1. History of U.S. Education
1.1. Reform Movement
1.1.1. The National Commission on Excellence (1983) offered five solutions to start the educational reform which are:
1.1.1.1. 1. All students graduating from high school complete "new basics"
1.1.1.2. 2. Schools at all levels expect higher achievement
1.1.1.3. 3. More time be devoted to teaching the new basics
1.1.1.4. 4. Preparation of teachers be strengthened
1.1.1.5. 5. Citizens require their elected representatives to support and fund these reforms
1.2. Historical Interpretation of U.S. Education
1.2.1. The conservative perspective argues that U.S. students know very little and that U.S. schools are very mediocre. The conservatives point to the failure of the so called progressive education to fulfill its lofty social goals without sacrificing academic quality.
2. Educational Reform
2.1. School Based Reforms
2.1.1. School-to-Work Programs intended to extend what had been a vocational emphasis to non-college bound students regarding skills necessary for successful employment and to stress the importance of work-based learning.
2.1.2. During the 1980s, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nation's schools were not producing the kinds of graduates necessary for a revitalization of the U.S. economy. Several School-Business Partnerships were formed, the most notable of which was the Boston Compact begun in 1982.
2.2. Societal, economic, community, or political Reforms
2.2.1. School Finance Reforms: Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Rodriguez vs. San Antonio, which decalared there is no constitution right to an equal education, school finance equity and adequacy advocates litigated at the state level.
3. Schools as Organizations
3.1. Major Stakeholders of my district (District 6)
3.1.1. State Senator - Larry Stutts
3.1.2. House of Representatives - Johnny Mack Morrow
3.1.3. State Superintendent - Michael Sentance
3.1.4. Representative on the State School Board - Cynthia Sanders
3.1.5. Local Superintendent - Gary Williams
3.1.6. Local School Board - Ralton Baker, Pat Cochran, Shannon Oliver, Mike Shewbert, Terry Welborne
3.2. Elements of Change within School Processes & School Cultures:
3.2.1. Conflict is a necessary part of change. Efforts to democratize schools do not create conflicts, but they allow previously hidden problems, issues, and disagreements to surface.
3.2.2. 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, collaboration, and conflict resolution.
3.2.3. 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.
3.2.4. Process and content are interrelated. The process a team uses in going about its work is as important as the content of educational changes it attempts. The substance of a project often depends upon the degree of trust and openness built up within the team and between the team and the school.
4. Sociological Perspectives
4.1. Theoretical Perspective concerning the relationship between school & society: Functionalism, Conflict Theory, and Interactionalism
4.1.1. Functionalists view society as kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work.
4.1.2. Unlike functionalists, conflict sociologist do not see the relation between school and society as unproblematic or straightforward but rather emphasize struggle.
4.1.3. Interactional theories attempt to make the commonplace strange by turning on their heads everyday taken for granted behaviors and interaction between students and students and students and teachers.
4.2. 5 effects of schooling
4.2.1. 1.Knowledge and attitudes do have an impact on education. It was tested and realized that students who had a better attitude about school and who put effort into learning throughout the summers better in school.
4.2.2. 2. Employment is something that most students attending college hope to gain after they graduate. It is true that it is easier to find a job after graduating from college rather than not attending.
4.2.3. 3. Education and mobility is when you go to either a public or private school and the individual that graduates from the private school has an advantage.
4.2.4. 4.Teacher behavior Is when teachers may ask more of their students at times but praise them for a job well done which makes the students feel better as well.
4.2.5. 5. Inadequate schools means that students may have a chance to be more successful if they attend a private school over a public school.
5. Philosophy of Education
5.1. Pragmatism: An approach that assesses the truth of meaning of theories or beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.
5.1.1. Based on Experimentalism: Students can learn from both experimenting and from reading books.
5.1.2. Key researchers: George Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey.
5.1.3. Goal of Education: Dewey believed that the school should provide "conjoint, communicated experience" - that it should function as preparation for life in a democratic society.
5.1.4. Role of the Teacher: In a progressive setting, the teacher is no longer the authoritarian figure from which all knowledge flows; rather, the teacher assumes the peripheral position of facilitator.
5.1.5. Method of Instruction: Problem solving or inquiry method is used. Dewey proposed that children learn both individually and in groups. He believed that children should start their mode of inquiry by posing questions about what they want to know.
