TEACHERS POLARIZATION IN HETEROGENEOUS CLASSROOMS AND THE SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION OF ACHIEVEMENT - AN ISRAELI CASE-STUDY

This paper addresses a pertinent question in the sociological study of classrooms: to what extent do teachers in heterogeneous classrooms pr ovide pupils with equal educational opportunities. The thesis of this paper is that instruction in heterogeneous classrooms is grounded in t he dialectics of social control and instruction. To instruct, teachers must maintain social order in the classroom; yet attempts to impose c ontrol upon pupils' behaviour are not conducive to efficient instructi on or learning. In view of this organizational duality, we hypothesize that teachers would tend to report that they make more instructional efforts towards those who need little control, namely, high-achieving pupils. At the same time, we hypothesize that teachers would tend to r eport that they make more efforts at socialization of low-achieving pu pils, who need more control. Our third hypothesis is that the lower a teacher's polarisation between high- and low-achieving students, the l ower the achievement gap between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The study measures the extent to which Israeli teachers in heterogeneous classrooms purport to make differential efforts towar ds high- and low-achieving pupils in the cognitive and affective domai ns. The findings show that teachers do indeed have independent cogniti ve and affective educational aims. Moreover, while teachers tend to ad opt egalitarian norms, nonetheless they report that they divide their labour by stressing improvement of cognitive skills with high-achievin g pupils, while expecting low-achieving pupils to improve their self-e steem, social skills and discipline. These expectations are significan tly correlated with the social distribution of achievements. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.