1. Sociological Perspectives
1.1. Before better educational programs can be designed, educators must know what works and what does not.
1.2. A sociological perspective, while recognizing human capacity for free will, emphasizes the power that external forces have on individual choices and how these are often related to group differences within the social stratification system.
1.3. The institutional level includes societies major institutions, such as the families, schools, churches, and synogogues, business and government, and the media, all of which play an important role in socialization.
1.4. The intrapsychic level includes individual thoughts, beliefs, values, and feelings, which are to a large degree shaped by the societies, institutions, and interactions.
1.5. One of the best known is Ned Flanders interaction analysis scale.
1.5.1. This method involves the use of observers who watch classroom interactions and note these interactions on a standard scale.
1.5.2. Flanders hypothesized that students performance and learning is greatest when teacher influence is direct--that is, when there were other classroom interactions besides teacher talk.
1.6. Schools-as well as parents, churches, synagogues, and other groups-shape children's perceptions of the world by processes of socialization.
2. Philosophy of Education
2.1. Pragmatism
2.1.1. Founders were George Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey.
2.1.2. Pragmatism is a philosophy that encourages people to find processes that work in order to achieve their desired ends.
2.1.3. Pragmatists are action oriented, experimentally grounded, and will generally pose questions such as "What will work to achieve my desired end?"
2.2. Generic Notions
2.2.1. The school became an "embryonic community" where children could learn skills both experientially as well as from books, in addition to traditional information, which would enable them to work cooperatively in a democratic society.
2.2.2. Dewey's ideas about education proposed that educators start with the needs and interests of the child in the classroom, allow the child to participate in planning his or her course of study, employ project method or group learning, and depend heavily on experiential learning.
2.2.3. He advocated both freedom and responsibility for students.
2.2.4. Dewey's progressive methodology rested on the notion that children were active, organic beings, growing and changing, and thus required a course of study that would reflect their particular stages of development.
2.3. Goal of Education
2.3.1. Dewey stressed the importance of the school as a place where ideas can be implemented, challenged, and restructured, with the goal of providing students with the knowledge of how to improve the social order.
2.3.2. Dewey's vision of schooling must be understood as part of the larger project of social progress and improvement.
2.3.3. The primary role of education was growth.
2.4. Role of the Teacher
2.4.1. The teacher assumes the peripheral position of the facilitator, not the authoritarian figure from which all knowledge flows.
2.4.2. The teacher encourages, offers suggestions, questions, and helps plan and implement courses of study.
2.4.3. The teacher also write curriculum and must have a command of several disciplines in order to create and implement curriculum.
2.5. Methods of Instruction
2.5.1. Dewey proposed that children learn both individually and in groups.
2.5.2. Problem solving or inquiry method- children should start their mode of inquiry by posing questions about what they want to know.
2.5.3. Formal instruction was abandoned. Traditional blocks of time for specific discipline instruction were eliminated. Furniture, usually nailed to the floor was discarded and favor of tables and chairs that could be grouped as needed.
2.5.4. Children could converse quietly with one another, could stand up and stretch if warranted, and could pursure independent study or group work.
2.6. Curriculum
2.6.1. A particular subject matter under investigation by students, such as whales, would yield problems to be solved using math, science, history, reading, writing, music, art, wood or metal working, cooking, and sewing--all the academic and vocational disciplines in an integrated, interconnected way.
3. Schools as Organizations
3.1. The Structure of U.S. Education
3.1.1. In the U.S., we have public and private educational systems that sometimes work in tandem and sometimes in opposition.
3.1.2. The purpose of discussing the organization of schools should be clear--without a sense of structure, one has little way of grasping it as a whole.
3.1.3. It is the product of ideology, pragmatism, and history. It is unlike virtually any other educational system because the U.S. system is so decentralized and so dedicated to the concept of equal educational opportunity.
3.2. International Comparisons
3.2.1. Countries vary considerably by how they organize their school systems.
3.2.2. Few school systems are as complex as that in the U.S.; for instance, most countries have a National Ministry of Education or a Department of Education that is able to exert considerable influence over the entire educational system.
3.2.3. Education in the U.S. is fundamentally inclusive in its purposes; most other educational systems are not as inclusive. Individuals in other systems undergo a very rigorous academic rite of passage that is designed to separate the "academically talented" from the less gifted.
