Frontiers in Sociology of Education PDF
Preview Frontiers in Sociology of Education
Frontiers in Sociology of Education Frontiers in Sociology and Social Research Volume 1 Series Editor: Howard B. Kaplan Texas A&M University, College Station, USA Frontiers of Sociology and Sociological Research publishes a series of edited volumes that will focus on new directions in (sub)specialties of sociology as these are reflected in novel theoretical paradigms, innovative methodologies, and contemporary substantive findings that exemplify and anticipate trends in these field. The volumes will parallel and complement the volumes in the Handbooks of the Sociology and Social Research series. Frontiers of Sociology and Sociological Research series begins where the Handbooks leave off by looking to the future. The series is predicated on the observation that any field of knowledge in contemporary times is a dynamic, rapidly changing body of perspectives and understanding that continuously builds upon the foundation of extant scholarship. For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/8690 Maureen T. Hallinan Editor Frontiers in Sociology of Education Editor Maureen T. Hallinan department of Sociology University of notre dame notre dame, Indiana USa [email protected] ISBn 978-94-007-1575-2 e-ISBn 978-94-007-1576-9 doI 10.1007/978-94-007-1576-9 Springer dordrecht Heidelberg london new York library of Congress Control number: 2011933228 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 no part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) To Warren Kubitschek Accomplished Sociologist Generous Collaborator Trusted Mentor Faithful Friend Foreword when unsuspecting high-school students read the new bowdlerized edition of Huckleberry Finn, in which the word “slave” replaces the word “nigger,” they might not be aware that someone in an official capacity has exchanged their possible dis- comfort in confronting a noxious word for missing one of the major points of the novel. an educational “effect,” of a curricular nature and of as yet unknown magni- tude, will have occurred. during an investigation of schooling in the Chicago area, Rebecca Barr and I discovered that students in one of the nine fourth-grade math classes we observed showed very substantial achievement gains, considerably better than the other fourth-grade math class in the same working-class multi-ethnic school whose class composition and text were the same, and better than results obtained in a far more affluent suburb. we asked the teacher how she designed her instruction. She said she starts the year in the middle of the textbook where fourth-grade-level math starts. The first half of the book, she remarked, reviews third-grade math; why go through that when third-grade math is already incorporated in the fourth-grade materials? all the other teachers we studied started fourth-grade math instruction in January; she started in September. In another case, the superintendent of the moderately affluent suburb noted above appointed a new coordinator of elementary reading instruction in the belief that first-grade reading achievement levels were too low. Her task was to introduce a new instructional program and enforce it—a bureaucratic and unpopular mandate. She introduced a demanding, eclectic, wide-ranging basal series with a high ceiling, and also increased substantially the time allocated to reading instruction. learning improved markedly. So did her popularity. Students in the low-reading groups did notably better than those in some of the comparable middle and high groups in other schools whose reading programs were not as well designed. what we have here are cases of educational change (and, by implication, absence of change) based upon prevailing ideas and practices. They draw attention to the supply side of educational organization, to what the educational system, at each level from the state to the classroom, makes available for the process of schooling: administrative decisions, curricular materials, teachers’ knowledge and practices, vii viii Foreword time allocations. The supply side is critical. Since the mid-1960s, sociologists have overwhelmingly—though not entirely—treated the educational process in schools as a demand-side problem: preoccupations with individual aspiration and achieve- ment and with equality of opportunity being apposite cases in point. They have been expressed in a large survey methodology that ascribes the characteristics of collec- tivities, usually schools, to individual students in analyses that resemble status attainment research, where individual achievement is the final outcome. This approach, which relies mainly on very large overall samples of students with very small samples from within schools, entirely appropriate for status attainment prob- lems, does not adequately investigate schooling events that transpire at the levels of classrooms, grades, subject matters, and grade sequences, because these aspects of educational organization are not appropriately represented in the samples. The supply side pertains to the provision of education, to forms of government action at all levels—federal, state, township, municipal. It also includes considerations that are not explicitly educational, but pertain to education (e.g., taxation and the definition of political boundaries that define the distribution of school populations). It includes the design, production, and distribution of curricular materials as well as their employment in classrooms. at issue is students’ exposure to