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Social Institutions: Exercise 2 - Education as a social institution
Instructions:
Read the passage and click on the correct answer. Scroll down
if you do not see the Answer box. If wrong, try again. Click
here to review the key terms for this exercise.
Parents and students from low-income
families usually believe that getting an education is the way out
of poverty. However, most educational systems keep up the existing
social inequalities. Schools do this in a variety of ways. We will
look at how standardized testing and differences in schools help maintain
the existing social inequalities.
The practice of standardized testing,
such as the SAT which tests high school students who want to go to
college, helps preserve existing social inequalities. The questions
in these tests reflect the knowledge and values of the dominant culture
to which the minority students don't belong. Therefore, they tend
to get lower scores. The scores students get are believed to reflect
the students' abilities and are used to group students in the same
classes. This is known as tracking. Students from minority groups
are grouped together into lower quality courses because they are
believed to have lower academic abilities. Students who are placed
in lower tracks tend to get less qualified teachers, poorer quality
textbooks and fewer resources, such as science labs.
The differences among schools also help
preserve the existing social inequalities. Children whose parents
can afford to send them to private schools will benefit from the smaller
class size, which allows them to get more student-teacher contact.
Therefore, they get a better education, go on to college, and get
a high-paying job. There are also differences among public schools.
The government funding (money) that schools get is based on the taxes
residents pay. Because of this, schools in upper-middle class neighborhoods
get more money than public schools in poorer neighborhoods where people
pay less in taxes. Of course, this keeps up the existing social inequalities
because schools with less money have larger class size, fewer resources,
a less demanding curriculum and more discipline problems, which means
that poor students may not get a good education in these schools.
Instructions:
Read the passage and click on the correct answer. Scroll down
if you do not see the Answer box. If wrong, try again.
