Assess the Claim That Social Class Differences in Educational Achievement Are Primarily the Result of School Factors

The 1985 comedy drama movie, The Breakfast Club, included five teenagers who are in Saturday school detention for various reasons and at the end of the day must write an essay that explains how they define themselves. In Saturday school detention, each teenager learns about one another, what they have in common, and why they were assigned to be in detention. The teens all have similar problems with stereotyping of how society and especially how their parents define them. In the movie, four of the main characters: Claire, John, Andrew, and Allison experience at least one of the following theories: strain theory, social learning theory, control theory, and labeling theory.

Media has influenced a lot of today’s trends and ideologies. Adolescents, being on the psychological level of self-identification, bring this deceptive notion of fashion and social classes to school. The problem comes when this trend affects the performance of students and their personal lives. We all remember our days back when the talk was “Who are the jocks, the cheerleaders, the rick kids, the geeks, the losers, etcetera?” Believe it or not, the status quo in schools is always composed of them. These cliques have identities exclusive for each. Students who do not look, act, or dress the same as one group are, more often than not, left out. They could be hurt physically and or psychologically with cruel teasing and rumors. Bullying and

Using material from Item A and elsewhere assess the view that social class differences in educational achievement are the result of school processes such as labelling.

In contrast to this, it’s all well saying that students will fall into these subcultures due to labelling and streaming, but this theory can be accused of determinism. Not all teachers label pupils nor do all pupils follow this self-fulfilling prophecy guidance. Some students may refuse to live

Tradition includes the concept of losing your individuality and becoming uniform with other people at the school. This is shown through most of the characters becoming lawyers or doctor. They also all wear uniforms, sleep in the same dorms, learn and study exactly the same. When most of the adults find a nonconforming child, they associate that with being disobedient or even a failure. On a side note, thesaurus.com even defines disobedience as a suitable synonym for non-conforming. In general, the school and leaders or teachers within the school, contribute to the boys’ new strange views on life.

Growing up, I defied pigeonholing. I was one of two accelerated students in my grade, a two-to-three sport athlete who started as a sophomore in soccer and basketball, a stagehand for the theater club, part of student council and class president, a member of the math team, and that’s just to start. I hung out with the nerds, the jocks, the theater geeks, but the group I enjoyed my time the most with were kids who my teachers labeled as “troubled.” I defied pigeonholing, but as they say, “You are judged by the company you keep.” But what I came to realize was that, unlike everyone else in high school, these so-called “troubled” kids were usually labeled because of their families’ troubles- not their own.

Undefinable, they are the faces you see in the hallway during the course of four years that you will never be able to learn to specifically recognize. The names you don't know and the people you will one day never remember. Labeled as underachievers, their potential is, for the most part, limited by their situation. Their lack of motivation and difficult personalities cast them into slow-moving classes where they form connections with those individuals on their level. They all have their reasons for being there. Reasons why their hair is uncombed and their clothes go unwashed. Reasons why they are so easily angered angered with paranoia and so simply satisfied with promises of friendship. Reasons why any thought of a future for themselves seems so impossibly out of reach. If only there was a proper term to identify this abstract grouping of teens, that there was some gathering place for the subculture we are trying to describe. They take whatever name we see fit to give them. Every high school has them, yet they are rarely analyzed. The remaining questions we hope to answer, Who exactly are these kids? How did they come to be this way?

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,

In comparison, Brooks-Gunn and Duncan (1979) found that One possible reason for this is that social environments (for example, schools and neighbourhoods) begin to matter much more for children than family conditions once children reach school age. Secondly, school-related achievement depends on both ability and behaviour. Children’s behavioural problems measured either before or after the transition into school, are not very sensitive to parental income differences. Lastly a potentially crucial, reason concerns the timing of economic deprivation. Socioeconomic status has vital effects on later outcomes such as school completion friendships popularity to stop children feeling isolate as they struggle to find the grasp of their likes dislikes

The performance gap in social studies between gender is usually small. For history, geography, and economics, there has been a tendency for males to perform slightly better than females. On the contrary, girls perform better than boys on civics. In contrast to gender, socioeconomic status seems to be a strong determinant of performance on social studies assessments. The children of educated parents are more successful in on national assessment of social studies. The reason behind this is the children from higher socioeconomic level have access to the best education available. Like the performance gap among the different socioeconomic groups, differences in performance among ethnic groups are similar. White students perform better than

Children enter the education system from all different backgrounds and leave with different experiences and results. According to statistics and data taken from the The Youth Cohort Study (2007) it shows that middle class children on average perform better than working class children. This is because the poorest and most disadvantaged homes are the ones that achieve the lowest results.

Sociology can be defined as the study of human society (Conley, 2013, p. 3). When studying sociology, we need to use our sociological imagination, which is the ability to see connections between our personal experience and the larger forces of history (Conley, 2013, p. 4). When people think of sociology, many tend to think of being a sociologist who studies human society. However, sociological issues, problems and theories are all around us in our daily lives. Using our sociological imagination can help us to look at the world through a different lens, and to analyze the world in which we live. For instance, the looking at the effects of socioeconomic status on a student’s academic achievement is a sociological topic. In some ways, this topic can be viewed at the individual level, but the effects that it has on society are often overlooked and are a sociological issue. Whether the effects are bad or good, they affect society at large. If the socioeconomic status of a person or family is affecting a person’s education negatively, education systems suffer dropouts and lose funding and lower graduation rates mean fewer jobs are filled. On the opposite end of the spectrum, when SES affects education in a positive way, high graduation rates mean more jobs and positions are filled in the work force. Wesier and Reggio (2010) stated that family background plays an important role in successful academic achievement. This opens the door to determining what aspects of family

An interesting study concluded in 1997 that gathered data on class-specific distributions of school performance and cognitive competence. The classes were broken up into six groups, and measurements were taken at four intervals (see Appendix A). Referring to the first graph in Appendix A, titled “Educational Performance”, note the vertical separation of the “Series” (or socio-economic status) and the fact that the scale increases by half a point each increment. Turning the attention to the second graph

The sample was drawn from 33 rural and urban schools. The target sample consisted of 3000 Children from rural schools and 1000 from urban schools. The mean, S.D., t-test and co-efficient of correlation was used for arriving at conclusions. The hypothesis of the study framed were, there is no significant sex difference in the academic achievement of primary school children, there is no rural urban difference in academic achievement of primary school children. The findings of the study points out that, Socio-economic status is positively and significantly co related with academic achievement at the primary stage of education, Higher SES category students show significantly better academic achievements in comparison to meddler low SES

(Anyon) This is significant because the students in this setting are motivate to develop their own ideas different from other classmates. The last one is executive elite where students in the high upper class learn to develop analytical intellectual powers involve skills such as reasoning and problem solving skill. (Anyon) The students here are expected to be at an advance level doing heavy complex course work unlike all the previous social class. It all boils down to the fact that students are being taught and treated differently in certain school base on their parent income.