Robin Nash ("Keeping In With Teacher", 1972)

To explore the possible effect that teachers have on the educational performance of their pupils (and, by extension, to test the relative influence that factors external to the school contribute to a child's educational success or failure) Nash argues we should place teachers in a central role in the educational process.

However, rather than seeing the teaching role in relatively passive terms (such as the role proposed by Marxists such as Althusser, Bowles and Gintis and so forth), Nash argues that we should see this role as a more active one; a role, in short, that helps to create and perpetuate educational differences.

Nash suggests one way of empirically exploring the teaching role is to use Kelly's "Personal Construct Theory". This involves the idea that an individual views significant events and people in their life through what are called "personal bi-polar constructs". That is, in terms of a dichotomy between two, opposed, ideas (for example, in terms of "good or bad", "clever or stupid", "quiet or noisy").

The first step in the process of understanding how teachers view their pupils is to find out how an individual views the relative value of two ideas (for example, does a teacher value a quiet pupil rather than a noisy pupil; do they value a clever pupil over a stupid pupil and so forth). These values are personal (subjective) in that they are created by individual teachers; however, since we are also talking about a teaching role we would expect a broad convergence between individual teachers about the things they have learned to value while performing the role of teacher (the majority of teachers, for example, would value quietness over noisiness in their pupils because the former makes the teaching process much easier for the teacher).

Once the relative values have been established, it is then possible to apply a four-point scale to each pair of possible values. For example:

1. Is someone (quiet / clever / good)?
2. Does someone tend to be (quiet / clever / good)?
3. Does someone tend to be the opposite of (quiet / clever / good)?
4. Is someone the opposite of (quiet / clever / good)?

In the statistical interpretation and presentation of teacher attitudes, each paired quality is scored (1 to 4) on the basis of the above. Thus, if a teacher values a quiet pupil more than a noisy pupil, then the former scores 1 and the latter scores 4 in relation to the "quiet / noisy" dichotomy. Overall, the pupils who score the lowest across a range of valued qualities are the ones who the teacher regards most highly.

Nash argues that this "teacher regard" is translated, through classroom interaction, into higher educational achievement. Those children who are most highly regarded by the teacher are the ones who eventually achieve educational success in terms of the various qualifications that they achieve.

In this respect, there is a strong (positive) correlation between a child's "construct rank" (the way a teacher perceives them) and their achievement. However, Nash argues that there is a weak correlation between social class background and achievement.

For Nash, the most important variable here is the perception a teacher has of a pupil's social class (their subjective interpretation of a pupil's class background).

He found this perception tends to be put in terms of home background rather than in specific class terms (a dichotomy between a "good" and a "bad" home background). The implication is that a "good home background" correlates to being middle / upper class and a "bad home background" correlates with being working class - but the fit is not perfect. A child from a working class home can be perceived by their teacher as being from a good home, just as the opposite might be the case. All kinds of subjective interpretations will come into play in the perception of a child's home background (how the child is dressed, how it speaks, the teacher's contacts with a child's parents and so forth).

Thus, while objective social class is invariably found to be important, Nash argues that the relationship between social class and achievement is opaque, rather than transparent. That is, social class tends to be filtered through a teacher's perception of the child's home background and, therefore, the way the teacher identifies and interprets this background is going to be the most important factor in a child's eventual educational achievement. The implications of this argument are clear:

If a working class child can, through their behaviour, appearance, etc., convince a teacher they are from a "good background", their chances of educational success are enhanced. Since a "poor home background" is associated in the mind of the teacher with low ability, the labelling of a child in this way leads to a progressive interpretation and confirmation (in the teacher's mind) of a child's ability.

Bad behaviour, for example, is taken to be indicative of a poor home background which is taken, in turn, to be indicative of low ability. A child has low ability because of their poor home background which results in bad behaviour - a classic example of what Interactionists term a self-fulfilling prophecy (a teacher believes something to be true and this belief leads him / her to make it come true)...

Nash's overall conclusion is worth noting before we investigate further themes relating to the part played by schools in the process of educational differentiation.

"Certainly children of low social origin do poorly at school because they lack encouragement at home, because they use language in a different way from their teachers, because they have their own attitudes to learning and so on. But also because of the expectations their teachers have of them".