Frank Kogan

See Mark's comment below. Cliques and broader groups do function as classes (even in the standard sense) in schools, and status within those groups does function as status in schools, even if such status and classes don't map directly onto parents' class (or even your own "class" outside of school). But one doesn't belong to just one class. "Boys" and "girls" are classes, especially in primary school, where there's no harder friendship barrier to cross on school grounds than that one.

In the main study I've seen of high school social groups, Penelope Eckert's Jocks and Burnouts, about 33% of the jocks (generic term that included the preps and - to some extent - the brains) were from blue collar families and 66% from white collar families, the percentages being reversed for the burnouts. But, e.g., all burnouts took on burnout characteristics such as smoking cigarettes, using more "urban" diction (the study was in the Detroit suburbs, and the blue collar families tended to live closer to the city), etc. And these behaviors/affinities could have effects later in life (though I don't think there were followup studies to confirm this): burnouts tending towards blue collar jobs as adults, even if they were among the 33% from white collar backgrounds.

What the standard "upper-middle-workingclass" divisions miss is the way the power structure actually works. In high schools, it isn't simply jocks and preps rule with the burnouts on the bottom. The actual social structure is Jocks Vs. Burnouts, and this structures a lot of the rest: most people being neither jocks nor burnouts but - significantly - thinking of themselves as in-between; and these in-betweeners will have fewer friends and therefore may have lower status (depending on who's doing the looking!) than the burnouts do. And the misfits, outcasts, and nerds may be the real low status kids ("nerd" not in the sense of "computer geek" but in the '80s sense of "idiot who doesn't get it")("loner" might be something different: someone who'd be a misfit except he gathers respect for being different; is considered different by choice rather than by social incompetence). A burnout who is popular with other burnouts and something of a leader among them probably could be considered fairly high status; and the "upper-middle-workingclass" scheme doesn't take account of status hierarchies within the various groups. As I said, you don't necessarily belong to a single group. E.g., someone can simultaneously be a jock, can be a girl (might be a "cheerleader type," even if she's not a cheerleader and doesn't play sports, or might play volleyball or soccer or field hockey), can be in the honors society owing to good grades, can be black.

Another idea that Eckert had was that when the freaks were a strong enough group (freaks then not being misfits but being people with a lot of freak friends, with some being high status in the way that high-status burnouts are high status), the situation became unstable, since the freaks don't just challenge to the two major groups, they are a challenge to the whole Jocks Vs. Burnouts structure (and my speculation is that the result here would be that jocks and burnouts start absorbing freak characteristics and freak values, until the freaks have been co-opted and aren't as strong a group: and in this way society progressively takes on more and more bohemian values, which seems to have happened in the last 60 years).

I'm not sure if what I'm saying holds in detail in actual schools, or outside of schools, but you can see why I'm trying to use the word "class" (yes, this has to do with status and power) yet trying to use it differently, since standard rhetoric doesn't match up with class as people actually experience it. This doesn't mean that the standard vocabulary is of no value - there's certainly a difference between managers and those on the shop floor/manning the counters. But even there, one needs to look at "internal" status within groups. E.g., the head of the word processing department in an engineering firm is likely to be serving and taking guff from a new engineer off the street, but may be pulling a higher income, and as for her status, that may depend on whose eyes you're looking through.