1. The History of Education
1.1. Reform Movement
1.1.1. 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson
1.1.1.1. Doctrine known as "separate but equal".
1.1.1.2. U.S. Supreme Court case from 1896 that upheld the rights of states to pass laws allowing racial segregation in public and private institutions such as schools.
1.1.2. 1954 Brown v. Board
1.1.2.1. The supreme court ruled that state-imposed segregation of schools was unconstitutional.
1.2. Historical Interpretation of US Education
1.2.1. The Democratic-Liberal School
1.2.1.1. Democratic-liberals believed that the history of US education involved the progressive evolution of all school systems committed to providing equality of opportunity for all.
1.2.1.2. Democratic-liberals believe that the education system must continue to move closer to each, without sacrificing one of the other too dramatically.
1.2.1.3. Lawrence A. Cremin was a representative of this view. He did not see equity and excellence as inevitably irreconcilable, but rather tensions between them both. He believed that equality and excellence were just ideals.
2. The Sociology of Education
2.1. Theoretical Perspectives
2.1.1. Functional Theories
2.1.1.1. Functional sociologists picture a society that emphasizes the interdependence of the social system. They view the society as a machine, where both parts work with one another to make the society work.
2.1.2. Conflict Theories
2.1.2.1. Conflict sociologists view the society as being held together by the dominant groups imposing their will of force, manipulation, and cooptation. This view believes the society is held together by economic, political, cultural, and military power.
2.1.3. Interactional Theories
2.1.3.1. Interactional theories attempt to see the everyday behaviors that are taken for granted, and the interactions between students and students, and between students and teacher.
2.2. Effects of Schooling on Individuals
2.2.1. Attitudes
2.2.1.1. Research has indicated that more highly educated people are more likely to be liberal in their political and social attitudes.
2.2.2. Employment
2.2.2.1. Student believe graduating from college will lead to greater employment opportunities.
2.2.3. Education
2.2.3.1. The belief that education opens up more opportunities for a person still firmly remains to America.
2.2.3.2. American people believe that education is the great equalizer.
2.2.4. Mobility
2.2.4.1. Where people go to school affects their mobility. For example: Children that go to private and public schools receive the same education, but a child that goes to a private school, the diploma may act as a mobility escalator.
2.2.5. Knowledge
2.2.5.1. More years of schooling leads the students to greater knowledge and participation in society.
2.2.6. Gender
2.2.6.1. Even though girls usually start school cognitively ahead of boys, at the end of high school, boys seem to be ahead of the girls when it comes to self-esteem and they also have lower aspiration.
3. The Philosophy of Education
3.1. Generic Notions- Dewey's form of pragmatism, instrumentalism and experimentalism was founded on the philosophy of education. The school became a community where children could learn skills both experientially as well as from books and other traditional information.
3.2. Key Researchers- John Dewey, William James, and George Sanders Peirce.
3.3. Goal- For students to continuously grow and for them to be prepared for their future and life academically and socially.
3.4. Role of Teachers- To encourage, offer suggestions, and help plan the course of study. Act as a facilitator.
3.5. Method of Instruction- Children learn individually and in group. Also, problem solving and, or, inquiry method instruction.
3.6. Curriculum- Based off of core curriculum or integrated curriculum. The teachers also base the curriculum off of the interests of the students.
4. School as Organizations
4.1. Lawrence County, Alabama - educational stakeholders
4.1.1. State Superintendent - Richard Shelby
4.1.2. House Rep - Marcel Black
4.1.3. State Superintendent - Michael Sentance
4.1.4. Reps on State School Board - Gov. Robert Bentley, Mary Scott Hunter, Yvette Richardson, Jackie Zeigler, Betty Peters, Stephanie Bell, Ella Bell, Cynthia Sanders McCarty, Jeffrey Newman.
