Internal factors: Social class and education Flashcards
What do studies show about labelling?
Show that teachers attach labels based more on class rather on actual ability and attach negative labels to working class and positive to middle class
What study did Becker conduct?
Interviewed 60 high school teachers he found that they judged pupils according to how closely they fit the image of an ‘ideal pupil’
> Teachers often saw middle class students as the closest to ideal and working class children as furthest way
What study did Rist conduct?
- Observation on pre set groups in schools
- Study on primary school teachers and found teachers used students backgrounds to place in separate groups
What does Rist’s study show?
- Shows how labelling can put working class students at a disadvantage as labels lower their self esteem and reduce the help received by teachers
What was the study Rosenthal and Jacobsen conducted?
Pygmalion in the classroom
- Field experiment
- Told a school they had a new test (standard IQ test) designed to identify spurters
- Selected 20% of students at random and told teachers these were the future spurters
- When they returned to the school a year later, 47% of the spurters show significant progress
What’s a critique of negative labelling?
can sometimes have the opposite effect
- Margaret Fuller’s research on black girls in London comprehensive school found that they were labelled as low achievers
- response: was to study hard to prove their teachers and the school wrong
What is streaming?
Involves separating children into different ability groups called streams
- Each group is taught separating based on their ability
How does streaming affect social class and education?
Likely to have an effect on working class students achievement as teachers see them as less able and poorly behaved = placed in lower stream
What are pupil subcultures?
Refer to a group of pupils who share similar goals and behavior patterns (often emerge as a response to labels and streams)
What pupil subcultures are there?
Pro school subculture: tend to have a positive attitude to school and respect school values
Anti school subculture: tend to be those placed in low streams and blame school for their low self esteem
How is marketisation a factor?
Funding and publishing league tables put schools under pressure to compete
- Popular outstanding schools can select which students they enroll
How is marketisation relevant to social class?
Popular schools often choose middle class students for stronger exam results
- Schools also tend to use covert selection policies such as selection by mortgage (high mortgage = selection, link to catchment areas)
and pushing working class children out of schools due to high resource costs
Who conducted marketing research?
Gillborn and Youdell
What did G&Y argue?
Publishing league tables leads to A-C economy
(system which schools ration their time and effort on pupils seen as having potential to get A-C’s at GCSE = boosted league table position)
What are the 3 types of students identified by G&Y
1) students that are going to fail regardless
2) students that need work but have potential
3) students that are going to excel and need less attention
What does marketisation explain?
Popular schools under pressure = selective, choose more able middle class pupils over working class = help the school achieve higher rankings on the league tables with results
- Unpopular schools have no choice but to take underachieving badly behaved students who have been rejected from popular schools
What evidence is there about marketisation?
Evidence that it produced a polarized education system with popular well funded schools having only middle class and deprived failing schools with only working class (extreme)
How is the evidence about marketisation relevant to HE?
- Top highly elective sixth forms attract middle class students and provide academic courses leading to uni and professional careers
What were the 2 groups in Rist’s study?
- Those seen as fast learners were labelled as “tigers” and tended to be middle class
- Those seen as less able were placed on tables towards the back and labelled “clowns” and received less teacher attention (tended to be working class)
How were the 2 groups in Rists study taught?
- tigers = language taught was more abstract and theoretical
- clowns (working class mainly) = use low status language (descriptive and common sense)
- Reduces lower class students access to elaborated core = putting them at a disadvantage
What does R&J’s study suggest?
- Suggests that when a teacher believes a child is able they show motivation to help them achieve and demonstrates the impact of self fulfilling prophecy
How did the streams affect the 2 classes?
- Within lower streams, achieving high grades is difficult due to no access to higher exam papers
- Middle class placed in high sets = greater self esteem and motivation to succeed
How were students labelled according to G&Y?
- Labelled by teachers through ability, class and ethnicity and working class tend to be labelled as unable (hopeless cases) = self fulfilling prophecy and failure
