Clarifying the Meaning of Social Class Effects on Academic Achievement in Schools and Classrooms

• In Event: Compositional or Cohort Effects on Educational Outcomes

Abstract

A plethora of data sources, including van der Berg’s data set from South Africa (above), illustrate that there are reliable and strong empirical effects of school social class and racial composition on individual measures of student achievement. However, it is unclear what the meaning of this effect is. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether such effects are the result of a student’s peers directly influencing a student’s motivation to do well in school, as so elegantly argued by Paul Willis (Learning to Labour) and Sennett and Cobb (The Hidden Injuries of Class). On the other hand, those same effects might be largely the result of fewer or more school resources and lower or higher teacher/school expectations associated with concentrations of lower and higher social class students in schools.

Author

• Martin Carnoy, Stanford University