Sociology of Education (Half Term)

Poor students lag academically behind their more advantaged peers, and explanations for this achievement gap are hotly debated. While some have pointed to the quality of education offered in public schools as the primary culprit, others have drawn attention to the role of out-of-school factors in creating and exacerbating these gaps. In this course, which is a graduate-level introduction to the sociology of education, we make sense of competing explanations of pre-K-12 educational performance through a sociological lens, and evaluate the possibilities for and barriers to closing achievement gaps.