Showing papers in "American Journal of Education in 1980"

The Credential Society

Abstract: Suppose that, throughout history, as human productivity increases above subsistence, it becomes increasingly profitable for the most bold, ruthless, and adroit people to seize it from those who are producing. Suppose that as these few can seize more tribute, it also becomes more efficient for them to include proportionately more people into their privileged circle of tribute gatherers. However, suppose that if these elites do not expand their own numbers and efficiency of tribute gathering to the very limits of what is possible, they will expose themselves to takeover by other bold, ruthless, and adroit people waiting for the chance to do so. (So, with a little help from Machiavelli, Darwin, and some others, we have the beginnings of a "law of expanding elites" that is linked to expanding productivity.) To continue the supposition: in times of rapid increases in productivity, and therefore rapid increases in the need for more tribute gatherers, controlled recruitment and gatekeeping to admit those filling the extra job openings would be needed. To avoid resentment and unrest, this recruitment system should neither depend on chance nor rely only upon inefficient personal patronage by the already privileged. Instead, this gatekeeping system might best have the appearance of a fair, open, universal, and impersonal competition among the nonprivileged, whereby the many losers in the race can be encouraged to blame only themselves for their continuing unprivileged plight, and even to keep a privilege-friendly hope alive that they-or their children-might still some day be winners. (We will call this sentiment "legitimacy.") This competition for privilege should be an independent enterprise at arm's length from ruling elites, and should not put the already privileged to any real tests, and provide bypass alternatives for their children. Still, for appearances, it should test at least some qualities or values flatteringly attributed to the

Conceptualizing and Measuring the Effects of School and Schooling

Abstract: Studies of "school effects" must make a clear conceptual distinction between school and schooling. School is an organization that conducts instruction; schooling is the process through which instruction occurs. Schooling, which is a structure of action by students and teachers, is conditioned by the social organization of classrooms, curricular tracks, and other instructional units. A theory of schooling must include a conceptualization of its social organizational components. A theory of school effects must show how the organizational form of schools affects schooling. In research on school and schooling, it is important to differentiate levels of analysis to be sure that the level of analysis matches the level of conceptualization. Very different results may be obtained by research that does and does not maintain these conceptual and corresponding operational distinctions.

Experiential Learning Programs for Youth

Abstract: Opportunities for young people of secondary school age to learn outside of classrooms currently exist in a variety of programs, and the proliferation of such programs has been widely recommended. Their promise lies in engaging the learner more actively in learning, in contrast to the relative passivity of much classroom learning. Its proponents argue that such learning is more easily applied to real situations and that it need not rely on such extrinsic motivations as grades. However, experiential learning is also acknowledged to be less efficient and less generalizable than highly symbolic classroom learning. Its place, therefore, must be found in a set of educational approaches that includes conventional schooling. The claims for experiential learning have not been grounded solidly in research. Although unequivocal effects have been demonstrated for few educational programs of any kind, the informed creation of experiential learning programs for youth requires research that demonstrates the association ...

The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework.

Abstract: The IQ as a concept and intelligence testing as a procedure were developed within a specific sociocultural context in the United States during the period 1900-1930. This context included massive immigration, ethnic and racial diversity, and urban complexity; the expansion of school facilities and educational purposes; the growing influence of science and technical expertise in all areas of social life. The IQ seemed to provide a form of social order and meritocratic evaluation at the same time as it helped to organize an increasingly complex educational process, made both more ambitious and more idealistic because of John Dewey's challenging educational philosophy. In the light of the proven feasibility of mass testing during World War I, IQ testing was rapidly accepted in the public schools despite the knowledge that some immigrant and racial groups did significantly less well on the tests than others. While IQ testing would ultimately form the basis of a tracking network which would be perceived as unde...

What Makes Sammy Run?: An Empirical Assessment of the Bowles-Gintis Correspondence Theory.

Abstract: The Bowles-Gintis correspondence theory rejects conventional explanations that stress the role of cognitive skill in explaining the link between educational attainment and occupational status or earnings. According to Bowles and Gintis, schools do not serve primarily to enhance or to certify cognitive skills necessary for the technically efficient performance of occupational roles; instead, they serve primarily to develop noncognitive characteristics necessary to the reproduction of the social relations of production in a capitalist economy. From their theory, Bowles and Gintis explicitly advance or imply several empirical propositions. These include: (a) holding constant relevant noncognitive traits will reduce the apparent relationship between years of schooling and economic success; (b) holding constant measures of cognitive skill will not reduce the apparent relationship between years of schooling and economic success, except insofar as cognitive and noncognitive characteristics are related; and (c) t...

