1. Philosophy of Education
1.1. Pragmatism
1.1.1. GENERIC NOTIONS - Pragmatism comes from the Greek word pragma, meaning work. Pragmatism is a philosophy that encourages people to find processes that work in order to achieve their desired ends. Pragmatic Scheme: problem> speculative thought > action > results Dewey's form of pragmatism - instrumentalist and experimentalism - was founded on the new psychology, behaviorism, and the philosophy of pragmatism. His ideas were often referred to as progressive and proposed that educators start with the needs and interests of child in the classroom, allow the child to participate in planning his or her course of study, employ project method or group learning, and depend heavily on experiential learning.
1.1.2. KEY RESEARCHERS - FOUNDERS: George Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), and John Dewey (1859-1952) JOHN DEWEY: Dewey's philosophy of education was the most important influence on what has been termed progressive education.
1.1.2.1. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)-English philosopher and scientist traced back to pragmatism's roots, as well as modern realism's roots. "Pioneer in the pragmatic school of philosophy."
1.1.2.2. John Locke (1632-1704)-Modern realist and political philosopher who followed in the pragmatic tradition. Interested in the way people come to know things.
1.1.2.3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)-French philosopher who believed that individuals in their primitive state were naturally good and that society corrupted them. His emphasis on experience and on the child in a state of nature, constantly growing and changing, paved the way for thinkers such as John Dewey.
1.1.3. GOAL OF EDUCATION - The school is a place where ideas can be implemented, challenged, and restructured, with the goal of providing students with the knowledge of how to improve the social order. School should provide "conjoint, communicated experienced " - that it should function as preparation for life in a democratic society. Schools should balance the needs of society and community on one hand and the needs of the individual on the other. Dewey believed that if schools instilled democratic and cooperative values in children they would be prepared as adults to transform the social order into a more democratic one. Education had no other goals than growth - growth leading to more growth. School was to be "a lever of social reform" - that is to be the central institution for societal and personal improvement, and to do so by balancing a complex set of processes.
1.1.4. ROLE OF THE TEACHER - The teacher is no longer the authoritarian figure but rather the peripheral position of facilitator. The teacher encourages, offers suggestions, questions, and help plan and implement courses of study.
1.1.5. METHOD OF INSTRUCTION - Children learn both individually and in groups. They should start their mode of inquiry by posing question about what they want to know. Today, we refer to this method of instruction as the problem-solving or inquiry method.
1.1.6. CURRICULUM - Core curriculum, or an integrated curriculum. A particular subject matter under investigation by students, such as whales, would yield problems to be solved using math, science, history, reading, writing, music, art, wood or metal working, cooking, and sewing - all the academic and vocational disciplines in an integrated, interconnected way. Progressive educators are not wedded to fixed curriculum either; rather, curriculum changes as the social order changes and as children's interests and needs change.
2. Equality of Opportunity
2.1. CLASS: Education is extremely expensive. Families from the upper class and the middle class are also more likely to expect their children to finish school, whereas working-class and underclass families often have lower levels of expectation for their children. Middle and upper-class children are more likely to speak "standard" English. Children from working-class and underclass families are more likely to underachieve, drop out, and resist the curriculum of the school. 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.
2.2. RACE: Drop out rates are higher and reading levels lower for African-American and Hispanic American students. These lower levels of proficiency are reflected by the fact that minorities have, on average, lower SAT scores than white students. It is 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.
2.3. GENDER: Today, females are less likely to drop out and have a higher level of writing and reading proficiency than males. Males outperform females in mathematics proficiency. Gender differences between men and women, in terms of educational attainment, have been reduced. Even so, there are still significant advantages for men when competing for the most prestigious academic prizes, however.
2.4. THE COLEMAN STUDY (1982): Set off a firestorm of controversy 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. Differences among schools do make a difference.
3. Politics of Education
3.1. Four Purposes of Education
3.1.1. INTELLECTUAL - to teach basic cognitive skills (reading writing, and mathematics), transmit specific knowledge (literature, history, sciences). help students acquire higher-order thinking skills (analysis, evaluation, and synthesis)
3.1.2. POLITICAL - to inculcate allegiance to the existing order (patriotism), prepare citizens who will participate in this political order (democracies), assimilate diverse cultural groups into a common political order; teach children the basic laws of society.
3.1.3. SOCIAL - to help solve social problems; socialization
3.1.4. ECONOMIC - to prepare students for future occupational roles; train; allocate individuals into the division of labor
3.2. Role of the School
3.2.1. The liberal perspective views the school's role as enabling the individual to develop his or her talents, creativity, and sense of self. Views role of education as balancing the needs of society and the individual in a manner that is consistent with democratic and meritocratic society. Equality!
3.3. Explanation of Unequal Performance
3.3.1. Liberals argue that 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.
3.4. Definition of Educational Problems
3.4.1. The ways in which each perspective addresses specific educational problems at the close of the twentieth century, and consequently how each sees solutions to these, is of utmost importance.
