Working Class Betrayed by Labour Education

There’s a great story in the Daily Mail today about how working class educational underachievement is the fault of poor quality state schools. Great that is, as an exercise in practical criticism for sociology students. The article cites the evidence of an IFS study conducted jointly with the Institute of Education and links that with research on a rather different educational issue from York University.

I suggest that the research - which according to the article - puts the blame for working class educational achievement firmly on ‘poor-quality schooling’ is open to criticism in terms of several methodological matters. Discuss how the following issues could be important:

Operationalisation - what indicators are selected and used to measure key concepts, e.g. here, ‘quality of school’

Cause and Effect - Could the research conclusions be confusing cause and effect? Remember - correlation does not equal causation. Think back to Durkheim and suicide.

School Factors and Input Factors - educational research going back to the cultural deprivation theorists of the 1960s, distinguished between the role of school factors and the social characteristics students bring into the school with them. Both factors can play an important role in underachievement. Is the research reported in the Mail neglecting one set of factors?