Class and Educational Achievement Flashcards
What are some of the internal factors that could impact on a students achievement, in relation to class?
- Their attitude to learning
- Relationships between pupils and their teachers.
- Teacher labelling
- School subcultures (pro-school, pro-education, anti-school, anti-education).
What are some of the external factors that could impact on a students achievement, in relation to class?
- Money - does the student, or their family, have enough money to purchase the resources needed?
- Home background
- The level of parental support or encouragement that the student receives.
- Parental attitudes - do the parents think education is important?
- Changes in family circumstances.
What are the usual characteristics of middle class jobs?
- Non-manual
- Professional
What are the usual characteristics of working class jobs?
Manual (either unskilled or skilled)
What are some of the official statistics for education?
- Private school classes are often half the size of state school classes.
- Private schools education 7% of British children.
- The middle class are more likely to stay in education for longer.
- Private school pupils are almost 1/2 of the children in Britain who go to universities such as Oxford and Cambridge.
- Children from the middle class, on average, perform better in education that those from working class backgrounds.
Give three examples of policies that are used to determine a pupils class.
- Free school meals
- Pupil premium
- Bursary funds
What happens to the gap in educational achievement?
It widens with age
What are some of the reasons why the working class underachieve?
- The working class fail to socialise their children adequately which results in them becoming culturally deprived.
- Working class families tend to have a lack of resources to stimulate their children and help them through their education.
- Working class culture has deprived children of the language skills needed for education.
How does the education system benefit the middle class?
As classroom dialogue, exams and textbooks are written in an elaborated speech code.
What is compensatory education based around the idea of?
Positive discrimination (treating some pupils more favourably than others, usually to help them overcome their disadvantage.
What was the purpose of compensatory education?
To tackle the problem of cultural deprivation in the home, by providing extra resources to schools in deprived areas.
What was Operation Head Start, and what was its purpose?
- A form of compensatory education, which took place in deprived areas of the USA, in the 1960s, to help pre-school children.
- To equip parents with the parenting skills to give out nursery classes.
- To provide home visits by health and education psychologists.
- To make sure that parents from deprived backgrounds were able to support their children to make the best start in life.
What did Sesame Street (part of Operation Head Start), allow?
Children to learn basic literacy and numeracy skills which their parents would then support them with at home.
What compensatory education was introduced in the UK?
Educational priority areas - founded in 1960s.
Educational action zones - founded in 1990s.
What was Sure Start, and what was its purpose?
Compensatory education, aimed at helping pre-school children and their parents in the year 2000.
What are some evaluation points for ideas about cultural deprivation?
- Compensatory education system acts to hide the real cause of underachievement - social inequality and poverty.
- Keddie (1973) believes that rather than viewing the working class as deficient, schools should build on its strengths and challenge the anti working class ideas of teachers.
- Troyna and William (1986) believe that the problem is not the child’s language, but the attitudes of teachers towards the language that working class students use.
- Blackstone and Mortimore believe that the parents of the children can be held responsible to some extent.
What is material deprivation?
The lack of material necessities such as adequate housing or income.
What evidence is there to suggest that poverty is linked to educational underachievement?
- 2006 - Only 33% of students on free school meals gained 5 or more A*-C grade GCSEs.
- 90% of failing schools are in deprived areas.
- More working class children are likely to be excluded from school.
How can housing affect the education achievement of students?
- It is likely that the housing that working class students live in, is overcrowded, or children find themselves living in temporary accommodation - children have to move schools more frequently as a result.
- More working class students experience health and welfare problems.
- If houses are overcrowded, in increases the chances of pupils not having a quiet place to work.
What material factors can cause educational underachievement?
- Hidden costs in education which working class parents may not be able to afford.
- Not having enough money to be able to buy books and other resources, uniform, or pay for transport for example.
How might parents not being able to afford uniform affect students?
- If families are having to cope with hand me downs, this can often make students feel socially excluded.
What is the main reason why students who are entitled to free school meals, do not access them?
- There is a real stigma around free school meals. Only 20% of eligible students do actually make use of their entitlement.
Why might the fact that many working class parents are only in part time employment, impact educational achievement?
The parents may not be able to afford books, uniform and transport, as well as the other things that students are expected to have for school.
What internal factors affect educational achievement?
- Stereotyping or teacher labelling.
- Streams and sets
- Teacher ‘style’.
- Peer groups - pro/anti school subcultures
How do teachers label students?
- There is evidence to suggest that teachers label students based on non-academic factors, such as stereotyped assumptions about their class.
How can teacher labelling affect educational achievement?
By leading to the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How can self-fulfilling prophecies produce underachievement?
- If teachers have low expectations for a certain child and communicate these expectations during interactions with the student, then the student may develop a negative self-concept.
- Students may see themselves as failures and therefore stop trying, and end up for-filling the original prophecy.
What does streaming involve?
- The separation of children into different ability groups called streams.
- Teaching each ‘stream’ separately for each subject.
How might streaming impact on student attitudes and motivation?
- The self-fulfilling prophecy is more likely to occur when students are streamed.
- Once students have been placed into streams, it is usually difficult to move up to a higher stream, children are almost locked into a teachers low expectations of them.
- Children in the lower streams ‘get the message’ that their teachers have written them off as no hopers.
- The idea that children ‘get the message’ creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where students live up to the low expectations of their teachers, by underachieving.
In what ways do the middle class benefit from streaming?
- They are likely to be placed in higher streams and therefore reflect teachers views of them being the ‘ideal pupil’
- Becoming the ‘ideal pupil’ means that they develop a more positive ‘self-concept’, gain confidence, work harder and improve their grades.
What is a pupil subculture?
A group of pupils who share similar educational values and behaviour patterns.
Why do pupil subcultures emerge?
As a response to the way pupils have been labelled, and in particular as a result of streaming.
What subculture do pupils in higher streams usually belong to?
- Pro-school subculture.
- This is normally because, pupils who are placed in higher streams, usually middle class, tend to remain committed to the values of school.
What are the usual characteristics of pupils who form the anti-school subculture?
- They are placed in lower streams and tend to be working class.
- Suffer a lack of self-esteem and feel that their school has undermined their self worth by placing them into a position of inferior status.
- Label students with failure and cause them to turn to alternative ways of gaining status, such as going against the values of school.
What is joining an anti-school subculture likely to cause?
A self-fulfilling prophecy for educational failure.
What is a possible criticism for the labelling theory? Give at least two examples.
- Teacher labelling supports the idea that that educational underachievement is caused by a persons social class, and therefore it is likely that working class students will be labelled by their teachers and therefore are likely to be placed in a lower stream.
- These studies are not useful in showing that schools are not neutral or fair institutions, as cultural deprivation theorists assume.
- The labelling theory has been accused of determinism. It assumes that all pupils who are labelled, have no choice, but to for-fill the prophecy and will inevitably fail. However, studies such as Fuller’s (1984) show that this is not always true.
- Marxists also criticise the labelling theory for ignoring the wider structures of power within which labelling takes place.
- The labelling theory tends to blame teachers for labelling pupils but does not explain why they do so.
What is symbolic capital?
- The idea that middle class pupils are deemed by their school to be valuable.
- This is because schools have a middle-class habitus, and the pupils that are socialised into a middle class habitus at home, gain ‘symbolic capital’
