Foundations of Education

1. Chapter 9: Explanations of Educational Inequality

1.1. Types of Cultural Differences Theory:

1.2. 1. John Ogbu conducted research on African Americans and how they deny their personal heritage and start acting like the majority, which is usually middle-class white people.

1.3. 2. Bourdieu's research showed that social and cultural capital help us understand how cultural differences affect education. Higher class people involve their students in cultural things like trips to museums and social capital like networking with colleges. Lower class people usually don't use either of those.

1.4. Four School Centered Explanations of Inequalities:

1.5. 1. School Financing: Private schools or suburban schools make more money to fund their schools than urban or inner-city schools.

1.6. 2. Effective School Research: Predominantly white schools have a more effective learning environment than predominantly colored schools.

1.7. 3. Gender and Schooling: Women have lesser opportunities for education than men.

1.8. 4. Curriculum and Ability Grouping: There is unequal education for different groups of students.

2. Chapter 7: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and the Transmission of Knowledge

2.1. I advocate the Self Efficiency Curriculum because it follows my guidelines of my personal educational philosophy in that students with certain educational needs need to be taught specifically for their needs. They're also not really into standardized testing and I am all for no standardized testing.

2.2. The two dominant types of traditions in teaching are mimetic and transformative. Mimetic teaching relies on lecturing and the relationship between the teacher and the student. Transformative teaching focuses on actually impacting the student's life by not acting like an authority figure bur rather by being almost like a friend/mentor.

3. Chapter 10: Educational Reform and School Improvement

3.1. School-Based Reforms:

3.1.1. Project specifications

3.1.2. End User requirements

3.1.3. Action points sign-off

3.2. 1. School-to-Work Programs: Schools wanted non-college bound students to be able to gain certain skills to help them in the work force.

3.3. 2. Teacher Quality: Schools follow the NCLB's rules for hiring teachers who meet the qualifications to teach in a classroom. A majority of teachers in urban schools do not meet those requirements

3.4. Reforms That Impact Education:

3.5. 1. Political: State boards of education are required to reward schools that perform well on, what I assume, is standardized tests and to sanction those that don't. That effects education because some states can actually completely take over a school if they think it's not meeting the right standards and that completely takes away the rights of teachers and students.

3.6. 2. Community: Teaching the community as a whole rather than focusing on one student can benefit a school tremendously. Schools focus on not just a student's educational needs but also social, psychological, and physical needs.

4. Chapter 8: Equality of Opportunity and Educational Outcomes

4.1. Class: Being in school requires a lot of money whether you're paying the state for fees or you're using your own money for books if your school can't afford them so if you're in the lower economic class it maybe a little more difficult to stay in school when it's taking up all your money.

4.1.1. Materials

4.1.2. Personnel

4.1.3. Services

4.1.4. Duration

4.2. Race: Apparently race still effects your education or what kind of education you receive. The book says where only 5.2% of white Americans dropout, 9.3 percent of African Americans dropout and 17.6 of Hispanic Americans dropout as well. People of color also have lower literacy levels compared to white people.

4.3. Gender: In older times, men had more of an educational opportunity than women. Today, however, women are better at reading while men apparently are better at math.

4.4. The responses of the Coleman Study from 1982 was that private schools had more effective learning environments than public schools because they focus more on academics rather than sports.

5. Chapter 6: Schools as Organizations

5.1. Major Stakeholders in Cullman County Board of Education

5.2. - Local Superintendent- Shane Barnette

5.3. Changes within school processes and cultures involve conflict with teachers and their school board to change something about the school, new behaviors like establishing relationships and trust, team building and making group decisions about the school, and the processes a school has to go through in order to complete a task.