Showing papers in "American Journal of Education in 1986"

The Social Context of Effective Schools.

Abstract: This article analyzes differences in the operation of school effectiveness factors in high- and low-SES effective schools. Observable differences are found on several effectiveness variables. The social context of the effective schools appears to influence the breadth of the curriculum, the allocation and use of instructional time, the instructional leadership role of the principal, the nature of the school reward system, and the type of expectations embedded in school policies and practices. These findings, though tentative, indicate that practitioners should not treat the well-publicized effectiveness factors as generalizable to all school settings. In addition, the results suggest that researchers concerned with understanding the process of effective schooling should focus on the manner in which these schools translate contextual expectations into school policies and classroom practices.

Ethnic identities and patterns of school success and failure among Mexican-descent and Japanese-American students in a California high school: An ethnographic analysis.

Abstract: This paper addresses the interrelatedness of three variables: ethnicity and ethnic identity, minority status and perceptions of adult opportunities, and how this interrelation affects school performance. The research draws on fieldwork in an agricultural/suburban community along the central California coast. The analysis employs a cultural/ecological framework for explaining variability in patterns of school performance among Japanese-American and Mexican-descent students.

A Population at Risk: Potential Consequences of Tougher School Standards for Student Dropouts

Abstract: This paper considers the potential impact of the recent recommendations for raising standards in American schools on a population at risk, that is, those students likely to leave school prior to high school graduation. The paper proceeds by (1) presenting a systematic review of the empirical evidence on factors that predict dropping out, (2) synthesizing and explicating the recent recommendations for raising standards in American schools, (3) considering the likely positive and negative effects of higher standards on the population at risk in the absence of any other changes in the structure of schools, (4) identifying the school characteristics that can be altered to minimize the adverse effects of changes in academic standards on potential dropouts, and (5) proposing recommendations to raise academic standards and mitigate the dropout problem simultaneously.

Measuring the Effects of Instructional Time on Student Learning: Evidence from the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study

Abstract: This paper analyzes data from the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study to examine whether learning rates vary across students, across teachers, and across subject matter as a function of allocated instructional time. The effect of a student's beginning achievement level on the rate of learning is investigated. Time allocated to learning is significantly related to reading and mathematics test scores, but the size of the effect varies across teachers in mathematics and across subject matter and grade level. Higher beginning achievement levels are consistently and significantly associated with lower learning rates.

Explaining School Cohesion: What Shapes the Organizational Beliefs of Teachers?

Abstract: Effective schools often possess teachers who hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices. But little empirical evidence exists that helps to explain what factors shape the level of convergence in teachers' beliefs. Organizational theorists and practitioners alike are divided between two theoretical camps. Some claim that a strong principal and factors within the school can move teachers toward a shared commitment to the school's philosophy and method (a natural-system model). Others suggest that convergent beliefs among school staff are more strongly shaped by the school's environment, including diversity within the local community or fragmentation within the organization of school funding as structured by state and federal education agencies (an open-system model). This study finds that the level of convergence in teachers' beliefs is sensitive to local environmental forces, including heterogeneity of students, size of administrative staff, and the community's social class. But such ...

Effective Bilingual Schools: Implications for Policy and Practice.

Abstract: A paradigm of the relation between bilingual program effectiveness and schoolwide effectiveness is presented. A case study of Calvin J. Lauderbach Community School, an elementary school in which both school and bilingual programs are effective, is presented. The analysis of Lauderbach highlights both the dynamic nature of the effective school and the mutually reinforcing interaction between bilingual programs and school context that produces high levels of student achievement. Implications for further research and for policy matters are presented and discussed in light of the Lauderbach case study.

The Context of Education for Hispanic Students: An Overview

Abstract: This article summarizes current data available on the educational attainment of precollegiate Hispanic students. Dr. Arias reviews those factors that contribute to the heterogeneity of Latinos and the educational implications that derive from the demographic changes of the last 20 years. She emphasizes that the increasing residential segregation of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans has educational consequences in promoting linguistic isolation that impede academic attainment.

Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?

Abstract: A follow-up study was conducted of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School (SVS), a democratically administered primary and secondary school that has no learning requirements but rather supports students' self-directed activities. Although these individuals educated themselves in ways that are enormously different from what occurs at traditional schools, they have had no apparent difficulty being admitted to or adjusting to the demands of traditional higher education and have been successful in a wide variety of careers. Graduates reported that for higher education and careers, the school benefited them by allowing them to develop their own interests and by fostering such traits as personal responsibility, initiative, curiosity, ability to communicate well with people regardless of status, and continued appreciation and practice of democratic values.

Work, Education, and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890-1920.

Abstract: This essay examines the ideological origins of vocational education in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the leading participants in the vocational movement, it asks why people across a broad spectrum of political and economic opinion seized on vocational education as an instrument of economic reform. The essay argues that vocational reformers often differed with one another about the form that vocational education should take and the purposes it should serve but that what united them all was a desire to rationalize the operation of the economy without directly attacking private property or the class structure. The result was to transform questions about the nature of work and inequality into matters of socialization and training, thereby institutionalizing the idea that preparation for work was a primary function of American education.

Hispanic Education: Challenges, Research, and Policies

Abstract: The nation's political mood affects not only the nature of the educational policy debate but also the kind of research that is funded and the research findings that receive most attention. The conservative mood of the eighties has produced a general decline in educational research support and a particular decline in serious investigations of the condition of minority education. These changes have meant that the country knows far less than it needs to know about one of the most important challenges facing our schools and colleges-the education of the large and rapidly increasing Hispanic communities. The 1980s has been a period of intense discussion of educational policy and major reforms, but the debate has been very different from that of the sixties. Concern with equality, equity, and access has been replaced with campaigns to raise standards, arguments about the superiority of private schools, and neoconservative attacks on civil rights and other liberal policies. This drastic change of focus obscured one of the most dramatic developments in American social and educational history-the extremely rapid growth of a second great minority population, the Hispanics, who may well displace blacks as the nation's largest minority. The great expansion of this very young population and the accumulating evidence of their widespread educational problems are likely to be seen, in retrospect, as among the critical developments of this century. This special issue of the American Journal of Education is an effort to stimulate thoughtful consideration of the implications of the growing Hispanic presence in American life and American schools.

Sociology and Special Education: Differentiation and Allocation in Mass Education

Abstract: Although special education provision has been expanding rapidly over the past 30 years, sociologists of education have shown little interest in the topic. This may be because the main themes in existing sociological studies that bear on special education, reviewed here, do not address the central structural concerns of the sociology of education. This paper presents a structural framework for the analysis of special education, seeing it as one of the ways in which schools perform their reproductive task by differentiating children and allocating them to different educational treatments. This framework is then used to analyze the different histories of special education in England and the United States.

The Constitutional Moment: Reconstruction and Black Education in the South

Abstract: For a brief period after the Civil War, blacks gained a measure of political influence in Southern states. They used this nascent power first in a grass roots movement to build, fund, and staff schools. Then they joined with Radical Republicans in the Congress and with allies in Southern constitutional conventions during Congressional Reconstruction to establish free and universal public education. This article examines these political campaigns and the new constitutional frameworks that established schooling as a basic right for both races and that created new structures for the governance and finance of public education. These campaigns broadened traditional tenets of republican ideology to include the exslaves, but when white supremacists overthrew Reconstruction governments in the 1870s, the crusade stalled. Diminishing educational opportunity for blacks accompanied the loss of political rights and influence. Despite grave inequities that emerged between black and white schools, the principle of universal education remained in these constitutions. Although Reconstruction failed to transform the political economy of the South, it did leave an educational legacy vital to the survival and regeneration of black people. F. L. Cardozo, a black teacher and politician, was aware that his people had reached a turning point in their history after the Civil War, a time of promise and precarious power for the former slaves. The delegates meeting in the Reconstruction convention during the winter of 1868 were framing a new constitution for South Carolina. "I do desire we shall use the opportunities we now have to our best advantage, as we may never have a more propitious time," said Cardozo in arguing for

Teacher Education and Feminist Theory: Some Implications for Practice.

