My Foundations of Education

1. Philosophy of Education

1.1. Existentialism

1.2. Genetic Notation: Basically believe that individuals are placed on this Earth alone and must make some sense out of the chaos they encounter. Sartre believed that one must create themselves and create their own meaning.

1.3. Goal of Education: They believe that 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 non-rational as well as the rational world, and the tensions in the living world.                                              Role of the Teacher: Teachers should understand their own "lived worlds" as well as that if their students in order to help their students achieve the best "lived worlds" Teachers must take risks, expose themselves to resistant students, and work constantly to enable their students to become "wide awake."

1.4. Models of Instruction: Existentialists would abhor "methods" of instruction as they are currently taught in the schools of education. 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.

1.5. Curriculum: Existentialists would choose curriculum heavily biased toward the humanities. Literature especially has meaning for them since literature is able to evoke responses in readers that might them to new levels of awareness, "wide awake."

2. Schools as Organizations

2.1. Stakeholders

2.1.1. State Senators: Tim Melson, William L. Holtzclaw, Arthur Orr, Paul Sanford, Steve Livingston, and Clay Scofield.

2.1.2. House of Representatives: Phil Williams, Mike Ball, Laura Hall, Howard Sanderford, Jim Patterson, Ritchie Whorton, and Mac McCutcheon.

2.1.3. State Superintendent: Tommy Bice

2.1.4. Representative on State School Board: Mary Scott Hunter

2.1.5. Local Superintendent: Matt Massey

2.1.6. Local School Board: Nathan Curry, Angie Bates, Mary Louise Stow, David Vess, and Jeff Anderson

2.2. Elements of Change within School Process and School Support

2.2.1. Conflict is a necessary part of change: Efforts to demonstrate schools do not create conflicts, but they allow previously hidden problems, issues, and disagreements to surface.

2.2.2. New behavior 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.

2.2.3. 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.

2.2.4. 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.

3. Curriculum and Pedagogy

3.1. Curriculum Theory:   Social meliorist curriculum:  philosophically social reconstructionist, both out of the writings of Dewey, who was concerned with the role of the schools in reforming society, as well as, the response to the growing dominance to the social efficiency curriculum. The social meliorist tradition is the precursor to what is called contemporary critical curriculum theory. The view of this curriculum stresses the role of the curriculum in moving students to become aware of societal problems and active in changing the world.. For the most part, social meliorist has been responsible for what is taught in U.S. schools.

3.2. The Mimetic Tradition: This tradition is closer to what most people today seem to think education is all about. It is named this because it gives a central place it the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process. In short, it is the knowledge "presented" to a learner, rather than "discovered" by him or her. Thus tradition can be preserved in books and films.

3.3. The Transformative Tradition: A transformation of one kind or another in the person being taught- a qualitative often of dramatic proportion, a metamorphosis, so to speak. Such changes would include all those traits of character and personality most highly prized by the society at large. They also would include the eradication or remediation of a corresponding set of undesirable traits.

4. Equality of Opportunity

4.1. Impact on Education

4.1.1. Class: Education is very expensive. families from the upper class and the middle class are also more likely to expect children to finish school, whereas, working-class and underclass families often have lower levels of expectation for their children. From a cultural point of view, schools represent the values of the middle class and upper class.

4.1.2. Race: 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.

4.1.3. Gender: Historically, an individual's gender was directly related to his or her educational attainment. 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. The one area that males outperform females is mathematical proficiency. There is little doubt that society discriminates against woman occupationally and socially.

4.2. Responses to Coleman Study from 1982

4.2.1. The debate over High School Achievement findings has centered on the interpretations attached to the magnitude of the findings. What Coleman and his associates saw as significant others saw as nearly insignificant. Jenks used Coleman's findings to compute the estimated yearly average achievement gain by public and Catholic school students. Subsequent studies that have compared public schools to private schools have also found that private schools seem to "do it better,' particularly for low-income students.

4.2.2. After Borman and Dowling researched and study what Coleman said in the previous years, discovered that wherever 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 an individual's race and class.

5. Educational Reform

5.1. School Based Reforms

5.1.1. School-to Work Programs: In the 1960s, 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. While these systems were different from state to state they were each were supposed to provide every U.S. student with the following: Relevant education, allowing students to explore different careers and see what skills are required in their working environment. Skills, obtained from structured training and work-based learning experiences, including necessary skills of a particular career as demonstrated in a working environment. Valued credentials, establishing industry-standard benchmarks that ensure that proper education is received for each career.

5.1.2. School-Business Partnerships: 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. 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.

5.2. Different Reforms Explained

5.2.1. Connecting School, Community, and Societal Reform: Research suggests that the combination of the school, community, and societal level reforms are necessary to reduce the achievement gap. The research also argues that a successful school reform is based on a number of essential supports, including leadership as the driver for change; parent-communication ties; professional capacity; student-centered learning climate; instructional guidance. They demonstrate that these supports are most needed and difficult to implement in the highest poverty schools and that educational reforms must include policies aimed at the amelioration of the effects of poverty. (I combined community and societal reforms)

6. Social of Education

6.1. Functionalism: Functionalists view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy required to make society work. Functional sociologists begin with a picture of society that stresses the interdependence of the social system; these researchers often examine how well the parts are integrated with each other.

