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Title
Abstract
Introduction XVII
Introduction
| Introduction
Background
The Future of Charter Schools
Schools for Questioning
Implications for Current Educational Practice
Implications for Grassroots Movements
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution
From Scopes to Edwards
Intelligent Design
The Controversy Over Data Reporting
Definitions Related to Drug Use
Statistics on Family Participation in Ece Programs
Making the Case for Less Government Support of Ece
The Eightyear Study
Historical Background
Looking Toward the Future
Social Critics and Future Trends in Homeschooling
Subject Areas
International Test Results: An Overview
Teaching and Learning for Our Future
Glimpse Into Our Future
Future Oriented Perspective
Historical Overview of Jrotc
Moral Education: An Unsettling Future
What Future for Parental Involvement?
Holmes and Matthews 1984 Meta-Analysis
Jackson 1975 Systematic Review
Jimerson 2001 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Holmes 1989 Meta-Analysis
Safety Plan Recommendation
Fallacies of Statistical Averages
Implications of the Research
The Future of Small Schools
What is the Future of Teacher Unionism?
Conclusions
Court Cases
Summary
Conclusion
References
All Topics
Education
Curriculum and Instruction
Battleground Schools
E. Wayne Ross
Sandra Mathison
2008
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762 pages
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Abstract
"[Winner of the 2010 “Critics Choice Award” from the American Educational Studies Association]

"No topic sparks an argument faster among the American public, even with relatively apolitical people, than how their children are taught. In schools across the country, school boards, parents, teachers, and students themselves debate issues ranging from charter schools, to the first amendment rights of students, to the efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act. School districts in Georgia and Pennsylvania have seen battles over the teaching of evolution; places as diverse as Colorado, Washington, and Kentucky have had debates over how best to protect children while at school. Battleground: Schools provides an in-depth, balanced overview of these controversial topics and enables teachers, students, and their parents to better understand the foundations of these conflicts. Battleground: Schools cover the 100 most relevant conflicts involving education issues today. A sample of the debates analyzed:

* Charter schools
* Distance education
* Home schooling
* Students' Rights
* Military in Schools
* Religion and public schools
* Single-sex schooling"""
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BATTLEGROUND
SCHOOLS

BATTLEGROUND
SCHOOLS
VOLUME 1 (A–K)

Edited by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross

GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London

iii

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Battleground : schools / edited by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–313–33941–7 (set : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–33942–4 (vol. 1 : alk.
paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–33943–1 (vol. 2 : alk. paper)
1. Education—United States—History. 2. Public schools—United States—History.
I. Mathison, Sandra. II. Ross, E. Wayne, 1956–
LA212.B295 2008
370.973—dc22
2007029589
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2008 by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007029589
ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33941–7 (set)
978–0–313–33942–4 (vol. 1)
978–0–313–33943–1 (vol. 2)
First published in 2008
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Colin, who daily draws us onto the battleground of schools.

CONTENTS
Guide to Related Topics

Preface

Introduction

xvii

Entries
Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

Accountability

Afterschool Programs

Alternative Schools

Alternatives to Schooling

Art Education

Assessment

Bilingual Education

Bullying

Business and Corporate Involvement

Character Education

Charter Schools

Children’s and Students’ Rights

vii

viii

| Contents

Citizenship Education

101

Civil Rights

110

Class Size

116

Clothing and School Uniforms

123

Commercialization of Schools

128

Compulsory Schooling

136

Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution

147

Critical Pedagogy

156

Culturally Relevant Education

161

Curriculum

168

Desegregation

179

Discipline

187

Dropouts

194

Drug Use and Prevention

203

Early Childhood Education

213

E-Learning

221

English Language Learners

228

Evaluation

234

Finance

241

Foreign Language Education

249

Foundations and Schools

254

GED (General Educational Development) Credential

261

Gender

267

Gifted and Talented Education

274

Global Education

280

Government Role in Schooling

287

Grading Policies

294

Head Start

301

Homeless Children and Schools

306

Homeschooling

313

Homework

319

Contents | ix

Human Development

326

Inclusive Schooling

333

Integrated Mental Health Services in Schools

340

International Comparisons of Student Achievement

346

Knowledge

357

Leadership

367

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Youth

374

Literacy Education

381

Mathematics Education

391

Media and Schools

400

Mental Health

406

Middle Schools

415

Military in Schools

421

Moral Education

428

Motivation and Learning

437

Multiculturalism

445

No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

451

Nutrition in Schools

459

Parental Involvement in Schools

467

Pedagogy

473

Physical Education

483

Popular Culture and Schools

489

Progressivism

495

Purpose of Schools

502

Race, Racism, and Colorblindness in Schools

509

Religion and Public Schooling

514

Retention in Grade

520

Rural Schools

526

Safety and Security in Schools

533

School Choice

539

School Counseling

548

Contents

Science Education

556

Sexuality Education

562

Single-Sex Schools

569

Small Schools

579

Social Studies Education

586

Sports in Schools

595

Standardized Testing

599

Teacher Education

609

Teacher Knowledge

616

Teacher Licensure

622

Teacher Unions

628

Teaching

639

Technology and Schooling

649

Textbooks

655

Time in School

661

Tracking

671

Urban Education

681

Youth Activism

687

General Bibliography

695

Editorial Advisory Board

699

Contributor Biographies

701

Index

727

GUIDE TO RELATED TOPICS
legal issues and legislation
Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers
Accountability
Civil Rights
Desegregation
Finance
No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
Religion and Public Schooling
Textbooks

school and classroom practices
Accountability
Assessment
Class Size
Critical Pedagogy
Culturally Relevant Education
Curriculum
Discipline
E-Learning
Evaluation
Gifted and Talented Education
Grading Policies
Homework
Human Development
Inclusive Schooling

xii

Guide to Related Topics

Pedagogy
Retention in Grade
Standardized Testing
Technology and Schooling
Textbooks

school organization and forms of schooling
Afterschool Programs
Alternative Schools
Alternatives to Schooling
Compulsory Schooling
Early Childhood Education
Finance
Foundations and Schools
GED (General Educational Development) Credential
Head Start
Homeschooling
Integrated Mental Health Services in Schools
International Comparisons of Student Achievement
Leadership
Middle Schools
Parental Involvement in Schools
Progressivism
Rural Schools
Single-Sex Schools
School Choice
Small Schools
Time in School
Tracking
Urban Education

schools and society
Bilingual Education
Business and Corporate Involvement
Civil Rights
Clothing and School Uniforms
Commercialization of Schools
Desegregation
English Language Learners
Gender
Government Role in Schooling
Homeless Children and Schools
Knowledge
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Youth
Media and Schools
Military in Schools

Guide to Related Topics |

Nutrition in Schools
Popular Culture and Schooling
Purpose of Schools
Race, Racism, and Colorblindness in Schools
Religion and Public Schooling
Youth Activism

school subjects and disciplines
Art Education
Citizenship Education
Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution
Foreign Language Education
Global Education
Literacy Education
Mathematics Education
Multiculturalism
Physical Education
Science Education
Social Studies Education
Sports in Schools

social, moral, and emotional development
Bullying
Character Education
Dropouts
Drug Use and Prevention
Mental Health
Moral Education
Motivation and Learning
Safety and Security in Schools
School Counseling
Sexuality Education

teachers and teaching
Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers
Teacher Education
Teacher Knowledge
Teacher Licensure
Teacher Unions
Teaching

xiii

xiv

PREFACE
The Battleground: Schools volumes provide a historically situated description
of the most salient controversies in schooling during the past century. Many
of these controversies have persisted over this long period of time (such as
what should be taught in the subject areas or the role of standardized testing in
schools), and some are more contemporary (such as the role of technology in
education or commercialization in schools). Controversial issues in schooling
are topics about which there is no consensus of values or beliefs. By their nature,
these controversial issues generate diverse opinions and debate on the distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad practice, justice and injustice, and
on interpretations of fairness and tolerance. These are topics on which reasonable people sincerely disagree. Schools and education become sites of controversy because of their universality and the high expectations about what schools
can accomplish. Controversies in schooling are driven by educational research,
politics, courts, and grassroots movements.
Scholars and the interested public will find this collection helpful to gain a
quick understanding of what is and has been happening in schools. Written in
nontechnical language, this collection is easily accessible for high school and
college students and an interested lay public, but scholars of education will find
the collection useful as a reference on a wide variety of educational topics. Each
essay concludes with suggested further readings for readers who wish to delve
more deeply into a particular topic. In addition, many essays include graphs,
charts, and illustrations that provide a quick sense of the magnitude or nature of
the particular controversial issues.
We have selected 93 controversial issues to include in this collection, issues that have ebbed and flowed, or appeared sometime in the last 100 years of

xvi

Preface

schooling in the United States. A thorough review of educational research
literature, our own professional experience in schooling, and the assistance of
an editorial board of prominent educational scholars aided us in identifying the
topics to include in this collection. Indeed there are additional issues that might
have been included, but the constraints of book length led us to choose these as
the most central, both for their longevity and for the likelihood that these issues
will persist well into the future.
The essays are authored by an impressive number of first-rate educational
scholars. Never before has such a pre-eminent and diverse group of scholarly
perspectives been combined in one collection. The authors each have demonstrated through their publications and research their prominence in their particular area. Many are award-winning scholars. Some are also practitioners. No
single ideology prevails. Throwing a cocktail party for the 118 authors would be
an intellectually exciting event—the room would brim with scholarly discourse
and diversity of perspective and would reflect the cultural and ethnic mosaic of
U.S. society. The reader can learn more about individual authors by consulting
the alphabetically listed biographies included in this collection.
The essays are arranged alphabetically by topic. Each essay summarizes the
nature of the controversy, including major players and events relevant to the
topic. In a number of cases, timelines of critical events are also included. And
each essay concludes with readings for further investigation of the topic. The
complete volume concludes with a general bibliography of works that address
the topics covered in this encyclopedia.
To give the reader further access to this volume, there are two helpful lists:
An alphabetical list of the topics is included at the beginning of the volume, as
well as a list of all the topics grouped under broad headings, called the Guide to
Related Topics. Finally, the book ends with a comprehensive index.
It goes without saying that we could not have prepared this collection without the collaboration and cooperation of many people. We thank all of the contributors to Battleground: Schools who took on the metaphor of schools as a
battleground with a keen eye for describing what has been happening in U.S.
schools over the past century. We appreciate the help the Editorial Advisory
Board provided in identifying the most salient issues to include and in identifying contributors. Thanks also to Marie Ellen Lacarda, whose idea this encyclopedia was—we appreciate her thinking of us as good stewards of the project.
And thanks to Kevin Downing, our editor at Greenwood, who has provided the
necessary supports and just enough encouragement to bring these volumes to
fruition.
Neither of us has ever shrunk from controversy, and so we find ourselves in
comfortable territory in these volumes. We would like to thank our many colleagues over the many years, on all sides of our own individually championed
controversies, as well. While it is easy to thank those with whom you agree, as
these essays suggest, those with whom we do not agree are equally important
in helping us to reflect upon and give good reasons for the positions we hold.
Without the counterpoint, our point is diminished.

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS A CONTROVERSY?
Controversial issues in schooling are topics about which there is no consensus of values or belief. By their nature, these controversial issues generate diverse
opinions and debate on the distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad
practice, justice and injustice, and on interpretations of fairness and tolerance.
These are topics about which reasonable people sincerely disagree. Schools and
education become sites of controversy because of their universality and the high
expectations about what schools can accomplish. Controversies in schooling are
driven by educational research, politics, courts, and grassroots movements. The
essays in this encyclopedia provide an historically situated description of salient
controversies in schooling during the past century. Many of these controversies
have persisted over this long period of time (such as what should be taught in
the subject areas or the role of standardized testing in schools), and some are
more contemporary (such as the role of technology in education or commercialization in schools).
WHENCE COMES CONTROVERSY?
Events and people have created, contributed to, and sustained controversies in schooling and education over the past century. Many social, political,
and technological events occurring outside of schools have an impact on
schools, and if there is disagreement about how and if schools should respond,
controversy ensues. Some events are meant to solve controversies in schools,
and while resolution sometimes occurs, just as often the attempts at resolution

xvii

xviii

Introduction

sustain disagreements and schools continue to be a battleground for different
value positions. Court cases, legislation, and educational research are all such
events. But individual people and their ideas also inhabit the battleground of
schools and their ideas become the weapons in the ongoing struggle for power
and control over schools both as an organization and an institution.
Events
Court Cases
Even before the 1900s the courts played an important role in schools. When
value conflicts arise in schools the disputants turn to the courts to arbitrate
those differences. Seldom do the courts settle matters for all times, although
they do bring moments of quiet in controversies. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision
of 1869 maintained that schools could be racially separate but equal, but Brown
v. Board of Education in 1954 changed that ruling. And now, there are continued
challenges to the Brown decision. The longevity of some court decisions is remarkable though, such as the Scopes v. Tennessee trial of 1925, which challenged
the Butler Act passed to protect the teaching of divine creation and disallowing
the teaching of evolution. Although Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, the court case created a public discourse that resulted in the repealing
of the Butler Act. Throughout these essays readers will see that court cases are
key weapons on the school battleground, in issues of children’s rights, academic
freedom, racial segregation and integration, gender relations, and many more.
The courts have been and will continue to be used in an effort to quell controversy in schools, but in so doing they inevitably sustain and sometimes even
sensationalize those controversies.
Legislation
As mentioned above, laws are passed that create or contribute to controversies in education. Whether to safeguard particular beliefs (like the Butler Act
of 1925), to provide entitlements to redress injustices (like Title I, Head Start,
or the Civil Rights Act), to direct educational policy and practice (like the National Defense Education Act, Education for All Handicapped Children Act,
or laws that enable charter schools to be created), legislation is a key contributor to controversy in schools. When laws are enacted a problem is inherently
defined and forms of redress prescribed. Inevitably there are disagreements
with both. In part because it is contemporary, but also because of the unprecedented intrusion of the federal government into educational policy and practice, the No Child Left Behind Act (the reauthorization of the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act—itself a source of controversy) demonstrates well
the disagreements over what is wrong with schools and how they should be
remedied. The fierce battle over the reauthorization of this legislation attests
to its contribution to controversies that cut deeply into the nature of schooling
in the United States.

Figure 1 Key events contributing to controversy in education.

xix

Introduction

Educational Research and Scholarship
While some argue that educational research has little to contribute to schools
and schooling, the essays in this volume suggest a different story. For example,
John Dewey’s influence on schools and education in the last century is remarkable. So too is the influence of Frederick Taylor, an engineer and not an educator,
yet someone whose ideas reverberate in the organization and administration of
every school. And the influence of psychologists on the many and competing
conceptions of learning (whole language or phonics, behaviorism or constructivism, internal or external motivation, and so on) sustain controversies about pedagogy and human development (cognitive, moral, and physical). Specific works of
educational scholars have also been the source of controversies in education—the
development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test in 1926 was proffered as a solution
to the need for greater efficiency in dealing with ever-larger numbers served by
the schooling system. The use of standardized tests has always been a source of
conflict, and there is no reason to believe this will change. Another example is the
creation of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1969, a
test developed for one purpose but one that has since been reformulated to serve
some interests at the expense of others. Sometimes studies have had a profound
impact on the definition of what matters in schools—James Coleman’s The Equality of Educational Opportunity Study in 1966 is one such example. To this day, the
Coleman report (as it is simply referred to) is used to support arguments about
school finance, the nature of parental involvement, and a host of issues about the
relative importance of schooling in determining life’s chances.
Social, Technological, and Political Events
But it isn’t just what happens within schools or the educational system that
creates controversy and turns schools into a battleground. Events that are part
of the cultural epoch have been key in drawing schools into larger controversies.
The launch of Sputnik in 1957 set off alarms about American students’ poor
preparation in science and math, enough so that the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed the following year; while its scope was wide ranging, the intent was to bolster American progress in the space race with the Soviet
Union. Many technology advances, perhaps most notably the creation and uses
of computers and digital information, produce skirmishes in schools: How
HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION PROJECTS
These on-line history projects are continually evolving; they include timelines as well as
essays.
History of Education: Selected Moments of the Twentieth Century: http://fcis.oise.
utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/index.html#90s
History of American Education Web Project: http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfrnb/index.html
American Educational History: A Hypertext Timeline: http://www.cloudnet.com/
~edrbsass/educationhistorytimeline.html

Introduction

should computers be used, can kids still learn arithmetic if they use a calculator,
do computers keep kids from thinking for themselves, are digital sources of information better or worse than print sources, and so on. Recently, catastrophes
(such as the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina) have fomented
disagreement about how schools should respond. The increased presence of
the Religious Right in American social and political life has fueled the fires of
old controversies (like the separation of church and state, including issues like
the role of prayer or the teaching of evolution) and created some new (like the
role of special interests in school boards). Schools do not exist in isolation, and
indeed they are perhaps the common battleground for seeking resolution of
differences of belief and value. The human right of all persons to education is
widely accepted—and explicitly set out in international human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and schools, as the
primary manifestation of this right, provide a common context in which many
differences are made public.
People
Many people’s ideas and scholarship have contributed significantly to the
nature of education and schooling in America, but a few scholars stand out for
the extent to which their work fomented controversy in education, controversy
that indeed has lasted throughout most of the twentieth century. These individuals’ ideas are still at the heart of many controversies: Frederick Taylor’s scientific
principles of management are still evident in the ways schools are organized; the
Progressive education movement, initiated by John Dewey and including Harold Rugg and George Counts, is alive and contested; and Ralph Tyler’s hand
can be seen in much of modern curriculum and assessment. These names recur
throughout the essays in this encyclopedia, attesting to the foundational nature
of their ideas and their sustaining qualities.
Frederick Taylor (1856–1915)
The publication of The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 set forth
the four basic principles of Taylorism: (1) replace rule-of-thumb work methods
with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks; (2) scientifically select,
train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train
themselves; (3) cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed; and (4) divide work nearly equally between
managers and workers so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks. Taylor, an
engineer, was not himself interested in schools. His focus was on using scientific
methods (like time and motion studies) to determine the most efficient way to
produce goods. However, his ideas were appealing at a time when schools were
grappling with too few teachers and classrooms and too many immigrant children to educate. If Taylor’s principles were applied to education it was assumed
there would be the same positive effect as in manufacturing, clerical work, and

xxi

xxii

Introduction

other production contexts. Schools became departmentalized, students began
moving from teacher to teacher, and educational finance became a field. Over
the years, Taylor’s principles of efficiency have often prevailed in contexts such
as the school consolidation movement, year round schooling, high-stakes testing, and educational-management organizations (EMOs).
John Dewey (1859–1952)
In stark contrast with the principles of Taylorism was the rise of the Progressive Era in public education. Born about the same time, John Dewey saw the
world quite differently, and the influence of his ideas continues to this day. The
publication of Democracy and Education in 1916 and the creation of the Progressive Education Association in 1919 mark the beginning of the Progressive Era,
which ranged from 1880 to 1920, although the underlying ideas have long survived
that period. While Taylor focused on efficiency to increase productivity, Dewey
and the progressives focused on the effectiveness of schools in promoting democratic principles. Schools and education should be directed to: (1) helping each
individual recognize his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs, and cultural
identity, and (2) developing of critical, socially engaged intelligence, enabling
individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good. This approach to
education was and is referred to as child-centered and social reconstructionist.
While these principles have probably never been manifest widely in American
schools they have nonetheless prevailed throughout the century, providing the
counterpoint to management principles. While the Cold War dampened the
enthusiasm for progressive education, a number of recent educational reforms
demonstrate that these principles live on, such as the Coalition for Essential
Schools, the small schools movement, free schools, and whole schooling.
Harold Rugg (1886–1960)
In 1938, Columbia professor Harold Rugg’s Man and His Changing World,
a social science textbook, was published, and the controversy this sparked set
the pattern for textbook publishing to the present. Rugg’s text, in spite of its
sexist title, reflected the principles of progressivism, including racial understanding, democracy, and social justice. The fact that he encouraged skepticism
about business practices attracted the attention of the National Association of
Manufacturers, the American Legion, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, among others. Rugg’s textbooks were considered too critical of private
enterprise, and the business community’s campaign against the texts was highly
successful: Sales in 1938 were 300,000 and by 1942 had dropped to 21,000, including book burnings in some communities. Lobbying by powerful groups has
been a mainstay in determining what textbooks, library books, and curriculum
materials are used in schools. Business interests continue to hold sway and have
been joined by the interests of the Religious Right.

Introduction |

George Counts (1889–1974)
Continuing the progressive principles, George Counts published a slim volume, Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Teachers, he suggested, should
be the leaders in society, taking an active change agent role in economics, politics, and morality. Education was the means for social change, he argued, and
his argument was renounced by conservatives of the day. Counts understood the
extent to which schools were a means for maintaining the status quo, and while
he was clearly influenced by Dewey, Counts’ faith in schools as sites for social
and economic change had a more collectivist sensibility (society-centered rather
than child-centered). Conservatives of the time labeled him a communist (which
he was not) and the discourse of the day laid open an ongoing disagreement
about who would control schools and toward what ends. Today, neoliberalism
is the dominant discourse in schooling, but the refrain of George Counts’ challenge to schools to build a new social order is still heard, especially in alternative
schools, culturally relevant education, critical pedagogy, and liberatory notions
of education.
Ralph Tyler (1902–1994)
Much of the modern era in American education (from the 1920s to the present) has been touched by Ralph Tyler’s work. (Both Tyler and Counts were
students of Charles Judd at the University of Chicago.) An advisor to six U.S.
presidents, Tyler was the key figure in the development of many educational
policies—as architect of the evaluation for the Eight Year Study he developed
common and still prevailing notions of curriculum, evaluation, and student assessment. In 1949, Tyler’s Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction was
published, and “the Tyler rationale” became a mainstay in defining what curriculum studies is. Tyler was a key figure in the development of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and he initiated the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP). Tyler likely served on more national policyoriented committees and commissions than any other education scholar, and so
his influence still rings through curriculum studies, pedagogy, evaluation, and
assessment.
Modern Scholarly Contributions to Controversy
It remains to be seen who the lasting key contributors to controversies in
education and schooling will be, but a number of possibilities recur through
this collection of essays: Jean Anyon, Michael Apple, James A. Banks, William
Bennett, Chester E. Finn Jr., Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, Deborah Meier, Diane
Ravitch.
SHOULD SCHOOLS BE A BATTLEGROUND?
Characterizing schools as a battleground may seem unnecessarily provocative. What the metaphor suggests, though, is a lively discourse about competing

xxiii

xxiv

| Introduction

fundamental values and beliefs and how they are played out within schools.
When controversies and struggles cease, schools will have become the agents
of a single-minded indoctrination, a state that is singularly undesirable in a
democracy. While today’s controversy may lead to tomorrow’s consensus, new
and revived controversies will arise. That controversy is the steady state within
education and schooling is a good thing, and what is to be guarded against
are discourses, power relations, and institutionalized practices that disallow
controversies to be debated in public and forthright ways. Deliberation in democracy (whether through legislation, courts, grassroots movements, or educational scholarship) does not guarantee particular outcomes, but it does set forth
principles that insure that neither coercion nor brute economic power should
determine how schools should be, and thus how American society should be.
Deliberation is not, however, a guarantee for resolution. That schools are a battleground signals a healthy democracy.
Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross

ACADEMIC FREEDOM FOR K–12 TEACHERS
Is there anything left of academic freedom for K–12 teachers? The Hazelwood
School District v. Kuhlmeier decision removed the legal framework for defending
teachers’ academic freedom in the United States. Since that time, some conservatives have maligned academic freedom as “political correctness” and redefined it as student and parent rights to their viewpoints in classrooms and the
curriculum. Lower courts have consistently relied on Hazelwood as a precedent,
and the U.S. Supreme Court defaults to this 1988 decision to refuse to hear K–12
academic-freedom cases. The result of a long-term erosion of rights and professional autonomy is an increasingly difficult battleground of academic freedom
for teachers.
Academic freedom for teachers is traditionally interpreted as freedom of expression. J. Kindred (2006) in the Education Law Journal defines the concept as
“a right to raise new and controversial ideas in an effort to stimulate thought
and the further pursuit of truth . . . a right to critically speak out against their
[i.e., teachers’] employers” (p. 217). Clauses guaranteeing freedom of expression under constitutional law protect the freedom to acquire materials for
teaching and more generally the professional autonomy to construct or select
content, resources, and assessment or instructional methods that are responsive to courses, disciplines, and students. This includes the ability to make professional judgments without coercion or censorship. However, it is important
to understand that the First Amendment basically stops at schoolhouse doors
in the United States; teachers in Canada continue to be protected by section
2b in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadians have generally managed

| Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

to address academic freedom at district and teacher union levels, or outside of
the courts, but analysts describe an erosion of rights in Canada that parallels
recent history in the United States, and Canadian judges invariably look south
for legal precedent.
This discussion outlines the history of academic freedom for teachers and
provides an overview of recent cases and trends. The neoconservative revival of
academic freedom is juxtaposed against teacher activists who took a stand on
academic freedom as fundamental to teaching in democratic systems of governance. Many believe that teaching controversial issues and promoting a collective sense of academic freedom have never been more important. This is the case
for K–12 teachers as much as the university professoriate. Perhaps a statement
on the times, educators of the current generation generally draw a blank when
asked: “What is academic freedom for K–12 teachers?”
ACADEMIC FREEDOM FOR DEMOCRACIES
In many ways, mass education and academic freedom are synonymous, one
requiring the other in democratic systems. Throughout the 1920s, the percentage of eligible students attending high school jumped from 31 to 51 percent.
Average secondary school class sizes increased from 20 in 1915 to 31 in 1932.
Mass education and the public schools had perennial critics, but during the
1920s criticism turned excessively alarmist. Conservative and liberal parents
condemned the public schools and withdrew their children, reversing a 20-year
downward trend in the percentage of students enrolled in private and sectarian schools. Control over the curriculum was particularly troubling, and in
1928, the National Education Association (NEA) reported that “a nationwide
and insidious propaganda of prodigious proportions has been and continues to
be carried on by the private power companies of this country [i.e., the United
States], and . . . has attacked the entire public school and educational system”
(p. 352). To defend against this, that same year in Minneapolis the NEA (1928)
passed a “Freedom of the Teacher” resolution:
Whereas, the classroom teachers are the ones who must use these censored text books and literature and are held responsible for the proper
guidance and training of the youth, who are to become future citizens,
therefore be it Resolved, that we most earnestly protest against the use
of the public schools and educational system of our country by any private concern or organization in behalf of selfish class interests against
the general and public welfare. (p. 352)
In 1935, the NEA expanded this to include the belief that schools and school
personnel should have the opportunity to present different points of view on
controversial questions to help students be better prepared for life.
Oppressive conditions reigned, and by the mid 1930s over 20 states required
loyalty oaths, meant to effectively isolate and eliminate radical teachers. A little
red rider law was passed in the District of Columbia in 1935, revoking salaries

Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers |

from teachers who “taught or advocated communism.” The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) fought against intimidation and for the repeal of loyalty and red rider laws. These were nevertheless heady days when it
seemed like the schools really could play a lead in reconstructing the social order.
In 1932, Teachers College professor George Counts challenged teachers with a
resonant question: “Dare progressive education be progressive?” In the height
of the depression, the effects of capitalism were horrific, and teachers generated
a tremendous resistance to conservative governance, intimidation, and oppression. Academic freedom for teachers was part and parcel of democratic reform
and social justice.

FIGURE A.1
Source: As first appeared in Teacher Magazine, September, 1995. Reprinted with permission from
Editorial Projects in Education. Photo by Greg Goldman.

| Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

Similar conditions and sentiments prevailed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The McCarthy era in the United States extended the loyalty oaths and red riders
of the 1930s to a regressive practice of intimidation and red-baiting. The force
of the schools as instruments of national security was tremendously challenging
to teachers interested in defending academic freedom and fundamental rights
to professional practice without coercion. The civil rights movement emerged
from this context, demanding that teachers reject any pretense of neutrality. In
his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, Martin Luther King linked academic freedom to civil disobedience. He encouraged moderate professionals to
get off the fence and speak out against injustice by exercising First Amendment
rights. The day after King was shot in 1968, Riceville, Iowa, teacher Jane Elliott
gave her third-grade students a lesson in racism that they would never forget.
This and subsequent blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiments she conducted stand
as extraordinarily meaningful expressions of academic freedom. In a later era,
she would have been fired despite the lifelong lessons in discrimination the students experienced.
Inspired by civil rights and increasing activism, in December 1965 Beth
Tinker and John Tinker, 13 and 15 years old, and Christopher Eckhart, 15 years
old, decided to express their objection to the Vietnam War by wearing black
armbands to school. Hearing of the plan, on December 14, principals of Des
Moines, Iowa, schools adopted a policy that students wearing protest armbands
would be asked to remove the symbols and, if they refused, be suspended.
On December 15, Mary Beth and Christopher wore their armbands and were
suspended. On December 16, John did the same and was suspended until after
the New Year as well. The students’ parents filed complaints in the district court,
only to be dismissed. The circuit court appeal was split, affirming the district
court’s decision to dismiss the appeal. The Supreme Court eventually heard the
case and in 1969 delivered its decision upholding the students’ rights. “It can
hardly be argued,” the judges wrote in their opinion, “that either students or
teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at
the schoolhouse gate. . . . This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court
for almost 50 years” (393 U.S. 503, 1969, sect. 1, para. 2). The opinion affirmed
that administrators “do not possess absolute authority” over students and teachers. As a profound legal framework for academic freedom, this decision prevailed until the late 1980s.
At the time Tinker v. Des Moines was decided in the Supreme Court, academic
freedom for teachers was fairly respected. Yet in 1969, only 55 of 2,225 school
district contracts contained provisions to protect the right. Twenty-nine of these
contracts were based on the Linden, Michigan, agreement stating that democratic values were best upheld
in an atmosphere which is free from censorship and artificial restraints
upon free inquiry and learning, and in which academic freedom for teacher
and student is encouraged. B. Academic freedom shall be guaranteed
to teachers and no special limitations shall be placed upon [teaching and
learning] subject only to accepted standards of professional educational

Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers |

responsibility. C. Freedom of individual conscience, association and expression will be encouraged and fairness of procedures will be observed
both to safeguard the legitimate interests of the schools and to exhibit
by appropriate examples the basic objectives of a democratic society.
(NEA, 1969a, p. 9)
A year earlier, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Township High School
teacher Marvin Pickering’s appeal that his board of education erred in firing him
for publishing a letter critical of their budgeting process (391 U.S. 563, 1968).
Given the Pickering v. Board and Tinker v. Des Moines decisions in addition to
the robust statement in the Linden contract, the NEA (1969b) reaffirmed its
resolution on academic freedom in 1969.
Censorship nonetheless persisted, and in 1980, the American Library Association reported that 62 percent of 910 censorship cases from 1966 to 1975
involved public schools. Increasing erosions of academic freedom prompted the
Education Digest to ask: “Is academic freedom dead in public schools?” This was
an ominous start to a decade that would, if not kill, nearly eliminate academic
freedom for teachers. In 1983, three days before the April issue of a Hazelwood
East High School (St. Louis, Missouri) student newspaper, the Spectrum, was to
be printed, Principal Robert E. Reynolds censored the proofs and deleted two
pages. He objected to the content of an article that dealt with teen pregnancy
and another with the impact of divorce on students. The staff of the Spectrum,
enrolled in a Journalism II course, objected, but the issue was published without
the two pages. Upon encouragement from their previous journalism teacher,
who transferred schools a month prior to the censor, three students (Cathy
Kuhlmeier, Leslie Smart, and Leann Tippett) contacted the American Civil
Liberties Union and filed suit in the district court. The censored articles were
taken to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and published in their entirety.
In 1985, the district court sided with the principal, but the appeals court decision upheld the rights of the students. On January 13, 1988, the Supreme Court
reversed the lower court’s decision with a five-to-three majority opinion that
regressively shaped the future of academic freedom for K–12 teachers:
school officials may impose reasonable restrictions on the speech of
students, teachers, and other members of the school community . . .
Educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial
control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored
expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to
legitimate pedagogical concerns. (484 U.S. 260, 1988, sect. B, para. 4)
Those last three words—“legitimate pedagogical concerns”—subsequently
provide the test for administrative intervention into curriculum and teaching and
establish precedent for all legal deliberation to follow to date. Placing power over
the curriculum in the hands of administrators, Justice White continued: “This
standard [of legitimate pedagogical concerns] is consistent with our oft-expressed
view that the education of the Nation’s youth is primarily the responsibility of
parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges”

| Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

(484 U.S. 260, 1988, para 4b). With this default position, the Supreme Court has
since refused to hear K–12 academic freedom cases. In dissent, however, Justice
Brennan wrote, “the case before us aptly illustrates how readily school officials
(and courts) can camouflage viewpoint discrimination as the ‘mere’ protection of
students from sensitive topics” (484 U.S. 260, 1988, Dissent, sect. B, para. 5). He
called the majority opinion a stamp of “brutal censorship” (sect. C, para. 2).
The Duke Law Journal immediately declared “the end of an era.” Newspapers and civil liberties groups denounced the decision and accurately predicted

FIGURE A.2

Red Baiting School Propaganda from 1949.

Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers |

the end of academic freedom for K–12 teachers and students. Looking back,
Canadian legal analyst Nora Findlay (2002) aptly concluded: “With Hazelwood,
everything changed . . . Schools have the ability to censor material that raises
‘legitimate pedagogical concerns’ (i.e., the censorship can be justified educationally); this decision supports control of schools, not freedom of expression”
(pp. 353–354). Indeed, trends in the history of academic freedom for teachers
suggest a gradual erosion of activism and rights, marked by a vigorous defense
in the 1930s and 1950s and a noticeable decline of support through the late
1980s and the current era.
SILENT NO MORE
Of course, prior to and between Tinker v. Des Moines and Hazelwood v.
Kuhlmeier were numerous cases that tested or weakened academic freedom for
K–12 teachers. But since Hazelwood, teachers have not had an opportunity in
the U.S. Supreme Court to put the “legitimate pedagogical concerns” standard
to test. Cases that in an earlier era would have gone to the Supreme Court were
left with an unsettling feeling that the “myth” of academic freedom for teachers
“dies slowly.” Peggie Boring’s and Cissy Lacks’ cases are two such injustices that
deserved a fair hearing in the high court. Their legacy is nonetheless significant,
as both Boring and Lacks have been courageous in championing academic freedom and sharing their resistance narratives with teachers. Along with others,
such as Nadine and Patsy Cordova, Releah Cossett Lent and Gloria Pipkin, they
chose to be “silent no more.”
In September 1991, Charles D. Owen High School drama teacher Peggie
Boring and an extraordinary group of students chose the play Independence
to rehearse and perform. Independence is fundamentally about love, care, and
compassion, explored through intensely difficult relationships (divorced mother
with three daughters: one a lesbian, one pregnant with an illegitimate child, and
the third with street-sense vocabulary). Owen High School (Black Mountain,
North Carolina) had just opened with a new theater, and the drama group was
ecstatic over the facility. Both teacher and students were winners of prestigious
awards and scholarships, and the group earned a chance to perform at the International Thespian Festival later that year. With script approval by the performers’ parents and implicit approval from the school’s administrators, their
rendition of Independence was award winning and advanced to the state finals
in competition. However, after a rehearsal in front of an English class in the
school, a parent complained about the content of Independence. The principal
intervened and insisted on censoring certain parts of the play. Boring reluctantly
agreed, and the group went on to alternate winner at the competition. At the end
of the school year, Boring was reassigned to a middle school for lack of compliance with the district’s controversial materials policy.
Boring predictably lost an appeal of the dismissal at the school-board level
but won her initial legal appeal in the Fourth Circuit court in 1996. A Fourth
Circuit panel subsequently reviewed and in 1998 reversed the closely divided
decision. Insofar as the principal and superintendent were acting on “legitimate

| Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

pedagogical concerns,” Boring evidently had no right to participate in creating
the school curriculum through selection and production of plays (136, F.3d, 364;
Daly, 2001; Russo & Delon, 1999; Zirkel, 1998).
In January 1995, English teacher Cissy Lacks, who had been teaching since
1972 and had a record of successes similar to Peggie Boring, was forced into the
same battleground of academic freedom. Lacks drew on proven creative writing
and poetry methods, including drama exercises accommodating the students’
everyday “street” language. This method draws creative expression from reluctant and troubled students before moving to refinement of genre, technique, and
style. For one assignment, the students wrote, performed, and videotaped short
plays, which, all in all for the class, totaled to 40 minutes and contained 150
instances of profanity. Like most high schools, the tape represented a fair cross
section of language and themes common to Berkeley High School (FergusonFlorrisant School District of St. Louis). Following up on a student’s complaint,
the principal confiscated the tape from Lacks’ locked classroom closet, reviewed
it, and moved to suspend and eventually fire her for disobeying the school discipline code (i.e., no profanity). Lacks described her termination hearings before
the school board as a kangaroo court. An appeal to the Federal District court
won an injunction to have her reinstated, but the board rejected it. Her appeal
trial in the Eighth Circuit court in 1998 trapped Berkeley High’s principal on
perjury, but the court nonetheless decided on behalf of the school district. Her
claims to academic freedom in the selection of professionally proven methods
and First Amendment rights to profanity in creative writing were summarily
dismissed. Similar to the Boring v. Buncombe decision, the Eighth Circuit decision rested on Hazelwood—the board’s prohibition of profanity was based on
“legitimate pedagogical concerns” for acceptable social standards in the curriculum (147, F.3d, 718, 1998; Daly, 2001; Lacks, 2001, 2003; Russo & Delon, 1999).
And like Boring, Lacks was denied a hearing by the Supreme Court. In Canada
in 2003, Richard Morin’s use of a video to teach resulted in a similar treatment
and outcome.
Boring’s and Lacks’ cases are significant not only for constitutional and
employment law, but for their power in reminding teachers of the relevance of
academic freedom to everyday practice. As Lacks (2003) concluded:
my story was the same as the myriad of stories like mine in schools
everywhere. . . . Learning fields had become mined battlefields, but it was
going to take my case, and some others, and a handful of catastrophic
school violence incidents before most teachers would understand how
vulnerable they were, and how ineffective this new censorship dogma
would render them. (p. 113)
NEOCONSERVATIVE REVIVAL OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM
From the beginning of Boring’s case, which quickly made headlines in local
papers, conservative Christians rose up in moral outrage against the play
Independence and the teacher’s direction for the drama program. The “Friends

Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers |

and Supporters of Owen High School” took out a print ad in the local newspaper to chastise the teacher as an agitator for profanity, blasphemy, sexual
promiscuity, adultery, and homosexuality. Although Independence and Boring’s
pedagogy may have drawn the wrath of conservatives in previous decades, it
was no coincidence that this occurred in the early 1990s.
These nascent days of a neoconservative revival of academic freedom were
punctuated by President George H. W. Bush’s commencement speech at the
University of Michigan on May 5, 1991. The president noted that “political
correctness [PC] has ignited controversy across the land,” declaring “certain
topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”
Chock-full of contradictions, the address set off a series of articles on PC in
the Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Nearly overnight,
defenders of academic freedom were redefined to what Bush called “disputants”
and sympathizers of PC. However, many educators including Henry Giroux reasoned that the PC battle was less a correction of bad educational practices and
more a strategy for eliminating debate.
September 11, 2001, reinforced conservative backlash and made academic
freedom for K–12 teachers ever more elusive. Parents and students with a
range of political interests took it upon themselves to safeguard the patriotic
curriculum. Civil liberties be damned, numerous corporate groups introduced curriculum to help buttress America’s militaristic counter to terrorism.
Even elementary and middle school students, such as 11-year-old Emil Levitin
(pseudonym, see republicanvoices.org), began to patrol and report what teachers taught in classrooms and how well they entertained conservative or certain
Christian viewpoints.
In September 2003, David Horowitz launched a campaign with parents and
students to promote an academic bill of rights, effectively a manifesto for conservative viewpoints. A “Students for Academic Freedom” Web site and blog
were created at the time, and a year later, a “Parents and Students for Academic
Freedom” (PSAF) campaign and site was launched. The PSAF’s Academic Freedom Code for K–12 Schools spells out a conservative agenda under a disguise of
neutrality:
Whereas parents and taxpayers have a right to expect that taxpayer
resources will be spent on education, not political or ideological indoctrination; Therefore be it resolved that this state’s [board of education or other relevant regulating body] will promulgate clear
regulations for appropriate professional and ethical behavior by teachers licensed to teach in this state; that these guidelines shall make it
clear that teachers in taxpayer supported schools are forbidden to use
their classrooms to try to engage in political, ideological, or religious
advocacy. (Horowitz, 2004)
In response to Horowitz, an Academic Freedom Bill of Rights for postsecondary students was introduced into federal and state legislatures in 2004.
In February 2005, the Florida House of Representatives, for example, passed
the bill through the House Choice and Innovation Committee and the

| Academic Freedom for K–12 Teachers

Education Council. It died on the calendar in May 2005, but similar legislation across the United States has serious implications for both K–12 and
post-secondary education.
In the midst of this neoconservative revival, in October 2005 a North
Carolina high school student was turned over to police by a Wal-Mart clerk for
photocopying an anti-President George W. Bush poster for a civics course assignment. Selina Jarvis, the Currituck County High teacher who gave the Bill
of Rights assignment, was then questioned by the Secret Service. And in early
March 2006, Aurora, Colorado, social studies teacher Jay Bennish was suspended
after a student covertly recorded and circulated a tape of Bennish’s in-class
comparison of the arrogance of the Bush administration’s policies with the
arrogance of Hitler’s Nazi Party. The Fox Network’s coverage and the student’s
tape continue to be downloaded and circulate from YouTube.
CAVEAT PEDAGOGUE
On this battleground of surveillance, economic and military in/security, the
commercialization of education, and neoconservative revival, academic freedom attenuates and censorship proliferates. There is no more important time for
those who can to exercise and defend academic freedom as a viable, necessary
form of activism. Are we not witnessing some of the worst fears of academic
labor where power in the conception of curriculum is invested in administrators and a few appointed or elected officials while execution rests in teachers? As
legal scholar Karen Daly (2001) cautions,
the legal limitations that may be placed on an individual teacher’s classroom speech encourage school boards and administrators to monopolize
discussions about curricular and other pedagogical concerns, crowding out the voices of those on the front lines of education. This micromanagement of the teaching process reduces teacher morale, discourages
innovative educational methods, and creates a disincentive for intelligent,
independent-minded individuals to enter into the profession. (p. 3)
It should be clear that the cultural, historical, and legal dimensions of academic
freedom for K–12 teachers only partially explain why we are at this juncture. Like
education itself, academic freedom is profoundly political. Whether it remains a
taken-for-granted discourse of the left is uncertain. What is for sure, however, is
that the battleground of academic freedom for K–12 teachers can no longer be
dismissed or neglected.
Further Reading: Clarke, P. T., 1998a, Canadian public school teachers and free speech: Part
1—An introduction, Education & Law Journal, 8(3), 295–314; Clarke, P. T., 1998b, Canadian public school teachers and free speech: Part II—An employment law analysis,
Education & Law Journal, 9(1), 43–96; Clarke, P. T., 1999, Canadian public school teachers and free speech: Part III—A constitutional law analysis, Education & Law Journal,
9(3), 315–81; Cossett Lent, R., & Pipkin, G., eds., 2003, Silent no more: Voices of courage in American schools, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Daly, K. C., 2001, Balancing
act: Teachers’ classroom speech and the First Amendment, Journal of Law & Education,

Accountability
30(1), 1–62; Dolmage, W. R., & Clarke, P. T., 2002, Copyright ownership of teacherprepared teaching materials: An examination of issues in the contemporary context, Education & Law Journal, 11(3), 321–341; Findlay, N. M., 2002, Students’ right, freedom of
expression and prior restraint: The Hazelwood decision, Education & Law Journal, 11(3),
343–366; Horowitz, D., 2004, February 13, In defense of intellectual diversity, Chronicle of
Higher Education, 50, B12; Kindred, K., 2006, The teacher in dissent: Freedom of expression and the classroom, Education Law Journal, 15(3), 207–31; Lacks, C., 2003, Words can
never hurt me, in ReLeah Cossett Lent and Gloria Pipkin (eds.), Silent No More: Voices of
Courage in American Schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Lacks, C. 2001, The teacher’s nightmare: Getting fired for good teaching, in J. Daly, P. Schall, & R. Skeele (Eds.),
Protecting the right to teach and learn (pp. 133–141), New York: Teachers College Press;
National Education Association (NEA), 1928, Resolutions, Proceedings and Addresses of
the National Education Association, 66, 351–352; National Education Association (NEA),
1969a, Negotiation agreements: Academic freedom, NEA Research Bulletin, 47(1), 7–10;
National Education Association (NEA), 1969b, Resolutions, Proceedings and Addresses of
the National Education Association, 107, 576; Petrina, S., 2006, Review of School commercialism: From democratic ideal to market commodity, Teachers College Record, retrieved
Nov. 10, 2007 from http://www.tcrecord.org; Pipkin, G., & Cossett Lent, R., 2002, At the
schoolhouse gate: Lessons in intellectual freedom, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann; Russo, C.,
& Delon, F., 1999, Teachers, school boards, and the curriculum, NASSP Bulletin, 83, 22–
29; Smith, H. L., 1936, Report of the committee on academic freedom, Proceedings and
Addresses of the National Education Association, 66, 814–816; Violas, P., 1971, Fear and
the constraints of academic freedom of public school teachers, 1930–1960, Educational
Theory, 21(1), 70–80; Woods, L. B., 1980, Censorship in the schools, Education Digest,
45(5), 10–12; Zirkel, P., 1998, A uniform policy, Phi Delta Kappan, 79, 550–551.

Stephen Petrina

ACCOUNTABILITY
Accountability of schools is a relatively contemporary concern, dating probably to James Coleman’s 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity. This
report examined achievement of children of different races and shifted the attention toward outcomes and away from resources and inputs. That this report was
followed closely by the development of the National Assessment of Educational
Progress in 1970 meant that student test results were available to indicate the
outcomes of schooling. Since then demands for schools to be accountable have
been accentuated by the often-conflicting demands of policymakers and politicians who control the educational purse strings and professional educators with
the knowledge and skills to educate children within a democracy.
THE MEANING OF ACCOUNTABILITY
Accountability is a means of interaction in hierarchical, often bureaucratic,
systems between those who have power and those who do not. Complex hierarchical systems do not permit those in power to be everywhere and do everything at the same time to achieve what they consider to be desirable outcomes.

| 11

| Accountability

Consequently, authority must be delegated to others, which disperses power
to lower levels of the hierarchical system. Those who receive this authority do
not receive it in full, however. Power flows through them, but not from them.
For example, the authority of accountable persons is limited to establishing the
means by which the ends of power shall be achieved.
Specifically, accountability is an economic means of interaction. When power
is delegated and dispersed to those within a hierarchical system there is an expected return from the investment of that power in others. Those to whom power
has been delegated are obligated to answer or render an account of the degree
of success in accomplishing the outcomes desired by those in power. Because of
the diffuse nature of many hierarchical systems, accountability depends on both
surveillance and self-regulation. The power of surveillance is borne out in part
by the spectacle that may result from accounting by those to whom power has
been delegated. In other words, the powerful in small numbers are surveilling
the performance of many (through means such as standardized tests), which in
turn become spectacles observed by the many (as in when schools test scores
are reported on the front page of the newspaper). Self-regulation, that is the
faithful exercise of delegated authority, is in part based on surveillance and the
concomitant possibility of spectacle, but also on the perception of the legitimacy
of those delegating power.
Within systems of accountability delegates of power must answer to some
higher authority, but the identity of this authority is obfuscated when the interests of the public, “the American people,” are used to obscure the special interests
of the few. Additionally, the obfuscation of the identity of those in power and its
purpose (i.e., being in the greater good) also serves to convince the many of
the value of the interests of the few. The implication is that teachers, professors,
public schools, and universities are accountable to the public, but the higher
authority is more specifically the interests of the capitalist state, an inextricable
conglomeration of business and government interests.
PUBLIC STATEMENT
Educational Accountability
American Evaluation Association
November 1, 2006
The American Evaluation Association (AEA) supports educational accountability systems
that are methodologically sound and produce credible, comprehensive, context-sensitive
information. Such systems can strengthen teaching, learning, and educational governance.
With this statement, AEA hopes to contribute to the continuing public debate and evolution
of educational accountability systems and, in concert with our Guiding Principles for Evaluators and our earlier statement on high stakes testing in education, to affirm and extend
AEA’s tradition of encouraging high-quality evaluation.
Good evaluation has much in common with good accountability systems, including responsibility for assuring the highest quality data and their most appropriate use.

