Assess and explain the impact of social class on inequalities in educational outcomes.

According to Bynner and Joshi (1999) class differences have persisted since the late 1950’s. It can be seen that all studies carried out by various theorist came to the same conclusion that middle class pupils tend to do a lot better than working class in terms of educational achievement. Pupils from middle class backgrounds tend to pass more exams, stay on at school for longer and are five times more likely to go to university. This gap in achievement widens with age as right from nursery school to university, processes like labelling or the self fulfilling prophecy take

Throughout the world, social classes tend to separate people into groups. Everything depends on a person’s experience with wealth and power. Therefore, the levels of education determine the value of a person. In the articles, “Blue-Collar Brilliance” and “Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s” by Rose and Staples, they go in depth about how education and wealth plays a significant role in today’s society.

Although most American views prosperity as an individual effort, still the society is stratified and there is no way to ignore the class factors on individuals. The educational and economical life of a child still depends on the educational level of their parents and the wealth they inherit from their parents.

We live in a culture where success is increasingly defined by a paycheck and is seemingly as important to the parent as the child. Raising children to be “successful” is increasingly becoming an obsession for upper-middle-class-parents, who encourage certain activities and scores to provide their child with the best chances of attending elite schools. The article focuses on the inherent advantage upper-middle-class parents provide but fails to mention those who the parent’s action affects: their children.

In Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis”, we are introduced to stories that give us glimpses into the lives of youth across America. The stories represent and act as examples of the two very different groups of youth living in our nation today: children born to parents who are educated, and children born to those who likely only graduated high-school and are struggling to stay afloat economically. There are the rich kids and the poor kids, and, as his book and his research illustrate, the gap between the two continues to grow. National trends regarding rising income inequality, the disappearance of the working-class family, and growing class segregation show that the lives and experiences of rich kids and poor kids are drastically different and continue to veer further and further apart. The subject of his book is the “nationwide increase in class inequality- how the class-based opportunity gap among young people has widened in recent decades” (p. 19) and his thesis is that instead of simply talking about inequality of income among adults, we have to focus on this opportunity gap and work to begin closing it.

Bowles and Gintis argue that education is the reason that this does not happen, as it legitimising class inequality by producing ideologies that justify why this inequality is fair and inevitable. Bowles and Gintis describe education ‘as a giant myth-making machine’ like the myth of meritocracy, which means that it is untrue that everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve, that rewards are based on effort and so on. A reason for achieving high income is argued to be determined more from your family and class background rather than ability or educational achievement. This serves the higher classes as it makes it appear that they gained their roles in the workforce by an equal opportunity but in reality, that is not the case, they use this to trick working class pupils to accept inequality. This means that the education system exists not only to allocate and train young people for their future work roles but also to accept the roles they are given and for the bourgeoisie to keep their power.

Concerted cultivation versus achievement of natural growth are the two topical themes of Annette Lareau’s book unequal childhood. The ethnographic study she conducted with the eleven families reveals how the social structures can shape the cultural capital of the kids. The variation in the patterns of rearing in middle class families compared with that of the working class and poor families is directly echoed on the future perspective and potentials. The domains of interaction in the environments in which the kids acquire their knowledge and skills are determined by certain trajectories. The physical activities differ drastically between the social classes, where it tend to be highly organized, carefully chosen, and timely managed for the middle class families. As for the working and poor families’ kids, time and sports activities are poorly directed, randomly selected, and often less productive. There is also a variation in ways of communication and the type of language used across the families. Garret Tallinger

Laureau argues that a child’s social class can affect and shape the way a child feels about their place in the world. Middle class parents, regardless of race, tend to raise their children as Laureau would describe as “concerted cultivation.” This type of parent enroll their children in many extra curricular actives. These activities are organized and used as a means to develop the child’s talents and instill important life skills. Working class and poor families tended to utilize the “accomplishments of natural growth” model. These families did not participate in as many activities because they were often unable to afford them. These two different types of parenting styles affected the way the child views their social status. Middle class children had a higher sense of entitlement while poor and working class kids felt they had no identities or abilities.

