1.1. The developmentalist curriculum is related to the needs and interests of the student rather than the needs of society. This philosoohically 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.The teacher, from this perspective, was not a transmitter of knowledge but rather a facilitator of student growth. It has been profoundly influential in teacher education programs.
1.2. The mimetic tradition is based on the viewpoint that the purpose of education is to transmit specific knowledge to students. The transformative tradition believes that the purpose of education is to change the student in some meaningful way, including intellectually, creatively, spiritually, and emotionally. In contrast to the mimetic tradition, transformative educators do not see the transmission of knowledge as the only component of education.
2. Chapter 5 - Philosophy of Education
2.1. Generic Notions Existentialists Pose questions as to how their concerns impact on the lives of individuals. Existentialists believe the individuals are placed on this earth alone and must make some sense out of the chaos they encounter. This, individuals are in a state of constantly be coming, creating chaos in order, creating good and evil. Key Researchers Some key researchers for Existentialism would include Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Karl Jasper, Jean Paul Sartre, and Maxine Greene. Goal of Education Education should focus on the needs of individuals, both cognitively and affectively. They also believe that education should stress individuality; that it should include discussion of the nonrational as well as the rational world; and that the tensions of living in the world should be addressed. Role of the Teacher Teachers should understand their own "lived worlds" as well as that of their students in order to help their students achieve the best "lived worlds" they can. The role of the teacher is to help students understand the world through posing questions, generating activities, and working together. Methods of Instruction They view learning as intensely personal. They believe that each child has a different learning style and it is up to the teacher to discover what works for each child. Curriculum Existentialists choose curriculum heavily biased toward the humanities. Literature especially has meaning for them since literature is able to evoke responses in readers that might move them to new levels of awareness.
3. Chapter 6 - Schools as Organizations
3.1. Superintendent Jimmy Cunningham and Board Members James B. Durham, Jr., Randy McClung, Carolyn Martin, Neal Baine, and Kathy Prater
3.2. School processes naturally lead to questions concerning the nature of teaching and the need for greater teacher professionalization. School culture as authority structures and the significance of bureaucracy. School culture is not easy because culture is exactly that which one takes most for granted.
4. Chapter 2 - Politics of Education
4.1. -Political purposes teach children the basic laws of the society. -Intellectual purposes teach basic cognitive skills. -Social purposes help socialize children into the various roles, behaviors, and values of society. -Economic purposes are to prepare students for their later occupational roles
4.2. Liberal Perspective 1. The role of the school is to provide the necessary education to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed in society, and to teach children to respect cultural diversity so that they understand and fit into a diverse society. 2. The explanation of unequal education performance is that individual students or groups of students begin school with different life chances and therefore some groups have significantly more advantages than others. 3. The definition of educational problems is that schools too often limit the life chances of poor and minority children and therefore the problem of underachievement by these groups is a critical issue, and also that schools place too much emphasis on discipline and authority, thus limiting their role in helping students develop as individuals.
5. Chapter 3 - History of U.S. Education
5.1. Race to the Top has been a very influential reform. It not only builds data systems that measure student growth and success and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction, but it also recruits, develops, rewards, and retains effective teachers and principals. Race to the Top has been able to turn around our lowest-achieving schools.
5.2. Democratic-liberals tend to interpret history optimistically. They believe that a school system should be committed to providing equality of opportunity for all.
6. Chapter 4 - Sociological Perspectives
6.1. Functionalism Functionalists tend to assume that consensus is the normal state in society and that conflicts represent a breakdown of shared values. Conflict theories Conflict sociologists do not see the relation between school and society as unproblematic or straightforward. The conflict perspective offers important insights about the relation between school and society. Interactionalism Interactionalism of school and society are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspectives. 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.
6.2. Knowledge and Attitudes Differences between schools in terms of their academic programs and policies do not make differences in student learning. Academically oriented schools do not produce higher rates of learning. Even taking into account the importance of individual social class background when evaluating the impact of education, more years of schooling leads to greater knowledge and social participation. Employment Most students believe that graduating from college will lead to greater employment opportunities, and they are right. Credential inflation has led to the expectation among employers that there employees will have an ever-increasing amount of formal education. Getting a college and professional degree is important for earning more money, but educational loan does not fully explain differences in levels of income. Teacher Behavior Teachers have a huge impact on student learning and behavior. Teacher set standards for students and influence student self-esteem and sense of efficacy. Teachers' expectations of students were found to directly influence student achievement. When teachers demanded more from their students and praised them more, students learning more and felt better about themselves. Student Peer Groups and Alienation The student culture idealizes athletic ability, looks, and that detached all the indicates "coolness". Student cultures play in important role in shaping students' educational experience.
