1. Politics of Education
1.1. Radical Prerspective
1.1.1. 1.
1.1.2. The radical perspective do not believe that free market capitalism is the best form of economic organization.
1.1.3. Radicals believe that the capitalist system is central to the U.S. social problems
1.1.4. The radical perspective believes that social problems are structural in nature.
1.2. Progressive Vision
1.2.1. View schools as central to solving problems
1.2.2. A vehicle for upward mobility
1.2.3. Progressives believe the schools should be part of the steady progress to make things better
2. History of U.S. Education
2.1. Education for Woman and African-Americans
2.1.1. In 1821, Emma Hart Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York.
2.1.2. In 1833, Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio opened its doors to women as well as African Americans.
2.1.3. In 1868, the Freedom's Bureau helped to establish historically Black Colleges, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Hampton Institute in Virginia.
2.2. The Democratic-Liberal School
2.2.1. Democratic-liberals believe that the history of U.S. education involves the progressive evolution.
2.2.2. Lawrence A. Cremin,, in his three-volume history of U.S. education(1972, 1980, 1988) and in a study of the Progressive Era portrays the evolution of U.S. education.
2.2.3. Democratic-liberals believe that the U.S. educational system must continue to move closer to each, without sacrificing one or the other too dramatically
3. Sociological Perspectives
4. Schools as Organizations
4.1. District 8
4.2. State Senator- Richard Shelby
4.3. State Representative- Governor Robert J. Bently
4.4. Local Superintendent- Troy Holiday
4.5. Comparison of another Country's Education Sysyem
4.5.1. Education in the United States is fundamentally inclusive. Other educational systems are not as inclusive
4.5.2. France is highly centralized educational system compared to the system in the United States.
4.5.3. The children of wealthy families had private tutors, while the poor children received no education.
5. Curriculum and Pedagogy
5.1. Humanist Curriculum
5.1.1. Reflects the idealist philosophy that knowledge of the traditional liberal arts is the cornerstone of an educated citizenry.
5.1.2. Purpose of education is to present to students the best of what has been thought and written .
5.1.3. Traditionally this curriculum focused on the Western heritage.
5.2. Modern Functionalist Theory
5.3. Developed in the United States through the works of Talcott Parsons (1959) and Robert Dreeben (1968).
5.4. This society according to functionalists, is a democratic, meritocratic, and expert in society.
5.5. Believed that schools teach the general values and norms.
6. Equality of Opportunity
6.1. Students with Special Needs
6.2. Beginning in the late 1960s, parents of children with special needs began to put pressure on the educational system to serve their children more appropriately and effectively.
6.3. In 1975,Congress passed the Education for ALL Handicapped Children Law.
6.4. In the late 1980s,critics of special education pushed the regular education initiative, which called for mainstreaming children with disabilities into regular classes.
6.5. The Coleman Study
6.6. James Coleman received an extremely large grant to study the relationship between the organizational characteristics of schools and student achievement.
6.7. The motivation behind this grant was to demonstrate that African American students and white students had fundamentally different schooling experiences.
6.8. Coleman's findings caused a tremendous controversy.
7. Educational Inequality
7.1. Functionalists
7.1.1. Functionalists believed that the role of schools is to provide a fair and meritocratic selection process for sorting out the best and brightest individuals, regardless of family background
7.1.2. The functionalist vision of a just society is one where individual talent and hard work based on universal principles of evaluation are more important than ascriptive characteristics based on particularistic methods of evaluation.
7.1.3. Functionalists expect that the schooling process will produce unequal results,but these results ought to be based on individual differences between students, not on group differences.