Public Schools in the New America

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Public Education ◽  
American Dream ◽  
School Funding ◽  
Severe Disabilities ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Advanced Placement Classes ◽  
Great Prosperity

THE LANDSCAPE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLING in the United States has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, in part because of substantial movement toward the collective goals of education. Schools are more racially integrated than before Brown v. Board of Education; desegregation continues to contribute to the growth of the black middle class. Levels of school funding are higher than a generation ago, and in many states funding is more equitable across districts. Children with severe disabilities spend more of their days in the mainstream; children with subtle learning problems are increasingly identified and helped; parents have the legal right either to challenge the separation of children with disabilities or to demand special services for them. Most English language learners get at least some help in making the transition to English-speaking classes. Dropout rates have declined for whites and for blacks (although not for Hispanics). NAEP scores are higher in many subjects in most grades, with the greatest gains being made by black students. Most states have adopted standards and are developing curricula and professional development programs to bring those standards into the classroom; some states have shown demonstrable improvement in student learning as a consequence. Schools are increasingly sensitive to students from varied religious and ethnic backgrounds, and curricula are more multicultural. Ability grouping is more flexible than it used to be, more students have access to Advanced Placement classes, more take a reasonably demanding curricula, and more attend college. Through it all, despite concerns and disagreements, Americans have sustained their commitment to public schooling. While conflicts over education policy remain serious and policy irrationality persists, policy and practice have changed in ways that bring the ideology of the American dream closer to reality. These developments took place mostly in a context of economic stability (or even great prosperity) that made it relatively easy to dedicate more resources to public education. Broader political, social, and demographic developments, beginning with civil rights protests, also strongly affected them. Yet schools would not have moved toward greater quality, equality, and inclusiveness unless enough Americans believed deeply in the American dream and expected public education to foster the institutions and practices needed both to promote the pursuit of individual dreams and to keep democracy vital.

American Dream and Public Schools

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Ability Grouping ◽  
American Dream ◽  
School Funding ◽  
The Public ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Individual Success ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Apparent Conflict

Why is education policy so contentious? Do conflicts over specific issues in schooling have anything in common? Are there general principles that can help us resolve these disputes? In this book the authors find the source of many debates over schooling in the multiple goals and internal contradictions of the national ideology we call the American dream. They also propose a framework for helping Americans get past acrimonious debates in order to help all children learn. The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, multicultural education, and ability grouping. These seem to be separate problems, but much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict, rooted in the American dream, between policies designed to promote each student's ability to pursue success and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole. The authors show how policies to promote individual success too often benefit only those already privileged by race or class, and too often conflict, unnecessarily, with policies that are intended to benefit everyone. The book also examines issues such as creationism and Afrocentrism, where the disputes lie between those who attack the validity of the American dream and those who believe that such a challenge has no place in the public schools. At the end of the book, the authors examine the impact of our nation's rapid racial and ethnic transformation on the pursuit of all of these goals, and they propose ways to make public education work better to help all children succeed and become the citizens we need.

Making public education popular

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
Russell Arben Fox
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Community Schools ◽  
Parental Authority ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Ideal

Michael J. Apple$quoteright$s book constitutes, among many other things, an ambitious rethinking of what will be necessary to make the ideal of egalitarian public schooling more appealing to those parents who have, in recent years, found their beliefs and criticisms most readily responded to by various `conservative modernizers' and other enemies of public education. Rather than treating all those who make attacks on public schooling in the same way, Apple proposes that educators develop ways to alter the structure of public schools so as to draw in the support of at least some of their critics, particularly those whose criticisms arise from concerns about the perceived opposition between public schooling and religious and parental authority. The question then becomes how to accommodate such charter and community schools within the public education ideal.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
American Dream ◽  
School Funding ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
The United States ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
The Individual

THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all. From the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. “I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my talents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same freedom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen— to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country.” Not all residents of the United States believe all of those things, of course, and some believe none of them. Nevertheless, this American dream is surprisingly close to what most Americans have believed through most of recent American history. Public schools are where it is all supposed to start—they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans expect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but also to make them good citizens who will maintain the nation’s values and institutions, help them flourish, and pass them on to the next generation. The American public widely endorses both of these broad goals, values public education, and supports it with an extraordinary level of resources. Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies—over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegregation, and creationism—seem, at first glance, to be separate problems.

