1. Ch.6 Schools as Organizations
1.1. State Senator: Richard Shelby
1.2. House of Representatives: Bradley Byrne
1.3. State Superintendent: Michael Sentance
1.4. Representative on State School Board: Mary Scott Hunter
1.4.1. Schools are political organizations in which there are numerous competing interests. Thus, 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. Bureaucracies can become so complex, so rule oriented that rationality can often suppress the creativity required for learning.
1.5. Local Superintendent: Jason Barnett
1.6. Local School Board: Jeff Williams: Chair; Randy Peppers: Vice Chair; Matt G. Sharp: Member; Mark Richards: Member; Robert Elliot: Member
2. Ch.7 Curriculum and Pedagogy
2.1. Social efficiency
2.1.1. was a philosophically pragmatist approach developed in the early twentieth century as a putatively democratic response to the development of mass public secondary education.
2.1.2. Student centered and meeting the needs of the child.
2.2. Developmentalist
2.2.1. is related to the needs and interest of the student rather than the needs of society.
2.2.2. building block based on needs.
2.3. memetic
2.3.1. based on the viewpoint that the purpose of education is to transmit specific knowledge to students.
2.3.2. best way to use this method is through lecture and presentation.
2.4. transformative
2.4.1. this tradition believes that the purpose of education is to change the student in some meaningful way.
2.4.2. a multidimensional way of teaching. It is meeting the students needs.
3. Ch.8 Equality of Opportunity
3.1. Class Students in different social classes have different kinds of educational experiences. From a cultural point of view, schools represent the values of the middle and upper 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. In sum, social class and level of educational attainment are highly correlated.
3.2. Race An individual's race has a direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve. 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.
3.2.1. Coleman Study Differences among schools do make a difference, private schools demand more from their students than do public schools. Subsequent studies that have compared public and private schools have also found that primates schools seem to "do it better", particularly for low-income students. Catholic schools seem to advantage low-income minority students, especially in urban areas. Where an individual goes to school is often related to her race and socioeconomic background, but the racial and socioeconomic composition of a school has a greater effect on student achievement than a individual's race and class.
3.2.1.1. School segregation based on race and socioeconomic status and within school interactions dominated by middle-class values are largely responsible for gaps in student achievement. Educational reform must focus on elimination the high level of segregation that remains in the U.S.'s educational system and that schools must bring an end to tracking systems and biases that favor white and middle-class students.
3.3. Gender Historically, an individual's gender was directly related to his or her educational attainment. In the last 20 years, gender differences between male and female, in terms of educational attainment, have been reduced. There is little doubt that society discriminates against women occupationally and socially.
4. Ch.9 Education Inequality
4.1. Cultural deprivation theory, popularized in the 1960s, suggest that working-class and nonwhite families often lack the cultural resources, such as books and other educational stimuli, and arrive at school at a significant disadvantage.
4.1.1. School Financing, public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources.
4.1.2. Effective School Research, The findings of Coleman and Jencks that differences in school resources and quality do not adequately explain between-school differences in academic achievement was viewed by teachers as a mixed blessing.
4.2. Critics argue that it removes the responsibility for school success and failure from schools and teachers, and places it on families. Further, they suggest that it blames the victims of poverty for the effects of poverty rather than placing the blame squarely where it belongs: on social and economic processes that produce poverty
4.2.1. Between-School Differences, school climates affect academic performance. Communities have school climates conductive to positive academic achievement. Barnstein's theory is similar to Bowels and Gintis's view that the type of schooling corresponds to the social class of students in a particular school, their different places in society.
4.2.2. 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.
5. Ch. 10 Educational Reform
5.1. Charter schools are public schools that are free from many regulations applied to traditional public schools, and in return are held accountable for student performance. They are self-governing institutions with wide control over their own curriculum, instruction, staffing, budget, internal organization, calendar, etc.
5.1.1. State Intervention and Mayoral Control in Local School Districts; 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.
5.1.2. Full Service and Community Schools; Another way to attack education is to examine and plan to educate not only the whole child, but also the whole community. Specifically designed to target and improve at-risk neighborhoods, full-service schools aim to prevent problems, as well as to support them.
5.2. The teacher education debate revolved around three major points; the perceived lack of rigor and intellectual demands in teacher education programs, the need to attract and retain competent teacher candidates, and the necessity to reorganize the academic and professional components of teacher education programs at both the baccalaureate and post-baccalaureate levels.
