Educational Pathways into the Middle Class(es)

Although the close relationship between education and the middle class has long been recognised in the sociology of education, its various dimensions have rarely been examined in detail. Through investigating the educational histories and occupational destinations of 199 recruits into the middle class, this paper explores whether there is any clear connection between educational pathway and occupational location. In particular, it analyses the cohort's various careers against suggested cleavages within the middle class (professional/managerial, symbolic/material, public/private). The data indicate that educational pathways influence occupational locations along a number of directions. Some schools, notably those that are private and academically selective, feed a greater proportion of students into high-status universities and out into high-status occupations. However, in terms of the level of occupation, the status of university seems more important than the school. Whether a school is public or private does not appear to have influenced the choice of a managerial or professional career path, but school sector may contribute to horizontal differentiation of middle classes in terms of whether they take up employment in the public or private sector. The data suggest that schools reflect and reinforce contrasting allegiances to private and public forms of educational provision that then influence sectors of employment and political preferences.     

Where knowledge construction,equity, and context intersect: Student learning of science in small groups

To provide insight into the strengths and limitations of using groupwork to promote excellence and equity in science education, the researcher investigated how students using the Complex Instruction model of groupwork constructed scientific knowledge. Eighty sixth-grade students and one life science teacher at an urban middle school participated in this study. Qualitative analysis of videotapes and interviews makes clear that group discussions rarely moved beyond observational or procedural matters, that students of high status (perceived academic ability and popularity) had greater access to their groups' materials and discourse, and that students made few connections among the contexts of school, science, and everyday life. Quantitative analyses of participation during groupwork and performance on unit tests show that high-status students had significantly higher rates of on-task talk than their middle- or low-status counterparts, and that those students who talked more learned more as well. Thus, although groupwork should not be summarily dismissed as an instructional strategy, group tasks and implementation must be further refined to adequately address the dual goals of excellence and equity: Students need greater guidance in how to talk and do science, and teachers, greater assistance in eliminating differences in student participation and achievement. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 1039–1065, 1997.     

Access to academic curriculum in Australian secondary schools: a case study of a highly marketised education system

This study examines how access to academic curriculum differs between secondary schools in Australia, a country whose education system is marked by high levels of choice, privatisation and competition. Equitable access to academic curriculum is important for both individual students and their families as well as the larger society. Previous research has shown that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are less likely to study academic curriculum than their more advantaged peers. Less is known, however, about the extent to which this pattern is related to differential provision of curriculum between schools. We found that low socio-economic schools offer students less access to the core academic curriculum subjects that are important for university entry. We also found that the breadth and depth of courses offered is related to school sector (private or public) and socio-economic context. Previous research has shown that choice and competition are inequitable because they frequently increase school social segregation and ‘cream-skimming’. Our findings show another inequitable consequence, namely that choice and competition limit access to high-status academic curriculum in working-class communities.     

When groups are not created equal: effects of group status on the formation of intergroup attitudes in children

This study was designed to examine whether the presence of implicit links between social groups and high versus low status attributes affects the formation of intergroup attitudes. Elementary school children aged 7 to 12 years (N = 91) were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem, and assigned to one of three types of summer school classrooms in which teachers made (1) functional use of novel ("blue" and "yellow") social groups that were depicted via posters as varying in status, (2) no explicit use of novel social groups that were, nonetheless, depicted as varying in status, or (3) functional use of novel social groups in the absence of information about status. After 6 weeks, children completed measures of intergroup attitudes. Results indicated that children's intergroup attitudes were affected by the status manipulation when teachers made functional use of the novel groups. Children who were members of high-status (but not low-status) groups developed in-group biased attitudes.     

Effective Dropout Prevention and College Attendance Programs for Students Placed at Risk

In this article, we review research on programs designed to reduce dropout rates and increase college attendance among at-risk students in middle and high schools. Two dropout prevention and 4 college attendance programs either fully or partially met the review's criteria for methodological adequacy of evaluation and replicability. The Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program and Achievement for Latinos through Academic Success demonstrated strong impacts of comprehensive programs to reduce dropout rates. Improved college attendance rates were documented for Upward Bound, SCORE, Project Advancement Via Individual Determination, and Graduation Really Achieves Dreams. In general, successful programs emphasized creating meaningful bonds between students and teachers, connecting students to an attainable future, giving students opportunities to work while in school, providing academic assistance, and giving students high-status roles in the school.     

