Examines ways in which current United Kingdom school-choice policies interact with parental pressures on their children to achieve excellence and how these pressures affect the emotional health of their middle- and working-class children as they make the transition from primary to secondary school. Finds serious emotional consequences (exam…

Interviews with low-income parents revealed that they were aware of the class character of local schools and believed that high-income schools were superior. Ninety-four percent favored social class school desegregation, believing that their children would thereby obtain a better education and better preparation for social interaction in adult…

Challenging conventional characterization of teenage girlhood as a wasteland of depression, low self-esteem, and passive victimhood, this book presents accounts of young girls showing how their voices are shaped and constrained by socioeconomic class. Based on a year-long study involving conversations with white adolescent girls from the working…

Smoking among students in a suburban high school appears to be part of a complex, symbolic process that is associated with a system of social differentiation between working class and middle class students. To be effective, anti-smoking programs should consider the social dynamics of smoking. (Author/MJL)

Concerned about working-class failure, argues that recent (British) government policies have insufficiently considered sociological studies on how social class affects educational success or failure. Social-inclusion policies must address forms of middle-class self-exclusion from mainstream public education as well as working-class social…

A study examined the match between the vocabularies of children of different ethnic and socioeconomic status groups and the school vocabulary revealed by readability formulas and word lists. The Spache 1040 and the Dale 769 readability formula word lists were used as indicators of school vocabulary in the early primary grades, and a corpus of talk…