1. History of U.S. Education
1.1. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The act allowed children to pass their classes no matter what.
1.1.1. This act allowed students to move forward in class no matter the pace the child learned. This eliminated the gap between students.
1.1.2. This act made schools who receives federal funding issue standardize test to all students in order to keep receiving their funding.
1.1.3. In the years before students had to reach a high goal set than the previously tested children.
1.1.4. The act requires all schools to have "highly qualified" teachers, however the state gets to set the bar for what the "highly qualified" was.
1.2. The Process of Educational Reform: Conflict and Accomodation
1.2.1. The economic and educational systems possess fairly distinct and independent internal dynamics of reproduction and development. The process of incessant change within the economic system is a basic characteristic of capitalism.
1.2.2. The educational system is rather less dynamic:Our schools and colleges, foundations and schools of education tend to promote a set of cultural values and to support an educational elite which reproduces and stabilizes these institutions through time.
2. The Philosophy of Education
2.1. The Ideal of the Educated Person
2.1.1. R. S. Peters's Educated Person; The starting point of Peters's philosophy of education is the concept of the educated person. While granting that we sometime use the term " Education" to refer to any process of rearing, bringing up, instructing, etc., Peters distinguishes this very broad sense of " Education" from the narrower one in which her is interested.
2.1.2. Initiation into Male Cognitive Perspectives; The disciplines are guilty of different kinds of sex bias. Even as literature in the fine arts excludes women's works from their subject matter, they include works which construct women according to the male image of her.
2.1.3. Genderized Traits; The masculinity of Peters's educated person is not solely a function of a curriculum in the intellectual disciplines, however. Consider the traits of characteristics Peters attributes to the educated person.
2.1.4. A Double Bind; It may have been a concern over Peters's use of the phrase "educated man" which lead to the investigation in the first place, but as you can see, the problem is not one of language. Had Peters consistently used the phrase "educated person" the conclusion that the ideal he holds up for education is masculine would be unaffected.
2.2. Pedagogic Creed
2.2.1. What the School Is; It is believe that the school is primary a social institution. Education began social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.
2.2.2. The Subject-Matter of Education: It is believed that the social life of the child is the basis of concentration, or correlation, in all his training or growth. The social life gives the unconscious unity and the background of all his efforts of all his attainments.
3. Equality of Opportunity
3.1. The Coleman Study(1966)
3.1.1. 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.
3.2. Responses to Coleman
3.2.1. Round One: If student-body composition has such a major effect on student learning, then the policy implication is clearly that poor students should go to the school with middle-class students in order to equalize their educational opportunities. this assumption was the foundation that justifies busing students between schools and between school districts.
3.2.2. Round Two: This debate is not resolved, and one can expect that more research and more controversy will surface. For example, a recent article by Baker and Riordan argued that Catholic schools in the 1990s have become more elite, belying the argument that they are modern common schools (Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993; Greeley, 1982). In a scathing response, sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley argued that Baker and Riordan's evidence ignores the past two decades of findings that support a democratic view of Catholic schools.
3.2.3. Round Three: Formal decomposition of the variance attributable to individual background and the social composition of the schools suggests that going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student's achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student's school are 1 3/4 times more important than a student's individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.
3.3. The Coleman Study (1982)
3.3.1. Like the first Coleman report, this book set off a firestorm of controversy. 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.
3.4. Conclusion
3.4.1. Do school differences make a difference in terms of student outcomes? At this point, probably the best answer to this question is a highly qualified and realistic yes. Schools that are less bureaucratic and more academically oriented are better learning environments for students.
4. Educational Reform
4.1. Race to the Top
4.1.1. 1.) Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.
4.1.2. 2.) Building data systems that measure student growth and success and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction.
4.1.3. 3.) Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especiallywhere they are needed most.
4.1.4. 4.) Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.
4.2. Teacher Education
4.2.1. 1.)The perceived lack of rigor and intellectual demands in teacher education programs.
4.2.2. The emergence and development of teacher education as an educational problem was a response to the initial debates concerning the failure of the schools.
4.2.3. 2.)The need to attract and retain competent teacher candidates.
4.2.4. 3.) The necessity to reorganize the academic and professional components of teacher education programs at both the baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate levels.
4.3. School-Based Reforms
4.3.1. By the late 1980s, however, school choice was at the forefront of the educational reform movement. President Reagan and Bush supported choice and one influential White House report enumerated a number of reasons why choice was the right reform for the times(Paulu, 1989).
4.4. Schhol-to-Work Programd
4.4.1. On May 4, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994.This law provided seed money to states and local partnerships of business, labor, government, education, and community organizations to develop school-to-work systems.
