Showing papers in "Teachers College Record in 1976"

The Experimental Ecology of Education.

Abstract: Ishall begin by stating three basic requirements that, in my judgment, must be met if we are to make progress in the scientific study of educational systems and processes. 1. Our researches cannot be reistricted to the laboratory; for the most part, they must be carried out in real-life educational settings. As will be indicated below, this does not mean that laboratory experiments cannot serve a useful and, indeed, essential purpose, but they must be carried out with explicit recognition of the delimiting and distorting nature of the laboratory as a setting and deliberately designed to articulate closely with and complement companion researches carried out in real-life situations. 2. Whether and how people learn in educational settings is a function of sets of forces, or systems, at two levels:

Implementation as Mutual Adaptation: Change in Classroom Organization.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter presents classroom organization projects that provide particularly, clear illustration of the conditions and strategies that support mutual adaptation and thus, successful implementation. They are especially relevant to understanding the operational implications of the Change Agent study finding for policy and practice not only because mutual adaptation is intrinsic to change in classroom organization, but also because the question of institutional receptivity does not cloud the view of effective implementation strategies afforded by these projects. Overcoming the challenges and problems inherent to innovations in classroom organization contributes positively and significantly to their effective implementation. The amorphous yet highly complex nature of classroom organization projects tends to require or dictate an adaptive implementation strategy that permits goals and methods to be reassessed, refined, and made explicit during the course of implementation, and that fosters learning-by-doing.

The Public, The Professionals, and Educational Policy Making: Who Governs?

Abstract: In twenty years the argument about who controls the American public schools has changed dramatically. In 1953 Charters challenged the then-prevalent view, derived from a quarter century of research,1 that American public school systems support the values of the 'dominant' social class of their constituent communities.\"2 This view was based upon evidence which supposedly demonstrated (1) the middle class bias of teachers, school administrators, and school board members; and (2) the pervasiveness of dominant community values. By way of illustration, the latter part of this view was well expressed by Warner:

The Politics of Training Teachers in Schools.

Abstract: In the recent past, it has been relatively easy to effect school reform through teacher turnover and recruitment. As long as teacher mobility remained high, a principal could count on replacing perhaps as much as one-fifth of the staff in a year. But now and for the foreseeable future, mobility will be greatly constricted by the teacher surplus, the availability of maternity leaves, the need for multiple incomes per family, and the effects of unionization. School reform must now be accomplished through existing personnel. More than ever before, those who seek to change schools must change teachers while they are working in the schools. The euphemism for that is staff development.

Socialization and Education of Young Black Girls in School

Abstract: Young black girls are an ignored and invisible population. One of the great struggles that arise when documenting the early experience of black girls in school is that they have not been the focus on the agenda of social science research. As one reads through the literature in search of some mention of the special identity and experience of black girls in school, one is struck by the blank slate. Classroom research does give us prototypic images of white boys, white girls, and black boys. White boys are described as aggressive, initiating, and dominant, less likely to conform to the demands of a highly structured and controlling environment than their female counterparts. White girls are likely to be described as the perfect, obedient students who adapt easily and smoothly to the social norms, psychological constraints, and cognitive demands of school. Black boys are considered hyperactive, disobedient, withdrawn, and lazy—the extreme deviants of an orderly environment. But images of black girls—no matter how distorted or ethnocentric—do not present themselves in the literature on teachers and children in classrooms.

Parent Participation in School Innovations.

Abstract: Item: In the fall of 1974, the public schools in Kanawha County, West Virginia, were rocked by violence over textbook adoptions. A school was bombed, and six men were arrested, including the protest leader, Rev. Martin Horan. Sheriffs deputies escorted school buses as protests continued. Over 2,000 people protested in Charleston, West Virginia, when 300 books which they believed to be \" irreligious and unAmerican\" were returned to school reading lists, and sometime later 200 people attended a Klu Klux Klan rally to protest the Kanawha County schools' use of books like Soul On Ice. Carl Marburger, in a New York Times column, argued that the school board had shown an \"astonishing insensitivity to local cultural values,\" and he viewed their decisions as the equivalent of adopting Little Black Sambo in the largely black Newark, New Jersey schools. Marburger advised school boards to permit more parent participation in the selection of textbooks, and he recalled Thomas Jefferson's advice to trust the informed wisdom of the people.1

Mastery Learning: Partly Boon, Partly Boondoggle

Abstract: In the process of this analysis, components of the mastery model will be contrasted with components of other instructional models, and their relative advantages and disadvantages will be discussed. This approach is somewhat problematic in that it presupposes the existence of a catalogue of discrete instructional models, with their respective components formally recognized and established. Such is not the case. Existing instructional models, to the extent that they have been formalized at all, tend to overlap in their inclusion of and emphasis on various instructional and evaluative components. And even then there is not total consensus among proponents of the individual models. Perhaps, then, it would be more appropriate to say that this article will examine components of the family of mastery models, contrast them with components of real and hypothetical alternative models, and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses.