Accountability

| 13

Accountability systems are mechanisms by which (1) responsibilities and those responsible
are identified, (2) evidence is collected and evaluated and, (3) based on the evidence, appropriate remedies, assistance, rewards, and sanctions are applied by those in authority. The
relevance, accuracy, and completeness of the evidence are central to appropriate decisionmaking about policies, institutions, programs, and personnel and to the appropriateness of
rewards and sanctions.
The research literature identifies several important concerns that may arise with educational accountability systems, including:
• over-reliance on standardized test scores that are not necessarily accurate measures
of student learning, especially for very young and for historically underserved students, and that do not capture complex educational processes or achievements;
• definitions of success that require test score increases that are higher or faster than
historical evidence suggests is possible; and
• a one-size-fits-all approach that may be insensitive to local contextual variables or to
local educational efforts.
The consequences of an accountability system that is not accurately or completely measuring student learning can be significant. An over-emphasis on standardized tests may lead
to a decrease in the scope or depth of educational experiences for students, if the tests do
not accurately measure the learning of some. In addition, if resource allocations are based
on difficult-to-attain standards of success, an entire educational system may suffer. Consider
in particular those schools that are struggling to serve students who face the greatest ob
stacles to learning. These schools may be at risk for having resources unfairly underestimated or disproportionately withheld.
AEA is dedicated to improving evaluation practice and increasing the appropriate use
of evaluation data. To encourage the highest quality accountability systems, we advocate
approaches that feature rigor and appropriate methodological and procedural safeguards.
AEA encourages movement in the following directions for educational accountability
systems.
• Multiple measures: Empirical evidence from multiple measures, data sources, and
data types is essential to valid judgments of progress and to appropriate consequences. For example, at the local level, if teachers’ assessments as well as standardized test scores were incorporated into accountability systems, this could provide
more detailed information regarding curriculum mastery by students.
• Measurement of individual student progress over time: Many traditional assessments examine current achievement levels only. Including longitudinal data on student progress over time would increase the sensitivity of the system to changes in
learning made by individual students and could help identify the effects of services
provided.
• Context sensitive reporting: Reporting systems that promote awareness of the many
influences affecting outcomes are part of a complete and accurate assessment of
school quality and student achievement. Findings from research and evaluations

| Accountability
should be reported and considered part of a comprehensive educational accountability system.
• Data-based resource allocations: If resource allocations take into consideration the
needs and difficulties that are identified from comprehensive data of many types,
the result could be greater equity in funding and increased support for teachers and
schools that serve low-income and other high-risk students.
• Accessible appeals processes: The opportunity to appeal decisions enhances the
fairness and transparency of an educational accountability system that is itself accountable for the appropriateness of its decisions and the accuracy, completeness,
and relevance of its evidence.
• Public participation and access: Ideally, accountability systems should be developed
and implemented with broad participation by many stakeholders. A system that is
open to public involvement and scrutiny is likely to result in a more complete understanding of educational institutions, their contexts, the nature and success of their
efforts, and the effects and appropriateness of the consequences of accountability
systems.

Educational accountability has the potential to improve the quality of our schools and the
experiences and achievements of our children. The concerns and strategies outlined above
are intended to encourage educational accountability systems that fulfill that potential.

THE MANIFESTATION OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN SCHOOLS
Historically, external forces have often controlled schools: for example, the
Sputnik era brought massive curricular reforms such as Man a Course of Study
(MACOS), Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), and others, and
long before that accountability schemes such as the spelling tests proposed by
Joseph Rice in Boston early in the 1900s to rid schools of undesirable headmasters. Still, the power of accountability in K–12 schools increased most
dramatically in the early 1980s with the publication of A Nation at Risk. That
report linked American educational performance to the decline in the perceived preeminence of the United States in science, technology, and overall
global competitiveness.
The era of big curriculum reform lacked any widespread and sustained
change in schools, in large part because local conditions mitigated efforts to
create standardized content, pedagogy, and classroom processes. The curriculum reform era has been replaced by a standards-based reform era focusing
exclusively on outcomes, a basic utilitarian approach that focuses more on ends
(for example, test scores) than means, but that affects both. Much of the impetus and continued support for accountability comes not from educators, educational researchers, nor the public, but rather from corporate business. In fact,
a main current in the history of education in the United States is the effort of
corporate leaders and their allies in government to shape public education to
the ends of business.

Accountability

The National Education Summits
The four national education summits held since 1989 have been key events
in the rise of the accountability movement in K–12 schools and intensified efforts to transform schools to meet corporate expectations. In 1989, President
George H. W. Bush called the nation’s governors together for the first national
education summit in Charlottesville, VA. They set goals and developed ways to
measure progress, but were stymied by resistance to federal interference in local
school decisions. Seven years later, governors and top corporate leaders met at
IBM’s conference center in Palisades, New York, and developed an approach for
states to accomplish what had eluded participants in the first summit, namely
defining what should be taught in local schools and enforcing curriculum
standardization through state mandated tests—what is called the “standards
movement.”
The most recent summits (in 1999 and 2001) aimed at consolidating “gains”
that have been made in the corporate/state regulation and administration of
knowledge in public schools, including the successful adoption of a national
testing plan, which was President George W. Bush’s top domestic priority when
he took office in 2001. The 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is the most dramatic change in the federal role in
local education since the early 1960s. Ironically, the Republican Party, which has
argued for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, is now responsible
for the greatest ever federal involvement in local schools.
This business-government alliance has, however, encountered public resistance
to its agenda. At the 1999 Summit, Public Agenda, a public opinion research
organization, reported that the movement to raise standards in public schools
strikes a responsive chord with the public, but also warned that the issue of
standards is not immune to the “normal controversies and complications that
accompany any large-scale policy change.”
What is noteworthy about this report, Standards and Accountability: Where
the Public Stands, is its straightforward description of the agenda that must be
pursued if the economic, political elite is to maintain legitimacy as they define
the curriculum and pedagogy of public schools. The number one task according
to Public Agenda is effective propaganda. While the authors of Standards and
Accountability: Where the Public Stands make much of the “established and remarkably stable” support for standards-based educational reform in the United
States, they are mindful of “pitfalls that could derail or unsettle support.” First,
the report warns that standards advocates should expect unhappiness when
the rubber hits the road and students are retained in grade or denied diplomas. Pointing to the dramatic shift in public support for managed health care
as people experienced drive-by surgery and denial of treatment options, Public Agenda warns standards advocates that delivering test score increases must
be accompanied by the “appearance of fairness” in managing the reform effort.
Now that, in the first decade of twenty-first century, thousands of students are
being forced to repeat a grade or are denied a diploma, it is likely that the mere
appearance of fairness will not be enough to stave off opposition to standards

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| Accountability

and the high-stakes tests that accompany them. Parents and teachers are the two
groups most likely to derail the standards train.
The Public Agenda report—in a somewhat quixotic claim—declares that
parents are insignificant players in the standards movement. While parents
generally support standards-based reform, Public Agenda describes parents as,
“not especially well-informed or vigilant consumers, even concerning their own
child’s progress.” This claim conflicts with reports that the once-sporadic resistance to test-driven accountability is blossoming into a broader rebellion. For
example, as a result of parent protests, Los Angeles school officials backed off
a plan to end “social promotions,” and in Massachusetts officials were forced
to redefine cut scores on state tests that otherwise would have prevented as
many as 83 percent of Latino and 80 percent of African American students from
receiving high school diplomas.
While Public Agenda—and perhaps the corporate leadership of the movement—considers parents to be little or no threat to standards-based educational
reform, politicians appear more sensitive to the growing antistandards, antitesting pressures. Test boycotts and other forms of resistance have moved the
governors of Michigan and California to offer students money (“scholarships”
of up to $2,500) for taking or scoring well on state-mandated tests. Indiana
politicians are bracing for an enormous backlash against the state graduation
test, which threatens to keep 50 percent of the seniors in urban districts and a
quarter of seniors statewide from graduating this year.
Teachers are the most significant potential pitfall to the standards movement,
according to the Public Agenda report. While many school administrators and
the top leaders of the teachers’ unions are solidly on the standards bandwagon,
rank-and-file teachers’ pivotal role is rightly acknowledged. Following the lead
of Public Agenda, the top agenda item at the summit was teaching, in particular
devising ways in which teacher preparation and pay can be tied directly to the
standardized curriculum and tests developed by states.
In the end, the national education summits are a portrait of power relations
in neoliberal democracy. Neoliberal democracy reflects our hierarchical society,
where citizens are made to be passive spectators, disconnected from one another and alienated from their own desires, learning, and work. The spectacle
of standards, test scores, and summits obscures the role of parents, teachers,
and students in decision making in public education. This spectacle expresses
what society can do, but in this expression what is permitted with regard to
teaching and learning limits what is possible.
The Liberal-Conservative Alliance
The national education summits and the standards-based educational reforms they have nurtured should be understood both within the context of neoliberalism and the coalescing of historically liberal and conservative political
and economic principles. A hallmark of the standardization craze is its remarkable capacity to unite seemingly disparate individuals and interests around the
“necessity” of national and/or state educational standards—the standardization

Accountability

imperative. Ostensibly strange bedfellows, including for instance E. D. Hirsch
Jr., Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, Gary Nash, Bill Clinton, Edward Kennedy,
both President Bushes, IBM chairman Lou Gerstner, the leaders of the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA), 49
state departments of education, and nearly all governors (Democratic and Republican), join to support standards-based reform and its concomitant “need” to
implement systems of mandated, high-stakes testing. Somehow these “divergent”
educational leaders manage to pull together around standards-based reform as
the medium for “real” public school improvement.
In the past several years the Education Excellence Partnership, which includes
the AFT, NEA, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the
National Alliance of Business, Achieve Inc., the National Governor’s Association, and the U.S. Department of Education, have sponsored over 50 full-page
advertisements in the New York Times promoting the standards agenda and, in
particular, the use of high-stakes tests as means to both “motivate achievement”
and retain children in grade.
Education policy is being crafted in a milieu distinguished by the prostandards consensus among an array of both liberal and conservative players
and exemplifies how elites manufacture crises (for example, the widespread
failure of public education) and consent (for example, the way to save public
education is through standardized schools driven by high-stakes tests). Accordingly, the commitments of the political-pedagogical Right—public school
privatization, the reduction of national financial support for public education,
the promotion of U.S. global corporate hegemony, “creationism,” sociocultural
homogenization around a few dominant “moral” themes, anti-immigration, the
assault on organized labor, school prayer, and so on—blend with those of the
Left—equality, expanded democracy, economic opportunity, social justice, diversity, and so on—to create a clever although fundamentally confusing admixture of contradictions and inconsistencies.
At its core the pro-standards accountability framework can be characterized
by its commitment to a relatively few defining principles. Advocates argue first
that standards-based reform is necessary vis-à-vis school improvement because
the current educational “crisis” is rooted in the inability or unwillingness of
“failing” schools to offer the same “high-quality” programs provided by more
“successful” schools. Since the identified purposes, selected content, teachers,
and modes of evaluation must be better in some (usually wealthy and majority
white) schools than in others (usually less wealthy and majority Latino/a and
African American), the implications are unmistakable. Elite educational leaders and policymakers are saying that “other” schools can indeed improve, but
only to the extent that they become more like “our” schools. Hence, we see the
promotion of a one-sided standardization imperative and the subsequent normalization of whiteness, wealth, and exclusionary forms of knowledge.
In short, the accountability alliance argues, in most cases without any evidence, that: (1) today’s students do not “know enough” (no matter how knowing
enough is defined); (2) curriculum and assessment standards will lead to higher
achievement (although arguably many students achieve highly now—they just

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| Accountability

do so differently or in ways not easily quantified); (3) national and state standards
are crucial in terms of successful U.S.-corporate-global economic competition;
(4) standards-based reform should occur with federal guidance yet be implemented under local control (thus keeping both big government liberals and New
Federalist conservatives happy); and (5) “higher” standards/standardization will
promote equal educational, thus economic and political, opportunity.
SOME SPECIFIC EFFECTS ON SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLING
The national education summits and the standards-based accountability
movement as a whole are quintessential examples of how neoliberal democracy
works to thwart meaningful participation of the many by allowing the few to
speak for all. The objective appearance of accountability schemes, which aim
to reform schools by focusing on test scores, conceals (partially) the fact that
these reforms are the result of the deepening economic inequality and racial
segregation, which are typically coupled with authoritarianism. For example,
in Chicago, many public schools have been militarized—six schools have been
turned into military academies and over 7,000 students in 41 schools are in
Junior ROTC—and teachers have been given scripted lessons, keyed to tests, to
guide their instruction. In a dramatic shift away from democracy, urban schools
systems are being taken over by states. In Detroit, a Democratic mayor and a
Republican governor disbanded the elected school board and appointed a new
board—whose members represent corporate interests and of whom only one is
a city resident. In December 2001, another partnership between a Democratic
mayor and a Republican governor resulted in a state takeover of the 200,000student Philadelphia school system with the intention of giving Edison Schools
Inc., the largest for-profit manager of public schools in the United States, a
six-year, $101 million contract to become a district consultant and run 45 of the
city’s schools.
The primary justification for the seizure or closing of schools and/or the imposition of standardized curriculum has been poor test scores and high dropout
rates. But standardized test scores are less a reflection of ability or achievement
than measures of parental income. For example, someone taking the SAT can
expect to score an extra 30 test points for every $10,000 in parental yearly income. Dropout rates are directly related to poverty, and none of the powers
demanding the school seizure or standardization have addressed the broader
question of poverty.
The accountability movement and its dependence on standardized testing is
not only good for business, but also good business. While a sociopolitical agenda
(of mixed perspectives) drives these reforms in education, they also present the
opportunity for much enhanced profit making in textbook, educational materials,
and test sales and increased stock values. These are corporate business interests
intertwined with government officials in no less significant ways than other
aspects of public life, such as energy or the environment. There are three major
textbook/standardized testing companies in the United States (McGraw-Hill,
Harcourt, and Houghton Mifflin), and all will see sales and profits skyrocket as

Afterschool Programs

NCLB is implemented. George W. Bush’s entanglement with Enron is rivaled by
his entanglement with McGraw-Hill, one based on several generations of mutual
support between a family of politicians and a family of publishers. Even not-forprofit organizations such as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) have ousted
their academic CEO (Nancy Cole), replaced her with a marketing executive (Kurt
Landgraf), and created a for-profit subsidiary, ETS K–12 Works, which will sell
tests and testing services to elementary and secondary schools.
Accountability is not inherently bad—the public has a right to know that schools
are educating the nation’s young, and schools have a right to know that public
officials are ensuring that the resources and capabilities to provide quality education are in place. Current forms of accountability are, however, one-directional
and conceive of the purposes and outcomes of schooling in simplistic terms.
Further Reading: Carnoy, M., 2003, The new accountability: High schools and high stakes
testing, London: Routledge Falmer Press; Dorn, S., 1998, The political legacy of school
accountability systems, Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 6(1), retrieved March 4,
2007, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v6n1.html; Jones, K., ed., 2006, Democratic school
accountability, Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield.

Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross

AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS
Afterschool programs are a growing part of the educational landscape in the
United States. While receiving broad support from parents, schools, policymakers, and the general public, there remains a great deal of controversy concerning
the purpose of afterschool programs. Are they meant to boost school success,
provide supervision for working parents, or prevent risky behavior?
There are three main arenas of influence for afterschool programs: education,
child care, and prevention. Some supporters promote afterschool programs as
an education strategy, designed to raise the achievement of students, especially
those failing or at risk of failing high-stakes tests. Others point to the importance of adult supervision for children during the many hours when parents are
working and school is out. Women’s success in the workforce, including that
of women transitioning off welfare, is dependent on having places for children
to stay and caregivers to watch over them after school. Finally, there is a long
history of programs designed to prevent problem behaviors in young people,
especially adolescents, bolstered by evidence that most youth crime takes place
in the afterschool hours.
AFTERSCHOOL: THREE PURPOSES, THREE HISTORIES
These various conceptions of the role of afterschool programs grow out of
three disparate movements, each suited to a different purpose. The oldest afterschool programs began as part of a risk-reduction strategy, a way to keep young
people out of trouble and constructively occupied. This approach was popular
during the immigration waves of the early twentieth century, when settlement

| Afterschool Programs

houses “Americanized” youth, providing recreation and social services to help
them and their families acclimate to a new nation, and by the 1980s had resulted
in funding for pregnancy prevention, drop-out prevention, drug-abuse prevention, and so on.
While prevention represented an improvement over a purely interventionist approach to youth problems, practitioners realized that the narrow funding
that drove their work needed to be linked, as it all focused on the same group of
“at-risk” students, ignored the larger societal framework that led to their vulnerability, and assumed that economically disadvantaged young people had nothing
to offer but trouble. The youth development movement has worked to transform
the “at-risk” approach to one of “at-promise,” focusing on building the strength
and engagement of young people, often with a focus on the arts or community
change.
In the meantime, white, middle-class mothers were joining their African
American and immigrant peers in the labor force in increasing numbers, beginning back with “Rosie the Riveter.” As their child aged out of early care and into
the school years, there often was nowhere to go and no one to take care of them
during the many hours when parents were working and schools were not in
session, leading to the birth of “school-age child care.”
More recently, in an era of high-stakes testing and intensive accountability
for schools, afterschool programs have emerged as a promising strategy for
promoting academic achievement. As a relatively low-cost and easy to institute
educational reform, afterschool programs have the ability to extend children’s
learning time and to do so in innovative ways, since they are less encumbered by
institutional structures and requirements. While decades of attempts to reduce
the achievement gaps between races and classes have had only incremental
results, there is strong evidence that most of the gap is due to experiences and influences from outside of school, including caring adults, access to extracurricular
and enrichment activities, and social capital. Afterschool and summer programs
are increasingly seen as a potential way to “level the playing field,” providing
economically disadvantaged, African American, and Latino students with access
to the same opportunities enjoyed by their middle-class and white peers.
THE PROGRAM LANDSCAPE TODAY
Despite the existence of programs in the education, child care, and youth
development sectors, there are still many children left unserved. According
to a survey by the Afterschool Alliance, more than 14 million K–12 youth are
responsible for taking care of themselves during the afterschool hours. African
American and Hispanic youth spend significantly more time unsupervised.
Nearly four million (26 percent) of the children in self-care would be likely to
participate in an afterschool program if one were available in the community.
National household surveys indicate that approximately 6.5 million children
(11 percent of the 57 million youth in grades K–12) participate in afterschool
programs. Younger children make up the largest segment of afterschool program participants. Afterschool programs serving youth and families are offered

Afterschool Programs

through many types of organizations including not-for-profit, for-profit, and
public agencies. Programs take place in public schools, libraries, parks, sports/
recreation facilities, faith-based organizations, community centers, housing development centers, cultural organizations, and private schools/agencies. While
each historical strand of afterschool—school-age child care, youth development,
and education—encompasses a wide diversity, there are also features that distinguish these prototypes.
By 1991, over 50,000 school-age child care programs were serving 1.7 million children. These programs, sponsored by a wide variety of providers from
national organizations such as the YMCA to small churches, often depend on
child care subsidies from CCDF or other state child care funds as well as parent
fees to provide supervision after school hours, during school vacations, and in
the summer. Children who attend school-age child care programs are generally
in early elementary years and often find an environment similar to that of an
early childhood program, including “soft” reading or resting areas, time for free
or outdoor play, and relatively close connections between staff and parents.
Youth development programs include an extremely wide diversity of models,
ages, and missions. Some are prevention-oriented programs focused on reducing risky behavior such as drug and tobacco use, while others bring teens into
the arts or social action projects. Programs tend to be focused on older youth,
including middle school and especially high school, and have a broad array of
developmental goals for youth, often with a focus on strong mentoring relationships between staff and youth. While there is no nationally representative data
on participation in such programs, it has been estimated that youth-serving
organizations serve nearly 40 million children and adolescents each year.
The prototypical education-oriented afterschool program consists of teachers and paraprofessionals from the school day working extra hours to help with
homework and provide remedial instruction. However, while many school-run
programs may follow this model, others, including those funded by state and
federal community learning center grants, often collaborate with community
resources to offer a wide variety of activities and opportunities. Programs serve
a wide age range, typically only open after school on days when school is in
session. Whatever the model, though, these programs share a common goal:
enhanced achievement in core academic subjects.
THE POLICY LANDSCAPE
The two major sources of federal funding for afterschool programs reflect—
and contribute to—the segmented nature of the afterschool field. Child Care and
Development Fund (CCDF), federal block grant subsidies from the Department
of Health and Human Services and Twenty-First Century Community Learning
Centers (21st CCLC) grants from the Department of Education are the largest
providers of school-age child care and educational afterschool programs, respectively. The Finance Project estimates that in 2005, the federal government invested 1.2 billion dollars in CCDF funding for afterschool programs for children
ages 5–12 and one billion dollars in 21st CCLC grants to afterschool programs.

| Afterschool Programs

The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) represents a significant public investment—$4.8 billion in federal dollars and an estimated $2.2 billion in
state funds in FY2003. In addition to these figures, many states are transferring
significant amounts of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds
to CCDF, and are directly spending TANF on afterschool programs and child
care. Federal law mandates that CCDF funds may be used to provide child care
support for children up to the age of 13 (the age may be extended to 19 in certain circumstances). In FY2001, 36 percent of 1.8 million children receiving
CCDF subsidies were school-aged; another 10 percent of the subsidies were for
kindergarten-age children.
The CCDF block grant supports subsidies, in the form of contracts with providers or vouchers for families, to low-income families with work-related child
care needs, including those transitioning off welfare. As long as the family maintains income eligibility, the child is able to continue receiving care until he or
she reaches the age of 13. Programs gain a relatively stable revenue stream in
exchange for meeting state licensing guidelines and providing services that meet
the needs of working parents (that is, until 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. on school days and
eight to ten hours during school holidays and vacations).
The Department of Education had little formal involvement in afterschool
programs until the mid-1990s. Prior to the 1990s, some local school districts
and schools used a portion of their Title I dollars to support extended learning
opportunities for low-income children. In 1994, the 21st Century Community
Learning Centers Act (21st CCLC) was introduced; and in 2003, 1.4 million children and youth were attending these programs in approximately 6,800 schools
in 1,597 communities across the country. Federal funding for the 21st CCLC
program began at $750,000 in 1995 and had grown to nearly one billion dollars
in FY 2003, where it has remained nearly level.
The 21st CCLC program has been referred to as the fastest-growing grant in
U.S. history and has created a vast new system of school-linked programs across
the continent, which has resulted in the development of models, professional
development, research, recognition, and curricula that benefits the broader
field. At the same time, 21st CCLC funding comes in the form of grants that last
for a limited duration, typically three to five years, and sustainability has been a
major challenge. Few programs are open during school vacations or summers,
and children may only attend a few hours or days per week, causing challenges
for working parents and limiting the effects on participants.
Many states and cities have also joined the afterschool bandwagon, whether
for purposes of reducing juvenile crime, moving mothers from welfare to work,
or boosting academic test scores. Many states, including Georgia, Maryland,
South Carolina, Washington, D.C., New Hampshire, and Delaware, use state
dollars to supplement funding for programs, while Californians passed Proposition 49 in 2002, which promises to boost state funds by as much as $550 million.
Most large and medium-sized cities have also launched significant afterschool
initiatives, including Los Angeles; Columbus, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina;
Kansas City, Missouri; New York; Detroit; and many others.

Afterschool Programs
Table A.1

The Afterschool Program Landscape
Education
After School

Major Goals

Accountability
Framework

Primary Stafﬁng
Major Funding
Sources

Improve academic
achievement
Decrease achieve
ment gaps

School-Age Child
Care Programs

Supervision for
children of working
parents
Support child
development
State 21st CCLC
Licensing
evaluation measures Accreditation
Changes in test
scores
School teachers
Child care staff
Paraprofessionals
21st Century Com
Child Care
munity Learning
Development Fund
Centers
Parent fees

Youth Development
Programs
Promote youth
development
Prevent risky
behaviors
Outcomes-based
evaluation

Youth workers

Philanthropic funding
Public crime and
drug prevention
funding
Primary Population Elementary and
Elementary school
Middle school and
Served
middle school
children with working
high school age
students; lowparents
youth; often lowperforming students
income
Hours
Open on days when
Open 3 or more hours Typically a few days
school is in session;
all days when school
per week or on
range from 5 days to is in session, full days weekends/evenings
just a few hours per
(8–10 hours) during
week
school holidays and
vacations

THE EFFECTS OF PARTICIPATION IN AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS
What changes for young people who participate in an afterschool program?
One thing is clear from existing research: spending time without adult supervision during the hours after school puts children at risk. Especially likely to end
up in trouble—whether in the form of substance abuse, behavioral problems,
or school truancy—are young people who are “hanging out” in neighborhoods
with their peers.
Beyond safety and reduction of risk, it is less clear exactly how youth benefit from participation in afterschool programs. Despite the expectation that
attending an afterschool program will boost student performance, research on
the academic effects of afterschool programs has been mixed, with some studies finding benefits for youth in math, reading, and other scores while others
find no positive outcomes. In addition, the wide variety of program types, outcomes measured, and methodologies employed make comparison exceedingly
difficult.

| Afterschool Programs

The major national study of educational afterschool programs, Mathematica’s
evaluation of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, had disappointing
results for those in the field who promoted afterschool programs as a “silver bullet” answer to low student performance. Seeking evidence of academic effects, the
study found little support for afterschool programs as an achievement-booster,
although parent involvement did increase, which may lead to positive outcomes
in the long run. However, these weak results have been questioned in light of
many other studies indicating positive educational outcomes, whether on direct measures such as achievement in reading and/or math or on school-linked
outcomes such as attendance and attitude toward school. Researchers attribute
this discrepancy to a number of methodological problems, but perhaps most
importantly, the fact that the Mathematica study did not take into consideration
variations in quality and quantity (hours of service) between programs.
While studies examining the academic effects of afterschool program participation are somewhat mixed, the research literature suggests that afterschool
programs are especially suited to promoting the social and emotional skills of
young people. Studies have found that participation in afterschool programs can
lead to a stronger sense of competence, better social skills, closer connections
with adults and school, and enhanced work habits. The youth development literature emphasizes the importance of these attributes for healthy development,
while education researchers note the foundational aspect of engagement in
learning to long-term school success.
While research points to the potential of afterschool programs to benefit
young people, there is less evidence that these positive outcomes are likely to be
experienced by most of the young people currently participating such programs.
Afterschool programs face daunting challenges in meeting their promise for
youth. Given the many challenges, including lack of sustainable funding, low
wages, and the part-time nature of afterschool employment, many programs are
barely beyond crisis management and have little capacity to plan and implement
effective curricula.
ATTRIBUTES OF EFFECTIVE AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS
What makes an afterschool program “work?” Research on the quality of
effective programs is of very recent origin. It is common sense that low-quality
programs are unlikely to produce positive outcomes for youth. Many studies
may be mixing low- and high-quality programs and therefore finding little evidence of program effects.
In two studies of elementary school children, Deborah Vandell found that
positive interactions between staff and children, as well as between children and
peers, were related to successful functioning. A team of researchers from the
RAND Corporation reviewed all existing studies of afterschool program quality in 2001. While concluding that there were few studies emulating high scientific standards, the RAND researchers found a number of program practices
that the data supported as good indicators of program quality, including a high
level of staff training, education, and compensation, low child-to-staff ratio,

Afterschool Programs

age-appropriate activities, positive emotional climate, communication with
school and families, and community partnerships.
In 2002, the National Research Council published Community Programs to
Promote Youth Development, which identified eight features of positive developmental settings: physical and social safety; appropriate structure; supportive
relationships; opportunities to belong; positive social norms; support for efficacy and mattering; opportunities for skill-building; and integration of family, school, and community efforts. While the National Research Council book
bases its recommendations on knowledge about child and adolescent development, an accumulating series of afterschool program research and evaluation
studies have been adding to our understanding of how program quality leads to
positive outcomes for youth.
More recently, several important studies have attempted to disentangle the
complex levels and features of programs that produce positive outcomes for
children and youth. The Massachusetts Afterschool Research Study (MARS)
obtained information on program characteristics, program quality, and youth
outcomes from nearly 4,000 youth between kindergarten and eighth grade attending 78 diverse afterschool programs across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Through the use of multilevel modeling, a sophisticated statistical
strategy, the researchers found that staff engagement led to youth engagement,
which in turn was the critical pathway to youth outcomes. The five youth
outcomes included in the study were: increased initiative, better quality homework, stronger relationships with adults, stronger relationships with peers, and
better behavior. Programs with highly qualified staff were most successful in
producing the high-quality programs that led to good outcomes. Strong leadership in the form of an experienced, educated site director, higher staff compensation, strong connections to schools, good communication with families, and
more staff training were also linked to higher program quality in the study.
A six-year evaluation by Policy Studies Associates of projects under the auspices of the After School Corporation (TASC) in New York City included 96
afterschool program sites serving 52,000 participants in a school-based model.
A substudy examined the characteristics of 10 afterschool programs that had particularly strong contributions to student’s academic performance. Interestingly,
these programs were not ones with the greatest focus on academic outcomes,
but rather programs that used effective strategies to promote children’s development in all areas. The evaluators note five especially important characteristics of
such programs: (1) a broad array of enrichment opportunities; (2) opportunities
for skill building and mastery; (3) intentional relationship-building; (4) a strong,
experienced site manager supported by a trained and supervised staff; and
(5) administrative support from the sponsoring agency.
A study sponsored by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional
Learning (CASEL) provides new insight into the important role played by
appropriate, well-implemented curricula. In this meta-analysis of existing highquality studies, positive outcomes for youth in the areas of personal and social
skills were associated with programs’ use of four research-based approaches
to skill development: sequential, active, focused, and explicit. That is, there is

| Afterschool Programs

a sequential set of activities designed to build skills, the skills are developed
through engagement in active learning, there is at least one program component
focus on developing social or personal skills, and the targeted skills are explicitly
communicated to all those participating.
Together the MARS, CASEL, and TASC studies provide important insights
into characteristics of effective afterschool programs. Programs must have staff
with the knowledge and capacity to carry out well-planned, intentional learning activities with youth. Not only that, but they must be able to develop strong
relationships with children that build and strengthen over time. Interestingly, the
findings for academic and nonacademic outcomes are very similar. In the TASC
study, programs that did not have a strong academic focus were most successful
in raising school performance. What this research suggests is that strong staff and
good curricula is necessary for all programs, whatever their intended outcomes.
MANY PURPOSESONE PROGRAM?
Many afterschool programs are moving to combine the “best of both worlds,”
in recognition that if children are to succeed in school, they need strong relationships with adults, motivation to learn, positive behavior, and a sense of
mastery, which are all outcomes of high-quality afterschool programs. Afterschool programs that look and feel too much like school aren’t likely to benefit
children very much, in part because children will have little reason to attend. On
the other hand, purely recreational or custodial programs may succeed in keeping children safe, but are otherwise unlikely to benefit them developmentally or
academically. Research suggests that the very same qualities promote positive
outcomes in all areas of development: highly qualified staff; small group sizes
and low ratios that permit the development of strong relationships; and active,
intentional, well-planned curricula.
Recent research on how people learn supports these evaluation findings.
Learning isn’t just a matter of taking in new information; knowledge is organized into conceptual frameworks based on past experience and understandings.
Children (and adults) learn by fitting new information into a framework that
they have already developed. Afterschool programs, with their relative flexibility
in scheduling, content, and accessing community resources, at their best provide fertile ground for building children’s background knowledge, deepening
their understanding, and broadening their horizons.
The strongest evidence to date suggests that afterschool programs can play a
powerful role in children’s development, but it is not necessarily the same role
that is played by schooling. Afterschool programs rely on different staff, have
different hours, and have a great deal more flexibility than schools. The fact that
youth often attend programs over several years creates opportunities for strong
relationships to develop with adult role models, a key factor in educational success. In addition, the relatively flexible circumstances of afterschool programs can
support the best of informal learning modalities, including project-based learning, community service learning, experiential learning, science inquiry-based
learning, and the arts. At the same time, in order to reach this potential, programs

Alternative Schools | 27

will need adequate, sustainable financial and institutional resources, which are
not typical at this time.
Further Reading: Birmingham, J., Pechman, E., Russell, C. R., & Mielke M., 2005, Shared
features of high-performing after-school programs: A follow-up to the TASC evaluation,
Washington, DC: Policy Studies Associates; Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P., 2007, The
impact of after-school programs that promote personal and social skills, Chicago, IL: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL); Halpern, R., 2003,
Making play work: The promise of after-school programs for low-income children, New
York: Teacher’s College Press; Miller, B. M., 2003, Critical hours: Afterschool programs
and educational success, Quincy, MA: Nellie Mae Education Foundation; National Institute on Out-of-School Time and Intercultural Center for Research and Education,
2005, Pathways to success for youth: What counts in afterschool? Boston: United Way of
Massachusetts Bay; National Research Council, 2000, How people learn: Brain, mind,
experience, and school, Washington, DC: National Academy Press; Vandell, D. L., Pierce,
K. M., & Dadisman, K., 2005, Out-of-school settings as a developmental context for
children and youth, in R. Kail (ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior,
Vol. 33, Cambridge, MA: Elsevier Press.

Beth M. Miller
ALTERNATIVE SCHOOLS
We are approaching 50 years since the first alternative schools were launched,
and one can point to a number of reforms adopted by mainstream institutions
that are fairly directly traceable to alternative schools. Yet these schools have
still not attained institutional legitimacy within education, and snide comments
are still often tossed their way. For example, the Brooklyn Free School, one type
of alternative, earned an Associated Press story in late November 2006. But the
title one newspaper gave it was Free Schools: Anarchy at Work—hardly a respectful characterization, and particularly for a school that prides itself on being
a democratic community. So after almost half a century, the genre—if not all
its practices—remains a field of pedagogical contention. Its advocates include
some of today’s leading names in education, and the same can be said of its
detractors.
BACKGROUND
The first alternative schools were sired by the 1960s and carried many of the
themes and emphases of that tumultuous decade. Many of these first alternatives,
which began outside the public schools, sought to free and liberate children from
the stultifying, oppressive institutions in which they claimed to labor, and instead
to make schools inviting, fascinating places. Other alternatives focused explicitly
on the poor and minority children of the cities and the South and sought to extend the benefits of education to this population. Still others were not so much
interested in benefiting individual children as in rebuilding all of society. And
people with all three visions of what the fundamental mission of a school should
be were starting what came to be called “alternative schools” in the 1960s.

| Alternative Schools

As the 1970s dawned, public school systems began launching their own
alternative schools, and although each was unique, they tended to differ systematically according to their locations and circumstances. Those established in
affluent communities, for example in suburbs, tended to be the kind of alternative schools created to attract, challenge, and engage able students. They often
had innovative curricula and creative teachers who, like their students, wanted
something more than traditional schools appeared to offer. These schools often
attracted some of the ablest of students, and many were able to claim remarkable
achievements on the part of their students and graduates.
The alternatives begun in the inner cities were quite another story. Their mission was to try to bring education to populations that schools customarily had
failed. As a result, they were often dealing with students who had little support
at home and who needed a great deal of remedial work. These were the first
schools for the “at risk,” although the appellation didn’t come until later and
even today is rather rarely claimed by genuine alternative schools, which are
more likely to prefer a heterogeneous student population and to share the stance
of the principal of one such school who insisted, “It is our school and its way of
teaching that is alternative, not our students.”
Both sorts of alternative schools sketched above were likely to be launched by
people with progressivist leanings. If they were politically inspired, the inspiration was likely to come from the political Left, and if solely pedagogically inspired,
from the “pedagogical Left,” such as John Dewey or such then-recently emerged
gurus as A. S. Neill, John Holt, and Paul Goodman. Not surprisingly, then, it was
not long after public schools began establishing alternatives in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, before educational conservatives began asking for their own
alternatives.
Two books appearing in the early 1970s lent considerable, though indirect,
support to the establishing of alternatives of both types—indeed, of all types.
Mario Fantini’s Public Schools of Choice was welcomed in 1973 by espousers of
the 1960s sorts of alternatives (of which Fantini, himself, was one). It argued
that different youngsters need different kinds of school environments in order to
succeed. A year later, David Tyack’s The One Best System (1974) underscored the
arbitrary nature of the assumption that there is any single best way to organize
and deliver education. Both books were invoked to urge that alternative schools
become the norm and that every public school in effect become the alternative to all the others. The new “best system,” in other words, would be marked
by enormous diversity as well as by choice, with families selecting the school
program and environment they found most compatible.
The alternative schools idea rather quickly proved adaptable to a variety of
purposes beyond the several rather diverse ones for which these schools had
originally been established. In the early 1970s, the federal government, seeking ways to refashion entire school systems, set up the Experimental Schools
Program, which funded three school districts to create multiple alternative
schools. Under the program, whole sets of alternatives were established as models for school change, in Minneapolis, Berkeley, and Tacoma.
In 1976, the federal government offered a broader, major stimulus to the
alternatives and options idea when it began funding magnet schools under the

Alternative Schools | 29

Emergency School Aid Assistance Act. Although magnet schools and alternatives
are not synonymous, some people tended to see magnets as alternatives created
to stimulate voluntary racial desegregation. Despite important organizational
differences—with magnets typically inspired by and often controlled by the central office, and alternatives more typically grassroots generated and operated—a
number of alternative schools have been funded as magnets.
There have also been a number of federal and state initiatives for alternatives in the interests of preventing school vandalism and violence, juvenile crime
and delinquency, and truancy and dropping out. In Hawaii, alternative schools
were begun for a somewhat different reason: to address the needs of secondary,
at-risk students. Then, in 1994, when a federal court ordered the state’s public
schools to improve their provisions for children needing mental health services,
that served to impose a particular slant on the alternative schools. The State Department of Education rushed to expand what had been a pilot program for
special education students into a statewide program for all students, in order
to take advantage of the funding opportunities opened by the court order. The
pilot program had been designed by a mental health expert, and across the state,
today’s alternative schools still bear that influence.
TODAY
Alternative education is not as prominent today as it was three or four decades
ago. One does not hear as much about it or hear the label as often. Yet it is certainly here. In addition to numerous state organizations, there are two national
organizations of alternative school educators, the Alternative Education Resource
Organization (AERO), with almost 400 member schools and organizations and
an e-newsletter with 7,000 subscribers; and the International Alternative Learning Association (IALA). For the last several years, AERO has held an annual conference with the last one drawing about 350 people from the United States and
elsewhere. There is also an annual IDEC, or International Democratic Education
Conference, drawing a very similar audience, since “democratic education” is a
variant of alternative education, as will be seen below. The IDEC conference,
which this year drew 300 attendees, is truly international, being sponsored by
a different school, in a different country, each year. So far, the annual meetings
have been held in Israel, Japan, Germany, India, the United States, New Zealand,
England, Ukraine, Austria, and Australia.
But despite such a widespread following, it appears that alternative schools
around the world are often in difficulty. Nowhere, it would seem, have they arrived at institutional legitimacy, and they still often have to struggle against local
authorities to remain open.
Why is this the case, with an educational genre that is far from new, and which
has, over the years, received tremendous support from foundations and numerous government agencies? One reason is that after almost half a century we still
have no accepted definition of alternative schools or alternative education—and
a wide range of institutions identifying themselves this way, with the result that
failures of one type of “alternative” are erroneously and unfairly attached to a
school or program of another sort altogether. This is too bad, because there are

| Alternative Schools

striking differences and even contradictions among schools that go by the name
“alternative.”
ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL TYPES
Three distinct archetypes—with different sources, different missions, and different audiences—can be used to describe alternative school types. The alternatives designed to provide a more challenging and compelling education to
students and teachers seeking it are termed Type I alternatives. These are the
schools that are likely to be found in affluent communities and populated by
middle-class and upper-middle-class students (although perhaps the best known
Type I alternatives are among those established in District 4, Manhattan’s Spanish
Harlem, in the 1970s, where it was the explicit wish of the founder, Deborah
Meier, to provide for poor children the kind of education she had enjoyed as a
child attending a private progressive school). Education in these schools is highly
invitational, with strong emphasis being placed on motivation, and accordingly,
it is likely to feature strikingly innovative curricula and instructional methods.
In tone, Type II alternatives are the exact opposite of Type I schools. Whereas
those of the Type I variety work at being chosen by those who want to affiliate with them, students (and perhaps sometimes teachers) are “sentenced” to
Type II alternatives. Variants of Type II programs include in-school suspension
programs, “cool-out” rooms, and longer-term placements for the behaviorally
disruptive. Type II programs are assumed to be temporary—at least if successful—and typically offer time off (i.e., a shortened sentence) for good behavior.
Behavioral modification is usually the Type II program’s focus, and instead of
any attempt at a novel educational program, these alternatives often try to have
students perform the work of the regular classes. Since many of the students
assigned to these programs may be behind academically, Type II alternatives
sometimes offer a heavily “basics-oriented” curriculum emphasizing factual
knowledge, elementary skills, and rote learning.
Type III programs are typically nonpunitive and more positive and compassionate in orientation. They are designed for students thought to need extra help,
remediation, or rehabilitation—academic, social, emotional, or all three. If jail is
an apt metaphor for Type II alternatives, therapy seems appropriate for Type III
programs. In theory, after sufficient treatment, successful students will be able
to return to the mainstream and continue in the regular program. There is no
special sort of academic program that is specific to Type III schools, but most
reflect an emphasis on the school as community, since such a focus is thought to
stimulate social and emotional development. The Hawaii alternative education
program described above calls for Type III schools.
Alternative schools are usually identifiable as one or another of these
three types, although particular programs may be something of a mix. A
compassionate staff, for example, can give a Type II program overtones of Type
III, despite official purposes. Or a committed Type III staff may undertake a bit
of the programmatic innovation that distinguishes a Type I alternative. But even
so, the fundamental type goes far in determining such central features of an

Alternative Schools |

alternative school as how its students arrive there (by choice, sentence, or referral); how long they stay and whether or not they can remain to graduate; and
how the alternative school itself will be evaluated.
Perhaps most basic of all the differences among the three types is the relationship they assume between student behavior and performance and achievement
on the one hand, and school program and environment on the other. Type I
programs assume that by changing the school, student performance and accomplishment can be changed. In contrast, both Type II and Type III alternatives
assume that the reasons for student misbehavior and failure lie within the individual; so it is the student who must be changed, not the school, in order to
bring about improvement.
RECORDS OF THE THREE
Not surprisingly, the track records of the three types of alternatives differ. It
is difficult to find any positive evidence for Type II alternatives. They seem to
serve no positive purpose for those sentenced to them, only perhaps for ridding conventional classrooms of disruptive youngsters. A now classic study of
a Florida program assigning students to in-school suspension programs concluded that the almost 58,000 such assignments made during one school year
had accomplished no positive purpose whatsoever. Comparisons with districts
without such programs demonstrated that there was no correlation between
having them and lowering dropout, referral, corporal punishment, suspension,
and expulsion rates—the problems that Type II alternatives had been launched
to solve.
The record of Type III programs is better. Student behavior and accomplishment usually improve under the compassionate, supportive conditions these
programs provide. However, the improvements are likely to fade once the student has been returned to the regular school. The studies documenting such
outcomes typically conclude that the alternative school the student attended has
failed—has failed, that is, to successfully remediate the student—rather than
what has been documented, that the student can succeed in an alternative environment. (Thus, the very evidence documenting the need for such school variants is sometimes read as testimony to their failure.)
The record of Type I programs is quite a different story, sometimes traced all
the way back to the famous Eight-Year Study of the 1930s, when the college success of 1,500 students attending progressive schools was compared with that of
1,500 graduates of conventional high schools. The progressive school graduates
earned better grades and more academic honors and displayed more intellectual curiosity, higher levels of critical-thinking ability, greater resourcefulness
in responding to challenges, and more concern for the world around them. Psychologists have also established that autonomy-supportive environments, which
Type I alternatives typically constitute, are associated with greater conceptual
learning than are more structured and directive environments.
One of the Type I alternative school success stories that is often cited is
Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) in East or Spanish Harlem—a

| Alternative Schools

neighborhood where crime, drugs, and violence abound. In the 1990s, five years
after its establishment, this school enrolled a population that was 90–97 percent
minority, with 60 percent of its students coming from poverty homes. Yet its attendance rates were above city averages and its suspensions below. Ninety-two
percent of those who began the school year at CPESS completed it there, compared with 71 percent in other high schools, and there were no dropouts from
the class that graduated in June 1994. In the 1990s, approximately 90 percent of
the school’s graduates were going on to four-year colleges.
Although CPESS is clearly an outstanding case, it would appear that a number of Type I alternative schools are outstanding even if less renowned. It is not
unusual for researchers and evaluators to receive testimony of amazing individual transformations that such schools have brought about—with youngsters
who had detested school suddenly anxious to attend, and poor students suddenly transformed into well-performing ones.
And what is it about a Type I alternative school that could account for such
changes? Different advocates tend to locate the crux of success in different features. Thus, some alternative school educators insist it lies in the freedom such
schools permit, others attribute their success to their holistic preoccupation,
while still others claim it lies in their democratic orientation. There are many
varieties of alternative schools. A recent list assembled by the new editor of
Education Revolution included the following: Montessori, Waldorf, Democratic
schools, Quaker or Friends schools, Reggio Emilia schools, charter schools,
magnet schools, progressive schools, folk schools, and holistic schools. Core
principles for an alternative school are:
• Offers a personalized education for each student with a focus on the academic, social and emotional needs of each, and has systems in place to
address those needs as part of daily practice.
• Is chosen by families, students, and staff for its distinct philosophy, culture,
mission, and practices.
• Employs authentic assessment of student learning, without sorting or
stratifying.
• Has a strong identity shaped by the community it serves.
• Articulates and models shared values.
• Includes and responds to the voices of all its constituents by distributing
leadership.
• Is less bureaucratic and more personal than schools generally are.
• Introduces and experiments with pedagogical practices.
If some of these principles sound familiar, it is because they have been
picked up and featured by a number of other educational movements. So ironically, although alternative schools themselves may still be the object of battles,
considerable parts of what they stand for have been incorporated as features of
programs that have won wide acceptance and approval.
Further Reading: Fliegel, S., with MacGuire, J., 1993, Miracle in East Harlem: The fight for
choice in public education, New York: The Manhattan Institute; Mintz, J., ed., 1994, The
alternative education handbook, New York: Macmillan; Raywid, M. A., 1995, Alternatives

Alternatives to Schooling | 33
and marginal students, in M. C. Wang and M. C. Reynolds (Eds.), Making a difference
for students at risk: Trends and alternatives (pp. 119–155), Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin
Press.

