I n this presentation\, I draw on 2.5 years of longitudinal ethnography and 1 96 interviews conducted at a racially diverse\, public middle school in Los Angeles to reveal how dominant narratives of age contribute to the persist ence of gender and racial inequalities in education. In a suburban school l ike the one I studied\, where the majority of students were affluent\, whit e\, and Asian American\, educators viewed students’ behaviour through a dev elopmental framework. In other words\, educators deployed ideas loosely aff iliated with developmental psychology to characterize students’ intellectua l\, social\, and emotional capabilities as gradually expanding as students grew older. Despite describing students’ behaviour in seemingly gender- and race-neutral ways\, the developmental framework helped normalize affluent\ , white boys’ behaviour as the default standard against which other student s’ capabilities were measured. Ultimately\, educators’ beliefs in biologica l development helped obfuscate the routine ways in which taken-for-granted school processes can advantage race- and class-privileged boys in early ado lescence.
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