FOLK NORMS AND SCHOOL REFORM: ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

Turner's (1960) sponsored and contest mobility framework has been much utilized in analyzing mobility in England and the United States. This paper focuses on Turner's more central concern with how folk norms influence educational practices and the efforts to reform them. To test Turner's proposition that reformers and reform debates are bound by the logic of folk norms, I investigated efforts to reform the General Certificate of Education examinations in English secondary education between 1966 and 1976. Qualitative analysis of focused interviews and documentary data suggests that English educators and reformers alike were by and large actuated and constrained by sponsorship beliefs. But the paper moves beyond Turner. It reveals how sponsorship folk norms and functions are inscribed in the ideology and interests of particular educational constituencies who effectively institutionalized and perpetuated sponsorship principles in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]