6. Ch.2 Politics of Education
6.1. Intellectual purpose: is to teach basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics; to transmit specific knowledge; Political purpose: is 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; Social purpose: is to help solve problems, to work as one of many institutions, such as family and the church to ensure social cohesion and to socialize children into various roles, behaviors, and values of the society; Economic purpose; is to prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into the division of labor.
6.2. The Conservative Perspective believes that schools should ensure that all students have the opportunity to compete individually in the educational marketplace and that schools should be meritocratic to the extent that individual effort is rewarded. Based on the belief that individuals succeed largely on their own accord, conservatives argue that the role of the school is to provide a place for individual merit to be encouraged and rewarded.
7. Ch.3 History of U.S. Education
7.1. The Post-War II Equity Era, the patterns that emerged during the Progressive Era were continued. First the debate about the goals of education and wether all children should receive the same education remained and important one. Second, the demand for the expansion of educational opportunity became perhaps the most prominent feature of educational reform. Whereas the Common School era opened access to elementary education and the Progressive Era to secondary education, the post-World War II years were concerned with expanding opportunities to the post-secondary level.
7.2. the process of educational change is a straightforward extension of our analysis of the capitalist economy. The role of education in legitimizing the class structure and in fostering forms of consciousness consistent with its reproduction also figure prominently in our analysis.
8. Ch.4 Sociological Perspective
8.1. Theoretical pictures of society are created by human beings and interpreted by them. Thus, knowledge of the social world cannot be totally separated from one's personal and social situation. One's best conceptual guide to understanding the relation between school and society because it gives on the intellectual scaffolding from which to hang empirical findings.
8.2. Functionalists tend to assume that consensus is the normal state in society and that conflict represents a breakdown of shared values. Educational reform, then, from a functional point of view, is supposed to create structures, programs, and curricula that are technically advanced, rational and encourage social unity.
8.3. Whereas functionalists emphasis cohesion in explaining social order, conflict sociologists emphasize struggle. To their minds, there is a direct correspondence between the organization of schools and the organization of society and until society is fundamentally changed, there is little hope of real school reform.
8.4. Interactional theories about the relation of school and society are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspectives. Observation that functional and conflict theories are very abstract and emphasize structure and process at a very general level of analysis. Interactional theories tend 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.
8.5. Sociologists of education disagree strongly about the relative importance of schooling in terms of what knowledge and attitudes young people acquire in school. Other research indicates that differences between schools in terms of their academic programs and policies do make differences in student learning. Education is also related to individuals' sense of well-being and self-esteem.
8.5.1. The belief that occupational and social mobility begin at the schoolhouse door is a critical component of the American ethos. As part of what might be termed civil religion, there is an abiding faith among most Americans that education is the great equalizer in the "great status race" There has been a point made that there is a difference between educational amount and educational route.
8.5.2. Teachers expectations of students were found to directly influence student achievement. The labels that teachers apply to children can influence actual performance.This form of self-fulfilling prophecy indicates that teachers' expectations play a major role in encouraging or discouraging students to work to their full potential.
8.5.3. Student subcultures continue to be important after high school. There are four major types of college students; careerists, intellectuals, strivers, and unconnected. Student cultures play an important role in shaping students' educational experiences.
8.5.4. Another way that schools reinforce or even create inequalities, particularly racial and ethnic inequalities, is through de facto segregation. Although the issue is far from resolved, most of the evidence indicates that racially mixed schools benefit minorities and do not suppress white achievement.
9. Ch.5 Philosophy of Education
9.1. Pragmatism is generally viewed as an American Philosophy that developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Pragmatism is a philosophy that encourages people to find processes that work in order to achieve their desired ends.
9.1.1. meant to attainment of a better society through education. Thus, the school became and "embryonic community" where children could learn skills both experimentally as well as from books.
9.1.2. Key researchers: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, George Sanders Peirce, William James, and Francis Bacon
9.1.3. To be a level of social reform. To be the central institution for societal and personal improvement, and to do so by balancing a complex set of processes.
9.1.4. In the role of progressive setting the teacher is no longer the authoritarian figure from which all knowledge flows, rather the teacher assumes the peripheral position of facilitator.
9.1.5. Children are going about learning in nontraditional yet natural ways. Not everyone's learning style is the same.
9.1.6. Progressive educators support starting with contemporary problems and working from the known to the unknown.