ReviseSociology

Are schools meritocratic?

In this post I apply some sociological concepts to develop arguments for and against the view that schools are meritocratic.

This post is really designed to show students how they can apply concepts to this question from across the sociology of education topic within A-level sociology.

Arguments for the view that education is meritocratic

Particularistic values

Functionalists argue that at in school students are judged by universalistic values, so it is more meritocratic than at home where children are judged by different particularistic values.

Cultural deprivation

Schools offer children equality of opportunity and so are fair, it’s the inferior values of working-class parents such as immediate gratification that stops them achieving.

School ethos

Nearly all schools today, especially academies have a high ethos of achievement.

Pupil Premium

Introduced under The Coalition government, this encourages schools to accept more students from poor backgrounds, helping to combat selection by mortgage, which is not meritocratic.

Other supporting concepts and evidence

Life-long learning, parity of esteem, expansion of modern apprenticeships, compensatory education.

Arguments and evidence against the view that education is meritocratic

Correspondence principle

In state school children are taught to obey authority and accept hierarchy rather than to use their talents to achieve.

Cultural capital

Middle class parents have always been more able than working class parents to use their skills to get their kids into the best schools, thus there is not real equality of opportunity

Teacher labelling

Teachers are more likely to negatively label boys, working class and Black Caribbean children as problem students, meaning they are held back through being put in lower bands.

1988 Education Act

Unfairly benefitted middle class parents through selection by mortgage and the school-parent alliance.

Other criticising concepts and evidence

Banding and streaming, myth of meritocracy, hidden curriculum, ethnocentric curriculum.

Sociology Teaching Resources for Sale

If you’re a sociology teacher and you like this sort of thing, and you want to support my resource development work, then you might like these teaching resources for the sociology of education. They are specifically designed for A-level sociology students and consist of three documents:

Sociological Perspectives on ‘Renting a Womb’

Kim Kardashian and Kayne West are apparently expecting a fourth child, employing a surrogate mother to carry their fertilised eggs. This will be the second surrogate child, following the birth of their first surrogate child, ‘Chicago’, born in January 2018.

Paying someone to be a surrogate mother, or ‘renting a womb’ is legal in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, surrogacy is legal, but parents are only allowed to pay the surrogate expenses related to the pregnancy, rather than paying them a fee for actually carrying the child.

The reason Kim Kardashian and Kayne West have opted for surrogates recently is because Kim has a medical condition which means that becoming pregnant again carries a higher than usual risk of her dying, so this isn’t just a lifestyle choice, but an interesting ethical/ sociological question is whether or not paid for surrogacy should be legal in the U.K. (NB – there’s a chance that it will be, as the surrogacy law is currently under review.

This topic is clearly relevant to families and households and especially social policy, and it’s quite useful to use it to explore different Feminist perspectives on the family….

Liberal Feminism

From a liberal feminist point of view, renting a womb should be acceptable because it would enable career-women to avoid taking time off work to pregnancy and child birth, and thus prevent the kind of career-breaks which put them at a disadvantage to men.

In fact, as far as the couple hiring the surrogate are concerned, this puts them on an entirely equal footing in relation to the new baby, meaning that it would be practically possible for them to share maternity/ paternity leave equally, rather than it ‘making sense’ for the woman to carry on taking time off after she’s done so in order to give birth.

Paid for surrogacy also provides an economic opportunity for the surrogate mothers, an opportunity only available to women.

Marxist Feminism

From a marxist feminist point of view renting a womb is kind of paying women for their labour in one sense, however it’s a long way off providing women a wage for ‘traditionally women’s work’ within the family, such as child care and domestic labour.

Ultimately renting a womb does little to address economic inequality between men and women because it’s only available to wealthier couples, meanwhile on the supply side of the rent a womb industry the only women likely to enter into a surrogacy contract are those that are financially desperate, i.e. they have no other means to make money.

Radical Feminism

From a radical feminist perspective renting a womb does nothing to combat patriarchy more generally. If paid for surrogacy was made legal in the UK, the only consequence would be to give wealthy couples the freedom to pay poor women to carry their children for 9 months.

This does nothing to combat more serious issues such as violence against women.

In conclusion…

While it’s an interesting phenomenon, renting a womb, rather than just voluntary surrogacy, will probably do very little to further the goal of female empowerment. However, it will obviously be of benefit to potentially millions of couples (in the long term) who are unable to have children.