5.1.6. Curriculum: Core curriculum or an integrated curriculum. Subjects that are studied would be math, science, history, reading, writing, music, art, wood or metal working, cooking and sewing - all the academic and vocational disciplines in an integrated and interconnected way.
6. Curriculum & Pedagogy
6.1. Developmentalist Curriculum
6.1.1. This is related to the needs and interests of the student rather than the needs of society. This curriculum emanated from the aspects of Dewey's writings related to the relationship between the child and the curriculum.
6.2. Two Dominant Traditions of Teaching
6.2.1. Mimetic Tradition - Called "Transformative". It is the easier of the two traditions to describe. It is closer to what most people today seem to think education is all about. It is named "mimetic" because it gives a central place to the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process.
6.2.2. 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.
7. Equality of Oppurtunity
7.1. Impact of Educational Outcomes
7.1.1. Students in different social classes have different kinds of educational experiences. One way class has an impact is that education can be extremely expensive. The longer a student stays in school, the longer they will need financial support from their parents. Obviously, this situation favors wealthier families and could possibly impact those who aren't as wealthy.
7.1.2. Race also has a huge impact on educational outcomes. An individual's race has a direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve. That race is related to educational outcomes is undeniable, although, given the nature of U.S. society, it is extremely difficult to separate race from class. Minorities do not receive the same educational opportunities as whites, and their rewards for educational attainment are significantly less.
7.1.3. Historically, gender was directly related to his or her educational attainment. Even though women are often rated as being better students than men, in the past they were less likely to attain the same level of education. Today, females are less likely to drop out of school than males, and are more likely to have a higher level of reading proficiency than males.
7.2. Responses to The Coleman Study (1982)
7.2.1. Round Two: The debate over the High School Achievement findings had centered on the interpretations attached to the magnitude of the findings. What Coleman and his associates saw as significant, others did not.
7.2.2. Round Three: More than forty years after the publication of Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity, Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling applied the most sophisticated statistical tools to evaluate educational data in a similar manner as Coleman had done in 1966.
8. Politics of Education
8.1. 4 Purposes of Education
8.1.1. Political
8.1.1.1. Political purpose is to incorporate 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.
8.1.2. Social
8.1.2.1. Social purposes are to help solve social problems, to work as one of many institutions and to socialize children into the various roles, behaviors, and values of the society.
8.1.3. Economic
8.1.3.1. Economic purposes are to prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into the division of labor.
8.1.4. Intellectual
8.1.4.1. The conservative perspective sees 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.
8.1.4.2. Intellectual purposes are to teach 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.
8.2. Conservative Perspective
8.2.1. The Role of the School
8.2.2. Explanations of Unequal Performance
8.2.2.1. Conservatives argue that individuals or groups of students rise and fall on their own intelligence, hard work, and initiative, and that achievement is based on hard work and sacrifice.
8.2.3. Definition of Educational Problems
8.2.3.1. Decline of Standards: As referred to be conservatives, is their response to liberals and radicals demands for greater equality in the 1960s and 1970s. The schools systematically lowered academic standards and reduced educational quality.
9. Educational Inequality
9.1. Two Types of Cultural Deprivation Theories
9.1.1. 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 for future reward and the importance of schooling as a means to future success. This deprivation results in educationally disadvantaged students who achieve poorly because they have not been raised to acquire the skills and dispositions required for satisfactory academic achievement.
9.1.2. The relative failure of many of the compensatory education programs that were based on its assumptions about why disadvantaged children have lower levels of acheivement than more advantaged children. Compensatory programs, as a whole, have not improved significantly the academic performance of disadvantage students.
9.2. School-Centered Explanations for Educational Inequality
9.2.1. 1. School Financing
9.2.1.1. Public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. The majority of the funds come from state and local taxes, with local property taxes a significant source.
9.2.2. 2. Effective School Research
9.2.2.1. The effective school research suggests that there are school-centered processes that help to explain unequal educational achievement by different groups of students.
9.2.3. 3. Between-School Differences: Curriculum and Pedagogic Practices
9.2.3.1. The effective school research points to how differences in what is often termed school climates affect academic performance.
9.2.4. 4. Within-School Differences: Curriculum and Ability Grouping
9.2.4.1. The fact that different groups of students in the same schools perform very differently suggests that there may be school characteristics affecting these outcomes.