The tendency of much of the research on educational disadvantage has been to see schooling as a constant rather than a variable. Working-class disadvantage is theorized as attributable, in part, to schools valuing performances in such a way as to turn cultural or linguistic differences between children into deficits for working-class children. In this view the school is assumed to be ‘middle-class’ and thus to be well adapted to the middle-class child. However, much of the research which underpins this view can be reconstrued from a different perspective. Whatever schools do, it is for the most part mediated through verbal communication. A re-examination of communication research shows that it is possible to theorize in terms of a school communication failure rather than a working-class cultural/linguistic difference-cum-deficit. This failure is evident when school talk is examined from the standpoint of its metacognitive quality. The school communication pattern is ill adapted to both working-class and middle-class clients but middle-class children survive it better.
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