Archived: The Educational System in the United States: Case Study Findings

Peer influence on perceptions of schooling. 
We were interested in knowing how
peers influence perceptions of academic achievement and the attainment of aca-
demic potential. We talked with students whose friends support their academic
goals, students whose friends do not but who are able to retain their own ideals,
and students who feel as though they must choose between the values of their
friends and those of the school.
Most students could identify a particular group of students who were highly en-
gaged in academics, but there were frequent acknowledgments that such students
could be found in nearly any of the various groups. At one of the large com-
prehensive high schools with a diverse student body, where 80 percent of the

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students go on to college, the school librarian talked about the remarkable range
of groups she observed—punk rockers, graffiti writers, musicians, athletes, even
computer nerds who intermingled with rockers and spent their times on games
such as dungeons and dragons. Asked about the ‘‘really studious kids,’’ she
claimed that ‘‘these kids are not part of any particular other group. They are uni-
versal. In every group, you can see maybe 10 studious kids.’’
Students, however, acknowledged that some groups were more supportive of aca-
demics than others and that in some social circles an academic focus would bring
disdain. They spoke most often of the influence of immediate close friends. Some
talked about their awareness of being with friends who shared academic values.
A 15-year-old male student at Hamilton said:
My close friends are a lot like me. We want to do something with our lives.
We see something beyond here. We are all crazy—funny, you know. We don’t
hold each other back. If one says, ‘I have work to do,’ we will be like ‘Okay,
that’s cool.’
Others spoke of friends who did not share their values, and this was most often
heard in the early years of high school, when they began to progress academically
and friends from earlier years did not. A ninth-grade female at Hamilton said:
My friends are smart, but they don’t work as hard as I do. Their expectations
of themselves are not as high as mine, and sometimes when I tell them that
I have to go and do homework, they don’t understand. They’ll ask why, and
try to draw me away from it. I don’t know why I work harder than they do.
I think it was the way I was raised. There is something inside that really makes
me want to do good and if I don’t do good, I feel let down inside—like I let
myself down.
Another ninth-grader spoke of the difficulty of letting go of a friend from middle
school years:
I had a best friend from last year and I have seen her slowly slip away. I tried
to talk to her. I didn’t want to sound like her mother. But once when she
did something really stupid, I took her aside and told her ‘you are getting
dumber and dumber.’ She started crying . . . . She was trying to fit in, she
was louder than usual, and she lied a lot, because she knew that was what
people wanted to hear.
Some high-achieving students we interviewed described dual worlds of classes and
friendships. Those in honors and accelerated courses frequently made comments
such as: ‘‘I don’t see a lot of (my friends) during the day. I take advanced classes
and so I don’t see them. I see them before school, after school—and during lunch

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is the time that we all come together and meet.’’ A college-bound Hispanic stu-
dent in West City described a similar life:
Most of my friends that I hang around with, they are not really into
school . . . . Sometimes they do not even go (to school) until 10:00 a.m.
School is just not so important to them. These are the people I hang out with.
But the people I have in my classes are pretty good.
Middle school seemed to be the point where students first feel pressed to make
choices about friends and academic values. In a group interview with students at
King, one of the female students said:
At school some kids are under pressure to hang out with their friends instead
of like getting a really good education, because they think if you don’t hang
out with them then you’re not their friend.
Teachers of students this age expressed worry over these perceptions. A female
science teacher at Metropolitan said:
Some kids don’t want to show that they’re bright, because their peers will
look down on them. However it came to that, I have no idea. But it’s really
a shame.
We also interviewed students who were proud of their academic accomplish-
ments, yet uncertain of the labels they might be accorded by peers. One acceler-
ated high school student, defining the groups in his school, said that ‘‘There are
academic clubs, like the math and science teams, who are—I don’t want to call
them nerds, because I am kind of one of them. Scholars, I will call them.’’ The
disparaging term ‘‘nerd’’ was seldom generated by students, and generally used
only in disclaiming self-reference.
These findings are limited by the fact that students with genuine disdain for the
academic environment were less likely to be in our sample than those who are
more engaged in schooling. Furthermore, students may have been unlikely to ex-
press their lack of engagement to the interviewers, knowing the focus of the
study.