues as to how some working-class minorities were able to manage their difficult participation in multiple worlds, how they developed cultural strategies for overcoming various obstacles, and how they managed to develop sustaining and supportive relationships with institutional agents.

In the end, I grew to be a strong supporter of this article. It stirred up many emotions ranging from frustration and understanding as found to being able to relate to much of what Stanton-Salazar mentioned in the article.

The second article I chose to evaluate is "Working and Playing Around in the Classroom" by Doulgas Foley. I chose this article because I found myself having various emotions and a connection to what Foley had to say. Also, because it was an easier read then the previous article. It wasn't dry and maintained my interest from beginning to end.

Foley states the school classrooms were structured by "ability grouped" from 'advanced', 'average', and 'practical' based of the students test scores ten years earlier. This is a form of tracking students by their ethnicity and/or obviously their test scores.