1. Educational Reform
1.1. In a centralized organization, all of the "power" or decision-making authority lies with a group or individual at the top. The other members of the organization then work to carry out the decisions made by top-level leaders. A decentralized organization does just the opposite, spreading decision-making authority to managers at various levels. Both operational structures have pros and cons and can contribute to organizational success in the right situation.
1.1.1. Decentralized organizations, on the other hand, are generally more adept at making decisions with local context in mind, moving quickly, and engaging customers in a way that is more meaningful. Staff may also be more engaged as they are empowered to make choices about their work and their area of the organization. A potential downside of the decentralized structure is that local decisions may not align with the larger organizational goals around budgets, efficiency, messaging, operations, legality, etc. Organizations could choose to adopt a decentralized model for a variety of reasons, including the importance of local context to success; a concern over becoming too bureaucratic; an overall trust in managers at all levels of the organization to make decisions; or an instance of mismanagement as top level leaders have lost control or were not qualified enough to have it in the first place.
1.1.1.1. Charter schools are public schools of choice, meaning that families choose them for their children. They operate with freedom from some of the regulations that are imposed upon district schools. Charter schools are accountable for academic results and for upholding the promises made in their charters.
1.1.1.2. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332
1.1.1.3. http://www.nea.org/home/11204.htm
1.1.1.4. http://www.tecweb.org/eddevel/telecon/de99.html
1.1.1.5. http://www.aqeny.org/campaigns/campaign-for-fiscal-equity/
1.1.2. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2001 and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002, is the name for the most recent update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
1.1.3. http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html
1.2. http://blogs.edweek.org/topschooljobs/k-12_talent_manager/2013/06/centralized_or_decentralized.html
2. Educational Inequality
2.1. http://nysa32.nysed.gov/edpolicy/research/res_essay_nixon_serrano.shtml
2.2. Above is a URL for a good article on the Serrano v. Priest case.
2.3. Educational Inequality is the difference in the learning results, or efficacy, experienced by students coming from different groups. Educational efficacy is most often measured by grades, GPA scores, test scores, drop-out rates, college entrance statistics, and college completion rates.
2.3.1. Ability grouping, also known as tracking, is the practice of grouping children together according to their talents in the classroom. At the elementary school level, the divisions sound harmless enough - kids are divided into the Bluebirds and Redbirds.
2.3.1.1. A curriculum is all the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.
2.3.1.2. http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2013/12/24/ctq_powell_strengths.html
2.3.1.3. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ829018.pdf
2.3.1.4. http://www.schoolclimate.org/climate/
2.4. http://www.fno.org/sept03/pedagogy.html
2.5. https://www.teachfirst.org.uk/why-we-exist/what-educational-inequality
3. Equality of Opportunity
3.1. "Social stratification is a hierarchical configuration of families (and in industrial societies in recent decades, unrelated individuals) who have differential access to whatever is of value in the society at a given point and over time, primarily because of social, not biopsychological, variables."
3.1.1. Despite the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, United States society is still highly stratifies by race. An individual's race has a direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve.
3.1.1.1. 5.2 percent of white students are likely to drop out of high school, whereas 9.3 African-American students are likely to drop out of high school. 17.6 percent of Hispanic-American students are likely to drop out of high school.
3.1.1.2. Among 17 year-olds, 89 percent of white 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. 66 percent of Hispanic-American students are reading at the intermediate level.
3.1.1.3. General Education Outcomes are the goals for learning and development upon which higher education general education programs are based. They can be defined as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that college students will need to be successful in work, family, and community.
3.1.1.4. In 1981, the Education Law Center filed a complaint in Superior Court on behalf of 20 children attending public schools in the cities of Camden, East Orange, Irvington, and Jersey City. The lawsuit challenged New Jersey’s system of financing public education under the Public School Education Act of 1975 (Chapter 212). This was the first salvo in the historic case, Abbott v. Burke, which is widely recognized as the most important education litigation for poor and minority schoolchildren since Brown v. Board of Education. Beginning in 1981, ELC argued that the State's method of funding education was unconstitutional because it caused significant expenditure disparities between poor urban and wealthy suburban school districts, and that poorer urban districts were unable to adequately meet the educational needs of their students. The case eventually made its way to the NJ Supreme Court, which, in 1985, issued the first Abbott decision (Abbott I) transferring the case to an administrative law judge for an initial hearing (http://www.edlawcenter.org/cases/abbott-v-burke/abbott-history.html).
3.1.1.5. Coleman Report An influential and controversial study, published by the US Government in 1966, under the title Equality of Educational Opportunity. The co-authored report was based on an extensive survey of educational opportunity (the national sample included almost 650,000 students and teachers in more than 3,000 schools), was mandated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was directed by the sociologist James Coleman. It was a landmark in policy research, being one of the first social scientific studies specifically commissioned by Congress in order to inform government policy, following those done on the military during the Second World War. The research design adopted for the investigation changed the whole direction of policy research in education and was widely imitated by later researchers. The results shaped school desegregation policy for many years following publication of the Report (http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-ColemanReport.html).
3.1.2. Equality of opportunity is a political ideal that is opposed to caste hierarchy but not to hierarchy per se. The background assumption is that a society contains a hierarchy of more and less desirable, superior and inferior positions. Or there may be several such hierarchies (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equal-opportunity/)
3.1.3. It is extremely difficult to 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. The achievement gap refers to the observed, persistent disparity of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity and gender.
4. Curriculum and Pedagogy
5. Schools as Organizations
6. The Politics of Education
6.1. http://usconservatives.about.com/od/education/a/The-Conservative-Case-For-School-Choice.htm
6.2. http://www.liberal.org.uk/policies/education.htm
6.3. The purposes of schooling, laid forth by our textbook, are to help solve social problems, to work as one of many institutions, such as the family and the church (or synagogue), and to socialize children into the various roles , behaviors, and values of society. This process, called socialization, is a key ingredient to the stability of any society.