‘Why are you applying there?’: ‘race’, class and the construction of higher education ‘choice’ in the United Kingdom

Despite entering higher education in good numbers, candidates from some black and minority ethnic groups are concentrated in less prestigious institutions. A similar pattern is evident in candidates’ applications, raising important questions about the role of ‘self-exclusion’. Statistical analysis confirms that candidates from some minority ethnic groups tend to target lower-ranking institutions, but these differences are almost entirely explained by other variables, particularly academic attainment, type of school attended, number of A-levels taken and subject mix. It follows that some minority ethnic groups appear to be indirectly disadvantaged by patterns of schooling that do not prepare candidates for elite higher education. Similar processes are evident in relation to social class, although candidates from less privileged family backgrounds remain less likely to target high-status institutions even when other variables are taken into account.     

School Choice and the Polarization of Public Schools in A Global City: A Bourdieusian GIS Approach

ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, urban sociologists have shed light on the intensifying social inequality between the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods in global cities; yet limited research has been done to illuminate the relationships between urban polarization and school choice (i.e., where parents choose schools for their children). This study sociospatially examines the patterns of secondary school choice in the global city of Toronto to illuminate the relationship between urban polarization and school choice. In doing so, this study combines Pierre Bourdieu’s sociospatial theory with a geographic information systems (GIS) approach. Overall, we found that popular schools and schools with specialized choice programs tend to be located in high-status neighborhoods, defined as neighborhoods with residents in the top 20% of family income, home prices, education attainment, and representation from the dominant culture. We also show that mobile students who choose popular schools or highly sought-after specialized programs tend to come from advantaged neighborhoods. Meanwhile, local students who choose a regular school in their neighborhood tend to come from low-status neighborhoods. With a new interdisciplinary approach, this study contributes to a more spatialized understanding of how social inequality and polarization account for school choice.     

Travels in extreme social mobility: how first-in-family students find their way into and through medical education

ABSTRACT

Higher education is understood as essential to enabling social mobility. Research and policy have centred on access to university, but recently attention has turned to the journey of social mobility itself – and its costs. Long-distance or ‘extreme’ social mobility journeys particularly require analysis. This paper examines journeys of first-in-family university students in the especially high-status degree of medicine, through interviews with 21 students at an Australian medical school. Three themes are discussed: (1) the roots of participants’ social mobility journeys; (2) how sociocultural difference is experienced and negotiated within medical school; and (3) how participants think about their professional identities and futures. Students described getting to medical school ‘the hard way’, and emphasised the different backgrounds and attitudes of themselves and their wealthier peers. Many felt like ‘imposters’, using self-deprecating language to highlight their lack of ‘fit’ in the privileged world of medicine. However, such language also reflected resistance to middle-class norms and served to create solidarity with community of origin, and, importantly, patients. Rather than narratives of loss, students’ stories reflect a tactical refinement of self and incorporation of certain middle-class attributes, alongside an appreciation of the worth their ‘difference’ brings to their new destination, the medical profession.     

Interest in biology. Part I: A multidimensional construct

Interest in a school subject (e.g., biology) is conceptualized in terms of three components: topics, activities, and motives, each of which has several dimensions. In this study, seven instruments were developed and administered to grade-10 biology students in Israel. Factor analysis provided support for the conceptualization which underlies the development of the instruments. Topic dimensions included biochemical processes, nonhuman organisms, human biology, personal hygiene, and practical applications; the activity dimensions were experiential learning, reception learning, writing/summarizing and group discussion; motives included environmental issues, moral issues, examination success, personal independence, problem solving, and four career dimensions (research, high-status professions, lower-status careers, “woodsy-birdsy” careers). In an analysis described in Part II of this paper, the students were classified into four groups on the basis of their grade-11 subject enrollment intentions: H (high-level biology), L (low-level biology), P (physical science), and N (no science). Zero-order and multiple correlations were found between interest and other variables and membership/nonmembership of the four groups. Students in Group H were characterized by higher achievement in year-10 biology, higher levels of enjoyment of biology, career orientations towards research or high-status biology-based professions, greater interest in various biology topics, especially reproduction/cell division/genetics, and a greater tendency to regard the Bagrut (grade-12) examination as interesting. Students in Group N displayed lower levels of interest in various topics (especially the microscope, plants, and reproduction), were less motivated to solve problems, had poorer grades in biology (and chemistry), were less likely to perceive biology as useful, were less likely to regard the Bagrut examination as fair, and were less likely to be interested in social modes of learning. There were few associations between interest variables and membership in Groups L or P.     

