My Foundations of Education

1. Politics of Education

1.1. Conservative

1.1.1. 1. Process that enables the strongest individuals or groups to survive, and looks at human and social evolution as adaptations to changes in the environment.

1.1.2. 2. Individuals have to compete in the social environment in order to survive and human progress is dependent on individual initiative and drive.

1.1.3. 3. Conservatives see the role of the 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.

1.2. Progressive

1.2.1. 1. View the schools as central to solving social problems.

1.2.2. 2. Believe the schools should be part of the steady progress to make things better.

1.2.3. 3. Essential to the development of individual potential and as integral part of a democratic society.

2. History of U.S. Education

2.1. Reform Movement

2.1.1. 1. By the late 1970's, conservative critics began to react to the educational reforms of the 1960's and 1970's. They argued that liberal reforms in pedagogy and curriculum, and in the arena of educational opportunity had resulted in the decline of authority and standards.

2.1.2. 2. In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence (1983), founded by President Reagan's secretary of Education, Terrel Bell, issued is now famous report, A Nation at Risk. This report provided a serious indictment of U.S. education and cited high rates of adult illiteracy, declining SAT scores, and low scores on international comparisons of knowledge by U.S. students as examples of the decline of literacy and standards.

2.1.3. 3. The years following this report were characterized by scores of other reports that both supported the criticism and called for reform. During the 1980's and 1990's, and into the twenty- first century, significant attention was given to the improvement of curriculum, the tightening of standards, and a move toward the setting of academic goals and their assessment, A coalition of U.S. governors took on a leading role in setting a reform agenda; business leaders stressed the need to improve the nation's schools and proposed partnership programs; the federal government, through its Secretary of Education (under Ronald Reagan), 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 the reforms.

2.2. Historical Interpretation

2.2.1. 1. The history of education in the United States, as we have illustrated, has been one of conflict, struggle, and disagreement. It has also been marked by a somewhat ironic pattern of cycles of reform about the aims, goals, and purpose of education on one hand, and little change in actual classroom practice on the other ( Cuban, 1984).

2.2.2. 2. The different interpretations of U.S. educational history revolve around the tensions between equity and excellence, between the social and intellectual functions of schooling, and over differing responses to the questions, Education in Whose interest? Education for whom? The U.S. school system has expanded to serve more students for longer periods of time than any other system in the modern world.

2.2.3. 3. Historians and sociologists of education disagree about whether this pattern of increased access means a pattern of educational success.

3. Philosophy of Education

3.1. Generic Notions:

3.1.1. Dialectic was used by Plato to move individuals from the world of matter to the world of ideas. Plato's philosophy should be called "ideaism" rather than idealism, since, for Plato, ideas were what mattered above all.

3.1.2. Plato thought that education, in particular, was important as a means of moving individuals collectively toward achieving the good. He believed that the state should play and active role in education and that it should encourage the brighter students to follow a curriculum that was more abstract and more concerned with ideas rather than with concrete matter. Thus, brighter students would focus on ideas, and data collecting would be assigned to the less able.

3.1.3. Since Plato's time, people have seen the state become a major force in determining the system of education. People have also witnessed how increasingly the school and tracking, in particular, determine the life chances of students.

3.2. Key Researchers

3.2.1. St. Augustine (354-430AD) added religion to classical idealism http://www.philosophybasics.com/photos/augustine.jpg

3.2.2. Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

3.2.3. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

3.2.4. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) Descartes Kant and Hegel all added their particular visions to platonic idealism.

3.3. Goal of Education

3.3.1. Idealists subscribe to the notion that education is transformation: ideas can change lives.

3.4. Role of the Teacher

3.4.1. It is the teachers responsibility to analyze and discuss ideas with students in order to move to new levels of awareness so that ultimately they can be transformed.

3.5. Curriculum

3.5.1. An idealist curriculum would be the Great Books curriculum at Saint John's University, in Annapolis, Maryland. During their four years in college, students read,analyze, and apply the ideas of classical works to modern life. For elementary school-age children, there is a Great Books course promoted by individuals in the private sector and there exists as well a grass-roots movement to institute a core curriculum in elementary and junior high schools throughout the nation.

3.6. Method of Instruction

3.6.1. Through questioning, students are encouraged to discuss, analyze, synthesize, and apply what they have read to contemporary society. Students are also encouraged to work in groups or individually on research projects, both oral and written.

4. Educational Inequality

4.1. Sociological Explanations of Unequal Achievement

4.1.1. 1. Functionalist Theorist support the idea that each students’ success is determined by their own hard work and desire to succeed.

4.1.2. 2. Conflict Theorists support the idea that student success is affected by their environment.

4.1.3. 3. Interactionists Theorists support that student success is determined by a combination of factors such as family, social class schools and environment.

4.2. School Centered Explanation

4.2.1. 1. School Financing: Public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. However, the majority of funds come from state and local taxes, with local property taxes a significance source.

4.2.2. 2. School centered explanations, however, suggest that school processes are central to understanding unequal educational performance.

4.2.3. 3. In the 1980s, educational researchers examined carefully the myriad processes within schools that explain the sources of unequal academic achievement. This school-centered research focused on both between and within school processes.

5. Sociological Perspectives

5.1. Relationship between School and Society

5.1.1. 1. Theoretical Perspectives: Theory is an integration of all known principles, laws, and information pertaining to a specific area of study, such as, Functional Theory, functionalists view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work.

5.1.2. 2. Conflict Theories: From a conflict point of view, schools are similar to social battlefields, where students struggle against teachers, teachers against administrators, and so on. These antagonisms, however, are most often muted for two reasons: the authority and power of the school and the achievement ideology.

