My Foundations of Education

1. Delivery Timeline

2. Equality of Opportunity

2.1. Class: Students in different social classes have different levels of educational experiences. There are several factors that can influence these class-based experiences. For instance, education is extremely expensive. The longer a student stays in school, the more likely he or she needs parental financial support.

2.2. Race: An individual's race has direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve. Among 16-24 year olds, for instance, 5.2 percent of white students drop out of school, where as 9.3 percent of African-American students and 17.6 Hispanic-American students are likely to drop out of school.

2.3. Gender: Historically, an individual's gender was directly related to his or her educational attainment. Even though women are often rated as being better students than men, in the pas they were less likely to attain the same level of education. Today, females are less likely to drop out of school than males, and are more likely to have a higher level of reading proficiency than males.

2.4. Responses to Coleman #1: In the past twelve years a body of empirical knowledge has accumulated, beginning with the Equality of Educational Opportunity survey and based on both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, which unequivocally indicates that, overall, between school differences in any measurable attribute of institutions are only modestly related to a variety of outcome variables.

2.5. Responses to Coleman #2: What then of Coleman, Hoffer, Kilgore's claim that Catholic schools are educationally superior to public schools? If trivial advantage is what they mean by such a claim, then we suppose we would have to agree. But judged against reasonable benchmarks, there is little basis for this conclusion.

3. Politics of Education

3.1. Four purposes of education

3.1.1. Economic

3.1.1.1. The economic purposes of schooling are to prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into the division of labor.

3.1.2. Intellectual

3.1.2.1. The intellectual purposes of schooling are to teach basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics; to transmit specific knowledge.

3.1.3. Politcal

3.1.3.1. The political purposes of schooling are to inculcate allegiance to the existing political order.

3.1.4. Social

3.1.4.1. The social purposes of schooling are to help solve social problems; to work as one of many institutions, such as family and the church to ensure social cohesion; and to socialize children into various roles,behaviors, and values of the society.

3.2. The role of the school

3.2.1. The conservative perspective sees the role of school as providing the necessary educational training to ensure that the most talented and hard-working individuals receive the tools necessary to maximize economic and social productivity.

3.3. Explanations of unequal performance

3.3.1. The liberal perspective argues that the individual students or groups of students begin school with different life chances and therefore some groups have significantly more advantages than others.

3.4. Definition of educational problems

3.4.1. The radical perspective argues

3.4.1.1. The educational system has failed the poor, minorities and women through classist, racist, sexist, and homophobic policies.

3.4.1.2. The schools have stiffled critical understanding of the problems of American society through a curriculum and teaching practices that promote conformity.

3.4.1.3. The traditional curriculum is classist, racist, sexist, and homophobic and leaves out the cultures, histories, and voices of the oppressed.

3.4.1.4. In general, the educational system promotes inequality of both opportunity and results.

4. Curriculum and Pedagogy

4.1. Humanist Curriculum: reflects the idea that knowledge of the traditional liberal arts is the cornerstone of an educated citizenry and that the purpose of education is to present to students the best of what has been thought and written.

4.2. The Mimetic Tradition: The tradition is named "mimetic" because it gives a central place to the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process.

4.3. The Transformative Tradition: The adjective "transformative" describes what this tradition deems successful teaching to be capable of accomplishing: a transformation of one kind or another in the person being taught--a qualitative change often of dramatic proportion, a metamorphosis, so to speak.

5. History of U.S. Education

5.1. Reform Movement

5.1.1. The choice movement seeks to give parents the right to choose the public school to send their children, rather than the traditional method in which one's school was based on neighborhood zoning patterns.

5.2. Historical interpretation of U.S. education

5.2.1. The Radical Revisionist School

5.2.1.1. Beginning in the 1960's, the optimistic vision of the democratic liberal historians began to be challenged by radical historians, sociologists, and political economists of education. The radical revisionist historians of education, as they have come to be called, revised the history of education in a critical direction.

