Study Guide for "Schooling and the Reproduction of Inequality"

The following includes a very broad set of questions to help you understand your assigned reading. You are responsible for material in the article that these questions may not directly address. That is, to do well on the quiz you must read the entire article at least once if not more than once. On the day of the quiz, you will have a five question multiple choice quiz in class. Study hard and enjoy understanding how the educational system reproduces social and economic inequalities!

What are the differences between inequality of income and inequality of opportunity?

What are two sources of unequal economic opportunity? Why will there never be true equal opportunity?

What are the author's four main arguments?

What was the role of schools in colonial America?

What undermined the role of the family as the major unit of both socialization and production?

What spelled the demise of the extended family and greatly weakened even the nuclear family?

What does the author mean when he argues that the social relations of the school would replicate the social relations of the workplace, and thus help young people adapt to the social division of labor?

What does the author mean when he argues that a system of class stratification developed within this rapidly expanding educational system?

What does the author means when he argues that unequal schooling reproduces the hierarchical social division of labor?

What groups of people are likely to receive the least and most amount of education?

What does the author mean when he argues that the social relations of the educational process ordinarily mirror the social relations of the work roles into which most students are likely to move?

Where does Radford University fit into the hierarchy of higher education within the Commonwealth of Virginia and what socialization process is mostly fostered at Radford?

Explain this statement: Class stratification within schools is achieved through tracking, differential participation in extracurricular activities, and in the attitudes of teachers and particularly guidance personnel who expect working class children to do poorly, to terminate schooling early, and to end up in jobs similar to their parents.

Does the author argue that most of the educational differences that result between social classes result from unequal educational opportunities?

How does the author make the following argument: if education is to compensate for the social class immobility due to the inheritance of wealth and privilege, education must be structured so that the poor child receives not less, not even the same, but more than equal benefits from education?

If schools, particularly public schools, are not run by a "power elite" than why are they so unequal?

How do schools complement the subcultures of socialization?

How do objective grades and standardized tests such as the SAT mask the mechanisms which reproduce the class system from generation to generation?

What does the following sentence mean in reference to the educational system? The power of the upper class exists in its capacity to define and maintain a set of rules of operation or decision criteria-"rules of the game"-which, though often seemingly innocuous and sometimes even egalitarian in their ostensible intent, have the effect of maintaining the unequal system.

Why do some school districts in Virginia have more educational resources than other school districts?

How can we successfully reform our educational system? Is it possible to reform the educational system within the parameters of a capitalistic system?