Mary Anne Raywid

ALTERNATIVES TO SCHOOLING
The history of deschooling is necessarily tied to the history of compulsory
state schooling in the West, which has a surprisingly short trajectory, especially
in North America.
The idea that the State should take responsibility for what children must
learn has its origins in Platonic theory. In the Republic Plato suggested that in an
ideal State philosopher-kings would have total control of education, streaming
students based on collective needs and perceived abilities. Plato’s scheme was
entirely theoretical, but at least one Athenian lawmaker, Solon (638–558 b.c.)
had already tried to legislate that all freeborn boys would have to learn to swim
and play the lyre, but to little avail, and Greek education was a private matter, left
to families, tutors, and lyceums.
Throughout the span of the Roman Empire, various emperors attempted
to institute mandatory educational reforms, hoping to replicate Athenian intellectual vitality, but with little success. Hadrian (76–138 a.d.) and Marcus
Aurelius (121–180 a.d.) were two notable examples who attempted to create
common schools for children of peasants and the poor, with mandated curriculums, but these initiatives too fell short, in large part due to jurisdictional diffusion. After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were few significant Western
efforts to compulsorize children’s education, and it was largely left a private,
and typically religious, matter for a millennia.
It is during the Enlightenment that the first real roots of our modern
school system find soil. As Western European culture began to pull itself
out from the weight of religious hegemony, many prominent intellectuals
and writers began to posit that State control of education was the only way
to forge a citizenry whose loyalty would be to the nation, not the church.
Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, and many others began to devise
schemes by which the State could direct and organize its subjects, inculcating them with progressive and humanistic ideals and a fidelity to the national good.
Progressives who argued that only with compulsory schools could ideals of
equality and equity be disseminated carried much of the argument for what was
called national education. The most prominent early opponent was William
Godwin, who is also often called the first anarchist. He suggested that governments would hardly fail to use compulsory schools to entrench their power and
domination.
One person who was forcefully affected by the arguments for national
schools was Napoleon, who set out to transform the French educational system. He began to reorganize schools and universities into replications of military structure, in regiment-sized classes, with work done to the sound of a

| Alternatives to Schooling

drum and uniforms for authorized teachers. His argument was that a strong
and loyal population could be made, not just hoped for.
This line of thinking was confirmed during the wars of 1806 when Napoleon’s
army swept through Prussia and destroyed German forces with surprising and
humiliating ease. In defeat Prussian leaders began pointing to the French efforts towards national education as one of the key reasons for their humiliation,
particularly the comparative cohesiveness and discipline of Napoleon’s forces.
Prussian intellectuals and leaders quickly began designing a compulsory Stateorganized education system, which would ensure a knowledgeable, loyal, and
compliant citizenry.
Alongside the establishment of a Prussian national school system, the German industrial economy began to recover exceedingly quickly from the ruins
of the war, and the first decades of the nineteenth century saw a rapid revival
of Prussia: militarily, economically, and culturally. Impressed by the stunning
growth, young aristocrats and academics began streaming to Prussia to study the
resurgence. Among them was Horace Mann, a young official from Massachusetts
who returned to the United States a national education convert and immediately
began proselytizing for the establishment of state schooling in America.
Mann was eventually successful, and in 1852 Massachusetts passed the first
compulsory education laws in North America. By the 1880s every state in the
union had passed similar laws. Compulsory schooling took effect a little more
haphazardly in Canada, with Ontario passing legislation in 1871 and bc by 1873,
while Quebec and Newfoundland held out until 1943. Since the introduction of
national schooling in North America, the system has been founded on four basic
premises suggested by R. Koetsch (1997), which remain largely intact today:
1. The State has a responsibility to educate all of its citizens.
2. The State has the right to force all parents to send their children to school.
3. The State has the right to force the entire community—including citizens
without school-age children—to support by taxes the education of all children.
4. The State has the right to determine the nature of the education it offers.
This is what we have in front of us in North America: a 150-year-old, Platonically rooted, Prussian-inspired model that is built to support and augment nationalist rationales. It is little surprise then that not only have the best and most
coherent critiques of compulsory state school come from anarchists, but also the
most compelling alternatives.
RESISTING STATE POWER
Leo Tolstoy in Tolstoy on Education once famously claimed that the imaginary
characters of his books were far less interesting than real children. A Christian
anarchist, Tolstoy established a school in 1859 for peasant children on his estate
called Yasnaya Polyana and a journal of the same name, and much of his thinking around education foreshadows contemporary deschooling thought.

Alternatives to Schooling | 35

Education is the tendency of one man to make another just like himself
. . . Education is culture under restraint, culture is free. [Education is]
when the teaching is forced upon the pupil, and when the instruction is
exclusive, that is when only those subjects are taught which the educator regards as necessary. (Tolstoy, 1967, p. 76)
The connection between forced education and state power was made more
clearly by Francisco Ferrer, a Spanish anarchist who was interested in building
an institution where children were free of hegemonic teaching, state dogma,
and religious sentiments. Ferrer was very clear that schools were designed to
provide the state with industrial workers, and the intent of his Modern School
was to allow children to develop free of race and class prejudice in an atmosphere
of free expression as a precursor to a just society. Ferrer founded his school in
1901, and it quickly spread with branches around Spain.
Ferrer’s critique of schools was an explicit attack on State power, for which he
was executed in 1909, after founding the International League for the Rational
Education of Children as well as a journal. In 1911 a Modern School was established in Manhattan, with classes during the day for children and lectures at
night for adults. Prominent activists including Alexander Berkman, Voltairine
de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman were founders, Will Durant was an instructor
and principal, and people like Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair
gave talks. Eventually the school moved to Stelton, New Jersey, and more than
20 similar schools were established around the country.
As the last of these schools was closing its doors in the 1960s, the free school
movement, spurred by A. S. Neill’s book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to
Child Learning, was beginning to explode in North America. Neill founded
Summerhill in 1921 believing that children need an atmosphere free of fear to
genuinely thrive, and that their days should be free of external compulsion. Thus
students at Summerhill, which is still running in southern England, are permitted to play as long and as much as they wish and only participate in classes and
activities of their own choosing.
Neill’s famous line is that children have “freedom, not license” at Summerhill, and the whole school community is governed democratically. That means
that all rules and decisions governing daily life are made by the whole group of
students and staff together in school meetings. Each person has a single vote,
regardless of age, and meetings are run by strict rules. Disputes and individuals
who break the rules can be brought in front of the school meeting to have their
grievances and/or transgressions heard out and resolved.
This is the basic model of a democratic free school, and its introduction to
North America caused a remarkable proliferation; by 1971 there were more than
1,100 free schools across Canada and the United States. There were many variations on the theme, but all built upon Neill’s basic recipe of personal autonomy
and collective self-governance. The movement did not last long, and by the
end of the 1980s there were no more than a few dozen remaining. Interestingly
however, there has been a contemporary resurgence of interest in democratic
schools, with international networks linking schools across the globe and

| Alternatives to Schooling

multiple schools popping up in Russia, Israel, Europe, India, Japan, and Korea,
as well as all over North America.
The energy of the free school movement did not evaporate in the 1980s; it
transformed itself in new configurations, largely morphing into progressive
homeschooling or unschooling, and the creation of learning centers. Much
of this was fueled by the writings of John Holt (1923–1985) and Ivan Illich
(1926–2002). Holt began his career as a teacher and slowly radicalized, eventually coming to believe that education was the project of people shaping, and that
he was against it entirely. Instead he advocated for “self-directed, purposeful,
meaningful life and work, and against ‘education’—learning cut off from active
life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear” (Holt, 1976,
p. 2). In 1977 Holt started Growing Without Schooling magazine to describe and
support a kind of homeschooling that wasn’t simply parents replicating school
curriculums in the home. Thus the term unschooling was born.
Illich articulated the larger cultural repercussions of a society where learning is
assumed a scarce resource administered by professional teachers. Illich’s critique
of modern development took a number of directions, and in Deschooling Society
he called for the disestablishment of schooling and the deinstitutionalization of
learning, calling for self-directed learning occurring in fluid, informal, and local
webs. Illich also critiqued notions of schooling itself, suggesting that alternative
schools were simply more pleasant routes to the same end: the professionalization
of knowledge and the undermining of people’s capacity to run their own lives.
Illich’s analysis has been the catalyst for many unschoolers, drop-outs, and
activists to create community learning centers, or free schools, places built not
on a school model, but more like a library, where people of all ages can come
together to share resources, take classes, and develop projects without official
curriculums or coercive authority. Deschoolers argue that noncoercive learning, that is, learning that is motivated by people’s own energy and enthusiasm,
leads to deeper academic and intellectual engagement, develops self-reliance,
and supports people’s confidence in their own capacities, all of which compulsory schooling erodes.
CONTEMPORARY DESCHOOLING MOVEMENT
The contemporary deschooling movement is built on this historical and philosophical ground. Deschoolers represent a wide range of political and philosophical perspectives, and thus their resistance takes equally varied forms, but
deschoolers in general support the displacement of monopoly state schools with
a wide range of community-based alternatives that might include, but is not
limited to: charter schools, alternative schools, learning centers, homeschooling and homelearning, community learning networks, and even traditional and
religious schools. The point is not to legislate a certain mode of schooling, but to
allow a vast range of options to develop, including the possibility of children and
families rejecting schooling altogether. Potential alternatives are intertwined,
building and supporting one another to develop a genuine alternative to compulsory schooling.

Art Education

There is certainly a libertarian thread to the unschooling movement that
repudiates any government involvement in schools whatsoever, often coming
with calls for a voucher system. Deschoolers are largely disinterested in vouchers, however, believing that they would only replicate existing class inequities.
Instead, deschoolers look to community control of resources, whereby public
funding would be retained, but with a much wider array of possibilities and clear
local control over funding decisions. There is recognition that a broad array of
possibilities is needed in a diverse society and that individual children may well
shift and move through a variety of scenarios over the years.
Pedagogically, deschoolers seek to deconstruct contemporary conceptions of
learning, arguing instead for an equally broad and fluid understanding of how
people acquire knowledge, skills, and capacities. Instead of asking how we can
accumulate and deposit information in students, we should be asking under what
conditions children will thrive, and not the abstract children of theory, but the
kids we see and work with every day. And necessarily, those answers are always
shifting and contingent, questions that look much closer to parenting than professionalized teaching. Deschoolers question dominant Western beliefs about
teaching, building on Paulo Freire’s critiques of the “banking method of education” and looking to approaches that emphasize self-direction, often arguing that
“the only thing you can teach is yourself,” which has a double-edged meaning.
Deschooling is also closely linked with other social movements: ecological,
antiglobalization, queer rights, antiracism, vegetarian, vegan, and animal rights,
native self-determination, anticolonialism, and much else. Deschoolers tend
to see these connections not as ancillary, but as fundamental to deschooling.
Resistance to compulsory schooling cannot simply be reduced to an individualist politics or it will simply reproduce or entrench inequality. Deschooling
has to be about genuine social freedom: a freedom to something, not just from.
That something has to be a social vision of collective freedom, which can only
be achieved when compulsory state schooling and its attendant pedagogical
imperatives are abandoned.
Further Reading: Gatto, J., 2002, Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory
schooling, Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers; Holt, J., 1976, Instead of education,
Boston: Holt Publishers; Illich, I., 1999, Deschooling society, London: Marion Boyars Publications; Koetzsch, R., 1997, A Handbook of Educational Alternatives, Boston: Shambhala
Publications; Llewellyn, G., 1998, The teenage liberation handbook: How to quit school and
get a real education, Eugene, OR: Lowry House Publishers; Tolstoy, L., 1967, Education and
culture, in L. Weiner (Trans.), Tolstoy on education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matt Hern

ART EDUCATION
A relatively decorous battle, as school battles go, is being played out among
art educators concerning the definition and selection of the art content in K–12
art curricula. It’s a battle that has been evolving in its most recent form since
the mid-1980s, when art education was helped by considerable infusions of

| Art Education

financial support from the Getty Center for Education in the Arts to reconsider
the disciplinary boundaries—content and attendant methods—of art education.
That late-twentieth-century battle has largely been won—there now seems no
question that art teachers should be teaching art history and criticism (and even
aesthetics) in addition to how to “make” art. The current battle is more focused
on the kinds of imagery appropriate to teaching these disciplines and, behind all
of that, the reasons why we should be teaching art at all.
Some observations follow on the issues reflected in the current deliberations
and on their implications for both why and how we educate young people to
examine their own culture as well as the cultures studied in other subject areas
such as literature and social studies. Much of K–12 education is aimed not only
at building immediately useful skills but also, ultimately, at developing a lifelong
commitment to learning, learning that can be continued both deliberately and
accidentally at museums of all kinds. The current battle over art content reflects
fascinating differences in the art education community’s conceptions of what in
today’s culture is worthy of our attention.
THE EARLIER BATTLE FOR DISCIPLINEBASED ART EDUCATION
The argument to move art education from a production-focused, “creativity”focused, emphasis to a broader definition of education in the arts was articulated by proponents of discipline-based art education, or DBAE, a conception
developed by a number of scholars beginning in the 1980s and distilled into
some cogent, thoughtful, and often free and broadly disseminated publications
funded by the Getty. DBAE seemed revolutionary at the time, a broadening
of the conception of “art” that required of art teachers a stronger foundation
in art-historical inquiry and in the purposes and techniques of criticism than
many had received in their preservice teacher training. DBAE was threatening
to many, invigorating to some, but so well endowed by Getty funds that it was
able to spread and be learned, tried, assessed, and reported on in print and at
small and large conferences. Art educators arguing for a DBAE approach argued
that making art, alone, was an inadequate approach to convey the importance
and rewards of the language of the visual arts, that in order to make art well,
students needed also to have a strong art-history background, be adept in critiquing and assessing art, and be comfortable in discussing issues of aesthetics. Thus, the four disciplines of (in no particular order) art history, aesthetics,
art criticism, and art production were the “disciplines” of discipline-based art
education. DBAE was promulgated in an astonishingly rich array of resources
coming from the Getty—policy publications, handbooks, curriculum guides,
and how-to guidelines, presentations at state and national conferences, regional
workshops involving K–12 art teachers, practicing artists, art historians, critics, and aestheticians. Sessions at annual meetings of the American Educational
Research Association, for example, included K–12 art teachers who had been
trained more traditionally as art-production teachers, testifying with slides and
curricular examples to the richer and more meaningful art their students were
able to produce when able to understand, decode, appreciate, and move beyond

Art Education

the art of mature artists from our own and other times and places. Over the
years it became apparent to established art teachers that young children could,
in fact, understand and interpret serious art from many cultures, and that their
art projects could be far more sophisticated than the worst examples of what a
colleague of mine calls the “sparkly bunnies” approach to art-making, a kind
of playing with materials that results in representations that may have little or
no meaning behind them. Children could indeed respond to Renaissance portraits, Matisse paper cutout compositions, Chinese landscapes, African masks,
Native American weavings, and pre-Columbian ceramics with interest, insight,
and invention. By the end of the century that just ended, it seems safe to say that
the battle for a redefinition of “art education” to include a variety of disciplines
exercised in an intertwined and enriching way has been won. Sometimes an art
teacher might suggest that students “paint a landscape” without first studying
excellent mature examples of landscapes, but that is now, fortunately, quite rare.
TODAY’S BATTLE: “VISUAL CULTURE”
The debate is no longer over whether art criticism is appropriate for the K–12
art curriculum, but rather about what kinds of visual images are worthy of our
attention in that curriculum—what kinds of images should be included in the
“art history” we address, and what kinds of interpretive skills are required to address whatever imagery we do admit? We are, as another colleague of mine said
a few years ago, “beyond DBAE.” The current debate is phrased in terms of the
role of “visual culture” in the art curriculum, and on what actually constitutes
the “visual culture” in “visual culture studies.” Freedman, in Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics, and the Social Life of Art, offers an excellent summary of the argument for using the visual culture in art education, and a large
number of current thinkers at the forefront of art education have addressed
the topic in various public forums including the NAEA and state art-education
meetings as well as NAEA’s journal addressed to K–12 teachers. A number of
small-group meetings have attempted to define visual culture and to identify
what does and does not fall within its purview; generally it has been agreed that
the visual culture that merits inclusion as the object of serious study by children
includes print advertising, billboards, product packaging and other commercial
design, television commercials, television shows, movies, buildings, shop window design, zines, animé and Manga, Web sites, even pop-up ads on the Internet—in short, the consciously designed visual environment. It has been debated
whether, in laying out the visual-culture studies field, “garbage on the street”
might be included—it is, after all, a visual event, and might be memorable even
in terms normally applied to the fine arts (color, area of emphasis, etc.)—but
most visual-culture scholars are content to focus instead on more deliberately
designed visual experiences.
The current struggle to identify what kind of imagery is appropriate in the
school art curriculum takes the form of debates over whether children most
need exposure to the fine arts or whether they need skills for interpreting visual
compositions of all kinds. Some of the now-convinced DBAE supporters are so

| Art Education

fully comfortable with using the fine arts in school that they fear that including
contemporary advertising in the art curriculum threatens to dilute the impact
of art instruction; adamant visual-culturalists can easily see this adherence to
established and traditional art forms as elitist and limited. But it is the success
of DBAE that has liberated art educators to think this broadly about the content of the art curriculum, and the most effective use of popular-culture imagery explores this content through precisely the disciplines that DBAE freed us
to trust children to be able to master. Thus, we can approach popular-culture
imagery with a trained critical eye, can assess its aesthetic value, and can see
its place in the history of imagery—can even make insightful comparisons and
contrasts between popular-culture imagery and the images from art history
textbooks.
We could not have gotten to this point without first having had the success of
DBAE: The current interest in visual-culture studies is a chance to apply DBAE
methods of inquiry to a body of content that goes well beyond the “art history”
defined by DBAE. DBAE’s disciplines are now freely used as filters for examining our contemporary visual environment. This extension of the content of art
education to include billboards, shop windows, and Web sites is exciting. It is
the logical extension of a conception of education that—in all fields—includes
children’s own everyday experiences as well as the records and experiences of
people and civilizations long dead.
WHY THIS BATTLE IS IMPORTANT
The battle for art content is more important than it might seem to non-art
educators, whose conceptions of “art” may fit the popular stereotype (things
in gold frames or on pedestals), for whom the content of art may have always
seemed to be “art” as defined by what museums value, and for whom the notion of a battle for content might seem rather odd, even unnecessary. There
is, after all, so much “art” in the world that we scarcely seem to need an even
broader range of choices for teaching. There are more fine examples of cultural
artifacts than we could ever fully use, and the art in museums reflects a range
of media and purposes (celebratory, decorative, ritual, everyday) broad enough
to cover virtually every subject connection we might make. That a battle rages
over broadening this resource to include advertising and comic books might
seem strange, given the serious crises of funding, violence, religious incursions,
the distortions fostered by an emphasis on testing, and other quite immediate
dangers that face schools.
But the battle over art content is important, and the following are four reasons why, phrased as arguments for broadening the content to a definition of
“visual culture” that includes popular culture and other sources of compelling
visual compositions.
1. Curriculum content carries signals about the relative value of the content
of everyday life. In other words, the potential “elitism” of a focus solely on
Great Art is dangerous not only because students need to know more than

Art Education

some predetermined canon of great art, but also because including images
from their own lives honors their own everyday experience as something
worth taking seriously. To exclude familiar images from the study of imagery is to move contemporary imagery to some other, undefined and unstudied, realm.
2. The visual content of everyday life is rich, stimulating, compelling, and
heavily imbued with meaning: It offers rich content in itself, and it demands
interpretation. It is new, ever-changing, looks quite different from the Mona
Lisa or Asian landscapes, and needs a language for analysis and critique.
But this language already exists in the language of art criticism, which can
illuminate the meaning of contemporary visual content partially by making connections between today’s visual environment and the vestiges of
past visual environments now visible on museum walls. In short, serious
exploration of visual culture calls on the skills of assessing fine art and can
create useful connections to it.
3. Most art now considered “fine art” once had another life, and not all fine art
started life as fine art. Much of it started life as decorative embellishment,
soup tureens and upholstered chairs, ritual objects, family portraits in private
rooms, and burial objects never intended to be seen at all. To study today’s
practical, public visual design is to study exactly the kinds of objects that
could later be declared “art”: to study these things is to accord respect to
today’s objects and to people willing to take them seriously—students themselves. The study of visual culture honors the potential status of familiar
things as things that might be valued by future generations for reasons we
don’t now intend for them. It honors the true life story of things.
4. The language of the visual arts is a language to which all students should
have access, just like the languages of words and numbers, and the visual
culture offers countless examples of both effective and less-effective uses of
this language: Students need to know how to assess the difference if they are
to be responsible consumers of design and visual content. They can learn this
language by studying fine art, but if they limit themselves to fine-art content they can (depending on how teachers define “fine art”—some courses
stop decades ago, with the advent of “modern” art) miss the opportunity
to learn the contemporary language of art. Just as they read contemporary
novels and study current events, students need guidance in learning the
contemporary language of the visual.
The current battle over art content, when it takes the form of “fine art” versus
visual culture, is also a battle about the purpose of art education itself. Do we
teach “art” because we want students to master a repertoire of great images from
the past, and some of the skills that those artists used, as a kind of canonical approach to what knowledge is of most worth? Or do we want students to study
art because art refers to the rich array of visual choices made by artists and designers throughout time and including the students’ own visual environments,
and because we want students to have the skills to understand, assess, respond
intelligently to, and be able to participate in their own world?

| Art Education

AN INTERPRETATION AND A PREDICTION
The difference between the two approaches is sometimes phrased in those
stark terms. However, what we are seeing in this decorous battle is, instead, not
a battle so much as an evolution, a metamorphosis of sensitivity on the part of
art educators regarding what art images are worth our attention. An art-history
textbook once widely in use turned out to be (as was appreciated, much later)
focused almost entirely on art by dead white males—painting and sculpture
from Europe and America—and “art” was symbolized by a gold-gilt frame. That
has changed. Art history, even in high school, now routinely includes what we
used to call “non-Western” art (though pre-Columbian Mexico is plainly in the
“west,” as are Native Americans), and DBAE, for all that it has been criticized
as elitist, always did include art from non-EuroAmerican cultures. The debate
is now presented as a choice between “museum-quality” imagery and objects
(allowing for all kinds of cultures and media), and imagery that includes—
without rejecting the things in museums—today’s popular culture as well. “Visual
culture” will probably win this quiet battle, and someday we may wonder that we
ever considered excluding children’s real lives from the study of artfulness and its
techniques.
The lovely thing about this battle over art content is that if visual-culture
studies wins out, the other alternative still exists. Teachers will still be able to
focus their attention on the Mona Lisa and Asian landscapes, for these of course
will always (we hope) exist. What these more old-fashioned teachers will inadvertently benefit from, of course, is that time keeps marching on, the stockpile
of imagery keeps growing, and the Mona Lisa continues to be part of an everlengthening and ever-modernizing tradition, one that is available to teachers if
they want to use it. And very probably they will indeed want to use it, for the
Mona Lisa becomes even more fascinating when she can be compared to a fashion model today, especially since the fashion portrait isn’t necessarily “better,”
only more contemporary, more familiar, more accessible to interpretation. We
can always have both.
One last note: This battle over art content may be referred to as a quiet one, a
decorous one. This should not imply that the battle isn’t vociferous, or heart-felt,
or fraught with anger and frustration on both sides—all of these qualities are discernible in the articles, the conference presentations, and especially the private
conversations on the subject, on both sides. And art should not be stereotyped
as especially decorous or gentle, either, for some of the most powerful visual
imagery studied today, especially by visual-culture enthusiasts, is violent and
disturbing, including images of war, or natural disasters, of racist perceptions,
or graffiti—the world of art is not a decorous world, though the museum setting
can make it seem so. What seems decorous in this battle is the shared values
behind the deliberative, articulate, impassioned, and well-reasoned cases being
made on both sides. Both sides see the art curriculum as a place where students
learn essential skills and perspectives not available through other subjects, and
both sides agree that a school without art is an incomplete and barren place

Assessment

in which to ask children to spend 12 years. Both sides delight in the visually
wonderful, and all seem to agree that the skills promulgated by that earlier battle
(over teaching four disciplines of art rather than just one) are skills an educated
person should have. The disagreements are not over such fundamentals, and
because of this, they seem calm, decorous, more interesting than violent.
Today’s battle over art content is one battle in a series of many, the future
ones of which we can’t now envision. The joy of working in art education lies
partly in the joy of constant discovery of new visual forms and of students’
abilities to respond to them—and time will not stop this story of change. It
is an art educator’s job to stay current with the imagery that our and other
cultures produce. Cultures produce visual culture, and if we agree that art is
a language we need to master, it seems clear that we need to master it completely. Today’s battle for a visual-culture definition of art content is a beautiful example of the task that faces all educators—that of teaching our children
well about the world they live in now, and preparing them for the world they
will live in later, as adults, when today’s battling adults have retired and are no
longer guiding them.
Further Reading: Boughton, D., Hausman, J., Hicks, L., Madeja, S., Smith-Shank, D.,
Stankiewicz, M. A., et al., 2002, Art education and visual culture, Reston, VA: National
Art Education Association; Dobbs, S. M., 1992, The DBAE handbook: An overview of
discipline-based arts education, Los Angeles: The Getty Center for Education in the Arts;
Freedman, K., 2003, Teaching visual culture: Curriculum, aesthetics, and the social life of
art, Reston, VA: National Art Education Association; Wilson, B., 1997, The quiet evolution: Changing the face of arts education, Los Angeles: The Getty Education Institute for
the Arts.

Elizabeth Vallance
ASSESSMENT
Classroom assessment in the United States has been strongly influenced by
standardized testing. One hundred years ago, “objective tests” were developed
for classroom use to correct the problem of unreliability in grading, and for
many decades, teacher candidates took courses in tests and measurements to
learn how to make classroom tests in the image of standardized tests. Eventually subject-matter experts, troubled by the limitations of objective formats for
capturing important learning goals, began to develop alternative assessment
strategies that were much more closely tied to ongoing instruction. They also
reconceptualized the purpose of classroom assessment to be less about grading
and more about improving student learning.
Unfortunately, in recent decades, efforts to improve classroom assessment, such as the “authentic assessment” movement of the early 1990s, have
been persistently thwarted by escalating demands from external, high-stakes
testing. When teachers feel pressured to “teach to the test” in response to
high-stakes accountability tests, one of their most frequent strategies is to

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| Assessment

make their own tests, quizzes, and worksheets imitate the high-stakes test
as much as possible. Moving now into the new century, a research-based reform focused on “formative assessment” in classrooms runs the risk of being
subverted because it is easier for school districts to purchase commercially
available standardized tests labeled as formative assessments than to invest
in curriculum-embedded assessments and necessary teacher professional
development.
HISTORIC INFLUENCE OF STANDARDIZED TESTS
The first standardized achievement tests were invented by educational
reformers who believed that schools were failing and who wanted scientific
measures to force school improvement. Joseph Rice launched the school survey
movement and was credited with the invention of the “comparative test,” but it
was Edward Thorndike who became the “father” of educational measurement
because of his far greater influence. Thorndike and his students created the first
standard tests, in arithmetic and handwriting, with the intention that the principles of scientific measurement would be used to overcome the “scandalous”
unreliability of teachers’ examinations found in numerous studies. Thus, Thorndike worked to bring standardized, objective formats into the classroom. At the
same time, he was also working to develop the statistical machinery underlying
IQ testing and contributed to the measurement of individual differences. It is no
surprise, then, that the formats of standardized achievement tests shared much
in common with IQ tests.

A TIMELINE OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF
CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT
1908: Edward Thorndike published the first standard test, the Stone Arithmetic Test, to
overcome the “scandalous” unreliability of teachers’ examinations.
1929: G. M. Ruch published The Objective or New-Type Examination, which became a
model for tests and measurement textbooks for teachers to learn about classroom
tests.
1983: A Nation at Risk and the Back-to-Basics Movement intensified the use of standardized test formats in classrooms as teachers began to “teach to the test.”
1985: Marie Clay developed “running records” to assess decoding errors and comprehension during oral reading. Other subject-matter experts also developed alternatives
to standardized tests for classroom purposes.
1989: The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics emphasized the importance of
conceptual understanding in mathematics learning and refocused the purpose of
assessment on diagnostic feedback and the improvement of instruction.

Assessment
1989: Grant Wiggins used the term “authentic” test to argue that assessments
should more fully represent the intended outcomes of a discipline.
1989: In Australia, Royce Sadler introduced a model of formative assessment,
arguing that students needed feedback that would help them internalize the
features of quality work.
1998: Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam published their famous review of research
showing that formative assessment can be an effective intervention to improve student learning.
2000: Lorrie Shepard argued that formative assessment would not work unless
classrooms could move from a “grading culture” to a “learning culture.”
2001: The No Child Left Behind Act has exacerbated the negative effect of standardized testing on classroom practice, making it more difficult to support
teachers in developing new formative assessment strategies. Test publishers
have worsened this problem by selling interim standardized tests to districts
and calling them “formative assessments.”

From the beginning, critics complained that objective tests measured facts
instead of reasoning, but measurement experts, who had the upper hand, countered by saying that there was a strong correlation between measurement of
information in a field and the ability to think in the material of that field. Thorndike himself acknowledged three criticisms to be answered. First, it was feared
that official measurements would cause students to work for marks instead of
real achievement. To solve this problem, he argued that we should have measures worth working for. Second, it was said that teachers should be working to
improve achievement rather than measuring it, but Thorndike argued that all
but the most gifted teachers are aided, not hindered, by instruments to measure
progress. Third, he acknowledged the fear that only the “baser parts of education can be counted and weighed.” Thorndike called this fear groundless, however, and answered with his famous article of faith, “Whatever exists, exists in
some amount,” and therefore can be quantified.
From the early 1900s through the 1980s, Thorndike’s view of what teachers
should know about testing predominated in teacher-preparation programs.
Teachers took “Tests and Measurement” courses with a heavy emphasis on statistical procedures and the skills needed to construct formal tests for the purposes of grading. Although measurement textbooks included a chapter on essay
tests, greater attention was paid to objective formats—true-false, matching, and
multiple-choice. Item analysis and technical aspects of test construction were
emphasized. Traditional measurement textbooks affirmed the need to design
tests to reflect instructional objectives, but because tests were intended to be
administered at the end of instructional units, no attempt was made to connect
them to instructional activities or to help teachers know what to do when students performed poorly.

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AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT AND REFORMS
BY SUBJECTMATTER EXPERTS
In the 1980s, subject-matter experts began to develop alternatives to standardized tests for classroom purposes. These efforts can be seen as a revolt
against the increasing strong influence of standardized tests following A Nation
at Risk and the basic skills movement. However, more fundamental changes
were also taking place at that time in conceptions of learning and achievement.
Because of the “cognitive revolution” there was a growing awareness of the need
for sense making on the part of learners and the need to connect instruction to
students’ developing understandings. Real-time assessments would play a key
role in helping to make these connections.
In reading, researchers working from an emergent literacy perspective, focused much more on observing and supporting children’s developing skills during normal activities, rather than on measuring isolated skills under standard
conditions. In place of old theories, which saw learning as the accumulation of
small, decontextualized bits of knowledge, new theories of learning suggested
that children come to understand what reading is for and how to participate in
literacy activities before mastering specific skills. For example, a child demonstrates important pre-literacy skills if she scribbles and then tells her mother what
the scribbles “say” or turns an upside-down book right-side-up and opens it from
the front. Instead of using readiness tests to determine the fit of children to a
pre-specified school program, informal observations in the context of real-world
tasks can help the teacher see what each child is ready to learn based on emerging
skills. Marie Clay, a well-known teacher and researcher from New Zealand, developed a note-taking technique called “running records” that teachers can use to
record specific types of errors and self-corrections during normal reading groups
or in periodic one-on-one sessions. By analyzing the patterns of errors, teachers
can determine whether a child needs help with medial vowels or should be reading an easier text with a focus on comprehension and meaning making.
In the mathematics community, learning mathematics was redefined as a
process of inquiry and reasoning that involves looking for patterns, formulating and representing problems, making connections, and applying a variety
of strategies to solve problems. In 1989, The National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics (NCTM) developed Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for
School Mathematics to move curriculum and instructional practices away from
memorization and mindless use of algorithms toward conceptual understanding and discourse practices that would engage students in explaining their
thinking. Correspondingly assessments needed to change to capture the kinds
of thinking processes and application of skills envisioned by the reforms. The
contrast between test questions from early in the twentieth century and the
assessment tasks, which appeared in the Dutch National Mathematics Exam
in 2002 (see pages 48–49), reflect the significant changes that have occurred
in both the conception of mathematics and the character of assessment tasks.
NCTM reformers also refocused the purpose of assessment, emphasizing the
need to provide rich diagnostic feedback and evidence to improve instruction
rather than merely evaluating achievement.

Assessment
Table A.2 Examples of Test Questions from Standardized Achievement Tests Published
Early in the Twentieth Century
Cooperative General Mathematics Tests for College Students, Form 1934
28. How many axes of symmetry does an equilateral triangle have?
29. Eight is what per cent of 64?
30. Write an expression that exceeds M by X.
31. Solve the formula V = Bh for h.

Sones-Harry High School Achievement Test, 1929
SECTION G. MATHEMATICS
IMPORTANT THEOREMS IN GEOMETRY
Directions: In the parentheses after each geometric condition given below in Column 2,
write the number of the results in Column 1 that can be proved by it.
COLUMN 1 (RESULTS)
1. angles equal
2.
3.
4.
5.

triangles congruent
triangles similar
lines perpendicular
lines parallel

6. quadrilateral is a parallelogram
7. parallelogram is a rectangle
8. two arcs equal (in same or
equal circles
9. two chords equal (in same or
equal circles
10. areas of polygons equivalent

COLUMN 2 (CONDITIONS)
66. If two opposite sides are equal
and parallel
67. If perpendicular to the same line
68. If the sides are proportional
69. If they have equal arcs
70. If side-angle-side equal side-angle-side
respectively
71. If they are parallelograms with equal
bases and altitudes
72. If their central angles are equal
73. If a tangent is drawn to the radius at
a point of contact
74. If corresponding parts of congruent
triangles
75. If one angle is a right angle

In 1989, Grant Wiggins introduced the term “authentic test” to refer to this
idea that tests should more directly “embody” and “evoke” desired outcomes
in their real-world contexts. Building on examples from the arts and athletics,
Wiggins argued that it would be legitimate to teach to an authentic test because
then we would be coaching or supporting students to engage in the actual
performances that we want them to be good at. Wiggins was most interested in
changing classroom assessment practices by using projects, portfolios, exhibitions, and the like so that students would be engaged in the actual work of the
discipline and would learn to internalize the criteria of excellent work. Other reformers at the same time applied the idea of authentic performance assessments
to external accountability tests because of their significant impact on classroom
practices. Lauren Resnick coined the phrase “You get what you assess” and
demonstrated the harm to instruction of using indicators that only correlate
with the real learning goals. For a short time in the early 1990s, a number of

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A SAMPLE MATHEMATICS ASSESSMENT TASK FROM THE DUTCH
NATIONAL MATHEMATICS EXAMINATION USED IN MATHEMATICS
REFORM WORKSHOPS IN THE UNITED STATES
A campground has a large lawn with a soccer field that measures 100 × 50 meters. The
park manager decides to keep the field open at night.

Therefore, a decision needs to be made about where to place some light posts. Standard
lamp posts are 13 meters high and light a circular region with a radius of 50 meters.

The diagram below shows the lighting of the field when lights are placed at points D
and B. What is the area of the soccer field that is NOT lit when these two light posts
are used? Show your work.

Assessment

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For soccer tournaments, the entire field must be lit and so more lights are needed. However, the Figure below shows that even with four lights the soccer field is not completely lit.
The radius of each “circle of light” is too small.
2.

How large must the radius of the “circles of light” be to light the entire soccer field
with four light posts?

A decision is made to increase the height of the lampposts rather than purchase extra
lights. To light the entire field with four lights, what height should be used for the light
posts? (If you were not able find an answer to question 2, use a radius of 58 meters.)

Note: Cito, 2002, Verlichting op het voetbalveld (Lighting on the football field), in Cito (Ed.), Wiskunde
Examen VBO-MAVO-C (National Mathematics Exam: Level VBO-MAVO-C ), Arnhem, The Netherlands: Cito.
Reprinted with permission.

| Assessment

states developed more open-ended and challenging assessments. Many introduced writing assessments. Two states even implemented portfolio assessments.
However, many of these reforms have since been eliminated because of their
greater cost and the mandate to test more subjects and more grade levels.
RESEARCHBASED FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Subject-matter experts in the United States understood that assessment reforms required changes not only in the content and form of assessment tasks but
also in the way that assessments are used. To policymakers and the majority of
educators, however, authentic assessment reforms looked mostly like a change in
the content of high-stakes tests and a shift from norm-referenced to standardsbased reporting metrics. In contrast, reformers in other countries looked to the
research literature on learning and motivation to identify features of classroom
assessment that were known to support student learning; and they made a concerted effort to convince policymakers that improving “formative assessment”
in classrooms could be an effective tool for increasing student achievement.
Again in New Zealand, in 1988, Terry Crooks conducted an extensive review
of research in educational measurement, motivational psychology, cognitive science, and research on teaching to determine the effect of classroom evaluation
practices on students. To no one’s surprise, he found that classroom tests and
grading practices shape students’ judgments about what is important to learn
and affect students’ self-perceptions of competence. More significantly, Crooks
also reached the following conclusions from his research synthesis: (1) Greater
learning occurs when assessments focus on deep learning rather than surface or
memorization approaches to learning; (2) Feedback that helps students see how
to improve is much more important for learning than is maximizing the reliability of summative assessments; (3) Cooperative learning contributes to students’
active engagement and helps to develop valuable peer and self-assessment skills.
In Australia in 1989, Royce Sadler developed a model of formative assessment in classrooms. Sadler was trying to show why students so often failed to
improve even when teachers provided accurate feedback. He argued that it was
insufficient merely to point out what students had done wrong. For assessment
to be formative, literally to form new learning, a student must:
• Come to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that of the teacher.
• Be able to compare the current level of performance with the standard.
• Be able to take action to close the gap.
Sadler addressed both the cognitive aspects of learning, that is, helping the
student understand the qualities of good work and how to make changes in their
own work to move closer to the goal—but he also emphasized that successful
learning required that students develop intelligent self-monitoring skills and
take increasing responsibility for their own learning.
In England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, also in 1989, a task group
of the British Educational Research Association was formed, initially to study
new national testing programs and their impacts on schools and classroom

Assessment

practices. Later this group became the Assessment Reform Group and focused
much more on the link between assessment in classrooms and teaching and
learning. The Assessment Reform Group commissioned the now famous review
by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam on formative assessment, published in 1998. In
their comprehensive review, Black and Wiliam brought together research from a
wide variety of areas including motivational research on self-perception and goal
orientation, discourse, teacher questioning, and mastery learning. They focused
especially on studies demonstrating the characteristics of effective feedback,
namely studies where feedback was focused on features of the task rather than
the goodness or badness of the individual and where it gave students specific information about how to do better. They also identified student self-assessment
as a critical component of formative assessment. Self-assessment in the studies
with positive outcomes did not mean helping the teacher with grading. Rather,
self-assessment is beneficial for learning, following Sadler’s ideas, when it helps
students develop a clear understanding of the learning targets and helps them
gain experience evaluating their own work in light of quality criteria.
Impressively, Black and Wiliam showed that formative assessment, used in the
way described by the research, produced positive learning improvements compared to controls of .4 to .7 standard deviations. (Because studies use a variety of
different outcome measures, it is helpful to report results in standard units. These
standard units compared to controls are called effect sizes.) An effect size of .4
standard deviations is a large effect compared to other educational interventions
designed to improve achievement. It would mean, for example, that an average
student at the 50th percentile would instead be performing at the 64th percentile
because of the improvement in teaching and learning. Black and Wiliam worked
to convince policymakers that formative assessment could be used to improve
student learning in contrast to national testing programs, which merely document rather than help school achievement. They published Inside the Black Box:
Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment in an effort to help policymakers
understand that tests aimed at outcomes would not ensure gains unless supports
were also put in place to improve what goes on in classrooms.
There are additional elements of effective assessment practices identifiable
from the cognitive science literature. For example, we now know that learning
occurs when students make sense of new experiences and ideas and connect
them to existing understandings. Therefore, effective instructional strategies
build on what students already know, which requires assessment of prior knowledge. Rather than a score on a pretest, however, prior knowledge assessment
may be invisible to students. It involves questioning or other classroom routines to draw out students’ relevant knowledge; and it requires that teachers develop a qualitative understanding of students’ existing conceptions. Teaching for
transfer also has implications for assessment. When students first begin to understand a new idea, their knowledge is superficial and fragile. Teachers foster
limited and nonrobust learning when they rely on repetitive formats and only
ask students to demonstrate their learning in one, familiar way. To build deeper
and more principled understandings, teachers should regularly ask students
to extend what they just learned to a new context and should engage them in

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conversations about the underlying principle that let them generalize from one
application to the next.
Beyond specific, cognitively based strategies, is the call for a fundamental
shift in the purpose of assessment and how assessment insights are used. To
move from a “grading culture” to a “learning culture,” we have to change the
social meaning of evaluation. Because of the paramount importance of grades,
students worry about what will be on the test rather than thinking about learning. They finish assignments to “be done” and don’t expect to use knowledge
again. They have learned to pretend competence and hide their confusion from
the teacher. The older the students, the more ingrained these negative habits
have become. To change these cultural practices requires a consistent refocusing of classroom activities to be explicitly about learning. For example, a
well-known prior-knowledge assessment tool is Donna Ogle’s K-W-L technique,
where teachers ask students to post on a chart what they already know (K) and,
through discussion, establish what they want (W) to learn. At the end of the
activity students discuss and summarize what they have learned (L). Perhaps it
seems obvious, but classroom routines such as this help students think about
the learning purpose of an assignment, and over time can help students develop
self-monitoring skills. Similarly, the research on feedback shows that feedback
is effective when it is specific about ways to improve. This means, however, that
classroom practices have to allow regularly for students to use the feedback they
receive either by redoing an assignment or by attending to the same features in
the next assignment. Feedback given only at the end of a unit of study is more
about justifying grades than about fostering improved performance.
Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who lived from 1896 to 1934. His
cultural theory of development has had great influence on present-day learning
research, and it provides a coherent way of thinking about the cultural shifts
needed in classrooms to enable effective formative assessment practices. Children
develop their abilities to think and reason in the same way that they learn language, gestures, interpersonal behaviors, and attitudes—through their social
interactions with family and community. In various learning contexts—talking
at the dinner table, helping in the kitchen, doing math in classroom—learners
have both expert models and supports from adults or peers to enable them to
participate in that activity and increase their competence. This theory from
Vygotsky of socially mediated learning and internalization has had a profound
effect on reforms in nearly every field of study. Mathematics and science reforms
have students explain their reasoning to develop deeper conceptual understanding but also to help students practice reasoning from evidence. In literacy
instruction, classroom routines like “author’s chair” help students think about
ways to improve their story, but also help them try out the roles of author and
critic. An important aspect of today’s sociocultural theory based on Vygotsky’s
insight is that motivation and cognitive development are no longer separated. At
the same time that they are developing specific skills, children are also taking on
the identity of an author, a scientist, and a capable learner.
Vygotsky also developed the concept of the zone of proximal development to
help describe how it is that adults and peers help support a learner in becoming

Assessment

more competent. The zone of proximal development is the space between
what a student can do independently and what he or she can do with assistance. Teachers are now familiar with the term scaffolding, which refers to the
supports teachers provide to the learner during problem solving to enable successful completion of a task. The teacher or adult does not do the task for the
student but may modify the task or ask leading questions to help the student
complete the task in a meaningful way. Consistent with apprenticeship models
of learning, these supports are gradually removed so that eventually the student can perform independently. Sadler’s model of formative assessment can
be thought of using these same ideas. Formative assessment provides insights
about a learner’s current understanding and involves the teacher and learner
jointly in figuring out how to close the gap between the learning target and current performance. According to Sadler, the teacher could help the student internalize quality criteria by translating them “from latent to manifest and back to
latent again” until these criteria become “so obviously taken for granted that
they need no longer be stated explicitly.” As was stated previously, Sadler saw that
the ability to self-monitor was an important aspect of developing competence in
a field of study.
RESEARCHBASED GRADING PRACTICES
Summative assessment and grading pose a serious threat to the learning
purposes avowed for formative assessment. As we have already seen, if tests
diverge from valued goals, students focus only on the graded portion of the
curriculum. Thus it is essential that the work and tests that determine students’
grades be conceptually aligned with rich and authentic learning tasks and criteria
that have been a part of ongoing classroom instruction. Summative assessments
used for grading can be thought of as important milestones on the same learning continua that undergird formative assessment. These can be thought of as
achievement-based grading to distinguish them from grading practices based on
effort or improvement. Unfortunately, a quick Google search indicates that many
educators use the term achievement-based grading as a synonym for normreference grading, which has well-known negative impacts on student motivation.
Perhaps a better term is standards-based grading, requiring that grades reflect attainment in relation to substantive standards of performance. A commitment to
standards-based grading would mean doing away with compliance grading used
to control student behavior and extra-credit points unrelated to learning goals.
Other ways to soften student and parent worries about grades can be allowed as
long as they provide opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery, for example, by using replacement assignments or throwing out test scores when mastery of a particular learning objective is verified by later assessments.
Of equal importance to the substantive basis for grades is their impact on
students’ motivation to learn. In the research literature on motivation, an important distinction is drawn between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We
know that extrinsically motivated students work toward “performance goals”—
to get good grades, to please the teacher, and to appear competent. In contrast,

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intrinsically motivated students, or students with a learning orientation, work
toward “learning goals”—to feel an increasing sense of mastery and become
competent (as opposed to appearing competent). Learning-oriented students
are more engaged in schoolwork, use more self-regulation, and develop deeper
understanding of subject matter. Importantly, learning versus goal orientations
are not fixed student attributes but can be created or elicited by different learning environments. In her major review of motivation research completed in
1996, Deborah Stipek concluded that normative grading practices and the use
of grades as rewards contribute to the development of a performance orientation. She cited in particular a series of studies undertaken by Ruth Butler in
which normatively determined grades resulted in lower interest, less willingness
to persist, and lower performance compared to students who received substantive feedback. Thus, there are strong parallels between the types of feedback that
improve both cognitive development and student motivation.
CONCLUSION
Formative assessment holds great promise for significantly improving student
learning. A compelling body of research shows us specifically how it works—by
eliciting and building on prior knowledge, by helping students internalize the
features of good work, by providing specific guidance about how to improve, and
by engaging students in a classroom culture focused on thinking and reasoning
and becoming more competent. Despite the best efforts of curricular reformers, however, new research-based conceptions of subject-matter learning have
not easily displaced traditional teaching practices. Thus, teachers will clearly
need consistent support to develop the knowledge and skills needed to carry out
formative assessment practices in the ways envisioned by the literature. Marie
Clay’s literacy assessment practices, fully embedded in instructional routines,
are an encouraging example because they illustrate how a substantial rethinking
and shift in practice can occur. Efforts to improve teachers’ classroom assessment practices are most likely to be effective and coherent if they are closely tied
to standards-based curriculum and instructional reforms in each subject area.
Authentic assessment and formative assessment reforms represent significant
efforts intended to correct the negative effects of standardized testing. Unfortunately the forces that work to maintain the dominating influence of standardized
testing are quite powerful. The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001
only exacerbated the negative effect of standardized testing on classroom practice and has left very little room for the development of formative assessment
expertise. As before, the high stakes attached to test results encourage teachers to
ignore subjects that aren’t tested and to teach reading and mathematics in ways
that closely imitate the test. Most recently, test publishers have invented new
products to help in the flurry to raise test scores. Interim or benchmark assessments can now be given three or four times per year to identify students at risk
of failing to meet the proficiency standard at the end of the year. By design, these
official instruments imitate the end-of-year test but for ease of scoring use only
multiple-choice questions. From the sheer amount of testing we might imagine

Assessment

students’ images of subject matter shifting toward the knowledge conceptions
evident in tests 100 years ago. Sometimes publishers use the term “formative
assessment” to refer to these interim or benchmark tests, but that would be a
misnomer because they reflect none of the features of formative assessment described in the research literature. Investments in this type of product only exacerbate the effects of standardized testing on classrooms and undermine the
chances for truly important research-based reforms to occur.
Further Reading: Black, P., & Wiliam, D., 1998a, Assessment and classroom learning,
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy, and Practice, 5(1), 7–74; Black, P., &
Wiliam, D., 1998b, Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment, London: Department of Educational and Professional Studies, King’s College;
Clay, M. M., 1993, An observation survey of early literacy achievement, Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann; Crooks, T. J., 1988, The impact of classroom evaluation practices on
students, Review of Educational Research, 58(4), 438–481; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, Curriculum and evaluation standards for school mathematics,
Reston, VA: Author; Sadler, R., 1989, Formative assessment and the design of instructional assessments, Instructional Science, 18, 119–144; Shepard, L. A., 2000, The role of
assessment in a learning culture, Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14; Stipek, D. J., 1996,
Motivation and instruction, in D. C. Berliner & R. C. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology (pp. 85–113), New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan; Thorndike,
E. L., 1922, Measurement in education, in Twenty-first yearbook of the National Society
for the Study of Education, Part I (pp. 1–9), Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing; Wiggins, G., 1989, Teaching to the (authentic) test, Educational Leadership, 46(7),
41–47.