4.1.5. Local Superintendent - Jon Brett Smith
4.1.6. Local School Board - Ms. Christine Garner, Mr. Gary Bradford, Dr. Beth Vinson, Mr. Shannon Terry, Mrs. Reta Waldrep
4.2. School Processes and School Cultures
4.2.1. Conflict - Efforts to democratize schools do not create conflict, but they allow hidden problems and issues to surface. In order to restructure the school, the staff must be involved and prepared to resolve and manage conflicts.
4.2.2. New Behaviors - With change, new behaviors and new relationships are required. When changing, the process must include building communication and trust, enabling leadership and initiative to emerge, and learning the techniques of conflict resolution and also communication and collaboration.
4.2.3. Team Building - This must extend to the whole school. All decisions must be shared and work out and give on-going attention to relationships within all of the staff at the school. If this does not work, issues of exclusiveness and imagined elitism may surface, and resistance to change will persist.
4.2.4. Process and Content - "The process a team uses in going about its work is an important as the content of educational changes it attempts." (p.232) Depending on the degree of trust and openness built up within the team and between the team and school, is the substance of a project.
5. Curriculum & Pedagogy
5.1. Social Efficiency Curriculum
5.1.1. Pragmatist approach developed in the early 20th century as a democratic response to the development of mass public secondary education.
5.1.2. The dominant model in U.S. public education since 1920's.
5.1.3. This became the cornerstone of the new progressivism.
5.1.4. There is a strong classification between academic and vocational curriculum, with students taking the majority of courses in one area or the other, or weak classification, with students taking courses in both areas.
5.1.5. There have been philosophical and sociological factors in organization of the curriculum.
5.2. Dominant Traditions of Teaching
5.2.1. The Mimetic Traditions
5.2.1.1. There are 5 steps in the Mimic Traditions: 1. Test ; 2. Present ; 3. Perform/Evaluate ; 4. (Correct performance) Reward/Fix ; 4. (Incorrect Performance) Enter Remedial Loop ; 5. Advance.
5.2.1.2. Central place to the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process.
5.2.2. The Transformative Tradition
5.2.2.1. Transformative explains what this tradition deems successful teaching to be capable of accomplishing.
5.2.2.2. Modes of Operation
5.2.2.2.1. 1. Personal Modeling
5.2.2.2.2. 2. "Soft" Suasion
5.2.2.2.3. 3. Use of Narrative
5.2.2.3. Within this tradition, the superiority of the teacher's knowledge is not nearly so clear cut.
6. Equality of Opportunity
6.1. Impact on educational outcomes
6.1.1. Class:
6.1.1.1. There are several factors that can influence these class-based experiences. For instance, education is extremely expensive. The longer a student stays in school, the more likely he or she needs parental financial support.
6.1.1.2. Studies show that the number of books in a family's home is related to the academic achievement of its children. Middle and upper middle-class children are more likely to speak "standard" English.
6.1.2. Race:
6.1.2.1. An individual's race has direct impact on how much education he or she is likely to achieve.
6.1.2.2. Minorities do not receive the same educational opportunities as whites, and their rewards for educational attainment are significantly less.
6.1.3. Gender:
6.1.3.1. Historically, an individual's gender was directly related to his or her educational attainment.
6.1.3.2. Overall, males are more likely to score higher on the SATs than females. It should be added that more women are now attending post-secondary institutions than men, although it is true that many of the postsecondary institutions that women attend are less academically and socially prestigious than those postsecondary institutions attended by men.
6.2. Coleman Study
6.2.1. Private schools scored public schools in every subject area according to the study.
6.2.2. Study compared public and private schools and found that lower income students tended to do better than in subject areas.
6.2.3. Where an individual goes to school is often related to their 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.
7. Educational Inequality
7.1. Cultural Deprivation Theories
7.1.1. Cultural deprivation theory popularized in 1960s, suggests that working-class and nonwhite families often lack the cultural resources, such as books and other educational stimuli, and thus arrive at school at a disadvantage.
