SCLY2 - Topic 2 - Education - Class - Internal factors (AQA AS sociology)

Labelling in secondary schools - ____________________ carried out an important interactionist study of labelling. Based on interviews with 60 Chicago high school teachers, found that they judged pupils on how closely they fitted an image of the 'ideal pupil'. Pupils work, conduct and appearance were key factors influencing teachers judgements. The teachers saw children from middle class backgrounds as the closest to the ideal, and lower working class children as furthest away from it because they regarded them as badly behaved.

______________________ study of educational counselling in an American high school shows how labelling can disadvantage working class students. Counsellors play an important role in deciding which students will get on to courses that prepare them for higher education. They found inconsistencies in the way counsellors assessed students suitability for courses. Although they claimed to judge students according to their ability, in practice they judged them largely on the basis of their social class and/or race. Where students had similar grades, counsellors were more likely to label middle class students as having college potential and to place them on higher level courses.

Labelling occurs from the outset of a child's educational career, as ______'s study of an American kindergarten shows. He found that the teacher used information about children's home background and appearance to place them in separate groups, seating each group at a different table. Those she decided were fast learners, whom she labelled the 'tigers' tended to be middle class and of neat and clean appearance. She seated these at the table nearest to her and showed them greatest encouragement. The other 2 groups whom she labelled the 'cardinals' and the 'clowns' were seated further away. These groups were more likely to be working class. They were given lower level books to read and fewer opportunities to demonstrate their abilities. For example, they had to read as a group, not as individuals.

________________ studied Mapledene, a child centred primary school where children were allowed to choose activities for themselves and develop at their own pace. The teachers felt that when a child was ready to learn they would seek help, for example with reading. On the other hand, the teachers believed that children who were not yet ready to learn should be allowed to engage in compensatory play in the Wendy house until they too were ready. In practice, however this meant that middle class children, who started reading earlier, gained the help they needed, while working class children were ignored. Their findings support the interactionist view that children of different class backgrounds are labelled differently.

Other studies show that labelling can be applied not just to pupils, but also to the knowledge they are taught. _________ found both pupils and knowledge can be labelled as high or low status. The comprehensive school classes she observed were streamed by ability, but all streams followed the same humanities course and covered the same course content. However, she found that although teachers believed they were teaching all pupils in the same way, in practice when they taught the A stream, they gave them abstract, theoretical, high status knowledge. The less able C stream pupils, on the other hand, were given descriptive, common sense, low status knowledge, related more to everyday experience. As lower streams generally contain more working class pupils, this withholding of high status knowledge from the C stream is likely to increase class differences in achievement.

________________ show how schools use teachers notions of ability to decide which pupils have the potential to achieve five A*-C grade GCSE's. They found that working class and black pupils are less likely to be perceived as having ability, and more likely to be placed in lower sets and entered into lower-tier GCSE's. This denies them the knowledge and opportunity needed to gain good grades and so widens the class gap in achievement.

Self-fulfilling prophecy - __________________ Show the self-fulfilling prophecy at work. They told the school that they had a new specially designed to identify those who would spurt ahead. This was untrue, because the test was in fact simply a standard IQ test. Importantly, however, the teachers believed what they had been told. The researcher tested all the pupils, but then picked 20% of them purely at random and told the school, again falsely, that the test had identified these children as 'spurters'. On returning to the school a year later, they found that almost half (47%) of those identified as spurters had indeed made significant progress. The effect was greater on younger children. They suggested that the teachers beliefs about the pupils had been influenced by the supported test results.

The self-fulfilling prophecy can also produce under-achievement. If teachers have low expectations of certain children and communicate these expectations in their interaction, these children may develop a negative self-concept. They may come to see themselves as failures and give up trying, thereby fulfilling the original prophecy.

Streaming involves separating children into different ability groups or classes called streams. Each ability group is then taught separately from the others for all subjects. Studies show that the self-fulfilling prophecy is particularly likely to occur when children are streamed.

Who benefits from streaming?

A pupil subculture is a group of pupils who share similar values and behaviour patterns. Pupil subcultures often emerge as a response to the way pupils have been labelled, and in particular as a reaction to streaming.

We can use ___________ concepts of polarisation and differentiation to explain how pupil subcultures develop. Differentiation is the process of teachers categorising pupils according to how they perceive their ability, attitude and/or behaviour. Polarisation is the process in which pupils respond to streaming by moving towards one of two opposite poles or extremes.