Lorrie Shepard

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BILINGUAL EDUCATION
Miriam Amanda Ferguson, known as Ma Ferguson, the first woman governor
of Texas some 75 years ago, became involved in a debate about which languages
should be used in teaching Texas school children. “If English was good enough
for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me,” she said. This statement characterizes
the seemingly irrational view many Americans have of English. Just like motherhood, justice, freedom, democracy, and apple pie, it seems that English has
become a central symbol of American culture.
Many view English, especially reading and writing, as the prerequisite that
allows both native-born and immigrant students’ participation in schools, socialization into society, ability to learn, and academic and professional success.
Many believe that the learning of English is a basic requirement of citizenship
for immigrants; their democratic responsibility. Many secondary teachers argue
that English should be a prerequisite for entrance into their classes and are convinced that English should be a prerequisite for immigration. Issues relating to
the use of languages other than English in the United States have become both
contentious and politically charged. English has become so central that some
states have passed English-only laws, and the group called U.S. English has organized to lobby for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would establish
English as the official language. In 1998, 63 percent of the voters in California
supported an anti-bilingual proposition called Proposition 227. Arizona has also
passed a similar law. In the mid-term election of 2006 voters of Arizona voted
849,772 (66 percent) to 295,632 (26 percent) in favor of Proposition 103 to make
English the official language and businesses to enforce the measure. (See http://
englishfirst.org/ for an interesting view of English.)
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The passage of the law in California in 1998 neither made the advocates of
English-only happy nor did it eliminate bilingual education.
The bilingual lobby is now simply defying the law. A front-page story
in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined “Educators Working Around
Prop. 227” reports that “in many Bay Area school districts, bilingual
education lives.” When kids got back to school “they found bilingual
education waiting for them.” The bilingual-education director in Contra
Costa County defiantly said, “If a child is very limited in English proficiency, we will offer [native] language instruction. It’s essentially the
same as what we offered last year. (Amsell & Moore, 1998, p. 2)
The mere mention of bilingual instruction disturbs many Americans. Those
who speak English as a Second Language (ESL) are seen as the culprits of lower
reading scores in many jurisdictions. Unfortunately, students who speak languages other than English at home are less likely to succeed in schools. Spanishspeaking students are less likely to complete high school than English speakers
and are also less likely to go on to university. Immigrants enrolled in secondary
school English-only programs do not do well academically, and they drop out
at alarming rates. Such students could be helped in their studies by some kind
of support in their first languages. The political climate is such, however, that
the use of languages other than English or bilingual instructional programs
causes general societal and governmental angst. History, however, reveals that
the United States is a country of diversity that has welcomed people who speak
many different languages. How then, has it transpired that English-only is considered by so many as the only way; the American way?
NOT ALL OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS WERE
ENGLISH SPEAKERS
The earliest European colonists to America were English speakers. However,
by 1776 there were thousands of German settlers in what became the states of
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New York, and Ohio. The Continental Congress produced German versions of many of its proclamations. H. Kloss, in The
American Bilingual Tradition (1998), notes that “the most important German
publication of the Continental Congress was the German edition of the Articles
of Confederation, which had the title: ‘Artikel des Bundes under der immerwährenden Eintracht zwischen den Staaten’ ” (p. 28). And the recognition of the
German language was also a recognition of “a strong and enthusiastic participation of most of the German minority in the armed rebellion” (p. 28).
According to Kloss, the Third Congress was asked in 1794 by individuals
from Virginia to print copies of federal laws in German. This issue did not
come up for a vote until 1795, when it lost, 41 to 42. Kloss notes these events
gave rise to the “Muhlenberg legend.” The legend is that the Congress wanted
to make German rather than English the official language of Congress, and
Muhlenberg, the Speaker of the House, “thwarted” the action (p. 30). Kloss
concludes that this is not true. It is true, however, that the first Constitutional

Bilingual Education

Convention in the State of Pennsylvania on July 26, 1776, published records in
German. Therefore, the use of German in state business is as old as the state itself.
BILINGUAL INSTRUCTION: AN AMERICAN TRADITION
The State of Ohio first authorized German-English instruction in 1839. Laws
authorized French and English programs in Louisiana in 1847 and Spanish and
English in the territory of New Mexico in 1850. By the end of the 1800s nearly a
dozen states had established bilingual programs in languages such as Norwegian,
Italian, Cherokee, Czechoslovakian, and Polish. Reports revealed that about
600,000 students were receiving some or all of their education in German. During
the years before the First World War there were thousands of students enrolled
in bilingual classes. Subjects such as mathematics and history were taught in
students’ first languages. However, it appears that the First World War signaled a
hardening of attitudes toward instruction in languages other than English. This
negative view appears to have been solidified during the Second World War and
did not change substantially until the 1960s. It is important to note that immigrant students did not do so well in their studies by being immersed in Englishonly programs. During the later 1800s and early 1900s immigrant students did
considerably worse than their English-speaking classmates.
Immigrant groups did much worse than the native-born, and some immigrant groups did much worse. The poorest were Italians. According
to a 1911 federal immigration commission report, in Boston, Chicago,
and New York 80% of native white children in the seventh grade stayed
in school another year, but 58% of Southern Italian children, 62% of
Polish children, and 74% of Russian Jewish children did so. Of those
who made it to the eighth grade, 58% of the native whites went on to
high school, but only 23% of the Southern Italians did so. In New York,
54% of native-born eighth-graders made it to ninth grade, but only
34% of foreign-born eighth-graders did so. (Olneck & Lazerson, 1974,
pp. 453–482)
By the mid-1940s bilingual education had become unpopular in general, and
it seems that an anti-German response was likely responsible.
THE EXCITING 1950S AND 1960S
The space age was launched on October 4, 1957, by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). This first successful launching of Sputnik I was followed by
the launch of Sputnik II on November 3. A great feeling of failure became part
of the American “psyche,” and a general angst focused Americans’ attention on
how Russia could have been first. The schools became the target for critics who
believed they were not producing the scientists required to keep America first
in technology and science. In 1963, H. G. Rickover wrote American Education:
A National Failure. As a result of his efforts, a focus turned to developing students trained to be scientists. However, in the early 1960s hundreds of thousands

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of Spanish-speaking Cubans arriving in Florida resulted in a resurgence of and a
refocus on bilingual education in an environment of the drive for civil rights.
BILINGUAL EDUCATION REDUX
Systematic bilingual programs in the United States appeared in Dade County
in Florida after the influx of thousands of Spanish-speaking Cubans. These bilingual programs were designed to be transitional; that is, the first language was
used to support students until their English skills developed and they could
learn in English. The majority of students’ early education in this model was
conducted in first language, with a daily “period” reserved for English instruction. Students began to transition to English after they had attained a degree
of English proficiency. These programs came to be known as transitional bilingual education, or TBE. It is interesting to note that in 1968 Governor Ronald
Reagan signed into law California Senate Bill 53 that allowed the use of other
instructional languages in California public schools. Like other Republicans in
the 1960s he was a proponent of bilingual instruction.
Congress passed the Bilingual Education Act (known as Title VII) in 1968.
The act specified that individuals who “come from environments where a language other than English has had a significant impact on their level of English
language proficiency; and who, by reason thereof, have sufficient difficulty
speaking, reading, writing, or understanding the English language” should be
provided bilingual programs. All programs had to provide students “full access
to the learning environment, the curriculum, special services and assessment
in a meaningful way.” Congress did not provide funding for Title VII. However, subsequently it provided support, and 27,000 students were served by
Title VII–funded programs. The bill encouraged instruction in a language other
than English, primarily Spanish.
BILINGUAL PROGRAMS GAIN SUPREME COURT BACKING
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1974 concluded that all students had the right to
access to educational programs in schools and that an individual’s first language
(L1) was a key to such access. The decision is referred to as Lau v. Nichols. The
decision included a number of comments, however, and one significant one was,
“Basic English skills are at the very core of what public schools teach. Imposition of a requirement that, before a child can effectively participate in the educational program, he must already have acquired those basic skills is to make a
mockery of public education.” Title II of the Educational Amendments Act of
1974 mandated that language barriers were to be eliminated by instructional
programs. School districts were required to have bilingual programs. The new
teachers were told was that any group that had 20 or more speakers was to be
provided bilingual programs.
The situation was tense. Budget cutbacks forced some school districts to lay
off teachers. However, bilingual teachers were exempt from being laid off. Many
were minimally qualified and were hired on “emergency” certificates, without the

Bilingual Education

required teaching qualifications. There was the perception that the least-qualified
teachers were Spanish and Tagalog speaking. The San Francisco district in general
was in continuing distress, a distress that was confounded by the assassination of
Mayor George Moscone and city councilman Harvey Milk. There were significant
negative views and perceptions of bilingual programs. It cannot be concluded
that these negative views formed the foundation of what appears to be a widely
held negative view of bilingual instruction. It seems, however, that sometime in
the 1980s a powerful pessimistic view of bilingual education became widely held
across the United States. It may also be a coincidence that the Reagan presidency
was also a feature of the 1980s. Unfortunately, research hasn’t helped much.
BILINGUAL EDUCATION: THE RESEARCH BASE
Researchers became interested in exploring bilingual education beginning in
the late 1960s and found evidence that a student’s initial reading instruction, for
instance, should be in their “mother tongue.” The belief was that students should
learn to read in their L1s first as the “native-language literacy axiom.” Some early
researchers, particularly those who looked at French-immersion programs in
Canada, concluded that students don’t necessarily learn to read best in their L1s.
This is an argument that continues. Generally, however, the students in these
early studies were from families in which both English and French were highly
valued and the dominant language was English.
There are two kinds of language proficiencies to be learned: basic interpersonal communicative skill (BICS), the language of ordinary conversation or the
manifestation of language proficiency in everyday communicative contexts, and
cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP), the language of instruction
and academic text. These labels might lead to a misinterpretation of the complexities they seek to describe and imply a deficit model of language. CALP has
been likened to “test-wiseness” and is sometimes referred to by an additional
acronym; SIN, or “skill in instructional nonsense,” a term coined by C. Edelsky
in With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education. The two labels have generally, however, come to represent two categories of
proficiency; one associated with face-to-face conversation (BICS) and the other
with learning in the context-reduced cognitively demanding oral and written
environment of the classroom (CALP). Older students use knowledge of academic material and concepts gained studying L1 to help them in L2, and the acquisition of L2 occurs faster. A number of researchers found that BICS requires
about two to three years to develop and that CALP takes about five to seven
years.
Cummins and Swain (1986) proposed a “Common Underlying Proficiency”
(CUP) model based on the notion that “literacy-related aspects of a bilingual’s
proficiency in L1 and L2 are seen as common or interdependent across languages” (p. 82). Literacy experience in either language promotes the underlying
interdependent proficiency base. This view suggests that “common cross-lingual
proficiencies underlie the obviously different surface manifestations of each language” (p. 82). There is evidence to support CUP; however, there is only modest

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evidence of transfer of language skills. Common underlying proficiency has also
been referred to as the interdependence principle, and some research provides
powerful long-term evidence that common underlying proficiency or interdependence does exist.
The 1990s brought a focused research effort to investigate bilingual education
but resulted in little definitive evidence that transitional bilingual education
(TBE) is a superior strategy for improving language achievement. Bilingual immersion programs were designed to introduce minority students to English during the early years by integrating second-language instruction with content-area
instruction. Immersion students showed an early significant advantage at grade
four that disappeared by grade seven. One major difficulty in evaluating bilingual studies is that there are so many variations in programs across studies. A
second major difficulty is that many studies are neither well designed nor well
evaluated. A third difficulty is that authors often take for granted that what other
authors claim is true of their findings is, in fact, true.
Dual-immersion programs were an alternative to TBE programs that gained
popularity in the 1990s. Two-way immersion programs are defined as the integration of language-majority and language-minority students in the same
classrooms where: (1) language-minority and language-majority students are
integrated for at least half of the day at all grade levels; (2) content and literacy
instruction are provided in both languages to all students; and (3) languageminority and language-majority students are balanced. The support for dualimmersion programs, like other bilingual programs, is limited.
The Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) established the National Reading Panel (NRP) in 1997 as a
result of a congressional request (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/
intro/htm). The issue of second-language learning was not included in the
panel because it was to be addressed by a different research review. An additional National Literacy Panel was established to conduct a literature review on
the literacy of language-minority children and youth. In August 2005 the U.S.
Department of Education declined to publish the report of the National Literacy
Panel reportedly “because of concerns about its technical adequacy and the degree to which it could help inform policy and practice.”
Research has found that secondary students in English-only schools disappeared
from academic classes at about a 60 percent rate, and there were significant differences in disappearance rate among ethnolinguistic groups. The relatively high socioeconomic status (SES) students who were Mandarin speakers achieved at higher
rates and had lower disappearance rates than did the low SES students who were
Spanish and Vietnamese speakers. Other research shows that structured English
immersion resulted in higher success for English Language Learners (ELLs).
There is a constant debate between advocates of English-only and advocates
of bilingual programs. The claims that one instructional approach is superior
to any other appear to be founded on limited or questionable evidence. At best,
inferences about best approaches appear to have limited empirical support. It is
likely impossible to conduct scientific research in a typical school because there
are too many confounding variables to control.

Bilingual Education

Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of ESL (ELL) students are failing to
learn in school and are dropping out. In the United States, Spanish-speaking students are less likely to complete high school than English speakers and are also
less likely to go on to university. The 2005 National Assessment of Adult Literacy
report states that, “Perhaps most sobering was that adult literacy dropped or was
flat across every level of education, from people with graduate degrees to those
who dropped out of high school” (accessed on December 22, 2005, at http://www.
nifl.gov/nifl/NAAL2003.html). They also report that those who have higher literacy levels made about $50,000 a year, which is $28,000 more than those who had
only minimal literacy skills. It is estimated that the loss of potential wages and
taxes in the United States alone over the lifespan of the total number of dropouts
in a year is approximately $260 trillion. For countries like the United States that
are striving to have a technically trained work force and to remain technically
superior, dropouts are a serious difficulty. It is a significant problem that seems to
be ignored in favor of arguments about language of instruction.
BUT WHO’S ON FIRST?
The struggle to learn English and to learn academic content is extremely difficult. ESL students deal with the trials and tribulations of growing into adulthood while trying to master English and multiple sets of expectations from their
schoolmates, their friends, their teachers, and their parents. Many hundreds of
thousands drop out. Proponents and opponents of bilingual education argue
their viewpoints vehemently, often referring to research or to political views to
support their beliefs. Most bilingual research is focused on younger students,
and what happens in secondary and post-secondary situations has had little attention. Much like Ma Ferguson, modern-day critics often make statements that
are not always logical. Bob Dole, for instance, argued that “We must stop the
practice of multilingual educations as a means of instilling ethnic pride, or as a
therapy for low self-esteem, or out of guilt over a culture built on the traditions
of the west.” The former Speaker of the U.S. House, Newt Gingrich, concluded:
“Bilingualism keeps people actively tied to their old language and habits and
maximizes the cost of transition to becoming American” and “Without English
as a common language, there is no such civilization.” He also has stated, “When
we allow children to stay trapped in bilingual programs where they do not learn
English, we are destroying their economic future.”
The scandalous situation is that ESL students are not learning the academic
skills to allow them to enter into our technological society and they are dropping out at high rates; some groups more than others. In the meantime, educators, researchers, politicians, and others seem intent on proving that their views
of English-only or bilingual instruction are right rather than on searching for
the best programs to assure that all students, including ESL students, learn the
vital skills they need to participate in this technologically based society. Is learning English in a bilingual program so evil? It seems time to wake up to history.
Diversity has worked well for the United States in the past; one wonders, why
not today?

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| Bullying
Further Reading: Amselle, J., & Moore, S., 1998, North of the border—Mexico lobbies for
specific U.S. educational policies—Includes related article on California’s Proposition
227, October 12, National Review 50, 22–24; Crawford, J., 1999, Bilingual education: History, politics, theory and practice, 4th ed., Los Angeles, CA: Bilingual Education Services;
Cummins, J., & Swain, M., 1986, Bilingualism in education. New York: Longman Group;
Gunderson, L., 2007, English-only instruction and immigrant students in secondary
schools: A critical examination, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Kloss, H.,
1998, The American bilingual tradition, McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and
Delta Systems (originally published in 1977 by Newbury House); NCES, 2004, Language
minorities and their educational and labor market indicators—Recent trends, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, #2004–009;
Olneck, M. R., & Lazerson, M., 1974, The school achievement of immigrant children:
1900–1930, History of Education Quarterly, Winter, 453–482; Ovando, C. J., 2003, Bilingual education in the United States: Historical development and current issues, Bilingual
Research Journal 27(1), 1–24; Stritikus, T., 2002, Immigrant students and the politics of
English only: Views from the classroom, New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing.

Lee Gunderson

BULLYING
The animal kingdom, as well as an extended view of human history, demonstrates how biological and sociological forces interact to produce and temper
dominance and submissive behaviors. Charles Darwin first taught about how
natural selection identifies dominant individuals for long-term survival of the
species. Societies create norms designed to temper the more powerful in order
to promote the society’s survival needs over the desire for individual domination. The continuing tensions between these forces can be seen in many segments of society. One of these segments is schools, where bullying is a problem
reflecting domination and socialization forces as students grapple with learning
to balance individual and societal needs.
The continual collision of individual dominance pressures with socialization
demands creates a fluctuating pattern of aggression and reactions as people seek,
but never quite find, the perfect balance for themselves and others. The pattern
is so historically consistent that until recent history, schools accepted bullying
as a problem to be dealt with individually and scholarly attention was minimal.
The topic of youth bullying was virtually absent from the major medical, education, social science, and psychology journals prior to 1980. Even by 1990, less
than two dozen scholarly articles were available. All that changed in the following years, so that now more than 1,000 manuscripts can be easily identified and
the research continues to expand.
The focus of theory, research, and practice around school bullying has been
more one sided than the human experience itself, and therein lies the seeds for
conflict. Scholarly works and professional application models generally emphasize the harm in bullying, societal needs for order, the human right for a sense of
safety, and caring for others. These are highly moral and reasonable issues that
emphasize sensitivity and cooperation. Only by emphasizing such behaviors can

Bullying |

families, schools, societies, countries, or cultures maintain strength and ability
to control their fates.
What professional exploration has given less emphasis to is the human drive to
assert oneself and demonstrate superiority over others. Individuals and societies
know this drive well, giving it recognition in many ways. Across cultures, people
struggle to win at games, compete for resources, acquire the best mating partners, and secure positions of authority. All these victories provide individuals or
groups with a source of pride and security in the knowledge that they control
people in their environment that might otherwise control them. This individual
drive to control others in order to achieve a sense of security and superiority is a
normal part of human existence.
CONFLICTING PRESSURES
Domination Pressures
The support for demonstrating dominance has always been visible in many
aspects of society, even though scientists and educators have shied away
from publicly supporting its virtues. Those who dominate take pride in it, are
rewarded for their control of others, and seek to maintain or increase these pleasurable results. Those dominated are hurt by their one-down position and either
attempt to strengthen themselves in some way so they can win back power, find
another who they can dominate, or drop out of the competition. These processes
can provide strength and growth leading to more productive ways of being as
supporters would say, or they can lead to deterioration and loss of hope as detractors would emphasize. Two common situations provide examples of how
societies indirectly demonstrate and teach the value of dominating behaviors.
Games that get the most public attention require one person or team to gain
control of their destiny by dominating another. Winners take pride and the motivation to continue their status while losers must decide how to cope with diminished status. The desire for victory can become so extreme that it can carry
over to violence that goes beyond the rules of the sport or the norms of public
decorum. Academic achievement is also commonly measured by what one has
accomplished more than others. Students, schools, and even countries are given
grades and percentile ranks that clarify how well they are doing in comparison.
Those who do the best are rewarded with superior grades, prizes, and the support of peers and those in authority. Those who do less well miss out on the
rewards and, in some combination, feel bad, work harder, or drop out of the
competition.
Socialization Pressures
Just as individuals strive to control themselves and others to achieve rewards
and security, so do groups of individuals such as families, schools, communities, and countries. To approach these goals, they attempt to make the best
use of the varied individuals in their group, which requires discouragement of
excessive dominance by one component over another because such a situation

| Bullying

reduces the number and value of resources. Children, for example, can be seen
as highly vulnerable and least immediately valuable to a society. If individual
dominance and survival of the fittest were the only component in operation,
children might be eliminated as a drain on resources with no immediate value.
It is the society that recognizes the need to protect children because of their
long-term value and essential role in producing future generations. It is this societal role of protecting the weak from over-control by the dominant that creates
pressures against bullying.
Social pressures attempt to control domination by a few without eliminating
the desire for dominance altogether. Rules are created in games to emphasize
fairness, sportsmanship, and the value of the competition itself being as important as identification of the victor and loser. Schools try to balance academic
achievement pressures with caring and attention to the needs of all students
regardless of their success level, and governments reinforce this by providing
funding designed specifically for those with the greatest needs.
INCREASING ATTENTION TO BULLYING
Schools have been hit particularly hard since the mid-twentieth century with
the conflicting pressures for domination and socialization in ways that have increasingly highlighted issues of bullying. One significant point at which pressures to identify outstanding individuals and promote their achievement came
about in the late 1950s when U.S. president Kennedy concluded that there was a
crucial need to produce more scientists and mathematicians. Fear of scientific
and technological domination by the Soviet Union, who had recently won the
race to put the first man in space, provided the emphasis to win the race to the
moon. Money and energy flowed to training programs and schools to identify
high achievers, guide them toward critical careers, and track the success of individuals and programs. What followed was a huge surge in standardized testing,
emphasizing where people stood in comparison to others. The most recent decade has seen another surge in testing highlighted by the No Child Left Behind
Act designed to identify the best schools from others. These are examples of how
society was increasingly rewarding the best and improving or eliminating the
weakest through academic competition.
Expanding technological advancement and the demand for people who can
compete intellectually both demonstrate how emphasis on winning, achieving,
and having value in school can become largely determined by being better than
others and maintaining that position. This domination of others is reflected in
society by greater distances between the economic and social haves and have
nots at all ages. So it is not surprising that various forms of bullying and harassment among individual students and groups have also increased during these
times.
The Vietnam War symbolized, for many, a time of human consciousness
raising in the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s. The negative aspects of dominating and winning at all costs became highlighted during these times and
pushed society to seek more humane ways of dealing with others. The U.S.

Bullying |

Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1971 that forced busing was an appropriate vehicle for integrating schools in order to equalize educational opportunities
and help diverse groups develop better relationships by learning and sharing
together. Values clarification and helping all students achieve at their own pace
with lessened pressures were core to the models for schools into the 1970s.
More attention was being paid to student social skills, relationships, and helping those most in need. How to get along and accommodate others gained a
more equal focus of attention with the press to demonstrate superiority. This
time frame was virtually absent of literature on bullying.
One form of bullying did increasingly receive major attention during the
1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s and would later become a model for recognizing
and dealing with bullying in the schools. Sexual harassment in the workplace
became a significant social issue as women became more assertive about being
treated as equals. Businesses and societies in general were pushed to recognize
that, because women had generally less physical and authority power in the
workplace than men, they were vulnerable to domination in various forms of
abuse and particularly sexual harassment. Eventually sexual harassment policies and legislation gave focus to the primary abuse characteristics that would
later become the core definition of bullying: Harm was defined from the victim’s
perspective; a significant power differential put the victim at a disadvantage;
and repetition of such acts increased the harm done. These abuse characteristics
would become integral in defining severity of various issues including sexual
abuse, discrimination, and bullying in schools.
Scholarly and public discussion of school bullying as a problem began to gain
visibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was again a time of building societal
pressures for success and winning. A good business or farm was no longer one
that produced a profit and provided jobs for employees. Success was increasingly
identified as continually getting bigger and better by beating competitors. Schools
faced the same pressures from societal trends, policies, and laws fostering private
schools, charter schools, and school vouchers. Schools now had to compete academically or lose the best students and funding. Pressures built to limit the more
physical and social aspects of schools from recess time to physical education, the
arts, and psycho/social development programs. Increased academic pressures
and limiting social development opportunities gave a clear message to administrators, teachers, parents, and students that what mattered was demonstrating
your superiority over others. These times of increased pressures to outperform
others was reflected in the increased visibility of gangs, cliques, and bullying,
which are opportunities to show dominance in nonacademic ways.
The first serious scholarly work on bullying came in the late 1980s and early
1990s from Dan Olweus in Norway and Peter Smith in England. Numbers of
students involved and the impact students reported on them began to receive
attention in the United States as concerns about the safety of individual students
began to grow. This type of research is important to understanding, but it was
public events in the mid-1990s that created major movement.
A 15-year-old student named Brian Head went to his Georgia classroom as
usual, pulled out a gun, and shot himself to death in front of his classmates. The

| Bullying

year was 1993, and his notes, poetry, and drawings made it clear that this suicide
was because he could no longer take the bullying and teasing he had endured
in school. Brian’s actions caught the attention of the national media, and it was
becoming clear that he was not alone. Suicides related to being bullied at school
received increasing attention, and bullying became raised to the level of a potentially life-threatening danger.
Violence in the schools and the role of bullying in it were raised to another
public level in 1997 when a 14-year-old in Kentucky came to school and shot
eight students in a prayer group, killing three. It was not the first of its kind, but
it included more people and got more press. These killings were followed up in
the next year by similar high-visibility school shootings of multiple students in
Jonesboro, Arkansas, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Oregon, among
others. Then there was the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, where 13
were killed and 24 wounded. Each of these very public events had one particular
thing in common; the perpetrators had made it clear that their harassment and
bullying by others was the central motivation for taking violent revenge.
The public visibility of bullying’s relationship to youth suicides and murders of
peers continued to shock people who viewed schools as places of safety. The result
was an increasing concern about the safety of students in schools and the need
to deal with it directly. Brian Head’s father was among the earliest individuals instrumental in pressing for legislation around bullying in schools. His efforts and
those of others continue to find success in establishing local policies and even
state laws around bullying issues. Major educational, medical, psychology, and
social work organizations have all since taken major stands on the dangers of
and need to deal with bullying in schools. Laws and policies that direct practices
or prevention efforts to reduce bullying in schools have been passed in countries
around the world, including over half the states in the United States. Prior to
1990 catalogs of school programs, videos, books, and other materials contained
virtually nothing on bullying. Since that time, the same types of materials have
been among the fastest-growing types of educational products, and schools have
been given a major responsibility for reducing bullying even as the pressures of
individual and school competition continue.
The conflicting domination and socialization pressures placed upon schools
by nature and society have become too visible and problematic to ignore. Two
examples of how the conflict plays out in schools are zero tolerance and legislating bullying prevention in schools. These two issues highlight the pitfalls faced
by school personnel and laypersons as they work to create a safe environment
for all students while allowing for natural developmental issues that result in
students making mistakes.
Zero Tolerance Policies
Zero tolerance policies gained popularity with the recognition that deadly
school violence could emerge from bullying, harassment, and the anger and
frustration they can cause. Policies set forth predetermined consequences to
be applied to students and situations regardless of the seriousness of deemed

Bullying |

inappropriate behaviors or mitigating context. The consequences are generally
punitive, sometimes harsh, and result in punishments to students whose behavior has some degree of potential to create an unsafe environment. Studies have
shown that controversy and public outcry arise when similar punishments are
doled out across a wide range of incidents.
While violence against others, like bullying, cannot be condoned by schools,
some incidents of implementing zero tolerance policies have people saying
enough is enough. One of many examples is the 2001 case of two second-graders
being suspended and charged with making terroristic threats after pointing a
piece of paper folded in a crude approximation of a gun at fellow classmates and
saying, “I’m going to kill you all.” School personnel justified their strict interpretation of zero tolerance policy and consequential actions as appropriate in light
of actual school shootings that have occurred elsewhere. Others were incensed
with the thought that taking two second-graders to the police station and charging them with making terrorist threats was enormously bad judgment.
Promoters of zero policy actions believe that the inflexibility of the utilitarian
policy is the significant deterrent. Applied to the case of the second-graders, the
school’s policy was designed to teach both boys as well as an entire community
that no matter how or why you threaten others, the fact that you broke the rule
causes the penalty to be enforced. Detractors believe it is definitely wrong and
counterproductive to frighten students into conformity and that more socially
appropriate prevention and treatment models are available. This type of controversy found its way to a joint effort by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S.
Department of Education, which came to the conclusion that zero tolerance
policies are not recommended as a vehicle for dealing with bullying, harassment, and potential school violence. While zero tolerance polices are unproven
and may carry the potential for serious harm as a result of the use of such policies, they continue to have supporters even in the face of lawsuits.
The threat of legal action against implementers of zero tolerance policies has
moved some states to provide legislative protection for school personnel required to adhere to school policies. One such state is New Hampshire, where
mandatory reporting directly to the school principal is required for any bullying
incident. Staff members who initiate the bullying report are immune by state
law from any liability that might occur after the reporting. People opposed to
zero tolerance reject this dominance-based model and believe that the answers
to dealing with these interpersonal problems in schools are prevention efforts
designed to help promote empathy, communication, and social skills to reduce
peer abuse and foster a safer environment.
Bullying Legislation
Many state legislatures have proposed laws requiring schools to have antibullying policies and programs in an effort to create safer schools. Currently more
than half the states have laws related to school bullying and harassment, with
additional bills being presented in other states and even the U.S. House of Representatives.

| Bullying

Individuals who endorse a legislative approach to keeping students safe from
bullying in schools point to previous reporting statutes like mandated reporting of child abuse and neglect that have been successful in helping to safeguard
the welfare of children. Supporters also recognize that incentives for schools to
deal with abuse and violence can come from state and federal laws and policies. Prime examples of such initiatives are funding for Drug and Alcohol Free
Schools and No Child Left Behind, which have provided funds for research and
programs on school violence. State bullying statues have been used to support
training for school employees to increase their ability to recognize and intervene
in peer-abuse situations before they can escalate into deadly peer violence.
Several state legislative bodies require local schools or school boards to
develop and implement bullying policies. In these cases, involving appropriate stakeholders within the community and the school including students is
seen as optimal for community/school buy-in and sense of shared ownership of
the issues and their solutions. Promoters believe that sustained programmatic
effort integrated into the curriculum, the school’s discipline policies, and other
violence-prevention projects can create a learning culture that is productive
and safe for all. The U.S. Department of Education supports this view and has
developed a five-day on-line course to provide quality information to school
districts for developing and implementing effective bullying-prevention programming.
Not everyone is a proponent of bullying legislation. Many cite the problems
associated with attempting to implement such forced policies. School personnel often discuss (1) lack of time in the school day, (2) inadequate support
within the school and community, (3) staff inadequately trained to effectively
implement policy, and (4) lack of financial support. Administrators report
frustration that state legislators impose such demands as unfunded mandates.
Others suggest that the law simply forces schools to deal with yet another “new”
program that creates a sense of burden due to increased paperwork and hoops
through which teachers, students, and administrators must jump. Some detractors believe that bullying programs stigmatize students by categorizing them as
a bully or victim, thereby giving them a label that might make it more difficult
for students to escape their role within the bullying dynamic.
Another category of individuals who oppose mandated approaches refer to
them as feel good popular legislation, not the meaningful legislation necessary to
meet the educational and safety needs of schools. They see bullying as something
that has always occurred and that a skewed focus on it creates a situation where
responses to other potential school issues are not given their due attention.
Bullying in schools is viewed differently depending on time, place, and individuals involved. Natural pressures interact to influence individuals and
school in ways that promote both the domination and socialization thinking
and behaviors. The result is that how the problem is viewed fluctuates with the
pressures and events of a given social climate as well as the individuals and
communities involved. The expansion of research on the issue over the past two
decades will likely continue in its attempts to sort out the complexities of these
interactions.

Business and Corporate Involvement
Further Reading: For additional information on zero tolerance policies, see: Skiba, R.,
Reynolds, C. R., Grahan, S., Sheras, P., Close Conoley, J., & Garcia-Vazques, E., 2006,
Are zero tolerance policies effective in schools? An evidentiary review and recommendations, Alexandria, VA: American Psychological Association. Available at: http://www.
apa.org/ed/cpse/zttfreport.pdf; for additional information on bullying legislation and
prevention programs, see: Limber, S. P., & Small, M. A., 2003, State laws and policies
to address bullying in schools, School Psychology Review, 32(3), 445–455; U.S. Department of Education, 2006, Exploring the nature and prevention of bullying, Washington,
DC: Author. Available at: http://www.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/training/bullying/
bullying_pg3.html; A five-day Web course offered by the U.S. Department of Education
is an excellent resource on bullying prevention through which participants can examine
state-of-the-art research, policies, and practices from the field to assist schools in developing well-informed programs, policies, and practices. The five-day Web course is taken
on-line with a commitment of one hour per day.

JoLynn V. Carney and Richard J. Hazler

BUSINESS AND CORPORATE INVOLVEMENT
Perhaps the most fundamental question underlying public education is its
purpose. Why do we mandate compulsory education, raise taxes to fund it, and
gather the vast majority of our nation’s youngsters in public schools? In the midnineteenth century, Horace Mann promoted public education as a way of promoting stability during times of turmoil. Additionally, he touted it as a means
of increasing the value of labor in the economy. John Dewey, a founder of the
Progressive movement in education in the early twentieth century, saw two purposes of education: the development of intelligence in the individual and the
creation of a thoughtful electorate in a democratic society. And, in the early
1900s, leaders of the new world of corporate business promoted the idea that in
order to strengthen America’s position in an era of global economic competition, public schools needed to prepare children for their future roles as workers.
It is a vision of education that has remained powerful for more than 100 years.
At the very same time that Dewey and the progressives developed their educational philosophy and practice, a competing vision of education was put
forth by a coalition of men who held power and authority in American society: businessmen, presidents of prestigious universities, and many superintendents of the recently formed urban school districts. University professors in the
newly developed specialty of educational administration joined this coalition.
Together they presented a consensus of experts on the needed reorganization
of American schooling. These reformers based their program for school reorganization on the model provided by the modern business corporation, along
with its innovative mass production processes and its use of the principles of
scientific management. Their vision could not have been more different from
that of the educational progressives. It valued efficiency more than democracy
in the schools. These reformers eschewed the progressives’ notion of organizing the classroom and the school around the needs of developing children.
Rather, it aimed at achieving efficiency in schools by establishing external or

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| Business and Corporate Involvement

environmental controls through organizational techniques. It is no surprise that
100 years ago it was the business community’s vision of education that took root
across the nation and, to a large degree, endures to this day. Business has long
held a position of prestige and influence in our country. Business leader’s values,
beliefs, and opinions are both listened to and often admired. Their emphasis on
“the bottom line” and efficiency has held allure for much of the populace because of its apparent practicality and efficacy.
Corporate power and influence has been used for over 100 years to promote
the idea that the primary purpose of our schools should be to prepare children
for their future roles in our economy. In fact, a reading of the business community’s call for school reform from 100 years ago sounds eerily familiar today.
Much was made then of America’s precarious position in comparison with its
international economic competitors, particularly Germany. American schools
were blamed for not preparing children for their roles in a newly industrialized
economy. At that time, vocational education was seen as being key to improving
the nation’s schools. This was a novel idea, since up to that point, training for
the workplace had been done by employers through apprenticeships. However,
leaders from the world of business and commerce were united in their belief
that the public schools should assume this responsibility.
Beyond vocational education, the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM) and other business groups championed the argument that unless the educational system was entirely revamped, the United States would have to surrender its place as a leader among the manufacturing nations of the world. Should
you think you have heard this argument more recently, you are correct. In 1983,
A Nation at Risk asserted, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce,
industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” The report warned of a “rising tide of mediocrity”
in our nation’s schools. The message to the American people at the beginning
and end of the twentieth century was the same: Unless we radically overhaul our
school systems to take account of economic exigencies we are, in essence, sealing our own doom.
How, exactly, education should be reformed has, time and again, been
strongly influenced by the latest industrial management models of the day.
Throughout the twentieth century, business leaders promoted the idea that
schools would become more productive if they used “universal” management
principles first developed in industry. For example, the corporate form of organization, a management revolution that swept the United States at the close of
the nineteenth century, was heralded as critical to improving efficient operation
of early twentieth-century schools. Ninety years ago, Ellwood Cubberley, one
of the most influential school reformers of the time, confidently recommended
consolidation of small rural and urban neighborhood schools into large, bureaucratic organizations. Cubberley promoted a governance structure that
mimicked that of the corporation: a president, board of directors, and full-time
administrative staff.
The president, known as the superintendent of schools, would have total control over the school organization. The school board would have an advisory role,

Business and Corporate Involvement

with all professional functions left to the “captain of education,” i.e., the superintendent. Just as the corporate board of directors had little power to direct the
day-to-day operations of a firm, the school board would defer to the educational
executives. As Cubberley wrote in 1916, it was in the “interests of efficient administration for the board to leave all executive functions to carefully chosen
executive officers, who act as its representatives. In this regard the evolution
of city school control has kept in touch with the best principles of corporation
management and control.”
Reform of the school organization was the first step in a two-step process
to make schools function more like successful corporations. Once in power,
the professional school administrator could apply efficient, mass production
principles developed in manufacturing. The introduction of departmentalized
instruction, similar to the division of labor in a factory, made this possible.
Departmentalization was coupled with the principles of “scientific management,” which were imported into the schools in the early part of the twentieth
century. Frederick Taylor, the inventor of scientific management, disapproved
of improvisation by people throughout an organization. Rules, developed by
management, needed to replace improvisation. The rules had to be based on
the “science” of the particular job to be done, whether it be making a widget in
industry or teaching arithmetic to schoolchildren. It was postulated that conformity and obedience by people at all levels of the bureaucratic pyramid, from the
child in the classroom to the teachers, principals, and central office administrators, was essential for the school organization to operate efficiently. An order,
once given, was to go without question “through the works” of the school organization. Of course, this stripped teachers of the power to innovate or adapt
curriculum for their students. It was the belief that any decision made by a classroom teacher would be inferior to those made by the men at the top of the organizational pyramid; men who understood the “science” of the job to be done.
This education reform movement was based on the idea that once industry
made clear what educational products were necessary for its competitive operation, the science of education would allow school managers to devise the one
best way of teaching the curricula and skills necessary to deliver the desired
end. Here is how Elwood Cubberley (1916) delineated the efficient way to meet
society’s demand for educational output:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from
the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business
of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid
down. This demands good tools, specialized machinery, continuous
measurement of production to see if it is according to specifications, the
elimination of waste in manufacture, and large variety in output.
The wide variety of output was needed to prepare children for the four layers
of “civilized society” described by Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1908: the
narrow upper layer of the managerial and intellectual class, the layer of skilled

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workers, the commercial or merchant class, and finally, the “thick fundamental layer engaged in household work, agriculture, mining, quarrying, and forest
work.” Andrew Draper, first commissioner of education in New York, used a military analogy, promoting his idea that the mass of society was suited for the rank
of corporal. These corporals were important to society because they supplied
labor “for the great manufacturing and constructive industries” in the country.
Education, accordingly, had to be designed by the elite to get the masses ready
for their participation in these industries. Children had to be tested, sorted, and
prepared for their future roles in society.
Although progressives such as Jane Addams protested having the schools do
the training for work that she and others felt was the responsibility of employers, this vision of education prevailed. Accordingly, educational tracking, much
in keeping with the layers outlined by Charles Eliot, was ubiquitous throughout
the twentieth century. It was only at the close of the century that a demand for
a new type of employee led to a call for reform of the educational system instituted nearly a century earlier.
The 1980s brought recession and the rise in the intensity of global economic
competition. Manufacturing jobs began to be sent off-shore to countries where
workers were paid a tiny fraction of the wages and benefits paid to American
employees, particularly those in unionized industries. The alarm sounded by
A Nation at Risk led to one call for school reform after another. But in the case
of nearly every call for reform, the “economic imperative” was the driving force
behind it. This led to unanimity on the following assumption: All students, not
just those from Eliot’s top tiers of society, would now have to be educated, not
merely trained for a trade or vocation. This education should prepare them for
“knowledge work” in order to allow the United States to compete economically.
Every student would now need strong math, science, and reasoning skills. Robustly supporting, and often directing these calls for reform in the contemporary
period, is the business community. It brings to bear its vast array of resources,
networks, and influence on discussions about how education should proceed.
After A Nation at Risk there was some effort to inject an element of autonomy
and professionalism into teaching. The idea, borrowed from the business management model, Total Quality Management (TQM), was that in order to improve
the quality of a product or service, the people closest to the actual production or
service provided should be empowered to make decisions about how their work
should proceed. Site-based decision making was touted as the best way to get
our children ready to compete with children from nations such as Japan—the
home of TQM—who surpassed American youngsters in international comparisons. CEOs from Fortune 500 companies and the National Alliance of Business
encouraged school districts around the country to follow their lead and adopt
the TQM management model.
However appealing this idea was to teachers, i.e., that they should have the
autonomy to decide how educational services ought best be delivered, it was less
appealing to those at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid, who feared a power
shift downward. Within a decade of its introduction, site councils were either
abandoned or stripped of any authentic power to control how education was

Business and Corporate Involvement

carried out in their schools. And by the turn of the twenty-first century, centralized decision making was back in vogue—more vigorous than it had been prior
to the wave of site-based decision-making councils. In fact, some reformers proposed doing away with local school boards and having states control schools directly, i.e., mandating curricula and programs, hiring teachers, funding schools
entirely from their coffers, and turning over the day-to-day operations of schools
to private contractors.
The impetus for the renewed faith in and popularity of centralized power is
the two-sided coin of “standards” and “accountability” that has dominated the
debate about education since the turn of the twenty-first century. The argument
is that schools need to be held accountable for turning out students who are
fit for the workplace or college. The standards movement is closely tied to the
“specifications for manufacturing” that Cubberley discussed so long ago. Though
those specifications have changed, the utilitarian vision of the schooling remains
a constant. This is due, in great measure, to the influence of the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the NAM, and the Conference Board.
These business groups have been key players in the development of what the new
specifications for educational “output,” that is, graduates, ought to be. Schools
that are highly productive create those graduates efficiently. Accountability is
assessed by quantitative measures, for example, standardized test scores and
graduation rates. These aggregated data are regarded as representing objective,
value-free truth.
Big business has pulled out its big guns to shape today’s education reform
agenda. It has pushed for nation-wide high-stakes testing via the No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) legislation, serving the dual purpose of imposing one-size-fits-all
standards as well as opening rich, new markets in testing, test preparation, supplemental tutoring, and curricular programs that promise higher test scores.
New partnerships between business and education have been developed in an
attempt to import business-based management principles into the schools. As
was seen in the early part of the previous century, business management models
are viewed as being universally applicable to the school setting. TQM and other
data-driven management systems have been imported into school administration. Harvard, Stanford, and other elite universities have programs developed
jointly by their schools of business and education to help school district superintendents work more like corporate executives. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce
sponsors the Business Education Network aimed at building partnerships between business and education. Business philanthropy helps to advance its reform
agenda, including the sponsorship of favored curricular packages and programs.
It has also supported the break up what has been deemed the public school
“monopoly” through its vigorous support of charter schools and “educational
entrepreneurship.”
As involved as it was in setting the school reform agenda in the early part
of the twentieth century, business rarely got involved in the day-to-day operations of schools. However, today’s business reform agenda parts company with
that of the past in its drive for the private, for-profit takeover of public schools.
Beginning with Education Alternatives, Inc., and followed by the Edison Proj-

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ect (now Edison Schools, Inc.) in the early 1990s, private management companies have marketed themselves as the means of improving student outcomes as
measured by higher test scores. In 2006 these education management organizations (EMOs) operated in 28 states and the District of Columbia, enrolling nearly
240,000 students. The EMOs argue they can do a better job of running schools
than traditional school administrators; this, despite the fact there is no research
to indicate that private management does, in fact, improve student achievement.
EMOs have generally been brought in by school boards to take over troubled
schools in urban areas. NCLB allows for state takeover of schools that fail to
meet annual performance goals for five consecutive years. One option for this
takeover is contracting with an independent entity to run the school. It is assumed that private management, aligned with the best principles of business
administration, will improve educational outcomes. The students most often enrolled in the schools run by EMOs are children of color who come from families
of the working poor.
How has business continued to be so successful in getting its agenda for school
reform adopted over the last century? The argument that children should be able
to earn a living after attending school is an appealing one to most parents. In addition, business embodies much of what is esteemed in our nation. But business
is powerful not only for this reason. It has behaved proactively, using its influence and vast economic resources in attempts to sway both the public and the
legislatures to its way of thinking on school reform. For example, business has
been perhaps the strongest proponent of the No Child Left Behind Act. In 2001
the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed a coalition of 50 other business groups and companies to support the passage of NCLB.
The coalition worked to ensure that the law’s testing requirements concentrated
on reading and math and required annual testing of students. In addition, business groups endorsed the accountability requirements, for example, allowing
students to transfer from “failing” schools to other schools, including those run
by EMOs. Congress adopted the approach favored by the business coalition.
NCLB has been lambasted by a variety of critics. Modern-day progressives
disagree with the emphasis on annual testing as the only measure of education
success. Teachers’ unions argue that insufficient funding accompanies the mandate to get all children on track for high math and reading achievement, regardless of their knowledge of the English language, the difficult lives they live,
or their learning problems. Commentators such as Richard Rothstein question
whether the goal of having every child master high academic standards by 2014,
regardless of his or her academic talent, is achievable even with the best funding,
curricula, and teaching. As 2007, the time for reauthorization of the law, approaches, critics clamor for radical changes in the legislation. In 2006, sensing
a fierce challenge to the law, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business
Roundtable formed a new coalition to prevent substantive changes to NCLB.
They hired lobbyists to protect their interests. These business groups say that
as the biggest consumer of American educational products, it is only natural
that they be involved in making sure that students learn the skills that will make
them capable employees in tomorrow’s workforce. Why should Congress listen?