Educational Policy and Practice From the Perspective of Institutional Theory: Crafting a Wider Lens

2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Burch
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Institutional Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Critical Issues ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
K 12 ◽  
Future Work

Institutional analyses of public education have increased in number in recent years. However, studies in education drawing on institutional analyses have not fully incorporated recent contributions from institutional theory, particularly relative to other domains such as law and health policy. The author sketches a framework that integrates recent institutional theorizing to guide scholarship on these and other issues in K–12 public education in the United States. The author argues that although concepts such as “loose coupling” have been widely used, education researchers have not fully tapped institutional theories that have emerged more recently. The author introduces three interrelated constructs and applies them to a case study of district reading and mathematics reform. In the final section, the author considers how current developments in the governance of public schooling increase the utility of institutional perspectives and identify critical issues that need to be addressed in future work.

Challenging the American Dream

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Hochschild ◽  
Nathan Scovronick
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Bilingual Education ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Central Value ◽  
General Goal ◽  
Separate Identity

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION, whether as a curricular reform or as a general goal for education, swept the nation’s schools during the 1990s. As generally understood and practiced, it does not challenge the American dream; it is a central way of teaching respect for difference and part of the continuing process of redefining the common American culture. Similarly, bilingual education is usually intended to help students pursue success within the mainstream, not to remain outside it. But some Americans go beyond claims for respect and incorporation. They seek to use multicultural or bilingual education to enable members of their group to attain distinctive treatment within public schools, or they promote changes in school curricula or methods of teaching that reflect their racial identity or religious beliefs in ways that challenge the American dream. They promote “allegiance to groups,” in Albert Shanker’s terms, or they insist on the value of difference. Some of these advocates do not believe that fostering individual success should be a central value of public schooling, or they reject the usual formulation of democratic citizenship, or they believe that the whole ideology of the American dream is an exercise in power thinly disguised as a formula for fair treatment. When they couch alternatives in the language of discrimination or make proposals in the context of school failure, their impact can be politically volatile. These issues of religion and culture show the acute difficulty of balancing the claims of one, some, and all in American public schooling, as well as the virtues and defects of using the American dream as the framework for that balancing act. To the degree that proponents—of multicultural education, cultural maintenance, African-centered pedagogy, or religious values—appeal to fairness, challenge discrimination, or demand respect for diverse viewpoints, they can and should gain broad support. But when advocates of particular groups seek to use public schools to help them maintain their separate identity, try to separate themselves within schools, or propose to have an entirely separate education within the public school system, support appropriately drops. If they try to transform all the schools in accordance with their particular cultural views or religious beliefs in rejection of the American dream, support in the wider community melts away, as it should.

Conflict and Consensus Revisited: Notes toward a Reinterpretation of American Educational History

1976 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Kaestle
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Educational History ◽  
Social Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
Free Public Education ◽  
The Relationship

Since the early 1950s, educational historians have increasingly turned their attention to the role of social conflict in the creation of public schools. Consensus historians claim that most Americans were in agreement on the issue of free public education, while recent conflict historians posit that the social elite imposed public schooling on the working class. Author Carl Kaestle suggests that each view contains elements of the truth but that both are reductionist. In this article, he briefly examines these interpretations and then suggests improved models of historical research to define more precisely and elegantly the relationship between conflict and consensus in American educational history.

scholarly journals Citizenship, Social Change, and Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Mitja Sardoč
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Theory Research ◽  
Civic Space

