1. HISTORY OF EDUCATION
1.1. Social Engineering Reform was proposed by Thorndike. It emphasized on the organism's response to its environment. He used animals to conduct experiments concluding that human nature could be altered depending on the education to which it was subjected. He believed that schools could change human beings in a positive way and that the methods would be scientifically chosen.This thinking led to a belief that schools should be a meaningful experience for students and the belief that schools might begin to educate students based on their talents.
1.2. The Liberal Interpretation portrays the evolution of US education in the terms of popularization and multitudinous. It involves both the expansion of opportunity and purpose. More students from different backgrounds went to school for longer times. They interpret US education optimistically but flawed.
2. Educational Inequality
2.1. Cultural Deprivation Theories
2.2. School Centered Explanations
2.2.1. School financing
2.2.1.1. Funding for public schools in suburbs is significantly higher than public schools in lower-income communities.
2.2.1.2. Property values are higher in the suburbs, therefore they are able to receive more funding from the proportional taxing than those in lower income communities.
3. Educational Reform
3.1. School-based Reforms
3.1.1. Charter Schools
3.1.1.1. Public schools that are free from some restrictions that other schools may face, can be started by anybody and can develop their own curriculum.
3.1.1.2. Students have higher achievement level than students in similar schools.
3.1.1.3. Paid for with tax dollars and must be open to all students.
3.1.2. Voucher
3.1.2.1. Vouchers to pay for families to send their children to better schools as opposed to funding schools.
3.1.2.2. Gives the parents more choice over where their children get to go and will end up rewarding the good schools while punishing the bad schools in a way.
3.1.2.3. Would make low-income families feel more empowered and make parents more involved in their child's schooling.
3.2. Other Reforms
3.2.1. Harlem Children's Zone
3.2.1.1. Designed to provide parents in Harlem a way to educate themselves before becoming parents.
3.2.1.2. Teaches them how to provide a healthy home environment while also teaching them how to have conversations about school and academics.
3.2.1.3. Designed to help low-income African American students to have a better chance at succeeding in school.
3.2.2. Full Service and Community Schools.
3.2.2.1. Full Service schools not only attend to the student's academic needs, but also the needs of the entire family.
3.2.2.2. Act as community centers that are open to extended hours providing various services such as: after school programs, health clinics, and adult education programs.
3.2.2.3. Designed as a way to help at-risk children and families to succeed.
4. POLITICS OF EDUCATION
4.1. THE INTELLECTUAL PURPOSES
4.2. 1.Teach basic cognitive skills: reading, writing, mathematics. 2.Transmit specific knowledge: Literature, history, the sciences. 3.Help students develop higher-order thinking skills: analysis, evaluation and synthesis.
4.3. THE POLITICAL PURPOSES
4.4. 1.To teach, through persistent instruction, allegiance to existing political order. 2.Prepare students to participate in this political order. 3.Assimilate diverse cultural groups into a common political order. 4.Teach children the basic laws of society.
4.5. THE ECONOMIC PURPOSES
4.6. 1. Prepare students for later occupation. 2. Select, train, and allocate individuals into a division of labor.
4.7. THE SOCIAL PURPOSES
4.8. 1.Solve social problems 2. Work as one of many institutions to ensure social cohesion. 3. Socialize children into various roles, behaviors, and values of society (AKA socialization)
4.9. The Liberal Perspective
4.9.1. The role of school: 1. provide the education to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed in life. 2.Teach children to respect cultural diversity 3. The importance of participating in a democratic society and needing to be educated to do so.
4.9.2. Explanations of unequal performance: 1.Some students begin school with different life chances that give them an unfair advantage over the other students.
4.9.3. Definition of educational problems: 1. Schools limit the life chances of poor and minority children and underachievement by these groups is an issue 2.Schools place too much emphasis on discipline and authority 3. The difference and quality between urban and suburban schools is a central problem related to inequalities of results. 4. The traditional curriculum leaves out the diverse cultures of groups that comprise the pluralistic society.
5. Philosophy of Education
5.1. Pragmatism
5.1.1. Generic Notions
5.1.1.1. Based on the needs of the student Gain a better society through education Students were ever changing and their curriculum should change with them.