4.5. Societal, Community, Economic, and Political Reforms
4.5.1. 1.) A popular reform implemented over the past decade is mayoral control of urban districts. Similar to state takeover, mayoral control has been a favord neo-liberal reform, with urban mayors and business leadersarguing that centralizing governance into the mayor's office is more effective and efficient than traditional elected school boards.
4.5.2. 2.)In state takeovers there appears to be no standard method of imposing or implementing state control of local school districts, and there appears to be no standard method of returning control to local authorities. The experience with state takeovers is still relatively limited and fragmentary, but it has led to some perceived advantages and gisadvantages.
5. Politics of Education
5.1. Liberal- I believe that every child has a chance at a better education. The best education should be given to every child no matter what.
5.1.1. Every student deserves an equal opportunity to excel in the classroom. If students are having trouble they should be appointed help if needed.
5.1.2. Education should be available to every child no matter the circumstance.
5.2. Progressivism - School is apart of every day life and children should enjoy coming to school. Children need to have fun learning and love what they do in the classroom so it will give them a enjoyable way to learn.
5.2.1. Children should be able to enjoy learning. Making learning fun will make a child more engaged in the classroom.
5.2.2. The community needs to come together with the school to provide a way for children to learn outside the classroom.
5.2.3. Children need to understand that school is a stepping stone to help them through the challenges that life will bring.
5.2.4. Each student should learn and experience the world as they see it.
6. The Sociology of Education
6.1. The Contribution of Schooling to the Learning of Norms.
6.1.1. The concept of social norm has long been important in sociological thinking where it has been treated primarily as a determinant, a prior condition accounting in part for some pattern of behavior: a rule, expectation, sanction, or external constraint; an internal force, obligation, conviction, or internalized standard.
6.1.2. The functions of schooling contributes to pupils' learning what the norms are, accepting them, and acting according to them; norm content, acceptance, and behavior can, however, all very independently.
6.1.3. The Structural Basis of Sanctions; learning to accept norms and act according to them, like other forms of learning, requires the use of sanctions. In both family and school, pattern of action appropriate to each setting are encourage and discourage by rewards and punishments taking the form of both specific, momentary acts and more elaborate patterns of actions over time.
6.2. On Understanding the Processes of Schooling
6.2.1. Those who have used labeling theory have been concern with the study of why people are labeled, and who it is that labels them as someone who has committed one form or another of deviant behavior.
6.2.2. Labeling theory has significantly enhanced our understanding of the process of becoming deviant by shifting our attention from the deviant to the judges of deviance and the forces that affect their judgement.
6.2.3. W. I. Thomas, many years ago, set fourth what has become a basic dictum of the social sciences when he observe, "If men define situations as real, that are real in their consequences." This is at the core of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
7. Schools of Organizations
7.1. The Nature of Teaching
7.1.1. Lieberman and Miller(1984) have explored what they call "the social realities of teaching." Through their research, they have been able to identify elements of the teaching experience that give it its unique flavor.
7.1.2. According to Lieberman and Miller, the central contradiction of teaching is that teachers have to deal with a group of students and teach them something and, at the same time, deal with each child as an individual. The teachers, then, have two missions: one universal and cognitive, and the other particular and affective,
7.2. Underqualified Teachers
7.2.1. A requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act is that all schools have highly qualified teachersin every classroom.This criterion highlighted the problem of unqualified teachers, many of whom were teaching out of their field of expertise.
7.2.2. Most teachers today meet the highly qualified standards of NCLB;however, the data indicate that significant numbers of classrooms ar staffed by teachers who are not highly qualified in the particular subject taught.
7.3. Teacher Professionalization
7.3.1. Sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) argues that teachingm particularly elementary school teaching, is only partially professionalized. When he compared elementary school teachers to otherprofessionals, he found that the prerequisites for professionalism among elementary school teachers were vaguely defined or absent altogether.
7.3.2. Teachers receive their income from "onebig client." There is little opportunity for teachers to teach independently of their school, and thus there is little opportunity for teachers to gain a reputation for excellence outside of their school or their school district.
7.4. Stakeholders for my district
7.4.1. State Senators:Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions
7.4.2. House of Representatives: Mo Brooks
7.4.3. Local Superintendent: Kevin Dukes
7.4.4. Local School Board: Jackson County Board of Education
7.4.5. State Superintendent: Michael Sentance
7.4.6. Representative on State School Board: Mary Scott Hunter
7.5. School Processes and School Cultures
7.5.1. According to Waller, schools are separate social organizations because: 1.) They have a definite population. 2.) They have a clearly defined political structure , arising from the mode of social interaction characteristics of the school, and influenced by numerous minor process of interaction. 3.)They represent the nexus of a compact network of social relationships. 4.) They are pervaded by a "we feeling." 5.) They have a culture that is definitely their own.
8. Curriculum and Pedagogy
8.1. Explanations of Unequal Educational Achievement
8.1.1. The functionalist believe 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. The functional 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.
