Showing papers in "American Journal of Education in 1989"

Breaking Away: A Study of First Generation College Students and Their Families

Abstract: Detailed family histories were taken of students who were the first in their families to go to college. This paper utilizes the psychoanalytic and family systems theory of Helm Stierlin and others to explore (1) how college matriculation for first-generation students is linked to multigenerational family dynamics, and (2) how these students reconcile (or do not reconcile) the often conflicting requirements of family membership and educational mobility. The same modernity that creates the possibility of opportunity for these students is seen also to create the potential for biographical and social dislocation.

Effective versus Ineffective Schools: Observable Differences in the Classroom

Abstract: Until recently, the areas of school effectiveness and teacher effectiveness were examined separately. The study described in this article investigated differences at the classroom level in effective and ineffective schools. Teachers in more effective schools scored consistently higher on all identified dimensions of effective teaching. Field notes from observations in one matched pair of schools suggested possible school-level factors contributing to these classroom differences. The authors suggest that an astute, highly visible administrator and clear academic focus facilitate effective teaching, but they recognize that there may also be a reciprocal increase in school-effectiveness variables (such as quality of leadership and academic mission) resulting from the cultivation or appointment of effective teachers.

Measuring Curriculum Differentiation.

Abstract: This article advocates a quantitative sociological approach to measuring curriculum differentiation and its effects. It distinguishes between the social organization of schools, which includes such arrangements as the grouping and tracking of students, and the instructional processes that occur within classes. Because organization and instruction can vary independently, it is necessary to examine the academic experiences that presumably link students' outcomes with their positions in the school stratification system. An agenda for research calls for combining survey with observational methods to examine measures of track organization and instructional activities that are sensitive to conditions that differ across schools.

Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900-1925: An Analysis of Symbolic Action.

Abstract: This article interprets Americanization and civics education as symbolic action sanctioning a status order and authoritatively defining and interpreting social phenomena. It argues that symbolic reconfiguration of American civic culture, not transformation of immigrants, is the important historical consequence of the Americanization movement. Despite the emphasis that some scholars have placed on the imperatives for conformity characteristic of the Americanization movement, this article contends that the lasting import of the movement lies less in its bias toward cultural homogeneity and more in its symbolic delegitimation of collective ethnic identity and in its affirmation of the autonomous individual.

Standards and School Dropouts: A National Study of Tests Required for High School Graduation

Abstract: This article reports a study of minimum competency testing in American secondary schools. The analysis focuses on tests that students must pass before they receive the high school diploma. The effects of these tests on low-achieving high school students are explored. A particular concern is the possibility that test failure may reduce academic aspirations and thereby contribute to decisions to drop out of school. The study is based on a series of in-depth interviews with educators and school administrators in selected states, and on data collected face-to-face with more than 700 high school students. In one cluster of findings, the reports of test coordinators, school principals, and school counselors provide consistent echoes of a conventional wisdom that has enveloped high school exit exams: the belief that required competency tests are now so rudimentary that they cannot present much of a barrier to school completion. But at the same time, these educators report with uniform consistency that they do no...

The Careful Vision: How Practical Is Contemplation in Teaching?

Abstract: Does teaching begin and end in contemplative thought? In exploring this question, Margret Buchmann suggests that conceptions of teacher thinking must be expanded beyond planning and decision making People's ordinary conception of thinking includes imagining, remembering, interpreting, and caring Hence, to understand the full scope and meaning of teachers' thoughts, researchers and teacher educators have to broaden and diversify their ideas Contemplation is a process of thinking that, though remote from action and utility, directs and supports the comprehensive practical life Describing contemplation as careful attention and wonderstruck beholding, the author examines subject matter and children as objects of teachers' contemplative concern Her argument for the practicality of contemplation is based on a concept of practice going beyond what an individual teacher does or what can be typically observed in schools This collective, moral concept invokes intrinsic ends and ideas of perfection: constituti

Young Children Face the States: Issues and Options for Early Childhood Programs.

Abstract: The growing demand for compensatory education and for child care has generated a rash of federal legislation; many states have enacted new early childhood programs, most of them located within schooling systems, and many others are considering their options. This article examines the basic policy issues governments confront in early childhood education, including the content of programs, their financing, and the inevitable trade-off between cost and quality. The final section of the article outlines the available policy options.

The Effects of Ability Grouping on the Ethnic Achievement Gap in Israeli Elementary Schools.

