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This book brings together in one place Stephen Ball's key writings. Drawing on over 20 years' work, Professor Ball has selected his most seminal work - from education policy and sociology to his work on education and social class.
Bringing together twenty years of research and writing, this book provides an overview of Stephen Ball’s career and shows not only the development of his most important ideas but also the long-lasting contributions he has made to the field of educational policy analysis. This volume contains sixteen key essays divided into three sections: perspectives on policy research policy technologies and policy analysis social class and education policy. Each chapter presents innovative ways of thinking about public policy, asking probing questions about what policy is, how policy is influenced and what effects intentional and unintentional policies have. As a body of work, this collection raises issues of ethics and social justice which are often neglected in the mass of policies that now affect every aspect of our education systems.
This book takes a theoretically informed look at British education policy over the last sixty years when secondary schooling for all children became an established fact for the first time. Comprehensive schools largely replaced a system based on academic selection. Now, under choice and competition policies, all schools are subject to the rigours of local education markets. What impact did each of these successive policy frameworks have on structures of opportunities for families and their children? How and to what extent was the experience of secondary school students shaped and what influenced the qualifications they obtained and their life chances after schooling? The authors locate their work within two broad strands in the sociology of education. Basil Bernstein’s work on the realisation of power and control in and through pedagogic discourse and social reproduction provides a theoretical framework for exploring the character of and continuities and change in education and training policies. The book is an important contribution to debates about the extent to which education is a force for change in class divided societies. The authors also set out to re-establish social class at the centre of educational analysis at a time when emphasis has been on identity and identity formation, arguing for their interdependence. This book will be an important resource for students, policy analysts and policymakers wishing to think through and understand the longer term impact of programmes that have shaped secondary schooling in Britain and elsewhere.
Education, Inequality and Social Class provides a comprehensive discussion of the empirical evidence for persistent inequality in educational attainment. It explores the most important theoretical perspectives that have been developed to understand class-based inequality and frame further research. With clear explanations of essential concepts, this book draws on empirical data from the UK and other countries to illustrate the nature and scale of inequalities according to social background, discussing the interactions of class-based inequalities with those according to race and gender. The book relates aspects of inequality to the features of educational systems, showing how policy choices impact on the life chances of children from different class backgrounds. The relationship between education and social mobility is also explored, using the concepts of social closure, positionality and social congestion. The book also provides detailed discussions of the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, two important theorists whose contributions have generated thriving research traditions much used in contemporary educational research. Education, Inequality and Social Class will be essential reading for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students engaged in the study of education, childhood studies and sociology. It will also be of great interest to academics, researchers and teachers in training.
Social Class and Education: Global Perspectives is the first empirically grounded volume to explore the intersections of class, social structure, opportunity, and education on a truly global scale. Fifteen essays from contributors representing the US, Europe, China, Latin America and other regions offer an unparralleled examination of how social class differences are made and experienced through schooling. By underscoring the consequences of our new global reality, this volume takes seriously the transnational migration of commerce, capital and peoples and the ramifications of such for education and social structure. Moving beyond national confines, internationally recognized scholars, Lois Weis and Nadine Dolby, offer a set of emblematic essays that break new theoretical and empirical ground on the ways class is produced and maintained through education around the world.
Theorizing Social Class and Education presents a selection of writing on class analysis within sociology of education as it has evolved over the last decade both in the UK, and internationally. Moving from a narrow focus on class position and categorisation, to a much broader view on behaviours, attitudes, identities and practices, the contributors explore and theorize the ways in which particular individuals develop their perspectives and understandings of the social world, and the role education plays in shaping these. This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.
Historically, higher education was designed for a narrow pool of privileged students. Despite national, state and institutional policies developed over time to improve access, higher education has only lately begun to address how its unexamined assumptions, practices and climate create barriers for poor and working class populations and lead to significant disparities in degree completion across social classes.The data shows that higher education substantially fails to provide poor and working class students with the necessary support to achieve the social mobility and success comparable to the attainments of their middle and upper class peers. This book presents a comprehensive range of strategies that provide the fundamental supports that poor and working-class students need to succeed while at the same time dismantling the inequitable barriers that make college difficult to navigate.Drawing on the concept of the student-ready college, and on emerging research and practices that colleges and universities can use to explore campus-specific social class issues and identify barriers, this book provides examples of support programs and services across the field of higher education – at both two- and four-year, public and private institutions – that cover:·Access supports. Examples and recommendations for how institutions can assist students as they make decisions about applications and admission.·Basic needs supports. Covering housing and food security, necessary clothing, sense of belonging through co-curricular engagement, and mental health resources.·Academic and learning supports. Describes courses and academic programs to promote full engagement among poor and working class students.·Advising supports. Illustrates advising that acknowledges poor and working class students’ identities, and recommends continued training for both staff and faculty advisors.·Supports for specific populations at the intersection of social class with other identities, such as Students of Color, foster youth, LGBTQ, and doctoral students.·Gaining support through external partnerships with social services, business entities, and fundraising.This book is addressed to administrators, educators and student affairs personnel, urging them to make the institutional commitment to enhance the college experience for poor and working class students who not only represent a substantial proportion of college students today, but constitute a significant future demographic.
This title demonstrates from a sociological point of view and by way of empirical analysis that educational reforms have caused profound changes in the society of post-war Japan. It focuses on the spread of inequality in Japanese society as an 'unintended outcome' to which the educational reforms ended up contributing.
Equal access to education is an important American ideal, yet for many years it has been unavailable to a large number of Americans living in impoverished communities. Biddle gives an insightful progress report on today's educational system.
Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school. This book features: a summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more ; aA look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices." ; and an analysis of how the over-emphasis of standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.