Business and Corporate Involvement

The answer is clear: to make American workers of the future economically competitive, and ensure America’s standing in the world.
Further Reading: Cubberley, E., 1916, Public school administration, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin; Dewey, J., 1900, The school and society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Hoff, D., 2006, Big business going to bat for NCLB, Education Week, 26(8), 1, 24; New
commission on the skills of the American workforce, 2007, Washington, DC: National
Center on Education and the Economy; Tyack, D., 1974, The one best system: A history
of American urban education, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; U.S. Department of
Labor, 2000, What work requires of schools: A SCANS report for America 2000, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

Denise Gelberg

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CHARACTER EDUCATION
Except for parents who occasionally want to know whose values are to be taught
to their children in public schools, the public generally is unaware of the controversy that colors what has become known as “character education.” Yet it is telling that the nation’s only endowed chair for character education (c.e.), University
of Missouri’s professor Marvin W. Berkowitz, begins his chapter for William
Damon’s book, Bringing in a New Era in Character Education, as follows:
The field of character education is rife with controversy as debates
question whether the focus should be on virtues, values, behaviors, or
reasoning capacities. Controversy swirls around varied approaches of
implementing c.e.: experiential learning, peer debate, indoctrinative
teaching, community service, participatory governance, reading about
character, and so on. Many of these debates have strong roots in theoretical and philosophical differences. (2002, p. 19)
The most significant debate in c.e. relates to Berkowitz’s last sentence. It is this
philosophical arena where the most passionate battles in c.e. are fought. (The
irony in using such militaristic language to describe virtue education is noted.)
A chapter in volume three of the Praeger Perspectives text, Defending Public
Schools, places the various philosophical ideas about c.e. into conservative, liberal, and spiritual categories. The conservative model wants children to be socialized to conform to status quo, authority, and employment market needs. The
liberal model focuses on questions of power in reaction to the injustices that
result from the dog-eat-dog ethic of capitalism, although it still tends to view
the world as competitive in nature. In the spiritual model, conceived by way of
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indigenous worldviews, relationships are neither intolerant of nor competitive
with others, but are seen as inherently symbiotic and rooted in nature. In this
latter model, virtues originate not in cities as human constructs, but in nature as
lessons from the observation of nonhuman forms of life.
It is the conservative model that dominates most c.e. programs in public and
private schools today. These are generally aligned with assumptions that are
embraced by both Democrats and Republicans, including the Protestant work
ethic, nationalism, corporatism, and the absence of an emphasis on ecological
sustainability and its relationship to character. The assertion that a conservative orientation dominates c.e. in America is supported by Smagorinsky’s and
Taxel’s research as presented in The Discourse of Character Education: Culture
Wars in the Classroom. They analyze c.e. proposals of 31 states that were funded
by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (A good way to get a feel for the passionate debate that surrounds
their conclusions regarding their claims about the authoritarian and didactic
approach that they believe defines many c.e. programs is to look at the amazon.
com reviews of their book.)
In any case, both the conservative model, and to a lesser degree the liberal
model, are essentially rooted in traditional Christian religiosity. This alone has
been a cause for controversy. Educational critic Alfie Kohn, in his 1997 article
for Phi Delta Kappan, entitled “How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at
Character Education,” goes as far as saying that modern character education is
little more than a pulpit for Christian religion. In fact, much of the federal and
state funding for c.e. programs has resulted from the federal government’s 1999
Ten Commandments legislation. In an effort to improve the moral character of
American youth, the federal government in 1999 gave states the right to choose
if they want to mandate posting the Ten Commandments in public schools.
Only a few states have implemented such mandates in their schools, and there
have been many challenges.
Many had hoped for a resolution to this church/state issue when the Supreme
Court agreed to hear two related suits in 2005. Unfortunately, the Court bowed
out in essence by giving a “split decision” that has kept the fires of debate hot and
allowing for the continuation of what First Amendment senior scholar Charles
C. Haynes calls the Bible wars—the longest-running argument in public school
history. In November 2005, the Kansas Board of Education passed a resolution
allowing for intelligent design to become an alternative to the theory of evolution. The same year saw censorship of books on sex education and on gay
or lesbian issues. In July 2006, legislation to bar federal courts from ruling on
constitutional issues surrounding such religious references as the Pledge of Allegiance’s “one nation, under God” passed the House of Representatives 260–167,
after lawmakers argued that the pledge is linked to the nation’s spiritual history.
Although some of the precepts behind contemporary c.e. may have their roots
in pre-Christian ideas about moral education that came from Aristotle, these
ideas were incorporated into the early Christian church. In 350 b.c.e., his book,
The Nicomachean Ethics, explained that only teachers possess the expertise for
developing character in others; that the natural world does not contribute to

Character Education

character (only life in the cities can do this); and that children are basically blank
slates when it comes to character development. These assumptions continue to
be reflected in c.e. as well as in religious orthodoxy.
By the time the first formal schools of America emerged in 1635, however,
the Bible and its representatives became the “experts” for teaching character.”
The Olde Deluder Satan Act of 1647 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated Bible reading in the schools. Scripture was used for most reading, and
early primers contained verses such as “In Adam’s Fall, we sinned all” as a way
to teach literacy and the virtues of Christianity. In 1636, Harvard College was
similarly founded with the goal of assuring that scripture and Puritan religious
perspectives would define society. By the mid-1800s through the early twentieth
century, McGuffey’s Readers continued to use Christian values as a way to socialize immigrants from diverse cultures to a citizenry that reflected the Puritan values of obedience, hierarchy, and industriousness that would support the nation’s
economic system.
Religious debates emerged in the 1840s between Horace Mann’s ideas for the
first public schools, or “common schools,” and the growing Catholic minority.
Mann imagined the schools as teaching a common morality based on nonsectarian Christianity. His goal was to homogenize immigrants into this Christian
way of thinking. Mann and the common school idea won the debate, and the
Catholics began building the parochial school system. The Bible, in both cases,
remained the foundation for studies.
By the 1930s, the overt reliance on Christian doctrine as a basis for character
education began to disappear. This was not because the core ideas about obedience, hierarchy, and industriousness were being questioned, but because the
social gatekeepers were afraid they would be lost. These ideas were threatened
by their affiliation with increasing challenges to religious orthodoxy as well as by
communism, bootlegging, labor unions, and increasing calls for social justice.
Progressive educators like John Dewey eloquently challenged the idea of using
divine authority as the centerpiece of education. Science also played a growing
role in questioning this authority, as evidenced in the famous John Scopes trial
of 1925.
To maintain an economic system based on hierarchy, authority, and industriousness, the policymakers who feared for capitalism’s future wove a more
generalized set of Christian values into the “character education” curriculum.
Now, overt nationalism and an uncritical view of the United States replaced the
emphasis on orthodoxy. The Bible was still read, but without the overt interpretations that were now subject to scrutiny.
By the 1960s, however, Americans began losing faith in nationalism as well
while schools started losing faith in their ability to find common ground. Faced
with the Vietnam War, racial tensions, and growing student unrest with authoritarianism, educators began to avoid controversy of any kind. Educators like
John Holt, Paul Goodman, Charles Silberman, and Ivan Illich wrote that schools
were little more than enforcers of conformity to authoritarian institutions that
smothered creativity. As a result, all curricula, including character education or
“citizenship” training, were now being designed so as to offend as few as possible.

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By 1963, the courts ruled against reading the Bible in public schools at all, and
religion became the province of “Sunday schools.”
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the influence of Christian orthodoxy on
public schools remained low. Then, in the 1980s, the current resurgence in
Christian-based c.e., as marked by the events described earlier, such as the 1999
Ten Commandments legislation, the 2005 Supreme Court decisions, and the
2006 legislation, began. One reason for this may have been the introduction
of tax breaks for attending religious schools. These contributed to a drastic increase in private religious schools, eventually culminating in the 1998 federal
legislation allowing for vouchers to pay for religious schooling. Gallup polls by
1986 were reporting that 3 in 10 Americans felt comfortable referring to themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians, and the percentage has grown
significantly since. Educational policy, textbook selection, and curriculum all
became influenced by Christian traditional values. Once a fringe element, the
“Religious Right” became a mainstream influence on policymaking, resulting
in such “character education” offerings as the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Service’s “Silver Ring Thing,” a multimillion dollar federally funded
abstinence-only program that involves virginity pledges and Bible quoting.
At this time in history we must seriously question the ability of religion to
successfully contribute to the good character of people. In Sam Harris’s (2004)
recent New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the
Future of Reason, he describes the dangers and absurdities of organized religion
and suggests that there is a terrible price to pay for “limiting the scope of reason
in our dealings with other human beings” (p. 21) that comes from tolerating
religious faith. Of course, this criticism is not new. Thomas Paine, in his famous
Age of Reason, wrote as much in his chapter “The Effects of Christianism on
Education.”
This connection between rational thinking and spirituality is an important
link for understanding the c.e. controversy. Aristotle even admits that rational
thinking is a prerequisite for character building. Being a person of good character involves making good choices in life, therefore critical thinking should be a
vital component in c.e. At the same time, a spiritual dimension is equally vital.
Harris understands that humans cannot and should not live by reason alone.
This does not mean, however, that humans must be irrational to engage a spiritual reality or a sense of the sacred.
In their survey of c.e. programs funded by the USDE, Smagorinsky and Taxel
found that although rhetoric regarding the importance of critical thinking
was in some of the proposals from the upper Midwest, even these did not
address the ways in which critical thinking alone may lead to immoral acts.
Nor did anyone address how critical thinking may be a threat to authoritarian
educators who might find that someone who challenges authority is lacking in
character.
Teaching Virtues: Building Character Education across the Curriculum (Jacobs
& Jacobs-Spencer, 2001) offers an indigenous approach to c.e. that connects
practical reflection on experience with a sacred awareness that all things in
the seen and unseen universe are interconnected. This spiritual perspective is

Character Education

about universal questions regarding the meaning of life, rather than an arrogant
assertion that a particular religion can answer the questions for everyone. Traditional indigenous education sees character development as a continuation of
the nurturing that must be done for the inherent sacredness of the child. Smagorinsky and Taxel (2005) truly understood this approach, saying: “Such a belief
about human nature runs counter to that of Headmaster Jarvis’s view that people
are by nature mean, nasty, brutish and selfish. It is also distinct from Rousseau’s
view of the young as noble innocents who become corrupted by the effects of
society, a view potentially available in the reflective approach to character education (rather than the conservative one) we have reviewed” (p. 57)
Thus it may be that, in the final analysis, the greatest controversy in character education has yet to be engaged in the public forum as it was briefly introduced in The Discourse of Character Education. It will come from a dialogue that
considers the possibility that character education will find authenticity, not in
the Eurocentric orientations initiated by the Greeks, nor in any religious orthodoxy, but in the spiritual understanding that pervades the diverse approaches
to transformative learning that have been practiced by many indigenous cultures for thousands of years. This transformative process is not defined by any
particular book or set of precepts. It is not driven by extrinsic reward systems
that ultimately lead people away from generosity, courage, patience and other
character traits. It is a complex, experiential journey that Gregory Cajete, in his
book, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (1994), calls the
endogenous dynamic of Tribal education (p. 209).
Cajeti describes this process or this dynamic as involving seven stages. The
following brief interpretive synopsis is included to allow the reader to actively
engage in the character education controversy by contrasting them with what
they may know to be happening in a local school district and considering which
one may best allow for improving the health of ourselves, our children, our fellow creatures, and the planet upon which we live.
The first stage requires a deep respect for the spirit of each child from before
the moment of birth. It is about learning how to integrate one’s personal identity
into that of the community and ultimately into that of the natural landscape in
which the community dwells.
The second stage is about how children can learn to live in harmony with
their natural environment on a day-to-day basis and how this way of living is
informed by both one’s ancestral wisdom and by the local geography.
The third stage is a focus on coordinating the needs of the child with the
needs of the group through the processes of initiation, ritual, and ceremony.
The fourth stage finds the individual person moving toward what the Lakota
call “Wolakokiciapi,” a high degree of peace of mind and personal empowerment. This, however, is only the mid-point of the c.e. program.
The fifth stage involves searching for a life vision while at the same time gaining what Toni Gregory refers to as a mature understanding of diversity in her
writings and work involving grounded theory.
The sixth stage involves a time when the individual suffers through a rebirth and understands at long last how to heal the wounds of life through an

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enhanced awareness of the unconscious. This stage is referred to in the book
Primal Awareness: Survival, Awakening and Transformation with the Raramuri
Shamans of Mexico as coming from the CAT-FAWN connection, which shows
how one’s take on fear, authority, words, and nature during trance-like states of
consciousness serves to guide or misguide healthy actions.
The last stage represents “the place the Indians talk about.” It is about the
deep healing that comes when we ultimately find our center and recognize our
multiple connections to all things of body, mind, spirit, place, community, and
cosmos. It is not about creating this center. We were born with it. It is about
contacting it and knowing it through one’s own experiences and reflection.
When we understand that the culture wars in the classrooms of America are little more than what Daniel Wildcat thinks of as abstract disagreements between
antiseptic ideologies, perhaps we can enter into this place. In his book, Power
and Place, co-authored with the late Vine Deloria Jr., Wildcat argues that by
reducing success to competitive perspectives, rather than to a profound sense of
place and all it represents for those who inhabit that place, Western civilization
will continue a downward spiral in all matters pertaining to authentic health
and relationships.
In the same vein, as long as the character education controversy is reduced to
Western liberal or conservative ideologies that ignore the possibilities that exist
in indigenous approaches to c.e., it will contribute not to generous citizens who
are genuinely concerned with the well-being of all, but rather to self-serving
consumers who remain victims of their own fears and who feel alienated from
the places in which they live.
Thomas Paine learned from observing American Indian people that many
European ideas about character were flawed. Paine’s study of the American
Indian way of life helped him realize a number of ideas that are reflective of
good character development. For example, he learned that caring for the elderly
should be a responsibility of the society. He became a champion of public education and a guaranteed minimum wage. He advocated for many other radical
ideas that stem from a citizenry characterized by what are generally the stated
goals of character education—generosity, caring, honesty, humility, courage,
and respect—traits he saw the native people practicing without the need of legal
repercussions for acting otherwise.
Character education, even according to Aristotle, was ultimately about the
pursuit of happiness. The idea of happiness was substituted for property in the
Declaration of Independence largely because of the influence of American Indian societies on Paine and Jefferson. Perhaps a similar influence can make a
difference in the character education controversy.
Further Reading: Cajeti, G., 1994, Look to the mountain: An ecology of indigenous education,
Durango, CO: Kevaki Press; Damon, W., ed., 2002, Bringing in a new era in character education, Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press; Four Arrows, 2006, Unlearning
the language of conquest: Scholars expose anti-Indianism in America, Austin: University
of Texas Press; Harris, S., 2004, The end of faith, New York: W. W. Norton; Jacobs,
D. T., and Jacobs-Spencer, J., 2001, Teaching virtues: Building character across the curriculum, Landham, MD: Scarecroweducation Press; Smagorinsky, P., and Taxel, J., 2005,

Charter Schools | 85
The discourse of character education: Culture wars in the classroom, Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs
CHARTER SCHOOLS
Charter schools have become one of the most sweeping school reforms in the
United States in recent decades. Charter schools seek to reform public education
through a blend of elements found in public schools (universal access and public
funding) and elements often associated with private schools (choice, autonomy,
and flexibility).
While the definition of charter schools varies somewhat by state, essentially
they are nonsectarian public schools of choice that are free from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools. The “charter” agreement establishing each charter school is a performance contract that details, among other
things, the school’s mission, program, goals, and means of measuring success.
Charters are usually granted for three to five years by an authorizer or sponsor
(typically state or local school boards). In some states, public universities or
other public entities may also grant charters.
Authorizers hold charter schools accountable for meeting their goals and
objectives related to their mission and academic targets. Schools that do not
meet their goals and objectives or do not abide by the terms of the contract can
have their charter revoked or—when it comes time for renewal—not renewed.
Because these are schools of choice and receive funding based on the number of students they enroll, charter schools also are accountable to parents and
families who choose to enroll their child in them or choose to leave for another
school.
The charter school movement has grown rapidly from two charter schools in
Minnesota in 1992 to nearly 4,000 schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia as of 2007. In spite of this impressive growth, charter schools enroll only
a few percent of the public school students in the United States. Some estimates
suggest that charter schools enroll close to one million students in 2007. While
the impact of charter schools appears minimal at the national level, a few states
and several cities have seen the proportion of charter school students rise to
capture a quarter of all public school students.
Beyond the United States, charter school reforms can be found in Canada
and Puerto Rico. The charter school concept is also very similar to reforms
initiated in other countries at approximately the same time. In the U.K., we
saw the creation of grant-maintained schools, and in New Zealand and Sweden
independent schools were initiated. These various reforms are part of a larger
set of national and international trends that have sought to restructure public
education. Attempts to restructure schools in the 1980s focused largely on decentralization, site-based management, small-scale choice reforms, and the use
of market mechanisms. Proponents argued that restructuring public education
would make it more efficient and responsive. One of the main reasons for the
rapid and widespread growth of the charter movement in the 1990s was that

| Charter Schools

it provided a vehicle to pursue many or most of the goals related to school
restructuring. Another reason for the growth of charter schools is that this
reform has been championed by a wide range of supporters, from those who saw
these schools as a stepping stone to vouchers to those who saw charter schools
as a compromise that would avoid vouchers.
HOW AND WHY CHARTER SCHOOLS WORK
The simplest and most direct way to explain the theory and ideas behind the
charter school concept is to provide an illustrative model. Figure C.1 illustrates
the charter school concept and highlights some structural changes as well as the
intermediate and long-term goals or expectations of charter schools.
Structural Changes
The figure contains three parts. On the left are a set of policy changes—brought
about mostly through changes in state law—that alter the legal, political, and
economic environment in which charter schools operate. These are structural
changes because they seek to fundamentally alter the conditions under which
schools operate. The structural changes provide an opportunity space in which
charter schools may experiment. Thus, the charter concept is rather different
from other education reforms in that it does not prescribe specific interventions;
rather, it changes the conditions under which schools develop and implement
educational interventions.
One of the most important ways in which the charter concept seeks to change
schools’ external environments is through choice. Charter schools are schools of
choice in that, with some exceptions, students from any district or locale may

Figure C.1 Illustration of the charter school concept.

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attend any charter school. Advocates of school choice argue that choice will lead
to sorting by preferences, which will reduce the amount of time schools spend resolving conflicts among school stakeholders, leaving them more time and energy
to devote to developing and implementing educational programs. Advocates of
school choice also argue that the very act of choice will leave students, parents,
and teachers disposed to work harder to support the schools they have chosen.
Another theoretical argument for charter schools is that deregulated and autonomous schools will develop innovations in curriculum, instruction, and governance that will lead to improvements in outcomes. Traditional public schools
could also improve by adopting the innovative practices that charter schools are
expected to develop.
At the heart of the charter concept lies a bargain. Charter schools will receive
enhanced autonomy over curriculum, instruction, and operations. In exchange,
they must agree to be held more accountable for results than other public schools.
This new accountability holds charter schools accountable for outcomes—many
of them articulated in the charter contract—and then employs deregulation to
allow them to choose their own means for arriving at those goals. If charter
schools do not live up to their stated goals, they can have their charter revoked
by their sponsor, or they may not be able to renew the charter when it expires.
Another form of accountability charter schools face is market accountability.
Since these are schools of choice, and since money follows the students, charter
schools that fail to attract and retain students will, in theory, go out of business.
Opportunity Space and Intermediate Goals
The autonomy granted to charter schools provides them with an “opportunity
space” to create and operate schools in new ways. One important opportunity
that charter schools have is to create their own governing boards. Charter school
governing boards function much as local district school boards. Unlike district
school boards, however, charter school boards are appointed rather than elected.
Depending on the state, the board members are selected by the sponsor of the
school that granted the charter or they are selected according to specific bylaws
approved by the sponsor. This process helps ensure that the charter school can
obtain a governing board that is focused and responsive to the specific needs of
the school.
Charter school laws limit—to some extent—the opportunity space in which
the schools operate by defining a number of “intermediate” goals. One such intermediate goal found in many states is the enhancement of opportunities for
parental and community involvement. Parents who choose schools can be expected to be more engaged than those who do not. Beyond that, proponents of
the charter concept contend that such involvement is a valuable resource that
will ultimately lead to higher student achievement and other positive outcomes.
Another intermediate goal in most charter school laws is enhanced professional autonomy and opportunities for professional development for teachers.
Charter schools are schools of choice for teachers as well as for parents and
students. The charter school concept suggests that allowing teachers to choose

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schools with educational missions and approaches that closely match their
own beliefs and interests will create school communities that can spend less
time managing value conflicts among school stakeholders and more time
implementing effective educational interventions. School choice can also promote a shared professional culture and higher levels of professional autonomy,
which the literature suggests lead ultimately to improved levels of student
achievement.
While it is true that many important regulations are not waived for charter
schools, a few of the key freedoms charter schools are granted deal with teachers; for example, teachers are at-will employees, and most states do not require
all charter school teachers to be certified. These provisions allow charter schools
more flexibility in recruiting and structuring their teaching force to suit the specific needs of the school.
A third intermediate goal for charter schools is to develop innovations in curriculum and instruction. Put another way, proponents argue that charter schools
can function as public education’s R&D sector. As such, the benefits of charter
schools will extend to noncharter students as traditional public schools adopt
and emulate these innovations.
Finally, some charter school advocates hope the schools will be laboratories
for experiments in the use of privatized services. According to these advocates,
schools will run more efficiently by contracting out part or all the services they
provide. Charter schools, as it turns out, have provided a quick and easy route
for privatization as many states allow private schools to convert to public charter schools, and most states allow charter schools to contract all or part of their
services to private education management organizations (EMOs). While some
states have no charter schools operated by EMOs, others such as Michigan have
more than three-quarters of their schools operated by EMOs. In total, it is estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of all charter schools in the United States
are operated by EMOs.
The research base to support many of these theoretical arguments is largely
borrowed from market research and remains unproven within the education
sector. Nevertheless, proponents continue to argue that increased school choice
and privatization will bring a much-needed dose of entrepreneurial spirit and a
competitive ethos to public education. While the research base is still somewhat
limited, in recent years more and more sound evaluation and research has replaced the rhetorical or theoretical pieces that earlier dominated the literature
on charter schools.
Outcomes
Accountability is the price that charter schools pay for their autonomy—
specifically, accountability for results rather than accountability for inputs and
processes. This, however, begs two additional questions. The first is “accountability for which outputs and outcomes?” That is, which outcomes shall serve
as the primary indicators of charter school quality? The second question is

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“accountability to whom?” In other words, who will decide whether charter
schools are making sufficient progress toward their goals?
The most commonly noted “final” outcomes for charter schools are student
achievement and customer satisfaction, which are the two constructs on the
right-hand side of Figure C.1. There is some controversy over how policymakers and citizens should balance the values of student achievement and customer
satisfaction. While many charter advocates argue that both are important, some
libertarians and market conservatives view customer satisfaction as the paramount aim of public programs and agencies. Advocates of this position hold
that a policy decision or outcome is good only if its customers think it is good
and continue to “vote with their feet” for the service. Proponents of this position
also maintain that it is the customers—parents and guardians—and not public
officials who are best suited to know what is good for children. Interestingly,
while most studies or evaluations of charter schools find that parents and
students are generally satisfied with their charter school, the growing body of
evidence indicates that—on the whole—charter schools are not performing
better on standardized tests than are traditional public schools. Although there
are a few successful states, the overall results are mixed at best.
THE FUTURE OF CHARTER SCHOOLS
Charter schools are here to stay. Few will question that. However, two unanswered questions are of particular interest to the future of charter schools:
What will be the likely rate of growth of charter schools? Will charter schools
remain a distinct and separate school form, or will they be dragged back into the
fold and come to resemble and operate like traditional public schools? Answers to
these questions will depend greatly on how charter schools respond to a variety
of potential threats that are both external and internal to the movement.
External threats to charter schools include state deficits and re-regulation.
School systems are under increasing pressure due to large budget deficits at local,
state, and national levels. In times like these, governments will need to focus on
core education services and are less likely to start or expand reforms such as charter schools. Although some may argue that charter schools can be more efficient,
to date there is insufficient evidence to support these claims. Another potential
threat to charter schools is re-regulation. Requirements that charter schools administer the same standardized tests and have the same performance standards
as traditional public schools mean that they cannot risk developing and using
new curricular materials. New mandates regarding outcomes pressure charter
schools to conform and restrict the autonomy they were intended to enjoy.
There are also a number of internal threats that charter schools face that come
from within the movement. These include the following:
• Growing school and class size that is now approaching the sizes found in
traditional public schools.
• Unchecked expansion of private EMOs. Claim that EMOs can make
charter schools more effective have not been substantiated by research.

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While charter schools were originally intended to be autonomous and locally run schools, increasingly they are being started by EMOs—rather
than community groups—and steered from distant corporate headquarters.
• Lack of innovation and limited diversity of school options. True school
choice requires a diversity of options from which to choose, but charter
schools are becoming increasingly similar to traditional public schools.
• Lack of support and standards for authorizers. Many authorizers have no
funds allocated for oversight activities. Also, many authorizers are unprepared and sometimes unwilling to be sponsors of charter schools.
• Attrition of teachers and administrators is extremely high in charter
schools. A number of studies suggest that annual attrition of teachers ranges
from 15 to 30 percent. The loss of teachers leads to greater instability in the
schools and represents a loss of investment. Some of this attrition may be
“functional” as charter school administrators exercise their autonomy in
determining which teachers to hire and fire.
• Rapid growth of reforms. As with any sound reform process, it is important
to test charter school reforms on a small scale in order to make adjustments
before implementing it on a large scale. Some states have implemented and
expanded their charter school reforms very rapidly, resulting in a backlash
of resistance as shortcomings in oversight and other neglected aspects of
the reform become apparent.
EVALUATING SCHOOLS OR EVALUATED SCHOOLS
Charter schools—by their very design—were intended to be evaluating
schools. The charter school concept is based on providing greater autonomy for
charter schools in exchange for greater accountability. This implies that charter schools would be actively involved in evaluating their outcomes and reporting these outcomes to state agencies, the authorizer or sponsor, parents, and
the public at large. Another reason that suggests that charter schools would be
“evaluating schools” is that they embody site-based management, so there are
no bureaucracies to deal with. Also, the smaller size of these schools and selfselection by teachers and staff should lead to higher levels of interpersonal trust
and better collaborative relationships and professional culture. Reasons such as
these suggest that charter schools would be more likely to use and incorporate
evaluation into regular operations at the school.
Nevertheless, charter schools face a number of obstacles in using evaluation
or fulfilling their obligations for accountability. These include vague, incomplete,
and often unmeasurable goals and objectives included in the charter contracts
and the overwhelming start-up issues that charter schools face. Given the enormous start-up challenges related to facilities, staffing, and recruiting students, it
is no surprise that charter schools place evaluation low on the list of priorities.
Further obstacles include the often new and inexperienced school leaders and
the high turnover of teachers and administrators. Another critical obstacle is the
weak signals that the schools might receive from oversight agencies.

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While there are tremendous differences between and within states, it generally can be said that evaluation conducted by individual charter schools is weak
and limited in scope. Because of demands for accountability and because they
are not sufficiently proactive in demonstrating success, charter schools have
largely become “evaluated” rather than “evaluating” schools.
AUTONOMY FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
As noted earlier, the academic performance of charter schools is mixed at
best. Defenders of charter schools rationalize or justify this less-than-expected
performance by pointing out that many traditional public schools are also failing; and thus it is unfair to hold charter schools to high standards when other
schools are not.
Nationally, between 6 and 7 percent of all charter schools have closed, which
is surprising given their relatively weak performance. One reason for the lack
of closures is insufficient evidence about school performance from which authorizers can make renewal, nonrenewal, or revocation decisions. Political and
ideological factors can also explain—in part—why many authorizers are closing
so few poor-performing charters.
Closing poor-performing charter schools will strengthen charter school reforms in two ways. First, removing these schools from the aggregate results for
charter schools will increase their overall results. Second, closing such schools
sends a strong message to other charter schools that the autonomy for accountability agreement is real.
While many traditional schools do perform far below established standards,
this should not be used as a justification for excusing charter schools from the
standards agreed upon in their contracts. The idea behind charter schools was
not to replicate the existing system, which many argue suffers from a lack of accountability. Rather, they were envisioned as a means of pressuring traditional
public schools to improve both by example and through competition. If charter
schools are to serve as a lever for change, they must be better than traditional
public schools, and they must be held accountable for their performance.
Further Reading: Bulkley, K., & Wohlstetter, P., eds., 2004, Taking account of charter schools:
What’s happened and what’s next? New York: Teachers College Press; Finn, C., Manno, B.,
& Vanourek, G., 2000, Charter schools in action. Renewing public education, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press; Fuller, B., ed., 2000, Inside charter schools: The paradox of radical decentralization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Miron, G., &
Nelson, C., 2002, What’s public about charter schools? Lessons learned about choice and
accountability, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Gary Miron
CHILDREN’S AND STUDENTS’ RIGHTS
We live in a world where conflict is a constant reality of our day-to-day existence. The images of violence in the context of our homes, schools, communities, and across national and international settings bombard our senses so that

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no one is immune from these horrific cruelties. Although we are witnesses to
this violence throughout society, the pervasiveness of these events across time
and settings has often buffered our shock and muted our response to atrocities
against the most vulnerable, including the children who bear the brunt of abuse
and exploitation.
Children are the historic victims of ill treatment. Infanticide was an accepted
practice to manage population growth, selectively limit female births in favor
of preferred male offspring, or eliminate physically deformed children. Infanticide became less accepted as a practice, but communities condoned the sale
and abandonment of children. Throughout the Middle Ages children as young as
five years old worked alongside adults, wore fashions that mirrored adult dress,
and were treated as miniature grown-ups. In England, sexual relationship with a
child under 12 years of age was only a misdemeanor, and it was lawful to engage a
child aged 12 or older in sex. During the nineteenth century in the United States
the privacy of the family superseded the state’s interest in protecting the rights of
the young. Sexual abuse was largely ignored as a crime until the 1970s, and even
in the new millennium, stories of child abuse abound in the newspapers, on television, and in radio broadcasts. These stories may elicit a visceral response, but
the pervasiveness of these acts may evade our sense of duty to act.
The history of childhood chronicles the intensity and expansiveness of abuses
suffered by children throughout time and delineates the necessity of protecting
the young who are at risk for the most toxic effects of destructive acts against
their well-being. The universal pervasiveness of children’s exploitation highlights the challenge to policymakers and child advocates to intervene on behalf
of the young and to uphold their civic obligation to protect the most vulnerable
individuals in society.
Tragically, our desensitization towards others’ despair has contributed to
a minimization of the social connectedness within our communities. The social capital of a community relies on the civic engagement of its members and
gauges levels of trust, socialization, and interaction with others. Recent studies
have suggested that social capital can predict the quality of life and contribute to
greater happiness and well-being.
Despite the importance of social connectedness, it has experienced a decline
during the past half-century. Nonetheless, efforts to transform the status of
children have fostered the evolution of child advocacy. Through social action,
political agendas, and organizational policies, a universal obligation to protect
children’s rights and engage youth has been nurtured and disseminated.
It requires a significant transformation in society to not only listen to children’s
voices but to also take children’s issues seriously, regardless of the diverse perspectives on how to respond. Childhood, a socially constructed concept that has
proliferated through Western views of personality and society, has contributed
to the evolution of an international human rights initiative and nation-specific
responses. Although there is not agreement on what is harmful to children,
internationally there is a legislated expectation that children will be protected.
The ideal of applying human rights to children’s issues through legal enforcements is a recent development and is considered controversial. Divergences in

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cultural responses to violence and maltreatment, including its definition, necessitate a complex response, and some perceive the universal application of
children’s rights to be a mandate for culturally specific solutions based on assumptions about childhood.
Although infringement of children’s rights is a global and endemic problem, culture affects not only the definition of abuse and exploitation but also
the response to child victimization. Our conceptualization of child protection
and maltreatment reflects the beliefs, tensions, and injustices of the surrounding
society. Although these social constructs are culturally defined, the universal
dictates support an undefined practice of protecting children and upholding
their right to safety and well-being.
Within a cultural context some practices are deemed exploitative while others are encouraged as a necessary component of the socialization process into
adulthood. Yet the unifying cause of protecting the well-being of our youth joins
the world in a universal obligation to acknowledge violence against the young as
a fundamental violation of human rights, regardless of the extent of condemnation or tolerance for the victimization of children. As a result, every child in the
global community has a recognized right to protection and safety.
A child embodies the future while reflecting the past. The history of family
traditions, social expectations, political policies, religious dictates, and cultural
mores partially defines the experience of each child. Abuse occurs in the context
of these social and cultural foundations. Consequently, there is a need to adopt
critical and cultural approaches to pressing social issues.
Although child advocacy can serve as an integral component of developing
students’ understanding of participatory citizenry, these social concerns are
more than just of academic consequence. Child advocacy is pertinent to public
policy, since children who are victimized or exploited are more likely to be arrested as a juvenile, engage in adult criminal behavior, abuse drugs, and experience other adverse effects on their health and mental health.

FOSTERING ADVOCACY AND PROMOTING SOCIAL JUSTICE
Standing up for those who have no voice—the weak, the powerless, the
young—is a challenge. Threats to children’s well-being have persisted through
time, and although universal principles and international frameworks have
guided efforts to safeguard children, an effective response to infringements of
children’s rights requires the active support of young people. The transformation
of the response to child maltreatment and exploitation necessitates a focus on
youth whose voice can shift participatory citizenship to an emphasis on children
and children’s issues. The active participation of young people can improve the
policies, structures, and mechanisms that are created to protect them. Participatory citizenship is a component of civic education in which students engage in
discussions and activities to address critical social issues and serve the public
good. This focus on social issues connects the scholastic emphasis of a content
area with real world issues.

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Figure C.2 Child abuse and neglect fatalities victims by age, 2004.
Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2006. Child abuse and neglect fatalities: Statistics and interventions.

The broad issue of children’s rights extends to the global community as technological networks overcome geographic boundaries, foster communication,
and draw attention to the interrelatedness of people across nations. Young people can become social actors who contribute to part of the solution by championing changes that not only enhance their own lives, but also promote the need
to protect and defend other vulnerable individuals.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has highlighted the challenges of implementing and monitoring public policies that are designed to advocate for children. Although the CRC was unanimously adopted by the United
Nations General Assembly in 1989 and subsequently ratified by 192 countries,
developing mechanisms to overcome child fatalities, promote quality health care,
foster educational opportunities, and prevent maltreatment and exploitation is
difficult when child-friendly policies are underfunded or a low priority amidst
complex political agendas and economic instability. The momentum for achieving children’s rights must be driven by an informed citizenship with the skills
and knowledge to recognize the interrelationships between national, cultural,
familial, and individual factors associated with child victimization. Child wellbeing has drawn the attention of policymakers and researchers, yet the education community has been relatively disconnected from the significance of the
CRC for their own practice and focus of work with children in schools. In addition to helping shape program development, young people can serve effectively
as peer educators and advocates for children’s rights.
CHILD ADVOCACY
Although nations may differ on the social policies and professional practices
that frame community responses to child abuse, there are commonalities in the

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Figure C.3 Child abuse and neglect fatalities by maltreatment type, 2004.
Source: Child Welfare Information Gateway. 2006. Child abuse and neglect fatalities: Statistics and interventions.

underlying issues that guide the implementation of interventions. Child advocacy is based on a conceptualization of schools as prosocial support systems for
children and families in which educators are active participants in multidisciplinary, community-oriented intervention efforts. Despite global awareness and
widespread support, implementation of an advocacy role is an ominous task and
can have controversial aspects. In the United States, concerns over intrusive influences into family life have blocked ratification of the Convention on the Rights
of the Child, and even in other countries where the CRC is ratified, specific policies and solutions to the dilemma of protecting children are not resolved.
Although the international laws clearly dictate as offenses the abuse of children, many individuals in the United States, where the treaty has not yet been
ratified, remain unaware of its existence and the right of each child to protection. The culture of the United States encompasses diverse languages, ethnicities, religious principles, gender roles, political orientations, views of class, and
family structures. Each of these components contributes to a unique perspective
on how to regard issues of violence and abuse. In addition to the divergence of
perceptions, the response to child maltreatment is further confounded by the
variations in state definitions of abuse. The federal statutes stipulate a minimum
set of behaviors, but states define what constitutes abuse and the exceptions,
which are often based on variations in parenting practices due to cultural, religious, and socioeconomic diversity. Confusion over the definition of maltreatment may affect practice in responding to and intervening in abusive behaviors.
This imprecision and variability in defining abuse may be a barrier to drawing
valid and reliable comparisons between cultural groups and national entities.
American schools primarily have been involved in violence prevention as
part of a mandated role to intervene on behalf of children at risk for abuse and
neglect. The public interest in child protection dates back to the 1800s, when
separate juvenile courts were established to address children’s unique legal and
judicial needs. In 1865 the Society to Prevent Cruelty to Animals was founded
in the United States and addressed children’s issues. Nine years later the Society

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to Prevent Cruelty to Children was formed. However, it was not until the 1960s
that nationwide interest in child maltreatment spurred the implementation of
statutes to protect the physical and mental well-being of children. Today, every
state in the United States has enacted laws requiring the reporting of suspected
abuse and neglect.
Educators in school settings across the United States serve as a critical first
line of defense in assisting with the identification and prevention of child abuse
and neglect. Due to the extensive interaction between school personnel and
students during the school day, educators have an important opportunity to observe children, establish a reasonable level of suspicion, and report suspected incidents. Educators in this process may play an integral role; however, they tend
to lack confidence in their range of knowledge of abuse and their ability to provide appropriate intervention services to victimized children and their families.
Consequently, as society struggles to address the serious social and public health
problem of child abuse and neglect, educators often find themselves inadequately prepared to assist child victims in the classroom.
A CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY TO ADVOCATE FOR CHILDREN
Although recognizing when a student is at risk increases the potential for
intervention that can assist abused and neglected children, educators in the
United States have a great opportunity to facilitate the growth and development
of children by presenting strategies that decrease the likelihood of abuse and exploitation occurring and provide support for children’s disclosures. Child abuse
outcomes are impacted by the chronicity of the maltreatment, suggesting that
early recognition and intervention may optimize the child’s functioning and
promote resilient behaviors.
Barriers that stifle attempts to help children compromise the well-being and
potential of students; however, the interplay of teacher education programs,
school systems, and the community can challenge this difficult social issue and
secure resources that promote best practices. The schools are an ideal setting to
foster connections between isolated families and the community. In the school
setting, social networking can create a stable environment where consistent
daily interaction can foster natural community-based supportive services. A
program in Pennsylvania accomplished this objective by developing an intervention curriculum that trained resilient parents as cofacilitators and included
topics that focused on parent needs for themselves (i.e., establishing trust, identifying strengths and weaknesses, focusing on stressors and coping skills, and
addressing goals and barriers); parent needs in managing parent-child relationships; and parent needs to engage with the school community. When programs
are implemented to create collaborative initiatives addressing children’s rights,
a supportive focus can readily be embraced by school personnel as they subsequently increase their sensitivity to the identification of children and families
who could benefit from a multidomain array of services.
Many school districts have established procedures for reporting, but the intent of the legal mandate is not just to legislate a report, but also to reinforce

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action for the protection of children. With regard to schools, action can extend
to monitoring the intellectual, physical, and social-emotional functioning of
children; creating a supportive and caring climate in the classroom; and offering
interventions in conjunction with community agencies. Despite their extensive
access to children, many education professionals have not realized their opportunity to intervene on behalf of a maltreated child.
Overall, education professionals report a limited understanding of ways to
work with abused children in the classroom. Formal training is infrequent and
limited. Moreover, it tends to focus on indicators of abuse for identification and
places little emphasis on intervention skills for dealing with families in crisis.
Not surprisingly, there is widespread interest in additional training to supplement current incomplete levels of knowledge. This identified need presents an
opportunity to introduce developmental interventions to educators that empower abused and neglected children with constructive problem-solving skills
and build on their strengths, interests, and capacity to cope with stress. The
skills needed by professionals include strategies to provide consistent messages
of worth and safety to children in schools.
With the focus of the schools on the promotion of academic standards, many
teachers have obscured their awareness of the daily trauma of abuse and neglect and undermined their authority and role as advocates and protectors of
children’s well-being. In fact, many policies contribute to the systemic oppression and violence against children. The failed response of educators to address
trauma and abuse with caring and therapeutic interventions will require further
perpetuation of policies of containment and control as the social stressors take
their toll on fragile children. Confusion over appropriate responses to victimized children has resulted in a pervasive failure of significant adults to protect
children and ensure their safety.
Teachers need to create a classroom environment that is safe, nurturing, and
responsive to the needs of an abused child. In this context, educators will find
many opportunities to attend to children’s basic needs for warmth and security.
Children’s ability to achieve is impacted by fulfillment of these basic needs and
can be accomplished by communication and conflict-management strategies to
provide alternatives to rage, violence, and despair. Overall, the classroom should
foster a strength-based orientation and approach, and as a result academic success will contribute to resilience.
These findings note the importance of the interplay between legal mandates,
personal experience, and institutional response and demonstrate the need to involve educators in training and collaborative initiatives. Presently, systems for
monitoring the maltreatment of school-age children and the manner in which
the school system and staff address maltreatment are lacking. The full implementation of policies with multiple program components that address schoolfacilitated prevention and intervention can enhance outcome efficacy.
The necessity of involving educators in the response to child maltreatment is
supported by evidence that indicates that child abuse or neglect can contribute to
educational and behavioral difficulties in the classroom. School-based interventions, which are structured without regard for complex family problems, fail to

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optimize the coordination of assistance and support. It is critical that educators
understand the multidimensional symptoms and effects of child maltreatment.
Moreover, the contributions of educators to an interdisciplinary response to
abuse and neglect are essential to facilitating detection and prevention. The following recommendations describe changes that can reinforce the role of educators in meeting their civic role as advocates for children.
PREVENTING AND INTERVENING IN THE VICTIMIZATION
OF CHILDREN
Schools are often relied upon to be the center of prevention and intervention
efforts. Personal safety programs are implemented in many school sites; however,
these programs are not mandated in all schools, and they tend to be infrequent.
There remain a number of opportunities to improve practices in the schools that
will identify and support children who have been abused and neglected.
The focus in schools on high-stakes testing does not negate children’s needs
for support and prosocial skills. We are faced with the conundrum of teaching
what we measure. But there is no state or national test for effective survival skills.
Nonetheless, educators need to incorporate into the curriculum resilience training and measurements of effective functioning. This can be accomplished by integrating communication and conflict-management strategies into instruction.
Specific prevention programs in schools need to focus on teaching appropriate
behavior that can counter the learned abusive interactions. Punitive responses
are not sufficient in moderating discipline problems and violent behaviors that
may be associated with abuse and neglect. The critical component of successful
intervention is a uniform structure and consistent expectations. Peer mediation,
which is currently incorporated into many schools, demonstrates an evolving
school-wide culture that is supportive of socially responsible behavior. Continued initiatives that involve a whole-school response to conflict and a commitment to open communication and problem-solving skill development enhance
the schools’ role in providing a safe and supportive environment for children
at risk. Teachers and administrators also have an opportunity to model for students their roles in a community of caring by listening to children’s issues and
responding in a responsible and respectful manner. To ensure that all schools in
the system have an effective and caring approach to intervention, communitywide planning is recommended that involves families and neighborhood agencies in forming comprehensive plans and coordinating interagency services.
Educators need guidance in recognizing the broader response needed to
respond to suspected child abuse and neglect. Obligations of educators extend beyond the legal mandate of reporting and include the professional dictate of fostering intellectual and emotional development by observing a child’s
strengths, skills, interests, talents, and methods of coping with distress to assure
appropriate interventions that respond to the child’s academic challenges and
demands. Effective intervention offers empowerment of young victims with
constructive problem-solving skills and caring and supportive contexts. Beyond
the legal responsibility to report abuse, teachers have opportunities to create

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classroom environments where all children feel safe, valued, and respected. This
can be best facilitated by clear classroom expectations and predictable routines
that assist students in regaining control of their environment. Instruction in
social skills helps students feel confident in their role as valued contributors to
the class setting and assist them in achieving a sense of control.
Interventions that may be designed should incorporate multilevel strategies
that serve the needs of parents and children in creating safety in their homes
and the community. School-based prevention programming should include a
focus on child development, protection, and linkages with community resources
and supports. These interventions could include outreach activities that promote
prosocial parent-child interactions through school-based parenting services,
supportive parent networks, and social skills training in which parents serve as
volunteers in the school and assist in evolving the social effectiveness and support of child victims.
FOSTERING INTERSYSTEM COLLABORATION
An important skill for educators is when and how to seek outside assistance
in order to address issues related to victimized children. By reinforcing the role
of educators in a multidisciplinary partnership between school, community,
mental health, medical, social service, and law enforcement professionals,
teachers may experience increased levels of certainty in their identification of
abuse and more lenient decision criteria for reporting. This can be accomplished
by minimizing the perceived costs of reporting and maximizing benefits.
Presently, the trauma from abuse and neglect exceeds the capacity of school
systems to respond to child victims. Schools should work to coordinate a collaborative and productive response to abuse by facilitating communication
between school faculty, parents, the child, protective services, and community
agencies. This includes follow-up after a suspected case is reported. To initiate
this partnership, a forum for discussing the public-policy implications of school
involvement in child-maltreatment intervention should be initiated.
School-community programs and partnerships can promote training and
staff-development programs, public awareness initiatives, and access to school
facilities and resources. This may include parenting education and initiatives to
make children aware of their rights and supports to protect their safety. It is also
important that children and adolescents have opportunities to participate in creating safety at a developmentally appropriate level. This promotes confidence and
competence as they learn to shape solutions to critical social issues. A communitywide multidisciplinary response involves critical stakeholders in identifying the
most effective ways to achieve sustainable social outcomes for children.
HELPING CHILDREN BY STRENGTHENING FAMILIES
Although school-based responses to child maltreatment are necessary, they
are not a sufficient remedy to the trauma of abuse. Children’s rights promotion
needs to be addressed through integration into school policy and programming.

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Schools are an important system in child well-being initiatives; however,
proactive prevention efforts are receiving little resource allocation. In the United
States, less than 10 percent of the funds allotted for abuse and neglect are designated for prevention. Although interventions may be valuable, implementation
requires a financial capacity to involve families and communities while facilitating collaborations. Resources are needed to forge partnerships and build the
schools’ capacities to address their responsibility to violence prevention.
Some nations have already integrated comprehensive plans for the prevention of abuse, abandonment, and neglect of children. However, the capacity of
schools to facilitate this role cannot be actualized until additional financial resources are provided to fund training and partnerships between educators and
the communities in which children live. Policymakers should be encouraged to
provide funding that supports the current provisions of existing statutes. An emphasis on preparation of educators to promote children’s rights will contribute
to a standardization of practice, intensified training, and better accountability of
practices in schools to stem the tide of abuse and exploitation.
PLACING THE CHILD AT THE CENTER
In order to sustain positive change for children, communities need to commit
their support to children’s rights by actively modeling participatory behavior
and creating safe environments for children to grow and develop. Child-led advocacy creates a context in which children’s voices are heard and valued. Young
people are actively engaged in efforts to transform policies and laws by providing
them with developmentally appropriate and child-friendly knowledge and relevant information to help shape outcomes and the process. It is the responsibility of the adult community and governments to contribute to the development
of resilience in children and young people, enabling them eventually to assume
responsibility for their own lives and achieve their full potential by actively contributing to decisions to enhance their lives.
Every child has the right to be loved and cared for and to feel safe both at
home and away from home. One aspect of this is the provision of education
and child welfare services that are more responsive to the voices of children.
Moreover, the development of initiatives that allow children a voice and work
towards the increasing democratization of schools are necessary components.
But as a society we need to consider how we empower all children. Empowered
children speak out and do not become alienated. They reject bullying, racism,
and abuse. Evidence shows that disempowered children are more frequently the
victims of abuse. While citizenship education may be part of all our curricula, it
will not make the citizens of tomorrow unless they feel they have a valued role
in that society—first as children and subsequently as adults. Children and young
people who know they can talk about their experiences, who feel their views and
fears are listened to and respected, and who are given explanations of events that
impinge on them are more likely to understand the extent of their own obligations in the various aspects of their lives. We know this is not the experience of

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many children in their own homes, so as a society we are obliged to have structures in place that support all children and keep them safe.
The inclusion of children’s voices in the promotion of children’s rights affirms
children’s human dignity and physical integrity. Children are not just social actors in their families and communities; they are the holders of rights and the key
to ending the violence that is perpetrated against our young.
Further Reading: Berson, I. R., & Berson, M. J., 2001, Galvanizing support for children’s
issues through awareness of global advocacy, in Ilene R. Berson, Michael J. Berson, &
Barbara C. Cruz (Eds.), Research in global child advocacy: Cross cultural perspectives,
Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing; Berson, M. J., & Berson, I. R., 2000, An
introduction to global child advocacy: Historical action, contemporary perspectives,
and future directions, The International Journal of Educational Policy, Research, and
Practice, 1(1), 1–11; Block, A. A., 1997, I’m only bleeding: Education as the practice of violence against children, New York: Peter Lang Publishing; Dudley-Marling, C., Jackson,
J., & Stevens, L. P., 2006, Disrespecting childhood, Phi Delta Kappan, 87(10), 748–755;
Petit, M. R., 2006, Homeland insecurity: American children at risk, Washington, DC:
Every Child Matters Education Fund, retrieved December 15, 2006, from http://www.
democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/ECM/www/homelandinsecurity/.

Michael J. Berson and Ilene R. Berson
CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION
Citizenship education is the fundamental premise on which the whole public
school experience functions. Schooling in all societies aims to teach students the
knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to act effectively as citizens within
the parameters of what each society deems worthy. In a democratic society, key
curricular goals include knowledge of the community, nation, and world; skills
of critical mindedness and political action; and democratic dispositions of cooperation and tolerance.
Schools in the United States, unlike their counterparts in many other countries, operate independently of a national authority. However, national controversies over citizenship education, especially as it relates to patriotism, abound.
These controversies include the clash between unfettered free market economics
and social justice, the problems of pluralism and national unity in a context of
modernization, and the struggle over the meaning of patriotism in a democracy.
Each of these controversies stem from the American sociopolitical and economic context as it developed over the past 125 years.
A SOCIETY IN FLUX
Democratic citizenship education both reflects and aims to improve society. In the United States, varying states of sociopolitical and economic flux
influenced the course of the public school experience. Prominent among
these include trends related to immigration, modernization, and free market
economics.

