Academic Success and Social Power: Examinations in Inequality

by Richard Teese

"A most significant text that says something new about how student achievement is shaped. Richard Teese cuts across much of the recent talk about reform and allows us to think about the issues afresh. His findings will fascinate all."
Professor Simon Marginson, Monash University
This eye-opening study of Australian secondary education looks beyond clichés about 'excellence' to analyse the historically specific nature of the scholarly ideal against which successive generations of Australian students have been judged. Drawing on a wealth of strikingly original research, Richard Teese offers a penetrating analysis of Victorian secondary schooling in the half-century after World War Two. This was a era in which higher secondary schooling ceased to be the preserve of an elite and emerged as a system of mass education. It was also a period marked by successive waves of reform in curriculum and assessment. Yet, at the end of it all, Australians have been left with a sharply polarised system of schooling in which the most economically vulnerable populations of young people are also those most at risk of educational failure.
This book asks the hard questions. Are our systems of secondary teaching -- and the expectations they place on students -- anachronistic in an age of mass education? How far is the curriculum itself responsible for the manifest disparities in achievement between sectors and regions, and between boys and girls? What has been the universities' role in the process of reform and counter-reform? And what have all these upheavals implied for the practice of teaching?

282 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a set text for a summer school subject I’m doing to finish off my masters in Teaching next month. It is an interesting look at how curriculum in Australia is used to maintain systematic advantages for middle and upper class students while effectively excluding working class kids and migrants from socially privileged occupations.

In Australia we have a deeply segregated education system. The preferred method of segregation is along class lines – although, also on nationality too given recent migration and the tendency of migrants to live in particular suburbs.

Lately I’ve become fascinated with mathematics and how it is taught. But this book has made me think about this in quite another way. You might think that mathematics is the one subject least likely to be dependent on social status to determine attainment. The idea being that maths is pretty well about knowing how to get the right answer and that the logic of maths is as open to working class kids as it is to upper class kids.

However, this is simply not the case. Kids with parents without an academic background simply are not able to offer the support (from parents and home environment) that students generally need. Also, the great divide in Australian education is between the private, Catholic and public/state sectors. The private sector is increasingly financed by the government and then also imposes fees to keep the riff-raff out – effectively creating a system of state sponsored segregation. In Australia we have ghettos for the wealthy.

Maths is used as the gatekeeper. What is interesting is that to be effective at keeping working class kids out of the professions – law and medicine and increasingly business – has involved ensuring that the curriculum is highly theoretical, focused mostly on mathematics that has limited applicability or even relevance to most students either at school or in their future working lives. Over the years mathematics has been used as a way of culling (often savagely) very many students, and often the nearly brightest, from education. With failure rates for even students from middle class schools around 50% in the 1940s and 50s, maths was a savage gatekeeper indeed. However, this was turned around and the curriculum modified to improve pass rates when simply too many middleclass kids of fairly high ability were being failed out of the education system by the unreasonableness of the curriculum. Naturally, no such change in the curriculum has been made to help working class and migrant kids who still fail the subject at similar rates today.

I say the curriculum is unreasonable as it is set by the elite universities and they were using their power to shift the teaching of maths to high schools – but few of the students taking maths in high school ever wanted to study either maths or engineering at university level. The point being that not only do middle class kids tend to have professional parents who have also gone through the rigours of mathematics at some stage – but they are at schools that have specialised in churning out kids primed for exams. The benefit of mathematics over subjects such as English as a gatekeeper is that not only is social status an absolute benefit, but knowing that studying something so abstract and disconnected from everyday life is much easier if you know where it is leading you – most working class kids have no idea about academic pathways, have no idea that taking specialist maths is the best way into Law and have little hope of being able to afford the five to seven years of education necessary post high school needed to get into one of the professions anyway. And few people are telling them about pathways either.

What is most interesting about this book is that not only does mathematics teach so many kids what failure feels like, but as a subject it does little to meet the needs of the country or industry. This, apparently, is also the case with chemistry which has also tended to be much more theoretical than it needs to be. Again, chemistry is taught with a heavy emphasis on theory as an effective way of making the subject less relevant to working class kids and thereby using it as a gatekeeper.

The cost here is that while chemistry is being used as a means to keep working class kids out of professions, it could rather be used to teach people who are going to work in industries in Australia things they are likely to need to know. However, the symbiotic relationship between peak universities and peak private schools is such that such notions as relevant learning in subjects such as mathematics and chemistry seem very unlikely indeed. Peak universities still have a disproportionate say over what is taught in high schools – an all power, no responsibility relationship that no major political party in Australia is prepared to tackle. The worst of it being that the peak universities accept those who succeed from within the system they impose – again, mostly middleclass kids from private schools – and need have nothing to do with those failed by the system they have created.

Naturally, people automatically talk about ‘lowering standards’ when there is any talk of making the curriculum relevant – however, it is wrong to automatically assume that just because something is irrelevant to the lives (both during and post school) of most students it is therefore, ipso facto, high standard. The point is that the current curriculum is being used as a way of maintaining segregation, advantage and social power – those are the standards people are concerned with maintaining, standards of unfair social advantage. This book hopes that more general awareness of the issues is the best means of effecting change – although, this book is hardly written in a popular style likely to make its message all that generally available. But then, a thousand mile journey and all that…