8.2. The History and Philosophy of the Curriculum
8.2.1. The history of the curriculum helps explain why the curriculum looks as it does today. Kliebard (1986), in his book The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893-1958, outlines four different types of curricuum in the twentieth century: humanist, social efficiency, developmentalist, and social meliorist, each of which had a different view of the goals of schooling.
8.2.2. The development of standardized testing wa inextricabl related to the differentiation of the curriculum. At the elementary school level, intelligence tests and reading tests were used to assign students to ability groups and ability-grouped classes.
8.3. The Politics of the Curriculum
8.3.1. The politics of curriculum analyzes the struggles over different conceptions of what should be taught. As we have noted, the history of the U.S. curriculum may be understood in terms of different models of school knowledge.
8.3.2. Conflicts over curriculum are more likely to occur in public schools than in private ones. The reason for this is fairly clear. Parents who send their children to private orparochial schools do so, in part, because they support the particular school's philosophy.
8.4. The Sociology of the Curriculum
8.4.1. Sociologists of curriculum have focused on not only what is taught but why it is taught. As we have mentioned, sociologists of curriculum reject the objectivist notion that curriculum is valueneutral;rather, they view it as a reflection of particula interests within a society.
8.5. Humanist
8.5.1. The term "humanism" is ambiguous. Around 1806 humanismus was used todescribe the classical curriculum offered by German schools, and by 1836"humanism" was borrowed into English in this sense. In 1856, the great Germanhistorian and philologist Georg Voigt used humanism to describe RenaissanceHumanism, the movement that flourished in the Italian Renaissance to reviveclassical learning, This historical and literary use of the word "humanist" derivesfrom the 15th century Italian term humanist, meaning a teacher or scholar of Classical Greek and Latin literature and the ethical philosophy behind it. Humanist is for the people. It does not matter what your religion is, what background you are, or the color of your skin.
8.6. Twi Different Types of Teaching
8.6.1. 1) On thst simplistic level, how somethingis taught is important to you because it can make the difference between learning the material or not learning it. 2.) On a more complex level, the process of teaching, like the riculum, is not an objective skill agreed on by all practitions; rather' it is also the subject of disagreements over what constitutes appropriate teaching practices.
9. Educational Inequality
9.1. Student-Centered Explanations
9.1.1. In the 1960's, sociologists of education interested in educational inequalityoften worked from a set of liberal political and policy assumptions about why students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often did less well in school than students from higher socioeconomicbackgrounds.
9.1.2. A numberof research studies in the 1960's and 1970's demonstrated, however, that the conventional liberal wisdom was far too simplistic and that solutios were far to complex.
9.1.3. If school differences and financing did not explain unequal educational performance, then perhaps the schools themselves were not the most important factor. Based on the Coleman Report, educational researchers and policy makers oncludedthat the reason students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds did less well in school had more to do with the students themselves, their families, their neighborhood and communities, their culture, and perhaps even their genetic makeup.
9.1.4. Research suggested that there were far mor significant differences in academic performance among students in the same school than among students in different schools.
9.2. Genetic Differences
9.2.1. The most controversial student-centered explanation is the genetic or biological argument. From a sociological and anthropological prespective, biological explanations of human behavior are viewed as limited because social scientists believe that environmental ad social factors are largely responsible for human behavior.
9.3. Cultural Deprivation
9.3.1. In light of the Coleman Report's findings that school differences and resurces did not adequately explain unequalperformance by working-class and nonwhitestudents, some educationalresearchers argued that these students came toschool without the requisite intellectual and social skills necessary for school success.
9.4. Cultural Difference Theories
9.4.1. Cultural difference theorists agree that there are cultural and family differences between working-class and nonwhite students, and white middle-class students. Working-class and nonwhite students may indeed arrive at school with different cultural dispositions and without the skills and attitudes required by the schools.
9.5. Coleman 1982
9.5.1. By the 1980s, Coleman (along with Kilgore and Hoffer, 1982a) analyzed the High School and Beyond (HSB) data set–the nation's largest longitudinal study of schools effects, involving 28,000 sample students attending 1,015 public and private schools. In 1980, sophomore and senior students from public and private high schools were tested in language arts, science, social studies, and mathematics. Using the data as a synthetic cohort, Coleman and colleagues found that Catholic schools upheld the "common school ideal"; that is, the effects of family background on achievement were lower in the Catholic schools. "Average" students were more likely to take rigorous academic courses, thereby producing better results. Thus, Catholic schools avoided the "stratifying" practices, in Coleman's words, of a "'public' school system that no longer integrates the various segments of the population of students, but appears no more egalitarian than private education, and considerably less egalitarian in outcome than the major portion of the private sector in America–the Catholic schools" (1982)