3.4.1.1. A Nation at Risk By: Terrel Bell
4. Schools as Organizations
4.1. Alabama State Senators: Richard Shelby, Luther Strange
4.1.1. Define actions as necessary
4.2. House of Representatives: Bradley Byrne, Martha Roby, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt, Mo Brooks, Gary Palmer, Terri Sewell
4.3. State Superintendent: Michael Sentance
4.4. Representative on State School Board: Jeffery Newman (District 7)
4.5. Local Superintendent: Keith Davis
4.6. Local School Board: James Garner, Carol Dickinson, Brenda Taylor, Chris Carothers, Dana Peoples
4.7. School Processes
4.7.1. Identifying the powerful cultural qualities of schools that make them so potent in terms of emotional recall, if not in terms of cognitive outcomes. The culture of any one particular school is the product of the political compromises that have been created in order for the school to be viable. Schools, as they are now organized, are shaped by a series of inherent contradictions that can develop cultures that are conflictual and even stagnant. Changing the cultures of school requires patience, skills, and good will.
5. Curriculum and Pedagogy
5.1. Developmentalist Curriculum
5.1.1. 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, as well as developmental psychologists such as Piaget and it emphasized the process of teaching as well as its content. 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.
5.2. Two Dominant Traditions of Teaching
5.2.1. MIMETIC TRADITION: Based on the viewpoint that the purpose of education is to transmit specific knowledge to students. The mimetic model stresses the importance of rational sequencing in the teaching process and assessment of the learning process.
5.2.2. TRANSFORMATIVE TRADITION: Rests on the belief that the purpose of education is to change the student in some meaningful way, including intellectually, creatively, spiritually, and emotionally. Unlike mimetic, transformative rejects the authoritarian relationship between teacher and student and argue instead that teaching and learning are inextricably linked.
6. History of U.S. Education
6.1. Progressive Era
6.1.1. Child-centered reform supported by G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) which opened access to secondary education. Hall believed that children, in their development, reflected the stages of development of civilization. Curriculums tailored to the stages of child development. Schools individualized instruction and attended to the needs and interests of the children they educate.
6.2. Democratic-Liberal School
6.2.1. Committed to providing equality of opportunity for all. Liberal reformers help to expand educational opportunities to larger segments of the population. More students from diverse backgrounds went to school for longer periods of time, the goals of education became more diverse, with social goals often becoming as or more important than intellectual ones. Equality and excellence must continue to move closer to each, without sacrificing one for the other too dramatically.
6.2.1.1. The Troubled Crusade By: Diane Ravitch
7. Sociological Perspectives
7.1. Theoretical Perspective
7.1.1. FUNCTIONALISM - Society that stresses the interdependence of the social system. In a highly integrated, well functioning society, schools socialize students into the appropriate values, and sort and select students according to their abilities. Educational reform, then, from a functional point of view, is suppose to create structures, programs, and curricula that are technologically advanced, rational, and encourage technologically advanced, rational, and encourage social unity. Functionalists emphasize cohesion in explaining social order.
7.1.1.1. Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917) was the earliest sociologist to embrace a functional viewpoint about the relation of school and society. Durkheim virtually invented the sociology of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He believed that education was of critical importance in creating the moral unity necessary for social cohesion and harmony. For Durkheim, moral values were the foundation of society.
7.1.2. CONFLICT THEORY- Some sociologists argue that the social order is not based on some collective agreement, but on the ability of dominant groups to impose, their will on subordinate groups through force, cooperation, and manipulation. Conflict sociologists emphasize struggle in explaining social order; students struggle against teachers, teachers against administrators, and so on. The achievement ideology convinces students and teachers that schools promote learning, and sort and select students according to their abilities and not according to their social status.
7.1.2.1. Karl Marx (1818-1883) is the intellectual found of the conflict school in the sociology of education.
7.1.2.2. Max Weber (1864-1920) examined status cultures as well as class position as an important sociological concept, because it alerts one to the fact that people identify their group by what they consume and with whom they socialize.
7.1.3. INTERACTIONALISM - Primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspective. Interactional theories 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. By examining the microsociological or the interactional aspects of school life, people are less likely to create theories that are logical and eloquent, but without meaningful content.
7.2. 5 Effects of Schooling
7.2.1. KNOWLEDGE AND ATTITUDES - The effective schools research demonstrates that academically oriented schools do produce higher rates of learning. Research has indicated that the more education individuals receives, the more likely they are to read newspapers, books, and magazines, and to take part in politics and public affairs. More highly educated people are also more likely to be liberal in their political and social attitudes. Education is also related to individuals' sense of well-being and self-esteem. Thus, more years of schooling leads to greater knowledge and social participation.
7.2.2. INSIDE THE SCHOOLS - Research has shown that curricular placement is the single biggest determinant of college attendance (Lee & Bryk, 1989; Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993.) Large schools have better facilities, yet more bureaucratic and may restrain initiative. Smaller schools may allow more student and teacher freedom, but small schools often lack resources.
