Social class and educational attainment Flashcards
(20 cards)
How does material deprivation give working class students a disadvantage in education.
Traditional Marxist approaches favour materialist explanations , with poverty and deprivation as the main source of differential achievement.
-Material deprivation involves a combination of factors that give working class students a disadvantage in education ;
->Poor diet/nutrition;may be unable to concentrate on school work
->The lack of private study facilities and resources ; the home environment may make it difficult to study.
->The need to work to supplement family income
->More vulnerable to illness and disease so miss some schooling.
->The area students live in may also lead to disadvantages;
lack of community facilities e.g public libraries
levels of crime , drugs , abuse etc
Ramachandran evidence for material deprivation affecting attainment in India
Ramachandran argues that in india, for example, material deprivation is more serious:
50% of schools have a leaking roof or no water supply
35% have no blackboard or furniture
90% have no functioning toilets.
-She further argues: ‘Malnutrition, hunger and poor health remain core problems, which comprehensively affect attendance and performance in classes.
-The added burden of home chores and child labour influence a large number of children, especially girls, to drop out of school’.
Evidence against material deprivation - Douglas (1964)
-Douglas (1964) argued that material deprivation is too broad an explanation for all forms of underachievement, because some materially deprived children manage to succeed.
-Working-class attainment also tends to fall throughout a child’s education. This implies that school processes, such as labelling, stereotyping and low teacher/student expectations, considered later, are potentially significant explanations.
How does cultural deprivation affect attainment
-Working class families lack the attributes that contribute to middle class success.
douglas (1964) for example notes that notes the impact on educational attainment of variables such as:
- parental attitudes, expressed in terms of levels of encouragement and interest in a child’s education
- family size - larger working-class families mean fewer parental resources for each child
- position within the family - older children tend to achieve more than younger members of large families
- limited (deficient) care of babies in large families with fewer social and economic resources to devote to their care and upbringing.
What are the two main ways in which cultural deprivation affects attainment
1 Working-class children meet difficulties adjusting to the middle-class norms and values found in schools.
Bernstein (1971) argued that working-class restricted speech codes clashed with the elaborated speech codes of middle-class teachers.
This, in turn, influenced teachers’ assessments: middle-class students, able to express themselves in ‘the language of education’, were consequently over-represented in top streams, sets and bands.
- Wider economic pressures on family life result in working-class children leaving school at the earliest opportunity.
3.Parental attitudes and economic pressures combine to create a tendency towards immediate gratification. This has traditionally involved males moving into full-time manual work and females into part-time work and having a family of their own. In contrast, middle-class families are future orientated and their children tend towards deferred gratification. They see education as a
“means to an end’ of higher-status employment.
Evidence:
Goodman and Gregg (2010) found that around 80% of the most affluent mothers assumed that their child would go to university, while around 40% of the least affluent mothers ‘hoped’ their child would go to university. They also found that children from poorer families believed that they were ‘less academic’ and were consequently less concerned about doing well academically than their middle-class peers.
Marxist argument on the education system being dominated by middle class ideologies , beliefs, norms and values making ikt difficult for working class children to succeed
Marxists argue that education systems are dominated by middle-class norms, values, beliefs and ideologies.
While some working-class subcultural groups succeed by adapting successfully to this environment, others do not Underachievement, therefore, is a by-product of rejecting school values through things such staying away from school (truancy) and exclusion.
An alternative explanation involves situational constraints
Working-class children find it more difficult to translate values into social behaviour and, by extension, educational qualifications.
As Westergaard and Reser
(1976) argued, while working-class parents ‘have a high and increasing interest in their children’s education they lack the means to translate that interest into effective influence on their children’s behalf.
.
How do middle and upper class parents invest emotionally and economically into their children’s education?
Middle- and upper-class parents invest heavily in their children’s education:
* Economic investment involves things such as buying private education or tuition.
* Emotional investment involves middle-class parents being able to influence the focus and direction of a child’s education decisively. Mothers, in particular, invest time and effort in their children’s education. This emotional labour includes not just help with homework but also making sure that the school is providing appropriate levels of support, teaching and testing
How do speech codes affect educational attainment?
-Education systems were based on particular language code that needed to be either used or learnt if students were to succeed in the terms set by modern educational systems
What are the two types of Speech codes?
Restricted
Elaborated
Explain elaborated codes
they are ;
-Complex in their use of vocabulary and the expression of ideas
-Subtle in terms and the range of meanings they express and convey
-> Mostly used by the middle class, education systems are based on the use of both restricted and elaborated speech codes , which gives middle class students an advantage
-> Working-class students must first learn the elaborated code of the school before they can learn the knowledge being taught.
Explain restricted codes
-Simple in their use of language to convey direct meanings
-Predictable because an audience already understands their meaning
-concrete in their expression of relatively simple straightforward ideas
-used by workingclass
Evidence for speech codes affecting educational attainment (students in mauritius)
where teaching may involve a mix of languages - English, French and Creole.
Middle-class students who are more fluent in English and French (the elaborated codes of the school) have an advantage because of their familiarity with these languages. Middle-class students, able to express themselves in ‘the language of education’, are less likely to find themselves placed in the lowest streams, sets and bands through teacher assessments.
Arguments against the idea that speech codes affect educational attainment
–Class based speech differences barely exist in the 21st century. Working and middle class speech patterns have flattened and middle class youth now use restricted speech codes that were once only used by working class
Arguments against the theory that parental attitudes affect educational attainment
-Parental attitudes do not affect/help children who may have already internalised from their home background the idea that education is not necessary or not for people like them.
-Hanafin and lynch argue that many working class parents both black and white take a keen interest in their children’s
education
Labelling as a factor that affects educational attainment
What is labelling
How does it affect educational attainment?
Brimi (2005)
Nash(1972)
