Case Studies

Sue Sharpe

• In 1976, girls prioritized love, marriage, and family, but by 1996 their focus had shifted to jobs, careers, and financial independence. Sharpe found they viewed education as the key to achieving career success, independence, and security, showing they had become more ambitious and confident.

Emile Durkheim - functionalist

• Argues that, for society to work, there should be a value consensus (where everyone agrees about what is important and how to behave).

• Believes socialisation is a crucial agent of socialisation

• Argues that history is an important topic to learn about because it helps children to feel like they are part of a community and helps them understand that society is important.

• Schools encourage people to work with others to help children learn how to be part of society.

• Durkheim believed that morals were very important. He argues that schools need to have strict discipline for children to understand what is acceptable and what is not.

Criticisms: Some may argue that this doesn’t benefit all groups in society. Marxists believe it only benefits the ruling class and feminists believe it only benefits men.

Parsons - functionalist

• Parsons was highly influenced by Durkheim’s theory

• Believes that role allocation helps society to be meritocratic

• Parsons argues that this system helps people to be in their best suited positions in society. However, some argue that this doesn’t apply since we don’t know if some skills/talents are natural or nurture. Parsons believes this is a good thing because it helps the gifted to be in higher positions in society.

• Criticisms: Marxists believe that meritocracy is a myth that eludes the proletariat into believing that the ruling class achieved their success through hard work to make the proletariat believe that class inequality is fair. They argue meritocracy plays a crucial role in promoting false class consciousness 

Criticisms: Bowles and Gintis conducted a study that showed that IQ plays a relatively small part in success compared to economic background, ethnicity and gender.

Bourdieu - marxist

• Argues that schools assess culture capital, which is perceived as intelligence. Therefore, middle-class children tend to succeed more academically due to positive labelling.

• Developed the concept of habitus: a culture or worldview that is associated with a social class

• Working-class habitus are perceived negatively (unconsciously)

• Teachers are often middle-class and tend to be biased to pupils they can relate to.

• Basil Bernstein argues that social classes have different language codes. Middle class, exam language, and text books tend to share the same language codes. Whereas the working-class language code differs from the higher class language. This promotes inequalities in schools

• Bernstein argues that large parts of the educational system assess people on middle class habitus rather than merit or intelligence.

Tony Sewell(1990s):

• Black Caribbean families are 57% more likely to be lone-parent families compared to white households (25%)

• Many boys grew up without a father in a Caribbean household, meaning they aren’t taught discipline consistently and this makes students vulnerable to peer pressure.

• Many black boys are drawn to gang activity because this inserts the masculinity they lacked when growing up, but instigates criminal violence.

• According to Sewell, the black subcultures find gang activity a way of countering racism and injustice they feel from the wider society

Ball (1981):

• Spent three years in Beachside Comprehensive, carrying out a student observation.

• Focused on students that were streamed by ability and students in mixed-ability classes

• In mixed-ability classes, teachers are concerned that brighter students are held behind while the weakest students are left behind. However, Ball found out that it had a negative impact on working-class students

• Students who started school with similar urges to study diverged from this habit after being streamed.

• Working class students were often placed in lower sets which increased the amount of students that were “anti-school” and uninterested in school. This led to working-class students having fewer qualifications, therefore reproducing class inequalities, apparently by accident.

•  He describes a downward mobility - quite the opposite of what Parsons or Davis and Moore imagined - where attempts at differentiation damage working-class pupils' education and life chances.

Willis (1977): learning to labour

• Methodological pluralism: Interview methods, observation methods(overt)

• “The lads” - a group of students who misbehaved,disrupted class and had a very negative attitude towards education

• Willis described “the lads” as an “anti-school” subculture. A subculture where failing and messing about was considered cool and going against the school and educational values was encouraged

• This subculture perceived students who were praised as “ear’oles”(swots) 

• His findings challenged Parsons, Durkheim and Bowles and Gintis.