5.1.2. Key Researchers
5.1.2.1. John Dewey
5.1.3. Goal of Education
5.1.3.1. Prepare students to be an informed and educated member of a democratic society
5.1.4. Role of the Teacher
5.1.4.1. Facilitator and content expert
5.1.5. methods of instruction
5.1.5.1. Problem solving Inquiry based Project based
5.1.6. curriculum
5.1.6.1. Interest based integrated curriculum
6. Curriculum and Pedagogy
6.1. The developmentalist curriculum
6.1.1. Puts the student's needs and interest over society's
6.1.2. Emanated from aspects of Dewey as well as Piaget
6.1.3. Student centered and relates the curriculum to the needs and interest of each child at particular development stages
6.1.4. Stressed the importance of relating schooling to the life experiences of each child to make education meaningful
6.1.5. Teacher as a facilitator
7. Sociological Perspective
7.1. THEORIES
7.1.1. Conflict Theories: Schools are similar to a social battlefield. It is the students vs the teachers and the teachers vs the administration. They select students on their ability as opposed to their social status.
7.1.2. Interactional Theories: observing common place strange, taken-for-granted interaction between student and students and teacher and students.
7.1.3. Functional Theories: Stresses the independence of the social system. Schools should arrange students by their abilities and group them in that way. Promote being social with one another.
7.2. effects of schooling
7.2.1. Knowledge and Attitude
7.2.1.1. It is shown that students who come from a higher class family that enter school with prior knowledge have a better attitude toward education, therefore they end up doing better than someone who comes from a less privileged background.
7.2.2. Gender
7.2.2.1. Women are most of the time paid less than men. More women are teachers whereas more men are administrators. This gives a subliminal message that women are subordinate to men. It is also proven that boys get more attention in school than girls.
7.2.3. Education and Mobility
7.2.3.1. Students from working class families believe that they cannot excel in school and that they do not need an education to get a job because they have no mobility. While most Americans believe that you gain mobility through education
7.2.4. Tracking
7.2.4.1. Tracking, or setting different students on different class tracks, hinders their education. Most kids from poor or working class families get sent on a vocational track whereas suburban students get pushed down a more education oriented track.
7.2.5. Inadequate schools
7.2.5.1. Students who attend suburban, or private schools, are known to be more knowledgeable than their counterparts who attend low income schools. This is due to the fact that suburban and private schools have more funding than low income schools.
8. Schools as organizations
9. Equality of opportunity
9.1. Impact on Educational Outcomes
9.1.1. Class
9.1.1.1. Education is expensive and the more time a student spends in school, the more money they need. This helps wealthier families.
9.1.1.2. Teachers have been found to think more highly of middle and upper middle-class students than working class students because working class students do not speak middle-class English.
9.1.1.3. The higher the social class, the higher the likelihood that the student will enroll in college.
9.1.2. Race
9.1.2.1. Minorities have lower SAT scores than white students, and there is a direct correlation between SAT scores and college admission.
9.1.2.2. 9.3% of African Americans and 17.6% of Hispanic students drop out of school.
9.1.2.3. Minorities receive fewer and inferior educational opportunities.
9.1.3. Gender
9.1.3.1. Women are often rated as being better students than men.
9.1.3.2. Females are less likely to drop out of school than men.
9.1.3.3. Females are more likely to have a higher reading level proficiency than males.
9.1.3.4. Males outperform women in Mathematics, which could be blamed on teachers believing that the female students will not do as well in Mathematics and catering to the males.
9.1.3.5. Males are more likely to score higher on the SAT
9.1.3.6. More women are now attending post-secondary institutions than men, although they are less academically and socially prestigious than the institutions attended by the men.
9.1.3.7. Society discriminates against women occupationally and socially.
9.2. Responses to the Coleman Study from 1982
9.2.1. Round Two
9.2.1.1. While the differences that do exist between public and Catholic schools are significant, in terms of differences in learning, the results are negligible.
9.2.1.2. Private schools seem to "do it better" for low-income students.
9.2.1.3. Catholic schools in the 1990s have become more elite, belying the argument that they are modern common schools.
9.2.1.4. Andrew Greeley argued that evidence ignores the past two decades of findings that support a democratic view of Catholic schools.
9.2.1.5. Catholic schools seem to advantage low income minority students
9.2.1.6. They are also becoming more elite and like suburban public schools.
9.2.2. Round Three
9.2.2.1. 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 tan individual's race and class.
9.2.2.2. Race and class are predicators of academic success.
9.2.2.3. School segregation based on race nd socioeconomic status and within school interactions dominated by middle=class values are largely responsible for gaps in student achievement.
9.2.2.4. Schools must end tracking and biases that favor white and middle-class students