Discussions of Chapter 6 "The Place of Schools in Society"
Kishon
SS203Fall2018Chapter6Presentation.pptxCHAPTER 6: THE PLACE OF SCHOOLS IN SOCIETY
Presenters: Diamond Jones, Sha-torri Hopkins
Purposes of Schools
Private schools and academics were first established in colonial days for the children of the elite.
That did not mean that other children were not being educated as they worked with adults.
When possible, low income families were sending their children to the homes of neighbors where mothers or other women in the home would teach them how to read.
It wasnt until the early 1800s that public schools began to include children of families who were not affluent.
One of the goals of these early common schools were to mix students from different socioeconomic groups.
The curricula focused on teaching children to read the Bible, develop high morals, and become a good citizen.
Academic Achievement
One of the major purposes for attending schools is to learn academic content. State and national standards provide the framework for what students should know and be able to do to be academically proficient.
The Common Core Standards , which were developed by the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers (2010), were created to help students become successful in college and careers.
Schools, teachers, and principals are held accountable for student achievement based on their students performance on standardized tests.
Workforce Readiness
Preparing students to contribute to the economic growth of the nation has been a major purpose of schools for over a century.
The education system has been blamed for students not performing at the top of the international tests of knowledge and skills, for students not developing the critical thinking and problem solving skills needed for growing number of jobs, and for not preparing enough students for STEM fields.
continued...
What are the skills that are most important to employers? More than 100 U.S CEOs identified the following skills as the most important:
Work ethics
Teamwork
Decision making
Critical thinking
Computer literacy
Basic reading and mathematics
Business owners and the nations leaders also worry that not enough engineers, computer scientists, and other workers in the STEM professions are being produced by high schools and colleges to meet the needs of the country.
Citizenship
Citizenship is much more than voting in elections and knowing facts about the nations history, heroines, and heroes.
Preparing students to be active citizens include involving them actively in the democratic process as part of their school experience. The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools has identified the following 6 proven practices for civic learning:
Classroom instruction, including courses in government, history, economics, law, and democracy
Discussion of current events and controversial issues that includes issues important and relevant to the lives of young people
Service learning that provides students opportunities for community service linked to the formal curriculum and classroom instruction
Extracurricular activities that allows students to be involved outside of the classroom in the school or community
School governance that allows students to practice democracy
Simulations and democratic processes such as voting during election and participating in debates and trials
Social
Development
Schooling also provides opportunities for students to develop their social skills by interacting with others, in the process students should learn to respect each other
Teachers can give students opportunities to work with other students from diverse racial, gender, language, religious and ability groups.
Teachers can encourage interactions across groups through cooperative learning, activities in which students from different groups work together in small groups.
Schools around the world transmit the culture of their nation to young people so they can both maintain it and pass it on to the next generation.
Schools have often approached this task by teaching history with an emphasis on important events and heroes, this emphasis helps children learn the importance of patriotism and loyalty.
The challenge for Education is to transmit the commonalities across cultures while including richness and contributions of the diverse cultures of the U.S
Cultural Transmission
The Role of Culture in Schools
Culture provided a blueprint for how we think, feel, and behave in a society. It imposes rules and order to help us understand the subtleties of our shared language, nonverbal communications and ways of thinking and knowing.
Culture is learned, shared, adapted and dynamic, we learn our culture through enculturation, which occurs when parents, grandparents, religious leaders, teachers, television shows, and our neighbors teach us the culture.
We adapt our culture as we move from one section of the country to another or around the globe as do some of our students who are immigrants or whose families are in the armed services.
Dominant Culture
The dominant culture had its beginnings in the cultures of the white, middle class protestants who began immigrating to the colonies from western and northern Europe five centuries ago.
The Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s opened the political and corporate worlds to a growing number of women and persons of color.
During this period, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed to protect the rights of all people and to promote greater equality across groups oin education, housing and other areas.
Cultures of Families
Knowing more about your students cultures can help you make schooling and the curriculum more real and authentic for them.
It also shows that you respect their families and communities.
We may not know the importance of their ethnicity or language, therefore we need to be very careful not to stereotype them based on factors that can easily be identified.
