Social class + achievement

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Explaining class differences

  • 16% of White Brits on FSM do not obtain 5 or more GCSE's, 90% of failing schools are in deprived areas, 50% of Oxbridge students make up 7% of the population that go to public schools, the number of UCAS applicants dropped after tuition fees went up in 2012. 
  • External factors - Material/cultural deprivation; housing, diet & health, fear of health, restricted language codes, anti-school subculture. 
  • Internal factors - Labelling, teacher attitudes, streaming. 
  • Cultural deprivation - Centre for Longitudinal Studies; found that by age 3 children from disadvantaged were already up to one year behind those from more privileged homes, the gap widens with age; suggesting inadequate socialisation.
  • Language - Feinstein; educated parents were more likely to ask questions that challenged a childs thinking, e.g, 'what do you think?', whereas lower class parents would simply ask 'what's that animal called'. Engelmann; language used in lower class homes is deficient, they communicate with gestures, single words & disjointed phrases, leading children to not develop necessary language skills or abstract thinking. 
  • Speech codes - Bernstein; middle class children feel 'at home' in school because textbooks, exams & teachers use the elaborated code not the restricted code which w/c use. 
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Cultural deprivation

  • Parent's education - Dougals; w/c parents place less value on education, they were less ambitious for their children & took less interest, e.g, visiting schools to discuss progress. 
  • Feinstein; parents are education has an impact on how they socialise children, w/c discipline is harsh or inconsistent, which can make children dependent & lacking self-control.
  • Educated parents are more aware of how to assist their childs educational progress & may read to them, use songs, or museum visits that will improve schooling, they can also get expert advice on childrearing & establish relationships w/ teachers. Berstein & Young; m/c mothers can buy educational toys, books that stimulate reasoning skills & intellect.
  • Working-class subculture - Fatalism (there is nothing you can do to change your status) Collectivism (valuing being part of a group more than suceeding as an individual) Immediate gratification (seeking pleasure now rather than making sacrifices to get future rewards) Present-time orientation (the present is more important than the future, no long-term goals or plans); opposite of m/c values, which they then pass onto generations.
  • Sugarman; the differences in values are caused because w/c experience a less secure career structure in which individuals can advance, they are not able to have ambition or putting effort into gaining qualifications or promotion. 
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Cultural deprivation pt2

  • Compensatory education - Programmes like sure start aim to intervene in w/c socialisation early by providing communities & school with extra resources. Operation Head Start; in the US used 'planned enrichment' in a deprived childs environment to develop skills & instil achievement motivation, they also provided classes to improve parenting. 
  • Criticisms - Keddie; cultural deprivation is a myth & a victim-blaming explanation, school failure cannot be blamed on a culturally deprived home background because w/c children are culturally different. They are disadvantaged in places dominated by m/c values, schools have to recognise and build on w/c strengths & challenge anti w/c prejudices. 
  • Williams; teachers have a 'speech hierachy' & label m/c speech the highest, followed by w/c speech, then black speech.
  • Mortimore; w/c parents may attend fewer parents evenings bc they work longer or less regular hours & are put off by m/c atmosphere. Also schools with mainly w/c pupils have less effective parent-teacher contact systems in place, making it harder for parents to get in touch about their childs progress. 
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Material deprivation

  • Housing - Overcrowing can have a direct affect on educational achievement by making it harder for a child to study; nowhere to do homework or disturbed sleep from siblings. It can impair younger childrens development bc there is a lack of space for play or exploration. People in temporary housing may distrupt education through constant moving. 
  • It can effect a child's health & welfare, living in damp, cramped conditions, increases greater risk of accidents or infection.
  • Diet & health - Howard; young people from poorer homes have less intake of energy, vitamins and minerals, leading to ill health & more absences from school or low concentration. Wilkinson; among ten year olds, the lower the social class, the higher the rate of behavioural or emotional problems which are likely to effect education. 
  • Costs of education - Smith & Noble; poverty acts as a barrier to learning due to the inability to afford private schooling, they are left in poorer quality local schools. Lack of money means that students need to work, e.g, baby sittiing or cleaning, leading them to lose time for school.
  • Jackson; students with a negative attitude towards debt were 5x less likely to apply to university, w/c students had the most fear of debt. A National Union of Students survey found that 81% of those from a higher social class recieved financial help from their parents, against 43% from the lower class.
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Cultural capital

