6.1 Education
LO 6.1: Examine education using a sociological eye.
Education became a formalized institution during the Industrial Revolution. The Founders of the United States believed a strong democracy depended on educating the people (Kober, 2020). Therefore, the federal government gave land to states and local communities to set up and manage public schools.
What is Education?
As an institution, education is the formalized approach to teaching knowledge, skills, and culture. The educational system includes private, public, and charter K-12 schools, preschools, colleges, and universities. Teachers, janitors, principals, counselors, students, coaches, bus drivers, and others fill the roles needed to run the school. Blake (2023) used a sociological eye to study one of these roles for her research: that of high school counselors.
The Role of High School Counselors
The American School Counselor Association (2023) advises that schools have one counselor for every 250 students (or 250-to-1 ratio). On average, U.S. high schools meet this recommendation. Still, many schools have counselors serving many more students. Further, some schools have a large portion of students facing social problems that hinder their education, such as homelessness, hunger, or poverty, and therefore need counselors to work with fewer students.
Blake (2023) studied high school counselors at the macro, meso, and micro levels. She focused on the conflict between counselors’ training and their day-to-day jobs. Professionally (at the macro level), high school counselors are trained to address their students’ mental health and socio-emotional needs and guide course selection and post-graduation plans. However, the student-to-counselor ratio on any given day was often high at the school Blake studied (the meso level). Administrators would assign work like substitute teaching to counselors, taking them away from advising students. Therefore, counselors strategized to manage their workload at the micro level, resisting these meso-level demands by focusing on their professional role.
At the micro level, counselors met with students in groups to create their course schedules. They only met one-on-one with students who needed more attention. Blake (2023) and the counselors find their strategies imperfect and leave some students behind. One counselor Blake interviewed said, ” ‘It’s usually the really gifted ones that I spend a lot of time trying to get them into the school that they’re looking to … Or the really challenged ones that take up a lot of time’ ” (p. 9). The counselors understood that the students in the middle get less attention. Meso-level factors made it challenging to devote much high-quality time to them.
Photo 6.2
A High School Student Meeting with Their Guidance Counselor
One outcome of the limited time school counselors have for individualized attention to students is the growth of the private educational consultant industry. Higher-income households can pay private professional college consultants to fill the gap left by schools. They pay upward of $300 an hour for personalized help getting their children into their preferred college (Goldstein & Healy, 2019). As a result, children from higher-income households gain advantages in applying to college, while children from lower- and middle-income households are disadvantaged.