Teachers' polarisation 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 provide pupils with equal educational opportunities. The thesis of this paper is that instruction in heterogeneous classrooms is grounded in the dialectics of social control and instruction. To instruct, teachers must maintain social order in the classroom; yet attempts to impose control upon pupils' behaviour are not conducive to efficient instruction 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 report that they make more efforts at socialization of low-achieving pupils, who need more control. Our third hypothesis is that the lower a teacher's polarisation between high- and low-achieving students, the lower 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 towards high- and low-achieving pupils in the cognitive and affective domains. The findings show that teachers do indeed have independent cognitive and affective educational aims. Moreover, while teachers tend to adopt egalitarian norms, nonetheless they report that they divide their labour by stressing improvement of cognitive skills with high-achieving pupils, while expecting low-achieving pupils to improve their self-esteem, social skills and discipline. These expectations are significantly correlated with the social distribution of achievements.