Foundations of Education

1. Schools as Organizations

1.1. State Senators

1.1.1. 1. Tim Melson

1.1.1.1. 2. Larry Stutts

1.2. House of Representatives

1.2.1. 1. Phiillip Pettus

1.2.1.1. 2. Lynn Greer

1.3. Local Spuerintendent : Dr. Jennifer Gray

1.3.1. Included

1.3.2. Included

1.3.3. Excluded

1.4. Representative on state school board: Jeffrey Newman

1.5. State Superintendent: Michael Sentance

1.6. Local School Board: Mr. Ronnie Owens, Mrs. Barbara Cornelius, Mr. Daniel Patterson-VC, Mr. Jerry Fulmer-Chairman.

1.7. Elements of change:

1.7.1. Conflict: Where efforts to democratize schools does not create conflict but they allow previously hidden problems, issues, and disagreements to surface.

1.7.1.1. New Behaviors must be learned. 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.

1.7.2. 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. Otherwise issues of exclusiveness and imagined elitism may surface, and perceived "resistance to change" will persist.

1.7.2.1. Process and content are interrelated. The process a team uses in going about its work is an important as the content of educational charges it attempts. The usefulness and the visibility of the project will influence future commitments from and the relationships among the staff and others involved. (pg.. 232)

2. History of U.S Education

2.1. 1. The Age of Reform; The Rise of the Common School had a big influence of education because it was the start of the common school. There was a struggle for free public education, so Horace Mann took a stand and lobbied for a state board of education, and when they created one he held first secretary for 11 years. His annual reports served as models for public school refors.

2.1.1. Define actions as necessary

2.2. 2. The Democratic-Liberal School believes that history of U.S. education involves the progressive evolution, albeit flawed, of a school system committed to providing equality of opportunity for all.

3. Politics of Education

3.1. Purposes of Education

3.1.1. 1. The Intellectual purposes of schooling are to teach basic cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics; to transmit specific knowledge; and to help students acquire higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, evaluation, and synthesis.

3.1.2. 2. The Political purposes of schooling are to inculcate allegiance to the exisiting political order; to prepare citizans who will participate in the political order; to help assimilate diverse culteral groups into common political order order; and to teach children the basic laws of the society.

3.1.3. 3. The Social purposes of schooling are to help solve social problems; to work as one of many institutions, such as family and the church or synagogue to ensure social cohesion; ans to socialize children into various roles, behaviors, and values of society.

3.1.4. 4. The economic purposes of schooling are to prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into the division of labor.

3.2. Perspectives

3.2.1. 1. The liberal perspective for the role of the school is while also stressing the training and socializing function of the school, sees the aims a little differently. In line with the liberal belief in equality of opportunity, it stresses the school's role in providing necessary education to ensure that all students have an equal opportunity to succeed in society.

3.2.2. 2. The liberal perspective for "explanations of unequal educational performance" argues that individual students or groups of students begin school with different life chances and therefore some groups have significantly more advantages than others. Therefore, society must attempt through polecies and programs to equalize the playing field so that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have a better chance.

3.2.3. 3.The liberal perspective of "Defintion of Educational Problems' argues that for one, schools have too often limited the life chances of poor and minority children and therefore the problem of underachievement by these groups is a critical issue. Schools place too much emphasis on discipline and authority, thus limiting their role in helping students develop as individuals. Lastly, the traditional curriculum leaves out the diverse cultures of the groups that compromise the pluralistic society.

4. Curriculum and Pedagogy

4.1. Humanist : I think that the Humanist theory curriculum is the one that I advocate because education ahould be student centered. It should be about the kid's because kid's are our futute. We should want to know what they want to learn, and focus on how they learn the best. I believe that the student's should have somewat of a say in what is being learned. Not all control of it because teachers, boards, principles know more about curriculum part of it. Humanists think the curriculum should focus on subjects such as; History, Language and Arts, Science, Math, and etc.

4.1.1. Materials

4.1.2. Personel

4.1.3. Services

4.1.4. Duration

4.2. The Mimetic Tradition: Mimetic tradition is second hand knowledge. It is this property that allows us to say it is "transmitted" from teacher to student or from text to student. It does not entail handling over a bundle of some sort as in an actual exchange or giving. Rather, it is more like the transmission of a spoken message from one person to another.

4.3. The Transformative Tradition:– Time is the variable performance is constant. Based on spiral learning. Inquiry-based and discovery teaching methods. It focused on depth learning.

5. Equality of Opportunity

5.1. Class can influence class based experiences because for instance, education can be extremely expensive. The longer a student stays in school, the more liekly he or she needs parental financial support. Wealthier families do not have an issue. Working class and under class families have a lower expectation for their children on finishing school.

5.1.1. Dependencies

5.1.2. Milestones

5.2. Race can influence educational experiences because for instance, 5.2 percent of white students drop out of school, where as 9.3 percent of African-American students and 17.6 percent of Hispanic-Americans are likely to drop out of school.

5.3. Gender has an impact. Even though 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, women are less likely to drop out of school than men and are more likely to have a higher level of reading proficiency than males.

