“That Doesn’t Count as a Book, That’s Real Life!”

Chapter 6 demonstrates how students’ literacy skills are not simply erased within the school but also criminalized. Students write their identities in complex ways, highlighting the competing forces that recruit them to signal simultaneously their alignment with and opposition to the school’s project of socialization. Previous analyses of school-based socialization in urban contexts often distinguish between stereotypical “school kids” (who eventually graduate and become upwardly socioeconomically mobile) and “street kids” (who drop out and become part of the racialized American underclass). In contrast, this chapter shows how students in New Northwest High School draw on various literacy practices to signal school kid and street kid identities concurrently.