White Station and the Dichotomy of Optional and Traditional Programs

Although White Station High School is predominantly made up of students of color with roughly 50% of the student body made up of African American students, leaving 30% of the student body being white students, these numbers do not reflect the optional program. Instead, most of the classes are predominantly white; on the other hand, traditional classrooms see a majority of black students. White Station, as a telling sample of education in Memphis, is highly segregated and divided based on socioeconomic status, and yet, no one addressed this major problem. Instead, students, teachers, and administrators perpetuate this hierarchical power structure. There is essentially very limited to no contact between the two different groups of students. Even the name of the honors program as “optional” constructs a power dynamic with the optional students being able to choose the program that they attend due to their extended amount of resources in comparison to the traditional students who get placed into their program due to a lack of resources for lower income households. The creation of this power structure leads me to wonder: what are traditional students being taught in terms of both education and behavior. From my own experience at White Station, authority figures, such as teachers and administrators, often feed optional students the rhetoric that they are supposed to be inherently “better” than the traditional students on both an academic level and a social level. There is an unmistakable difference in the demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds within students depending on the program they attend. It is apparent that traditional students more typically come from working class households, while optional students have middle class homes. In addition, social class and race often work in tandem with one another, which can also be seen in these classrooms as black students are the majority in traditional classrooms, but white students are the majority in optional classrooms. 

The current optional program system in place is overwhelmingly based on a meritocracy in which traditional students are under-resourced. Consequently, these disadvantages primarily target black and working-class students who are subjected to these programs in attempt to keep the capitalist structure of our country in place. William Henry Watkins asserts that this problem comes from a historical context that continues to exist today in his book The White Architects of Black Education:

While Blacks had the desire to uplift themselves, join the social mainstream of American life (Tyack, 1974), and break forever with the bondage of the past, they lacked the resources to achieve either education or their larger freedom (p. 22).

The argument that the education of black folks continues to be problematic rings true in the context of White Station, because black students who predominantly make up the traditional program are consistently slighted in terms of the quality of education they receive in comparison to optional students.