5.3.1. Schedule

5.3.2. Budget

5.4. Response: "What then of Coleman, Hoffer, Kilgore's claim that Catholic Schools are educationally superior to public schools? If trivial advantage is what they mean by such a claim, then we suppose we would have to agree. But judged against reasonable benchmarks, there is a little basis for this conclusion".

5.4.1. KPI's

5.5. Response: "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 a student's achievement outcomes, aboe and beyond the effects of individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student's school are 13/4 times more important than a student's individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.

6. Sociological of Education

6.1. Functionalism: belief that education, in virtually all societies, was of critical importance in creating the moral unity necessary for scoial chesion and harmony.

6.2. Conflict Theory: Conflict sociologists do not see the relationshio between school and society as unproblematic or straightforward. Conflict Sociologists emphasize struggle. From a conflict point of view, schools are similar to social battlefields.

6.3. Interactionalism:: are primarily critiques and extensions of the functional and conflixt 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.

6.4. 5 effects of schooling on individuals

6.4.1. .Knowledge and Attitude: It is found that the higher the social class background of the student, the higher his or her achievement level. Also, their self-esteem plays  big role  in their education.

6.4.2. Student Peer Groups and Alienation: Student Peer Groups can connect you with your school, friends, etc. Many social groups led to some students being left out and that caused alienation. I seen it first hand when I was in high school. The book gives examples even on violence.

6.4.3. Gender: Gender discrimination is a big roll in schools. Men and women do not share equally in the U.S society. The book states that akthough girls usually start school cognitively and socially ahead of boys, by the end of high school, girls have lower self-esteem and lower aspirations than do boys.

7. Educational Reform

7.1. 2 School-based reforms:

7.1.1. 1. Privatization: First, for profit companies, such as the Edison Company, took over the management of failing schools and districts. It is too early to to access the efficacy of such privatition, but it is clear that corporations see the multi-billion dollar educaation industry as a lucrative market.

7.1.1.1. 2. School-to-work programs: 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.

7.2. 2 Community based-reforms

7.2.1. 1. Full service schools: focus on meeting student's and their families educational, physical, psychological, and social needs in a coordinated and collaborative fashion between school and community services. Specifically designed to target and improve at-risk neighborhoods, full service schools aim to prevent problems.

7.2.1.1. 2. Harlem Children's Zone: Canada provides programs for parents in Harlem before their children are even born in attempt to infuse all knowledge that middle-class parents know they should do for their fetuses and infants in a "sensitive way". They have a "Baby College" where participants are to participate in a program where instructors of color teach them how to have academic conversations and acceptable forms of discipline.

8. Philosophy of Education

8.1. Generic Notions viewed from pragmatism is that for Dewey, this meant that children could learn skills both experientially as well as from books, in addition to traditional information, which would enable them to work cooperatively in a democratic society.Deweys progressive methodology rested on the notion that children were active, organicbeings, growing, and changing, thus required a course of study that would reflect their particular stages od development.

8.1.1. Method of Instruction in pragmatism is prposed that children learn both individually and in groups. Dewey believed that children should start thier mode of inquiry by posing questions about what they want to know. These method os instructions are called the "Problem Solving Inquiry or Inquiry method".

8.2. Key Researchers of Pragmatism are JOhn Dewey, William Jmes, George Sanders Pierce, also earlyier prgmatists such as; Frances Bacon, John Locke, and Jean-Jacquese Rosseau.

8.2.1. Curriculum in pragmatism follows Dewey's notion of a core curriculum, or an integrated curriculum. A particular subject matter under investigation by students, such as whales, would yield problems to be solved using math, science, history, reading, writing, music, art, wood or metal working, cooking, and sewing-all the academic and vocational disciplines in an integrated, interconnected way.

8.3. Goal of Education in Pragmatism is that Dewey ultimately believed that school should provide "conjoint, communicated experience" - that it should function as preparation for life in a democratic society.

8.4. Role of teachers in pragmatism are that the teacher is no longer the authoritarian figure from which all knowledge flows; rather, the teacher assumes the peripheral position of facilitator. The teacher encourgaes, offers suggestions, questions, and helps plan and implement courses of study. The teachers also write curriculum and must have a command of several disciplines in order to create and implement curriculum.

9. Educational Inequality

9.1. 1. Anthropologist John Ogbu argues that african american children do less well in school because they adapt to their oppressed posititon in the class and caste structure. Ogbu believed there was a "job ceiling" for african americans in the U.S.

9.2. 2. Second theory sees working-class and nonwhite students as resisting the dominant culture of schools. These students reject the white middle-class culture of academic success and embrace a differet, often antischool culture-one that is opposed to the culture of schooling as it currently exists.

9.3. 1. School financing because public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources. Majority comes from local property taxes. They are based on the property value. More affluent communities are able to provide more per-pupil spending than poorer districts.

9.3.1. 2. Effective School research because the concern with unequal educational performance of nonwhite and working-ckass students is at the heart of such inquiry. Research is a huge part.

9.3.1.1. 3. Gender because feminists agree that schooling often limits the educaional opportunities and life chances of women in a number of ways. Curriculum materials portrays men's and women's roles often in stereotypical and traditional ways.