Aggravating Students’ Structural Vulnerabilities: Cruel Miseries of Selection for ‘Success’ in Schools with Power-Marginalised Intake

This paper explores how schools with students from power-marginalised positions—refugee, immigrant and working class—channel policy pressures in ways that aggravate students’ social-structural vulnerabilities. Drawing on interview data, we foreground voices of students who were selected into ‘accelerated’ academic programs in three Australian secondary schools. We relate their experiences and analyses to conceptual diagnoses of how historic conditions of current times are ‘cruel for optimism’ (Berlant), inciting social institutions to multiply ‘little miseries’ (Bourdieu), as meritocratic promises of upwardly mobile ‘opportunity bargains’ through schooling prove to be ‘opportunity traps’ (Brown). We highlight students’ pessimistic readings of likely futures in relation to school promises of ‘good futures’, as well as astute readings of how school competition strategies—caring for market ratings and reputations more than students—sort some to ‘achieve highly’ while chasing others, seen as ‘lesser-’ and ‘non-achieving’, onto devalued vocational paths and/or to other schools. We surface pressuring tactics that bear unequally, sometimes punitively, on differently sorted students. We conclude with suggestions for ethically re-purposed curriculum to engage all students— across diversities and working with teachers and community members—in practices of voice, participation and agency to address problems that matter for future life-with-others.