My Foundations of Education

1. Schools as Organizations

1.1. Senators

1.1.1. Richard Shelby

1.1.2. Jefferson Sessions

1.2. State Senator

1.2.1. Steve Livingston

1.3. House of Represenatives

1.3.1. Mike Hubbard

1.3.1.1. Speaker of the House

1.3.2. Victor Gaston

1.3.2.1. Speaker Pro Tempore

1.3.3. Jeffery Woodard

1.3.3.1. Clerk of the House

1.4. State Superintendent

1.4.1. Tommy Bice

1.5. Local Superintendent

1.5.1. Jason Barnett

1.6. Local School Board

1.6.1. Matt Sharp

1.6.1.1. Chairman

1.6.2. Jeff Williams

1.6.2.1. Vice Chairman

1.6.3. Randy Peppers

1.6.4. Mark Richards

1.6.5. Terry Wootten

2. Politics of Education

2.1. Conservative

2.1.1. Personal Responsibility

2.1.2. Limited Government

2.1.3. Free Markets

2.1.4. Traditional American values and strong national defence

2.1.5. The role of the government should be to provide people freedom necessary to pursue their own goals.

2.2. Liberal

2.2.1. Government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all.

2.2.2. The role of the government should be to guaranteed that no one is in need.

2.2.3. Policies generally emphasize the need for government to solve problems.

2.3. Radical

2.3.1. Does not believe that free market capitalism is the best form of economic organizations.

2.3.2. The capitalist system is the central of U.S. social problems.

2.4. Neo-Liberal Perspective

2.4.1. Austerity involves cutting spending on public education

2.4.2. Neo-Liberals, like conservatives, believe that the free market solves social problems better than governmental policy.

2.4.3. Dewey's form of pragmatism which was instrumentalism and experimentalism was founded on new psychology, behaviorism and the philosophy of pragmatism.

2.4.4. Believe that educational success or failure is the result of individual effort rather than social and economic failures.

3. History of U.S. Education

3.1. Colonial

3.1.1. Began with settlers bringing in ideas

3.1.2. Many of the wealthy cons remained in the U.S. went to higher education schools

3.1.2.1. Harvard

3.1.2.2. Yale

3.1.2.3. Columbia

3.1.3. The school would get to choose 10 of their best students and they would receive a scholarship to the College of William and Mary

3.2. Rise of the Common School

3.2.1. 1820-1860

3.3. Urbanization

3.3.1. Immigration and Urbanization of unprecedented proportions was upcoming in the 19th century and ushered in the First Industrial Revolution

3.3.2. Problematic to Americans

3.3.3. Large number of immigrants came from the northwest part of Europe

3.3.4. *Modern Idealist: Teachers who are interested in search for truth through ideas rather than through the examination of the falsely shadowy world of matter.

4. Sociological Perspectives

4.1. Theories

4.1.1. Functional

4.1.1.1. Stresses the interdependence of the social system

4.1.1.2. View society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work.

4.1.2. Conflict

4.1.2.1. Not all sociologists of education believe that society is help together by shared values alone.

4.1.2.2. Ideologist or intellectual justifications created by the powerful are designed to enhance their position by legitimizing inequality and the unequal distribution of material and cultural goods as an inevitable outcome of biology or history.

5. Philosophy of Education

5.1. Generic Notations

5.1.1. Plato argues for centrality of ideas.

5.1.2. Aristotle believed that through studying would it be possible for us to develop ideas.

5.2. Key Researchers

5.2.1. Plato, St. Augustine, Rene Descartes,

5.2.2. Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

5.3. Goal of Education

5.3.1. Teachers should be in the basic academic disciplines in order to transmit their students to the knowledge necessary for human race.

5.3.2. *Contemporary Realist: Plato and Aristotle believed that important questions concerning such notations as the good life, truth, beauty, and so on could be answered in different studies of ideas

5.3.3. *Pragmatism: Visions of schools were rooted in the social order.

5.4. Role of Teacher

5.4.1. It is the teachers responsibility to use different ideas with students so they can travel to new levels of awareness that can be used.

5.4.2. In the progressive setting, the teacher no longer has authority over anything. The teacher to be the facilitator.

5.5. Method of Instruction

5.5.1. Idealist teachers are able to be active in their students learning from day to day

5.5.2. Realists would support a number of different teaching techniques. Mostly they would lecture, and question and answer.

5.5.3. Dewey was more in to having students learn in a group level as well as individual. I see this happening more in the classroom today.

5.6. Curriculum

5.6.1. Idealists really like the idea of great literature from the past. They believe that they could be more understood from the past.

