Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

46 Language Diversity in the Classroomis also a great deal of rather pious lip-service paid to bringing parents‘into the classroom’, when it is clear that, in many instances, theirpresence is really not wanted. This is a subject for another day, butanyone who has spent time with teachers will recognize that, overburdenedas they often are, they may resent rather than welcome directparental ‘engagement’. This is not true for all teachers or in allcircumstances, but once one gets beyond structured occasions, likedesignated parent-teacher meetings, one is in murkier territory.Disadvantage and PovertyAs I have already mentioned in passing, there is an unsurprisingcorrelation between socioeconomic status (SES) and school achievement.It is not a simple linear relationship, however, as the meta-analyses ofWhite (1982) and Sirin (2005) have shown; see also the multi-countrystudy of Marks (2006) on between- and within-school differences inachievement. Studies typically base their investigations on parentalincomes, occupations and levels of education, on the one hand, and onchildren’s measured attainments overall grade averages, standardizededucational assessments, single-subject test scores (verbal skills, mathematicsachievement, and so on) on the other.One finding is that the relationship between SES and educationalachievement is greater at the level of the school than at the level ofindividual students; the wider generality of this American relationshipremains to be tested, since it seems to apply in the United States becauseof the association there between school funding and district tax bases. Italso seems that collecting family SES data from children is much lessinformative than going directly to the parents, since the former oftenover-estimate home resources; the disparities are greatest for youngchildren, for those from single-parent families and for those at the bottomof the achievement tables. This is important, of course, since suchchildren are typically the ones for whom we would like the most accurateSES data. A third finding particularly important in the context of thisbook is that SES (in Sirin’s American study, for instance) is a strongerpredictor of achievement for white students than for others. Forminority-group pupils, including African Americans, the general neighborhoodSES is more indicative (see Dornbusch et al., 1991; Gonzaleset al., 1996). The inference here is that lower-class minority groups oftenlive in neighborhoods with ‘higher educational risk factors’ (Sirin, 2005:441). Perhaps these tend to swamp individual family variations. A relatedpoint was made by Krieger and Fee (1994) who showed that simply