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Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning: Final Report of Research Findings

Morality politics theory predicts that gay rights policy will reflect the influence of religious groups, party competition, and partisanship while interest group theory suggests that these policies will correspond with interest group resources, elite values, and past policy actions. Using multiple regression on a 50-state data set and a county-level data set for gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado, we found gay and lesbian politics are no different from those for other policy issues. When gay and lesbian rights are not salient, the pattern of politics resembles that of interest group politics. If individuals opposed to gay and lesbian rights are able to expand the scope of the conflict, the pattern of politics conforms to morality politics.

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The Politics of Gay and Lesbian Rights: Expanding the Scope of the Conflict

The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the district, which are linked to local patterns of racial and class stratification and concentration. They show how these locally driven inequalities and their links to specific school resources have consequences for achievement in five distinct subject areas. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of their findings for understanding the local production of class and racial educational inequality and recent moves toward resegregation that are evident in many U.S. cities. D espite decades of research and public policy debates on the topic, it is still unclear whether educational spending influences students' achievement. Some studies have suggested that there are no apparent effects of spending, while others have found that educational dollars indeed make a difference (see Burtless 1996). These debates and the research from which they have drawn have been limited for several reasons, not the least of which is the reliance on district-level data on spending (Farland 1997; Picus 1997). In this article, we extend the literature on educational spending and achievement by presenting our study, which analyzed the extent of variation in spending, its potential causes, and its consequences for students' achievement across 89 elementary schools within one urban school district. These unique, within-district, school-level data allowed us to delineate (1) significant withindistrict inequality in spending and its consequences for achievement; (2) the extent to which the disparities are associated with larger patterns of racial and class inequality and concentration; and (3) how spending matters, that is, the mechanisms that mediate the link between spending and achievement. We conclude this article by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the dynamics of local stratification, school inequality, and depressed patterns of achievement that are evident in many urban areas of the United States.

Disparities Within: Unequal Spending and Achievement in an Urban School District.

Power and Discontent

The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions in which parents influence the party identification and certain issue attitudes of their adolescent children (recent high school graduates). The nature and extent of the parent-adolescent attitude correspondence is first established. Next, parental as opposed to environmental explanations for this correspondence are considered. Finally, the effects on parental influence of family interaction, political interest, issue salience to the parent, and accuracy of the adolescent's perception of the parental attitude are analyzed. Issue salience and perceptual accuracy are found to have strong effects; the other variables have lesser or no effect. When issue salience and perceptual accuracy are held constant in a multivariate equation, the beta weights indicating the influence of the parent attitude on the attitude of the adolescent are very similar for all issues and party identification. It is concluded that idiosyncratic variations in successful parent-child attitude transmission can be explained by a general equation.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400104022

The Influence of Parents on the Political Attitudes of Adolescents

Research emphasizing the correlates of state policy outputs and the performance of particular institutions has overshadowed the role of the citizenry in the drama of state politics. One question of basic concern is the relevance of state government and politics for the inhabitants of a state. At the level of public policy and institutional performance the answer to this is factual and straightforward. The nature, amount, distribution, and to some extent the quality of a state's services and policies can be specified. Since states perform most of the traditional functions of governmental units and since these functions affect the fortunes of the citizens, state politics has an obvious, tangible, objective relevance for a state's inhabitants. At another level, however, the answer is not so clear-cut. Here we are dealing with the idea of what is subjectively relevant. Large numbers of people apparently pass their lives being touched by political institutions in a variety of ways without becoming particularly interested in or involved with these institutions. Other people become intensely, purposively related to these same institutions. Still others fall along a continuum between these two poles. If substantial variations exist in the general salience of politics, there is little reason to doubt that the same conditions may be found in particular subsets of political matters. In the case at hand this subset consists of the cluster of institutions, actors, and processes known as state political systems.

