Public Education

Author(s):  
Peter Temin

The United States has a dual education system; the FTE sector sends its children to suburban public and private schools, and the low-wage sector sends its children to failing urban public schools. This dual system was created in response to the Great Migration as whites left inner cities to incoming black families. It was sustained by the Supreme Court and federal support for suburban growth. City schools are deprived of support and increasingly fail to educate black and brown children properly. Poor low-wage families with incarcerated fathers are forced to use failing schools, and their children grow up to be imprisoned. Reform efforts aim for quick results and fail spectacularly. Charter schools—private public schools—have widely varied effects.

Author(s):  
Peter Temin

The United States has a dual residential system; the FTE sector lives in wealthy suburbs, and the low-wage sector lives in inner cities. Urban services are old and deteriorating. City schools are old, city planners concentrated poor people in tall buildings, and public transportation is neglected. Insufficiently maintained tall buildings destroy social capital, and poor public transportation keeps low-wage workers from good jobs. Residential segregation has increased, leading to segregated schools and neighborhoods; support for inner cities is presented as helping African Americans and Latinos. The FTE sector has little personal contact with inner city problems, and does not support taxes to solve them.


Author(s):  
Richard J. Murnane

The previous chapter argues that comparisons of the performance of public and private schools can be misleading. This chapter examines in detail recent research providing such comparisons with the goal of clarifying what lessons can be drawn. The chapter also explains why the recent comparisons have puzzled, and in some cases infuriated, many public school educators. I begin by providing background on the best known of the recent studies. On April 7, 1981, at a conference attended by more than four hundred educators and the press, James Coleman announced the findings of research that he had conducted with Thomas Hoffer and Sally Kilgore on public and private high schools in the United States. Their principal finding was that Catholic schools and non-Catholic private schools are more effective in helping students to acquire cognitive skills than public schools are. Coming at a time of widespread criticism of public education and presidential support for tuition tax credits for families that use private schools, this finding was widely reported in the press and evoked a range of spirited reactions. Critics and supporters responded to Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore’s (henceforth CHK) work with articles and editorials with lively titles such as: “Coleman Goes Private (in Public),” “Lessons for the Public Schools,” “Coleman’s Bad Report,” and “Private Schools Win a Public Vote.” Over the succeeding months CHK’s work remained visible as critiques of their research and reanalyses of the data they used appeared in a variety of journals, in some cases accompanied by lengthy responses by CHK. Another wave of interest was sparked by the publication and subsequent reviews of CHK’s High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared, in which they presented their final research findings. As a result of the wide range of responses to CHK’s work and the numerous symposia in which CHK have debated their critics in print, there is now ample material available to any reader interested in forming a judgment about the quality of the research that produced their main conclusion.


1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Carroll

The Supreme Court of the United States, whose decisions not only define constitutional law but vitally affect national policy, has long held both an honored and a controversial place in American life. In no area do its decisions bring it more honor or more controversy than in the field of religion; for, as a member of the First Congress under the Constitution said, “the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand. … Thus, the same decision of the Court may be hailed by some as a great landmark in the struggle for religious liberty, and denounced by others as a serious invasion of liberty of conscience. For although it may be pleasant to dream of religion insulated from governmental touch, the dual membership of citizens in the state and in religious bodies insures that conscience and government will touch at some points with inevitable friction, and, to the conscience so touched, it makes little difference whether the governmental hand is that of a local school board, the Congress, or the Supreme Court of the United States.The Court has recently been attacked as antireligious, or at least as callous to our religious heritage, because of its decisions invalidating a state-prescribed prayer and state-prescribed Bible reading in public schools. The first of these decisions prompted the more excited outcry, but the two, at first singly and then together, have precipitated a renewed debate about the proper constitutional relationship between the state and religion.


Author(s):  
Robert N. Gross

Americans today choose from a dizzying array of schools, loosely lumped into categories of “public” and “private.” How did these distinctions emerge in the first place, and what do they tell us about the more general relationship in the United States between public authority and private enterprise? Public vs. Private describes how nineteenth-century public policies fostered the rise of modern school choice. In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems’ near-monopoly of education. In a nation deeply committed to public education, mass attendance in Catholic private schools produced immense conflict. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Public vs. Private shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where school choice flourished. The creation of systematic alternatives to public schools was as much a product of public power as of private initiative. As ever more policies today seek to unleash market forces in education, Public vs. Private concludes that Americans would do well to learn from the historical relationship between government, markets, and schools.


2002 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer O'Day

In this article, Jennifer O'Day builds on her earlier work defining and examining the standards-based reform movement in the United States. Here, O'Day explores accountability mechanisms currently associated with standards-based reform efforts that "take the school as the unit of accountability and seek to improve student learning by improving the functioning of the school organization." She examines such accountability mechanisms using the theoretical framework of complexity theory and focuses on how information travels through complex systems, with the understanding that information, its existence and usage, is key to improving schools. Drawing on work conducted with researchers at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education(CPRE), she contrasts the Chicago Public Schools' outcomes-based bureaucratic accountability approach with the combination of administrative and professional accountability found in the Baltimore City Schools. She argues that the combination of administrative and professional accountability presents a much more promising approach for implementing lasting and meaningful school reform.


