Social class and achievement.

Trends
1. Jefferies
  1. Children from working class backgrounds endear achieve compared with their middle class peers
  2. Studied 1100 children born in 1958 and noted that those who experienced childhood poverty had significantly fallen behind children from middle class backgrounds in maths, reading, etc.
  3. He also found that the gap in educational attainment betweeen individuals from higher and lower social classes widened as time went on and was at its greatest by the age of 33
2. The institute of education
  1. found that more children were born to educated parents in 1970 then in 1958, but those born into poverty persistently underachieve.
  2. childhood poverty makes educational attainment more difficult, even for children with similar test scores.
3. The national children's buraeu
  1. children from poor backgrounds were two-thirds less likely to gain at least 5 GCSEs graded from A*-C than those from affluent backgrounds.
4. Joan Payne
  1. research into participation in further education
    1. Differences in home background influence staying-on rates.
      1. 82% of children of professionals and managers were in further education.
      2. 60% of children of semi/unskilled workers were in further education
5. Connor and Dewson
  1. Study of students in higher education found that fewer than one in five young people from lower social class groups participate in higher education
External explainations for the Class gap.
1. Cultural deprivation theories.
  1. The values, attitudes and aspirations of parents have an important effect on their childrens education
    1. Working class parentsd tend to value education less that middle class parents
      1. This has a negative effect on working class students in terms of their poorer performance.
  2. Leon Feinstein
    1. The main reason for working class children underachieving was their parents lack of interest in their childrens education
    2. Working class parents are unlikely to give their children educational toys and activities that will stimulate their thinking and reasoning skills, and less likely to read to them
      1. Disadvantaged start compared to middle class children when starting school
  3. Basil Bernstein
    1. Distinguishes between elaborated and restricted speech codes.
      1. Working class children tend to use a restricted code which is less analytic and more descriptive
      2. Middle class children use an elaborate code which is more analytic in which speakers spell out what they mean
      3. The elaborated code is the one used in the education system, giving middle class children an advantage over working class children.
        This could partly explain that class gap in achievement.
2. Material deprivation theories.
  1. the lack of physical resources such as money, room, equipment, etc which may have an adverse effect on the educational achievement of working class children
  2. Smith and Noble
    1. the importance of material factors in influencing class differences in educational achievement.
    2. Having money allows parents to provide educational toys, books, a healthy diet, more space in the home to do homework, greater opportunities for travel and private tuition
  3. Gerwitz
    1. differences in economic and cultural capital lead to class differences in how far parents can exercise choice of secondary school.
    2. Professional middle class parents tend to be privileged skilled choosers who understand how the schools admissions procedures work and can use this knowledge to access the best schools
3. Cultural Capital
  1. Pierre Bourdieu
    1. uses the concept of cultural capital to explain why middle class students are more successful.
      1. The term cultural capital refers to the knowledge, attitudes, values, language, tastes and abilities of the middle class
    2. middle class culture as capital becasue it can be translated into wealth and power, and gives an advantage to those who have it.
      1. This is because the culture, knowledge and language of the schools fits more closely to middle class culture, therefore middle class students have an in-built advantage.
Internal explainations for the Class gap
1. Labelling
  1. Rist found that it was not ability which determined where each child was seated, but the degree to which the children conformed to the teachers own middle class standards.
  2. Gillborn and youdell found that teachers are more likely to see middle class students as having the ability to enter higher level exams.
    1. this is based more on the teachers' perceptions of what counts as ability rather than the students' actual ability
      1. For example teachers evaluating pupils on the basis of their social class, not the ability they demonstrated in class.
  3. Research suggests that teachers tend to expect more from middle class students, and are more likely to convey their expectations to them and act in terms of it
    1. the result of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby teachers expectations of students future behaviour and attainment will tend to come true
  4. Marxists criticisms
    1. Labelling theory ignores the wider structure of power within which labelling takes place.
      1. labels stem from the fact that teachers work in a system that reproduce class divisions.
2. Banding, Setting and Streaming
  1. A tendency for middle class students to be placed in higher groups and for working class students to be placed in lower groups.
  2. Teachers tend to have lower expectations for those working class students.
  3. Campbell argues that subject setting advantages middles class students in the top sets because research evidence suggests their attainment increases.
    1. working class students in the bottom sets do not increase their attainment at the same rate or to the same level.
  4. Stephen Ball refers to setting as social barbarism because it allows well-off parents to separate their children from 'others' whom they consider socially and intellectually inferior.
    1. He points to overwhelming research evidence that shows that grouping by ability leads to greater social class inequalities between children
3. Marketisation and Selection policies.
  1. Created a much more competitive climate among schools.
    1. Middle class students are seen as more desirable recruits as they achieve better in exam results.
    2. Working class students are seen as 'liability students' which are barriers to efforts by schools to climb the league tables.
  2. Gillborn and Youdell
    1. the publication of school league tables creates what they call a 'A*-C economy'
      1. channeling most of their efforts into those students who are likely to get 5 A*-C grades.
      2. this produces a system of education triage in which working class students are seen being lower ability and therefor 'hopeless cases'.
        This produces the self-fulfilling prophecy and failure.

Next up

Social class and achievement.

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by amylouisemurden7843 almost 11 years ago