7.1.2. Drawing on the thesis advanced by anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1966) about poverty in Mexico, cultural deprivation theorists assert that the poor have a deprived culture- one that lacks the value system of middle-class culture. According to the perspective, middle-class culture values hard work, the delay of immediate gratification for future rewards, and the importance of schooling as a means to future success.
7.2. School-Centered Explanations
7.2.1. School Financing
7.2.1.1. Public schools are financed through a combination of revenues from local, state, and federal sources.
7.2.1.2. School financing does have an effect on academic achivevement. Achievement is higher for those systems with better financing than that of those with lower financial aid.
7.2.2. Gender and Schooling
7.2.2.1. Research in Great Britain and the US indicates that the gender gap in achievement has diminished greatly if not disappeared. I both of these countries, the females perform better than males in almost all academic areas, and females have higher high school graduation rates, and higher levels of college attendance and graduation.
7.2.3. Effective School Research
7.2.3.1. Even though the effective school literature has attracted much support from policy makers and is often cited in the educational reform literature as the key to school improvement, the road from research to implementation is not a clear one. The effective school researchers have not provided a very good understanding on the implementations, and they have not provided answers to how effective schools are created. Some of the critics argue that the definition of effective schools is based on narrow and traditional measures, such as standardized tests scores.
7.2.4. Within-School Differences: Curriculum and Ability Grouping
7.2.4.1. Not only do we have significant differences in educational achievement between schools, but we also do within the schools. The fact that different groups of students in the same schools perform different, suggest that there may be school characteristics affecting these outcomes.
8. Educational Reform
8.1. School based reform
8.1.1. Teacher Education
8.1.1.1. The Teacher Education Project of 1086 had three major points. 1. The perceived lack of rigor and intellectual demands in the teacher education programs. 2. The need to attract and retain competent teacher candidates. 3. The necessity to reorganize the academic and professional components of teacher education programs at both the baccalaureate and post- baccalaureate levels.
8.1.2. Teacher Quality
8.1.2.1. In urban schools, principals often find it easier to hire unqualified teachers than qualified. Therefore, urban districts are always having to hire new teachers. Which is not good because it takes years to become an expert teacher.
8.2. School Finance Reforms
8.2.1. Rothstein, a liberal, and anyon, a radical, both conclude that school reforms is necessary but insufficient to reduce the achievement gaps without broader social and economic policies aimed at addressing the pernicious effect of poverty.
8.3. Full Service and Community Schools
8.3.1. specifically designed to target and improve at-risk neighborhoods, full-service schools aim to prevent problems, as well as to support them.
9. The Politics of Education
9.1. 4 Purposes of Education
9.1.1. * 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.
9.1.2. * The Political Purposes of schooling are to inculcate allegiance to the existing political order; to prepare citizens who will participate in this political order; to help assimilate diverse cultural groups into a common political order; and to teach children the basic laws of the society.
9.1.3. * The Social Purposes of schooling are to help solve social problems; to work as one of many institutions, such as the family and the church to ensure social cohesion; and to socialize children into various roles, behaviors, and values of the society.
9.1.4. * The Economic Purposes of schooling are to prepare students for their later occupational roles and to select, train, and allocate individuals into division of labor. The degree to which schools directly prepare students for work varies from society to society, but most schools have at least an indirect role in the process.
9.2. The Role of School
9.2.1. * Radical Perspective - Believe that schools prepare children from different social backgrounds for different roles within the economic division of labor. The radical perspective argues that schools reproduce economic, social, and political inequality within U.S. society.
9.3. Explanations of Unequal Educational Performance
9.3.1. *Radical Perspective - Just like liberal, radicals believe that low socioeconomic background students begin school with unequal opportunities. Radicals also believe that the reason of educational failure is because of the economic system, not the education system.
9.4. Definition of Educational Problems
9.4.1. * Radical Perspective - The educational system has failed the poor, minorities, and women through classist, racist, sexist, and homophobic policies. The radicals believe that the educational system promotes inequality of both opportunities and results.