How Psychology Is Used to Justify Inequality in Schools

Critics say dominant psychological models obscure structural racism and reinforce deficit views of students.

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A new article in the Journal of Education Policy argues that the widespread use of psychological science in UK education policy is reinforcing, rather than addressing, systemic inequality. Researchers Sarah Gillborn (University of Birmingham) and Thomas Delahunty (Maynooth University) call for a rethinking of how educational research is framed, warning that “common sense” psychological approaches can obscure structural causes of educational disparities.

In particular, the authors criticize the uncritical use of positivist methods—especially quantitative research—that pathologize individual students while ignoring social, political, and cultural contexts.

“Psychological research mentors and theories, therefore, command a level of respect, and ‘common sense’ assumptions regarding the objectivity, validity, and generalisability of these methods receive little critical attention, especially within the educational policy discourse.” 

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Kelli Grant
Kelli has two Master’s degrees, in Criminal Justice and Sociology. In 2024, Kelli was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and a Kentucky Colonel designation for her demonstrated contributions to academia, her community, and professionally. She believes that qualitative research methods can provide a deeper understanding of social systems and experiences. Kelli has her own experiences with the mental health care system as a late-diagnosed autistic woman. Those experiences, as well as her academic training and advocacy work the past 20 years, motivates her to help bring about a fundamental shift in how we approach mental health care, especially for the most vulnerable in our society. She resides in Kansas.

1 COMMENT

  1. A bunch of academics find that psychological frameworks are used to justify inequality, but that is a petty human insight available to anyone through perception, and it is a much vaster and more widespread problem throughout the socially conditioned human consciousness which is composed largely of the prejudices created by psuedo-experts of every kind which include the academics making this very argument in the first place. See how absurd it is to make a problem of the way psychological frameworks reinforce systemic inequality rather then boring down into the roots of the problem which is an unstable, fractured and confused social consciousness being managed by every kind of psuedo-expert, celebrity gossip, opinion collumns, conspiracy theorists, ideologues of every kind, spiritual quacks and vampires and ‘wellness gurus’ etc: see how worthless and impotent is our insight if we don’t see the total problem which means always tracing them to their root process IN THE ACTUAL, not inscribing on the actual your own circumscribing conceptual and theoretical limitations which is what you do here as always. Academics are the most petty and trivial contributors to the field of critique of psychiatry today if you ask me.

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