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Achievement ideology is the belief that one reaches a socially perceived definition of success through hard work and education. In this view, factors such as gender, race/ethnicity, economic background, social networks, or neighborhoods/geography are secondary to hard work and education or are altogether irrelevant in the pursuit of success.
In 2002, Sandra L. Barnes, [1] offered that people who believe in the American achievement ideology most likely blame underachievement on attitudinal or moral differences among individuals. For those who disagree with the achievement ideology, this difference in attitude is most likely the result of an oppositional response to negative institutional and structural forces. In her study, Barnes found that those who most benefit from achievement ideology (white males in higher class neighborhoods, for example) are most likely to espouse the achievement ideology. For example, African Americans are more likely than whites to believe that race is an ascribed trait that helps some achieve success more easily than others, and those with higher incomes are more likely to claim that having a strong social network is an unimportant factor for success. All respondent groups, however, believe that education and hard work are most important for success, proving that achievement ideology is alive and well. Ultimately, Barnes argues that success is best reached when one has an achievement-oriented attitude coupled with the actual ability to accomplish one's goals. While most people might have the proper attitude, structural factors can keep them from achieving.
Donna Y. Ford [2] sought to discover the differences in ideologies between male and female and gifted and nongifted African American students. Ford describes four theories related to achievement ideology – need achievement, test anxiety, social learning and attribution theories:
Social scientists who advocate this theory believe that one's achievement is a product of the motivation to succeed and the motivation to avoid failure. This means that individuals weigh their expectancy of success with the value they place on that success, or, how well an individual thinks they can do and how much doing well actually matters.
As with need achievement theory, social scientists who support test anxiety theory look to how a student evaluates her/his ability to succeed. Students who are preoccupied with the outcome of their performance, who fear failure or humiliation if they do not perform well, might not perform well because this anxiety stifles their performance. [3]
According to social learning theory, students are socialized from an early age and hold different expectations or values based on their own experience or social situation. [4] Students who are raised in an atmosphere of underachievement, who often see previous generations and family members not succeed, will most likely internalize these values and perceive their own success as unlikely.
This theory explains a lack of motivation in students as a result of the students' belief in achievement ideology. When students attribute their own failure to a lack of ability, they consequently are less likely to expect to do well. If a student fully believes in the achievement ideology, failure can only be a result of lack of ability or lack of effort.
Ford claims that, while these four theories may explain underachievement in some students, they only focus on students' lack of motivation to achieve and do not consider a student's failure despite her/his desire to achieve. She describes this as the "paradox of underachievement," a discrepancy between a student's ideology and their actual achievement (i.e., when students do not do well in school despite their support of the achievement ideology). In her study, the majority of both gifted and nongifted African American students claimed that school is "very important." The majority of male and female African American students alike responded that school was important or very important. If this is true that most students are, in fact, motivated and view school as important for success, a student's failure must be explained by some other variable—most likely ascribed variables like race/ethnicity, gender, and so on.
Belief in the American achievement ideology causes employers to look to an individual's educational success as the key factor in hiring potential employees because achievement ideology perpetuates the notion that those who have succeeded educationally are the most hard working. In Education and Jobs, Ivar Berg writes, "The increase in educational requirements for middle-level jobs…may thus be taking place at some cost to a society that has historically prided itself on its mobility opportunities." [5] This process causes America's education system to act more like a "licensing agency" [6] rather than promoting education for education's sake. This, in turn, causes many employees to be overqualified for their jobs.
When jobs gradually require higher and higher educational attainment as a prerequisite, the effort put into achieving these prerequisites (or, the effort put into school) does not equal the needed effort or skill at one's job. Thus, workers' endorsement of achievement ideology decreases each year that they remain in a particular job for which they are overqualified. [7] In other words, employees begin to see the effort they put forth in school as unnecessary.
Jay MacLeod studied two groups of boys and young men who lived in a low-income neighborhood for his book, Ain't No Makin' It . [8] The "Hallway Hangers," a group of mostly white boys, did not endorse meritocracy, the American achievement ideology. MacLeod found that their skepticism was a result of several factors. First, although the Hallway Hangers' parents wanted their children to do well, they knew from their own experience that encouraging high aspirations would only set them up for failure and disappointment. [9] Both parents and children were affected by the environment of underachievement.
