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Class (Social-Economic) Research

Class refers to economic position based on income, wealth, or a combination, as well as social expressions of class membership. More fundamentally, class refers to structural relationships based on control over wealth and its production. Research on class in curriculum mainly asks the extent to which curriculum enables children and youth to transcend their family's class or conversely, the extent to which it helps to reproduce the existing class structure, including the position of most individuals within that structure. Surprisingly, little research directly investigates these questions, although there is considerable theory about them, rooted in quite different perspectives. The primary question asked about class and curriculum from a functionalist perspective is what is the relationship between educational attainment, student family background, and class mobility. The primary question that is asked from a critical perspective is in what ways does curriculum contribute to the reproduction of the class structure and individuals' position within that structure. The primary question that is asked from an interpretive perspective is how do students from specific class backgrounds make sense of and respond to curriculum.

Functionalism

Functionalism has long dominated thinking about education and curriculum. Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton were two significant developers of functionalism during the mid-20th century, but this theoretical orientation is widely held by many educationists and economic developers and members of the business community. From a functionalist perspective, schools contribute to the nation's economic development; to maximize this contribution, the structures of schooling and contents of curriculum should match needs of the economic and social system. For example, a well-known report based on functionalism was A Nation at Risk, published in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which claimed that the United States lags in international competition because schools fail to teach the skills needed by today's economy. Although functionalism views poverty as a problem, it does not view the class structure itself as a problem. Therefore, research on class and curriculum addresses mainly how schooling might overcome effects of poverty.

Specifically, functionalists investigate the relationship between income and educational attainment, including (a) the extent to which educational attainment produces individual economic mobility, (b) the relationship between student family background and educational attainment, and (c) the extent to which education can overcome effects of family economic disadvantage. For the most part, functionalist education policies approach class by infusing additional economic resources into programs for students from low-income homes to compensate for presumed deficiencies in their backgrounds, such as linguistic or motivational deficiencies. Compensatory curriculum in programs such as Head Start or early literacy teaches school skills or school readiness. Research then evaluates the impact of such curriculum on children's learning and sometimes on their success in subsequent grade levels.

Critical Theories

Critical theories of class are based on analysis of the desire of the capitalist class to exploit labor to maximize profit and its power to structure social institutions, including schools, for this purpose. Rather than focusing on how to overcome poverty, critical theories examine how elites control and benefit from a stratified class structure. Applied to curriculum, critical theories ask how different kinds of curriculum are distributed based on class, who benefits most and least from that distribution, and who benefits most and least from curriculum content. There are tensions among various critical perspectives regarding class and curriculum. Although some clearly delineate processes by which class relationships are structured and reproduced through schooling (including through curriculum), others emphasize challenging and changing those relations, using curriculum as a tool for consciousness raising. Some theorists address only class relations, while others address multiple relationships, usually including class along with race and gender. Britain has a more robust history of critically examining class in education than does the United States.

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