Differential Educational Attainment

verbal deficit theory, which is an attempt to account for the social distribution of educational attainment, was first advanced in the late 1950s in Britain and the early 1960s in the USA, though there had been forerunners. At various times in the history of mass education different explanations have been offered for the phenomenon called differential educational attainment – the fact that children who pass through an education system reach very different levels of attainment, as measured by the criteria in general use at the time. To some extent such differences are also reflected in the age at which pupils leave the education system itself. Verbal deficit theories constitute a relatively recent attempt to explain differential educational attainment. Verbal deficit theories are generally presented not in isolation, but as the key element in more general theories of cultural deficit or deprivation or, in the case of Bernstein's collected papers on sociolinguistics, within the framework of much more ambitious sociological theories.