1. Philosophy of Education
1.1. Pragmatism
1.1.1. Generic Notions-the attainment of a better society through education.
1.1.2. Key Researchers-John Dewey's form of pragmatism was founded on the new psychology, behaviorism, and the philosophy of pragmatism.
1.1.3. Goal of Education-the primary role of education is growth.
1.1.4. Role of Teacher-the teacher assumes the peripheral position of facilitator. The teacher encourages, offers suggestions, questions, and helps plan and implement courses of study. The teacher also writes curriculum and must have a command of several disciplines in order to create and implement curriculum.
1.1.5. Method of Instruction-children should learn both individually and in a group. Students should start their mode of inquiry by posing questions about what they want to know.
2. Schools as Organizations
2.1. Senators-Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions
2.2. House of Representatives- Alabama District 4, Robert Aderholt
2.3. Alabama Superintendent- Michael Sentance
2.4. Alabama State Board of Education Board Member- District 6, Cynthia Sanders McCarthy
2.5. Marshall County Superintendent- Cindy Wiggley
2.6. Elements of Change within School Processes and School Cultures
2.6.1. Conflict is a necessary part of change. Efforts to democratize schools do not create conflicts, but they allow (and to be successful, require) previously hidden problems, issues, and disagreements to surface. Staff involvement in school restructuring must be prepared to elicit, manage and resolve conflicts.
2.6.2. New behaviors must be learned. Because change requires new relationships and behaviors, the change process must include building communication and trust, enabling leadership and initiative to emerge, and learning techniques of communication and trust, enabling leadership and initiative to emerge, and learning techniques of communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution.
2.6.3. Team building must extend to the entire school. Shared decision making must consciously work out and give on-going attention to relationships within the rest of the school's staff. Otherwise, issues of exclusiveness and imagined elitism may surface, and perceived "resistance to change" will persist.
3. Curriculum and Pedagogy
3.1. The developmentalist curriculum is related to the needs and interests of the student rather than the needs of society. This philosophically progressive approach to teaching was student centered and was concerned with relating the curriculum to the needs and interests of each child at particular developmental stages.
3.2. The mimetic tradition is named so because it gives a central place to the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process.
3.3. The transformative tradition 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.
4. Equality of Opportunity
4.1. Impact on Educational Outcomes
4.1.1. Class-Class is directly related to achievement and to educational attainment; there is a direct correlation between parental income and children's performance on achievement tests, as well as placement in ability groups and curriculum track in high school.
4.1.2. Race-An individual's race has a direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve. Minorities do not receive the same educational opportunities as whites, and their rewards for educational attainment are significantly less.
4.1.3. Gender-Although the difference between men and women , in terms of educational attainment, have been reduced there are still significant advantages for men. There is little doubt that society discriminates against women accupationally and socially.
4.2. 1982 Coleman Study
4.2.1. Coleman and his associates found that when they compared the average test scores of public school and private school sophomores, there was not one subject in which public school students scored higher than private school students. In reading, vocabulary, mathematics, science, civics and writing tests, private school students outperformed public school students sometimes by a wide margin.
4.2.2. What Coleman and his associates saw as significant, others saw as nearly insignificant. It was estimated that the annual increment attributable to Catholic schooling was tiny. To put it simply, the differences that do exist is between public and Catholic schools are statistically significant, but in terms of significant differences in learning, the results are negligible.
5. Educational Inequality
5.1. Cultural Deprivation
5.1.1. Popularized in the1960s, Cultural Deprivation Theory suggests that working-class and non-white families often lack the cultural resources , such as books and other educational stimuli, and thus arrive at school at a significant disadvantage.
5.1.2. Cultural Deprivation Theorists assert that the poor have a deprived culture, one that lacks the value system of middle-class culture. According to this perspective , middle-class culture values hard work and initiative, the delay of immediate gratification fir future reward, and the importance of schooling as a means of future success.
5.2. School Centered Explanations for Educational Inequality
5.2.1. School Financing-Families in more affluent communities have higher incomes, they pay proportionately less of their incomes for their higher school taxes.
5.2.2. Effective School Research-The effective school literature, as it is termed, suggests that there are characteristics of unusually effective schools that help to explain why their students achieve academically. These characteristics include the following: 1. A climate of high expectations for students by teachers and administrators. 2. Strong and effective leadership by a principal or school hand. 3. Accountability processes for students and teachers. 4. The monitoring of student learning. 5. 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. 6. Flexibility for teachers and administrators to experiment and adapt to new situations and problems.
5.2.3. Within-School Differences: Curriculum and Ability Grouping: For functionalists, the important thing is to ensure that track placement is fair and meritocratic- that is, based on ability and hard work rather than ascriptive variables. Conflict theorists, conversely, suggest that tracking is a mechanism for separating groups, often based on ascriptive characteristics, and that it is an important mechanism in reproducing inequalities.
