Notes
Chapter 4: Schools: Choices and Challenges
Chapter Preview



What are schools for?
Are schools supposed to:
o Prepare students for college?
o For a vocation?
o To achieve high scores on standardized tests?
o Help develop good interpersonal relationships?
o Patriotism?
o Help adjust to society?
o Change and improve society?
Examine the purposes of schools and some of the major criticisms
Purpose 1: To Transmit Society’s Knowledge and Values
(Passing the Cultural Baton)

Society plays a vital role in what schools do and how they do it
o Reflect and promote society’s values
o Select what to teach: Curriculum
 Match and advance its own view of history
 Its own values
 Its self-interests
o Its own cultures
o Select what to teach and what to omit
 What is valued and what is not
 What information is worth passing on
 Viewing “from the wrong end of the telescope”
Purpose 2: Reconstructing Society
(Schools as Tools for Change)



Reconstructionists: Believe society is “broken” and needs to be fixed
o Successful students are citizens ready to make change
o Believe that civic learning needs to be on par with other academic subjects
Social Democratic Reconstructionists
o Social action curriculum: students actively involve themselves in eliminating
social ills
 Students contributing to society
 Service credit requirements
 Provide a connection to the larger community
Economic Reconstructionists
o Believe schools teach the poorer classes to accept:
 Their stations in life
 To be subservient to authority
 To unquestioningly follow rules
 Labor for the economic benefit of the wealthy
o Paulo Freire
 The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: efforts to educate and liberate the poor
 Schools miseducate and oppress but “true education” liberates
Public Demands for Schools

John Goodlad
o A Place Called School: define the purposes of schooling
o Four goals:
1. Academic: knowledge and intellectual skills
2. Vocational: readiness for work and economic responsibility
3. Social and Civic: skills and behavior for participating in democratic society
4. Personal: development of individual talent and self expression
Where Do You Stand


Complete the questionnaire (page 136)
Acculturation, Americanization
o Replacing an old culture with a new, American one
Education Reform



A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983)
o Published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education
o Called for more grounding in the five basics:
1. English
2. Math
3. Science
4. Social Studies
5. Computer Science
o Called for greater academic rigor, higher expectations, better-qualified teachers
Top-down approach  will it really work?
o Too far removed from the classroom?
Three waves of reform
1. National defense and economic reform (Early 80s)
a. Standards!: State exams, identify weak students, teachers schools
2. Need for basic reform of school practices (mid-late 80s)
a. Study fewer topics but in more depth
b. Alarmed at loss of teacher autonomy, bland teaching, poor academic success
c. Reduce bureaucracy, create more professionally trained teachers, implement
local decision making, strengthen prinicpal’s role
3. Full Service Schools
a. Provides a network of social services
i. Nutrition, health care, transportation, counseling, parent education
ii. School boards replaced by children’s boards
iii. School policy replaced by children’s policy
Beyond the Neighborhood Public School

The future of the neighborhood school is now in doubt
The Choice Concept


Milton Friedman
o Public schools would be more effective if they functioned as a free market
o There is no competition and no incentive to do well
o Everyone needs the same freedom as the wealthy (who often send their children
to private schools)
School choice
o Parents choose what school to send their children
Magnet Schools

One portion of school desegregation:
a. Required students and teachers to attend schools outside their local communities
b. Magnet schools: created to offer high-quality education programs designed
around a special theme
i. Unique programs were not available in local schools-worth the bus ride!
Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment: eliminated the requirement that students must attend the closest
public school
a. Encouraged parents to choose a school
b. Greatly increased the number of schools to choose from
Vouchers



Educational vouchers: “admission tickets”
Parents “shop” for their ideal school; give the school their voucher; the school gives the
government the voucher
a. The government pays the school a fixed sum for each voucher
i. Good schools: attract vouchers; receive lots of funding
ii. Poor schools: have a hard time attracting vouchers; receive less funding
iii. Public versus private schools
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971)
a. Clear walls limiting the use of public funding to support religious education
b. Lemon Test: three criteria to determine the legality of government funds used in
religious schools

1. Must have a secular purpose
2. Must not primarily advance or prohibit religion
3. Must not result in excessive government entanglement with religion
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002)
a. Publicly funded vouchers could be used to send children to private religious
schools
b. Improving nation’s schools is a secular endeavor
Charter Schools




Charter Schools: legal permission from a local or state school board to operate the
school
a. Must follow some of the same rules established for publicly funded schools
b. Exempt from many state and local laws and regulations with the promise that they
will achieve better results
A break with the past, a new way to educate with tax dollars
Less controversial than vouchers
a. Don’t involve religious schools or competition between public and private schools
Revolutionize education?
Schools.com




Virtual schools: often via technology
Form of distance learning: provided over long distances via TV, Internet, etc.
Offers specialized, nontraditional courses
Critics: isolate students and deprive students of important social interaction
Educational Maintenance Organizations (EMOs):
Schools for Profit



EMOs: entrance of private companies into public education
Edison Schools: manage public schools
o Are they effective?
Private management of schools: privatization: corporations can privately and more
effectively and less expensively provide specific services for and even run innovative
schools fueled by a profit motive
Brand Name Education
Should Schools Be “Open” for Business

Is school choice a good idea?
 Support:
o Charter and vouchers-poor families can choose schools like wealthier families
o Urban parents are supporters
Home Schools, Home Teachers






Homeschooling: parents choosing to educate their children at home
Ideologues: focuses on imparting certain values
o Choose the curriculum, create the rules, enforce a schedule, promote their
beliefs
Pedagogues: motivated by educational goals
o Interested in the process of learning, intrinsic motivation, experiential
activities
Why such a large increase in home schooled students?
o School environment
o Religious values
o Technology
Does it work?
o Generally students have higher test schools
Critics:
o Educated in “isolation”
o Working and learning with other students
 Diverse beliefs and customs
o Promote Americanization
What Makes School Effective?

1.
2.
3.
4.
Five factor theory of effective schools:
Strong leadership
Clear school mission
Safe and orderly climate
Monitoring student progress
a. Norm-referenced groups
i. Compare individual students with others in a nation-wide norm group
b. Objective-referenced groups
i. Measure whether a student has mastered a designated body of knowledge
5. High expectations
a. Pygmalion in the Classroom: experiment showing the power of teacher
expectations in shaping student achievement
b. Self-fulfilling prophecy: students may learn as much or as little as the teachers
expect