Abstract: This study examined the achievement levels in arithmetic and verbal proficiency of over 2,000 grade 6 students in 24 Israeli elementary schools. The analysis employed a hierarchical linear regression model to estimate the size of the achievement gap between Sephardi and Ashkenazi students, and overall levels of achievement, after adjusting for measurement error and for students' family background characteristics and prior achievement. The study found large, statistically significant differences between schools in their ethnic achievement gaps, and in their intake-adjusted levels of achievement. The analysis also examined whether variation between schools in these outcomes was associated with various school-level factors. Schools with higher levels of between-classroom segregation had larger ethnic achievement gaps, but did not have higher intake-adjusted levels of achievement. There were no statistically significant sector effects or contextual effects. The findings suggest that the consequences of select...

Fiscal Support for Education in American States: The "Parity-to-Dominance" View Examined.

Abstract: Many policy analysts have characterized the 1980s as a period of emerging state activism. This view is clearly supported in public school financing at the aggregate level, where the state share has shifted from a "parity" to a "dominance" status over the past decade. This article examines this prevailing parity-to-dominance perspective by conducting an analysis of state school aid in each of the 50 states from 1968 to 1986. Instead of finding states converging toward activism, our analysis shows significant interstate diversity in school financing. Only a very small number of states have actually followed the parity-to-dominance path. More important, each of the 50 states can be systematically classified into one of several distinct patterns, each of which can be defined in terms of (1) a state's fiscal support status (i. e., parity or dominance) at the initial period (i. e., late 1960s) and (2) whether state support has increased, remained stable, or decreased over the 19-year period. Through a synthesis...

Lesson Evading and Lesson Dissembling: Ego Strategies in the Classroom.

Abstract: This article identifies two distinct kinds of classroom lesson tactics--lesson evading and lesson dissembling--and distinguishes them from both lesson engaging and lesson rejecting. All four types of lesson tactics are seen as situated expressions of persistent ego strategies, employed to maintain and enhance the individual's sense of self-in-sensible-world. At one time or another in our three-year study each of 193 students was seen to employ both evading and dissembling as well as engaging, and many also employed rejecting. Frequency of employment varied strikingly, however. Each child displayed a characteristic tendency to either engage, evade, dissemble, or reject in situations that were confusing, threatening, or boring. The strategies were found to relate to the instructional features of the eight classrooms studied. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

John Dewey and the Crisis of the Canon

Abstract: The role of classics in higher education has been emphasized by William J. Bennett and Allan Bloom. John Dewey's was a determinative voice in the current shape of American education. Dewey seemed opposed to lists of required classics and perhaps to the very notion of a classic. Dewey's contribution to the current "crisis of the canon" is explored in this essay, and a modified Deweyan solution is argued: that education be to a significant extent centered on the classics is not a mistake but a canon is. For classics tap the very common human experience Dewey himself was concerned to articulate, while canons are instruments of an orthodoxy Dewey repudiated in the name of democracy. Although this does not by itself solve the problem of how a culturally pluralist society can remain a community, it does lay down a basic principle for higher education in a pluralist society.

Beyond Board of Education v. Rowley: Educational Benefit for the Handicapped?

Abstract: This article analyzes lower court decision making since 1982 when the U. S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Board of Education v. Rowley interpreting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act. When the Supreme Court held that the Education for All Handicapped Children Act guarantees only access to school and some benefit to the child, many educators, lawyers, parents, and friends of handicapped children were left with the fear that the Court had sacrificed the very heart of the act. A review of lower court decision making, however, reveals that the Rowley decision has not had the detrimental effect on services that many feared. Instead, courts remain willing to support parents in their efforts to obtain expansive services for their handicapped children, in a seeming disregard of Rowley. Moreover, the 1986 amendments to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act encourage parents to seek judicial review and provide courts with broader enforcement power.

Values in Educational Inquiry.

Abstract: If the charge of systematic bias against mainstream social or educational research is to be credible, the notion of objective truth must be defended. After explaining why the intrusion of values into science is perceived to undermine objectivity, I consider various ways in which values inevitably enter educational inquiry but show that none of them undermines the possibility of objectivity. I show how theoretical frameworks, even those that carry particular values, may be legitimately employed to explain educational phenomena. Finally, I try to make credible the charge that mainstream research is systematically biased.

Keeping Them out of the Hands of the State: Two Critiques of Christian Schools

Abstract: reason a teacher in any one of his classes might want the Word of Scripture about some point or another. Our classes here reflect the Word of God. We believe that history, for example, is his story, the unfolding of the word of Jesus Christ on the center stage of the world. A man trying to write a history textbook that presents Jesus Christ asjust another historical figure has no concept of real truth. We don't teach that way in our history classes. Math is a study of orderliness. The Word of God says, "Let everything be done decently using some order." Try to keep I checkbook sometimes without using some order and organization. Science is an understanding of God's handiwork. Men deny the Word of God and try to make us believe that all that we see about us has come aboutjust through a series of events. Sometimes, the general term of evolution is used to apply to all this, but the Word of God is different on that. It clearly teaches that man was created from nothing: "Out of nothing," God states. The evolutionist says