State Schooling and the Reproduction of Social Inequalities
State Schooling and the Reproduction of Social Inequalities

Author: Sharon Jones

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-30

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1000817075

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This book critically explores the role of state schooling in the reproduction of social class inequalities in the UK. By uniquely combining critical ethnographic methods with participatory and visual research, it foregrounds the experiences and recollections of working class adults in relation to their past schooling. Drawing upon her own lived experiences, Jones theorises the experiences of her participants using an analysis of Marxist, Bourdieusian and Freirean frameworks to uncover relations of power and illustrate how schooling has reduced individual agency and sustained lived inequalities. By creating space for a Visual Intervention within Critical Ethnography (VICE) alongside her analysis of class and society, Jones successfully illuminates that working class struggles are not permanent, and that agency can be activated. The book also addresses an important need by centring research from the lived educational experiences of the working class, and, in particular, working class adults. Making a unique theoretical and methodological contribution using an innovative combined methodology approach, the text ultimately highlights the potential of empowering disadvantaged individuals by raising critical consciousness. Though it is focused on the experiences of adults, this book has important understandings for all sectors of education and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in the sociology of education, research methods in education, social inequality, social class and education politics.

Schooled and Sorted
Schooled and Sorted

Author: Thurston Domina

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2023-06-22

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1610449029

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We tend to view education primarily as a way to teach students skills and knowledge that they will draw upon as they move into their adult lives. However, schools do more than educate students—they also place students into categories, such as kindergartner, English language learner, or honor roll student. In Schooled & Sorted, Thurston Domina, Andrew M. Penner, and Emily K. Penner, explore processes of educational categorization in order to explain the complex relationship between education and social inequality—and to identify strategies that can help build more just educational systems. Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penner argue that when societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories—including race, gender, and class—and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite colleges, tracked high schools, and elementary school gifted programs provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded. Schooled & Sorted highlights that many of the decisions that define educational categories occur in school-based committee meetings and other relatively local settings. The local nature of these decisions provides many opportunities to define educational categories differently, and for school communities to bring about change. Schooled & Sorted is an illuminating investigation into the ways sorting within schools translates into inequality in the larger world. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system—and thus a more equitable society.

Policy and Inequality in Education
Policy and Inequality in Education

Author: Stephen Parker

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9789811040382

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This book is an edited collection introducing the Education Policy and Social Inequality series, and presents chapters from authors on the editorial board. It investigates relations between educational policy and social inequality, not simply in terms of policy solutions for inequalities but also how education policy frames, creates and at times exacerbates social inequalities. It adopts a critical stance, encompassing innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual studies -- drawing on e.g. sociology, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and history -- as well as original empirical work that examines a range of educational contexts, including early years education, vocational and further education, informal education, K-12 schooling and higher education. The book argues that critique and policy studies can have a transformative function, positing new dimensions for understanding the role of education policy in connection with recurrent social problems and seeking the amelioration of social inequality in ways that challenge the possibility of equity in the liberal democratic state, as well as in other forms of governance and government.

Higher Education and Social Inequalities
Higher Education and Social Inequalities

Author: Richard Waller

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-09

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1315449706

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A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and as a way of reproducing social advantage for the better off. With the number of young people from the very highest socio-economic groups entering university in the UK having effectively been at saturation point for several decades, the expansion witnessed in participation rates over the last few decades has largely been achieved by a modest broadening of the base of the undergraduate population in terms of both social class and ethnic diversity. However, a growing body of evidence exists in the continuation of unequal graduate outcomes. This can be seen in terms of employment trajectories in the UK. The issue of just who enjoys access to which university, and the experiences and outcomes of graduates from different institutions remain central to questions of social justice, notably higher education’s contribution to social mobility and to the reproduction of social inequality. This collection of contemporary original writings explores these issues in a range of specific contexts, and through employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The relationship between higher education and social mobility has probably never been under closer scrutiny. This volume will appeal to academics, policy makers, and commentators alike. Higher Education and Social Inequalities is an important contribution to the public and academic debate.

Race and Curriculum
Race and Curriculum

Author: Cameron McCarthy

Publisher: Falmer Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13:

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This text aims to put into a broader theoretical and political perspective the issues of racial inequality and minority under-achievement which faces educators in schools and universities across the United States.

Schooling and Work in the Democratic State
Schooling and Work in the Democratic State

Author: Martin Carnoy

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1985-06-01

Total Pages: 636

ISBN-13: 0804770425

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A new explanation of the relation between schooling and work in the democratic, advanced industrial state emerges from this study that rejects both traditional views and the more recent Marxian perspective. Traditional views consider schools as autonomous institutions that are able to pursue the goals of equality and social mobility irrespective of the inequalities of capitalist society; the Marxian perspective views schools as serving the role of producing wage-labor for capitalistic exploitation. The authors suggest that the shortcomings of both views are rooted in the fact that they do not recognize the true functions of the democratic, capitalist state. The state is seen as an arena for struggle between forces pushing for egalitarian, democratic reforms and those seeking to use the resources of the state for private capital accumulation. Depending on which side has primacy at the moment, schools will reflect one set of goals over the other. However, victory is never complete, and the tide of battle has shifted back and forth historically. The authors develop this theory through interpreting the dynamic relation between U.S. schools and the workplace. Based on this approach, they predict changes in both schooling and work as well as the forms that future conflicts between the contending forces are likely to take.

Education and Inequality in India
Education and Inequality in India

Author: Manabi Majumdar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1136680551

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"This book focuses on primary education in India and interrogates what schooling means and does to children from weaker sections of Indian society and which values underpin the school system. It examines whether the concept of "education for all" is just a mechanically conceived policy target to chasing enrolment and attendance or whether it a larger social goal and a deeper political statement about the need for attacking entrenched social inequalities, and above all an affirmation of the idea that schooling has a liberating potential. Drawing on original data collected in the two states of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, the authors first present the multiple ways in which social class impinges on the educational system, educational processes and educational outcomes. In the second part of the book, issues around autonomy and accountability are explored via an analysis of the position of teachers within the educational hierarchy, and by looking at the various possibilities of making teachers accountable. The last part centres on the learning process, with a particular focus on the classroom. The conclusion includes recommendations that are related to the necessity for a larger debate and normative framework, which includes private schools as possible partners in the pursuing of a public good for which a public entity should take some responsibility, and in conjuncture to that, the necessity to move from government action and responsibilities to a broader concept of public action"-- Provided by publisher.