It has not always been the case in American history that working class kids have felt threatened by school and built identities based on resisting it. Reflecting on their school years, my aunts and uncles reported no such thing. But the mid-twentieth century, with its massive post–World War II baby boom, gave rise to “tracked” oversized schools and multitiered mass education that invited such divisions in a way the smaller schools attended by the aspiring children of immigrants in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s did not.
