Chapter 12 - Understanding Institutions: Education

Question 1

Education

Answer 1

the process through which a society transmits its culture and history, as well as teaches social, intellectual, and specific work skills that result in productive workers and citizens.

Institutionalized.

Question 2

Institutionalized

Answer 2

Encoded in laws, policies, and common practices that organize schools and their support systems. Institutionalization is important to stability. Roles, rules, and routines limit how much individual personalities shape an organization’s operation. This allows smooth transitions when people are hired or depart, and it ensures that different organizations within an institution are comparable.

Question 3

Education and Modes of Production

Answer 3

Education prepares people to fill different roles in relation to the means of production (the methods for producing goods). If the means of production change, education must adapt to reflect those changes, or risk harming the economy and creating instability in society.

Question 4

Preindustrial Societies

Answer 4

school as we know it did not exist. Only the wealthy and religious leaders went to school, where classes focused on philosophy, sacred texts, and the arts.

Most children in preindustrial societies worked alongside their parents, who taught them work skills, life lessons, and values.

Question 5

Industrialized Societies

Answer 5

Industrialization created a need for mechanics, welders, factory workers, newspaper writers, bookkeepers, and other skilled workers. The demand for skills like reading, writing, and calculating laid the foundation for a compulsory educational system.

Question 6

Post Industrialized Societies

Answer 6

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, U.S. manufacturing started to decline as lower transportation costs, liberal trade policies, and tax breaks allowed companies to move their factories to places with cheaper labor. At the same time, higher levels of education coupled with new computing technology expanded knowledge-based work. The midcentury baby boom produced the largest and most highly educated generation thus far in U.S. history.

Securing higher paid work requires more education and/or technical training, while throughout the labor market, work increasingly demands strong social skills. Teaching children to show up on time, conform to a rigid structure, and yield to authority fails to develop either the creativity or knowledge needed to succeed at high income and professional levels in the current economy. These skills may still be important, but alone they cannot ensure social mobility.

Question 7

Public Education and Post Industrial Economy

Answer 7

The education system in the United States today reflects the industrial age more than it does the information era that it now serves

Most public schools do not adequately develop the knowledge, critical thinking, and creativity students need to succeed in today’s white-collar professions.

Question 8

The social functions of education

Answer 8

Functionalists point out that the institution of education provides a structure that teaches students about our shared culture and socializes workers and citizens. It trains and sorts workers by strengths and interests, and it provides access to various parts of the labor market while leveling the playing field with universal access. It can also protect democracy by creating an informed and educated electorate capable of electing good leaders.

Mandatory education system has latent (hidden) functions like providing childcare for working parents and regulating entry into the labor force.

Question 9

Education: Hidden curriculum

Answer 9

childcare for working parents and regulating entry into the labor force.

also responsible for reinforcing elements of social status and order, such as ideas about gender-appropriate roles and behaviors and race and class hierarchies. These messages are delivered through substantive choices in the curriculum and often through the social structure and functioning of the school itself.

Question 10

Education: secondary socialization

Answer 10

Teaching us how to behave appropriately in small groups and structured situations.

Be punctual, follow rules and directions, obey authority figures, and complete assigned tasks.

Question 11

Functionalists Perspective

Answer 11

Success in the classroom leads to higher level courses and acceptance into highly competitive and elite colleges and graduate schools.

Those with the highest abilities receive the most advanced training, earn the highest
credentials, and enter the most challenging fields. Likewise, those with less ability receive less training, earn lower level credentials, and enter less demanding (and often less lucrative) areas of work

Education promotes social cohesion and stability.

Question 12

Conflict Theorists

Answer 12

argue that the power dynamics of society shape schools and student outcomes. Differences in school experiences range from teacher quality and the physical state of school facilities to classroom interactions and school discipline.

These differences are not distributed randomly.

Children may have very different experiences on the basis of social characteristics, including race, class, and gender.

Question 13

Symbolic Interactionism: Education

Answer 13

Examine how social interactions create and reproduce school experiences and educational success or failure. Peer interactions teach kids the norms and values of youth culture, ingroup and outgroup boundaries and meanings, and ultimately their definition of self. They can also make school life fun, miserable, or somewhere in between.

Interactions with teachers and administrators teach kids about trust in and submission to nonparental authority as these adults try to socialize students to adult group behavior.

Question 14

Human capital

Answer 14

Education is supposed to provide.

Knowledge, skills, habits, and attributes necessary to succeed in work and life

Question 15

Strongest predictor of educational success

Answer 15

Parents’ education and income

students’ socioeconomic status. Parents’ education and income begin shaping children’s educational readiness, school performance, outcomes, and access to opportunity from birth

Question 16

Quality preschool programs

Answer 16

programs improve nutrition and stimulate brain development, closing the gap between poor and privileged children before they ever walk into a kindergarten classroom. These structured programs also prepare children to interact effectively in school settings

Question 17

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Answer 17

declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but federally mandated desegregation ended in the 1990s, and since then, school segregation has returned to pre-Brown levels

The % of K-12 public schools in the Unites States with 75-100% of studnets who are

Question 18

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Answer 18

declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, but federally mandated desegregation ended in the 1990s, and since then, school segregation has returned to pre-Brown levels

The % of K-12 public schools in the Unites States with 75-100% of studnets who are

Question 19

Tracking

Answer 19

involves placing students in classes on the basis of “ability,” often measured by classroom behavior, academic performance, and academic aspiration

Tracking seems like a logical way to make teaching and learning more efficient. Tracking, however, privileges the education of some students over others and determines future education and career paths from an early age.