The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Education brings together preeminent scholars to craft a comprehensive survey and assessment of the study of religion and education in the United States. Religion has been inextricably entwined with education in the United States since the days of colonial British America. Beginning with mothers schooling their children at home from the Bible, to the first establishment of Harvard College in 1636 with the principal mission to prepare clergy, the place of religion—and more to the point, whose religion and for what purpose—has been vigorously contested for nearly 400 years. This handbook aims to examine the current state of religion and American education from homeschooling to private religious schools to public schools to religious institutions and on through the range of public and private higher education. The book is organized into five sections: Frameworks; Lifespan Faith Development; Faith-Based K-12 education; Religion and Public Schools; and Religion and Higher Education. Within these sections forty leading scholars in the field of religion and education review these topics in thirty chapters. The contributors offer an in-depth synthesis of major issues within the field, while contributing to lively debates about the links between landmark research contributions and contemporary research agendas. Designed for an interdisciplinary audience, the Oxford handbook serves as a legacy project for leading scholars who are critically shaping the future direction of the field of religion and American education.


2015 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Abe Feuerstein

This paper examines the discursive strategies employed by advocates of Parent Trigger laws in the United States which allow parents of children in “failing” schools, in some states, to call for interventions in the operation of the schools via petition. The paper reviews the genesis of Parent Trigger laws, the network of conservative political organizations supporting Parent Trigger legislation, and the ways in which Parent Trigger advocates have promoted the concept through the deployment of both material and symbolic resources. The paper argues that Parent Trigger laws promote a “thin” form of democratic participation that equates democracy with consumer choice through the strategic representation of public schools as broken institutions and parent trigger laws as empowering parents to choose. Support for this position is developed through an empirical qualitative analysis of a sample of media texts produced by various organizations within the Parent Trigger policy network including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), American Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute, Parent Revolution, and others. By identifying frequently used framing devices such as metaphors, exemplars, catch-phrases, and depictions as well as reasoning devices such as root causes, consequences, and appeals to principle, the study reveals the dominant frames employed by Parent Trigger advocates and contributes to the development of a more critical perspective concerning the media produced by various interest groups.


1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1053-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor W. Rotnem ◽  
F. G. Folsom

Within the last five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has added decisions of greater importance to the case law of religious freedom than had been accumulated in all the years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The importance of two of these recent decisions rests upon the subordination of freedom of action based on sectarian beliefs to the restrictions of society as a whole. In one of the two cases, the law of society was a board of education order that school children participate in the flag salute exercise on pain of expulsion from the public schools; in the other, it was peddlers' license tax ordinances. Because neither of these decisions has been accepted as a firmly rooted precedent, it will be well to examine them in the light of the history of the federally secured right of religious freedom and in the light of the immediate public reactions to them.A considerable proportion of the early emigration to the thirteen original colonies was undoubtedly due to a desire to escape religious persecution in England and on the Continent. Those colonists, however, were as insistent that their own particular form of religion be adhered to as their oppressors had been. The story of Roger Williams, who was expelled from the colony of Massachusetts because of his non-conformist views and who established the colony of Rhode Island as a sanctuary of religious tolerance, and that of Ann Hutchinson, who also was exiled from the Bay Colony for a like reason, are monuments to the intolerance of the Puritans.


2015 ◽  
Vol 117 (14) ◽  
pp. 148-170
Author(s):  
Rema E. Reynolds

This chapter draws from empirical research on middle-class African American families to examine the ways middle-class African American parents and students make meaning of their experiences within public schools. In light of the current mainstream contention that the United States has entered a post-racial epoch with the election of the first African American president, this work posits that post-racial rhetoric obfuscates the continued racialized experiences of Black families regardless of class status. In particular, this work examines how middle-class African American families navigate conversations about race, agency, and structure as they relate to access and opportunities in education and society as a whole.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miwako Suzuki-Yamanaka ◽  
Robert A. Huggins ◽  
Kirk J. Armstrong ◽  
Kelly A. Coleman ◽  
Douglas J. Casa ◽  
...  

Abstract Context: The Athletic Training Locations and Services (ATLAS) Annual Report suggests there are differences in athletic trainer (AT) employment status on the basis of geographic locale. However, the influence of geographic locale and the school size on AT employment is undetermined. Objective: To describe if differences exist in the odds of having AT services by locale for public and private schools, and by student enrollment for public schools. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Public and private secondary schools with athletics programs. Patients or Other Participants: Data from 20,078 US public and private secondary schools were obtained. Main Outcome Measures(s): Data were collected by the ATLAS Project. AT employment status, locales (City, Suburban, Town, and Rural) for public and private schools, and school size category (large, moderate, medium, and small) only for public schools were obtained. AT employment status was examined for each category with odds ratios. A prediction model was produced by Logistic Regression Analysis. Results: Of the 19,918 public and private schools with AT employment status and locale, Suburban schools had the highest access to AT services (80.1%) with an increased odds compared with Rural schools (OR = 3.55 [3.28 to 3.850]). Of 15,850 public schools with AT employment status and student enrollment, large schools had the highest rate of having AT services (92.1%) with nearly 18.5 times greater odds (OR = 18.480 [16.197 to 21.083]) versus small schools. The logistic model determined that an odds of having access to AT increases by 2.883 times as the school size goes up by one category. Conclusions: Nationally, Suburban schools and large public schools have the largest access to AT services compared to schools that are in more remote areas and with less student enrollment. These findings elucidate the geographic locales and student enrollment levels where AT services are most prevalent.


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