A school also has a culture that generally reflects the nations dominant culture and the community in which it is located.
A schools culture provides meaning for its students, teachers, school officials and parents.
The cultural pattern that can develop in a school can have a powerful impact on the academic performance of students and the way teachers feel about their work and students.
Cultures of
Schools
Cultural Values
Although schools are expected to transmit the culture of the U.S to the younger generation, educators do not always agree on whose culture should be transmitted.
Some conservative politicians and pundits argue that schools should ignore diversity. they believe that all students should learn the common heritage and adopt the dominant culture as their own
Parents choices of schools, including religious schools, home schooling, or ethnocentric schools that build the curriculum around the histories and experiences of the families ethnic groups.
School Choices
Chapter 6 discusses the different school choices there are in society such as: Public, Private, Charter, Home school, etc.
Public School and Magnet School Choices
Parents were first offered a choice of public schools that their children can attend when the federal government funded magnet schools
Most public school options allow for parent and student involvement in school decision.
Magnet schools developed special academic programs and custom- designed facilities to attract a racially diverse student body from cross the city.
Many of the magnet schools emphasized a theme such as the performing and visual arts, math and science, or the liberal arts.
Charter Schools
Charter schools have become the most popular option to traditional public schools since the first one opened in Minnesota in 1991.
Founders of other character schools have designed curricula and climates that are centered in the ethnic heritages of the students and community.
Some charter schools focus more on academics with the goal that most of their students will attend and complete college.
Schools districts with largest percentage of charter schools are located in urban areas with 86 percent of the enrollment in the ten districts with the largest percentage of charter schools being students of color.
Virtual Schools
Virtual schools, or cyber schools, and virtual courses exist across the span of schooling from preschool through college and into professional development for teachers and other workers.
Virtual schools are generally tuition-free public charter schools.
The most common reason for a student to participate in an online school is that the course is not available in her or his school building.
By the 2012-2013 school year, 310,000 students were enrolled full-time in virtual schools– a 24 percent increase over 2010-2011.
Private Schools
Private school serve students from all racial, religious, economic, and language backgrounds. Some are progressive and innovative; some are conservative and traditional.
The majority of private schools are at the elementary level with only 25 percent at the secondary level.
Private schools are more likely to be located in cities or their suburbs than in rural areas.
Parochial School-four in five private school students attend a school supported by a religious group.
Religious schools such as , African American and Hispanic students perform better on standardized tests than their public school peers.
Home Schooling
Home schooling requires no public support; instead, children learn at home with at least one of their parents serving as the teacher.
An estimated 1.7 million students were being schooled at home, representing 3.4 percent of K-12 population in 2012.
Homeschooled students score 15 to 30 percentile points above their public school peers on standardized academic achievement tests, and homeschooled high school students score above average in ACT and SAT tests for college admission.
What are the pros and cons of homeschooling ?
Which school choice do you believe is best for students ? and why?
QUESTIONS
Early Childhood Education
G. Stanley Hall, defined early childhood as the years between ages four and eight. Later on the focus of early childhood education changed over time and became more behavioral oriented.
One of the most popular early childhood education programs is Head Start, which was created by President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in 1964, to help children in low-income families be better prepared to enter school.
To participate in Head Start , the income of a child’s family must be at the federal poverty level or below.
Grade Configurations in Schools
Continuing…
Montessori Model-
A educational program developed by medical doctor Maria Montessori. Whom the program for three- to dix year olds that are well organized into subject based centers where children interact with materials.
Elementary Schools-
includes the primary grades of PK-3 or K-3 plus the fourth, fifth or sixth
are impacted by state testing than other levels because students in grades 3-8 are assessed easily.
High Schools-
The number of high schools expanded during the Great depression of 1930s when children were pushed out of the workforce and into the high schools.
The Sense of Place: School locations
The place in which we live affects our cultural identity and life experiences.
Poverty is greater in rural and urban areas but is growing in suburban areas.
Schools in suburban areas– except those closet to the city have greater financial support , and students perform higher levels on achievement tests.