7.2.3. STUDENT PEER GROUPS AND ALIENATION - Student cultures play an important role in shaping students' educational experience. Schools are far more than mere collections of individuals; they develop cultures, traditions, and restraints that profoundly influence those who work and study within them. They socialize and sort and select students and , in doing so, reproduce society.
7.2.4. EDUCATION AND INEQUALITY - Social class differences are not only reflected in differences in income but in other social characteristics such as education, family, and child-rearing practices, occupation, place of residence, political involvement, health, consumer behavior, and religious belief. If you know a family's or individual's class position, you have a good idea about their life-style and life chances. Class influences and shapes the way people think. Class position creates selective perception which, in turn, creates a world view that "explains" inequalities.
7.2.5. TRACKING - "Tracking" refers to the placement of students in curricular programs based on students' abilities and inclinations. Studies prove that tracking decisions are often based on other criteria, such as students' class or race. Working class students end up in vocational tracks with middle class students in academic tracks. Students in lower tracks experience more alienation and authoritarian teachers than high-track students.
8. Educational Inequality
8.1. School-centered Explanations
8.1.1. SCHOOL FINANCING: There are vast differences in funding between affluent and poor districts. Public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. Since property values are significantly higher in more affluent communities, these communities are able to raise significantly m ore money for schools through this form of taxation than poorer communities with lower property values.
8.1.2. EFFECTIVE SCHOOL RESEARCH: Critics of student-centered findings suggested that there were differences between good and bad schools, and between good and incompetent teachers. The concern with unequal educational performance of nonwhite and working-class students is at the heart of such inquiry. Ronald Edmonds argued that researchers needed to compare schools within lower socioeconomic communities as well. The effective school research suggests that there are school-centered processes that help to explain unequal educational achievement by different groups of students. Although the effective school literature has attracted much support from policy makers and is often cited in the educational reform literature as the key to school improvement, the road from research to implementation is not a clear one.
8.1.3. WITHIN-SCHOOL DIFFERENCES: Ability grouping and curriculum grouping (often referred to as tracking by ability or curriculum tracking) is an important organizational component of U.S. schooling. At the elementary school level, students are divided into reading groups and separate classes based on teachers recommendations, standardized tests scores, and sometimes ascriptive characteristics such as race, class, or gender. Critics of tracking suggest that homogeneous grouping results in unequal education for different groups with differences in academic outcomes often due to the differences in school climate, expectations, pedagogic practices, and curriculum between tracks.
8.1.4. GENDER AND SCHOOLING: The feminist movement challenged unequal treatment of women in all aspects of society and worked actively to change both attitudes and laws that limited the life chances of women.
8.2. CULTURAL DEPRIVATION THEORY: Suggests that working-class and nonwhite families often lack the cultural resources, such as books and other educational stimuli, and thus arrive at school at a significant disadvantage. The poor have a deprived culture - one that lacks the value system of middle-class culture. 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. Educational Reform
9.1. School Based Reforms
9.1.1. SCHOOL-BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS: During the 1980s, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nation's school were not producing the kinds of graduates necessary for a revitalization of the U.S. economy. Over the past decade, however, a group of foundations and entrepreneurs have contributed significantly to educational reform efforts. School-business partnerships have attracted considerable media attention, but there is little convincing 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. SCHOOL-TO-WORK PROGRAMS: In the 1990s, school-business partnerships became incorporated into school-to-work programs. Their intent was 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. The U.S. system of vocational education remains a "second-class" educational track, which often does not equip students with a sound liberal arts foundation and is not adequately connected to career opportunities.
9.2. Reforms
9.2.1. SCHOOL FINANCE REFORMS: Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Rodriguez v. San Antonio, which declared there is no constitutional right to an equal education, school finance equity and adequacy advocates litigated at the state level. By 1980, more evidence had been accumulated regarding the inequality of education in urban areas and the Education Law Center filed Abbott v. Burke, on behalf of several urban school districts also due to a violation of the "thorough and efficient" clause. In 2009, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled as constitutional a new funding formula, SFRA, that eliminated the Abbott remedies and implemented a formula for allocating funding to all districts based on student needs. The State Supreme Court found the state school funding formula to be unconstitutional in 2001. Although all of these educational reforms have demonstrated the potential to improve schools for low-income and minority children, especially in urban areas, by themselves they are limited in reducing the achievement gaps.
9.2.2. FULL SERVICE AND COMMUNITY: Another way to attack education inequity is to examine and plan to educate not only the whole child, but also the whole community. Dryfoo's model of full service schools, Canada's Harlem Children's Zone, and Newark's Broader Bolder Approach, are three models of community-based reforms. 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 (1997) argument to repair the larger social and economic problems of societ as a means of improving public education, there is no evidence that full-service schools affect student achievement.