Social theories applied to drones over airports

Hundreds of flights were cancelled from Gatwick airport between the 19th-21st of December 2018 after reports of drone sightings nearby. This resulted in around 140 000 people’s flights being disrupted.

More recently, a drone was also sighted flying over Heathrow airport on Tuesday 8th Jan 2019 which led to flights being cancelled for an hour.

Despite ongoing police investigations and the military being involved in the Heathrow incident, we still don’t know who the drone pilots are. Even in 2023 this remains a mystery!

This post simply provides some sociological analysis of drones over airports, applying various sociological perspectives – this is clearly most relevant to the crime and deviance module within A-level sociology, but also relevant to the media, given that these are media events!

News Values

Firstly, it’s obvious why these events are newsworthy…. They tick lots of ‘news values’ boxes – Major drone disruption is very unusual, given that it’s never happened before, and it affected two of Britain’s best-known landmarks – Gatwick and Heathrow. This is also something most people can relate to, given that most people have used airports, the even at Gatwick at least had emotional appeal, because families were potentially being prevented from getting back together at Christmas.

The media and social reaction suggests support for aspects of Durkheim’s functionalist theory of crime – there was widespread condemnation of whoever the drone pilots in the media and one effect of their deviant act seems to have been an increase in social integration as the nation has come together in solidarity against them, even though no one knows who they are!

Interactionism – labelling and moral panic theory

An interactionist approach to these ‘drones over airports’ is, however, much more interesting…. One might ask why we’re making such a fuss over a few thousand people’s flight’s being delayed by drones, which is really no big deal, when the media fails to cover the use of drones by nation states to kill ‘suspected terrorists’ (and many innocent people) in foreign countries.

One might say this is a ‘moral panic’ over the general public’s use of drones to do ‘minor harms’, while the media ignores the use of powerful state actors to use drones to do ‘major harms’.

You can also apply interactionism to the police reaction…. As they arrested a working-class couple in a relatively poor part of the South East, only later to release them. I can just imagine the conversation…

‘There’s a drone over Gatwick’
‘Quick, go arrest someone’
‘Who’?
‘It’s probably poor people piloting it’
‘But there are no poor people in Surrey?’
‘What about Crawley, that’s nearby?’
‘All units to Crawly, go arrest some poor people who own a drone, we need to be seen to be doing something about this.’

Or in other words, this just seems to be a straightforward example of the police labelling the marginalised.

Subcultural theory versus neo-Marxism

It’s tempting to think this is a group of lads doing this for status (come on, admit that’s the image in your head, it probably is!) However, this could be a political act…. Maybe climate change activists? IMO leisure flights are the perfect target for the environmentally conscious. Or it could (actually) be one of the bottom 30% by income, one of those people that will probably never be able to afford to fly anywhere, protesting about being marginalised by grounding flights!?!

Post and late modernism

Whether this crime was politically motivated or not, it’s unlikely that the drone pilots wanted to kill anyone…. They’re probably aware of the high levels of risk consciousness that surrounds airports… they were probably well aware of the likely impact of their drone flights… which was the grounding of all flights for a period.

It’s also the perfect postmodern crime in that this is preventing many people from engaging in their leisure pursuits (I imagine most flights are for leisure), it’s targeted at consumers.

Then of course there’s the uncertainty factor…. We still don’t know who did it, or when the next drone is going to appear…

Crime Control….

Given that international airports are so large, and thus the boundaries so big, it’s impossible to have on the ground security along all of the perimeter. It’s difficult enough to get surveillance in place… especially when you have to go beyond the perimeter to cover the total area in which a drone could be operated from.

In other words, it’s difficult to apply target hardening (preferred by right realists). this goes to shows the difficulties of crime control in a postmodern age!

Gatwick aiport — Gatwick airport – a lot ground to police!

Globalisation

Finally, this could be used as an example of how easy it is to put ‘physical globalisation’ in the form of holiday migration into reverse… all it takes is one person in a car with a drone, and you can ground flights for days!

Signposting

This post is just a bit of fun, how you might apply sociology to contemporary news events.

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Sociology tuition online! From April 2019…

Online sociology revision webinars April to June 2019, covering the AQA A-level sociology content : education to crime and deviance!

I will be running a series of A-level sociology revision webinars from April to mid-June 2019. The focus will be on maximising marks in the three AQA sociology exams, as well as reviewing basic content across the main sociology options: education, methods, families, beliefs, crime and theories.