6.4. The Radical perspective does not believe that free marker capitalism is the best form of economic organization, but rather believes that democratic socialism is a fairer political-economic system. This perspective is based on the writings of the of nineteenth century German political economist and philosopher Karl Marx.
6.5. Liberals place a heavy emphasis on equality, especially the equality of opportunity. Liberals assert that the role of the government is to ensure the fair treatment of all citizens, to ensure that equality of opportunity exists, and to minimize exceedingly great differences in the life chances and life outcomes of the country's richest and poorest citizens.
6.5.1. The Progressive vision of education tends to view the schools as central to solving social problems, as a vehicle for upward mobility, as essential to the development of individual potential, and as an integral part of democratic society.
6.5.1.1. The Neo-liberal perspective is a synthesis of conservative and liberal perspectives. The Neo-liberal reform stresses five areas for educational policy: 1. Austerity; 2. The market model; 3. Indivisualism; 4. State intervention; and 5. Economic prosperity, race, and class.
6.6. The Traditional vision of education tends to view the schools as the most general representations of views about education. They also view the schools as necessary to the transmission of the traditional values of U.S. society, such as hard work, family unity, individual initiative, and so on.
6.7. The Conservative perspective has its origins in nineteenth century social Darwinist thought that applied the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the analysis of societies. This perspective, developed originally by the sociologist William Graham Sumner, looks at human and social evolution as adaption to changes in the environment. From this point of view, individuals and groups must compete in the social environment in order to survive, and human progress is dependent on individual initiative and drive.
6.7.1. The Conservative view of social problems places its primary emphasis on the individual and suggests that individuals have the capacity to earn or not earn their place within a market economy, and that solutions to problems should also be addressed at the individual level.
6.7.1.1. The Liberal view has its origins in the twentieth century, in the works of the U.S. philosopher John Dewey, and, historically, in the progressive era of U.S. politics from the 1880s to the 1930s. The Liberal perspective is concerned primarily with balancing the economic productivity of capitalism with the social needs of the majority of people in the United States.
7. Sociological Perspectives
7.1. 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. Functionalists view society as a kind of machine, where one part articulates with another to produce the dynamic energy to make a society work. The earliest sociologist to embrace a functional point of view about the relation of school and society was Emile Durkheim, who virtually invented the sociology of education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He believed that education, in virtually all societies, was of critical importance in creating the moral unity necessary for social cohesion and harmony.
7.1.1. I also think inadequate schools have a major impact on students. If a school does not have the funds to offer certain classes, or provide new textbooks, the development of a student can be delayed. Our book says that urban education, in particular, has failed to educate poor and minority students.
7.1.2. Interactional theories about the relation of the school and society are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflict perspectives. Basil Bernstein has argued that structural aspects of the educational system and the interactional aspects of the system reflect each other and must be viewed wholistically.
7.2. Not all sociologists believe that society is held together by shared values alone. 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, cooptation, and manipulation. In this view, the glue of society is economic, political, cultural, and military power. Karl Marx is the intellectual founder of the conflict school in the sociology of education.
7.2.1. In my personal opinion, I think that teacher behavior has a great impact on students. Teachers have a huge impact on students. Most times, teachers and coaches are a students biggest supporters. Our text says that teachers may have as many as 1,000 interpersonal contacts each day with children in their classroom. Research indicates that many teachers have lower expectations for minority and working-class students; this suggests that these students may be trapped within a vicious cycle of low expectation- low achievement- low expectation.
7.2.1.1. Employment also has a major impact on the lives of students. Most students believe that graduating from college will lead to greater employment opportunities. In 1986, about 54 percent of the eight million college graduates in the United States entered professional and technical jobs.
7.2.2. Determinism- The doctrine that all events are determined by causes external to the will.
7.2.2.1. Voluntarism- The principle of relying on voluntary action. The doctrine that the will is a fundamental or dominant factor in the individual or the universe.
7.2.2.1.1. Independence- The fact or state of being independent.
8. History of Education
8.1. In our textbook, the discussion of the history of education in the United States begins with the introduction of schooling in colonial America when Europeans settled in the colonies and began to devise systematic and deliberate forms of education for their children.
8.1.1. The religious impetus to formalize instruction can best be exemplified by the puritans in New England who, early in 1642 and 1647, passed school laws commonly referred to as the Old Deluder Laws.
8.1.1.1. According to the committee of ten, mentioned on page 73, the main goals of secondary education are: Health, Command of fundamental processes, Worthy home membership, Vocation, Citizenship, Worthy use of leisure, and Ethical character development.
8.1.1.1.1. The development of mass education,-now extending up through the college level- was, in many respects, a genuinely progressive development. A larger fraction of the U.S. youth is now enrolled in college than was enrolled in elementary school 135 years ago.
8.1.1.2. The Old Deluder Law was not very popular throughout New England. Often, towns simply neglected to provide the education for their youth as dictated by law. However, it remains a landmark in the history of education in the U.S. It established a precedent for public responsibility for education.
8.1.1.2.1. http://www.constitution.org/primarysources/deluder.html
8.1.1.3. The first law chastised parents for not attending to their children's "ability to read and understand the principles of religion and capital laws of this country" and fined them for their children's "wanton" and "immodest" behavior.
8.1.1.3.1. The expansion of schooling, like the expansion of the wage-labor system, has had consequences not only unanticipated by the capitalist and professional elites, but unwanted as well. By embracing potentially radical elements in the society, the school system has helped to extract the political sting from fundamental social conflicts.