The Salience of American State Politics

The educational system is -viewed as a politicizing agent of society. The norms and values thus transmitted are compared with those deemed necessary for a stable democratic political system. It is argued that neither the typical techniques of classroom instruction nor the content (or lack thereof) of social studies courses contributes to the formation of attitudes consistent with the requisites of democracy. A professionalized educational establishment is seen as the major obstacle to realistic educational reform. V. 0. KEY, JR. (1963:316) observed that "all national educational systems indoctrinate the oncoming generation with the basic outlooks and values of the political order." The conservative implications of this statement (and of others similar to it) are obvious to all who take time to reflect upon it. However, one cannot neglect the possibility that the conservative role of education in the socialization process partially is a consequence of the state of the development of the society in which it occurs. In "developing" countries, for instance, Coleman (1965:3) suggested that the educational system is viewed as the key to rapid, if orderly, social change: "Once regarded as an essentially conservative, culture-preserving, culture-transmitting institution, the educational system now tends to be viewed as the master determinant of all aspects of change." We suspect that Coleman's statement will be modified substantially when empirical research establishes what is expected of educational systems in developing nations. For instance, the goals of teachers in developing countries do not appear to be radically

The Political Functions of the Educational System

In America, interest groups operate within the democratic frame of reference. Like all political organizations, they are accorded more legitimacy when they can show that they are representative of the attitudes and values of a particular segment of the population. Consequently, the leaders of interest groups frequently spend a great deal of time explaining just how democratic their organizations are. If one examines the testimony of interest group leaders at state and national legislative hearings, he is likely to find that much of it is begun with an introductory statement explaining that the leadership of the testifying group is merely the voice of the membership. The personal values of the interest group leader are played down, and his function as representative (as distinguished from delegate) is exaggerated. On the other hand, relatively few political interest groups have systematic and formalized means of ascertaining the desires of members. We know that most of the devices used to solicit member opinion are not very effective. Truman has shown that the affairs of most interest groups are run on a day-to-day basis by a fraction of the total membership. The mass of the membership takes a relatively passive role with regard to the formation of public policies by the organization. Communication between leaders and followers is spasmodic and cannot provide efficient guidelines for the actions of leaders. Whether or not leadership of an organization seeks to become a manifestation of Michel's iron law of oligarchy, the realities of communication within an organization suggest that most of the communication undertaken by leaders will be with other members of the leadership clique rather than with the larger body of followers in the group.

Attitude Consensus and Conflict in an Interest Group: An Assessment of Cohesion *

EDRS Price ME-$0.25 HC-$2.35 Board of Education Role, *Boards of Education, *Community Influence, Community Support, *Political Influences, Rural Urban Differences, School Community Relationship, *Social Influences, Urban Schools This study tests the assumption that social complexity hampers the representative function of decision-making bodies. Data for the study were compiled from interviews with a national sample of 572 school board members in 96 districts. Since size is the basic variable, a series of controls is imposed to ascertain the extent to which variations attributable to size remain stable when individual properties are taken into account. Results indicate complexity operates both to strengthen and to impede the representative function. In more populous districts, board members tend not to define their roles as representing the public's wishes irrespective of personal values. The relative strength of the "delegate"" as opposed to the "representative" role orientation of board members in less populous districts may be laid to the relatively undeveloped group life of smaller, more homogeneous communities. In general, perceived conflict with public expectations is highest in large cities. Further, criticism of school boards, personal contact with the board by community organizations, and activity by interest groups (including teachers) are consistently greater in large districts. (Author)

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Response Styles and Politics: The Case of School Boards.

I N A RECENT STUDY of voting in Des Moines, Iowa, Robert Salisbury and Gordon Black assessed the effects of party affiliation and class composition on voting results in three kinds of electionspartisan, nonpartisan, and referenda.' They found that party affiliation accounted for more of the variation than did class in partisan elections; that party loomed more important than did class in local nonpartisan elections, although the range of variation was greater than for partisan contests;2 and that no strong relationships were indicated between either party or class and the vote in three out of four referenda (the exception being a vote on the city manager plan).3 The authors of the Des Moines report suggested that their findings should be regarded as specific to that city, and urged further analysis of other cities. In response to this suggestion and as part of a continuing research interest, we have undertaken a partial replication of that study in the city of Atlanta, Georgia. One may immediately say that comparisons between Atlanta and

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Harmon Zeigler

Papers

The Salience of American State Politics

The Political Functions of the Educational System

Attitude Consensus and Conflict in an Interest Group: An Assessment of Cohesion *

Response Styles and Politics: The Case of School Boards.

Class, Party, and Race in Four Types of Elections: The Case of Atlanta