Sociology-Education-Educational Policy and Inequality Flashcards

Question

What do Ball 1994 and Whitty 1988 note?

Answer 1

How marketisation policies such as exam league tables and formula funding reproduce class inequalities by creating inequalities between schools

Answer 2

Ensures that schools that achieve good results are more in demand, because parents are attracted to those with good league table rankings

Answer 3

It encourages cream-skimming and silt-shifting

Answer 4

'Good' schools can be more selective, choose their own customers and recruit high achieving, mainly middle-class pupils. As a result, these pupils gain an advantage

Answer 5

'Good' schools can avoid taking less able pupils who are likely to get poor results and damage the school's league table position

Answer 6

The opposite applies-can't afford to be selective, have to take less able and mainly working class pupils, so their results are poorer and remain unattractive to middle class parents

Answer 7

They produce unequal schools that reproduce social class inequalities

Answer 8

Schools are allocated funds by a formula based on how many pupils they attract-popular schools with good results and middle class pupils thrive, and unpopular schools fail to attract pupils and their funding is further reduced

Answer 9

As a result, popular schools get more funds and so can afford better-qualified teachers and better facilities. Their popularity allows them to be more selective and attracts more able or ambitious, generally middle-class applicants

Answer 10

They lose income and find it difficult to match the teacher skills and facilities of their more successful rivals

Answer 11

Competition oriented education systems such as Britain's produce more segregation between children of different social backgrounds

Answer 12

By increasing parental choice, marketisation also advantages middle class parents, whose economic and cultural capital puts them in a better position to choose 'good' schools for their children

Answer 13

Study of 14 London secondary schools found that differences in parents’ economic and cultural capital leads to class differences in how far they can exercise choice of secondary school, and identifies three main types of parents

Answer 14

Privileged skilled choosers, disconnected local choosers and semi skilled choosers

Answer 15

Mainly professional, middle class parents who used economic and cultural capital to gain educational capital for their children. Being prosperous, confident and well educated, they were able to take full advantage of choices open to them. Possessed cultural capital and knew how admissions systems work, and had time to visit schools and have skills to research available options. Economic capital means they could afford to move to better catchment areas or pay travel costs

Answer 16

Working class parents whose choices were restricted by lack of economic and cultural capital. Found it difficult to understand admissions procedures. Less confident in dealings with schools, less aware of available options, less able to manipulate system. Many attached more importance to safety and quality of facilities rather than league tables and long term ambitions. Distance and travel costs were also major restrictions

Answer 17

Parents are mainly working class, but unlike disconnected local choosers, they were ambitious for children but lacked cultural capital and found it hard to understand education market, often relying on other people's opinions on schools. Often frustrated at their inability to get their children into schools they wanted

Answer 18

In practice middle class parens possess cultural and economic capital and have more choice than working class parents, although in theory the education market gives everyone greater choice

Answer 19

It also legitimises it by concealing its true causes and by justifying its existence

Answer 20

It gives the appearance of a parentocracy, however Ball argues that parentocracy is a myth, not a reality. It makes it appear that all parents have the same freedom to choose which school to send their children to eg Gewritz

Answer 21

That middle class parents can move to areas so that their children can get into better schools

Answer 22

By disguising the fact that schooling continues to reproduce class inequality, the myth of parentocracy makes inequality in education appear to be fair and inevitable

Answer 23

Designating some deprived areas as Education Action Zones to provide additional resources, Aim Higher Programme to raise ambitions of those under represented in higher education, Education Maintenance Allowances, Introduction of National Literacy Strategy, City academies to give fresh start to struggling inner city (mainly working class) schools, and increased funding for state education

Answer 24

Sees a contradiction between Labour’s policies to tackle inequality and its commitment to marketisation-something she calls the ‘New Labour Paradox’

Answer 25

Introducing EMAs to encourage poorer student to stay in education, but then introducing higher education tuition fees

Answer 26

Strongly by neoliberal and New Right ideas about reducing the role of the state in the provision of education through marketisation and privatisation

Answer 27

To encourage 'excellence, competition and innovation', by freeing schools from the 'dead hand of the state' through policies such as academies and free schools

Answer 28

From 2010, schools encouraged to leave local authority control and become academies. Funding is then given directly to academies by central government, and they were given control over curriculum. By 2012, over 1/2 secondary schools converted. Some are run by private educational businesses and some funded directly by state. Instead of just targeting disadvantaged schools, and encouraging any school to change, it removes the focus on reducing inequality

Answer 29

Funded directly by the state, but are set up and run by parents, teachers, faith organisations or businesses rather than the local authority

Answer 30

They improve educational standards by taking control away from the state and giving power to parents. Free schools claim to give parents and teachers opportunity to create a new school if they are unhappy with the state schools in their local area

Answer 31

Research from Sweden (20% of schools are free schools) shows that they only benefit children from highly educated families

Answer 32

They are socially diverse and lower standards (Swedens international educational ranking fell since their introduction of free schools) And they only appear to raise standards because they have stricter pupil selection and exclusion policies

Answer 33

They take fewer disadvantaged pupils, eg in 2011, only 6.4% pupils at Bristol Free school were eligible for FSM, compared to 22.5% of pupils across the whole city

Answer 34

Increased fragmentation and increased centralisation of control over educational provision in England

Answer 35

Comprehensive system is being replaced by a patchwork of diverse provisions, much of it involving private providers, that leads to greater inequality in opportunities