5.1.3. 3. Interactional Theories: Are about the relation of school and society are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspectives. This level of analysis helps in understanding education in the "Big Picture," macrosociological theories hardly provide and interpretable snapshot of what schools are like on an every day level.

5.2. Three Effects of Schooling on Individuals

5.2.1. 1. Knowledge and attitude: Research has indicated that the more education individuals receive, the more likely they are to read newspapers, books, and magazines, and to take part in politics and public affairs. More highly educated people are also more likely to be liberal in their political and social attitudes.

5.2.2. 2. Employment: Most students believe that graduating from college will lead to greater employment opportunities, and they are right. In 1986, about 54 percent of the eight million college graduates in the United States entered professional and technical jobs. Research has shown that large organizations, such as corporations require high levels of education for white-collar, managerial, or administrative jobs (Collins, 1971).

5.2.3. 3.Education and mobility: Another important distinction when thinking of education and mobility. Hopper (1971) has made the point that there is a difference between educational amount and educational route. That is, the number of years of education is one measure of educational attainment, but where people go to school also affects their mobility. Private and public school students may receive the same amount of education, but a private school diploma may act as a "mobility escalator" because it represents a more prestigious educational route ( Cookson& Persell, 1985).

6. Schools as Organizations

6.1. Governance

6.1.1. Senators

6.1.1.1. Jeff Sessions and Richard C. Shelby

6.1.2. House of Representatives

6.1.2.1. http://www.legislature.state.al.us/aliswww/ISD/House/ALRepresentatives.aspx

6.1.3. State Superintendent

6.1.3.1. Thomas R. Bice

6.1.4. State School Board Representative

6.1.4.1. Robert J. Bentley: President

6.1.5. Local Superintendent

6.1.5.1. Craig A. Ross

6.1.6. Local School Board

6.1.6.1. James Thompson

6.2. Comparison to One Country

6.2.1. The United Kingdom's education program is much shorter than the United States education program. In the UK BA: 3 years,MA: 1 year,PhD: 3 years. In the US BA: 4 years,MA: 2 years,PhD: 5-7 years or longer . In the UK their homework consists of: general assignments or no assignments throughout the semester and their grades are based on final exams.

7. Curriculum & Pedagogy

7.1. Historical Curriculum Theory

7.1.1. 1.

7.1.1.1. The humanist curriculum

7.1.1.1.1. The humanist curriculum reflects the idealist philosophy 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.

7.1.1.1.2. Traditionally, this curriculum focused in the Western heritage as the basis for intellectual development, although some who support this type curriculum argue that the liberal arts need not to focus exclusively on the Western tradition.

7.1.1.1.3. This curriculum model dominated nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. education and was codified in the National Education Association's Committee of Ten report issued in 1893, "which recommended that all secondary students, regardless of whether they intended to go to college, should be liberally educated and should study English, Foreign Languages. Mathematics, history, and Science" (Ravitch, 1983, p.47).

7.2. Sociological Curriculum Theory

7.2.1. 1.

7.2.1.1. For the Sociological Curriculum Theory I would choose the General Functionalist Theory.

7.2.2. 2.

7.2.2.1. The theory is the social and moral breakdown initiated by modernization.

7.2.3. 3.

7.2.3.1. The General Functionalists Theory, derived by the work of Emile Durkheim, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was concerned with the role of schools in combating the social and moral breakdown initiated by modernization.

8. Equality of Opportunity

8.1. Educational Achievement & Attainment

8.1.1. 1. In 2009, a man age 25 or older with a college degree earned $72,868.00 per year on average, whereas, a woman with the same educational qualifications earned $44,078.00 per year.

8.1.2. 2. Privilege can tilt the field to the advantage of whites, males, and the wealthy.

8.1.3. 3. Males are more likely to score higher on the SATs than females. It should be added that more women are now attending post-secondary institutions than men, although it is true that many of the post secondary institutions that women attend are less academically and socially prestigious than those post-secondary institutions attended by men ( Persell, Catsambis, & Cookson, 1992).

8.2. Response to the Coleman Study

8.2.1. 1. Coleman received an extremely large grant in the mid 1960's to study the relationship between the organizational characteristics of schools and student achievement. The motivation behind this grant was to determine that African American students and white students had fundamentally different schooling experiences.

8.2.2. 2. It was hoped by policy makers that Coleman's study would provide the rationale for Federally funding those schools that were primarily attended by minority students.

8.2.3. 3. The results of Coleman's study were shocking because what he found, in essence, was that the organizational differences between schools were not particularly important in determining student outcomes when compared to the differences in student-body compositions between schools. Coleman's findings caused a tremendous controversy.

9. Educational Reform

9.1. School-based reforms

9.1.1. 1. During the 1980's, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nations schools were not producing the kinds of graduates necessary for revitalization of the U.S. economy.

9.1.2. 2. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has contributed hundreds of million dollars to small schools and more recently to teacher effectiveness.

9.1.3. 3. One such example is the $100 million contributed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to improve education in Newark, New Jersey.

9.2. Societal, community, economic,or political reforms

9.2.1. 1. School finance reforms: In 1970 Robinson V. Cahill was filed against the state of New Jersey, citing discrimination in funding for some school districts, which prosecutors believed was creating disparities in urban students' education by failing to provide all students with a "thorough and efficient" education, as guaranteed under the New Jersey State Constitution

9.2.2. 2. By 1980, more evidence had been accumulated regarding the inequality of education in Urban areas and the Education Law Center filed Abbott V. Burke, on behalf of several Urban school districts also due to a violation of the "thorough and efficient" clause.

9.2.3. 3. The court ruled in 1990, stating that more funding was needed to serve the children in the poorer school districts.