Sociology: Educational Policy - Key Sociologists

Answer

Hint

This liberal feminist sociologist argued that marketisation of education has created a "parentocracy," whereby parents with more resources and cultural capital are able to use their influence to secure places in the most desirable schools for their children, leaving those without such resources at a disadvantage. She also argues that this process reinforces and reproduces social inequality.

These New Right Sociologists believed an education system controlled by state and local authorities (local councils) is not the best means of achieving the New Right aim of education being used to train the workforce, to allocate students into jobs based on their talents. They argued this as it imposes a single type of school regardless of the wishes and needs of parents or local communities.

This sociologist followed a group of Black girls from a low-income London neighbourhood who had been labelled "hopeless cases" by their teachers and the school system. Despite these negative labels and low expectations from those around them, she found that the girls were able to achieve academic success by drawing on support from their families, peers, and communities outside of school. She argued that educational underachievement is not solely the result of deficits within the individual student or school system, but is also influenced by broader social and economic inequalities that impact students' access to resources and opportunities.

These sociologists argue that schools perform a triage (like Nurses at A&E), categorising pupils into those who will achieve anyway (and therefore don't require too much input), hopeless cases (who would be a waste of effort) and borderline cases who require attention and input to get their 5 Cs at GCSE. They call this the Educational Triage, linking this with the pressure on schools to maintain their position on league tables and the published A*-C rate. Therefore, this could be seen as a connection between education policy (e.g. marketisation policies and league tables) and processes within schools, such as labelling.

From a study of 14 London Primary Schools, this sociologist found class differences in the way parents choose where to send their children to Secondary School.

This Marxist sociologist argues that parentocracy is a myth, not a reality. Not only does marketisation reproduce inequality, it also legitimates it by concealing its true causes and by justifying its existence. He argues it gives the appearance of parentocracy (education system seems as if it is based on parents having a free choice of school), but other factors such as social class (Gewirtz), ethnicity, and other structural factors shape parents' choices and limit the degree of true choice that they have. By disguising the fact that schooling continues to reproduce class inequality in this way, the myth of parentocracy makes inequality in education appear fair and inevitable.