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IMPORTANT EVENTS IN CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION
1889: Jane Adams opens Hull-House to help immigrants gain citizenship.
1903: W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk attacks Booker T. Washington’s “accommodationist” approach to African American education.
1905: Thomas Jesse Jones establishes “The Social Studies in the Hampton Curriculum”
for developing African American citizenship.
1916: Report of the Social Studies Committee of the National Education Association.
1921: David Snedden’s Sociological Determination of Objectives in Education lays out
differentiated instruction for producers and consumers.
1923: Supreme Court overturns teaching foreign language bans in Meyer v. Nebraska.
1929–1940: Harold Rugg textbooks capture social studies market.
1936: Attacks begin on popular Rugg textbooks for “anti-competition” content.
1940: National Association of Manufacturers “educational assignments” curricula disseminated to promote free market system and citizenship.
1942: Historian Alan Nevin characterizes the teaching of American history in schools as
unpatriotic.
1958: E. Merrill Root’s Brainwashing in the High Schools attacks textbooks in civics and
social studies as divisive and unpatriotic.
1964: Establishment of over forty Mississippi Freedom Schools intended to promote and
expand African Americans’ citizenship education.
1969: Supreme Court rules in favor of “symbolic” free speech in schools in Tinker v. Des
Moines Independent Community School District.
1994: Controversial national history standards released and attacked.
2002: Florida enacts Celebrate Freedom Week in all public schools and requires portions
of Declaration of Independence to be recited daily.

Following the Civil War, events in Europe and Asia launched a massive trend
of immigration to the United States. Between 1876 and 1926 alone, some 27 million immigrants entered the United States. Moreover, the world wars brought
large populations of African Americans looking for work to urban centers in
the northern states. The lure for many of these immigrants and migrants was
the opportunity to obtain jobs during a time of massive industrialization. These
immigrants and sons and daughters of former slaves brought cultural traditions
and religious beliefs with them that ran counter to the pre-existing white, AngloSaxon, Protestant belief system that was most prevalent in schools. This trend
fluctuated over the last century, but a steady wave of immigrants, particularly
people from Latin America who now comprise the largest minority population
in the country, continues to see the United States as a viable economic alternative to their homelands.
Modernization spurred massive immigration to the United States and
migration to its largest cities. This trend, sometimes known as the Industrial
Revolution, shifted the workforce from a rural agrarian base to urban centers,

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where the growth of large public schools assisted newcomers in seeking
economic success and also built a competent workforce for the benefit of
business and industry. With modernization, government began to grow in
size and regulatory power, establishing bureaucratic, highly organized systems
of maintenance such as school systems. The secularization of knowledge—a
trend motivated by the faith in scientific endeavor—brought about the belief
that societal ills produced by modernization could be cured via the methods of
science that brought about these ills.
Laissez-faire, free market capitalism has been lurking in the background
throughout the multicultural growth and modernization of American society.
The valorization of rugged individualism free from government regulation has
winnowed its way in and out of education in the United States for more than
a century. Sometimes overtly taught as an aspect of patriotism and at other
times assumed to be a part of the hidden curriculum of personal success, free
market capitalism has been a major player in the struggle over citizenship
education in America’s classrooms. As the catalyst for massive immigration
and migration, as well as the fuel that fired the engine of modernization, free
market capitalism has a great stake in what it means to be a citizen in this
democracy.
THE FREE MARKET AND SOCIAL REFORM
The lack of government regulation on expansive industrial growth and cheap
immigrant and migrant labor brought about an extreme disparity in wealth following the Civil War. The “robber barons,” as they were known, took advantage
of this situation by accumulating fortunes of astronomical size, often at the expense of immigrants and migrants flocking to urban centers. The turn of the
twentieth century experienced a backlash against the inhumane treatment of
workers and the extreme power put in the hands of the wealthy few during the
Progressive Era. Social reformers and critics such as John Spargo, Edward Bellamy, and Jane Addams engaged in projects that gave visibility to social and economic disparities. Nonetheless, huge waves of immigrants flooded the urban
North, and schools faced the task of educating millions of immigrants and their
children in democratic citizenship. This situation led to the ongoing clash between free market capitalism and the goals of social reformers in the education
of democratic citizens.
Citizenship education during the Progressive Era fell largely into two camps
using the same term—“social efficiency.” Education sociologist David Snedden
envisioned schools that would educate children as either “producers” who would
constitute the working class or “consumers” who would assume the mantle of
economic and social leadership in society. His view of a socially engineered society, where everyone found and accepted their social situation, received high
praise from the business world. In opposition to Snedden’s idea of social efficiency was the view of philosopher John Dewey. Dewey believed that schools
should be agents working to assist students in developing a socially efficient
mind through reflective thinking. Thus, the school, far from acting as an agent

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for the corporate status quo, aimed to eliminate social barriers through experiences designed to enlarge the human sense of community.
Influenced heavily by Dewey’s ideas, the landmark 1916 Report of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary
Education of the National Education Association placed the responsibility of citizenship education squarely on the shoulders of the social studies curriculum.
The notion of community civics, forwarded by this report, appealed nationally
to schools. The report’s capstone course for high school students, titled Problems of Democracy, laid the foundation for more aggressively critical citizenship
curricula during the Great Depression. From this point forward, the struggle
over citizenship education took place primarily in the field of social studies.
World War I and the 1920s diminished the quest to seek a more socially
and economically equitable curriculum for citizenship education. Patriotism
spawned by the war and economic growth throughout the “Roaring Twenties”
masked social ills and rekindled the urge to socially engineer society. Organizations such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) championed
vocational curricula that sorted students into their most fitting roles as citizens
in a free market. The exultant tide of economic boom swamped the causes of
social reform and social justice. Even many progressives believed that vocational training in the schools, if conducted in an inclusive and comprehensive
setting, held the best hope for a competent, happy citizen workforce.
The Great Depression, however, adjusted this sort of thinking. A movement
began under the banner of “social reconstruction” that rekindled the reform
spirit of the Progressive Era and rained a torrent of criticism on the free market
system. In education, a group of scholars and school personnel known as the
“social frontiersmen”—drawing from Dewey’s version of social efficiency—led
the way. Emblematic of this group was Harold O. Rugg, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Titled Man and His Changing Society, Rugg’s
wildly popular series of social studies textbooks brought into question the assumption that unfettered free market capitalism was a necessary foundation for
democracy. Attacks on Rugg began in 1936 when his books were criticized for
“sovietizing” students with “anti-competition” content. School book burnings of
his curriculum ensued.
In 1940, NAM again joined the citizenship education fray with an explosion
of curricula known as “educational assignments” to combat the socialreconstructionist movement in citizenship education. As the Depression came
to a close, NAM commissioned a professor of banking at Columbia University,
Ralph W. Robbey, to develop abstracts of social studies textbooks so that businesspeople could be armed with knowledge to address and combat negative
free market curricula in their communities. Scholars and educators as diverse
as Charles Beard and Henry Steele Commager in history and Harold Rugg and
Edgar Wesley in social studies education came under severe criticism for their
treatment of the free market system.
World War II and the ensuing Cold War brought heightened interest in the
business community to link free market capitalism to patriotism within the

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105

THE RUGG SOCIAL-SCIENCE COURSE SERIES
Up to 1931
The Reading Books
Volume I: An Introduction to American Civilization
Volume II: Changing Civilizations in the Modern World
Volume III: A History of American Civilization: Economic and Social
Volume IV: A History of American Government and Culture
Volume V: An Introduction to Problems of American Culture
Volume VI: Changing Governments and Changing Cultures

The Workbooks
Volume I: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany An Introduction to American Civilization
Volume II: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany Changing Civilizations in the Modern World
Volume III: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany A History of American Civilization: Economic
and Social
Volume IV: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany A History of American Government and Culture
Volume V: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany An Introduction to Problems of American
Culture
Volume VI: Pupil’s Workbook to accompany Changing Governments and Changing Cultures

The Teacher’s Guides
Volume I: Teacher’s Guide for an Introduction to American Civilization
Volume II: Teacher’s Guide for Changing Civilizations in the Modern World

curriculum. Massive public relations campaigns brought various forms of profree market curricula (e.g., Junior Achievement programs) into America’s classrooms from organizations such as NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Social reformers also contributed much to the struggle over citizenship-education
curriculum after World War II via renewed vigor drawn from Brown v. Board of
Education (1954), the War on Poverty, and protests of the Vietnam War. The Citizen Education Project at Teachers College, Columbia University, represented
a growing movement during the 1940s and 1950s that advocated citizenship
development through an ambitious, participation-oriented curriculum. Other
curricula involving social problems and public issues (e.g., the Harvard Public
Issues Series, Brown University’s Choices for the 21st Century, and Rethinking
Schools) continued the spirit of social justice and reform through the study
of pressing social problems since the Vietnam War era. Additionally, service

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learning as a graduation requirement has moved students throughout the country to a heightened awareness of issues in social and economic justice and how,
as citizens, they can address these issues through action.
PLURIBUS AND UNUM
Immigration and emancipation mark a century-long debate over the definition of citizenship, as well as the makeup of the citizenry. An expanding inclusiveness in the meaning of citizenship brought about clashes between the forms
of citizenship education best suited for the United States.
Constitutional amendments expanding citizenship to include African Americans and women and the Snyder Act of 1924 (making Native Americans citizens), coupled with child labor laws and compulsory schooling regulations,
increased school enrollments tremendously during the early twentieth century.
Today, more than 90 percent of school-age children (approximately 50 million
students) attend public schools in the United States. Given this growth in public
education’s vastness and diversity, the fundamental mandate of citizenship education experienced much tension over the past century.
This situation—the tension between ethnic and racial pluralism and national
unity—continues today. Immigrant waves and heightened patriotism clashed
during the Progressive Era as the United States entered the stage of world powers
and experienced the infusion of myriad cultural mores. Citizenship education
from both the conservative and liberal perspectives saw the enlarging pluralism
brought about by immigration as a threat to democracy. Nativism in the schools
manifested in bans on foreign language instruction by some state governments
(overturned by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923) and the attempt
to denationalize immigrants from their cultural heritage in order to assimilate
them into the Anglo-American tradition. Progressives addressed the cultural
influx by gently assimilating immigrants into the principles of democracy without stripping immigrant students of their heritage.
Post–Civil War constitutional amendments ensuring citizenship for former
slaves brought about African American public education on a large scale. The
Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) kept local enforcement of
racial segregation intact, especially in the South. Efforts at citizenship education
for African Americans under these conditions came to rest largely within two
opposing camps. Booker T. Washington, architect of the Tuskegee Institute, and
Thomas Jesse Jones of the Hampton Institute looked upon the plight of African Americans as one that could only be surmounted through service to white
Americans via hard work and exemplary moral behavior. Washington seemed
to care little for African American civil rights outside the realm of economic
contribution and achievement. Jones, who developed one of the first known
courses in “social studies,” viewed citizenship education for African Americans
as something that would bring them into closer alignment with “the essentials
of civilization.” Opposing this subservient point of view was William Du Bois.
He championed civil rights as essential to the situation of minorities, especially
African Americans, through his teachings, writings, and lectures. His attack on

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Booker T. Washington in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and his co-founding of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—with, among
others, John Dewey—made him a leader in socially active citizenship education
for African Americans.

CITIZENSHIP CURRICULUM FOR MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM
SCHOOLS (1964)
Unit I: The Negro in Mississippi
Statistics on Education, Housing, Income, Employment and Health
The Poor in America
The South as an Underdeveloped Country
Unit II: The Negro in the North
Triple Revolution
Chester PA
Unit III: Myths about the Negro
Guide to Negro History
In White America (excerpt)
History addendum I
History addendum II
Negro History Study Questions
Development of the Negro Power since 1900
Unit IV: The Power Structure
Mississippi Power Structure
Power of the Dixiecrats
Nazi Germany
Unit V: Poor whites, Poor Negroes and Their Fears
Hazard, KY
Unit VI: Soul Things and Material Things
Statements of Discipline of Nonviolent Movements
Unit VII: The Movement, Part 1, Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins
Unit VII: The Movement, Part 2, COFO’s Political Program
Readings in Nonviolence
Rifle Squads or the Beloved Community
Voter Registration Laws in Mississippi
Civil Rights Bill
Nonviolence in American History
Behind the Cotton Curtain
Teaching Material for Unit VII, Part 2
Source: http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/A_03_Index.htm.

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The Washington-Jones view of the African American in citizenship education lasted throughout the twentieth century in spite of such gains as Brown v.
The Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Occasional and
important challenges to the status quo came with the Tennessee Foxfire movement and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools, where recognition of existing
inequities in citizenship and thoughtful activism highlighted the curricula. The
National Council for the Social Studies, a leader in citizenship education theory
and practice for thousands of teachers and teacher educators since 1921, championed the plight of unequal citizenship for both ethnic minorities and African
Americans throughout the latter half of the century, and depictions of minorities in textbooks began to take a dramatic turn toward integrating, rather than
denigrating or ignoring, the role of minorities in the development of American
democracy. Growing multicultural perspectives on the social studies and citizenship education in recent decades by scholars such as James Banks produced
a backlash from conservative scholars Diane Ravitch and Arthur Schlesinger,
among others, who warned of the dangers inherent in undermining the unum
for the sake of the pluribus.
The general response in schools, however, has been to teach English skills to
ethnic minorities and to steep all students in a basic understanding of government. In spite of progressive ideas embedded in the aforementioned 1916 NEA
report on the social studies and the many advances in teaching for and about
cultural difference since then, little has changed in the school curriculum with
regard to citizenship education for and about immigrants and minorities.
PATRIOTISM: BLIND FAITH OR CRITICAL THOUGHT?
The history of American citizenship education is filled with battles over the
meaning and manifestation of patriotism in the curriculum. Issues concerning
patriotism are a persistent subtext of the struggles between free market economics and social reform, as well as disagreements over the proper place of culture
and race in citizenship education. Joel Westheimer points out that patriotism is
a struggle between unquestioning faith in and total allegiance to the policies and
decisions of the government (authoritarian patriotism) and loyalty to the basic
principles of democracy (democratic patriotism). The events of the past century
pushed the debate on which of these two types of patriotism is most beneficial
to citizenship education.
National hubris brought about by manifest destiny and World War I pressured the school curriculum to raise the United States to a level of unparalleled
superiority throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Coupled with the
influx of immigrants, schools were looked upon as the agent of Americanization
necessary to convert various immigrant cultures to this form of authoritarian
patriotism. Embedded in this notion of patriotism was the edification of a
laissez-faire approach to free market capitalism as the bedrock of the American
way of life.
The 1916 NEA report on the social studies, Charles Beard’s 1932 American
Historical Association Commission on the Social Studies, and the Rugg curriculum

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represented attempts to establish a more democratic form of patriotism in schools.
Although the Great Depression ignited a backlash against authoritarian patriotism
in schools, these and other attempts at promoting a social reconstructionist, active view of citizenship came under severe attack. The Hearst newspapers labeled
Beard and his associates as a “red menace,” the Federal Bureau of Investigation
kept a watchful surveillance on Rugg, and the NAM textbook survey decried the
anti-American stance of many social studies curricula to which the task of citizenship education was assigned. Even though curricula with a focus on the discussion of social problems during the 1930s gained credence in many publications for
teachers, surveys found that less than 12 percent of teachers deemed discussions
on social problems appropriate for their students. The fact that 21 states required
loyalty oaths for teachers by 1936 may have contributed to this sentiment on the
part of teachers.
World War II ignited further assaults on an issues-centered, critical approach
to teaching democratic values. Historian Alan Nevin’s attack on attempts to
scrutinize the United States through the basic principles of democracy appeared
in the May 3, 1942, edition of the New York Times Magazine. Emblematic of the
authoritarian onslaught, Nevin’s article, titled “American History for Americans,”
excoriated public schools for neglecting to teach American history as a means to
preserve unity and promote patriotism, especially in times of war.
This theme—the importance of patriotism in times of war—ran throughout
the century and into the present. Education critics E. Merrill Root and Vice
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover continued Nevin’s theme during the Cold War.
Shocked by the Soviet Union’s success in its 1957 launch of Sputnik, these critics
again assailed the teaching of history (and all subjects, for that matter) as being
intellectually soft and anti-American. Root’s 1958 Brainwashing in the High
School managed to pull together the strands of immigration, free market capitalism, and patriotism in his reading of textbooks that, in his analysis, fomented
class struggles, questioned free market capitalism, and denigrated patriotism.
Amidst this struggle over patriotism in the curriculum, Maurice Hunt and Lawrence Metcalf published a social studies methods book in 1955 that offered the
analysis of American society’s closed areas (e.g., economics, race, social class,
and religion) as a way to develop democratic habits of mind. Indicative of democratic patriotism, this methods book for prospective high school social studies
teachers lived on into the early 1970s.
The Vietnam War era reopened the conflict between authoritarian and democratic patriotism in schools. One Supreme Court decision, in particular, highlighted this struggle. The Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School
District (1969) case concerned a 1965 incident over free speech carried out by
students in three Des Moines schools. Disciplined by the school district for
wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the students took the case
to the Supreme Court, which, by a seven-to-two vote, supported the students’
right to free “symbolic” speech as long as it did not disrupt the educational
process.
Struggles over the type of citizenship education best suited to the development
of patriotism continue. During the 1990s, authoritarian patriots argued staunchly

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against the proposed history standards as being negative toward the American
story and diminishing the importance of loyalty to the government and its processes. After September 11, 2001, states and school districts heightened the importance of pledging allegiance to the nation’s struggle with terrorism. The Florida
legislature, for example, passed a bill in 2002 creating Celebrate Freedom Week,
during which time students are required to recite daily a portion of the Declaration of Independence. Although educational organizations and individual teachers
continue to promote the notion of democratic patriotism through issues-centered
curricula and open inquiry, the Florida law is indicative of the trend toward authoritarian patriotism at this point in America’s educational history.
CONCLUSION
The education of democratic citizens is the core mission of public schooling
in the United States. Sociopolitical and economic trends, as well as unforeseen
events at home and throughout the world, have fueled controversies over how
citizenship education should be conducted in schools. These controversies involve the role of free market capitalism, social reform, pluralism, and patriotism
in the education of students as citizens.
Further Reading: Butts, R. F., 1989, The civic mission in educational reform: Perspectives for
the public and the profession, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press; Evans, R. W., 2004,
The social studies wars: What should we teach the children? New York: Teachers College
Press; Ross, E. W., ed., 2006, The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities, 3rd ed., Albany: State University of New York Press; Westheimer, J., 2006, Politics and patriotism in education, Phi Delta Kappan 87(8), 608–613.

Gregory E. Hamot

CIVIL RIGHTS
In December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), a civil rights group comprised mostly of young black college students
and graduates, conceptualized several projects to involve white volunteer
college students in assisting African American communities during what
became known as the Summer Project of 1964 in the State of Mississippi. One
of the various projects created was the notion of freedom schools—an alternative elementary/secondary educational program. Freedom schools were
designed to dramatize the inadequacies of the Mississippi public schools and to
encourage African American students to participate socially and politically in
their communities, linking education to their personal experiences. In March
1964, a two-day curriculum conference, sponsored by the National Council for
Churches, was held in New York City. Conference participants recommended
numerous progressive, democratic instructional methods that emphasized selfdiscovery and self-expression, encouraging students to think critically, to question Mississippi’s oppressive social order, and to participate in instituting social

Civil Rights

change. Traditional teaching in Mississippi had been a form of oppression.
Authoritarian in approach, it had relied on rote learning in which a teacher
lectured and then tested solely on the lecture. Students were expected to be
passive and subservient. Black students had little or no opportunities in their
Mississippi classroom to talk about, much less act upon the many problems that
they faced in their daily lives.
Under this oppressive form of education, African American youth learned
to accept inadequate conditions as unchangeable facts of their lives, not to trust
others (particularly whites), to be cynical, and to expect to be ill-prepared to
function in their society. The possibility that students should someday function
as active agents for social change was unheard of—and undesired. This was the
mentality of the black public education system, indeed the mentality of the Mississippi society at large.
SCHOOLS FOR QUESTIONING
In contrast, the freedom schools were to reject these traditional teaching practices, to rely on progressive methods designed to promote student participation,
worth and equality among students, and a connection between school and life.
These were to be schools for questioning, for exposing students to meaningful
discussion experiences, for helping them understand the social forces influencing
their lives, hopefully enabling them some management of social conditions under
which they lived. Students would be encouraged to ask questions about their experiences and their personal situations. Asking a question was a first step toward
overcoming the pattern of passive acceptance of authority: toward learning to
think, to inquire, and, ultimately, to convert learning and inquiry into action.
SNCC leaders believed that Mississippi students had vital and unique ideas to
contribute both to their communities and to the movement. It was hoped that
by learning to question freely and thoughtfully in an open environment of group
learning and discussion sessions, students would challenge views of society and
find alternatives. Freedom schools were to enable students to articulate the desire for change awakened by the questions they were being empowered to ask.
Asking questions was to be the means for converting attitudes from passive to
active—helping students to understand themselves, their society, and the need
to change it.
How to Design “Questioning” Lessons: Notes on Teaching in Mississippi
To help the volunteer-teachers in encouraging students to question, the Freedom School Committee compiled a number of the teaching suggestions from
the various curriculum outlines emerging from the curriculum conference
into a teaching manual entitled Notes on Teaching in Mississippi, which are part
of the collected SNCC papers. The purpose of the manual was to prepare the
volunteer-teachers for the specific situations they would encounter and to instruct them on how to respond to and teach the black students who would be in
their freedom schools.

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Figure C.4 Location of Mississippi Freedom Schools.

Promoting students to ask questions was to be built around the method of
meaningful and reflective class discussion. Discussion was to enable students to
learn to listen to others, to explore their own views, to ask questions in a sincere
attempt to understand conflicting views of others, to make up their own minds
about which ideas had better justification, and, in the end, to possibly improve
their own lives and the lives of others in their community. Discussion would
make ideas, beliefs, and experiences accessible to analysis, criticism, and new
insights. Embedded in the freedom school’s concept of discussion was that a successful discussion included a problem or issue topic that involved students’ views,
clarifications, and analyses; that through discussion students would learn the
obligations of civility, as well as strategies for moving a discussion forward; and
that policy conversations would focus toward decision and community action.

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Notes on Teaching in Mississippi stated that the discussion method was encouraged above other methods because it allowed for encouraging expression;
exposing feelings; permitting participation of students on various levels; developing group loyalties and responsibility; and permitting the sharing of strengths
and weaknesses of individuals. On the simplest level, students needed to learn to
talk and share ideas in the classroom. Through student talk, the conversion from
passive to active was to be accomplished, thus facilitating the primary belief of
the freedom schools.
Notes on Teaching in Mississippi provided a number of “teaching hints” and
“discussion-leading techniques” that defined the role of the freedom school
teacher as a moderator. The role was not passive; it required active participation.
As moderator, the freedom school teacher was responsible for establishing the
open environment needed for students to exchange views and for contributing
to the discussion at key points to clarify issues, aid analysis, and initiate evaluation. Teachers were to promote thoughtful, personal inquiry and to avoid using
their “authority” to influence students’ actions.
Discussion usually followed a three-step pattern. The teacher would first
ask introductory questions: “How do you feel about . . . ?” or “How would you
feel if . . . ?” After the students had had a chance to express their feelings, the
teacher would then ask probing questions: “Why do you feel this way?” or “Why
would anyone feel this way?” Finally, as the discussion progressed, the teacher
would draw more critical thinking from the students: “How do you feel about
his idea?” or “How do you feel about her experience?” The purpose of these
questions was to show that the teacher was interested in the students and their
independent ideas and to encourage the students to respond emotionally or intuitively and then to reflect upon those responses thoughtfully, even analytically,
rather than to solicit some particular answer from the students, trick them into
following the teacher’s own line of thought in the Socratic manner, or force them
to second-guess in order to please the teacher.
What to Teach: The Civic Curriculum
The classroom connection that would bring together the questioning, the students’ real life experiences, the solutions, and the direct action was a progressive
curriculum based on student-teacher talk. It was designed both to raise students
consciousness as a self-determining “minority culture” and to educate students
to be active agents of social change for a more just and equitable existence.
The curriculum was organized around a question-answer format to facilitate
the freedom school teacher to be “a concerned questioner.” Two sets of questions
were the foundation of the Civic Curriculum.

the basic set of questions
1. Why are we (teachers and students) in freedom schools?
2. What is the Freedom Movement?
3. What alternatives does the Freedom Movement offer us?

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the secondary set of questions
1. What does the majority culture have that we want?
2. What does the majority culture have that we don’t want?
3. What do we have that we want to keep?
IMPLICATIONS FOR CURRENT EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
Much of current educational practice seems to be steeped in a technocratic
and procedural methodology that looks for a “one-size-fits-all” approach to solve
the academic malaise of all students. Focusing on their own experiences as freedom school teachers, Florence Howe and Paul Lauter argue that the discussion
format is an approach that exemplifies “a politically charged way of thinking
about the relationships of teachers to students, students to learning, and of education to the struggle for social justice.” Discussion of students’ experiences can
generate visions of social change in students’ lives, empowering them to alter the
tasks that society in general and schools in particular have demanded of them.
The pedagogical orientation of the freedom schools was centered in key questions. The role of the teacher was to create an “open” environment in which discussion began with the experience of the students. Thus students in a class may
express themselves, explore their feelings and assumptions, share with others,
and eventually come to understand their experiences. From these experiences,
common intellectual ground can be established for further analysis. From the
discussions based on the “open” questions and on the students’ experiences, the
class could engage in collective decision making, planning and pursuing activities with shared goals. The teacher and the students would leaven the entire
process with new and additional information gleaned through further discussion and analysis. The entire learning experience would have students and the
teacher working together in the educational classroom for the mutual benefit
and enlightenment of all.
The freedom school educators realized that to implement what they called a
“liberatory pedagogy” would be difficult in light of the dominant rigid curriculum and authoritarian teaching. However, they believed that individual teachers, either in isolation or collectively in the public schools, can indeed make a
difference in the lives of their students. To do so they must change fundamental
curriculum tasks and encourage new curricular developments, with provocative questions, liberated student voices, greater understanding of student experiences, and then possible societal change. To be sure, the ideal in the freedom
schools was not always implemented, but it presented an alternative.
CONCLUSIONS
Reflecting upon the 1964 freedom school experience, Liz Fusco, the coordinator of the freedom schools in Indianola, Mississippi, wrote a summary of the
impact freedom schools had on the Mississippi students and, consequently, on

Civil Rights

their society. Freedom schools became a font of real activity during the Mississippi Project. Students began to have a sense of themselves as people who could
be taken seriously. They were encouraged to talk, and their talk was listened
to. They became articulate about what was wrong and what changes should be
made. Connections between curriculum and personal experience were made as
students studied the realities of conditions in Mississippi and the effects of those
realities on their lives. Students discovered that they were real human beings and
that they could alter realities by taking action against the injustices, which kept
them “unhappy and impotent.” The visible results were in the transformations of
who they were able to become “as discussion leaders, as teachers, as organizers,
as speakers, as friends, as people.” Fusco claimed it was asking questions about
real problems that led to students’ transformation from passive bystanders to
active community citizens.
The organizers of the freedom schools wanted a certain type of community
of students—active, participating student-citizens who would make positive
changes in the Mississippi social fabric as opposed to being passive “good little
n . . . . . s.” We should want nothing less for students today. Freedom school organizers created a discussion-based curriculum to accomplish their transformative goals. The objective of this discussion-based curriculum was to strengthen
self-esteem, build cultural identity, promote critical thinking and problem solving, and provide opportunities necessary for students to take control of their
personal lives. Therefore, this discussion-based curriculum motivated students
to become agents for change in improving existing conditions in their community; promoted learning as a foundation for democratic living when focused on useful knowledge and meaningful tasks; promoted an appreciation for
human diversity, acknowledging the dignity and worth of each individual; and
encouraged equality and social justice for all humankind. The discussion-based
curriculum was also related directly to the students by examining the existing
conditions, situations, and experiences in and outside of their communities. Students participated in serious in-depth examination and discourse concerning
problematic political, social, and economic issues; mastering relevant information, relating the new information to what they already know, and applying new
insights to current problems. In addition, public presentation of meaningful student work provided opportunities for students to participate actively in evaluating their own and their fellow students’ projects, thus building skills of critical
examination and experiencing personal growth. And finally, discussion-based
curriculum emphasized a team approach, with learning experiences that created
a dynamic, participatory, collective consciousness-raising educational environment in a democratic partnership. The focus was on both group responsibility
and community involvement, with genuine respect for and trust in students,
allowing them the freedom to express their feelings and ideas. Students were
guided in constructing, ordering, and making sense of their experiences and in
putting those experiences into action; they were encouraged to discover, engage,
and evaluate their own existing values, attitudes, and beliefs in relation to other
people, to their community, to society at large, and even to themselves.

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Educational classrooms could follow the example of freedom schools by providing democratic classroom laboratories where students encounter, rehearse,
cultivate, and apply the skills and practices of participating citizens. The public discourse should not be passive, rather it should be active in exploring the
meanings of self-determination and activism within the context of problems and
conditions that face students in their own society. Freedom schools gave to African American students within the context of a repressive society that seemed
to hold no democratic possibilities the opportunities to realize that they had a
voice and that through their collective voice real changes could be made. Educational classrooms in today’s society should provide similar opportunities where
students can engage in a civic curriculum for democracy, sitting face-to-face
in discussion circles; student citizens committed to questioning, to active giveand-take dialogue on everyday issues, discussing authentic problems focused on
the potential of real social change.
Further Reading: Lauter, P., & Howe, F., 1970, The conspiracy of the young, New York:
World Book; Perlstein, D., Teaching freedom: SNCC and the creation of the Mississippi
freedom schools, History of Education Quarterly 30 (Fall 1990); The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959–1972, 1982, Stanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America.

George W. Chilcoat and Jerry A. Ligon
CLASS SIZE
Class size reduction seems a simple idea, something that would be easy to define, implement, and evaluate. Put fewer students in a classroom with a teacher
and achievement should go up. But like so many things in education, class size
reduction has been anything but simple. It is a source of frequent argument
among researchers who debate its critical attributes, designs for research, and
the meaning of outcomes. It is a flashpoint for legislators who are hesitant to
vote against an incredibly popular reform. It is little wonder, because the public
commitment to class size reduction is stunning. The public favors investment in
class size reduction over vouchers by a seven-to-one margin. Most new teachers
and the majority of adults favor reducing class size as a way to improve teacher
quality. In 2006, 33 states had some kind of legislation limiting class size. In this
context, class size reduction is a puzzle for policymakers who work to develop a
policy that will fit into today’s cash-strapped schools.
Contentious debate surrounds this reform, its definition and history and the
methods and evidence used to support or refute its use, and there are several
dimensions of the discourse and practice of class size reduction:
• How big is small? Under the label of class size reduction, reforms have limited class sizes to 20 in California, to 15 in Wisconsin, but to 30 for 4- to
7-year-olds in England.
• What do you mean reduced class size? Sometimes class size is calculated in
terms of group size by capping the upper limit of the number of students

Class Size

assigned to a teacher. In other cases, class size reduction is taken as pupilteacher ratio, premised on the ratio of students to adults in the classroom
or school.
• Choosing targets of investment: Although any policy is a choice of relative
investment, class size reduction is often pitted against teacher quality as a
strategy for improving student achievement.
• The power of the individual: Class size reduction might be seen as a Western concern, based on assumptions about the needs of individual children
in the context of schooling. While seen as a valuable investment by many
U.S. educators, parents, and policymakers, educators in China and Japan
prefer larger classes so that children learn to be a part of a group.
DEFINITION
A simple definition of class size reduction is that it is a reform that limits
the number of students assigned to a teacher within a given classroom. The
limit set by a class size reduction policy varies by the context—in some cases it
is relative to empirical evidence on class size reduction and in others it is relative to prevailing practice or what is affordable. Embedded within the definition are assumptions about how class size reduction works to support student
learning.
For those who take a strict constructionist view of class size reduction, its
power comes out of changes in instructional and assessment practices. With
smaller groups, it is assumed that teachers do more intense assessment, they
have more direct interaction with individual students, their instruction matches
student need, they develop closer relationships with students and families, and
they spend less time on behavior management. Students are thought to learn
the culture of schooling more easily, they connect with their teachers and peers
in productive ways, and they are supported in their behavior as teachers can
identify problems more quickly. This theory of action rests on increasing the intensity of educational practice and experience and is based on research that has
examined the linear relations between group size and student outcomes. More
moderate approaches set class size at a politically expedient limit (smaller than
current practice) and reachable within budget resources. These programs, which
in the United States set class sizes to approximately 20, use the concept of class
size reduction without the idea of a threshold for improving practice. Instead,
it operates from a generic notion of the relationship between group size and
student outcomes.
In contrast to instructionally focused approaches to class size reduction, administrative or economic approaches attend to the ratio of students to teachers
at either the classroom or school level. Pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) is persuasive to
those interested in educational costs, and the ease of calculation makes it a quick
and dirty proxy for estimates of class size. Its logic is conceptualized in terms of
relative investment (class size vs. teacher salary vs. teacher quality) or in terms
of general allocation of units of educational expertise (the addition of staff, any

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kind of staff, provides students with a greater proportion of adult support). The
problem is that PTR is tangentially related to classroom practice and as a result, student learning. Dividing the number of students by school staff can factor in both certified staff (speech and language clinicians, psychologists, special
education teachers, etc) and noncertified staff (secretaries, janitors, foodservice)
that support students but indirectly. At the classroom level, pupil-teacher ratio
approaches might include the use of paraprofessionals or pairing large groups of
students with more than one teacher. These classroom practices are difficult to
translate to increased student achievement.
HISTORY
There are two related but separate histories in this story. The first is the history of class size reduction practice, most typically at the state level. The second
is the history of class size reduction research, told through analyses of student
outcomes, teacher practice, and economic costs. This research history has two
components—the research on class size and the research on programs that
specifically aim to shape teaching and learning by having teachers work with
smaller groups. These histories sometimes develop in parallel; sometimes they
intersect, with actors referencing the other strand to advocate, repudiate, and
substantiate work. The practice of class size reduction policy only vaguely relies
on the research on class size, and the research on class size reduction goes on
separately from the work on class size as a whole.
Although researchers and policymakers have been interested in class size for
years, the most recent scholarship and policy development have come out of the
opportunities created by new research methodologies and the economic bubble of
the late twentieth century. Research methodology supported the trend with the
development of meta-analysis, a tool that allowed powerful statistical synthesis
of quantitative studies on a topic. Class size was one of the first topics chosen to
showcase the method. Following foundational meta-analyses by Glass & Smith,
states took up class size reduction as a tool to enhance student achievement.
From the start, there was a conflation of class size reduction and pupil-teacher
ratio in research and practice, tangling up interpretations. The first major initiative, Indiana’s Project Prime Time, added paraprofessionals to classes, making
it a PTR approach. It was soon followed by Project STAR in Tennessee, a fieldbased experiment that randomly assigned students and teachers to regular-sized
classes, regular-sized classes with an aide, and small classes of 13–17 students.
Despite some weaknesses in the design, STAR was touted for its methodological rigor, and its results were widely disseminated, reanalyzed, and discussed.
Its results, combined with an economic upturn that allowed states to explore
new policy investments in education, prompted other states to develop class size
reduction programs. Wisconsin developed the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) program, initially designed to support communities in
poverty and later expanded to approximately 500 schools. SAGE calls for class
sizes of 15:1 in K–3, rigorous curriculum, professional development and teacher

Class Size

evaluation, and increased connection between home and school. California took
a different approach, providing funding for universal class size reduction. In
contrast to SAGE, which provided $2,000 per low-income student, California
provided $650 per student regardless of income status. The federal government
had a short-lived class size reduction program that infused 25,000 teachers into
the teaching ranks, and through the 1990s and early part of this decade, other
states implemented limited class size reduction programs. A class size reduction
program in Britain focused on an upper-end estimate of effective group size by
setting a limit of 30 on the early groups in schools. More recently Florida voters
approved a constitutional amendment that phases in a sweeping class size reduction program by 2010. Students assigned per teacher in core courses will be
limited to 18 in Pre-K–3, 22 in grades 4–8, and 25 in grades 9–12.
In addition to analysis of specific reforms, researchers looked to existing databases to understand class size effects. This work analyzed existing data, correlating class size information with outcomes as diverse as student achievement,
teacher salary, and placement in special education. More narrowly constructed
database analyses used large-scale data collection opportunities like the National
Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study. These database analyses often expanded attention to class size reduction
beyond the early elementary years, where the bulk of the reforms have invested
funding. This resulted in an interesting asymmetry—the student outcomes could
be most easily available at the later elementary or secondary level while the class
size reduction programs were at the early elementary level.
DOES CLASS SIZE REDUCTION WORK?
The most typical question asked about a reform is “Does it work?” Class size
reduction is no exception, and the first-generation research posed that question simply, comparing students who had attended reduced-sized classes with
students who had attended more typical groups. Rather than a single answer,
researchers qualified their responses. In research on specific class size reduction implementations, class size effects could be identified in programs with
sufficiently small groups, with best outcomes in classes smaller than 20. These
achievement effects were seen across all students but were more pronounced for
African American and economically disadvantaged students. Low-achieving students and English language learners did not receive extra benefit from class size
reduction beyond their peers in smaller classes. Students who experienced small
classes maintained their advantage over their larger classes peers in later grades,
and the longer they stayed in small classes, the better the outcomes. The addition of teacher aides, purported to reduce pupil-teacher ratio, did not improve
student achievement.
Analysis of surveys and other databases about class size are inconclusive, with
some analysts arguing that it is a good investment and others denying its utility.
Much of the scholarly argument centered on methodology chosen for analysis,
with more global strategies generating less-positive findings.

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Recognizing the complexity of classroom practice, researchers also looked
beyond student outcomes. How does class size reduction change how participants feel about schooling and shape what teachers do? Student and teacher attitudes are improved in smaller classes, less class time is spent on discipline,
and students receive more individualized instruction. In higher-achieving classrooms, the teaching is more explicit and more directly related to student needs.
Although there is an implicit assumption that teacher activity will be different
in smaller classes, researchers have not always found that to be the case. Differences in practice are more likely in early primary than later school grades.
The California implementation provided a window on systemic effects of
a universally provided class size reduction program. The introduction of this
reform stressed an already pressured system, with an increase in the number
of underqualified staff and expansion of classroom sections without adequate
space, with these problems most acutely experienced in the most challenged
schools. These problems were experienced to a lesser extent in Wisconsin, where
many schools implemented class size reduction in buildings with insufficient
space, placing 30 students with 2 teachers.
How Does Class Size Reduction Work?
As researchers pondered the mixture of outcomes uncovered in firstgeneration research, a number of people shifted their attention to the question
of how class size reduction produced, or did not produce, changes in student
outcomes. This work came out of a growing recognition that how class size reduction works depends on how it is implemented. This should come as no surprise—
class size reduction is an educational treatment used to change the conditions in
classrooms to increase student achievement. The variability of implementation,
however, implies that there is little consensus and/or little recognition of the
parameters of the treatment or the mechanisms at work. The following section
will examine several ways we can interpret the mechanisms at work in class size
reduction and will explore conceptualizations used in prevention science, ideology and culture, and developmental effects as potential explanatory factors.
Treatment Fidelity
When a treatment is tested in medicine or intervention science, there is careful
attention paid to treatment fidelity—the degree to which it was implemented as
it was designed and intended. While it is certainly the case that any educational
intervention or reform will have a local implementation that reflects the history,
needs, and politics of its context, extreme variation changes the basic meanings
of a treatment. If we thought of class size reduction in this way, we would look
carefully at how stakeholders implement class size reduction in terms of three
specific elements: timing, intensity, and duration. Timing describes when a treatment is applied—is it best to reduce class size in the early grades, later, or both?
Intensity describes how the treatment is enacted and would address issues such

Class Size

as how small a class needs to be to have an effect and the types of instruction
that makes smaller classes most potent. Duration relates to how long students
need to experience small classes (a) to have an effect and (b) to sustain an effect.
Implementations of class size reduction have typically ignored these elements,
particularly related to the issue of intensity, with little attention to preparing
teachers to take advantage of CSR. An example of this comes from evaluation
of the SAGE project, which has within the reform provision for professional
development (PD). In action, schools can define any professional development
as meeting the policy’s PD requirements. This played out in interesting ways in
SAGE’s 30:2 classrooms, where many pairs of teachers used tag-team teaching, a
strategy where one teacher took charge of 30 students while another teacher did
other classroom work such as going through folders or contacting parents. This
strategy effectively increased class size in a reform that promoted smaller groups,
reducing the intensity of the treatment. Analysis of class size research needs to
take these elements into account if we are going to have a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying class size reduction. Policy construction
and enactment should address these elements to ensure that investments are
made on dimensions that are scientifically based.
Developmental Mechanisms
There is more investment in CSR programming in the primary grades and
more evidence of efficacy with younger students. The public is more likely to
invest in class size reduction, believing in early intervention and the needs of
younger students to work in smaller groups. Is class size reduction more effective for younger students or do we just have more data on it? Several researchers
have suggested mechanisms that produce the effects in early grades. Ehrenberg,
Brewer, Gamoran, & Willms (2001) suggest that CSR has a latent effect in two
related dimensions. CSR has an ability to change the cognitive, psychological
social development through its intensified instructional practices. This in turn
changes the future developmental context for students, improving their chances
of success. By intervening early these changes accumulate positively over time.
Is it more amenable to the practices of teachers in the primary grades? More
focused on small group instruction, teachers in grades K–3 may already have
in their practice the seeds of class size reduction strategies. However, little specific attention has been paid to fostering these strategies. It seems that there
is a belief that teachers will naturally change their practice to take advantage
of smaller classes, and researchers and policymakers have not described the
changes. The research community seems stuck in the description that teachers
don’t change.
Ideology
The ideology of CSR (or its poor cousin PTR) shapes the nature of implementation and research in every dimension. The politics of achievement drive this

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reform, with a simplified view of educational practice. Although there has been
attention paid to other elements of implementation and practice, most frequently
CSR is isolated as an input that will magically change both the processes and
the outcomes of education. If we just change the number of children in a class,
achievement goes up. But achievement is nested in many contexts. In the early
grades CSR’s effects can be seen across student groups but are most profound
for African American and economically disadvantaged students. CSR’s promise,
however, has a powerful pull for the middle class who advocates for universal
implementation. Unfortunately, this results in scarce resources being spread
across schools in generic ways, without attention to differential needs of students
or teachers. The cost of increasing staff is so formidable that other concerns like
space or support for teachers cannot be addressed. CSR is implemented in an
educational context where teachers are socialized to work in particular ways,
ways that come out of histories where larger groups were much more prevalent.
These histories also have developmental assumptions about the needs of children to become increasingly independent over time, making small group work
less likely for older students. And they are histories where one-teacher:one-class
is the norm rather than forms of team teaching or sharing students. Some frame
CSR as pork barrel politics, a bone thrown to teachers who see it as making their
life easier. When education is viewed in terms of bodies to process through a
system, CSR makes teaching look like a cushy job, particularly if it’s asserted that
teachers don’t change what they do with smaller groups. This makes it very easy
to blame teachers if CSR does not produce the outcomes implicit in this considerable investment. It allows us to ignore the more troubling structural elements
that limit student and teacher resources. These simple conceptualizations of CSR
apply linear thinking to a nonlinear world, isolate cause in a multidimensional
model, and reduce the possibilities that CSR will have positive effects.
CONCLUSION
What would be a reasonable justification for class size reduction? And how
would we enact it in policy, practice, and research? In the current political context, any justification has to highlight student achievement. But a singular focus
on student outcomes, without attention to the contextual dimensions of teacher
practice, the physical realities of school space, and the tradeoffs of competing investments will undermine the potential impact class size reduction might have
on teaching and learning.
Further Reading: Blatchford, P., 2003, The class size debate: Is small better? Maidenhead,
UK: Open University Press; Ehrenberg, R. G., Brewer, D. J., Gamoran, A., & Willms,
J. D., 2001, Class size and student achievement, Psychological Science and the Public
Interest, 2(1), 1–30; Finn, J. D., Pannozzo, G. M., & Achilles, C., 2003, The “whys” of class
size: Student behavior in small classes, Review of Educational Research, 73(3), 321–368;
Graue, M. E., Hatch, K., Rao, K., & Oen, D., in press, The wisdom of class size reduction.
American Educational Research Journal.

