The study found that the counsellor judged pupils largely on their social class; this therefore put them at a disadvantage as middle-class students were placed on higher level courses. The self-fulfilling prophecy is another internal factor that can be linked to social class differences in achievement. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true simply by virtue of it being made. Some sociologists argue that labelling can effect pupil’s achievement by creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. This can be seen in a study of a primary school by Rosenthal and Jacobson.
Becker concluded that it was much easier for middle class students to meet this ideal since they are better dressed and spoken than their working class counterparts. Thus, working class children are not going to be perceived as academic which will impact the opportunities available to them in school and therefore result in them having negative views of school influencing their attitudes and leading them to form anti-school subcultures. Paul Willis found that working class boys form sub cultures as a response to their limited opportunities. This leads to disengagement from education and underachievement. By contrast, many sociologists have found that the reason the effect of labelling is so great is due to the self-fulfilling prophecy this sociological explanation was examined by Ball he found that pupils who that pupils of similar ability were placed in different streams.
Payne stated that students should learn the “hidden rules” of the middle class from their educators so that they have another set of rules to use if they choose to do so. Impoverished students, compared to students of middle or upper class, often have a lack of proper funding, thus, a lack of appropriate resources to use in their education. Due to this, they are often unprepared for school, not having the money to purchase books and other educational tools. Both authors realize this, but argue that the responsibility lies on different shoulders. Payne states that impoverished students face inequality at school, insinuating that the school should be responsible for helping to provide for these students so that they can have a better education.
One factor for the working-class under-achieving is that the working-class families are less likely to give their children toys that are educations, stimulating their thinking and reason skills. Another factor is that they are also less likely to read to their children also. These theorist believe that this effects the children’s intellectual development so when they begin, they are immediately at a disadvantage when compared with the middle-class children Secondly, another factor that is seen as responsible for the working-class to be under-achieving is known as “restricted speech code”. A sociologist called Bernstein has distinguished speech into two: “elaborated speech code” and “Restricted speech code”. The middle class are said to use the elaborated speech code , this tends to be a wide range of vocabulary and complex sentences.
It affects everything we do and who we are. Social class influences how people orientate themselves in society, as they are socialized into class identities from quite an early age, through living with and encountering in their communities people in the same social class as themsleves, who are like them, who share similar lifestyles,attitudes and value, and with whom they feel comfortable in their everyday lives. It is proven that 90 % of 'failing schools' are located in deprived areas. Some people who are not brought up in low-income families may act like social class doesn't affect your life chances that much and if someone wants to achieve something really badly they can work for it and everything else they take as an excuse. Perhaps anyone can achieve anything they set their minds to ,but social class and how they are brought up affects them so much from such an early age.
In her essay “Gender in the Classroom,” Deborah Tannen uses her own experiences as a college professor, the experiences of other professors, her research and writing, and the work of other social scientists to discuss why students behave differently from each other in the classroom. She concludes that three factors affect how students behave: (1) gender, (2) nationality and (3) past educational experiences. Gender plays a big role inside a classroom. Tannen explains that gender affects peoples behavior in different ways. She states, “So one reason men speak in the class more than women is that many of them find the 'public' classroom setting more conductive to speaking, whereas most women are more comfortable speaking in private to small group of people they know well” (227)Accoriding to her statement men are more outspoken then women since they rather speak in small groups.
The everyday conversation involves language uses. There are many ways of conversation, and it can be influences by different regional, ethnic, family background, age and gender. In Deborah Tannen’s research of the “gender in the classroom” stated about that female and male mix up class, men take the role in the class, which talks more than women. However, record to my own knowledge and research I did not support the statement, like in my English class the female and male students are equal, yet female talks way more than male. Therefore, I disagree with Tannen’s theory, “[…] speaking in a classroom is more congenial to boys’ language experience than to girls’ […]” (164).
Also, because the teachers have middle class values as well, the cultural deprivation theorists believe that they will have a bias against the working class kids and therefore they will not be able to teach them properly since their values and cultures conflict. Compensatory education is a policy that was designed to deal with the problem of cultural deprivation, by providing extra resources to schools and communities in deprived areas. Compensatory education programmes were introduced to intervene early in the socialisation process to compensate children for deprivation they experience at home. The most comprehensive programme was Head Start. It involved health care, social services, and education.
Parents tend to spend less time reading with their sons, and the mother is usually the reader which makes boys think that reading is feminine. Boys tend to form anti-school subcultures, which means they adopt the norms and values of traditional masculinity. Messing around helps their status within the group. Francis says that
Along with the growing emphasis on education, reduction in class size has become a trend in a considerable number of countries, especially those with highly-developed educational system, like America, Canada and the UK (Ehrenberg and Brewer et al., 2001) The issue of the role of class size in deciding the achievement of students has been widely debated. The debate concerning class size helps evaluate the worth of large investment in staff-student ratio. It is true that limiting class size can produce benefits in teaching, but it is obviously not the only factor. In this essay, I will argue for the impacts of small classes, and put forward other essential factors that can influence academic success. Recent research (Ward, 2006 ) demonstrates that separating students into small size classes by their different levels is better for literacy instruction in elementary schools.