Tracking labels some students as “academic” and others as “vocational,” which in turn structures the students’ interactions. These interactions in turn determine students’ self-concepts and their own perceptions of what they can or cannot achieve.

Question 20

State Funding for Higher Education

Answer 20

Higher education was once viewed as a public good that was well funded by state governments. States now give far less support to their public universities and colleges, which must therefore rely more on student tuition for funding.

Question 21

Affirmative Action

Answer 21

Affirmative action is a mechanism used to ensure greater racial and ethnic diversity in higher education.

Higher education officials recognized the value of diversity and the barriers that many racial minority students faced competing on a “level” admissions playing field. In the 1960s and 1970s, selective public and private colleges and universities voluntarily engaged in affirmative action practices to recruit minority students and examine student applications in a more holistic way to identify and admit promising students from underrepresented minority groups

These policies produced more minority college graduates, increased minority representation in graduate and professional programs, and helped corporations diversify their white-collar workforce.

Sociology in Action (p. 245). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Question 22

Finland

Answer 22

Finland stands out as a top-performing country on standardized tests of secondary students. Most notable is the consistency of performance across schools and among students within schools

The Finnish system is relatively new and is the result of a national effort to establish a single compulsory system that educates all children without tracking

The system is learner centered and emphasizes happiness and well-being. Teachers assign little homework, and students do not take a standardized test until they apply to college

These approaches require highly qualified and engaged teachers. All teachers must hold a master’s degree, and they are generally drawn from the pool of high academic performers

Question 23

Pre- K Education

Answer 23

Proponents of the value of quality early education and care argue for universal access from birth to age five and rigorous education and training for birth-to-five caregivers and teachers. Ninety percent of the brain’s architecture
develops by age five

Research suggests that public investments in quality pre-K education and care can reduce public spending on special education and social welfare programs. When families have access to affordable quality care, more parents work. The rise in employment reduces child poverty and increases tax revenue to help pay for the public provision of care

Question 24

The Abecedarian Project

Answer 24

The Abecedarian Project examined the long-term impacts of quality pre-K education and care. Researchers randomly selected children born between 1972 and 1977 and assigned them to the intervention group or a control group.

The intervention received full-time, high-quality education and childcare from infancy through age five.

Researchers followed up with both groups at ages twelve, fifteen, twenty-one, thirty, and thirty-five, and the results were encouraging: kids enrolled in the Abecedarian pre-K program were four times more likely to attend college than kids in the control group

Question 25

No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)

Answer 25

2001

Concerns about the failure of U.S. schools gave rise to market-based models for improving quality, lowering costs, and increasing accountability

increased standardized assessments, raised penalties for low performance, expanded school choice through charter schools and vouchers, monitored teacher quality through student performance, enacted a “reading first” approach aimed at ensuring that all children read at grade level by the end of third grade, and consolidated bilingual and immigrant education programs

dramatic increase in class time spent preparing for and administering standardized tests, an increase in school choice options, and the rapid growth of charter schools and the use of vouchers.

Nearly twenty years after the implementation of NCLB, concerns about the quality and competitiveness of American schools remain

Question 26

School Choice

Answer 26

options vary by location but can include the ability to attend the public school of the family’s choosing, attend a charter school, or use a voucher to subsidize attendance at a private school.

Question 27

Charter School

Answer 27

Beginning in the 1990s

The two primary mechanisms for creating a market in public primary and secondary education are charter schools and vouchers.

publicly funded schools that are established under a charter and governed by parents, educators, community groups, or private organizations. The “charter” details the school’s mission, curriculum or philosophy, students to be served, performance goals, evaluation plans, and commitments.

After more than two decades, however, the effects of charter schools on student achievement appear to be mixed. Overall, charter school students do not necessarily perform better than other public school students on tests such as the SAT or ACT, but more of their students go on to college than those in regular public schools

Question 28

Voucher

Answer 28

Began in the 1990s

certificates of government funding that make each pupil’s state funds portable, allowing parents to choose to use their child’s funds at a public or private school of their choice.

Proponents argue that all students are entitled to their state funding allotment, and where they choose to use it should be up to them.

Others argue that states are not funding individuals but a system.

When vouchers are used to pay for private education, needed funds are removed from the public schools, and working-class taxpayers subsidize wealthy kids’ attendance at private schools.

Critics argue that increased use of vouchers will further segregate schools by class as better educated and well-resourced parents will use vouchers to send their children to the best schools, diminishing the resources of the public schools they leave behind and filling those public schools with students whose parents likely have less education and lower incomes.

Question 29

Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

Answer 29

2015 in response to criticism for NCLB

an effort to address some of the unintended negative consequences of NCLB. Notably, ESSA deemphasized punitive responses, such as schools losing funding or being closed down for persistent poor student performance, and emphasized the use of incentives to improve school and teacher quality

reduces onerous testing requirements while maintaining a focus on accountability