Abstract: Recent research on women challenges long-held generalizations in the history, sociology, and psychology that are taught to future teachers. This article examines the implications of this research for teacher education, with specific focus on the traditional staples of teacher preparation: foundations of education, educational psychology, and curriculum and methods courses. Authors propose various changes to correct for current imbalances.

Bilingual Development and the Education of Bilingual Children during Early Childhood

Abstract: Early education of language-minority students has considered linguistic, cognitive, and social attributes of children and schooling contexts. The bilingual nature of the student and the instruction provided that student have received considerable educational research attention. Bilingualism, once considered an educational liability, has recently been placed into new theoretical and educational perspectives. At the same time, research related to the effective instruction of language-minority students has emerged. Although far from comprehensive, language-minority education has a broader theoretical and empirical foundation from which present educational practice can be judged and future research can be designed.

Consequences of Skill: The Case of Abacus Training in Taiwan

Abstract: A general orientation toward the study of skills and their development is outlined, in which analyses of representation, transfer, and context are used to explore the consequences of developing a specific skill. This general approach is then applied to the study of abacus training and its implications for school achievement and cognitive development. Previous studies of abacus skill are reviewed, and two new studies are reported. Previous research showed abacus training to result in qualitative changes in children's representations of mental calculation through development of a "mental abacus." In Study 1, mental abacus skill was found to develop primarily as a result of practice rather than of selection factors such as socioeconomic status, ability, and previous mathematical knowledge. Abacus skill did, however, have positive effects on future achievement. Study 2 clarified the mechanisms underlying the functional relationships discovered in Study 1. Abacus training was found to affect both calculation s...

Concentration of California Hispanic Students in Schools with Low Achievement: A Research Note

Abstract: This study was conducted to learn more about the achievement of students in California's public schools Three major questions were examined in this study The first question asked, "How are the students of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds distributed in schools with different levels of achievement?" The second question asked, "How do students of ethnic and linguistic background relate to reading and math achievement?" The third question asked, "What are the characteristics of schools that produce high and low achievement from various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in grades 3, 6, and 12?" The population sampled was that of 4,268 public elementary schools and 791 public high schools in California for 1977-78 This sample includes all of the public elementary and high schools in California

Comparing Structured English Immersion and Bilingual Education: First-Year Results of a National Study.

Abstract: The U.S. Department of Education commissioned a study to determine the relative effectiveness of programs for limited English proficient students wherein English is the only language of instruction and those in which both English and the child's primary language are used for instruction. This article describes the instructional differences observed in the first of a four-year longitudinal study of three such programs, English Immersion Strategy, early-exit, and late-exit transitional bilingual education programs. This process evaluation confirms implementation of each program through documentation of those factors deemed critical to each instructional model. The study concludes that the programs differ radically in the use of English and the child's primary language for instruction and that these language use patterns are consistent with the instructional model for each program. Little or no differences were noted in the teaching behaviors used among the three programs. These and subsequent process data w...

Reading Activities and Reading Proficiency among Hispanic, Black, and White Students

Abstract: The most recent evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that, despite large gains in reading proficiency by minority children over the last decade, Hispanic and black children continue to read at significantly lower levels than do whites. The purpose of the present study is twofold. First, it attempts to examine the extent to which lower reading proficiency among Hispanic and black children is explained by parents' educational level and by reading activities and behaviors on the part of the family and child (e.g., reading materials in the home and amount of reading done for enjoyment). Second, it attempts to examine the direct effect of parents' education and reading activities on reading proficiency among minority and nonminority children. These research questions are addressed by conducting further analysis with the National Assessment of Educational Progress's 1984 survey of reading proficiency among in-school fourth, eighth, and eleventh graders. The results show that, whil...

