My Foundations of Education

1. Sociological Perspectives

1.1. Schools, as well as parents, churches and synagogues, and other groups share children's perceptions of the world by processes of socialization.

1.2. Schools socially and culturally reproduce the existing society through the systematic socialization of its youngest members.

1.3. The concept of equal educational opportunity is a key element in the belief system that maintains that the United States is a land of opportunity where hard work is rewarded.

1.4. Schools, through such practices as tracking, academically stratify students by curricular placement, which, in turn, influences the long-term social, economic, and cultural destinies of children.

1.5. Difference between schools in terms of their academic programs and policies make differences in student learning.

1.6. Many other factors besides education affect how much income people earn in their lifetimes: these include type of employer, age, union membership, and social class background.

2. Philosophy of Education

2.1. Realists reject the Platonic notion that only ideas are real, and argue instead that the material world or matter is real.

2.2. Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Axiology

2.3. Both Plato and Aristotle believed that important questions concerning such notions as the good life, truth, beauty, and so on could be answered through the study of ideas, using the dialectical method.

2.4. Teachers should be steeped in the basic academic disciplines in order to transmit to their students the knowledge necessary for the continuance of the human race.

2.5. realists believe in objective criteria for judging the value of artistic and literary works. They support method instruction in order to give students the knowledge necessary to make these evaluations.

2.6. Curriculum for realists: Science and Math, Reading and Writing, and the Humanities.

3. Schools as Organizations

3.1. State Senators

3.1.1. Richard Shelby since 1987

3.1.2. Jefferson Sessions since 1997

3.2. DeKalb County Superintendent Hugh Taylor

3.3. International school systems are as complex as the U.S.; for instance, they also have department of education that is able to exert considerable influence over the entire educational system.

3.4. Another dimension apparent in comparative analysis is the relative selectivity of systems.

3.5. The relative selectivity of a school system is an excellent indicator of its exclusiveness or inclusiveness.

4. Curriculum and Pedagogy

4.1. Historical Curriculum Theory

4.1.1. The humanist curriculum reflects the idealist philosophy that knowledge of the traditional liberal art.

4.1.2. The social efficiency curriculum was a philosophically pragmatist approach developed in the early twentieth century as a putatively democratic response.

4.1.3. The developmentalist curriculum is related to the needs and interests of the student rather than the needs of society.

4.1.4. The social meliorist curriculum, which was philosophically social reconstructionist.

4.2. Sociological Curriculum Theory

4.2.1. Reject the objectivist notion that curriculum is value neutral; rather, they view it as a reflection of particular interests within a society.

4.2.2. It concentrates on the function of what is taught in schools and its relationship to the role of schools within society.

5. Educational Reform

5.1. School-Business Partnerships

5.1.1. During the 1980s, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nation's schools were not producing.

5.1.2. The Walton Foundation has funded charter schools and voucher initiatives.

5.1.3. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed hundreds of million dollars to small schools and more recently to teacher effectiveness.

5.2. Properly done, takeover can provide a good opportunity for state and local decision makers to combine resources and knowledge to improve children's learning.

5.3. Takeover can help create a healthy environment in which the local community can address a school district's problems.

5.4. If the state carefully collects and analyzes pupil achievement and other data in state-operated districts and schools, it can lead to improvements in statewide accountability efforts.

6. Politics of Education

6.1. Conservatives believe in personal resposibiliy, limited government, free markets, individual libery and a strong national defense.

6.2. Conservative looks at social evolution as a process that enables the strongest individuals and groups to survive, and looks at human and social evolution as adaptation to change in the environment.

6.3. Reagans presidency championed a free market philosophy and argued that welfare state policies were at the heart of an American malaise.

6.4. Conservatives lauded Reagan's policies and credited him with restoring U.S. economic growth, both liberals and radicals were very critical.

6.5. Traditional visions tend to view the schools as necessary to the transmission of the traditional values of U.S. society, such as hard work, family unity, individual initiative.

6.6. Traditionalists believe the schools should pass on the best of what was and what is.

7. History of U.S. Education

7.1. By the late 1970s, conservative critics began to react to the educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s.

7.2. 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.

7.3. The politics of the reform movement were complex and multidimensional.

7.4. The choice movement is divided into those who support public school choice only to those who would include intersectional choice policies.

7.5. U.S educational history revolve around the tensions between different interpretations.

7.6. The U.S school system has expanded to serve more students for longer periods of time than any other system in the modern world.

8. Equality of Opportunity

8.1. Academic achievements of students from different backgrounds is an important aspect of sociological research on education.

8.2. Both sexes 25 years old or older, 92.1% of whites graduated from high school and 33.3% received a bachelor's degree.

8.3. The Scholastic Aptitude Test has become the unofficial college entrance examination in the United States.

8.4. The Digest of Educational Statistics indicates that white students outperform all other students outperform all other students.

8.5. Much research indicates that social class is strongly and independently related to educational attainment and achievement.

8.6. Subsequent studies that have compared public and private schools have also found that private schools seem to do it better, particularly for low-income students.

9. Educational Inequality

9.1. The two major sociological theories of education provide a general understanding of the problem, although from very different directions.

9.2. 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.

9.3. Conflict theorists are not in the least bit surprised by the data.

9.4. A climate of high expectations for students by teachers and administrators.

9.5. Strong and effective leadership by a principal or school head.

9.6. A high degree of instructional time on task, where teachers spend a great deal of their time teaching and students spend a great deal of their time learning.