Are all state schools equal?

School Admissions I’ve always said, only half jokingly, to anyone who would listen - If you want a successful school, choose your pupils carefully. So it’s nice to see Peter Wilby agreeing with me.

The surest way to turn a bad school into a good one is to change the pupils who attend it, according to Peter Wilby in The Guardian. Wilby argues thus:

The government tries to make allowances for differing intakes by publishing ‘value-added’ scores. If parents took this seriously they would clamour to send their children into Islington and Lambeth, and away from Kent, but they don’t. In effect, then, schools are judged on their intake. If one school achieves a better intake, the less able children blight another nearby school. The latest big idea to overcome this is to introduce random allocation (crudely, lotteries). But the idea is fraught with practical difficulties. The truth is that Britain has a problem with school admissions because it is a grossly unequal society. Schools wouldn’t have such grossly dissimilar intakes if extremes of wealth and disadvantage were not so great.We need to face the truth. Britain has a problem with school admissions because it is a grossly unequal society, in which rich and poor are segregated. Schools wouldn’t have such grossly dissimilar intakes - and such dramatically contrasting results - if extremes of wealth and disadvantage, which Labour has reduced only marginally if at all since 1997, were not so great. The never-ending debate about pupil admissions and bad schools is a diversion. We have a social and economic problem, and we have to tackle that before we have a hope of curing educational problems.

No marks for guessing which sociological perspectives that comes from. As I’ve indicated, Wilby’s point of view also reflects my own viewpoint. But let’s exercise the sociological imagination; how would opposing theoretical perspectives counter this argument?