So what are the causes of this social class hierarchy and what can be done to stop it? The problems appear to be evident at all levels of education including early childhood, primary and secondary education and tertiary education. Studies in education across the world show that the success rates at school are greatly determined by the student’s parents. In particular, their occupational status, money they earn and education. If the child’s parents socio-economic status is not up to high society’s standards, it may influence the child’s social interaction that may cause some children to work to their full capabilities, impaction on what they may gain from their education. An example of how to help the situation of social class would be to look at Graham Holley, the chief executive of the Training and Development Agency in the United Kingdom. Mr Holley has attempted to improve the impact that teaching can have on the quality of children’s education. According to a UK journal ‘The Independent quotes, “Mr Holley called for moves to ensure the most highly qualified teachers were persuaded to teach in the country's

References Ball, S. J. (2003). Class strategies and the education market: The middle classes and social advantage. London, UK: Routledge. Ball, S. J., Reay, D., & David, M. (2002). '

In Gillian Evans’ book of ‘Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain,’ she mainly draws attention between the link of social class and education. Children, who have been brought up in a working class background, do not really have much of a head start in education in comparison to children who come from middle/upper-class backgrounds (Evans, 2006). Educational and economic status of parents plays an essential role on the road to success for their children. What’s more, her chapter proposes that children from working class backgrounds are innate to possess a low level of intelligence, but it can still be argued that a minority of children who come from working class backgrounds do tend to get great results (Evans, 2006). The author has illustrated an outlook on the social structure of intelligence and the way in which a child’s and parents relationship can have an impact on their level of understanding (Evans, 2006). It is commonly known that children tend to always pick things up and the learning process is

In Australia, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom, a student’s chances of academic success are greatly influenced by factors such as ‘ parental wealth, occupational status, education and aspirations’ (Argy, 2007:para3,

Brown (1997) argues that middle class families impose values onto their children regarding education from a young age; they place high importance on educational qualifications as they are aware that the job market is becoming increasingly competitive (cited Ball and Vincent, 2001). This suggests that middle-class pupils value school and try to get as much as they can out of it, thus have higher levels of attainment than working-class pupils.

Efforts to reach this are the provision of schools, with entry on a meritocratic basis. Following the 1944 Education Act in Britain, the removal of fees from secondary schools and the provision of student grants, certain financial barriers to educational attainment were minimised. Whether we measure equality of access fairly is a debateable topic, however there is overwhelming evidence which confirms that social class origins are strongly and clearly implicated in educational success or failure. Halsey, Heath and Ridge (1981), in a study of 8529 males educated in England and Wales, found that a boy who was considered middle class, compared to a boy in working class had fourth more times of attending a public school, eighteen times more chance of attending a minor independent school and twelve times more chance of attending a direct grant school and three times more chance of attending a grammar school (Journal of Social Policy, 1981). So this study heavily implies that the pattern of unequal access to the more prestigious secondary schools remained, despite the post war education reforms ‘the probability of a working-class boy receiving a fair education in the mid-fifties and sixties were very little different from that of his parents’ generation thirty years earlier’ (Halsey,

Although education should be the way out of poverty and inequality, there is the evidence that still, ‘graduates who went to private schools earn substantially more than those who went to state schools’ (The Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2014). The gap was quite substantial as it amounted up to 17 per cent, depending on the university and subject they studied. Nonetheless, even for those who came from a similar background, graduated from the same university, studied the same subjects, achieved the same grade, and chose a similar career, those, who attended state schools, still earned 7 per cent less than graduates from private schools. Such evidence suggests the question, why the higher education, which is perceived as the route out of poverty into equality and prosperity, does not level the opportunities and does not prevent the discrimination. Would implement a social justice approach be able to close such gaps? Social justice with equal distribution of opportunity, income and wealth achieved through respective policies in the politics, economy and social welfare (Craig, 2002).