5.2.4. Gender and Schooling- Given the role that schools play in reproducing gender inequalities, feminists argue that school organizations, curriculum, and pedagogic practices need to be changed to address more adequately the needs of females.
6. Politics of Education
6.1. The Purposes of Education
6.1.1. The Intellectual Purposes
6.1.1.1. Teaching basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics; to transmit specific knowledge; and to help students acquire higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, and synthesis.
6.1.2. The Political Purposes
6.1.2.1. To inculcate allegiance to the existing political order; to prepare citizens who will participate in this political order ; to help assimilate diverse cultural groups into a common political order, and to teach children the basic laws of society.
6.1.3. The Social Purposes
6.1.3.1. To help solve social problems; to work as one of many institutions, such as the family and the church to ensure social cohesion; and to socialize children into the various roles, behaviors, and values of society. This process, referred to by sociologists as socialization, is a key ingredient to the stability of any society.
6.1.4. The Economic Purposes
6.1.4.1. To prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into the division of labor. The degree to which schools directly prepare students for work varies from society to society, but most schools have at least an indirect role in this process.
6.2. The Role of the School
6.2.1. The liberal perspective sees the role of education as balancing the needs of society and the individual in a manner that is consistent with a democratic and meritocratic society.
6.3. Explanations of Unequal Educational Performance
6.3.1. 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. Therefore, society must attempt through policies and programs to equalize the playing field so that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have a better chance.
6.4. Definition of Educational Problems
6.4.1. The liberal perspective argues the following points:
6.4.1.1. 1. Schools have too often limited the life chances of poor and minority children and therefore the problem of underachievement by these groups is a critical issue.
6.4.1.2. 2. Schools place too much emphasis on discipline and authority, thus limiting their role in helping students develop as individuals.
6.4.1.3. 3. The differences in quality and climate between urban and suburban schools and, most specifically, between schools with students of low socioeconomic backgrounds and high socioeconomic backgrounds is a central problem related to inequalities of results.
6.4.1.4. 4. The traditional curriculum leaves out the diverse culture of the groups that comprise the pluralistic society.
7. History of US Education
7.1. Reform Movement that has most Influenced Education
7.1.1. The Post-World War II Era: 1945-1980
7.1.1.1. The debate about goals of education and whether all children should receive the same education remained an important one. Second, the demand for the expansion of educational opportunity became perhaps the most prominent feature of educational reform.
7.2. Historical Interpretation of U.S. Education
7.2.1. The Democratic-Liberal School
8. Sociological Perspectives
8.1. Theoretical Perspectives Concerning the Relationship Between School and Society
8.1.1. Functionalism-Functionalists view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work.
8.1.2. Conflict Theory-based on the ability to dominate groups to impose their will on subordinate groups through force, cooptation, and manipulation.
8.1.3. Interactionalism-theories that 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.
8.2. Five Effects of Schooling on Individuals that have the Greatest Impact on Students
8.2.1. 1. Employment-schools act as gatekeepers in determining who will get employed in high status occupations, but schools do not provide significant job skills for their graduates.
8.2.2. 2. Teacher Behavior-expectations do indicate that the attitudes of teachers toward their students may have a significant achievement and perception of self.
8.2.3. 3. Student Peer groups and Alienation-schools develop cultures, traditions, and restraints that profoundly influence those who work and study within them.
8.2.4. 4. Education and Equality-class influences what people think, by shaping the way in which they think. Class position creates selective perception which, in turn, creates a world view that "explains" inequalities.
8.2.5. 5. De Facto Segregation-African-Americans from low income communities who attended racially mixed schools were more likely to graduate from high school and college than similar African-American children who attended segregated schools.
9. Educational Reform
9.1. School Based Reforms
9.1.1. School-Business Partnerships-School-Business partnerships have attracted considerable media attention, but there is little evidence that they have significantly improved schools or that, as a means of reform, school-business partnerships will address the fundamental problems facing U.S. education.
9.1.2. The Effective School Movement-Research provides advice to districts about how they can build organizational capacity, and suggests a focus on the following five dimensions: vision and leadership; collective and cultural norms; knowledge or access to knowledge; organizational structures and management; and resources.
9.2. Societal, Economic, Community, or Political Reforms
9.2.1. Full Service and Community Schools-Specifically designed to target and improve at-risk neighborhoods, full-service schools aim to prevent problems, as well as to support them. Whereas this model supports Anyon's argument to repair the larger social and economic problems of society as a means of improving public education, there is no evidence that full-service schools effect student achievement.
9.2.2. School Finance Reforms-Although past educational reforms have demonstrated the potential to improve schools for low-income and minority children, especially in urban areas, by themselves are limited in reducing the achievement gaps unless they also address the factors outside of schools responsible for educational inequalities.