Answer 36

Central government alone has the power to allow or require schools to become academies, or allow free schools to be set up. These are funded directly by government. Their rapid growth has greatly reduced the role of elected local authorities in education

Answer 37

Policies such as free school meals (all children in reception, year 1 and year 2) and pupil premium (money that schools receive for each pupil from a disadvantaged background)

Answer 38

In many cases it isn't spent on those it is supposed to help. Only 1 in 10 headteachers said it had significantly changed how they supported pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds

Answer 39

Spending on many areas of education has been cut (spending on school buildings cut by 60%, Sure Start centres closed, EMA abolished and tuition fees tripled to £9000 a year)

Answer 40

Cutting the sure start and EMA has reduced opportunities for working class pupils, and increased university fees may discourage them from higher education

Answer 41

It involved the transfer of public assets such as schools to private companies, and there has been a trend in recent years towards the privatisation of important aspects of education, where education becomes a source of profit for capitalists

Answer 42

The education service industry (ESI)

Answer 43

Increasing range of activities in education, including building schools, providing supply teachers, work based learning, careers advice and Ofsted inspection services, and even running entire local education authorities

Answer 44

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in which private sector companies provide capital to design, build, finance, and operate educational services, typically with contracts lasting 25 years or more, during which time the local council pays a monthly lease and management fee out of public funds

Answer 45

Many of these activities are very profitable. Companies involved in such work expect to make up to ten times as much profit as they do on other contracts. However local authorities are often obliged to enter into these agreements as the only way of building new schools because of lack of funding by central government

Answer 46

Leave to set up or work for private sector education businesses. These companies then bid for contracts to provide services to schools and local authorities eg 2 companies set up in this way hold 4 of the 5 national contracts for school inspection services

Answer 47

The flow of personnel allows companies to buy ‘insider knowledge’ to help win contracts, as well as side-stepping local authority democracy

Answer 48

Many private companies in the ESI are foreign-owned, eg Edexcel the exam board is owned by the US educational publishing and testing giant, Pearson, and according to Ball, some Pearson GCSE exam answered are now marked in Sydney and Iowa

Answer 49

The Uk’s four leading educational software companies are all owned by global multinationals (Disney, US toy companies Mattel and Hambro, and French media corporation Vivendi)

Answer 50

Many contracts for educational services in the UK are sold on by the original company to others such as banks and investment funds, then in a globalised world, they are often bought by overseas companies. Also some UK education business work overseas and provide services to deliver policies, making nation states less important in policymaking, which is shifting to a global level that is often privatised

Answer 51

Eg through vending machines on school premises and the development of brand loyalty through displays of logos and sponsorships

Answer 52

The cola-isation of schols

Answer 53

Schools are targeted by private companies because ‘schools by their nature carry enormous goodwill and can thus confer legitimacy on anything associated with them’ (they are a kind of product endorsement)

Answer 54

They are very limited

Answer 55

A Cadbury's sports equipment promotion was scrapped after it was revealed that pupils would have to eat 5,440 chocolate bars to qualify for a set of volleyball posts

Answer 56

UK families spent £110,000 in Tesco supermarkets in return for a single computer for schools

Answer 57

A fundamental change is taking place in which privatisation is becoming the key factor shaping educational policy

Answer 58

It is increasingly focused on moving educational services out of the public sector controlled by the nation-state, to be provided by private companies instead

Answer 59

Education is being turned into a 'legitimate object of private profit making', a commodity to be bough and sold in an education market

Answer 60

Sees coalition government policies as part of the ‘long march of the neoliberal revolution’. See academies as examples of handing over public services to private capitalists such as educational businesses

Answer 61

In their view, the neoliberal claim that privatisation and competition drive up standards is a myth used to legitimate the turning of education into a source of private profit

Answer 62

In 19th century females were largely excluded from higher education. Under tripartite system girls had to get higher pass mark than boys for a grammar place. However since 1970s policies such as GIST have been introduced to try to reduce gender differences in subject choice

Answer 63

There have been several phases: assimilation, multicultural education and social inclusion

Answer 64

Policies in 1960s-70s focused on need for ethnic minorities to assimilate into mainstream British culture as a way to raise achievement, especially to help those who didn't have English as a first language. Examples of this are compensatory education programmes

Answer 65

Some minority groups who are at risk of underachieving, such as African Caribbean pupils already speak English, and that the real cause of their underachievement lies in poverty or racism

Answer 66

Policies through 1980s and into 1990s that aimed to promote achievement of ethnic minority pupils by valuing all cultures in school curriculum, and so raising minority pupils' self esteem and achievements

Answer 67

Critical race theorists argue it is a tokenism, and picks stereotypical features of minority cultures for inclusion in curriculum but fails to tackle institutional racism. New Right say is perpetuates cultural divisions as they take the view that education should promote shared national culture and identity into which minorities should be assimilated

Answer 68

Argues that black pupils don't fail due to lack of self esteem, so MCE is misguided

Answer 69

Social inclusion of pupils from minority ethnic groups, and policies to raise their achievement in late 1990s

Answer 70

Detailed monitoring of exam results by ethnicity, amending race relations act to place legal duty on schools to promote racial equality, help for voluntary 'Saturday schools' in black community, and english as an additional language programmes

Answer 71

Sees little genuine change in policy and argues that instead of tackling structural causes of ethnic inequality such as poverty and racism, educational policy takes a ‘soft’ approach that focuses on culture, behaviour and the home

Answer 72

Institutionally racist policies in relation to the ethnocentric curriculum, assessment and streaming continue to disadvantage minority ethnic group pupils