Educations Inconvenient Truth Part 1 The Middle Class Advantage

Education's Inconvenient Truth Part 1

My take on this article:

The middle class advantage, accentuated by zoning.

The moral responsibility of us all not to disadvantage other children by advantaging our own.

..... there is at various points public, practitioner and policy denial of the problem. 

This is partly because a lot of policy which advantages the educational prospects of the middle class occurs outside education, for instance in housing, and so people in the education sector tend not to look at it. Meanwhile, within education, concern about growing class inequalities comes up against competing and rather more celebratory discourses such as school improvement, educational leadership and teacher quality which also distract from the problem. 

It is much easier to talk in a disconnected way about an underclass, than to see ourselves creating the educational problems of the poor.


There are things which can be done if we can summon up the political will to do them. 

Also of interest is how the middle class ‘fails to register the social implications of its routine actions’ (Savage, 2000: 159).

In relation to Decile 8,9, 10 schools:
In part the preference for those sorts of schools reflect the ideological assumption of a relationship between high social status and quality but it also results from the importance of predominantly middle class schooling as a means of social reproduction or mobility.  

The fact that predominantly middle class schools are seen to offer positional advantage helps to explain why such schools are nearly always more popular than low socio- economic schools which have little positional value almost irrespective of what they do.


The key point to grasp is that these advantages of middle class schools are probably school-based but not school-caused, they needn’t reflect better teaching and management per se but probably stem directly from the other students in the school through peer group processes or stem from the way school policies and practices of many kinds are supported by high levels of student compliance, motivation and ‘ability’ which are in turn class-related.

Yet school zones are not what they used to be. They are now effectively drawn up by schools rather than Government and the Ministry of Education has only limited control over them. The working definition used is simply that a school has to be ‘reasonably convenient’ for its students; that is, a school that, taking into account a range of factors, a reasonable person would judge to be reasonably convenient.

it is not uncommon for being in the zone of a popular high socio-economic school to make a difference to asking price and to feature in advertising. 

while the government does provide equity funding of around $250m spread over 15 programmes and low decile schools get more of this funding than high decile schools, it is not clear that the former get nearly enough to compensate for the

poverty-related issues they face compared to the advantages brought by the student intake in high decile schools, nor their inability to raise local money 

At a personal level such middle class advantage raises an ethical challenge for all of us who are middle class parents: to recognise the line to be drawn between advantaging our own children and doing this at the expense of other people’s children (Kohn, 1998).