The influence of social status on children's merit-based resource allocation: The potential explanation of expectation

How 3- to 11-year-old children integrate recipients' merit and social status when allocating resources was examined in 2021 and 2022. Study 1 (Han Chinese, n = 309, 150 girls) showed that while children prioritized merit, they developed from favoring high-status recipients to favoring low-status recipients. Study 2 (n = 194, 98 girls) and Study 3 (n = 138, 68 girls) revealed that children held stereotypes about the relation between merit and social status which shifted with age from expecting high-status peers to expecting low-status peers to work harder, these expectations corresponded allocation decisions. These findings suggest children shift from perpetuating to rectifying inequity and changing stereotypes about people of different social status may serve an important function in the process.     

Democracy,Justice, and School Closures

Over the past few decades, school closure has emerged as a key strategy for education reform. Districts across the country have moved to close schools deemed to be chronically underperforming by official metrics as way to promote academic achievement. More recently, a sizeable body of literature has emerged raising significant questions about the wisdom of school closures, with some scholars and activists criticizing school closures as an injustice. In this article, Ellis Reid takes seriously the claim that the adoption of school closures as a reform strategy is unjust. Drawing on work in democratic theory, Reid argues that the widespread embrace of school closures to "turn around" schools thought to be failing rests in part on racially stigmatizing ideas about schools serving Black and Latinx students and the communities in which these schools are embedded. Importantly, racial stigmatization is not an isolated problem but rather points toward a broader crisis in American democracy. Ultimately, Reid argues that responding to this crisis demands that we take seriously the arguments advanced by the critics of school closures and adopt a broader view of the value of a school.     

Peer contagion of aggression and health risk behavior among adolescent males: an experimental investigation of effects on public conduct and private attitudes

Peer contagion of adolescent males' aggressive/health risk behaviors was examined using a computerized "chat room" experimental paradigm. Forty-three 11th-grade White adolescents (16-17 years old) were led to believe that they were interacting with other students (i.e., "e-confederates"), who endorsed aggressive/health risk behaviors and whose ostensible peer status was experimentally manipulated. Adolescents displayed greater public conformity, more internalization of aggressive/health risk attitudes, and a higher frequency of actual exclusionary behavior when the e-confederates were high in peer status than low. Participants' level of social anxiety moderated peer contagion. Nonsocially anxious participants conformed only to high-status peers, whereas socially anxious participants were equally influenced by low- and high-status peers. The role of status-maintenance motivations in aggression and risk behavior, and implications for preventive intervention, are discussed.     

School exclusions and masculine,working‐class identities

In this paper attention will be paid to issues arising from school‐based research into the experience of working‐class boys who are excluded. National and local school exclusion statistics indicate an overall gender imbalance: in the secondary school sector, for every four boys who are excluded only one girl is excluded. Furthermore, statistics show that other groups such as pupils living in poverty (as indicated by receipt of free school meals) have an increased likelihood of being excluded from school. Explanations for the disproportionate exclusion of working‐class boys are considered here in relation to three pupil case studies drawn from a group of 20 case studies gathered in four secondary schools. There are indications that the processes by which some working‐class boys actively negotiate their masculinities are the same processes that lead to their exclusion from school. This paper uses empirical data from interviews and classroom observation to analyse these twin processes, considering how and why certain masculine identities are marginalized in school settings.     

Educational reform and educational crisis

Even though the sciences may deserve an important and enhanced place in the curriculum, it is crucial that educators situate reforms in science education in the larger social context in which educational reforms are taking place. How and by whom reform is defined and carried out will have a significant impact on who benefits from the process. I argue that education in general has increasingly become dominated by economic interests that can lead not to enhancing equality but to its opposite. There are important ideological shifts that are occurring not only in what education is for, but in the content and control of curriculum and teaching. This has also been accompanied by an attempt to not only increase the influence of economic needs on schools, but to make education itself an economic product like all others. This will have a major impact on science education in particular, because both science and technology are seen as high-status in the transformation of education into solely an economic tool.     