The Unfortunate Fate of Alfred Binet and School Psychology.

Abstract: What accounts for the fact that the first serious and balanced attempt to present and discuss Binet’s contributions to psychology was by Theta Wolf in 1973?1 Indeed, her book is the first in any language that conveys a feeling for the man’s thinking, research and theoretical stance. Is it not remarkable that Piaget, the most towering figure in child development, long ago acknowledged his debt to, and appreciation of, Binet, at the same time that the rest of psychology knew Binet only for the test that bears his name? If for no other reason, Wolf’s book deserves the highest commendation because it warns us of the lethal danger of being ahistorical, of confusing facts with the truth, of ignoring the socialhistorical context which is always a determinant of how the substance of a person’s contribution is understood, transformed, and applied. Before trying to account for Binet’s unfortunate fate, I shall very briefly summarize a few of the major points which Wolf’s account substantiates.

Basic Mathematical Skills: Some Philosophical and Practical Remarks.

Abstract: Thus, we divide the matter of education into familiar \"subject\" categories and think thereby to have simplified and clarified the tasks of teaching. The subjects are, after all, drawn directly from parent disciplines, each with its distinctive and authoritative purchase on the world, each with its characteristic methodology and set of truths. Every subject is intellectually homogeneous within, and separable from every other without. Subjects are for the knowing, and knowing them is a matter of mastering their respective stores of truth and acquiring the respective methodologies from which their truths have sprung. Mastery of truths has to do with getting the appropriate beliefs; acquisition of methods and operations involves getting the right skills. For each subject there are characteristic and peculiar truths as well as distinctive and appropriate skills. To find these and to state them is to produce a curriculum. What could be more familiar—or more misguided?

Competency Based Teacher Education: Does It Have a Past or a Future?.

Abstract: Specific definitions of so general an idea are of course in controversy among both proponents and opponents of CBTE. But out of the great variety of programs spawned by the movement some common characteristics emerge. They revolve around the twin ideas of \"accountability\" and \"competencies.\" Teachers are the \"products\" of teacher-training institutions and these institutions should be held accountable for their products, the argument runs. By the same token, experienced teachers should be held accountable for their products (i.e., pupils).

On the History of Minority Group Education in the United States.

Abstract: Because of the heterogeneous character of the American population, the education of minority groups is a controversial subject—one which is frequently politicized by those who study it. Educational historians have tended to interpret this issue in accordance with their own political and social orientation. The dominant perspective, until the past decade, was that the American public schools were the highest realization of the democratic ideal, that they provided equal opportunity to all and rapid mobility to the deserving. This view, even at its most popular, never received universal assent; such distinguished historians as George Counts and Merle Curti criticized it vigorously. In recent years, this idealistic and optimistic vision has been dethroned by a barrage of criticism, and a new construct has been raised up in its place. The new interpretation holds that public schooling has been a capitalist tool of indoctrination, that it has been purposefully used to stamp out cultural diversity, and that it has been slyly (or brutally) imposed on unwilling masses by arrogant reformers.

A Futures Perspective on Preparing Educators for the Human Service Society: How to Restore a Sense of Social Purpose to Teacher Education.

Abstract: Many of the current proposals to rejuvenate professional teacher education programs, while well meaning, are remarkably shortsighted. These proposals often start from the plausible assumption that because colleges of education will be faced throughout the late seventies with dwindling enrollments, revenues, and placements, then it follows that teacher education should undergo a period of \"qualitative retrenchment,\" and concentrate on preparing better (but fewer) classroom teachers, special educators, vocational-technical teachers, and early childhood specialists.1

You Can Talk to the Teachers: Student-Teacher Relations in an Alternative High School.