Elizabeth Graue

Clothing and School Uniforms

CLOTHING AND SCHOOL UNIFORMS
In contemporary American society, it has become increasingly important to
understand the debates surrounding school clothing, educational dress codes
(defining what may not be worn to school), and school uniforms (defining what
must be worn to school). Such an understanding requires traversing the complex paths of history, culture, and politics to take stock of the ways these have
structured the contestation over dress in schools. The cultural anxieties of “appropriate” school clothing and the practices stemming from such ideologies
have taken varied forms, for assorted reasons, in a myriad of contexts, for some
time. Indeed, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the majority of public
schools had some form of dress code, while only a handful of public schools had
mandatory school uniform policies. By the turn of the century, fully one-quarter
of our public elementary and about a tenth of our public middle/high schools
had a mandatory uniform policy. It is upon these shores that the battle over
school clothing is being waged.
The history of pre-industrial educational dress is difficult to pin down. In
general, it is accepted that our current dilemmas have their roots in the confluence of secular and religious influences that contextualized early universities in Germany, France, and England. The cappa clausa is the earliest recorded
(c.e. 1222) institutionalized use of standardized educational dress ordered by
Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury. The contemporary tree of our
school clothing debate has its roots planted deeply in British soil. Though the
British educational system is fundamentally different, the common symbol of
the uniformed school lad/lass is etched in our minds as an English icon. The
school uniform in England has a long tradition in the universities and primary/
secondary schools that the population is compelled to attend. There are several
reasons associated with the use of the school uniform in England, reasons that
are still with us today, reasons that provide the contours of the contemporary
debate over educational dress.
In order to keep the flamboyancy of societal fashion outside the ivory tower,
thereby hoping to enforce an adoption of institutional values via mandated
clothing, Cambridge University, which had been enforcing various forms of
standardized dress since the thirteenth century, required long scholastic robes
and a skull cap (a modified cappa clausa) for undergraduates, with a different
cap for graduate students. Over time, the dress codes at Cambridge became
more specific, attempting to preempt societal influence and control and define
what was acceptable. Continuous student resistance to “acceptable school attire”
was commonplace, and, according to historians, by the sixteenth century, students typically wore what they wanted to wear.
While school uniforms were also used as a marker of status, the history complicates this fact. What would ultimately become the model for school uniforms
among English schoolchildren, for private and parochial schooling worldwide,
and for a growing proportion of American public school students is rooted
in the clothing worn by children at Christ’s Hospital in the sixteenth century.
These were cassock-like cloaks and were designed to emphasize the lower status

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of these children. This interesting historical fact, that uniforms were used to
distinguish the lower classes from everyone else in British society, though contrary to reigning assumptions, is important for our understanding of the contemporary reality of school uniform discourse in America. Uniforms, a mode of
educational clothing, were used in Britain as a marker of social status—first of
the lowest classes (orphaned children) and later as a symbol of elite education (a
badge signifying class status).
Another related use of school uniforms in England was as an instrument for
indoctrinating the masses and inculcating the herd instinct among the majority
of English citizens: the working class. As a rigid system of education mirrored
an equally rigid occupational hierarchy, uniforms attempted to accomplish
two things. First, they engineered a powerful tonic against individuality and
expression by flattening student body distinctions as well as creating distinctions
within schools (teachers vs. students)—mirroring the relations faced at work.
Second, as certain schools were for a certain class of children, the iconography of
uniforms (e.g., logos, badges) shaped distinction between schools—encouraging
inter- and intra-class conflict in the pursuance of social mobility.
Overall, standardized school dress requirements are linked to a semiotics of
legitimacy and authority, a reservoir of institutional socio-educational values,
and a method of social and cultural control over cohorts of students moving
through the system. Those without a school uniform would feel left out, and divergence from the uniform was akin to divergence from the institutional values
defined by the institution and therefore punishable by a variety of sanctioning
procedures. As such, they were imported into the United States.
Public schooling in the United States dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century—its foundations, much further. The growth of public schooling
in the United States since the 1850s has been extraordinary when compared to
other industrialized nations. Public schooling arose in the United States primarily as a means of preparing and socializing the young into their adult roles: as
citizens and workers. Thus, the beginnings of American public education corresponded tightly to the needs of industry and linked to the religious and moral
climate of the period. Of course, public schooling was, contradictorily, not available to everyone. The elite continued to support and send their children to preparatory schools, while the poor and minorities were denied public schooling.
The American introduction to the school uniform began in the private/
parochial sector—a marker of class status and tradition. For most, uniforms and
Catholic schooling are synonymous, and, by extension, with educational success. By the early 1960s, half of Catholic schools had uniform policies; however, Catholic experience with uniforms has been anything but congenial. In
the 1950s protests and concerns in the Catholic laity regarding the requirement
of school uniforms began, raising concerns that uniforms infringe on parental
rights and duties; are inherently conformists; were not cheaper for all families;
and, do not mask distinctions—concerns echoed today. It is significant that the
laity, and ultimately the church via Vatican II, were concerned with educational
dress. The timbre of such concerns mirrored the public disquiet as the civil
rights movement and student movements concerning free speech, the Vietnam

Clothing and School Uniforms

War, and other issues were ongoing and socially, culturally, and politically significant.
Before the 1950s, the literature concerning educational dress in American
schools is sparse. This paucity of literature on the debates concerning “appropriate” school clothing or even the issues of whether clothing impedes or encourages unity and academic success is indeed curious. However, the 1960s clarified
what was not apparent in the previous popular and scholarly work from earlier
educational history: that clothing in American public schools mirrored, to a
large extent, material, social, and cultural contextual realities. In material terms,
the clothes that children wore to school were predicated upon their class status.
Affluent children who did attend public schools wore clothing that bespoke
their parents’ positions and the ideology of individualism. Working class children primarily wore clothes designated for their station in society, while poor
children and minority children who were overrepresented in the poorest rural
areas of the United States wore whatever clothing they had.
It was during the 1950s and 1960s that the baby boom generation became
a target market for Madison Avenue. It was a large group with disposable income, and as a result, the role of fashion, music, expression, and identity became tightly linked—what it meant to be American was changing. The notion
that schools would create citizens, workers, indeed people of a certain type, was
withering. From this cohort, notions of convention, propriety, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and, yes, student dress would be seriously challenged. There is
no doubt that the battles fought in the 1960s and early 1970s concerning student
rights and freedom of expression were largely influenced by the sheer size of the
baby boom generation and the increasing diversity of student bodies. By 1969,
the U.S. Supreme Court, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, interpreted dress as a protected form of expression and pronounced that students
do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. As the major
social movements waned, one could say that the emperor had fewer clothes than
before. However, the gains would be swiftly usurped.
The seventies saw Joseph Califano Jr., President Carter’s Health, Education,
and Welfare secretary, propose taking the U.S. government out of the business
of long hair and jeans in schools; yet after Reagan’s election in 1979, his proposal
was reversed. Up until the early 1980s, states had been weary of enforcing dress
codes because they feared losing federal funds. Federal regulations throughout
the 1970s prevented recipients of aid from discriminating against any person in
the application of rules of appearance. In 1981, Education Secretary Terrel H.
Bell proposed canceling such federal regulations on public schools’ dress codes
and, ultimately, the Reagan administration did not enforce these stipulations.
Government was beginning to reverse the results of the student movements
of the previous two decades regarding freedoms of expression as manifested
through clothing and appearance. Enter the public school uniform.
The first documented discussions regarding school uniforms as an option for
public schools came from the Barry administration. Late in 1980, Washington
D.C. mayor Marion Barry began discussing with his administration the possibility
of a proposal of a standardized dress code for D.C.’s public schools. Prompted by

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recent incidents of violence in or near D.C. public schools, Barry figured that
uniforms would help to remedy such situations. Not using the term “uniform,”
because it sounded too militaristic, he speculated that such a policy would foster
school spirit, save parents money, and deter the infiltration of outsiders on campuses. Reaction spanned disbelief, sarcastic criticism, and cautious approval. It
wouldn’t be until 1987, after the publication of A Nation at Risk and the strengthening of corporate influence in schooling and educational policy, that the first
heavily publicized public school uniform policy would be implemented.
The first public school to heavily publicize its uniform policy was Cherry Hill
Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland, in the fall of 1987. Cherry Hill, a predominantly black elementary school of students from lower- to middle-income
families, implemented their policy as a reaction to a 1986 suburban shooting over
sunglasses and hoped it would cut clothing costs and reduce social pressures for
children. There are conflicting reports, but by the end of the 1987–1988 school
year, some five public schools in the Baltimore area and three schools in Washington D.C. had uniforms. Prophetically signaling the uniform discourse, articles
appeared in the media by December of 1987, framing the anecdotal discussion
of uniforms as providing a sense of togetherness, orderliness, and safety. Officials
in Baltimore hoped that uniforms would lead to higher grades, better behavior,
increased self-esteem, school pride, and a sense of belonging—all central facets
of the current debate. There is some evidence that other schools in the mid1980s attempted to initiate uniform policies, but parents were against them.
The idea spread quickly. By the fall of 1988, thirty-nine elementary schools
and two junior high schools in Washington D.C., as well as fifteen more Baltimore schools required uniforms. Others quickly followed (many called them
“dress codes”) and many more were inquiring into the process—the vast majority of these were largely urban schools serving predominately poor minority students. Also this year, New York City Mayor, Ed Koch, voiced support for a pilot
school uniform program with support from then School Chancellor of NYC:
Richard Green. Koch and Green began mustering public support and donations
from clothing manufacturers to begin a pilot program in NYC and gave a powerful voice to the school uniform movement. The pilot program was launched
in the Spring of 1989 and several influential educational leaders and organizations, including the National School Board Association and the National
Education Association gave their support. By 1990 school uniform programs
were also implemented in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia,
and San Fernando. These programs were a mix of voluntary policies, some close
to district-wide, others isolated in individual schools, most at the elementary
school level, and the vast majority were directed at poor and minority urban
students. Missing from all of this was any research into the effectiveness of such
policies—everything was based on anecdote and assumptions. Long Beach,
California launched an unprecedented program in 1994.
The board of the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD) unanimously
adopted a mandatory school uniform policy in all K–8 schools in 1994. The primary reasons given for LBUSD’s policy were: (1) to combat gang wear/colors; (2)
to quell student battles over designer clothing; (3) to level economic disparities;

Clothing and School Uniforms

and (4) to help students focus on learning. At the same time, Governor Pete Wilson signed a state bill allowing public schools to require students to wear uniforms and assuring uninterested parents that their children would be ensured
the appropriate alternative education. Other districts were watching LBUSD’s
lead: Los Angeles, San Diego, New York City, Miami, El Paso, Yonkers, Tacoma,
and Seattle. While private schools were loosening their dress requirements, public schools were dramatically increasing theirs. Such a policy took guts: LBUSD
set aside $175,000 to defend itself against legal battles.
The idea of uniforming public school students had gone from a few isolated
schools to a wide variety of schools in a number of locations across the United
States. The movement was in seminal form, the issues were raised, the early
anecdotal “findings” were out and entering solidly into the discourse—but the
spark that truly lit the fire was just around the corner. This spark was President Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speech on January 23, 1996, wherein
he gave the presidential seal of approval for public school uniform policies.
Immediately, Clinton instructed the Department of Education to distribute
manuals to all 16,000 U.S. school districts advising them how they can legally
enforce a school uniform policy. In similar speeches in Washington D.C., California, and other states crucial for his re-election, Clinton advised Americans
on school uniforms, playing off of the “rash” of school shootings early in that
year, and, for the first time, citing the then unpublished “effects” of the Long
Beach Unified School District’s foray into a district-wide uniform policy some
two years earlier. By the end of that crucial year, the word was out, and a movement was solidly underway in the United States bolstered by no evidence of
effectiveness.
By the end of the 1996–1997 school year, the media printed figures that half
of the urban school districts in the United States had adopted school uniform
policies. Over 60 percent of Miami public schools, closer to 70 percent of Cleveland’s public schools, 80 percent of the schools in the Chicago area, 50 percent
in the Boston area, and between 10 and 25 percent of the public schools in New
York City, the largest district in the nation, claimed to have adopted policies of
standardized dress. It still was largely an urban and elementary school phenomenon; yet, by 1997, more suburban, rural, and secondary schools had such policies as well. That year was capped off with the creation of the Land’s End school
uniform division aimed to capitalize on the movement. In March of 1998, the
New York City Board of Education voted and passed a resolution to require all
K–6 public school students in the system to wear school uniforms. At this point
two new developments emerged in the debate about school uniforms: (1) Some
schools were abandoning the policy for reasons of compliance, parental support,
“fashion policing,” etc; and, (2) the research was starting to emerge that warned
of the inconclusiveness and possible unintended consequences of such policies.
The massacre at Columbine in 1999 provided increasing fuel for the school
uniform fire. By the end of 2000, 35 of the 50 U.S. states had schools with uniform
policies. According to a 2000 school safety study, the CDC found that uniforms
were required in about 20 percent of public and Roman Catholic elementary and
middle schools and 10 percent of high schools. The events of September 11, 2001,

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also changed Americans’ perceptions of American institutions and seemed to do
three things relevant to the discussion at hand: (1) continued the path of limited
freedoms and privacy rights; (2) raised both increased suspicions as well as bolstered Americans’ faith in government; and (3) exponentially elevated the already
irrational culture of fear in the United States to unprecedented heights. All play
into the debate over school clothing, and the number of public school students
required to wear uniforms is still increasing amidst academic and public concern.
Those who oppose mandatory school uniform policies use several arguments.
First, they are concerned that schools and boards should not dictate what children should wear. Second, parents (and some educators) also have concerns that
such policies undermine students’ rights of free speech and expression. Third,
there is often an undercurrent of concern that uniforms are distractive from the
larger issues facing public education in the twenty-first century. Fourth, there
has been much concern over the lack of granting opt-outs for those parents opposed to the policies. Fifth, there is concern that teachers have enough to do
without policing dress code and uniform violations. Finally, and others argue
that ultimately, mandating a school uniform policy is akin to charging a fee for
public education, and that, they argue, is against everything that American public education is to stand for.
Paramount to this history is the role of the courts. Four key mandatory
uniform code cases have been ruled on, and, in all cases, the uniform policy
has been upheld. Three of these cases utilized primarily noneducational
precedents and steered clear of utilizing free speech cases like Tinker. In general,
students have been more successful in challenging dress codes than mandatory
school uniform policies. So far, the courts do seem willing to allow the school
uniform movement a chance to improve our schools, stating that more restriction is constitutional. One thing is certain in all of this—the debate and controversy over school clothing, educational dress codes, and school uniform policies
is not going away any time soon. It is a battleground that will continue to wage
its divisive and distractive war amidst misinformation and politics.
Further Reading: Bernstein, R. P., 1995, Dress codes: Meanings and messages in American
culture, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Brunsma, D. L., 2004, What the school uniform
movement tells us about American education: A symbolic crusade, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education; Brunsma, D. L., ed., 2006, School uniforms: A decade of
research and debate, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education; Brunsma, D. L., &
Rockquemore, K. A., 1998, Effects of student uniforms on attendance, behavior problems, substance use, and academic achievement, Journal of Educational Research, 92(1),
53–62; Davidson, A., & Rae, J., 1990, Blazers, badges and boaters: A pictorial history of
the school uniform, London: Scope International.

David L. Brunsma
COMMERCIALIZATION OF SCHOOLS
School commercialism typically refers to business involvement in public
schooling. School commercialism involves advertising to children in schools,

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sponsored educational materials, sales of particular products in schools (sometimes
through the use of exclusive contracts), electronic marketing in schools, for-profit
provision of educational services such as tutoring, the management of entire
schools for profit (often done by Educational Management Organizations (EMOs)
like Edison Schools), and voucher schemes that allow public tax money to pay for
private educational provision. Charter schools are viewed by many as an important
aspect of school commercialism. Even though most charter schools are nonprofit,
most public schools that are being managed for profit are enabled through charter
school laws that deregulate public schools. About half of the Edison Schools are
charter schools being run for profit.
Marketing to children has seen a 150-fold increase in the last 20 years, with
$15 billion in advertising targeting kids by 2004. Children between the ages of
3 and 17 by 1998 spent about $45 billion a year and influenced spending of
$295 billion. By 2002 kids 12 to 19 spent $170 billion and kids under 12 influenced $500 billion in spending. There is enormous money at stake for business
in terms of both capturing these dollars and creating lifelong brand impressions,
associations, and identifications in malleable young minds.
Although it is less obvious than junk food billboards on hallways and buses
or ads for running shoes and candy in textbooks, the sweeping federal No Child
Left Behind Act facilitates school commercialism in a number of ways including
by heavily funding charter school creation and forcing localities to use for-profit
tutoring companies rather than their own teachers. NCLB’s emphasis on frequent high-stakes standardized tests has resulted in test-publishing companies
making a fortune as schools and students are punished by their schools losing
funds if they perform badly. NCLB’s threats to close schools that do not meet
adequate yearly progress (AYP) is viewed by many as a form of backdoor privatization that is setting up schools that have suffered longstanding disinvestment
to be declared as “failed.” Once declared “failed,” these schools will be subject to
being made into for-profit entities. In fact, this declaration of school failure
to justify privatization and commodification of public schooling is a trend that
includes capitalizing on natural and unnatural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the historical production of urban ghettos. For example,
after Katrina numerous right-wing think tanks and publications described as
“the silver lining” of the storm privatizing the destroyed New Orleans public
schools with vouchers, charters, and contracting. In fact, refusing to rebuild the
schools was used to keep poor predominantly black residents from returning to
their communities as business groups orchestrated their own rebuilding plan.
Up-to-date information on trends in school commercialism can be found at the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at the University of Arizona, available on-line at http://www.
schoolcommercialism.org. This organization measures trends in school commercialism.

School commercialism includes modeling public schools on businesses.
This is evident at every level of the public school system from classroom pedagogy that asks students to be little managers or entrepreneurs to widespread

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proposals for teachers to get merit pay like Wall Street traders, to the widespread
expectation that teachers act entrepreneurially to write grants, to the naming of
business people as educational administrators and the title “CEO” for head of
school districts. Business as a model for schooling appears throughout educational policy literature as well as in the popular press. According to advocates of
school privatization schools are best off when they are starved of resources and
forced to compete with other schools for scarce resources. Then “just like business” the bad schools should be allowed to “fail” while the good schools should
be allowed to prosper. Language of business efficiency is widely invoked in both
academic and popular circles. Schools, it is said, are to be made more efficient
by being treated more like businesses. This means that the quality of educational services should be measurable and quantifiable and that constant pressure for increasing quantifiable measures of “achievement” are to be pushed. The
heavy emphasis on testing is largely driven by such thought. Schools “just like
businesses” must compete against other schools. The market should be given a
chance to “compete” with public schools that have a “monopoly” over education.
Students and parents should be given “choice” to shop for educational services,
and consumer dollars will strengthen good schools and punish bad.
Liberal humanist critics of treating schools like business suggest that business
values as they organize teaching and learning threaten human values that can be
fostered by classrooms oriented around collaborative learning rather than individualistic and competitive learning practices. Learning in this view should not
be based in a high-stakes, high-pressure fashion modeled after industrial and
corporate efficiency. Knowledge should not be treated like units of commodity
to be deposited in children. Rather, collaboration, an orientation towards dialogue in learning, and an approach to learning based in the curiosity of the student should be fostered. Critics of the high-pressure approach point to how fear
becomes the motivation for student learning and teacher performance rather
than interest in meaningful, relevant, or socially transformative knowledge. Additionally, these critics of school commercialism view the incursion of advertising and marketing in the classroom as threatening the public school, where such
collective values can be addressed without the values of business determining
and informing the conversation. For example, the consumerism, individualism,
and social Darwinism, the emphasis on exclusionary forms of competition, and
the removal of knowledge from broader contexts are all thought to be fostered
by the treatment of schools like the consumer culture common to societies organized and oriented by contemporary consumer capitalism.
Some advocates of school commercialism attempt to naturalize it as having always been a part of the U.S. public school experience from the business
involvement in producing curriculum (McGuffey’s Readers) to the contracting
for infrastructure to even advertising in schools. However, the scale of school
commercialism from the nineteenth century through most of the twentieth was
miniscule relative to the rapid expansion of commercialism from the 1980s to
the present. Some of the more sophisticated and theoretical analyses of school
commercialism view the phenomenon in relation to broader economic, social,
historical, and cultural struggles and issues. For example, scholars Alex Molnar

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and Joel Spring have done important work on situating school commercialism
in the context of the historical rise of modern consumer culture. Others have
written about how school commercialism has drastically expanded since the
early 1980s in part due to the rise of “neoliberal ideology” that treats social,
political, and public matters as business matters, that denigrates all things public, calls for privatization of the public sector, and calls for deregulating government controls on public goods and services like public schooling to allow for
expanded market involvement. Neoliberalism is a kind of faith in markets that are
viewed as always more efficient than the bureaucratic and inefficient public sector.
Although at the time of its inception in the 1950s and 1960s it was widely considered a radical and off-beat view, by the 1990s, following the rise of the Reagan
revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union as a symbol of an alternative system,
neoliberalism’s TINA thesis (there is no alternative to the market) became omnipresent in the United States; it had overtaken the culture of the United States.
Within such a cultural climate privatizing and commercializing public schools
began to appear commonsensical. Neoliberalism collapses the economic and the
political, the social and the individual, and the public and the private.
Public institutions have a mission of furthering the public interest. Private
organizations like businesses exist to accumulate profit. When public schools
are treated as businesses the possibilities of profit accumulation and the framing
concerns of business eclipse concerns with justice, equality, and the ways that
school practices foster social goals and visions that are collectively determined
by the society.
In the 1980s the neoliberal faith in business created a climate ripe for market
experimentation with public schooling. Despite the struggles waged over school
commercialism by the state, the private sector, teacher’s unions, policy workers,
teachers, scholars, and the public, the cultural and political climate created the
conditions for entrepreneurs like Christopher Whittle to set his sights on making a killing from public schools. Whittle, an advertising and magazine entrepreneur, was at the forefront of school commercialism, starting Channel One,
which sought to place ads in school classrooms under the guise of educating students with TV news programming. Many critics have derided the programming
as lacking in educational value. He sold the enterprise and built Edison Schools,
which aimed to create the largest for-profit company managing public schools.
Though long celebrated in the popular press, Edison increasingly faced a series
of intertwined problems that highlighted the troubles with running public schools
for profit. To impress investors with continually rising test scores, the company
pressured administrators and teachers who, it was revealed, cheated to show test
gains. The school counseled out students expected to lower test scores. They were
accused of manipulating financial and accounting data and misrepresenting test
scores and the number of schools under management. They suffered high teacher
turnover and sought to avoid teachers’ unions that afforded labor protections to
their workers. Expected to work long overtime hours, teachers’ turnover was high
while the best teachers were taken out of the classroom to be used as managers.
Edison became a publicly traded company only to have their stock price
plummet with the plethora of bad news and the slim likelihood of profitability.

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Edison claimed that if they grew large enough, economies of scale would allow
them to provide quality educational services superior to public schools at a
cheaper cost and also provide for investor profit to be taken away. This has yet
to be achieved, with conventional measures of quality viewing Edison as poor to
mixed and costs running on par or higher than comparable public schools. Critics have pointed out that Edison’s free market education plan has disproportionately relied upon getting philanthropic grants and thereby calling into question
the trumpeted claims about the alleged benefits of business efficiency. Although
throughout the 1990s the conservative business press had been hailing public
school privatization as a ripe opportunity, by 2002, with the Edison debacle, they
declared for-profit management of schools to be a poor business. This has not
stopped Edison and the other EMOs from continuing to run public schools for
profit. However, Edison and other companies have focused their expansion on
the for-profit tutoring market that NCLB has fostered. While the promises of
the company have been radically redefined from its inception, the company has
failed to fulfill its promises regarding quality or costs. Nonetheless Whittle and
other business executives made millions of dollars of profit that could have otherwise been invested in the education of children.
The school commercialism debates tend to focus on two central issues: educational resources and the purpose and mission of public schooling.
Contemporary defenders and advocates of school commercialism include
marketing companies, businesses interested in making early “brand impressions”
on youth, school administration organizations, and associations representing
such industries as soft drinks. Advocates of advertising, sponsored educational
materials, and sales of goods in school point out that public schools suffer from
a shortage of money and resources and suggest that by allowing marketers in,
they can offset some of the financial and material shortages. For example, soft
drink companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi promise cash for schools that
sign on to exclusive vending contracts and bonuses for excessive consumption of beverages. Other companies such as Channel One, a news program that
includes advertising, promise the installation of expensive equipment such as
televisions and video recording devices on the condition that students be held
as a captive audience for the programming. Advocates of commercialism typically frame such potentially lucrative endeavors as beneficial to the students,
schools, and communities. Often marketing to youth is framed as “businessschool partnerships.” The businesses get access to potential consumers and the
ability to saturate the atmosphere with ads to make powerful brand impressions.
In exchange the schools get to be “partners” with the businesses.
Critics of school commercialism view such marketing to youth in school as
a cynical ploy to capitalize on the unfair distribution of educational resources.
Within this view, the problems of school funding need to be remedied to provide
quality universal public education and should not be exploited for the benefit of
those who have plenty of resources and are looking to get more. School commercialism provides meager financial benefits if any, while it has numerous deleterious effects including eroding public school as one of the few places where
noncommercial values can be addressed by students. Commercialism places the

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authority and power of the school and the public to endorse products that may
have no redeeming worth or individual or public value. Soft drinks are a case in
point. Critics of commercialism point to the epidemic level of early onset type II
diabetes that is being fed by the steadily rising consumption of sugar-laden soda.
They point out that while the financial benefit to the schools is trivial, the social
cost of a society of diabetics and the financial cost of caring for them is far more
detrimental than the promise of the vendors. The public health issue raised by
soft drink marketing points to how the school commercialism debates are inextricably bound to competing social visions for public schools.
Disagreements about the purpose and mission of public schooling have much
to do with the view of commercialism people hold. Views on commercialism
tend to correspond to political perspectives. Fiscal conservatives or neoliberals view public schooling as a market. They hold that the purpose of public
schooling is to prepare workers for the economy or prepare nations to compete
economically. From this perspective public schooling has a principally economic role for the individual and an economic role for the society. Because the
market appears as always efficient and always better than the moribund public
sector, the fiscal conservative takes a radical stance in favor of privatization
of public schools. For-profit charter schools, voucher schemes, and competition-based pay for teachers appeal to the fiscal conservative because they make
schooling like business. As well, standardized testing and quantification of
knowledge appeal to the fiscal conservative because knowledge can be treated
as units of commodity or money to be deposited in students who can then
cash in that knowledge for grades and universities and jobs and commodities.
Quantification and measurability appear valuable because they allow for the
attempt to test continually for the increased acquisition of knowledge just like
capitalism fosters the continual growth of capital at any cost. Unfortunately,
such business framing of knowledge tends to decontextualize knowledge and
fails to account for more complex understandings of learning that treat knowledge holistically in terms of broader understandings, relations between subjects, the social, political, and cultural implications of claims to truth, and the
interests and relations of authority tied to particular interpretations.
Cultural conservatives are typified by E. D. Hirsch with his Core Knowledge
scheme and William Bennett who has, like Hirsch, written numerous books
about what students should know. Cultural conservatives believe in a canon of
knowledge that everyone should learn. This perspective is contrary to more critical approaches to knowledge that consider knowledge in relation to power, politics, history, and ethics. Critical approaches emphasize that knowledge ought
to be ruthlessly interrogated and interpreted in relation to the perspectives and
interests of those who make claims to truth. For criticalists, truth is arrived at
collectively, while for cultural conservatives truth is inherited from “those who
know.” The cultural conservatives are in a sense a variety of fundamentalists who
put forward dogmatic truth. They champion the partial values and perspectives
of those with power and privilege while alleging these values and perspectives
as universally valuable. Within this view, difference and contestation are viewed
as a problem to be eradicated. This perspective shares with fiscal conservatism

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the insistence on the standardized body of knowledge, the enforcement of
knowledge from above, and the treatment of knowledge as commodity to be
consumed by students. The overlaps between these conservative approaches can
be seen in such recent projects as William Bennett’s company K12, which sells
on-line homeschooling and charter school curriculum. It adopts Hirsch’s Core
Knowledge curriculum of what every student should know and marketizes it
so that the conservative and dogmatic perspective can be mass marketed for
profit. Acquisition of knowledge being quantifiable and measurable satisfies
the fiscal conservative obsession with treating school like business while at the
same time satisfying the right-wing cultural framing of knowledge important to
the cultural conservatives.
For left-wing proponents of critical, progressive, or radical schooling the
problems with the right-wing approach to commercialism are that it threatens
to undermine the socially and individually transformative potential of public
schooling. Transformative views of public schooling ask how schools participate
in enacting the future. For example, the reconstructionist views of progressive
philosopher of education John Dewey asked how schools are involved in educating citizens for democratic participation, self and social governance, democratic
culture, and ethical life. Contemporary transformative thinkers such as Henry
Giroux, a leading figure of critical pedagogy, draw on modern and postmodern
theoretical traditions to call for education to be reconfigured such that teachers are politically engaged transformative intellectuals with the task of teaching students to engage knowledge critically in relation to broader structures of
power and relations of domination and oppression. The task of critical pedagogy
is to expand democratic social relationships in terms of politics, economics, and
culture. In this view the school process is political at the core in that knowledge and school practices are shot through with values and ideologies that are
best critically analyzed by learners. For critical pedagogy knowledge cannot be
canonized and treated as dogma because learning ideally ought to begin with
the knowledge and experience of the learner in a particular context. Students
need to learn to theorize their experiences, to act on and transform the structures of power informing their experiences. Whether the object of knowledge
is a work of literature, a science lesson, a particular version of history, or an
advertisement, the critical approach views them all as needing to be interpreted
in relation to power and politics. While liberal critics of school commercialism
might frame school commercialism as a threat to the innocent space of school
culture, criticalists view advertising and commercialism as a worthwhile object
of critical analysis to dissect in terms of the sorts of political and cultural pedagogies it proffers. Strategies of critical media literacy and the insights of cultural
studies benefit teachers who want to give students the critical intellectual tools
to understand, for example, the financial interests and industries in relation to
the ideological messages, cultural values, and identity positions promoted by an
advertisement.
For cultural conservatives and for liberals (both of whom tend to deny the
cultural politics of the curriculum) school commercialism in the form of advertising and sponsored educational materials appears as a threat to the innocent

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space of school that must be kept pure for authentic learning to take place. However, liberals and cultural conservatives tend to embrace privatization initiatives
if they believe they effectively deliver this allegedly neutral and universally valuable school content. Some liberals and fiscal conservatives have no problem with
sponsored educational materials (like ads for Nike and M&Ms integrated as
math problems in textbooks) because of the belief that students learn more effectively when they are taught about things that are relevant to their lives. This is
distinct from the critical view that suggests that relevant and meaningful objects
of knowledge then need to be problematized in relation to both experiences of
oppression and broader structures of power informing those experiences. From
a critical perspective such sponsored educational materials should be kept out
of the curriculum. However, if they are found in it they ought to be critically
analyzed in terms of broader relations of power.
Two less commonly discussed but important aspects of school commercialism involve the way commercialism defines individual identity and the way it
relates to global politics.
As discussed above, school commercialism treats knowledge as objects to
be consumed by students like commodities. As well, commercialism treats individual subjects as objects in that it makes them into the means towards the
end of commercial profit. That is, commercialism makes subjects in the passive
spectatorial role of consumers. Subjects who define themselves principally as
consumers define their individual and social value largely through their consumption practices. They define the worth of others largely through passive
and private consumption practices. Subjects in this case are educated into the
identity position of objects. In an economic sense the education of subjects into
objects through consumer culture extends and deepens the ways that subjects
are made objects through the sale of labor power on the job market. The ideology of consumer culture works in complement with the objectification of the
subject by making individuals who understand their leisure and enjoyment as
passive objects. Such objectification treats people instrumentally as tools for the
use of others, thereby making people unfree. School commercialism educates
subjects to identify principally as consumers who maximize their human capacities through choosing from an array of predetermined objects and services
but not to exercise their human capacities to imagine and enact different ways
of living, of spending time, of consuming, or different ways of producing that
would maximize individual and collective freedom and creativity and minimize
exploitation and ecological destruction. In a political sense these commercial
ways of being are at odds with habits of engaged public citizenship that view
individuals as active participants who ideally should be working with others to
address public problems. Culturally, commercialism reduces all cultural values
to their market value. This is increasingly evident as science and mathematics
are emphasized at every level by the fiscal conservatives who dominate the U.S.
Department of Education while all other subjects are defunded.
Increasingly, school commercialism produced by multinational companies
like oil companies, chemical companies, and food companies in the form of advertising and sponsored educational materials can be found in North American

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public schools. These tend to offer a view of the world that portrays the earth,
work, science, leisure, and human beings as ideally under benevolent corporate
management. Critics contend that such corporate curricula misrepresent social
and political struggle, and they highlight the ways that these very same corporations are involved in threatening public interest in the pursuit of profit. School
commercialism also appears to be going global as the World Trade Organization’s
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) makes no distinction between
public schooling and private schooling. The implications are that public schools
may be forced by national governments who sign on to the WTO or other global
trade agreements to allow foreign for-profit education companies to compete
for provision of educational services. The public mission of the public schools
in any given nation (democratic schooling for example) would lose out to the
possibilities of multinational companies earning profits. Advocates of global
justice staunchly oppose the uses of national sovereignty to undermine the public possibilities of public schooling.
Further Reading: Apple, M., 2001, Educating the right way, New York: Routledge; Boyles,
D., 2005, Schools or markets? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Goodman, R., & Saltman,
K., 2002, Strange love, or how we learn to stop worrying and love the market, Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Molnar, A., 2005, School commercialism, New York: Routledge; Saltman, K., 2000, Collateral damage: Corporatizing public schools—A threat to
democracy, Lanham: MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Saltman, K., 2005, The Edison Schools,
New York: Routledge; Saltman, K., 2007, Capitalizing on disaster: Taking and breaking public schools, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers; Spring, J., 2001, Educating the
consumer-citizen, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kenneth J. Saltman
COMPULSORY SCHOOLING
Recognizing education (schooling) and development for what they are—
compulsory programs for integrating individuals and peoples into a rapidly globalizing, market-dominated culture, imposing on them a pattern of thinking and
living that otherwise has been alien to all known traditional, linguistically distinct cultures—is crucial to the formation and success of grassroots movements
that seek to achieve sustainable social and ecological relationships. Following
this train of thought, it becomes vital for grassroots movements that seek social and ecological sustainability to closely monitor and guide the schooling and
development processes within their communities. The reason for this is simple.
As the driving force behind the current epoch’s rush toward modern development, or toward what Lewis Mumford has called the “megatechnic” economy,
the market’s growth imperative, which schooling and development promote,
helps to expose it as a socially and ecologically devastating virus. As it infects
human communities, this economic growth imperative launches an uncompromising assault on the symbolic and literal soil upon which more traditional
cultures had created their identity as a people. As it destroys the foundations of
that which had once defined them as human beings, it moves like a contagion to
transform them and their progeny into agents of its future replication. For once

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it has sucked the life from one community and destroyed the commons that had
once sustained it, the market-dominated culture, promoting growth, progress,
and development, must spread to find another. The spread of the market virus
(aka global economy) will only result in further undermining the sustainability
of humanity’s social and environmental relationships.
Though many politicians and educationists, such as those who served on
the National Commission for Excellence in Education that produced the now
infamous A Nation at Risk report, like to implicitly credit the quality of American schools for the ascendancy of U.S. economic power, it is clear that military and political domination over an expanding global system of economic
imperialism fell to the United States largely by default in the aftermath of
World War II. The war had left the national, industrial infrastructures of that
system’s other traditional powers in ruin. While prewar planners in America’s
Council on Foreign Relations had hoped for and predicted a German defeat
of the Soviet Union that would have permitted the United States to claim total
hegemony, the survival of the Soviet state and its acquired satellites offered
U.S. strategists a useful foil in formulating their postwar plans. The ideology
of the Cold War, from the U.S. perspective, pitted the benevolent American
system of democracy and free market capitalism against the Soviet system of
totalitarian socialism. American propaganda immediately exploited the internationalist flavor of the various socialist movements that emerged as early as
the nineteenth century to paint the Soviet Union as an evil nation dedicated
to world domination. Hence, the doctrine of the Cold War allowed the United
States to cast its own plans for global hegemony as defensive in nature, never to
be perceived as naked aggression.
Though hardly a military threat to U.S. power, the Marxist rhetoric exploited
by the Soviets did pose, in the eyes of American planners, a very real ideological
threat to their designs. This threat rested in the appeal that socialist ideals held
for common people, which U.S. planners recognized as lacking in their own
plans. To counter that appeal and disguise its own imperial designs behind a
cloak of righteousness, President Harry Truman pronounced a global campaign
to replace the old system of colonial expansion and economic imperialism with
a new program of development, allegedly based on the concept of democratic
fair dealing. This global campaign promised to lift the world’s social majorities
out of their undignified condition of underdevelopment by remolding their societies in the image of the new global, democratic capitalist masters.
THE GENOCIDAL NATURE OF DEVELOPMENT
Less than two years before Truman pronounced development as the rationale
for expanding U.S. intervention in the affairs of other nations, the United Nations retained Rafaël Lemkin to head a committee charged with drafting a law
to define, prevent, and punish the crime of genocide. It was Lemkin who had
originally coined the term genocide in 1944, by combining the ancient Greek
word for race, tribe, or nation (genes) with the Latin word for killing (cide), to
refer to any policy intended to bring about the elimination of a targeted human

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group. Though obviously moved by the atrocities of Nazism in Germany, this
original definition recognizes that outright physical acts of murder represent
only one method by which to carry out policies aimed at the extermination of
a people. Even so, in pursuing its activities that would lead to the creation of
the Secretariat’s Draft of the current Genocide Convention, Lemkin’s committee significantly expanded and lent greater specificity to Lemkin’s original definition. Not only would a policy qualify as genocidal if it intentionally sought
the destruction of some racial, national, linguistic, religious, or political group,
but also if it sought to prevent the preservation and development of that group.
The committee also specified three means by which such policies could be carried out.
1. Physical Genocide could include the direct method of physical extermination as employed by the Nazis against numerous groups during their reign
of terror, but Lemkin’s committee included a number of other measures
under this category:
• Deliberately imposing conditions of life that would surely result in the
slow death of a people
• Mutilations and biological experiments not intended for curative purposes
• Depriving a group of their means of livelihood by confiscation,
curtailment of work, and the denial of housing and supplies otherwise
available to other groups within the same geographic area
2. Biological Genocide included programs of involuntary sterilization, creating obstacles to marriage, and segregating the sexes so as to prevent procreation among the target population.
3. Cultural Genocide, which will come to hold the greatest significance for
this article, includes all policies intended to eradicate the specific traits by
which a targeted population defines itself as a culture by imposing on that
population an alien national pattern.
By refusing to assign a hierarchy to these three categories of genocide, Lemkin’s committee acknowledged no moral or legal distinction between physical
violence and cultural violence. In fact, Lemkin used the terms genocide and
ethnocide (which he also coined) interchangeably. He viewed them as synonymous.
Lemkin’s committee submitted its draft to the UN’s Economic and Security
Council (ECOSOC) in November of 1947. From there, it was sent for review to
a seven-member ad hoc committee. Given the imperial intent of development as
defined in this article, it comes as no surprise that the U.S. delegate who chaired
that committee would have successfully worked to eliminate the category of cultural genocide from what would be adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly as
the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. What
is “development,” after all, if not the eradication of a culture through the imposition of an alien national pattern—the very essence of cultural genocide? Neither
should it be a surprise that the United States, also in light of its imperial intent,

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refused to fully ratify this convention, even in its diluted form, until 1996. When
the United States finally submitted its ratification with the UN in 1998, it used a
perverse form of self-proclaimed, international executive privilege known as the
“Sovereignty Package” to effectively exempt itself from compliance.
In order to fully understand the connections between imperialism, development, and cultural genocide it is necessary to examine the nature of the “alien
national pattern” that development seeks to impose on targeted populations.
Prior to that, however, it is vital to recognize that the practice of imposing an
alien national pattern on targeted populations under some ruse of benevolence
has always functioned as part of imperial strategies. Even the Roman Empire
did not expand its sphere of domination through brute military force alone.
Beginning in the sixth century b.c.e., the Romans established settlements
known as colonia, from which the word colonialism is derived. The colonia
served many functions, none more important to considerations of cultural
genocide than their status as showcases of Roman culture and examples of the
Roman way of life. Such examples demonstrated to the targeted native populations of the provinces—those referred to by the Romans as barbarians (the
“underdeveloped” of the age!)—how they were expected to live. Once members
of the barbarian population proved that they had satisfactorily internalized the
alien, Roman national pattern, the emperor promoted the settlement to the status of colonia civium Romanorum, bestowing on its targets full citizen rights,
and dedicated a temple to the so-called Capitoline triad: Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the deities venerated in the temple of “Jupiter Best and Biggest” on the
Capitol in Rome.
The cultural genocide initiated under the Romanization of Europe would
continue through its later “Christianization.” Though Christianity became the
official state religion of the Roman Empire—formally outlawing the practice of all
other religions—during the reign of Theodosius I (379–395 c.e.), the Christianization of northern and Western Europe did not begin in earnest until the fifth
and sixth centuries. While space prohibits a full accounting of their significance,
the histories of these two processes—Romanization and Christianization—mark
a crucial starting point from which to begin expanding current understandings
of the contemporary patterns of cultural genocide perpetrated in the name of
contemporary “development.” Typically, scholars associate those patterns solely
with atrocities committed by European and American governments against nonEuropean peoples. While those associations cannot be denied, they frustrate efforts to build stronger networks of grassroots solidarity by unnecessarily putting
people of European ancestry on the defensive by characterizing them as members
of a victimizing class. In tracing the origins of the cultural genocide perpetrated
under the banner of development back to the forces of imperial domination that
destroyed the indigenous cultures of Europe, a basis is provided for strengthening
possible networks of solidarity by situating those of European ancestry in a more
paradoxical position—as victimizers and victims. While the nation-states under
which they live have victimized peoples outside of Europe, those same nationstates took their current form through their participation in similar imperial
patterns of cultural genocide against the various indigenous cultures of Europe.

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The vestiges of those indigenous cultures of Europe, which survived the genocidal activities of Roman and Holy Roman Empires, would later be destroyed by
the same alien pattern associated with development.
The Rise of the Alien National Pattern (and Genocide) in Europe
The “alien national pattern” associated with development as a strategy of empire
has always been foreign to traditional human communities, including those of Europe, which happened to be the first targeted populations upon which that pattern
was imposed. Two of its most alien—and alienating—features will be treated here.
In the first case, persons in traditional cultures demonstrate a concern for the
general welfare of other individual members of the collective group. This concern
works to preserve the group’s culturally determined patterns of social organization and places significant limits on the extent to which economic concerns could
become a dominant force in their lives, thoughts, and behaviors. The subsistence
orientation of those cultures leads them to draw from their environment only
what the group requires for its collective survival. Refuting the standard claim that
the tendency to “barter and truck” represents a cross-cultural constant, anthropological evidence demonstrates that trade with neighboring groups was limited
and infrequent. Evidence also exists to highlight the fact that individuals within
traditional societies gain status from what they contribute to the collective effort.
Hence, such societies place a premium on generosity. They never learn to equate
status with individual economic gain or acquisitiveness.
In market societies, where the alien national pattern of “development” has
already taken root and become institutionalized as the dominant social paradigm, the situation is reversed. Rather than embedding the economy within social relations, market societies embed their social relations within the economy.
Individual gain motivates productive activity. It is not essential that productive
activity contribute to the welfare of the group. Individuals derive status from
how much gain they derive from market activity, not from what they contribute
to the welfare of others. Acquisitiveness, even when performed in the name of
providing for one’s own family, places the ties of friendship and kinship under
tremendous strain. Even in the current age of labor-saving technologies, members of market societies are working more than ever, much to the neglect of familial and communal ties.
An early episode in the history of the imposition of the market pattern on targeted European populations occurred during the English Agrarian Revolution
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, the enclosure movement fenced off public fields and forests known as “the commons” that had been
used for collective farming and fuel collection. The enclosure movement marked
an important step in the destruction of the traditional cultures of Europe, for it
transformed the basis of village life from a subsistence-oriented fellowship of
collective service and protection to an alienating pattern of servicing the economic interests of the great proprietor class. The individual legal and property
rights of the great proprietors began taking precedence over moral claims of the
larger community.

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This transformation of the commons (nature) into “property”—a commodity that could be privately owned, bought, and sold—accompanied industrialization’s transformation of “people” into “labor.” Human beings ceased to be
viewed as social beings connected to one another through mutual obligations,
but rather as atomist individuals whose chances for survival in “the market” depended on their ability and willingness to rent themselves and their energies, as
human capital or commodities, to others to harness in the pursuit of individual
profit. Displacing the motivation of subsistence with the motivation of gain or
greed, the market emerged as Europe’s dominant social paradigm. It redefined
human nature as “red in tooth and claw” and demanded a separation of the
economic sphere from the political sphere in order to effect a total subordination of the entire society to the requirements of the market. The market deems
social relations themselves as impediments to its growth. Even friendship, by
the end of the sixteenth century, came to be viewed by some as an unreasonable passion that caused division and great discontent. The individual pursuit
of wealth, on the other hand, received much praise as a moral virtue and a civic
responsibility.
The same disdain for social bonds and allegiances would later resonate in
the efforts of post-WWII “development experts” to explain why indigenous
and more traditional (nonmarket) societies seemed so resistant to the marketization process. People’s culturally ingrained allegiances and loyalties, their
community-centeredness, and their lack of individualistic motivations frustrated development workers from the beginning, as did their view of land as
communal property. These customs and mores, some development specialists
argued, would have to be eliminated, even though the resulting social disorganization would surely create much suffering and dislocation. Moreover, cultural
genocide was recognized as necessary if the alien national pattern of marketization was to be successful in replacing the existing patterns of life that had
successfully sustained the targeted populations for millennia. Such replacement
called for market-dominated cultural patterns, which would promote individualistic exertion for the sake of “economic development.” A similar attitude
was also expressed by those who clearly benefited from the imposition of this
pattern in Europe in the early seventeenth century. The nobles of the seventeenth
century sought their desired “public improvements”—the then contemporarily
equivalent euphemism for “development” in the post-WWII era—that profited
them privately at the expense of the poor, who would have to remain satisfied in
clinging to their hovels and mere habitation, if they were lucky.
It is apparent that the “rich men” of the seventeenth century faced the same
problem at home as the “development” expert of the twentieth century faced
abroad: how to secure continued personal exertion from the victims of social
dislocation. This dilemma suggests the second of the two features of the market pattern that had always been foreign to traditional cultures; namely, scarcity.
Traditional cultures have always organized themselves to obviate the possibility
of scarcity coming to dominate their social relations. In doing so, they sought
to remove envy and the fear of scarcity that might encourage individualistic
economic behavior (i.e., greed—the motivating force of the market) to infect

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those same relations. In order to ensure continued personal exertion from isolated individuals, the market pattern declared war against such subsistenceoriented customs. This war entailed the introduction of scarcity as the defining
characteristic of the human condition and, therefore, the universal condition
of social life everywhere. Some designers of the policies, who intended to force
people into the alien patterns of the market, crudely and brutally asserted that
inducing hunger and starvation among the people represented the surest way
to tame those who might demonstrate the indecency and lack of civility to resist selling themselves to the great proprietors of the age. In this view, hunger
would secure the obedience and subjection of even the most perverse recalcitrants in order to harness their labor in the “satanic mills.” It became the task of
government to increase want among the targeted populations in order to make
the physical sanction of hunger effective.
However, the state would eventually develop far more effective and subtle
means than hunger for grappling with this problem of disciplining people to
labor. The enclosure of the commons dislocated many thousands of Europeans
from their homes and generated new levels of poverty. In England during the
latter half of the sixteenth century, a law covering both “the punishment of
vagabonds and the relief of the poor” prescribed the construction of houses of
correction, to number at least one per county. A century later, workhouses were
established to confine an amazing heterogeneity of persons—criminals, the
insane, the unemployed, the homeless, and many of the poor. Concurrently in
France, the state dictated that each city establish similar institutions based on
the model of the Hôpital Général in Paris. Similar patterns emerged within the
Zuchthäusern (workhouses) in Germany.
Originally intended to suppress beggary, the confinement of this mass of undifferentiated bodies would eventually assume a new use. In addition to confining those without work, confinement would later function as a mechanism to
force them to work. The great houses of confinement became houses of correction, aimed at remedying poverty and idleness through “moral enchantment.”
Even as early as the seventeenth century, the logic of this alien pattern (ever so
present in A Nation at Risk’s scapegoating of schools and its implied accusations
of the American workers’ general stupidity!) promulgated the view that “the origin of poverty was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment,” but “the
weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.” The massive confinements
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then, represented the first efforts on
the part of the state to reform individuals in the name of rendering them useful
and productive members of society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
that task would be transferred to an altogether different institution seldom associated with confinement: namely, the compulsory school.
THE STATE AND THE MARKET FUNCTION
OF COMPULSORY SCHOOLING
In a very real sense, the imposition of the hitherto alien pattern of the market
on the peoples of Europe and—later—elsewhere requires a re-programming of

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state power. Where the power of the sovereign had once fixated itself on the
repression of those internal and external forces that threatened its right to rule,
the market now claimed sovereignty, transforming the state into an instrument,
a machine for ensuring its security and its freedom to expand and dominate life
in all of its forms and dimensions.
Domestically, the market demanded that the state secure access to isolated and
docile bodies in order to subject, use, transform, and improve those bodies. This
docility, predicated on viewing the body as a labor-machine, allows, then, for an
increase in the utility of that body. The state would go on to develop techniques
of power for exercising control over that mechanism’s movements, gestures, and
attitudes that would increase their utility in terms of their efficiency. Michel
Foucault describes those techniques as “disciplines”—a machinery of power
aimed at exploring the human body as a mechanism, breaking it down, and rearranging it not only to advance the growth of its skills, but to render the body
more obedient as it became more useful, and more useful as it became more
obedient.
From Foucault, it is learned that the form of power that emerged alongside the
market’s transformation of the state was disciplinary power. This form of power
met the requirements of an emerging art of government that properly disposed
and arranged things to service the market’s demands for growth. In order to
effect the right dispositions in people, disciplinary power seeks to increase the
economic utility of each individual by increasing the forces that the individual’s
body feeds into the market as both a worker/producer and consumer. Paradoxically, disciplinary power further seeks to control the body’s forces by seeking to
instill political obedience (allegiance) to the state and, thereby, to the market
that it serves. Whereas, as previously noted, traditional societies are marked by
deep allegiances to community, these disciplinary measures seek to reinforce
people’s primary allegiances to the state.
From the above analysis, we can discern how the state compels people (citizens) to attend school for two primary reasons that go far in defining the traditional role of schooling. In short, schooling conditions children for their future
lives as batteries, whose primary purpose in life is to provide energy to fuel the
machinery of a market-dominated culture. It also simultaneously cultivates their
obedience to the state. The state accomplishes this, in part, by disguising the disciplinary functions of schools that treat children as batteries behind a mask of
benevolence. In order to achieve maximum efficiency, the mechanism and the
supporting ideology of disciplinary power has to remain hidden. The state must
prevent people from recognizing the true nature of compulsory schooling—that
the state claims the right to lay hold of the bodies of children to carry out the
disciplinary measures required to maximize their utility to a market-dominated
culture. To blur the connections between school, state, and law, schooling was
tied to the value of education and presented as a human right and an opportunity.
Framed as a value and protected as a right, schooling came to fit into the logic of
the market as something that could be acquired. In the vernacular of schooling,
parents have learned to say that they want their children to get an education, or
to receive an education. Suddenly, something that had previously been seen as