  • Bourdieu; the middle class are more successful because they possess cultural, economic & educational capital over the working class. 
  • Cultural capital - The knowledge, attitudes, values, language & abilities of the middle class, which enables children to grasp & express abstract ideas, giving them an advantage in education. Schools reward these values with qualifications, whereas w/c culture is devalued as 'rough' or inferior, many w/c children 'get the message' that education is not meant for them & respond by trauncy, giving up or not trying at all. 
  • Educational & economic - Wealthier parents can convert their economic capital into educational by sending their children private schools and paying for extra tuition. Leech & Campos; in Conventry m/c parents can afford a house in the catchment area of a school that is highly placed on the league tables, aka 'selection by mortgage', it increases costs of houses near these schools & excludes w/c families. 
  • Usefulness - Sullivan; found that those children who showed greater cultural capital achieved higher GCSE results & were often the children of graduates. 
  • Criticisms - She also found where pupils of all classes had the same cultural capital, m/c students still did better, meaning that greater resources & aspirations of m/c families better explain the class gap in achievement. 
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Labelling

  • Becker; studied 60 Chicago highschool teachers & found that their 'ideal pupil' was likely to be from middle-class backgrounds, as they saw w/c children as badly behaved. 
  • Dunne; teachers 'normalised' the underachievement of the working class in secondary schools, they were not concerned & felt they could do nothing about it, whereas they believed they could overcome middle class underachievement.
  • They labelled w/c parents as uninterested in their childs education & m/c parents supportive, leading them to set extension work for m/c underachievers & entering w/c into easy exams. Any w/c who did well was seen as 'overachieving', they underestimated their abilities. 
  • Rist; in an American Kindergarten the teacher used children's home background to sit them on different tables, the 'fast learner' table tended to be middle class & of clean appeance, she sat them nearer to her & showed greater encouragement. The other table were of lower class & were given lower level books to read, being unable to show individual ability.
  • Self-fulfilling prophecy - Rosenthal & Jacobson; used a standard IQ test & told teachers it was a specialised test to see which students would 'spurt ahead', they picked 20 kids at random and told teachers they would achieve high grades. They then found that 47% of the spurters made significant progress, due to teacher's beliefs & interactions with them leading to self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Streaming

  • A-C economy; Gillborn & Youdell; w/c pupils (and black) were seen as having less ability, placed in lower streams & entered for lower-tier GCSEs, denying them the knowledge & opportunity to gain good grades, widening the gap in class achievement.
  • Schools need to score high in the league tables so they focus their time, effort & resources on students they see have the potential to gain 5 C's or above. AKA as 'educational triage', sorted as those who will pass anyway & should be left to get on with it, those with potential who need help to achieve grade C & the hopeless cases that are doomed to fail, creating SFP.
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Pupils subcultures

  • Lacey; pupil subcultures develop due to teachers differentiation (categorising, streaming) of different groups & the polarisation (seperation) of pupils that follows. Hightown boys' grammar school; streaming polarised boys into a pro-school & anti-school subculture. 
  • Those who were pro-school committed to the values of that school, they gained status through academic success. The anti-school subculture had kids who felt the label of failure try to gain status in a different way, e.g, distrupting lessons, smoking etc...
  • Criticisms - Deterministic; assumes that pupils who have been labelled have no other choice but to fulfill the prophecy & fail.
  • Marxism - Labelling theorists ignore the wider structure of power that causes teachers to label; they work in a system that reproduces class divisions. 
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Pupils' class identities

  • Habitus - Bourdieu; the 'dispositions' and learned ways of thinking/lifestyles that are shared by a particular social class, the m/c have the power to define their habitus as superior and impose it on the education system. Pupils who are socialised into a middle class habitus gain 'symbolic capital' and those w/c who do not have it experience 'symbolic violence' against their culture, labelling them as inferior & keeping them in place. 
  • Archer; working class pupils may see the m/c world of education as alien & unnatural, they may percieve educational success as 'losing yourself' and becoming 'posh', they saw middle class spaces such as university/professional careers as not being 'for the likes of us'. 
  • 'Nike identities' - Archer; w/c children may identify with certain ways of dressing that teachers see as 'street style' and deem as innapropriate to the dress code, causing further marginalisation. Middle class pupils may also look down on them, so they are causing their own self-exclusion over education.
  • Evans; 21 w/c girls  were reluctant to apply for Oxbridge or other elite universities because they felt as if they wouldn't fit in, they were causing self-exclusion & barriers. They also had a strong attachment to locality & only 4/21 wanted to move out of London to study. 
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