The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools, but this hiatus provided an opportunity to rethink the fundamental principles of our education system.
In this thought-provoking book, Alice Bradbury discusses how, before the pandemic, the education system assumed ability to be measurable and innate, and how this meritocracy myth reinforced educational inequalities – a central issue during the crisis.
Drawing on a project dealing with ability-grouping practices, Bradbury analyses how the recent educational developments of datafication and neuroscience have revised these ideas about how we classify and label children, and how we can rethink the idea of innate intelligence as we rebuild a post-pandemic schooling system.
Introduction This chapter focuses on the concept of ability as it is currently used in schools. The main focus is on what we can glean from teachers’ responses to a question about their understanding of ‘ability’ in the context of grouping decisions (arising from the Grouping Project explained in Chapter 1 ). As Ladwig and McPherson argue, there is research on the role of ability in distribution of curricula but ‘teachers’ conceptualisation and everyday use of the term “ability” has remained relatively obscure’ ( 2017 , p. 344). My intention here is to
Introduction In this chapter, I explore the impact of a second educational trend which sees an increased emphasis placed on data about children within schools, known as datafication . As with neuroscience, I begin with a discussion of the role of data in education, before considering the relation to concepts of ability and to the reproduction of inequalities. The field of data and education is vast and written about extensively elsewhere (for example, Eynon 2013 ; Lingard and Sellar 2013 ; Selwyn et al 2015 ; Lupton and Williamson 2017 ) so I provide
Introduction This chapter begins by setting out the extent and nature of inequalities in the education system in England, based on attainment data. Then, using research data from interviews with teachers, I set out the case for the argument that ‘ability’ and inequality are intertwined concepts, reinvigorated by recent developments. The literature discussed in the later part of the chapter demonstrates that the notion of ability has always been inflected with raced and classed discourses, but I argue here that the idea has been reinvigorated so that it
Introduction This book has sought to examine in detail how discourses of ‘ability’ as fixed and measurable, embedded within broader discourses of meritocracy, reproduce inequalities in education. I have argued that ability as discourse is a set of parameters which define and maintain acceptable truths within schooling, which can have pernicious effects. Two developments in education, related to data and to neuroscience, were used to consider how ability discourses operate at this historical juncture – within the current episteme – in a neoliberal
Introduction Crucial as they are, words and sentiments alone do not make the R2Provide ethos. This chapter examines the efforts Southeast Asian countries, more often than not under the rubric of ASEAN and through its various functional subsidiaries and its ‘Plus’ derivatives, have undertaken to develop the requisite capabilities – build their ‘response ability’ if you will – that would enable them to translate aspirations regarding responsible provision into reality. So far as the regional experience goes, the regionalization of responsibility in Southeast
95 FIVE Sorting and (much) more: prior ability, school effects and the impact of ability tracking on educational inequalities in achievement Hartmut Esser The problem There is hardly a country without educational inequalities based on social origin. The results of sociological research on inequality in general, international comparative studies, and some systematic comparisons between national studies, however, reveal clear differences (see inter alia, Kao and Thompson, 2003; Müller and Kogan, 2010: 252ff.; Hanushek and Wößmann, 2011). From the very
163 Journal of Poverty and Social Justice • vol 25 • no 2 • 163–76 • © Policy Press 2017 • #JPSJ Print ISSN 1759 8273 • Online ISSN 1759 8281 • https://doi.org/10.1332/175982717X14937395831424 Accepted for publication 31 March 2017 • First published online 06 May 2017 article SPECIAL ISSUE • Disability and Conditional Social Security Benefits Assessment of work ability in competing strands of social insurance: the German case Patrizia Aurich-Beerheide, patrizia.aurich-beerheide@uni-due.de Martin Brussig, martin.brussig@uni-due.de University of Duisburg
Can the criminal justice system achieve justice based on its ability to determine the truth?
Drawing on a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the concept of truth – its complexities and nuances – and scrutinizes how well the criminal justice process facilitates truth-finding. From allegation to sentencing, the chapters take the reader on a journey through the criminal justice system, exposing the marginalization of truth-finding in favour of other jurisprudential or systemic values, such as expediency, procedural fairness and the presumption of innocence.
This important work bridges the gap between what people expect from the criminal justice system and what it can legitimately deliver.