Moral Reasoning of Students in Different Cultural, Social, and Educational Settings.

Abstract: Cross-cultural research on the development of moral reasoning was carried out using about 115 adolescent subjects representing urban middle-class and lower-class, kibbutz-born and Youth Aliyah (disadvantaged urban youth educated in the kibbutz), Moslem and Christian Arab groups in Israel. Kohlberg's moral dilemmas were used to determine levels of moral reasoning, and the data analysis was done in terms of his six moral stages. Analysis of variance was used to determine whether differences between groups were significant. The results indicate the following. (1) The level of moral reasoning of kibbutz-born youth was higher than that of the other groups studied. (2) Middle-class and Youth Aliyah samples showed higher level of moral reasoning than lower-class samples. Youth Aliyah students, whose origin was urban lower class, had a level of moral reasoning almost a full stage higher than the comparable lower-class students. (3) The Christian and Moslem Arab middle-class samples showed similar levels of moral ...

Education in the Meritocracy

Abstract: Education is the "best observable predictor of a young man's eventual status or earnings" (p. 230), and it explains about two-thirds of the effect of measured family background on occupation and about onehalf of the effect of background on earnings (p. 78). And what explains who gets educated? Ability test scores predict educational attainment "at least as well as measured socioeconomic background in the United States," and most of the effects of test scores on education are entirely independent of family background (p. 104). The main reason test scores predict occupational status as well as they do is that ability predicts educational attainment which, in turn, predicts occupation (p. 112). These statements, all taken from Who Gets Ahead? leave me with the impression that both educators and educational researchers should take their jobs more seriously. Education indeed is the primary vehicle of social mobility in the United States. Given the importance of academic ability in who gets educated, as well as the continuing unrest in our schools and colleges over the use of standardized tests, most of my comments will deal in one way or another with test scores. I will begin by trying to assess whether Jencks and his colleagues committed a "sociological fallacy" in assuming that heredity does not account for much, a position quite different from the one that Jencks took in Inequality (Jencks et al. 1972). Next, I will argue that the authors of Who Gets Ahead? were wrong to underplay the actual importance of measured ability in the status-attainment process and to end up claiming that the United States is not meritocratic. I will then challenge the interpretation of the empirical results by Jencks and one of his coauthors that, even when test scores are controlled, nonwhites suffer badly from racial discrimination. The last section includes a number of short comments on a few other problems I had with the book. Before moving on to what appears to be a very critical review, I want to say that this is the best book ever to have been published by anyone on the subject. Not only does it deal with most of the best data available, it also uses the most sophisticated methods of quantitative analysis currently available. The authors often get themselves into trouble, however, by making statements so biased that it becomes clear to any reader on which side of the political fence most of them sit, namely, the liberal egalitarian. They make a serious attempt,

From Social Movement to Professional Management: An Inquiry into the Changing Character of Leadership in Public Education.

Abstract: In this exploratory essay the authors interpret changing forms of leadership in public education by locating them within the context of developing values, institutional structure, and broad social, political, and economic change. They advance two basic propositions. The first is that, during most of the nineteenth century, leadership in public education primarily took the form of guiding a decentralized social movement. In that era, they argue, the chief task of leaders was to create common schools across the nation through mobilizing opinion and effort at the local level. In stressing the importance of the rural, mostly unbureaucratized mainstream of public education, they depart from much recent historical literature which has focused on cities, growth of state power, responses to industrialization, and bureaucratization. Their second proposition is that at the turn of the twentieth century much of the direction of the educational system devolved upon university experts and professional managers. These ...

Images of Schools and Patterns of Change

Abstract: Many researchers, change agents, and practitioners have assumed that schools are rational bureaucracies. Yet, schools can vary in the clarity and consistency of their goals, in the ways in which staff work together, and in their abilities to deal with the outside world. The bureaucratic imagery does not take such variation into account. This paper contrasts the bureaucratic image of schools with four other possible images--the sect, the legislature, the hospital, and the anarchy--in order to develop a greater variety of ways to think about how schools can be organized. It then describes how schools corresponding to different images might deal with problems associated with four stages of the change process: adoption, initiation, implementation, and incorporation.