Chicanos in Higher Education: The Politics of Self-Interest.

Abstract: Higher education in the United States continues to be distributed unequally, with Mexican-Americans receiving less than their fair share. In California, the state with the largest number of Mexican-Americans, 21 percent of non-Hispanic whites have at least a B.A. degree whereas only 6 percent of Hispanics are similarly well educated. At the other end of the spectrum, Mexican-Americans are found disproportionately among the ranks of the undereducated and the underemployed. Up to now, concerns about the undereducation of Hispanics have been confined to its effect on this particular group. However, as Mexican-Americans make up an increasingly larger percentage of the Southwest's population, the undereducation of Chicanos represents a growing threat to both the functioning of higher education and the economic health of the region. By the end of this decade Chicanos will constitute a quarter of the college-age population in California and Texas and a similar portion of the work force. If we continue to enroll ...

The Formative Years of Schools of Education in America: A Five-Institution Analysis

Abstract: The prototype of the American graduate school of education emerged between 1900 and 1940. Five institutions--Chicago, Columbia's Teachers College, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California (Berkeley)--were pacesetters. Their experiences in trying to mediate between the academic pressures of their ambitious universities and demands for professional training and for services to public school practitioners were repeated elsewhere in a changing America. The generic problems of professional schools were compounded for schools of education by the tenuous state of professional knowledge, the low status accorded teaching, and the predominance of women among practitioners. The education professoriate dealt with these issues by emphasizing graduate instruction and research training, distancing themselves from teacher education, and assisting male educators to make careers as school administrators and faculty for the nation's other schools and departments of education.

Individual Differences: Changing Conceptions in Research and Practice

Abstract: This article discusses some of the ways in which the assumptions and general conceptions underlying recent research on individual differences differ from those guiding earlier research. It is suggested that certain social-philosophical changes that have occurred since World War II (e. g., the cognitive revolution evident in psychology and education and the more egalitarian conceptions of individual differences apparent in many spheres of society) have had a substantial influence on current research. A framework for relating various aspects of current research on individual differences is suggested, and examples of research on both knowledge-based differences (e. g., expert/novice differences in problem solving) and process-related differences associated with intelligence and various types of learning tasks are presented and discussed.

Is the Growth of Special Education Evolutionary or Cyclic? A Response to Carrier

Abstract: Carrier has done an elegant job of summarizing and synthesizing sociological research on special education in the United States and England. He correctly asks why this work has attracted so little attention from mainline sociology of education, and he criticizes those of us who do special education research for being excessively narrow. We have not explained why special education programs reveal important things about the broader relationships between education and society. Carrier attempts to repair this flaw and to explain why special education is a critical case and why it sheds light on social processes that have not yet been properly understood. He argues that special education is part of the means by which public education legitimates social and economic inequality and facilitates reproduction of the class structure from generation to generation. Education is a primary example of what Carrier calls "contractualist" social programs. These are based on the premise that all people are equal in terms of their fundamental biological attributes. Those inequalities that exist in society are produced by environmental differences. Some of these stunt the development of people as biological and psychological beings. Other environmental causes of inequality emerge from the institutional structure of society. In the contractualist view, social programs are responsible for overcoming these environmentally caused inequalities. Carrier builds on a long-standing sociological tradition arguing that although programs such as those in public schools are justified on contractualist grounds, in fact they do little to reduce inequality in society. By convincing people in the lower and working classes that education is a vehicle for substantial upward mobility, schooling works

The Limits of Change: Insights from the Sociology of Knowledge for Educational Theory