6. Sociological Perspectives

6.1. Define Project Schedule

6.1.1. Dependencies

6.1.2. Milestones

6.2. Limitations

6.2.1. Schedule

6.2.2. Budget

6.3. Define Project Development Measurement

6.3.1. KPI's

7. Education Inequality

7.1. Cultural Deprivation Theory: Suggests that working-class and nonwhite families often lack the cultural resources, such as books and other educational stimuli, and thus arrive at school at a significant disadvantage.

7.2. Curriculum and Pedagogic Practices between schools: A larger proportion of students who attend schools in higher socioeconomic communities achieve well in school.

7.3. Within school-differences (Curriculum and Ability Grouping: Different groups of students in the same schools perform very differently which suggests that there may be school characteristics affecting these outcomes.

7.4. Gender and Schooling: Feminists believe that schooling often limits the educational opportunities and life chances of women in a number of ways.

7.5. Effective school research: If students from the same racial and socioeconomic backgrounds attending different schools within the same community perform at significantly different rates, then something within the schools themselves must be affecting student performance.

8. Educational Reform

8.1. School-to-work Programs: The intent of these programs were to extend what had been a vocational emphasis to non-college-bound students regarding skills necessary for successful employment and to stress the importance of work-based learning.

8.2. School-Business Partnerships: During the late 1980s, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nation's schools were not producing the kinds of graduates necessary for revitalization of the U.S. economy. These partnerships were formed to resolve the issue.

8.3. School Finance Reforms: The court ruled in 1990, stating that more funding was needed to serve the children in the poorer school districts. In order to provide a "thorough and efficient education" in urban districts, funding was equalized between urban and suburban school districts.

8.4. Full service and Community Schools: The plan to educate not only the whole child, but also the whole community.

9. Sociology of Education

9.1. Interactionalism

9.1.1. Interactional theories attempt to make the commonplace strange by turning on their heads everyday taken-for-granted behaviors and interactions between students and students, and between students and teachers.

9.2. Conflict theory

9.2.1. From a conflict point of view, schools are similar to social battlefields, where students struggle against teachers, teachers against administrators, and so on.

9.3. Functionalism

9.3.1. Educational reform, from a functional point of view, is supposed to create structures, programs, and curricula that are techinically advanced, rational and encourage social unity.

9.4. Five effects of schooling on individuals

9.4.1. Larger schools can offer students more in the way of facilities, but larger schools are also more bureaucratic and may restrain initiative.

9.4.2. Employment- most students believe that graduating from college will lead to greater employment opportunities, and they are right.

9.4.3. Knowledge and Attitudes- Generally, it is found that the higher the social class background of the student,the higher his or her achievement level.

9.4.4. Curriculum placement within schools has a direct impact on the probabilities of students attending college.

9.4.5. Teacher behavior has a huge impact on student learning and behavior. Teachers are models for student and, as instructional leaders, teachers set standards for students and influence student self-esteem and sense of efficacy.

10. Philosophy of Education

10.1. Existentialism philosophy of education

10.1.1. Generic notions: Basically, existentialists believe that individuals were places on this earth alone and must make some sense out of the chaos they encounter.

10.1.2. Goal of Education: Existentialists believe that education should focus on the needs of individuals, both cognitively and effectively.

10.1.3. Role of the Teacher: Teachers should understand their own "lived worlds" as well as that of their students in order to help their students achieve the best "lived worlds" they can.

10.1.4. Method of Instruction: Existentialists view learning as intensely personal. They believe that each child has a different learning style and it is up to the teacher to discover what works for each child.

10.1.5. Curricula: Existentialists would choose curriculum heavily biased towards humanity. They believe in exposing students at early ages to problems as well as possibilities and to the horrors as well as accomplishments humankind is capable of producing.

10.1.6. Key Researchers: Existentialism dates as beginning with the nineteenth century European philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. More recent philosophers who work in this school include Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Jean Paul Sartre, and the contemporary philosopher Maxine Greene.