5.6.2. Realists believe in the basics which would be science, math, reading, and writing.

5.6.3. Existentialists and phenomenologists would choose a plan that would be more toward humanities.

6. Curriculum and Pedagogy

6.1. Developmentalist Curriculum

6.1.1. Related to the needs and interests of the student rather than society

6.1.2. Emphasized the process of teaching and its content.

6.1.3. It stressed flexibility in WHAT was taught and HOW it was taught.

6.1.4. The teacher was not the transmitter of knowledge, but the facilitator of student growth.

6.1.5. It is based on the relationship between the child and the curriculum.

6.1.6. The school and curriculum historians pointed out that this curriculum was not influential to the U.S. public schools.

6.2. Functionalist

6.2.1. School curriculum represents the codification of knowledge that the students need to become members of society.

6.2.2. Schools teach the students values that are essential to society.

6.2.3. They believe school teach the values and the "norms" of society.

6.2.4. The specific content of the curriculum is less important than the role of schools in teaching students how to learn a skill in an increasing society in which the decision makers of the government are chosen for office based on their technological background.

6.2.5. They believed that the 20th century curriculum had to change to meet the new requirements of the new "modern" world.

6.2.6. The Sociological Curriculum is what is taught in schools and its relationship to society.

7. Equality of Opportunity

7.1. Coleman Study

7.1.1. Round One

7.1.1.1. A group of scholars set a task of defining characteristics of schools, this made them effective.

7.1.1.2. Extensive literature concluded that the past years of knowledge had been accumulated which began with Equality of Educational Opportunity.

7.1.1.3. The organizational differences between schools were not particularly important in determining student outcomes when compared to the differences in student body between schools.

7.1.2. Round Two

7.1.2.1. A debate has centered on the interpretations attached to the magnitude of the newest findings.

7.1.2.2. Different studies have compared public and private schools have also found that private schools seem to "do it better" particularly for low-income reasons

7.1.2.3. Over the past two decades of findings that support a democratic view of Catholic schools have been a big debate.

7.1.3. Round Three

7.1.3.1. After more than forty years after the publications of his study, Borman and Dowling applied the most sophisticated statistical tools to evaluate educational data.

7.1.3.2. Where an individual goes to school is often related to their race and socioeconomic background, BUT the racial and socioeconomic composition of a school has a greater effect on student achievement than their race or class.

7.2. Special Needs

7.2.1. The field of Sp. Ed. has mirrored the debates about Equality for years.

7.2.2. 1970's

7.2.2.1. Congress passed the EHA which included 6 basic principles which was to guarantee that children with special needs were properly identified and placed in the right classes for them

7.2.3. 1980's

7.2.3.1. The law became a critical issue for policy makers and advocates of the disabled.

7.2.3.2. Despite good intentions, the law produced adverse effects such as over-identification.

7.2.4. In 1991 a comprehensive essay in the Harvard Educational Review analyzed the relationship between he organizational structure of public education and the bureaucratization of special education since 1975.

7.2.5. The field of Sp. Ed. today remains in conflict. studies have emerged to challenge theories made in the field .

7.2.6. The controversies over the REI and EHA still continue to this day. As we move ahead, we it is imperative that educational researchers provide evidence to imform placement decisions.

8. Educational Inequality

8.1. School Centered

8.1.1. Savage inequalities compared public schools in suburbs with public schools in poor inner cities, and unequal attainment

8.1.2. Public schools are financed through local, state, and federal sources.

8.1.3. Higher income

8.1.3.1. More affluent schools are able to provide more per pupil than the poorer districts.

8.1.4. There are legal attacks by communities that cut funding based on local tax because it denies equal opportunity for others.

8.1.5. They think that federal aid is going to help others in school, but that theory is controversial,

8.1.5.1. Others think it is still unequal.

8.2. Student Centered

8.2.1. Studies demonstrated that the conventional liberal wisdom was far too simple and the solutions were way more complex.

8.2.2. There were more significant differences in academic performances among the same school than in different schools.

8.2.3. Within-school differences doesn't rule out the schools affect on educational equality.

8.2.4. There are cultural and family differences between working-class and nonwhite students, and white middle class students.

8.2.5. There is a claim that lower-class environments are not deficient in their provision of resources for intellectual growth, but reflect differential evaluations of ideal family forms is also a problem.

8.2.6. People are blaming poor people for their problems or "blaming the victim" and this is one of the worst inequality because it blatantly states it.

9. Educational Reform

9.1. Intersectional

9.1.1. Includes public and private schools

9.1.2. Milwaukee and Cleveland provided tuition vouchers to students who attended private neighborhood schools.

9.2. Intrasectional

9.2.1. Policies are only public schools

9.2.2. Minnesota has been adopted by a number of other states

9.2.3. St. Louis has minority schools from the inner city who are able to attend suburban schools that are located in white neighborhoods.

9.2.4. Only a handful of white students have been to an inner city school.

9.3. Community and Societal

9.3.1. Leadership as the driver for change

9.3.2. Parent-Community ties

9.3.3. Professional capacity

9.3.4. Student centered learning.

9.3.5. Instructional guidance

9.3.6. Meaningful learning goals.