Abstract: C. A. Bowers's new volume, The Promise of Theory: Education and the Politics of Cultural Change, summarizes and continues to explore a theme that has informed his numerous writings over the last decade: the relevance of the sociology of knowledge to our understanding of learning and to the relationship between schools and the modern world. In this book (an "elaboration" of the Dewey Lecture that he delivered in 1982), Bowers argues provocatively and quite persuasively that the tradition of Schutz, Berger, and Luckmann can provide educational theorists and practitioners with a set of insights regarding the process of human socialization that has direct bearing on our assumptions about what learning truly means, how schooled learning is related to the nature of all cultural knowledge, and how the teacher can affect the quality of what is learned in the classroom. For Bowers, it has been the work of these sociologists of knowledge that has significantly reoriented our vision of the true nature of culturehow it is formed, learned, and perpetuated. Cultures are not objective mechanisms existing external to human actors and operating according to predetermined and lawlike structures that can be absolutely known and manipulated. Rather, a culture is a universe of meanings-of symbolic expressions and interactions interpreted in an ongoing way by humans (whether by everyday actors or by abstract thinkers) in a deeply intersubjective universe. Especially important to Bowers is the notion of society as a communicative network-as a density of languages within which people carry on the daily activities of their commonsense world.

Reply to Milofsky's Comments on "Sociology and Special Education"

Abstract: by clarifying and extending some of the brief arguments that I made about substantialist and contractualist ideologies. In the second, I deal more directly with two core concerns that seem to underlie a number of his comments: the relationship of special education to the internal operation of the schools and the relationship between special education and mainstream sociology of education.

A Response to Bowers, Howard, Stanley, and Soltis

Abstract: C. A. Bowers argues, logically and reasonably, that the dominant contemporary, progressive school of educational thought is implicitly nihilist. Understandably concerned about the implications of nihilism for education, he seeks a way out whereby most of the current nostrums can be maintained and the most severe problems of nihilism avoided. It is interesting that the three commentaries, presumably requested by the American Journal of Education, share certain fundamental assumptions with Bowers, even though they disagree with many of the specific ideas that he develops. I shall comment on the similarity of the guiding assumptions of the writer and commentators and explore the consequences of this cozy consensus. First, the common assumptions. Bowers concludes, "Renewing the foundations of belief and social practice involves restoring a sense of community, and this process cannot be achieved by basing education on nihilist values that make everything contingent on the subjective nature of the critically reflective individual who assumes the progressive nature of a raised state of consciousness" (1985, p. 488). Traditionalists will welcome his rejection of extreme individualism and the nihilistic assertion of will that underlies it. But Bowers is careful not to give too much comfort to traditionalists. He writes that "the project of consciousness-raising can lead to a more thoughtful awareness of how the present pattern of thinking originated in the past" (p. 487). Thus the cart of "consciousness-raising" is carefully put before the horse of tradition, although, in logic, it is difficult to see how consciousness can be meaningfully derived other than from the context of our inherited culture. Indeed, the central criticism of consciousness-raising as an educational purpose is precisely that it substitutes carefully selected and transitory aspects of our current culture for the firmer roots of tradition. Bowers deliberately draws back from the logical conclusion of his basic argument, from the abyss, which is that modern, liberal educational philosophy must by definition lead ineluctably to nihilism, to the triumph of Nietzschean will, to a subjectivist existentialism where values are created independently by individuals claiming to be autonomous. He does not conclude that emancipatory approaches to education