These Webinars will be live events, with 30-40 minutes of structured lecture/ Q n A revision supported by a PowerPoint, followed by 20 mins to deal with student questions and popular requests. Webinars will be recorded and accessible if students wish to go back over them, or if they cannot make a particular session.

The online revision sessions will be fully supported with work packs containing revision notes and activities and plenty of practice exam questions and model answers covering all of the short answer questions, the two types of 10-mark questions and the 20- and 30-mark essay questions.

I’m going to be offering access to these via a subscription through Patreon, so there will be tiered access ranging from £20 a month to £40 a month. If you subscribe to the lower tier, you get access to the revision webinars and resources (NB this is a bargain price!), if you subscribe to the higher level tiers, you get the webinars, resources AND I will provide you with feedback to any practice exam questions you do (basically I’ll mark more essays the higher up the tiers you go).

These Webinars will run on Tuesday evenings at 19.00 GMT, with the exception of the one before the families and beliefs exam, which will be on a Monday, because paper 2 is on a Tuesday!.

There will only be 20 places available* on these webinars. Subscriptions will open on March 1st 2019, but if you want to register your interest early just drop a comment below or email me and I can make sure you get a place.

(*There are more than 30 000 students who study A-level sociology , so these are actually ver rare!)

Quality Guaranteed!

I taught sociology for 16 years between 2001-2018 until I quit recently (because I live frugally I’ve retired from full-time work early) and I’m still an AQA examiner, so I know the content of A-level sociology and the exam rules intimately. I now spend most of my ‘working time’ maintaining this blog and keeping up to date with all things sociology, A-level and exams.

Provisional Timetable

Month/ Week	Content
1 April	Education
08 April 2	Methods and Methods in Context
15 April 3	Theories (the theories part of theories and methods)
22 April 4	Families
29 April 1	Beliefs
6 May 2	Crime
13 May 3	Education and Theory and Methods (exam on 22^nd May)
20 May 4	Education and Theory and Methods
27 May	Families and Beliefs
3 June 2	Families and Beliefs (exam on 4^th June)
10 June	Crime and Deviance and Theory and methods (exam on 12^th June)

A reminder of this years exam dates!

NB the above timetable is from the AQA exam board, other boards may have different times! Click here for the AQA’s A-level timetable.

Influence the content of these webinars – Requests!

What do you want covered in these Webinars? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll use the feedback to make sure certain topics are covered…. I know what the real bogeymen of A-level sociology are (selection, the fully social theory of deviance, green crime etc.), but I also know different students struggle with different things, so if you’re thinking of ‘attending’ and want something specific covered let me know and I’ll make sure I go over it!

A Brief Sociological Analysis of The 2018 Climate Change Agreement

Sociological perspectives applied to the 2018 climate change conference.

The 2018 United Nations climate summit ended with a new pact among 196 countries to curb global warming which included the following:

A new ‘rulebook’ which provides a framework for how to implement the pledges from the last 2015 climate summit
A commitment to restrict average temperature rises in the 21st century to well below 2 degrees.
An agreement on how countries should measure greenhouse gas emissions and how they should account for meeting them.

The agreement was even approved by the United States, and despite the fact that irrational climate change denier and puppet of the oil companies Donald Trump called it ridiculous, he can’t withdraw from the deal until the day after the next presidential election.

Sociological analysis

This seems to be a rare example of nation states agreeing on joint action to tackle a shared global problem…. which you could say offers broad support for the Functionalist point of view at a global level, because we have (near enough) value consensus.

HOWEVER, this may all be a bit of a sham, as Leslie Hood, writing in The Financial Times points out…

Nation states are still free to set their CO2 emissions at whatever level they like.
There is no agreement on the best way to actually reduce emissions.
There is no regime of sanctions in place to penalise nations who don’t meet their targets.

Ultimately, the success of climate accord largely depends on the top five polluters playing ball, and these are China, the US, Russia, India and the EU. Together these account for 50% of global CO2 emissions, but the first two of these, China and The USA don’t seem to be that committed…. China is still building coal burning power plants and Trump wants to pull out of the deal asap.

Fingers crossed Trump will be elected out and someone who cares about the future of the next generation will be elected into power in November 2020 and the US will be on board. However, even if this does happen, there’s enough evidence of this being a weak deal to say that, where climate change is concerned, nation states still have the power to not commit effectively to reducing it!

