Education - key sociologists

Sharpe - Liberal Feminist

Teenage girls see careers as more important than marriage and motherhood.

Bowles & Gintis - Marxist

Schooling reproduces class inequality through hidden curriculum

The Correspondence Principle: deliberately similar to work → prepares students for world of capitalism - obedience to authority (obedient docile workers), extrinsic rewards (grades in school / pay in work), fragmented (subjects, disciplines, etc).

The Myth of Meritocracy: system disguises class inequalities, making it seem as though those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder simply did not work hard enough (same applies in school)

Paul Willis - Marxist

“Learning to labour” ethnographic study of working class “laddish” boys in school with counter-school subculture
Mixture of overt participant observation and group interviews
Fieldwork in 1972 & followed the boys for six months in their second to last year of secondary school.
Interviewed them periodically up until 1976
Boys had transitioned from school to work (most of them going into manual factory jobs)
Counter school culture → resisted the power of the school → “self-damnation: their own choices to spend their time ‘having a laff’ by confronting school authority resulted in them achieving no qualifications and having no choice other than to move into working class jobs → class inequality = reproduced despite their class consciousness

Stephen Ball - Interactionist

2014: education policy has become increasingly dominated by economic imperatives over the last twenty-five years

Conducted research at Beachside comprehensive school
- 3 years field work
- participant observation - examined internal organisation of school
- pupils placed in one of three bands on basis of info from primary
- 1st contains most able pupils - allegedly ; 3rd band = least able
- compared this group with another taught in mixed ability classes
- observed that most pupils = conformist & eager when first entering school → behaviour eventually diverged
1. Band 1 child: academic potential, o levels, sixth form, projects, bright/alert/enthusiastic, concentrates, neat work, grammar school material, friendly, common sense
2. Band 2 child: not interested in school work, diff to control, rowdy/lazy, loses/forgets books, lacks concentration, low standard, poorly behaved
3. Band 3 child: unfortunate, low ability, maladjusted, anti-school, immature view of education, mentally retarded, emotionally unstable, waste of time

Ball, Bowe & Gertiz

Marketisation: Publishing exam league tables → schools hoped to draw in more academically able children & motivated parents → boost the school's position in the tables
Streaming & setting → focus resources on students = more likely to be successful in public exams
Material resources = advantageous in the education market (e.g. car to drive children to school)
WC parents send children to local schools
MC parents with correct cultural capital → compete in the market

Halsey, Heath and Ridge

Survey of over 8,000 males born between 1913 and 1952 who were educated in England and Wales
Social class origins based, on their father's occupation, and educational destinations:
1. Service class (professionals and managers)
2. Intermediate class (clerical or sales workers)
3. Working class (manual workers in industry and agriculture)

Individual from the service class compared to one from the working class:
1. 4x chance of being at school at 16 years
2. 8x chance of being at school at 17 years
3. 10x chance of being at school at 18 years
4. 11x chance of attending university

WC children > MC children left school at the first possible opportunity
MC children may have had a head start (higher household income → better quality housing → study materials → support at home)
Education system is not meritocratic (Marxist)
New Labour policies: reduce inequality (EMA and Aim Higher) → critics argue these educational reforms benefited the MC
Excluded females → significant difference to the findings

Feinstein

Material deprivation
2003: analysed data from 1970 birth cohort study (Longitudinal study)
Test scores at 22 months predicted educational attainment at 26 years
Test scores related to family backgrounds:
Children from poor backgrounds who achieved well at 22 months were often overtaken by the poor attainers from wealthy backgrounds

David Bull

Mat. Dep.
“The costs of free schooling” → uniform, food, travel → not truly free education

Smith & Noble

Mat. Dep.
Poor parents can’t afford additional resources (e.g. books, computers and space to work.)

Douglas

Cult. Dep.
WC parents less likely to support intellectual development

Bereiter and Engelmann

Language used in lower class families is deficient
Speech codes - extended speech codes MC trait & used in education
WC families use limited? speech codes

Keddie

Victim-blaming explanation → culturally different not culturally deprived.
Schools should build on the strengths of working class culture
WC children in schools rated as outstanding:
1. 2x as likely to gain 5A*-C GCSE grades than similar children in schools rated as satisfactory/’requiring improvement’

Rosenthall & Jacobson - Interactionist

Self-fulfilling prophecy
Teacher labelling & its impact on pupils.
Teachers labelled pupils as high-flyers or unusually gifted → attainment came to reflect that label (and, theoretically, the opposite would also be true, with negative labels)
Labelling = interactionist theory, there is no suggestion that a self-fulfilling prophecy is inevitable: people could also choose to reject the label.
sample of 20% of the elementary student population and informed teachers that these students could be expected to achieve rapid intellectual development.
They tested after one year → RANDOMLY SELECTED ‘spurter’ group had, on average, gained more IQ than the other 80%, who the teachers believed to be ‘average’.

Fuller -

Research on black girls in a London comprehensive school labelled as low-achievers
Response = knuckle down and study hard to prove their teachers and the school wrong.
Got good GCSE grades
Self-fulfilling prophecy not totally true

Bereiter and Engelmann

Linguistic deprivation
language spoken by low income black American families is inadequate for educational success

Mirza

Disdproves linguistic dep
Indian students do well at school despite often not having English as their home language
Chinese pupils 2022: highest attainment score (65.5/90.0 on avg). The avg score for this was 46.3

Althusser

ideological state apparatus - false class consciousness
hidden/formal curriculum