Misrepresenting the Terms of Political Discourse

Abstract: The wide range of topics in Education under Siege, by Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, as well as the disappointingly limited depth of analysis that characterizes the treatment of the main themes that link together the otherwise disparate chapters suggest that the title was created as the authors were attempting to establish a sense of a unified whole from a collection of previously published articles. As a result there is an element of false promise that surrounds the title of the book. Although certain aspects of their analysis are important to Marxist educational theorists, who must now decide whether Aronowitz and Giroux are prophets or apostates, the book itself fails to come to terms with the conservative and liberal debate that the authors promise to examine. This oversight creates special problems for readers who place their trust in the authors' ability to be fair and accurate, and it greatly weakens the conceptual foundations of Aronowitz and Giroux's own "alternative vision for schools." Before examining the themes that give Education under Seige its conceptual unity, it is important to clarify a unique feature of the book. Readers who have followed the development of Giroux's ideas will recognize that several of his most important articles appear essentially unchanged as chapters in this jointly authored book. In the acknowledgment section the authors state that even though chapters may have been individually written, they both claim joint responsibility for the content. Given this situation, my analysis will take them at their word by assigning joint responsibility, even though the position being analyzed had a prior historical existence. Although the authors take up such diverse themes as the failure of radical educational theorists to "recognize the limits of orthodoxy and neo-Marxian discourses," the crisis of higher education, and the com-

Response to Mark Holmes

Abstract: Whichever way you turn, teacher education is now being treated with open contempt. Politicians dismiss teacher educators as part of an educational establishment whose half-baked progressive ideas have brought teaching into disrepute; the media attacks new approaches to teaching as the fads and fashions of "theorists" who have little understanding of the realities of school life; and employers constantly complain that the emphasis given by teacher educators to "personal development" and "selffulfillment" neglects the need of pupils to acquire the knowledge and skills required for the world of work. Most teacher educators find this state of affairs difficult to accept and feel compelled to try to explain and justify their procedures and practices in open argument and critical debate. Mark Holmes, however, is a teacher educator who seems to share some of the popular scepticism and feels compelled to alert other teacher educators to the errors of their ways. These errors are, in his view, largely due to the fact that teacher education has been corrupted by the "ideology of therapy." "My main purpose," he says, "is to elaborate the dangers of the widely accepted (among educators) therapeutic human relations approach to the changing role of teachers, teaching and, ultimately, education, dangers of which so many otherwise intelligent educators appear quite unaware." Since these "dangers" are of such magnitude (the subversion of education, the corruption of teaching, moral decline, etc.) why are so many "otherwise intelligent educators" "unaware" of them? The reason, says Holmes, is that therapy is endemic to modern, liberal culture. In such a culture, with its overriding commitment to the values of individualism and to such educational aims as intellectual and moral autonomy, selfrealization and self-fulfillment, the authority of teachers can no longer be grounded in a clear set of moral and social values. Deprived of this traditional source of legitimacy, teacher authority now derives from their

The Problem of Tradition in Educational Theory

Abstract: Because in recent years I have experienced basic distortions of far simpler arguments, I was genuinely pleased with the accuracy exhibited by Mark Holmes in laying out my position. A second reason for commending his response is that he has put in sharper focus a fundamental issue that has become the Achilles' heel of the romantic, technicist, and emancipatory streams of liberal theories of education. It is also a key aspect of the confusion that surrounds recent attempts to use the traditional categories of political discourse to situate educational issues. Equating conservativism with the spread of technicism in education is an example of the confused thinking that results from not understanding how basic distinctions between political categories have turned on how the nature of tradition is viewed (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985). Holmes gives several compelling reasons why educators need to understand the nature of tradition. One is that a large segment of the public is reacting against the modernizing ideology held by most teachers, where the emphasis placed on a view of the rational process, authority of individual judgment, and the normality of change serves to relativize values and traditions. His observation raises important questions about the education of teachers, particularly, what they understand about the culture of modernism, how this cultural episteme influences our understanding of individualism and the educational process of empowerment, and how the culture of modernism differs from traditional cultures. The second reason that Holmes gives for educators taking seriously the nature of tradition seems, however, to be more fundamentally important to his disagreement with my argument that empowerment through consciousness-raising is achieved, in part, through a critical understanding of the continuities between the present and the past. As he puts it, "the cart of 'consciousness-raising' is carefully put before the horse of tradition." While seeming to want to find the middle ground between the "relativism" of my position and that of people who live behind the Maginot Line of absolute and unyielding beliefs, Holmes wants tradition to provide the "rudiments" of his conceptual and moral guidance system.