A-level sociology of education summary grids

I’ve been designing some sociology of education summary grids to try and summarise the AQA’s A-level sociology of education specification as briefly as possible. I’ve managed to narrow it down to 7 grids in total covering…..

Perspectives on education (Functionalism etc)
In-school processes (labelling etc.)
social class and differential achievement
gender: achievement and subject choice
Ethnicity
Policies
Globalisation and education (I couldn’t fit it in anywhere else!)

Here’s a couple of them… I figure these should be useful for quick card sorts during revision lessons. And let’s face it, there is only ONE thing students love more than filling in grids, and that’s a card sort!

Perspectives on education summary grid:

Education policies summary grid:

Of course I couldn’t resist doing fuller versions of these grids too, but more of that laters!

Compensatory Education

Compensatory Education aims to tackle cultural deprivation by providing extra funds and resources – examples include Operation Head Start, Education Action Zones and Sure Start

Compensatory Education aims to tackle cultural deprivation by providing extra funds and resources to schools and communities in deprived areas. It can also mean targeting extra resources to culturally deprived children specifically to make up for their cultural deficiencies.

The idea of compensatory education is that culturally deprived children lack the skills, knowledge and attitudes to do well in education, so to promote equality of opportunity, they need extra help to make up for these deficiencies.

The kind of skills culturally deprived children may lack include linguistic skills, cognitive abilities, and having inappropriate behavioural attitudes.

Three examples of Compensatory Education Policies are:

Operation Head Start
Education Action Zones
Sure Start

Positive Discrimination

Compensatory education policies are examples of positive discrimination: working class children are given extra help and support to make up for their deficiencies, so they can compete on a level playing field with middle class children.

Operation Head Start

Operation Head Start was a multi-billion-dollar scheme of pre-school education which took place in America in the 1960s to the early 1970s as part of President Johnsons’ War on Poverty.

It began in Harlem and was then extended to other areas across America.

It was a programme of ‘planned enrichment’ for children from deprived areas and consisted of the following:

Improving parenting skills
Setting up nursery classes
Home visits by educational psychologists.
Using mainstream media to promote the importance of values such as punctuality, numeracy and literacy.

However the results were disappointing: a large-scale evaluation found that the programme produced no long-term benefits for those who had taken part in it.

Education Action Zones

Education action Zones (EAZs) were set up in in 1998. These programmes directed resources to low-income, inner city areas in an attempt to raise educational attainment.

By 2003 there were 73 EAZs in England funded by central government with extra funding from business.

An OFSTED report on EAZs praised some initiatives such as breakfast clubs and homework clubs and found some improvement at Key Stage 1, but no improvement at GCSE.

Sure Start

Sure Start was one of the main policies New Labour introduced to tackle poverty and social exclusion.

The aim of Sure Start was to work with parents to promote the physical, intellectual and social development of babies and young children.

The aim of Sure Start was to create high quality learning environments to improve children’s ability to learn and help parents with supporting their children in this process. The idea was to intervene early and break the cycle of disadvantage

The main specific outcome of Sure Start was the establishment of 3500 Sure Start Centres, initially established in low-income areas. These centres provided ‘integrated’ family, parenting, education, and health care support. Parents could attend Sure Start centres with their pre-school children for up to 12 hours a week.

The problem with Sure Start is that although parents liked it there was no measurable improvement to the academic ability of the children who took part in it!

Criticisms of Compensatory education

Critics have argued that by placing the blame on the child and his/her background, it diverts attention from the deficiencies of the educational system.

Compensatory education policies accept the view that working class culture is inferior and this is why children fail in school. However, it may be more accurate to say that working class culture is just different to middle class culture, but schools are middle class institutions and working class children just feel like they don’t fit in.

Sharon Gewirtz (2001) goes as far as to say that Compensatory Education is really an attempt to eradicate working class culture by transforming working class parents into (better) middle class parents.

Building on the above point, cultural capital theory argues that the middle classes construct their culture as superior, and this creates a barrier to the working classes succeeding.

Compensatory education policies are likely to only have limited success in raising achievement because they involve quite a modest redistribution of resources to poor areas. They are unlikely to do much for the inequalities in the wider society which lead to poor achievement

Early intervention may be intrusive – it involves monitoring the poor more than the rich.

Compensatory Education is the solution to cultural deprivation, so any of the criticisms of cultural deprivation theory can also be applied to Compensatory Education.