__________ subculture is where pupils placed in high streams tend to remain committed to the values of the school. They gain their status in the approved manner, through academic success. Their values are those of the school: they tend to form a _____ subculture.

Lacey found that those placed in low streams (who tend to be working class) suffer a loss of self-esteem; the school has undermined their self-worth by placing them in a position of inferior status. This label of failure pushes them to search for alternative ways of gaining status. Usually this involves inverting the schools values of hard work, obedience and punctuality. These pupils form an anti-school subculture as a means of gaining status among their peers, for example by cheeking a teacher, truanting, not doing homework, smoking, drinking or stealing.

_____________ found that from the viewpoint of the education system, boys in the lower streams were triple failures; they had failed their 11+ exam, they had been placed in low streams and they had been labelled as worthless louts.

____________ studied Beachside, a school in the process of abolishing banding (a type of streaming) in favour of teaching mixed-ability groups. Banding had produced the kind of polarisation described by Lacey. He found that when the school abolished banding, the basis for pupils to polarise into subcultures was largely removed and the influence of the anti-school subculture declined.

Pro/Anti school subcultures are 2 responses to streaming; __________ argues other responses are also possible. These include; Ingratiation - being the teachers pet, Ritualism - going through the motions and staying out of trouble, Retreatism - daydreaming and mucking about and rebellion - outright rejection of everything the school stands for.

_____________ observes, pupils are not committed permanently to any one response to streaming, but may move between different types of response, acting differently in different lessons with different teachers.

The labelling theory has been accused of _____________. That is, it assumes that pupils who are labelled have no choice but to fulfil the prophecy and will inevitably fail.

____________ criticise the labelling theory for ignoring the wider structures of power within which labelling takes place. Labelling theory tends to blame teachers for labelling pupils, but fails to explain why they do so. They argue that labels are not merely the result of teachers individual prejudices, but stem from the fact that teachers work in a system that reproduces class divisions.

Which three things did marketisation introduce?

The policy of publishing league tables creates what _______________ call the A-to-C economy. This is a system in which schools ration their time, effort and resources, concentrating them on pupils they perceive have the ability to achieve 5 GCSE's at grade C and so boost the school's league table position. They call this the economic triage. Schools categorise pupils into those who will pass anyway and hopeless cases. They do this using notions of ability in which working class and black pupils are labelled as lacking ability. As a result they are likely to be classified as hopeless cases and ignored. This produces a self fulfilling prophecy and failure.

Marketisation also explains why schools are under pressure to select more able, largely __________ pupils who will gain the school a higher ranking in the league tables. Those schools with a good league table position will then b better placed to attract other able pupils. This will further improve the schools results and make it more popular still, thus increasing its funding. Increased popularity will enable it to select from a larger number of applicants and recruit the most able, thereby improving its results once again and so on.

_____________ argues that marketisation leads to popular schools; Cream-skimming - selecting higher ability pupils who gain the best results and cost less to teach, and Silt-shifting - off-loading pupils with learning difficulties, who are expensive to teach and get poor results. One example of how this can disadvantage working class children is through the use of home/school contracts. Selective schools often require parents to sign demanding home/school contracts before being offered a place.

____________ research on City technology colleges found that although they were intended to provide vocational education in partnership with employers and to recruit pupils from all social backgrounds, in practice they have come to be just another route to elite education. They became attractive to middle class parents not because of a high-tech image, but because they were seen as the next best thing to a traditional grammar school.

________ study of grant maintained schools, which were allowed to opt out of local education authority control, found them 'reinventing tradition'. One school had spent £10,000 on a new pipe organ for assemblies and had renamed its canteen the dining hall. The organ was in fact newer than the school's computer suite. He concludes that the reason most schools adopt a traditional image is to attract middle class parents.

According to _____________, schools have had to spend more on marketing themselves to parents, often at the expense of spending on special needs or other areas. There is evidence, then, that marketisation and selection processes have created a polarised education system; popular, successful, well resourced schools with a more unpopular, failing, under resourced schools with mainly low-achieving working class pupils at the other. Gewirtz describes this as a blurred hierarchy of schools.

__________ sees a similar pattern in post-16 education. At the top are highly selective sixth form colleges attracting middle class students and providing academic courses leading to university and professional careers. Then come general further education colleges catering for mainly working class students and providing largely vocational courses. At the bottom of are government funded training organisations providing low level leading to low paid jobs.