7. Chapter 8 - Equality of Opportunity
7.1. 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. Teachers have been found to think more highly of middle-class and upper middle-class children than they do of working-class and underclass children because working-class and underclass children do not speak middle-class English. Among 16-24 year olds, 5.2 percent of white students drop out of school, whereas 9.3 percents of African American students and 17.6 Hisanic students are likely to drop out of school. Among 17-year-olds, 89 percent of what students will be able to read at the intermediate level, which includes the ability to search for specific information, interrelate ideas, and make generalizations about literature, science, and social studies materials. However, 66% of African-American students have reach that level of reading proficiency and 70 percent Of Hispanic American students are reading at the intermediate level. It is not surprising that these lower levels of proficiency are afflicted by the fact that minorities have, on average, lower SAT scores than want students. 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 higher level of reading proficiency than males. The one area that males outperform females is in mathematics proficiency. There are numerous explanations as to why males do better than females in mathematics, the most convincing of which is related to the behavior of classroom teachers who tend to assume that females will not do as well as males in mathematics.
7.2. The annual increment attributable to Catholic schooling is tiny. The difference that does exist between public and Catholic schools are statistically significant, but in terms of significant differences in learning, the results are negligible. 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 the student’s achievement outcomes.
8. Chapter 9 - Educational Inequality
8.1. Researchers are you the African-American children do less well in school because they adapt to their oppressed position in the class and caste structure. Ogbu argued that there is a “job ceiling” for African Americans in the United States, as there is for similar caste-like minorities in other countries, and the African-American families and schools socialize their children to deal with their inferior life chances rather than encourage them to internalize those values and skills necessary for positions that will not open to them. more affluent families give their children access to cultural capital and social capital. Although Bourdieu recognizes the economic capital are still paramount in providing affluent families with an educational advantage, social and cultural capital are more subtle ways that social class advantages reproduce educational inequalities.
8.2. School Financing - Jonathan Kozol documented the vast differences in funding between affluent and pour districts. Significant differences between affluent suburban and poor urban districts remain the New York City schools receiving less than $21,000 per student and affluent Long Island schools receiving over $25,000 per student. Effective School Research - The differences in school resources and quality do not adequately explain between school differences in academic achievement was viewed by teachers as a mixed blessing. On one hand, if student differences are more important than school differences, then teachers cannot be blamed for the lower academic performance of nonwhite and working class students. On the other hand, if schools’ effects are not significant, then schools and, more specifically, teachers can do little to make a positive difference. The societal change was necessary to improve schools may have made teachers feel less directly responsible for problems that were often beyond their control, it also left teachers with a sense of hopelessness that there was little they could do to improve schooling from inside the schools. Curriculum and Ability Grouping - The fact that different groups of students in the same schools perform very differently suggest that there may be school characteristics affecting these outcomes. At the elementary school level, students are divided into reading groups in separate classes based on teacher recommendations, standardized test scores, and sometimes descriptive characteristics such as race, Class, or gender. For the most part, elementary students received a similar curriculum in these different groups, but it may be taught at a different pace, or the teacher in the various groups may have a different expectation for the different students. Gender and Schooling - Vivian argued that differences between men and women are cultural, not biological, and that women deserve equal Letty in the public and private spheres of life. The’s the feminist movement challenged unequal treatment of women in all aspects of society and worked actively to change both attitude and laws that limited the life changes of women. Feminist scholarship on schooling has attempted to understand the ways in which the schools limit the educational and life chances of women. It has focused on achievement differences, on women and schooling administration, on the history of coeducation, on the relationship between pedagogy and attitudes and knowledge, and other related issues. A significant aspect of this literature concerns gender differences in how men and women see the world, their cultural causes, and the role of schools in perpetuating or eliminating them.
9. Chapter 10 - Educational Reform
9.1. During the 1980s, business leaders became increasingly concerned that the nations schools were not producing the kinds of graduates necessary for a revitalization of the US economy. Several school business partnerships were found, the most notable of which was the Boston Compact begun in 1982. However, despite the considerable publicity that surrounds these partnerships, the fact is that in the 1980s, only 1.5% of corporate giving was to public primary and secondary public schools. In fact, corporate and business support for public schools has fallen dramatically since the 1970s. 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 US education. 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. On May 4, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994. This law provided seed money to state and local partnerships of business, labor, government, education, and community organizations to develop school to work systems. The law did not create a new program, but allowed states and their partners to bring together efforts at education reform, worker preparation, and economic development to create a system - assistant to prepare youth for the high-wage, high skill careers of today’s and tomorrow’s global economy.
9.2. A popular reform implemented over the past decade is mayoral control of urban districts. Similar to state takeover, mayoral control has been a favored non-liberal reform, with the urban mayors and business leaders arguing that centralizing governance into the mayors office is more effective and efficient than traditional elected school board. Proponents parent you that the mayoral control illuminates correction, leads to effective and efficient management and budget, increases student achievement, and reduces the political battles endemic to elected school boards. Critics argue that it has not increased achievement significantly, is undemocratic, and has reduce community and parental involvement. Robinson v. Cahill was filed in 1970 against the state of New Jersey, citing discrimination in funding for some school districts, which prosecutors believe was creating disparities in urban students education by failing to provide all students with a “thorough and efficient education”. The court ruled in 1990, stating that more funding was needed to serve the children in the poor school districts. In order to provide a “thorough and efficient education” in urban districts, funding was equalized between urban and suburban school districts. It was also determined that extra funding was to be distributed to provide additional programs in order to eliminate disadvantages within poor school districts.