3.3. Teachers, Teaching, and Professionalization
3.3.1. Teachers are expected to perform miracles with children but are seldom given the respect that professionals supposedly deserve.
3.3.2. Teachers are asked to put in 60-hour weeks but are paid relatively small salaries.
3.3.3. Teachers are expected to reform education, but are left out of the educational reform process.
3.3.4. Teachers are the key players in education but their voices are seldom heard and their knowledge is terribly underutilized, and even devalued.
3.4. Senators
3.4.1. Jefferson Sessions
3.4.2. Richard Shelby
3.5. District 5: Member of the House
3.5.1. Mo Brooks
3.6. State Superintendent
3.6.1. Tommy Bice
3.7. District 5 Representative
3.7.1. Ella B. Bice
3.8. Local Superintendent
3.8.1. Suzy Baker
4. Curriculum and Pedagogy
4.1. Social Efficiency Curriculum
4.1.1. Philosophically pragmatist approach developed in the early twentieth centry as a democratic response to the development of mass publuc secondary education.
4.1.2. Rather than viewing the need for a common academic curriculum for all students, as with the humanist tradition, the social efficiency curriculum was rooted in the belief that different groups of students, with different sets of needs and aspirations, should receive different types of schooling.
4.1.3. Based on the writings of Frederick Taylor about the management of the factory system, the administration of schools began to mirror this form of social organization, with its emphasis on efficiency, time on task, and a social division of labor.
4.1.4. Many critics question the moral basis of providing different students with such radically different school experiences.
4.1.5. Alabama's 5th Congressional District
5. Educational Inequality
5.1. Interactionism
5.1.1. Suggests that one must understand how people within institutions such as families and schools interact on a daily basis in order to comprehend the factors explaining academic success and failure.
5.1.2. In addition to studying empirical data on school outcomes,, which often explains what happens, one must also look into the lives and worlds of families and schools in order to understand why it happens.
5.1.3. The next step is to explain race-, class-, and gender-based inequalities of educational attainment and achievement.
5.1.4. Researchers have posed two different sets of explanations.
5.1.4.1. The first is centered on factors outside of the school, such as the family, the community, the culture of the group, the peer group, and the individual student.
5.1.4.1.1. These explanations are often termed as student-centered or extra-school explanations.
5.1.4.2. The second is cenetered on factors within the school, such as teachers and teaching methods, curriculum, ability grouping and curriculum tracking, school climate, and teacher expectations.
6. Educational Reform
6.1. Educational Reaction and Reform and the Standards Era
6.1.1. Critics argued that the preoccupation with using the schools to improve social problems not only failed but was part of an overall process that resulted in mass mediocrity.
6.1.2. Radical critics located the problem not so much in the schools but in the society at large.
6.1.3. The commission offered 5 solutions:
6.1.3.1. All students graduating high school complete what was termed the "new basics"--four years of English, three years of math, three years of science, three years of social studies, and a half year of computer science.
6.1.3.2. Schools at all levels expect higher achievement from their students and that four-year colleges and universities raise their admissions requirements.
6.1.3.3. More time be devoted to teaching the new basics.
6.1.3.4. The preparation of teachers be strengthened and that teaching be made a more respected and rewarded profession.
6.1.3.5. Citizens require their elected representatives to support and fund these reforms.
6.1.4. William Bennett took an active and critical role but continued to argue that it was not the federal government's role to fund such reform; and educators, at all levels, struggled to have a say in determining the nature of reforms.
6.1.5. Conservatives wanted to restore both the standards and the traditional curriculum.
6.1.6. School choice movement seeks to give parents the right to choose the public school to send their children, rather than the traditional method where one's school was based on neighborhood zoning patterns.
7. Politics of Education
7.1. Neo-liberal
7.1.1. Like conservatives, free market solves social problems better than governmental policy.
7.1.2. Like conservatives, educational success or failure is the result of individual effort rather than of social and economic factors.
7.1.3. Like liberals, state intervention in the educational system is at times necessary to ensure equality of opportunity.
7.1.4. Neo-liberals blame failing schools and ineffective teachers as the primary causes of school and student failures.
7.2. Traditional
7.2.1. Schools necessary to the transmission of the traditional values of U.S. society.
7.2.1.1. Hard work
7.2.1.2. Family unity
7.2.1.3. Individual initiative
7.2.2. Schools should pass on the best of what was and what is.