6.2. Conflict Theory: Conflict sociologists do not see the relationship between school and society as unproblematic or straightforward, they emphasize struggle. From a conflict point if view, schools are similar to social battlefields, where students struggle against teachers, teachers against administrators, and so on.

6.3. Interactionism: Interactional theories about the relation of school and society are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspectives. Interactional theorists 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.

6.4. Effects of Schooling on Individuals:

6.5. 1. Knowledge and Attitude: It is researched that the higher the social class background of the student, the higher his or her achievement level. Thus, it is clear that, 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.                          2. Teacher Behavior: Teachers are very busy people, they must also wear many different occupational hats. Teachers are models of students and, as instructional leaders, teachers set standards for students and influence student self-esteem and sense of efficacy. They impact students lives everyday.                        3. Student Peer Groups and Alienation: Students cultures play an important role in shaping students' educational experiences. Schools also develop cultures , traditions, and resistant's. They socialize and sort and select students and in doing so, reproduce society.

6.6. 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.                                   5. Inside the Schools: Since most people are apt to think about learning and growth from a psychological perspective, it is illuminating to stand back and speculate how school structures can also influence student outcomes. Like school size.

7. Politics of Education

7.1. Perspective

7.2. Definition of Educational Problems- Conservative Perspective:

7.3. 1. The demands of the liberals and radicals for the individuality and freedom resulted in schools losing their traditional disciplinary function and often became chaotic. The conservatives called this decline of authority. There was a loss of structure, which to me is the worst thing that could happen to a school. There are rules for a reason.

7.4. 2. In the event of the radical and liberal demands for multicultural education, schools watered down traditional curriculum, which weakened the school's ability to pass on the heritage American and Western civilizations to students. To me, this makes me think that some people don't want their child to learn the truth about history, but that's why we learn history, to make sure it doesn't repeat itself.

7.5. 3. The demands for cultural relativism by the liberals and radicals resulted in schools losing their traditional role of teaching moral standards and values. I feel that this is a big no no, because good morals are an important part in growing our society. Every generation is different and it should be, to make society diverse, but morals should always be taught in school at an early age. The earlier students learn the more it will stick with them in the end.

7.6. The Purposes of Teaching

7.6.1. Intellectual:to help students acquire higher-order thinking skills for example, evaluation and analysis, along with learning basic cognitive skills such as, reading, writing, and mathematics. Students are also taught to transmit specific details in history, science, and history.

7.6.2. Political: to teach students the basic laws of society. It also set there to prepare students or citizens to participate in the political order, and to exercise the allegiance to the existing political order. This purpose is there to help accumulate diverse cultural groups into this political order.

7.6.3. Social: to work as one institution to solve social problems, to ensure that students socialize and be socialized into various roles, behaviors, and values of the society. With this socialization is a key part to the stability of any society.

7.6.4. Economic: to help prepare students for their later occupational roles in life as well as prepare the students going into the division of labor The technique that schools use to prepare their students for work varies from society to society, but most schools have a least indirect role in this process.

8. History of U.S. Education

8.1. Reform Movement: During the 1970s  The City University of New York became the biggest experiment of higher education. It's efforts symbolized both the hopes and frustrations of unequal educational achievement. Although one could disagree, it is important to know that this period is recognized as the result in the significant expansion of higher education. The university became able to access low-income students.

8.2. Interpretation: Radical Revisionist School. The radical interpretation of U.S. educational history is a more pessimistic one. While acknowledging educational expansion, they suggest that this process has benefited the elites more than the masses. The results are very little for this process.

9. Sociological Perspectives

9.1. Define Project Development Measurement

9.1.1. KPI's

10. Educational Inequality

10.1. Cultural Deprivation

10.1.1. The Cultural Deprivation Theory was attacked viciously in the 1960s and 1970s by social scientists who believed it to be paternalistic at best and racist at worst. Critics argue that it removes the responsibility for school succeed and failure from schools and teachers, and place it on families. The 1960s theory suggests that families of the working-class or the ethnic minority lacked the cultural resources, such as books, and when they reach school-age, they arrive at school at a significant disadvantage than students from the upper-class or white families.

10.2. School Centered Explanations

10.2.1. School Financing: Public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. However, he majority of funds come from state and local state and local taxes, with local property taxes a significant source. 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. It is argued that this responsibility away from the schools and teachers, and placed it on communities and families. Between school differences: The research points to how differences in what is often termed school climates affect academic performance. Much of this research looked differences between schools in inner city, lower socioeconomic neighborhoods in order to demonstrate that schools can make a difference in thesecommunities. Within School Differences: The fact that different groups of students in the same schools perform very differently suggests that there may be school characteristics affecting these outcomes. Ability grouping and curriculum grouping are an important organizational component of U.S. schooling.