knowledge—what version of american history will they read in Texas, or edition of Huckleberry Finn? The supply side also encompasses not just the preparation of teachers, but the state of knowledge underlying teachers’ work, which is a property of the occupation of teach- ing. It also refers to the governance and management of school systems, from the level of districts to small instructional groups. The legacy of the status attainment approach to educational effects is the pre- sumption that individual achievement is the most important outcome of educational efforts no matter what their origin, no matter where those efforts occur. a case in point is studies that examine the intended effects of school segregation and desegre- gation, at district and cross-district levels, without considering the considerations (conditions and practices) that intervene between the definition of a district’s racial and ethnic composition and individual learning. In addition to the status attainment legacy, there is the common assumption that the school as a unitary entity is the key unit educational activity, and that if we “improve” or “reform” the school, not only will individual achievement improve, but so will the nation’s educational standing among other nations. But this subordinates the significant variation in educational conditions and practices both within schools and outside of them. In short, each level and segment of an educational system establishes conditions according to which other levels and segments operate. which ones have a direct impact on individual learning is an empirical question, not one to be begged. and which ones exert an impact on how other components of the system operate, but with- out a necessary direct effect on learning? Consider the case of teacher training. The american system of teacher education is as decentralized and uneven as the public school system itself and does not integrate the preparation of teachers with a national curriculum. This is far different from countries with ministerial educational systems. It is of more than passing interest to know, then, how occupational knowledge is cre- ated, transmitted, and, at the end of the line, employed in classroom. as John Meyer Foreword ix has persuasively argued, it is clearly the case that schools and schooling, based upon age-segregated, physically distinct classrooms; separated from the family; arranged in a yearly curricular sequence; and employing textbook-based knowledge, have become internationally institutionalized. Yet, given the high degree of institutional and struc- tural commonality, national differences of substantial magnitude exist. we tend, however, to fixate on differences expressed as aggregated individual achievement, flagellate ourselves about the shortcomings, and then propose “reme- dies” premised on bad metaphors. what is missing is proper attention to the supply side, to the structure and working of educational systems in different societies, the forces impinging on them, their internal components, and the connections among those components. among the key issues is national differences in the occupational knowledge of teachers and others engaged in the educational enterprise, what that knowledge is, and how it is both developed and imparted in training institutions and in work experience. The great strength of this volume rests in the great variety and depth of its explo- rations into the supply side of the educational enterprise. In this country, we are prone to proposing apoplectic remedies for what we construe to be educational deficiencies based on dubious cross-national comparisons: the United States vs. Shanghai?! I read the contributions to this volume as explorations into the nature and workings of educational organizations broadly considered, which is exactly where the emphasis should be. Matters pertaining to individual achievement, where most of the past attention has been directed, of course continue to be significant. But there needs to be a shift in emphasis toward what I have called the supply side. If constructive changes are to emerge, their viability will depend on how we under- stand the enterprise to operate. attending to the supply side needs to include thinking about the contributions of sociology, which in an oddly self-referential way is part of the supply side: a source of ideas that bear on the educational enterprise. Sociology has had far more to say about education than its sister social sciences. neither psychology nor economics has contributed much to the organizational and institutional sides of education, and apart from some excellent exceptions, political science has been largely silent. Historians, of course, have made large and important contributions, but it is not clear how many think of themselves as social scientists. Sociologists, as well as members of other fields, however, are academics; they write mostly for each other, not primarily for an audience of educational practitioners. Many of the ideas they generate are highly relevant to educational practice, and to that extent they reside on the supply side. But that assertion, however, may be only a conceit in light of the often frosty relations between academics and educational practitioners. The generation of educational knowledge, both for the understanding of education and for its practice, remains high on the agenda of outstanding problems. what this volume has to say addresses key issues on that agenda. University of Chicago Robert dreeben
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