School's Selection Function and the Social Class Divide: School Tracking as a Tool to Reproduce Social Class Inequalities

• In Event: 46.085 - Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 46.085-9 - Educational Attainment and the Social Class Divide: Sociopsychological Barriers to Equality and Justice

Abstract

Objectives
Most school systems officially rely on meritocratic principles to warrant the fairness of
treatment for students. In particular, access to different school tracks is seemingly determined by objective factors such as grades, which are assumed to reflect the students’ abilities. However, OECD’s results show that external factors such as students’ socioeconomic status (SES) heavily predict student’s results and in particular access to higher or lower tracks. Despite these results, tracking is still used in many educational systems across Europe and, to lower extent, in the United States. We suggest that students’ socioeconomic background remains an influential factor in conceding academic opportunities and that educational agents contribute to the status quo.

Theoretical framework
We propose that the social class achievement gap can be partly explained by the selection function of the educational system, which drives educational agents to reproduce the existing social order.

Methods and data
In the first two experimental studies (N = 99 students; N = 54 teachers), we provided a context in which participants could influence the scholastic path, and by extension the future social position, of individuals belonging to different social backgrounds. In order to do so, we placed the participant in the powerful position of a teacher having to decide which secondary school track was most suitable for a 12 year-old student. The student’s socioeconomic status was manipulated, but every target student was presented with the same grades, which were only slightly below the usual requirements for the highest track. In the third study (N = 160 students), we followed the same procedure, but the perception of the school’s function was manipulated beforehand and was either presented as serving an educational purpose (i.e. to develop skills and give all students the opportunity to progress in the mastery of his/her knowledge) or a selective purpose (i.e. to guide students according to academic abilities and to lead everyone to the maximum of his/her potential).

Results
Results of the three studies show that participants considered a lower track more suitable for a low-SES student than for a high-SES student, and that a higher track was more suitable for a high-SES student than for a low-SES student. In our third study, when the school’s function was perceived as being selective, the differences between social classes increased as compared with the condition in which the school purpose was seen as being educational. The results suggest that the manipulation of the institutional goal affected the way in which the tracking decision was made, where the perception of a selective educational system encouraged the reproduction of social class. Conversely, the educational context weakened the way in which stereotypical information interfered with the tracking decision process.

Significance
These findings suggest that selection practices reinforce social class inequalities by allowing the agents of the educational system to actively constrain the access to educational attainment.

Authors

• Anatolia Batruch, University of Lausanne

• Frédérique Autin, Universite de Poitiers

• Fabrizio Butera, University of Lausanne