•  He concluded that school was not working very well as an agent of socialisation: there was no value consensus here: pupils were actively rejecting the norms and values of society. This challenged Bowles and Gintis since it went against the theory that they were trained to be obedient workers.

And yet the outcome was much the same: the children of working-class parents going on to do working-class jobs. In this study they played an active role in this: they thought school was boring and pointless and was something they had to endure until they could go to work. They had a similar attitude to work, and got through it using similar techniques: "messing about" and "having a laff".

• Criticisms: it was suggested that the boys might have acted up for Willis. This might have occurred when they were being observed (the Hawthorne Effect - people behave differently when they know they're being watched) and when they were interviewed (an interviewer effect).

• Willis argues that working-class students (almost) always choose to fail and the capitalism designed for schools wasn’t the biggest factor in poor academic outcomes.

• He suggested it benefited Capitalism since it was not a meritocratic system and it reproduced inequality.

• A revolution would not happen since workers  found a coping strategy for doing boring and unfulfilling work. However, school was not creating docile and obedient workers

Bowles & Gintis (1976)

• Don’t believe the system is meritocratic

• Correspondence principle: The theory that school imitates the work industry to prepare people for society work. Schools have a hierarchical system between students and workers, is fragmented into subjects and discipline(like tasks and departments in a work place), people work for extrinsic rewards (house points and grades) rather than doing them for their own satisfaction.

• They argue that the aim of the correspondence principle is to create docile, obedient workers, who won’t question or challenge the system and are trained to be independent. 

• The schooling system keeps the working class and the ruling class separated (ruling class = private schools, CEO, better outcomes, working class = practical jobs)

Ball, Bowe & Gewirtz (1994)- Parental Choice & Competition

• 1988 Educational Reform Act, looked to create a market in state education. The idea was that parents would have more choice and control over their children's education.

• The first idea of marketization was the league tables (1988) - parents could decide which school their children would attend based on the pupils' results. The idea was that schools would sell themselves for parental approval and consequently improve the school.

• (1)The pressure of league tables impacted on children's education. Some schools responded to the pressure by focusing their attention on the most able children, which arguably disadvantaged lower-ability pupils.

• (2)Many schools reintroduced policies of banding or streaming in order to best identify the pupils who would achieve and help the league table positions.

• (3)marketisation benefited middle-class children, whose parents took advantage of the system to reinforce their advantages. Schools contributed to these situations since they believed that becoming increasingly middle-class would help them to move up in league tables

• (4) schools engage in cream skimming(selecting high-achieving/middle-class students for social and academic benefit) and silt shifting (the process by which schools stay behind because other schools select high-achieving students and results in other schools having to select working-class students). This decreases education quality since the school fundings are lowered and working-class students have lower results.

• Some would also point out that policies since 1994 have gone some way to resolving these issues, such as the Pupil Premium that ensures pupils from low-income households carry more funding and schools can invest that money into activities that benefit those pupils.

• middle-class parents should not be penalised for (apparently) taking a greater interest in their children's

Halsey, Heath & Ridge (1980) - Social Class Inequalities

• Halsey, Heath and Ridge accessed a large sample of 8000 men, to look at the extent to which social class had impacted their experience of education. He divided people up into three social

classes:

1. The service class

2. The intermediate class

3. The working class

• Service class = professional and managers, intermediate class = white collar workers, working-class = manual workers

• Children born into the service class performed better than intermediate class and working class, working class underperformed

• People from service class are 11 times more likely to go to university than working class people

• Service-class children are four times more likely to still be at school at 16, eight times and 17 and ten times at 18. (The school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972).

• Criticisms: the research did not consider girls at all, which could have a significant impact on the findings.

• Criticisms: Second, there had been significant changes in both the education system and society since many of the sample had finished school.

Criticisms: some sociologist would question the researcher definition of social class

Howard Becker

It is applied to education in relation to teachers applying labels on their pupils in terms of their ability, potential or behaviour. These labels can be positive or negative and can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Labelling is seen as an internal factor that could explain differential achievement in schools by class, ethnicity or gender.