In recent decades, discussions regarding citizenship and citizenship education have evolved from a marginal issue in political philosophy and the philosophy of education to one of the most pressing topics in contemporary discussions about the civic aims of public schooling. The place and contribution of citizenship education in public schools have become central points of discussion and debate in terms of theory, research, policy, and practice. Yet, existing conceptions of citizenship education differ considerably over various issues, including the basic motivational impulses associated with the civic aims of public education. In particular, the recent upsurge of phenomena as diverse as hate speech, populism, the shrinking civic space, radicalisation, and violent extremism have shifted the main justificatory impulse from consequentialist to urgency-based arguments. This shift of emphasis has had some unreflected consequences related to the justification for citizenship education in public schools. The central purpose of this article is to expound on the two main impulses associated with the civic aims of public schools and their interrelationship with social changes. The main part contrasts these two opposing motivational impulses associated with the justification of citizenship education. Each of the two impulses is presented and then clarified with an example to shed light on the basic justificatory procedure associated with it. The concluding part of this paper sketches the most distinctive challenges of the alternative conception of justifying citizenship education and its interplay with social change.

scholarly journals Fee-Paying English Language Learners: Situating International Students’ Impact on British Columbia’s Public Schools

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-79
Author(s):  
Ryan Deschambault
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
International Students ◽  
Public Education ◽  
International Education ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Language ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Educational Migration ◽  
K 12

This article examines the relationship between international education and English as an additional language (EAL) education in British Columbia’s public education system. Drawing on a wide range of data generated as part of a longitudinal study of high school aged fee-paying international students (FISs) in an urban school district in British Columbia, I make the case that FIS recruitment and presence is having a socializing impact on EAL education in British Columbia’s public schools. In contrast to the way FISs are accounted for in official government statistics, I show how, across multiple actors and dimensions of the public system, FISs are routinely treated and represented as English language learners (ELLs). I argue that these routinized constructions are evidence of the multilayered socialization of EAL education by internationalization efforts in British Columbia’s K-12 sector, and discuss some of the ways this FIS socialization is consequential for EAL learning and teaching in public high schools. I situate my discussion of the FIS-EAL relationship within the larger context of applied linguistics and education-related research on internationalization and educational migration in K-12 settings, and raise questions about how FIS socialization is relevant to discussions of public education.

The Destruction of Public Schooling

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Lafer
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
School Funding ◽  
High Stakes Testing ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Financial Interests ◽  
Certification Requirements

This chapter examines how a combination of interests—partisan politics, antiunionism, the drive to eliminate social entitlements, and unprecedented financial interests in privatization—come together around the issue of education reform. In particular, it considers corporate lobbies' proposals to replace public schools with privately run charters. It discusses legislation, backed by corporate lobbies, addressing issues such as cuts in school funding, class size, voucher programs, high-stakes testing, and charter schools. It also explores education reform as public policy, education technology and the replacement of in-person with digital instruction, and teacher training and certification requirements. Finally, it evaluates both the pedagogical evidence underlying corporate-backed legislative agenda and the political and economic interests driving it.

scholarly journals A Unique Blend of Research, Policy, Practice and Engagement to Impact Public Education for All Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Celina Moreno ◽  
María “Cuca” Robledo Montecel ◽  
Aurelio Montemayor
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Research Policy ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Systems Change ◽  
Educational Practices ◽  
Research Association ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Program Support

The Intercultural Development Research Association, founded in 1973, is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to achieve equal educational opportunity for every child through strong public schools that prepare all students to access and succeed in college. IDRA strengthens and transforms public education along six paths: fair funding, sound educational practices, valuing students, valuing educators, valuing families and systems change. The organization has done so by uniquely crossing borders of policy, research, practice and community engagement to transform education by putting children first. The following article reviews how IDRA drives critical paths to transform education. The authors tell the story of how these paths have developed over time to push for fair funding, which was IDRA’s founding issue and continues to be a central focus; promote sound educational practices through professional and curriculum development; model valuing of students particularly as demonstrated through the IDRA Valued Youth Partnership program; support educators in excelling as asset-based teachers and catalysts for student success; and focus family engagement on leadership in education for transforming policy and practice for their neighborhood public schools. These interrelated paths are woven into IDRA’s change model: The Quality Schools Action Framework. This framework is a tool for strengthening the capacity of public schools to affect systems change to graduate and prepare all students for college.

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