The media,marketing, and single sex schooling

The Australian media’s interest in education, as in many Anglophone countries, is frequently dominated by concerns about boys in schools. In 2002, in a country region of the Australian State of Queensland, this concern was evident in a debate on the merits of single sex schooling that took place in a small local newspaper. The debate was fuelled by the inclusion in this newspaper of an advertising brochure for an elite private girls’ school. The advertisement utilized the current concerns about boys in schools to advocate the benefits of girls’ only schools. Drawing on research that suggests that boys are a problem in school, and utilising a peculiar mix of liberal feminism alongside a neo‐liberal class politics, it implicitly denigrated the education provided by government co‐educational schools. The local government high and primary school principals, incensed at this advertisement, contacted the paper to refute many of its claims and assumptions and to assert the benefits, to both boys and girls, of their particular schools. A letters to the editor debate then followed an article representing these government school principals’ views. These letters were from two private school principals. This country newspaper thus became a medium through which various school principals engaged with the current boys’ debate, and research associated with it, in order to market their schools. This paper examines this particular newspaper debate and argues that, in the absence of nuanced, research based, and thoughtful policy responses to gender issues, many school policies on gender are being shaped through and by the media in ways that elide the complexities of the issues involved.     

School consolidation vs. decentralization: Trends,issues, and questions

The author examines two opposing administrative/policy trends that have simultaneously influenced the size and shape of American school districts. First,consolidation of school districts has dramatically reduced the number of districts from 130,000 in 1930 to 15,500 in 1990. State officials have viewed this as cost-effective approach and a way of reducing overlapping services and expenses. Local school and community people have seen this trend as a means of undercutting their local identity and pride. Second,decentralization has usually taken place in an urban school setting and involves reducing the size of the school district by dividing it into smaller units. This trend reached its peak in 1980, when 91% of the school districts with 100,000 or more students (n=22) reported some form of decentralization. By the 1990s, both school trends had slowed down; nevertheless, 20 questions are delineated for school administrators and school board members to consider in the event they wish to consolidate or decentralize.     

Fruit,vegetables, fatness,and Foucault: governing students and their families through school health policy

In an era of curricular accountability where everything from reading and math scores to body fat are events to be assembled, scrutinized, and standardized, the health‐conscious school plays an ever‐important role in community and the nation (or so we are told). This qualitative study analyzes interviews with school leaders in their role in creating educational policies that encourage students and their families to make health a priority. Theoretically, the work draws on the work of Foucault, specifically his writings on the governance of society and the self. The analysis reveals the ways in which notions of good health and how this should be achieved became, at this school, a basis for social evaluation and control. In performing this analysis I seek to problematize the enactment of school health policy as ideologically neutral, necessarily liberating, and inherently benevolent.     

School performance,school segregation,and stress-related symptoms: comparing Helsinki and Stockholm

This study investigates cross-cultural differences in the interrelation between school performance, school segregation, and stress-related health among 9th-grade students in the greater Stockholm and Helsinki areas. Contrary to the Swedish case, it has been proposed that school performance in Finland is largely independent of the specific school attended and of socioeconomic background. Finland also stands out as a contrast to Sweden considering their better performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys. Our first 2 hypotheses explore whether there is a greater degree of school segregation in Stockholm than in Helsinki, and our second pair of hypotheses test whether Finland’s school success has come at a price in terms of increased student stress. Our results largely confirm that Stockholm schools are less “equal” and more segregated than those in Helsinki. We also find that school performance is more strongly linked to stress-related complaints among students in Helsinki than in Stockholm, especially among Finnish girls.     

On ‘Politics,Markets, and American Schools‘

This paper traces the trajectory of New Labour education policy since the formation of the first New Labour government in 1997. During that time the policy discourse has moved from a position of individualized school improvement through competition, to one where there is an emphasis on ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ as key mechanisms for improvement. We note, however, that ‘specialism’, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are still key components of policy and that ‘partnership’ often denotes a deficit model, with more successful schools supporting (or in some cases taking over) less successful ones. Although there are the beginnings of a recognition that social class and social deprivation are factors which make achievement at school more problematic, generally New Labour policy has not attempted to alleviate the tendency to social polarization which has emerged as a result of school choice policies.     

Orality and Literacy,Intimacy and Alienation: The eternal,internal, contradictions of teaching composition

This is a personal account of a college English teacher's continual examination of the sacrifices demanded of his students when they enter writing classes. It is an attempt to encourage students to maintain a critical awareness of the loss of their oral culture and see the limitations of the gain from the literary culture that they immersed themselves in when they began their school career. Literary resources are examined, specifically the writings of Franz Kafka, to illustrate the nature of oral and literate cultures and the demands of each. There is an account of the author's first day at public school as an illustration that helps him to devise teaching methods that acknowledge the validity of students' rebellion against school (literacy) while at the same time developing ways for students to be more accomplished writers.