The Hallway Hangers and their parents rejected the achievement ideology because they did not see job success through hard work to be a likely outcome in their situation, a situation in which few family members ever succeeded financially, where job opportunities were few and where hard work in school rarely influenced employability. Moreover, if the Hallway Hangers were to accept the achievement ideology, this would logically entail the belief that their parents had not succeeded financially because they were lazy or unintelligent. The Hallway Hangers knew this was not true. [10] Ironically, though the Caucasian Hallway Hangers understood that the achievement ideology was false in their case, they were not able to understand that it was equally false in the case of African Americans. The Hallway Hangers were kept from this understanding by their belief in another powerful American ideology, that of racism and the intellectual inferiority of Blacks. Their racism sustained and in turn was bolstered by their sense that their own success was impeded because racial minorities received special treatment from programs such as Affirmative Action that gave Blacks an unfair advantage. Therefore, whereas the Hallway Hangers recognized that they failed to succeed financially because of their position in the lower class, they could not see that class exploitation was also responsible for the financial failure of African Americans. In addition to attributing inferiority to African Americans, the Hallway Hangers also scapegoated them, blaming them for taking all of the jobs that they, as white, believed they deserved.
MacLeod's analysis is completed by the analysis of a second group that called itself "The Brothers". Composed of African-American young men, The Brothers lived in the same housing project as the Hallway Hangers. They, however, did endorse meritocracy, the American ideology of achievement. The Brothers understood the racial situation in America to have been vastly improved since the time of their parents. [11] This led them to the belief that each generation of Blacks had worked harder than the last: if they did the same, they would be able to do well in school and succeed in the workforce. Though The Brothers lived in the same housing project, they had done so for far less time than the Hallway Hangers. Some of the Hallway Hangers' families had resided in "Clarendon Heights" for three generations. [12] Many of The Brothers had moved to the housing project from far worse situations and even poorer neighborhoods. Their recent arrival caused them to think that they were upwardly mobile. Due to their optimism, they were much more likely than the Hallway Hangers to find viable employment after school. Their belief in meritocracy, and their hard work in school, for a time allowed them to overcome the racism and class structures that defeated their aspirations in the outside world. In contrast to the Hallway Hangers, the Brothers graduated from high school and did not get arrested. They knew that the Hallway Hangers' ideology of racial inferiority was false, but often blamed themselves when they did not do better in school even after working hard. MacLeod notes that unlike the Hallway Hangers, the Brothers were less conscious of how "the deck was stacked against them." [13] Their acceptance of the achievement ideology meant that they turned the blame on themselves rather than on the inequality of the larger social structures. In this way, acceptance of the achievement ideology contributes to the continuation of structural inequality.
MacLeod explains the Brothers' mediocre grades by introducing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, and describes how schools systematically valorize the skills and knowledge of the upper class while deprecating the cultural capital of the lower class. Though all the Brothers initially believe in the concept of the achievement ideology, as they enter the workforce, they find themselves subject to the racism and classism that they had previously underestimated.
MacLeod had predicted the Brothers would do much better than the Hallway Hangers given that they conformed to rather than rejected societal expectations. But only Craig and Mike, the white member, attained a degree of success by mainstream standards. According to MacLeod, several of the Brothers still retained faith in the achievement ideology, but were "hard pressed to parlay their academic credentials into economic prosperity" [14] given the enduring structural and cultural inequality.
In sociology, habitus is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.
Meritocracy is the notion of a political system in which economic goods or political power are vested in individual people based on ability and talent, rather than wealth or social class. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement. Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the first known use of the term was by sociologist Alan Fox in the journal Socialist Commentary in 1956. It was then popularized by sociologist Michael Dunlop Young, who used the term in his dystopian political and satirical book The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958. Today, the term is often utilised to refer to social systems, in which personal advancement and success are primarily attributed to an individual's capabilities and merits.
Racial color blindness refers to the belief that a person's race or ethnicity should not influence their legal or social treatment in society.
Intellectual giftedness is an intellectual ability significantly higher than average. It is a characteristic of children, variously defined, that motivates differences in school programming. It is thought to persist as a trait into adult life, with various consequences studied in longitudinal studies of giftedness over the last century. There is no generally agreed definition of giftedness for either children or adults, but most school placement decisions and most longitudinal studies over the course of individual lives have followed people with IQs in the top 2.5 percent of the population—that is, IQs above 130. Definitions of giftedness also vary across cultures.
Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem. It was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas, according to whom self-handicaps are obstacles created, or claimed, by the individual in anticipation of failing performance.
Achievement gaps in the United States are observed, persistent disparities in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U.S. students, especially groups defined by socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity and gender. The achievement gap can be observed through a variety of measures, including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, college enrollment, and college completion rates. The gap in achievement between lower income students and higher income students exists in all nations and it has been studied extensively in the U.S. and other countries, including the U.K. Various other gaps between groups exist around the globe as well.
Differential Educational Achievement (DEA) is a sociological term often given to a concept that disagrees with some of the functionalist views on education.
Soft skills, also known as power skills, common skills, essential skills, or core skills, are psychosocial skills generally applicable to all professions. These include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency. This is in contrast to hard skills, which are specific to individual professions.
In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. The concept was originally proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura.
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct field research may simply observe animals interacting with their environments, whereas social scientists conducting field research may interview or observe people in their natural environments to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures.
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.
Oppositional culture, also known as the "blocked opportunities framework" or the "caste theory of education", is a term most commonly used in studying the sociology of education to explain racial disparities in educational achievement, particularly between white and black Americans. However, the term refers to any subculture's rejection of conformity to prevailing norms and values, not just nonconformity within the educational system. Thus many criminal gangs and religious cults could also be considered oppositional cultures.
An at-risk student is a term used in the United States to describe a student who requires temporary or ongoing intervention in order to succeed academically. At risk students, sometimes referred to as at-risk youth or at-promise youth, are also adolescents who are less likely to transition successfully into adulthood and achieve economic self-sufficiency. Characteristics of at-risk students include emotional or behavioral problems, truancy, low academic performance, showing a lack of interest for academics, and expressing a disconnection from the school environment. A school's effort to at-risk students is essential. For example, a study showed that 80% to 87% of variables that led to a school's retention are predictable with linear modeling. In January 2020, Governor Newsom of California changed all references to "at-risk" to "at-promise" in the California Penal Codes.
Elitism is the belief or notion that individuals who form an elite—a select group of people perceived as having an intrinsic and desirable quality such as high intellect, wealth, power, physical attractiveness, notability, special skills, experience, lineage or other desirable traits—are more likely to be constructive to society as a whole, and therefore deserve influence or authority greater than that of others. The term elitism may be used to describe a situation in which power is concentrated in the hands of a limited number of people. Beliefs that are in opposition to elitism include egalitarianism, anti-intellectualism, populism, and the political theory of pluralism.
Laissez-faire racism is closely related to color blindness and covert racism, and is theorised to encompass an ideology that blames minorities for their poorer economic situations, viewing it as the result of cultural inferiority. The term is used largely by scholars of whiteness studies, who argue that laissez-faire racism has tangible consequences even though few would openly claim to be, or even believe they are, laissez-faire racists.
Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be mastery or performance oriented, based on whether one's goal is to develop one's ability or to demonstrate one's ability, respectively. A mastery orientation is also sometimes referred to as a learning orientation.
Social privilege is an advantage or entitlement that benefits individuals belonging to certain groups, often to the detriment of others. Privileged groups can be advantaged based on social class, wealth, education, caste, age, height, skin color, physical fitness, nationality, geographic location, cultural differences, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, neurodiversity, physical disability, sexual orientation, religion, and other differentiating factors. Individuals can be privileged in one area, such as education, and not privileged in another area, such as health. The amount of privilege any individual has may change over time, such as when a person becomes disabled, or when a child becomes a young adult.
In social and developmental psychology, an individual's implicit theory of intelligence refers to his or her fundamental underlying beliefs regarding whether or not intelligence or abilities can change, developed by Carol Dweck and colleagues.
Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs is a 1977 book on education, written by British social scientist and cultural theorist Paul Willis. A Columbia University Press edition, titled the "Morningside Edition," was published in the United States shortly after its reception.
Success is the state or condition of meeting a defined range of expectations. It may be viewed as the opposite of failure. The criteria for success depend on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One person might consider a success what another person considers a failure, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game. Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a success, another might consider to be a failure, a qualified success or a neutral situation. For example, a film that is a commercial failure or even a box-office bomb can go on to receive a cult following, with the initial lack of commercial success even lending a cachet of subcultural coolness.