Sources of Satisfaction among Students in Postsecondary Education

Abstract: This research, based on the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, examines differences in educational satisfaction among black and white male students in postsecondary institutions. Three types of variables are used to study these differences: student characteristics (high school ability, expectations, and self-esteem); institutional characteristics (school and program type); and academic achievement (postsecondary grades). Blacks derive greater satisfaction than whites from their educational experiences for three important reasons: they have higher self-esteem, a greater proportion are enrolled in vocational schools and programs, and they experience greater status increase when their expectations and the type of school they actually attend are compared. These three factors are associated with high educational satisfaction. School and program type per se have little direct influence upon satisfaction; their effects are mediated.

School Administrators Besieged: A Look at Australian and American Education

Abstract: In this article, the author compares changing patterns of school governance in Australia and the United States. In both countries, Professor Murphy finds that during the last 15 years there has been a proliferation of new actors and pressures, and a realignment of influences within the federal systems. In Australia, however, the drift is toward greater decentralized authority at the school-site level, more influence from the federal government, and continuing pressure from teacher unions, but state governments continue to exercise major control over schools--more than in the United States. In the United States, the drift in professional authority is toward centers of power at higher levels of government, with weak counterforces arguing for more authority for individual schools. Also, unions, advocacy groups, courts, school boards, parent councils, disgruntled citizens--all are challenging the authority and discretion of U. S. school superintendents. The drifts in opposite directions in the states, Murphy ...

Jencks II: Paradigm Lost: And Found

Abstract: The publication of the second of two widely heralded reports on inequalities in the status and earnings of Americans, Who Gets Ahead?, by the second of two teams directed by Christopher Jencks, marks the end of two decades of intensive research on stratification since Michael Harrington reminded us of the other Americans and since the first of the modern era's \"human capital\" and \"status attainment\" studies of national and individual returns on investments in education

Assessing the Efficacy of Financial Reform in California

Abstract: In response to the second California Supreme Court ruling in Serrano, the legislature has recently acted to make the financing of schools fiscally neutral. The neutrality provisions of the new law have been challenged as permitting unacceptably large variations in per pupil expenditure among districts. The author shows that even if the intent to comply fully were not at issue achieving fiscal neutrality would be a difficult and complex task. Other provisions of the law address intradistrict financial practices and policies. Since equality of educational opportunity depends as much on intradistrict resource allocation as on fiscal neutrality, the author develops a research strategy to determine the efficacy of these intradistrict reforms. Drawing on recent theoretical work in the field of public-choice economics, he devises an analysis of decision making in school districts that yields testable hypotheses about the consequences of school-site councils and minimum performance requirements, two of the intrad...

From Practice to Theory: A History of School Review, Part II

Abstract: [School Review's] life-span coincides with the period of the most astounding development of public secondary education in world-history, a development that has included rapid increase in numbers and proportions of youth in attendance, horizontal expansion of the school by multiplication of the offering and activities, vertical extension through advent of junior high school and junior college, and a host of other modifications hardly less significant. Thus its life-span has put the Review in a position to witness and to record all this remarkable development. ["Volume Fifty, Number One," School Review 50 (January 1942): 1] It is the inexplicable but ineradicable suspicion of the theoretical in education that so often gives the field its peculiar status: in scholarship not quite a discipline and in practice not quite a profession. [Jacob Getzels, "Education for the Inner City: A Practical Proposal by an Impractical Theorist," School Review 75 (Autumn, 1967): 283-99, quote from p. 284] Theory is in the end ... the most practical of all things, because the widening of the range of attention beyond nearby purpose and desire, eventually results in the creation of wider and farther-reaching purposes and enables us to make much use of a wider and deeper range of conditions and means that were expressed in the observation of primitive practical purposes. [John Dewey, The Sources of a Science of Education (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), p. 17]

The Determinants of Jencks

Abstract: Another of Jencks's virtues is that he gives credit to his talented younger colleagues. Not for him a casual appreciation of assistance in the preface but, rather, a full appreciation on the title page of the book and the opening page of each chapter. Indeed, one of his most remarkable feats is that during the decade he has managed two different and sizable teams of colleagues into two books of great importance. While research assistants and associates can be of great help, they can also delay projects, produce conflict, perplex issues. Jencks must be an extraordinary manager and colleague. Jencks's fourth contribution is to the art of secondary analysis and reanalysis, the importance of which he has strengthened. Data collected by some, frequently at great expense, can be viewed systematically and effectively by others. Data then can have longer lives as they are given new treatments.