Abstract: Stephen Wilson is research coordinator for the Center for New Schools, Chicago. This article is one in a series of reports from the research and educational assistance program at the Center for New Schools. While the article represents the combined work of many members of the center, special acknowledgement is due to Richard Johnson, Thomas Wilson, Emile Schepers, Donald Moore, and Phyllis Wilson. The research was supported by grants from the Urban Education Research Fund of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, the National Institute of Education, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Carnegie Corporation.

The Nonimplementation of EEP: "All That Money for Business as Usual".

Abstract: The New York City schools' Experimental Elementary Programs were, from the very beginning, the result of a compromise. The United Federation of Teachers wanted a continuation and expansion of their More Effective Schools Programs. The MES program began in 1963 as a plan \"for saturating ghetto schools with compensatory services,\"2 such as reduced class size and extra staff. MES started in twenty schools, over the opposition of civil rights leaders who objected to the program's location solely in ghetto schools. But MES, when evaluated by the Board of Education and the Center for Urban Education, had proved unsuccessful in raising reading levels.3 Moreover, the board wanted a program with greater emphasis on the evaluation of experimental efforts, especially those entailing increased staff assistance.

What Should Be Taught and Learned through Secondary Education

Abstract: The question to which this chapter is addressed can be phrased in many ways. Herbert Spencer expressed it as "What knowledge is of most worth?" To Robert S. Lynd, it was "Knowledge for what?" To the contributors to a yearbook of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development it was "What shall the high schools teach?" and to the authors of a later ASCD pamphlet, "What are the sources of the curriculum? ''1 However phrased, it is the same question--the question of content, the curriculum, the appropriate learning experiences, what is to be taught and to be learned. It is an inescapable question that recurs in many versions throughout the ages. The answers differ with the era. The discussion in this chapter is limited to what Beck has termed "the modern era" in chapter 2 of this volume--the period in American education from World War I on. The selection is not arbitrary; the modern era in American education began with a milestone report in the development of secondary education in this country, that of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, usually called simply the Seven Cardinal Principles. 2 A watershed in the

Schoolboards and Superintendents: Modernizing the Model.

Abstract: Many social scientists now urge the development of more \"political\" forms of school administration. They call for explicit recognition of the board as a political body and the superintendent as an appointed politician. Thus, for example, suggestions are made that board elections be made partisan, that neighborhood school boards be created, or that boards and superintendents be brought into the departmental structure of general city government.2

Open Education; Fact or Fiction?.

Abstract: The quality of being open has been endowed with many meanings. One common assumption is that open education relates to a mass of youngsters milling around in a large open space. The image is that of schools without classroom walls and children without direction. Yet some of the best open schools in Britain are solid old buildings with walls like fortresses, and the approach has many flexible but obvious structures to direct and support individual children. It is a far cry from a chaotic environment within which the child is expected to identify, select, and integrate activities by himself on the presumption that it is the best way for him to learn. Open schools are not analogous to the large supermarket in which people are encouraged to wander and buy according to fancy rather than real needs. A better comparison may be made with a well-stocked speciality shop where the owner is sensitive to the nature of his customers and tries to meet a range of their needs by making high-quality provisions available and giving guidance whenever necessary.

Learning Through Modeling in the Classroom.

Abstract: Richard J. Nagle was a member of The Center for the Behavioral Analysis of School Learning during 1973-74, and is now assistant professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. This is the tenth in a series of papers to appear in TCR whose purpose is to explicate and interpret for educators the significance of research in their work. The papers have been organized by Dr. Mary Alice White and her colleagues at The Center for the Behavioral Analysis of School Learning, Teachers College.

Friendship and Fairness: Ideological Tensions in an American High School.

Abstract: Why should one see one's society from without? In these days of \"the participants know best,\" how can anthropology defend what many have considered to be its mission—objectivity through detachment? Many of the cultures and groups traditionally studied by anthropologists are rebelling against the \"irrelevance\" of the purported \"findings,\" asserting that they, as natives, know it all, more fully and directly.

Two Libertarian Educators: Elizabeth Byrne Ferm and Alexis Constantine Ferm.

Abstract: American individualism is as persistent in this culture as it is unique in the history of man. It is indentifiable in the character of the early American farmer and frontiersman. Scratch the surface of any significant historical or societal event and its independent postures are seen among the actors. Idealistic, moral, equalitarian and individualistic, it lives close to our conscience as a society.