Social Class and Educational Achievement

Social Class and Educational Achievement: Beyond Ideology

Education's Inconvenient Truth Part 2

Educations Inconvenient Truth Part 2

My take on this article:
Schools de-emphasise the advantages of middle class zones and schools and could do a lot to help critical debate and remediation if this issue.

Teachers and principals can advantage the middle class in lots of ways in the day to day life of schools: in their use of language, in what they choose to teach about and assess, in their support for segregated and stratified school programmes, in their assumptions about student behaviours and world views, the so-called ‘hidden curriculum’ and so on.

A key issue is simply where teachers and principals choose to work and hence take their own human resources.

Teachers tend to move to higher socio-economic schools in the first few years of their teaching lives and except when they are getting close to retirement, their subsequent moves are also more likely to be to higher than lower socio-economic schools.

principals get paid more by size of school and the large schools tend to be high decile schools.

by failing to raise middle class advantage in education as an issue, politicians and policymakers help it to be hegemonic, that is to appear natural and how the world should be. 

one key strategy for school improvement and leadership is to develop contextualised frameworks that highlight the differences and inequalities between schools rather than downplay them

the government could carefully open up public debate about the social costs of such a segregated education system and also be more honest with teachers and the public about the limits of school- based interventions.

However tight funding is getting across the schools sector as a whole, it is disturbing to see principals of high decile schools complaining in the media about the unfairness of extra funding going to low socio-economic schools. This shows a complete disregard for the myriad of ways their own schools gain advantage from the nature of their intakes, 

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).

The Rhetoric and the Reality

NZ Schools and schooling in the 21st century

P3
"... schools must become learner centred, not timetable or teacher or class centred, but centred on each individual's learning needs, talents and aspirations for th future....shifting traditional concepts of ownership and dependency away form the system, the school and teachers to the learner."  "Our Secondary Schools Don't work anymore.

p9
The problem is that our education system was not designed for learning, nor was it designed for inclusiveness or "universal participation." It was designed for the industrial economy, the industrial age, not the information or knowledge economy. It was designed with upraises in mind that can no longer be justified.

P13
As adults we know that children in their formative years ar spontaneous learners, intensely curious abut their world and creative i they play. Such positive traits were not encouraged i the schooling system. Nor was the a place for children who mastered material at different rates or who might learn martial mor easily if it were presented i a non-linear fashion.

The 7 Most Powerful Ideas Shifts in Learning Today

http://www.teachthought.com/trends/shift-learning-the-7-most-powerful-ideas-shifts-in-learning-today/?utm_content=buffer595e7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Democratic Education

http://www.edgazette.govt.nz/Articles/Article.aspx?ArticleId=9102&Title=Modern%20learning%20environments%20allow%20pedagogical%20shifts

Seven Habits of highly effective digital strategies

Interface Term 1 April 2015 Carolyn Stuart.

• Planning
• Implementation
• Change
• Resources
• Innovation
• Support

"The tool extends the mind- the mind extends the tool." Ken Robinson

Technology can drive change- you actually need to use a tool in order to generate new ideas about how to use it.

Vision, values and future focused expectations- the place to start.

How do we want the future state of education to look in our school? What attracts and competencies do we want to equip our students with, so they will experience future success?

Once this is identified then what principles do we have that reuse to drive investment and uptake of technology?

Seven ways to set your strategic path:
School charters- ensure broad goals align to principles underpinning digital strategy 
Annual charter- digital technology should relate to learning targets, incorporate digital technology into every target
School visit- focus on school vision and values, ask questions about principles that underpin decision making
Adults first-reply new technology to adults first
Scaffold innovation and creativity-  build a process to make it easy for teachers to innovate
Funding- only buy technology you know, and that meets your principles
Infrastructure- make sure its robust enough for your journey

Begin with the end in mind.