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a process became a thing that one could possess. Befitting the market’s logic of
acquisitiveness, education devolved into a commodity, and the more of it that
students consumed, as evidenced by the number of diplomas and degrees received, the more student use-value grew within the market-dominated culture.
Human beings, then, could be “graded” like batteries. Some are AAAs, some are
AAs, some are Cs, and some are Ds. As they increase their charge through the
consumption of schooling, the students/batteries clearly increase their certified
use-value for the market.
The market-dominated culture, itself, played a role in this when employers
began requiring educational credentials (diplomas, degrees, and certificates—
testimonials to the degree to which a person’s use-value had been developed) as
a precondition of employment. To the degree that the market literally became
people’s only means for satisfying their wants and needs through the buying and
selling of goods and services, these formal job requirements made compulsory
school laws somewhat obsolete. Because the market itself began requiring participation in the ritual of schooling as a condition of employment, the connection between the compulsory nature of schooling, the state, and the law became
less discernable. As a consequence, school could become viewed less in terms
of being an institution that the state forced people to attend, and more in terms
of an “opportunity” and, later, a “right” that the state granted to individuals, enabling them to meet the demands of the market.
The notion of “use-value” allowed the state to introduce the “law of scarcity”
into public policy planning that would also contribute to both its own benevolent image and that of the market. While the “doctrine of original sin” provided
the church with its moral imperative, one of the most fundamental laws of the
market provided the state with the imperative that it needed: namely, the law
of scarcity. The law of scarcity defines the human condition and social conditions everywhere. Applied to the human condition, the law of scarcity proclaims
that human wants are great (if not immeasurable), while their means for satisfying those wants are scarce. Only the market can provide those means—the
means for achieving secular salvation, defined as the satisfaction of wants. But
in order to access those means through participation in the market, one must
possess something of value to exchange on the market. One must possess something akin to grace sought by those who identified with the church. The market’s
equivalent of grace is use-value and the money it generates.
The “doctrine of original sin” taught people to understand that they were
born without grace, and that without grace they could not acquire eternal salvation. The “law of scarcity” teaches people that they have been born without
use-value. Without use-value, people have nothing to exchange on the market.
Therefore, they have no means for satisfying their wants or achieving salvation
in the secular world of a market society. In their raw-state, like any resource,
people possess no use-value. Also like any resource, however, they can be subjected to disciplinary processes designed to make them useful. Again, however,
the means for developing that use-value are scarce. Fortunately, or so their conscience is molded to believe, the benevolent state organizes a subsidy to support
public education for cultivating people’s use-value in order that they can find

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their own individual salvation in the market while contributing to the broader
salvation that the market bestows upon the society as a whole.
COMPULSORY SCHOOLING AS CULTURAL GENOCIDE
Compulsory schooling’s role in cultural genocide as it was imposed on the
children of European peoples evades our immediate recognition, in part because “education” has always been presented to us as an “opportunity” and
a “right,” not a state-imposed obligation, the neglect of which is punishable
under the law. It also evades us because much of the cultural memory of the
descendents of those peoples, as testimony to their status as victims of cultural
genocide, has been erased. Students in teacher education programs, if not all or
most people in “developed” nations, find it difficult to conceptualize that people
once found it entirely possible to sustain social order in the absence of schools.
They express great fear that any semblance of social order would survive the
elimination of compulsory schooling. Going to schools is as natural to them as
breathing. Nevertheless, the origins and the primary function of contemporary,
compulsory schooling need to be recognized as the forced integration of individuals into the market pattern. From this angle, compulsory schooling can be
understood as the domestic equivalent of “development” insofar as “development” was never genuinely presented to the members of traditional peoples as
an option. Development as a strategy of imperialism, like schooling, has always
been a compulsory program for integrating peoples into the market pattern,
and compulsory schooling is typically a constituent element of that same program.
While the cultural memory of the descendents of the traditional cultures of
Europe may have suffered devastating levels of erasure under the impress of a
market-dominated culture’s power of assimilation, the memory of the indigenous peoples of North America remains alive and continues to struggle against
those powers. Many of them still recall, and work to remind those around them,
how the governments of the United States and Canada restrained the violence
of physical genocide against their peoples only once they recognized that the
methods of cultural genocide were both less expensive and more effective. Instead of eliminating Indians through physical extermination, the patterns of cultural genocide perpetrated by the systems of residential schools in the United
States and Canada killed Indians by making them “white.” Indian children were
torn from their families and forcibly sent to these schools to be “civilized.” Their
hair was cut; they were forced to wear western clothes; and they were prohibited
from speaking their indigenous languages. Congruent with the experiences of
other indigenous peoples with the forces of development, the Christian church
played an important role in the operation of these schools. Children there were
forbidden from practicing their native religions. Instead, they were forced to attend Christian church services and to read from the Bible as part of the broader
effort to eliminate their cultural identities. Most significantly, in keeping with
the traditional function of compulsory schooling, the primary component of the
curriculum at these schools focused on cultivating these students’ appreciation

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for the value of work. In fact, they were frequently used as slave labor for local
ranchers and farmers in the communities adjacent to the schools.
IMPLICATIONS FOR GRASSROOTS MOVEMENTS
Once they recognize that development, in the guise of an imperialistic
expansion of a market-dominated cultural pattern, threatens to dismember
people from the cultural patterns that had once formed them into a network of
sustainable social and environmental relationships, even the grassroots movements in market societies can begin to reclaim the conservative character that
once defined them. Grassroots hold the soil together in order to prevent erosion.
For grassroots movements among the surviving more traditional and indigenous
peoples on the planet, holding together the soil of their traditional cultures represents the most pressing challenge. For people adrift in market-dominated societies that want to refer to their movements as “grassroots,” the task entails greater
complications. They are adrift because the soil of their culture has been washed
away by the flood of a long and brutal, though seldom acknowledged, history of
cultural genocide by market expansion. It is difficult for these people to see themselves as other than citizens of the state, who possess rights—including especially
the right to equal opportunity to participate actively and acquisitively in the economic market that dominates their lives. Most of what they refer to as grassroots
movements seek to expand that opportunity to others, even to those who may
not want to participate. They fail to recognize the conservative nature of what it
means to be a grassroots movement. Overcoming this failure hinges on a twofold
process of remembrance. On the one hand, they must remember a past that has
been lost to them. Rather than accepting the market’s view of change as natural
or progressive, they must confront the history of their own indigenous cultures’
respective dissolutions by the myriad of forces discussed here and others. On the
other hand, while this first act of remembrance should not be taken to suggest
some romantic return to the past, it holds vital importance for motivating the
second step. The most crucial task for authentic grassroots movements in market
societies requires that the participants in those movements “remember” themselves—putting themselves back together in the sense of living their way back
into sustainable relationships with one another and the environment. They must
recreate the soil of their own culture(s). Only once that soil has been recreated
can those movements realize the truly conservative qualities of their grassroots
character in the struggle to hold that soil together.
Further Reading: Churchill, W., 2004, Kill the Indian, save the man: The genocidal impact of
American Indian residential schools, San Francisco: City Lights Books [a brilliant exposé
of how the residential school movements in the United States and Canada functioned
as part of an effort to eliminate the indigenous peoples of North America; a highly instructive primer in cultural genocide]; Esteva, G., and Prakash, M. S., 1998, Grassroots
postmodernism: Remaking the soil of cultures, New York: Zed Books [a very useful account of the numerous ways in which the world’s social majorities are escaping from
the global monoculture of the market and regenerating their own cultural and natural spaces]; Gabbard, D., & Ross, E. W., eds., 2004, Defending public schools: Education

Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution | 147
under the security state, Westport, CT: Praeger [describes the high-stakes testing and
teacher accountability schemes that are central to contemporary school reform as part
of an effort to delegitimate the public control of schooling; these reforms are a trap, programmed to ensure the failure of public schools in order to transfer their control over
to private corporations; once this control is established, the public will lose any voice in
shaping the agenda of compulsory schooling]; Illich, I., 1971, Deschooling society, New
York: Harper & Row [one of the first books to challenge the school’s self-proclaimed
ability to deliver the individual and/or society into a condition of secular salvation]; Illich, I., 1992, In the mirror of the past: Lectures and addresses 1978–1990, New York: M.
Boyars [a seminal collection of Illich’s ideas for recognizing the radical otherness of our
twentieth-century mental topology and to become aware of its generative axioms that
usually remain below the horizon of contemporary attention].

David Gabbard
CREATIONISM, INTELLIGENT DESIGN, AND EVOLUTION
THE CREATIONIST CRUSADE
Evolution is clearly the most controversial topic in the public school science
curriculum in the United States. Among scientists, there is no significant controversy about the basic scientific issues: The earth is ancient (about 4.5 billion
years old); living things have descended, with modification, from common ancestors; and natural selection, by adapting living things to their environments, is
a major driving force in the history of life. As the National Academy of Sciences
observes, “The scientific consensus around evolution is overwhelming.” Recognizing the centrality of evolution to biology, the National Association of Biology
Teachers and the National Science Teachers Association have taken a firm stand
on the pedagogical necessity of teaching evolution. Teaching evolution is a matter of social controversy, however, owing to the prevalence of creationism—the
rejection of a scientific explanation of the history of life in favor of a supernatural account—among the public. Not all antievolutionists are creationists, and
not all creationists are fundamentalist Christians—there are creationists who
identify themselves with Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, New Age, and Native American religious traditions—but the juggernaut of antievolutionist activity in the
United States is propelled by Christian fundamentalism.
Creationists are not unanimous in their attitudes toward the antiquity of the
earth, common ancestry, and the efficacy of natural selection. Those who reject
all three are called young-earth or recent creationists; young-earth creationism
is currently the dominant form of creationism in the United States. Those who
reject only the latter two are usually called old-earth creationists; different forms
of old-earth creationism, corresponding to different interpretations of the book
of Genesis to accommodate the antiquity of the earth, include Day/Age and Gap
creationism. There is not a standard term for creationists who reject only the
efficacy of natural selection, perhaps reflecting their relative unimportance in
the debate. The latest incarnation of creationism—intelligent design—is strategically vague in its attitudes toward the age of the earth and common ancestry,
in the hope of maintaining a big tent under which creationists of all varieties are

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CREATIONISM, INTELLIGENT DESIGN, AND EVOLUTION WEB SITES
Following is a sampling of organizations (and their Web sites) active in controversies over
creationism, evolution, and their places in public science education. Where applicable, a
relevant subsection of the Web sites is identified. All Web site addresses were operational
as of November 2007.

Creationist Web Sites
Young-earth Creationist Organizations
Answers in Genesis: http://www.answersingenesis.org
Creation Research Society: http://www.creationresearch.org
Institute for Creation Research: http://www.icr.org

Old-earth Creationist Organizations
Reasons to Believe: http://www.reasons.org

Intelligent Design Organizations
The Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture: http://www.discovery.org/csc
Intelligent Design Network: http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org

Evolution Web Sites
Scientific Organizations
American Association for the Advancement of Science: http://www.aaas.org/news/
press_room/evolution
The National Academies: http://www.nationalacademies.org/evolution/

Science Education Organizations
National Association of Biology Teachers: http://www.nabt.org/
National Science Teachers Association: http://www.nsta.org/publications/evolution.aspx

Anticreationist Organizations
National Center for Science Education: http://www.ncseweb.org
TalkOrigins Foundation: http://www.talkorigins.org

welcome to shelter; its representatives run the gamut from antiselectionist creationists to young-earth creationists, while the bulk of its public support seems to
be provided by young-earth creationists.
In its traditional forms, creationism is typically based on biblical inerrantism—the belief that the Bible, as God’s Word, is necessarily accurate and
authoritative in matters of science and history as well as in matters of morals and
doctrine. Inerrantism allows for the nonliteral interpretation of metaphorical

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or figurative language, and thus young-earth and old-earth creationists are able
to agree on the principle of inerrantism while disagreeing on its application.
Mindful of the legal failures of attempts to include creationism in the public
school classroom, proponents of intelligent design sedulously disavow any commitment to the Bible, but such a commitment tends to surface nevertheless—for
example, in their frequent invocation of the Gospel of John’s opening verse, “In
the beginning was the Word . . .” Whether avowing inerrantism or not, creationists typically express a passionate concern for the supposed moral consequences
of the acceptance of evolution; the “tree of evil”—with evolution at its root and
various evils, real and imagined, as its branches—is a common image in creationist literature. Creationism is primarily a moral crusade.
It is a crusade that is waged against any public exposition of evolution—in recent years, national parks, science museums, public television stations, and municipal zoos have faced challenges to their presentations of evolution—but the
primary battleground is the public school system. Attempts to remove, balance, or
compromise the teaching of evolution occur at every level of governance: from
the individual classroom (where teachers may themselves be creationists, or
may mistakenly think it fair to present creationism along with evolution, or may
decide to omit evolution to avoid controversy), to the local school district, to
the state government’s executive or legislative branch or even—rarely, and then
usually as a mere token of support—to the federal government. Such attempts
are a recurring feature of American science education from the 1920s onward,
in a basically sinusoidal trajectory. Whenever there is a significant improvement
in the extent or quality of evolution education, a creationist backlash quickly
ensues, only to meet with resistance and ultimately defeat in the courts.
FROM SCOPES TO EDWARDS
The first phase of the antievolutionist movement in the United States, beginning after the close of World War I, involved attempts to constrain or even to ban
the teaching of evolution, in response to its appearance in high school textbooks
around the turn of the century. Due in part to the rise of organized fundamentalism, antievolution legislation was widely proposed (in 20 states between 1921
and 1929) and sometimes enacted (in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma,
and Tennessee). It was Tennessee’s Butler Act, which forbade teachers in the
public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation
of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from
a lower order of animals,” under which John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted in
1925. Although Scopes’s conviction was overturned on appeal, on a technicality,
the trial exerted a chilling influence on science education. Under the pressure of
legislation, administrative decree, and public opinion, evolution swiftly disappeared from textbooks and curricula across the country.
It was not until after the launching of Sputnik in 1957 that evolution returned
to the public school science classroom. Fearing a loss of scientific superiority to
the Soviet Union, the federal government funded a massive effort to improve
science education, which included a strong emphasis on evolution. Particularly

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Figure C.5 The Cobb County, Georgia, evolution warning sticker
(2002–2005).

important were the biology textbooks produced by the Biological Science Curriculum Study, established in 1959 by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the education committee of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
The popular BSCS textbooks, written with the aid of biologists such as Hermann
J. Muller (who complained of the inadequate treatment of evolution in biology
textbooks in a famous address entitled “One Hundred Years Without Darwin
Are Enough”), treated evolution as a central theme, and commercial publishers
began to follow suit. Meanwhile, the Tennessee legislature repealed the Butler
Act in 1967, anticipating the Supreme Court’s decision in Epperson v. Arkansas
(1968) that laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
After it was no longer possible to ban the teaching of evolution, creationists
increasingly began to argue that creationism was a viable scientific alternative that
deserved to be taught alongside evolution. Poised to take the lead was young-earth
creationism, in the form of the creation science movement, which contended that
there is scientific evidence that the earth (and the universe) are relatively young
(on the order of 10,000 years), that the earth was inundated by a global flood
responsible for a mass extinction and for major geological features such as the
Grand Canyon, and that evolution is impossible except within undefined but narrow limits (since living things were created to reproduce “after their own kind”).
Organizations such as the Creation Research Society (1963) and the Institute for
Creation Research (1972) were founded, ostensibly to promote scientific research
supporting creationism. Creation science remained absent from the scientific literature—but was increasingly prominent in controversies over science education.
During the second phase of the antievolution movement, science teachers,
school administrators, and textbook publishers found themselves pressured to
provide equal time to creation science. Creationists started to prepare their own
textbooks, such as the CRS’s Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity (1970)
and the ICR’s Scientific Creationism (1974), for use in the public schools. The
movement received a boost in 1980 from Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, who endorsed teaching creationism whenever evolution was taught.
And legislation calling for equal time for creationism was introduced in no fewer
than 27 states, successfully in both Arkansas and Louisiana in 1981. But both

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Figure C.6 The Alabama evolution warning sticker (1996–2001).

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laws were ruled unconstitutional, the Arkansas law by a federal district court
(McLean v. Arkansas, 1982) and the Louisiana law ultimately by the Supreme
Court (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987), on the grounds that teaching creationism in
the public schools violates the Establishment Clause.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN
In the wake of the decision in Edwards, which held that the Louisiana law impermissibly endorsed religion “by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural
being created humankind,” a group of creationists sought to devise a form of creationism able to survive constitutional scrutiny. A scant two years after Edwards,
intelligent design was introduced to a wide audience in Of Pandas and People
(1989; second edition 1993), produced by a fundamentalist organization called
the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and intended for use as a supplementary
biology textbook. Like its creation science predecessors, Of Pandas and People
contended that evolution was a theory in crisis, on the common creationist assumption that (supposed) evidence against evolution is perforce evidence for creationism. Unlike them, however, it attempted to maintain a studied neutrality on
the identity and nature of the designer, as well as on issues, such as the age of the
earth, on which creationists differ.
During the 1990s, the intelligent design movement coalesced, with its de facto
headquarters shifting from FTE to the Center for the Renewal of Science and
Culture (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture), founded in 1996 as
a division of the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle. At the same
time, as states began to introduce state science standards, which provide guidelines for local school districts to follow in their individual science curricula, the
treatment of evolution was improving, penetrating even to districts and schools
where creationism was taught—the Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards notwithstanding—or where evolution was downplayed or omitted altogether. (The
importance of state science standards was cemented by the federal No Child
Left Behind Act, enacted in 2002, which requires states to develop and periodically revise standards.) The stage was set for the third phase of the antievolution
movement, which is going on today.
Like the creation science movement before it, the intelligent design movement
claimed to favor a top-down approach, in which the scientific establishment
would be convinced first, with educational reform following in due course. But
like creation science before it, intelligent design was in fact aimed at the public schools. Supporters of intelligent design have attempted to have Of Pandas
and People approved for use in Alabama and Idaho, proposed laws to require
or allow the teaching of intelligent design in at least eight states, and attempted
to rewrite state science standards in at least four states, including Kansas, where
in 2005 the state board of education rewrote the standards to disparage the scientific status of evolution. As with a similar episode in 1999, the antievolution
faction on the board lost its majority in the next election, and the rewritten standards were abandoned in 2007. Such activity at the state level was mirrored at

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the local level, where attempts to require or allow the teaching of intelligent design caused uproar sporadically across the country.
In the small Pennsylvania town of Dover, the result was the first legal challenge to the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design in the public schools,
Kitzmiller v. Dover. After a summer of wrangling over evolution in biology textbooks, the Dover school board adopted a policy in October 2004 providing that
“[s]tudents will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s Theory and of other
theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.” The board
subsequently required a disclaimer to be read aloud in the classroom, according to which evolution is a “Theory . . . not a fact,” “Gaps in the Theory exist for
which there is no evidence,” and intelligent design as presented in Of Pandas and
People is a credible scientific alternative to evolution. Eleven local parents filed
suit in federal district court, arguing that the policy violated the Establishment
Clause. The court agreed, writing that it was “abundantly clear that the Board’s
ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause,” adding, “In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We
have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from
its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
THE FALLBACK STRATEGY
Like McLean, Kitzmiller was tried in a federal district court, and the decision
is directly precedential only in the district. (The Dover school board chose not
to appeal the decision, in part because the supporters of the policy on the school
board were defeated at the polls.) Thus there is no decisive ruling at the highest
judicial level that explicitly addresses the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design in the public schools so far, and it is possible that a future case will
ultimately produce a decision by the Supreme Court. Even before the Kitzmiller
verdict, however, the Center for Science and Culture was already retreating from
its previous goal of requiring the teaching of intelligent design in favor of what it
called “teaching the controversy”—in effect, a fallback strategy of attacking evolution without mentioning any creationist alternative. To its creationist supporters, such a strategy offers the promise of accomplishing the goal of encouraging
students to acquire or retain a belief in creationism while not running afoul of
the Establishment Clause. Unless there is a significant change in church/state
jurisprudence, forms of the fallback strategy are likely to become increasingly
prominent in the antievolution movement.
A perennially popular form of the fallback strategy involves disclaimers,
whether oral or written. Between 1974 and 1984, for example, the state of Texas
required textbooks to carry a disclaimer that any material on evolution included in
the book is to be regarded as “theoretical rather than factually verifiable”; in 1984,
the state attorney general declared that the disclaimer was unconstitutional. The
state of Alabama began to require evolution disclaimers in textbooks in 1996; the
original disclaimer (since revised twice) described evolution as “a controversial
theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living
things, such as plants, animals and humans.” Disclaimers have been challenged

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in court twice. In Freiler v. Tangipahoa (1997), a policy requiring teachers to read
a disclaimer that conveyed the message that evolution is a religious viewpoint
at odds with accepting the Bible was ruled to be unconstitutional. In Selman v.
Cobb County (2005), a textbook disclaimer describing evolution as “a theory, not
a fact” was ruled to be unconstitutional, but the decision was vacated on appeal
and remanded to the trial court, where a settlement was reached.
Attacking the content of textbooks is also a perennially popular form of the
fallback strategy, especially in so-called adoption states, where textbooks are selected by a state agency for use throughout the state, and the publishers consequently have a strong incentive to accommodate the demands of the agency. In
Texas, Educational Research Associates, founded by the husband-and-wife team
of Mel and Norma Gabler, lobbied the state board of education against evolution
in textbooks, succeeding in having the BSCS textbooks removed from the list of
state-approved textbooks in 1969. Owing both to changes in the Texan political
landscape and opposition from groups concerned with civil liberties and science
education, ERA’s influence waned in the 1980s. But the tradition is alive and
well: while evaluating biology textbooks for adoption in 2003, the Texas board
of education was inundated with testimony from creationists, complaining of
supposedly mistaken and even fraudulent information in the textbooks. All 11
textbooks under consideration were adopted nevertheless.
Calling for “critical analysis” of evolution—and, significantly, only of evolution, or of evolution and a handful of issues that are similarly controversial, such
as global warming or stem-cell research—is the latest form of the fallback strategy. Its most conspicuous venture so far was in Ohio, where in 2002, after a dispute over whether to include intelligent design in the state science standards was
apparently resolved, the state board of education voted to include in the standards a requirement that students be able to “describe how scientists continue
to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” The requirement served as a pretext for the adoption in 2004 of a corresponding model
lesson plan that, relying on a number of creationist publications, appeared to be
intended to instill scientifically unwarranted doubts about evolution. Following
the decision in Kitzmiller and the revelation that the board ignored criticisms of
the lesson plan from experts at the Ohio Department of Education, the board
reversed itself in 2006, voting to rescind the lesson plan and to remove the “critical analysis” requirement from the standards.
WHAT NEXT?
The United States is not the only country with controversies about evolution
in the public schools: In recent years, there have been reports of such controversies from Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Poland,
Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, for example. But the United
States is clearly exceptional in the amount and influence of creationist activity—
and of creationist belief. Comparing the levels of acceptance of evolution in the
United States with those in 32 European countries and Japan, a recent report
noted, “Only Turkish adults were less likely to accept the concept of evolution

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than American adults” (Miller et al., 2006), and plausibly attributed resistance
to evolution among the American public to three factors: the acceptance of fundamentalist religious beliefs, the politicization of science, and the widespread
ignorance of biology. Longitudinally, the report adds, “After 20 years of public
debate, the percentage of U.S. adults accepting the idea of evolution has declined
from 45% to 40% and the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48% to 39%. The percentage of adults who were not sure about evolution increased from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.”
These attitudes appear to be reflected in the public’s attitude toward the
teaching of evolution in the public schools. According to a pair of recent
national polls (CBS News, November 2004; Newsweek, December 2004), a
majority—60–65 percent—favors teaching creationism along with evolution,
while a large minority—37–40 percent—favors teaching creationism instead of
evolution. The situation is perhaps not quite so dire as these data suggest, however; in a poll that offered respondents a wider array of choices, only 13 percent
favored teaching creationism as a “scientific theory” along with evolution, and
only 16 percent favored teaching creationism instead of evolution (DYG, on
behalf of the People for the American Way Foundation, November 1999). Still,
it seems clear that in the public there is a reservoir of creationist sentiment,
which frequently splashes toward the classroom. In a recent informal survey
among members of the National Science Teachers Association (March 2005),
30 percent of respondents indicated that they experienced pressure to omit or
downplay evolution and related topics from their science curriculum, while
31 percent indicated that they felt pressure to include nonscientific alternatives
to evolution in their science classroom.
In addition to whatever creationist sympathies there are in the public at
large, reinforced by the efforts of a creationist counterestablishment, there are
also systemic factors that combine to sustain creationism and inhibit evolution
education. Perhaps the most important among these is the decentralized nature
of the public school system in the United States. There are over 15,000 local
school districts, each with a degree of autonomy over curriculum and instruction, typically governed by a school board comprised of elected members of the
community usually without any special training in either science or education.
Each district thus offers a chance for creationist activists—who may, of course,
be elected to school boards themselves—to pressure the school board to remove, balance, or compromise the teaching of evolution. Also important is the
comparative lack of attention to preparing educators to understand evolution
and to teach it effectively. Especially in communities with a tradition of ignorance of, skepticism about, and hostility toward evolution, it is not surprising
that teachers who are neither knowledgeable about evolution nor prepared to
teach it effectively often quietly decide to avoid any possible controversy.
There are signs of hope for supporters of the teaching of evolution, however,
in addition to the consistency with which courts have ruled against the constitutionality of efforts to remove, balance, or compromise the teaching of evolution. Rallied by the spate of intelligent design activity, the scientific community
is increasing its public engagement and advocacy, including outreach efforts

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to science educators in the public schools. Academic work in the burgeoning
field of science and religion is producing a renewed interest in exploring ways to
reconcile faith with science, while over 10,000 members of the Christian clergy
have endorsed a statement affirming the compatibility of evolution with their
faith. And the increasing economic importance of the applied biological sciences, of which evolution is a central principle, is likely to be increasingly cited
in defense of the teaching of evolution. Still, controversies over the teaching of
evolution are clearly going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Further Reading: Alters, B. J., & Alters S. M., 2001, Defending evolution: A guide to the
evolution/creation controversy, Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett; Larson, E. J., 2003, Trial
and error: The American controversy over creation and evolution, 3rd ed., New York: Oxford University Press; Miller, J. D., Scott, E. C., & Okamoto, S., 2006, Public acceptance
of evolution, Science 313: 765–766; National Academy of Sciences, 1999, Science and
creationism, 2nd ed., Washington DC: National Academies Press; Scott, E. C., 2005, Evolution vs. creationism: An introduction, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Glenn Branch
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
WHAT IS CRITICAL PEDAGOGY?
Perhaps the most distinguishing element of critical pedagogy is its aim to empower people to transform their world. There is no uniform definition of critical
pedagogy, as educators and theorists have transformed the concept over the years
as they deployed new approaches to understanding the world and changing it.
Critical pedagogy usually refers to educational theory, teaching, and learning
practices that aim to raise learners’ critical consciousness regarding oppressive
social conditions. Critical pedagogy focuses on the development of critical consciousness for both “personal liberation” and collective political action aimed at
overcoming oppressive social conditions and to create a more egalitarian, socially just world. Pedagogy that is critical encourages students and teachers to
understand the interconnected relationships among knowledge, culture, authority, ideology, and power. Understanding these relationships in turn facilitates
the recognition, critique, and transformation of existing undemocratic social
practices and institutional structures that produce and sustain inequalities and
oppressive social relations.
Critical pedagogy is particularly concerned with reconfiguring the traditional
student/teacher relationship, where the teacher is the active agent, the one who
knows, and the students are the passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge.
The critical classroom is envisioned as a site where new knowledge, grounded in
the experiences of students and teachers alike, is produced through meaningful
dialogue. In short, critical pedagogy aims to empower to students by (1) engaging them in the creation of personally meaningful understandings of the world;
and (2) providing opportunities for students to learn that they have agency, that
is their actions can enable social change.

Critical Pedagogy

Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy
The terms critical theory, critical thinking, and critical pedagogy are sometimes conflated. In 1843, Karl Marx defined critical theory as “the self-clarification
of the struggles and wishes of the age.” In more recent times, critical theory has
come to be treated as an umbrella term for a wide array of academic theories,
but current use of the term has two distinct meanings and origins—one related
to neo-Marxian social theory and the other to literary criticism. Many of the key
concepts and arguments of critical pedagogy are grounded in the critical social
theory tradition that began to emerge in the 1930s with the work of thinkers
affiliated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt and
others influenced by them. Known informally as the Frankfurt School, these
theorists developed analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that
had occurred since the classical theories of Marx. Frankfurt School critical theorists were oriented toward radical social change, as opposed to “traditional theory,” that is theory in the positivistic, scientistic, or purely observational mode.
Their emphasis on the “critical” component of theory was derived in an attempt
to overcome the limits of positivism and phenomenology by returning to Kant’s
critical philosophy and Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and
contradiction as inherent properties of reality. The rise of Nazism and the 1930s
publication of Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German
Ideology, as well as the theories of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, exerted an
enormous influence on Frankfurt School critical theory—which includes the
work Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse,
Eric Fromm, and later Jürgen Habermas, among others. The Frankfurt School
thinkers broadened the scope of Marxism beyond its dogmatic use by communist and social-democratic political parties to include issues such as how people
and institutions interact and by merging philosophical and empirical problems
introduced the idea that theory is a part of everyday life. Brazilian educator and
key critical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire was heavily influenced by Frankfurt
School critical theory.
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy
On a broad level, critical thinking and critical pedagogy share some common
concerns. In Critical Theories in Education, Burbules and Berk note that both
approaches imagine a population who to some extent are deficient in dispositions or abilities to discern inaccuracies, distortions, and falsehoods that limit
freedom (although this concern is more explicit in critical pedagogy, which
“sees society as fundamentally divided by relations of unequal power”). Critical
pedagogues are specifically concerned with the influences knowledge and cultural formations that legitimate an unjust status quo. Fostering a critical capacity in citizens is a way of enabling them to resist such effects of power. Critical
thinking authors often cite similar concerns, but in general regard them as less
important than the problem of people making life choices on unsubstantiated
truth claims—a problem that is conceived as nonpartisan in its nature or effects.

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As critical thinking advocate Richard Paul puts it, the basic problem is irrational,
illogical, and unexamined living.
Both critical thinking advocates and critical pedagogues “argue that by helping to make people more critical in thought and action, progressively minded
educators can help to free learners to see the world as it is and to act accordingly;
critical education can increase freedom and enlarge the scope of human possibilities.” However, as Burbules and Berk point out, the critical thinking tradition primarily concerns itself with “criteria of epistemic adequacy” or the logical
analysis of truth claims. To be “critical” in the critical thinking tradition means
to be more “discerning in recognizing faulty arguments, hasty generalization,
assertions lacking evidence, truth claims based on unreliable authority . . . The
primary preoccupation of critical thinking is to supplant sloppy or distorted
thinking with thinking based upon reliable procedures of inquiry.”
Critical pedagogy, on the other hand, regards belief claims, “not primarily
as propositions to be assessed for their truth content, but as parts of systems
of belief and action that have aggregate effects within the power structures of
society. It asks first about these systems of belief and action, who benefits?” Indeed, a crucial dimension of critical pedagogy is that certain claims, even if they
might be “true” or substantiated within particular confines and assumptions,
might nevertheless be partisan in their effects. Critical pedagogy is primarily
concerned with social justice and the transformation of oppressive, inequitable,
and undemocratic social conditions and relations.
PAULO FREIRE AND CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
Paulo Freire (1921–1997) was perhaps the most renowned educator of the
twentieth century and is the central figure in the development of critical pedagogy. Freire wrote numerous books, the most influential of which, The Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, was published in 1968. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues
against the “banking concept of education” and in favor of a liberatory, dialogical pedagogy designed to raise individuals’ consciousness of oppression and to
in turn transform oppressive social structures through “praxis.”
According to Freire, the “banking concept of education” positions students as
empty vessels, and traditional education is characterized as “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”
The teacher lectures, and the students “receive, memorize, and repeat.” Banking
education is characterized by the following oppressive attitudes and practices:
• the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing;
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
• the teacher talks and the students listen meekly;
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined;
• the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply;
• the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the
action of the teacher;

Critical Pedagogy

• the teacher chooses the program content and the students (who are not
consulted) adapt to it;
• the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with her or his own professional authority, which she or he sets in opposition to the freedom of
the students;
• the teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere
objects.
Freire’s dialogical approach to education (also known as “problem-posing education”) eschews the lecture format in favor of dialogue and open communication
among students and teachers. According to Freire, in this method, all teach and
all learn. The dialogical approach contrasts with the banking approach, which positions the teacher as the transmitter of knowledge, a hierarchical framework that
leads to domination and oppression through the silencing of students’ knowledge and experiences. Using a process of collaborative dialogue, Freirean critical
pedagogy engages students in critique (e.g., detailed analysis and assessment) of
social realities and enables praxis—which Freire defined as the complex activity
by which individuals create culture and society and become critically conscious
human beings. Praxis comprises a cycle of action-reflection-action that is central
to critical pedagogy. Characteristics of praxis include self-determination (as opposed to coercion), intentionality (as opposed to reaction), creativity (as opposed
to homogeneity), and rationality (as opposed to chance).
Freire and his work are not without critics. Rich Gibson, for example, has
critiqued his work as a cul-de-sac, a combination of old-style revolutionary socialism (wherever Freire was not) and liberal reformism (wherever Freire was).
Gibson describes Freire as “a paradigm shifter, willing to enclose postmodernism, Catholicism, Marxism, and liberalism, a person far more complex than
many of those who appropriate his work.”
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ITS CRITICS
Critical pedagogy is inclusive of a wide variety of alternative educational
practices that not only challenge the status quo of teaching, learning, and
schooling, but are often critical of the competing varieties of the critical pedagogy project.
It is not surprising that critical pedagogy has critics from without, as in nearly
every variation it offers up challenges of one sort or the other to the traditional,
“banking” approach to education. For example, public schools are primarily
concerned with reproduction of the status quo as they prepare students to assimilate into the world as it is. Critical pedagogy aims to engage students in
collaboratively constructing their own understandings of the world, which, at
least potentially, serve as platforms for reconstructing the world and their place
in it. Thus, critical pedagogy is controversial because it strikes at the very heart
of what teaching and schooling is assumed to be about by the vast majority of
stakeholders in public education (e.g., students, teachers, parents, local school
communities, politicians, and corporations).

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The very nature of critical pedagogy demands that it be continually reexamined, and some of the most scathing critiques of critical pedagogy have come
from within its broad boundaries. Critical pedagogy is a label that includes
educators and theorists working in traditions such as, but not limited to, Marxism and neo-Marxism (Michael Apple, Jean Anyon, Gustavo Fischman, Rich
Gibson, Pauline Lipman, Peter McLaren), cultural studies (Henry A. Giroux,
Pepi Leistyna), feminism (Patty Lather, Elizabeth Ellsworth), critical literacy
(Ira Shor), anarchism/social ecology (David Gabbard, Matt Hern, Ivan Illich),
and ecology (C. A. Bowers).
One line of self-criticism might be labeled the theory-practice gap. The few
authors or practitioners who offer concrete examples of critical teaching and
learning practices are contrasted with the relative many who focus on theorizing
a vision of society and schooling that is intended to shape the direction of a critical pedagogy. A common criticism within the critical pedagogy community has
been that authors of theoretical texts—sometimes written in abstruse, jargonladen language—fail to engage with the problems and everyday educational
contexts practitioners face. Few, if any, critical pedagogues believe that critical
teaching practices can be reduced to recipes. Indeed, it is because it is the responsibility of teachers in collaboration with their students to create appropriate
critical pedagogies that there is a concern that critical pedagogy theorists engage
more forthrightly with the pragmatics of critical teaching.
On the other hand, some radical critical pedagogues argue that in practice
critical pedagogy has been “domesticated” or diluted to the point that it has been
assimilated into the mainstream. In his book Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the
Pedagogy of Revolution Peter McLaren (2000) puts it this way
Once considered by the faint-hearted guardians of the American dream
as a term of opprobrium, critical pedagogy has become so completely
psychologized, so liberally humanized, so technologized, and so conceptually postmodernized, that its current relationship to broader liberation struggles seems severely attenuated if not fatally terminated. The
conceptual net known as critical pedagogy has been cast so wide and
at times so cavalierly that it has come to be associated with anything
dragged up out of the troubled and infested waters of educational practice, from classroom furniture organized in a “dialogue friendly” circle
to “feel-good” curricula designed to increase students’ self-image.
Lastly, the modernist assumptions of critical pedagogy—as evident in Frankfurt School thought—have opened it to criticism from the postmodernists.
Postmodernism encompasses a hugely diverse set of theories, but in general is
marked by a rejection of the universalizing tendencies of philosophy and totalizing systems of knowledge, meaning, or belief metanarratives. Postmodernists’
major criticisms of critical pedagogy include its use of categories and definitions that are presented as self-evident (e.g., “oppression,” “liberation,” “humanization,” “empowerment”); its assumption that there is an objective reality
that can be understood in a rational way (the postmodern worldview sees one

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perception of reality as no more true or accurate than another); and its reliance
on the metanarratives such as Marxism.
Despite the postmodernist critique, the critical pedagogical project of interrogating institutional structures that are implicated in relations of domination
and oppression can, some believe, be consistent with postmodernism. For example, Henry Giroux argues in his book Postmodernism as Border Pedagogy that
postmodernism can be viewed as equipping critical pedagogues with a new set
of theoretical tools for raising questions about how narratives get constructed,
what they mean, how they regulate experience, and how they presuppose particular epistemological and political world views.
In response to the postmodernist critique, some critical pedagogues counter
that postmodernism provides neither a viable educational politics nor the foundation for effective radical educational practice and argue that critical pedagogy
provides an alternative “politics of human resistance” that puts the challenge to
capitalism firmly on the agenda of educational theory, politics, and practice.
Further Reading: Burbules, N. C., & Berk, R., 1999, Critical thinking and critical pedagogy:
Relations, differences, and limits, in T. S. Popkewitz & L. Fendler (Eds.), Critical theories
in education, New York: Routledge; Darder, A., Torres, R. D., & Baltodano, M., eds.,
2002, The critical pedagogy reader, New York: Routledge; Freire, P., 1970, Pedagogy of the
oppressed, New York: Continuum; Freire, P., 1995, Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy
of the oppressed, New York: Continuum; Gadotti, M., 1994, Reading Paulo Freire: His life
and work, Albany: State University of New York Press; Gibson, R., 2007, Paulo Freire
and revolutionary pedagogy for social justice, in E. W. Ross & R. Gibson (Eds.), Neoliberalism and education reform (pp. 177–215), Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press; Hill, D.,
McLaren, P., Cole, M., & Rikowski, G., 2002, Marxism against postmodernism in educational theory, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books; McLaren, P., 2000, Che Guevara, Paulo
Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield; McLaren,
P., 2006, Life in school, 5th ed., Boston: Allyn & Bacon; Taylor, P., 1993, The texts of Paulo
Freire, Buckingham: Open University Press.

E. Wayne Ross
CULTURALLY RELEVANT EDUCATION
We have all heard the statistics before. Students of color are rapidly becoming
the majority in many schools and districts across the country. Immigrant and
linguistically diverse students are filling up our public classrooms. Teachers,
who are mainly white, monolingual, and middle class, increasingly face a larger
number of students who do not look like them and who come from backgrounds
unfamiliar to them. How do we teach these students?
Educators agree that the current school system is failing these students. However, there is disagreement over how best to educate them. Some believe that
these marginalized students need to assimilate into the American culture and
school system. They need to change in order to survive in today’s world. Others believe that schools and teachers need to change and adapt education to the
cultural backgrounds and needs of students.

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Fortunately, these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. These viewpoints need
not be opposed. Culturally relevant education is an approach that enables teachers to connect with their students of color while these students attain academic
achievement. Through culturally relevant education, academic success is not
predicated on abandoning their culture.
DEFINITION OF CULTURALLY RELEVANT EDUCATION
Culturally relevant education is a broad term that encompasses an educational philosophy, theory, and method that places culture at the heart of teaching and learning. Related approaches include culturally relevant pedagogy,
culturally responsive teaching, culturally congruent instruction, engaged pedagogy, and equity pedagogy, among others. Though they slightly differ in terminology, they all share the belief that it is important to use diverse students’ prior
experiences, cultural knowledge, and references to make learning more meaningful and accessible to them. When we connect their personal backgrounds to
what they are learning, all of our students have a greater chance of succeeding
academically.
THE RISE OF CULTURALLY RELEVANT EDUCATION
Public education has historically been used to assimilate different students
into mainstream dominant American society. Imagine a young child walking
to school every day. When she arrives at school, she expects to interact in ways
that are familiar to her. For most white middle-class children, they pass through
school doors without much thought to adjusting to the environment and its expectations. However, for students whose cultural norms do not match the status
quo of schools, they are expected to fit into this foreign environment. Unconsciously, these students are forced to leave their culture at the door, leaving them
disenfranchised and underachieving.
Culturally relevant education calls for changes in how teachers, administrators, and institutions conduct business so that the cultural backgrounds of all
students are welcomed and used to inform classroom practices and curriculum.
Though these ideas of culturally relevant education may be considered transformative, they are not new. Gay’s (2000) review of its beginnings shows that
scholars have discussed the importance of cultural diversity in education and
its positive impact on student learning since the 1970s. Already, early scholars
highlighted the ethnic differences between students and teachers and discussed
how to eliminate differences between the culture of ethnic minority students
and schools. Others focused on teacher bias and identified traits of effective
teachers with particular ethnic minority students (Kleinfield, 1975). As a result,
scholars introduced “culturally appropriate ways” to capitalize on students’ cultural background.
These early scholars laid the foundation for the field of cultural relevant
education—as we currently name and know it. The focus on teacher role and
reflection, cultural congruent communication, culturally responsive pedagogy,

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and curriculum continue to be reoccurring themes that shape our understanding of culturally relevant education today.
Teacher as Caring Cultural Mediator
Most scholars agree that the success of culturally relevant education rests on
the teacher. Therefore, it is important that teachers critically reflect upon their
cultural backgrounds and understand how factors such as race, class, and gender affect their teaching. Recognizing that their cultural lenses are clouded by
biases and assumptions moves teachers from being cultural dictators in the
classroom to cultural “mediators.” In Ladson-Billings’ (1994, p. 34) study of
exemplary teachers of African American students, she described a culturally responsive teacher in a similar role as a “coach/conductor” who:
• sees herself as an artist, and teaching as an art;
• sees herself as part of a the community, and teaching as giving back to the
community and encouraging students to do the same;
• believes all students can succeed;
• helps students make connection between their community, national, and
global identities;
• sees teaching as “pulling knowledge out”—like “mining.”
Underlying each of these characteristics is the ethic of care. A culturally relevant teacher views her profession as more than a job, but as a commitment to
humanity. She feels connected and cares deeply for the souls of her students,
their families, and the community. She values the home cultures that students
bring to the classroom and views their backgrounds as strengths and not limitations. Students are not viewed as culturally deficit or culturally deprived, but
rather rich with culture, abilities, and life circumstances. She spends time establishing relationships and getting to know her students. As Delpit (1995) states:
“In order to teach, I must know you.” Learning about student backgrounds helps
her understand, not judge particular and different behaviors, and helps her to
bridge discrepancies between home and school culture. Finally, along with caring comes high expectation of excellence from his students. A culturally relevant
teacher displays tough love. He is a “warm demander,” who is emotionally warm
and holds high standards for all his students.
Culturally Congruent Communication
Within the last two decades, much of the literature on culturally relevant education has focused on the mismatch between home language and communication patterns and those used at school and how this disparity affects classroom
dynamics. In mainstream classrooms, language and communication is largely
based on white, middle class, and monolingual communication structures.
Standard English, “the passive—receptive posture” or the one-way communication from teacher to student and single turn-taking tends to be the norm. This

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contrasts with the communication style of some ethnic groups. For example,
African Americans tend to communicate with a “call and response” pattern
whereby listeners verbally affirm and respond to speakers as they are talking.
While African Americans are likely to “talk back,” Native Hawaiian students
tend to use a discourse structure in their homes called “talk story,” a communal form of communication to promote solidarity where speakers recall events,
share personal experiences, ramble, and joke as a means to promote a shared
feeling.
Researchers also found disconnect between adult and child oral interactions
that occurred at home and at school. In Shirley Brice-Heath’s 1983 book Ways
with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms, she found
that European American middle-class parents posed commands in the form of
questions, while African American and working-class parents posed commands
in a more authoritative and direct manner. For example, African American
parents might state: “Go to sleep,” while European American parents ask: “Why
don’t you go to sleep now?” Though phrased as a question, it was “code” for “Go
to sleep.” In the classroom, this communication mismatch can be problematic.
When a European American teacher states a command in the form of a question
like, “Why don’t you sit down now?” to a student who is accustomed to direct
commands, the student interprets that he has a choice to stand or sit. When the
student decides to stand, his action is misinterpreted as defiance rather than
an act of cultural miscommunication. In effect, students who do not think, behave, and express themselves in mainstream manners face greater obstacles in
learning.
To a teacher unfamiliar with talking back and talk story, these communal
styles of communication may be viewed as talking out of turn, undignified, illogical, or uneducated. To a teacher who expects compliance in response to a
command posed as a question, she might be frustrated with the lack of classroom
management. However, instead of viewing these different styles of communication as nonstandard, inferior, or a hindrance, culturally relevant education argues for teachers to be aware of these differences and their impact on classroom
dynamics and relationships. Teachers must capitalize on different communication patterns and work to make their speech patterns, communication styles,
and participation congruent with their students.
Culturally Responsive Teaching and Curriculum
Culturally relevant education views teaching and learning as a dynamic and
joint venture between teacher and student. Knowledge is shared, subjective, and
critically analyzed. The teacher’s curriculum “mines” the lives and perspectives
of students, utilizing their familiar worlds to teach unfamiliar concepts. For example, Ladson-Billings (1994) describes a culturally relevant lesson where one
teacher discusses the bylaws and social structure of an African American church
or local civic association to learn about the formation of the U.S. Constitution.
In the Algebra Project, a national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color, a look at the Washington D.C.

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Metro-line map helps students build on concrete life experiences to understand
integers. To teach science concepts of sustainability and service learning, Chinn
(2006) immerses her students in a local Hawaiian state park to restore lo’ikalo,
the flooded pond fields that produce taro.
In Introduction to Multicultural Education, James Banks (2007) offers a hierarchical curricular framework that incorporates multiple perspectives and
diverse content into curriculum. Teachers must move beyond the “contributions approach” or the only focus on “ethnic foods, festival, and folk-dancing,”
so culture does not become trivialized or essentialized. They must move away
from the “additive stage,” which merely adds cultural content without changing the Eurocentric and mainstream structure of curriculum and results in this
content being perceived as “an after-thought,” Teachers must strive to include
perspectives from the marginalized groups themselves and a good faith effort to
include the perspective of marginalized groups can be more harmful when not
represented critically and authentically.
Curriculum becomes culturally responsive when it reaches Banks’ most advanced stage, the “transformative and social actions” stage, where key concepts
or issues are examined from multiple viewpoints, including the students’, and
acted upon to make society a better place. For example, when teaching the
American Revolution to a class largely composed of Filipino American students,
teachers can begin by conducting an exercise to demonstrate the rebellious nature of students. Next connect learning about the stages of the American Revolution to other examples like the Philippine Revolution. Finally, teachers should
encourage students to take action on an important issue in their community
that needs to be revolutionized. Hence, students become creators of knowledge
instead of consumers of knowledge.
UPRISE OVER CULTURALLY RELEVANT EDUCATION
The rise of culturally relevant education has not been without contention. In
the era of conservatism, “back to basics,” and the “standards-movement,” culturally relevant education has come under attack over its necessity and practicality. Opponents of culturally relevant education argue that culturally relevant
education is not rigorous or academic enough. They fear that it is so focused on
culture and making students of color and poor children feel good about themselves that the academics are lost, especially in our test-driven environment. They
believe that if we attend too much to students’ well-being and different cultural
backgrounds then we further deny marginalized students more from accessing
mainstream curriculum. Some believe these students are culturally deficient and
in need of becoming culturally literate with mainstream knowledge.
Proponents of culturally relevant education counter that the approach is
directly intended to improve the academic performance of students who are
culturally, ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse. Their backgrounds
become central to accessing mainstream content. Furthermore, proponents
see value in embracing the whole child with care and high expectations. Students from groups who have been historically discriminated against experience

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self-denigration and low self-esteem. Therefore, proponents believe that increasing cultural pride, seeing a connection to what is being learned, and finding
oneself represented in the curriculum all produce a positive outlook on oneself
and an increased motivation to learn.
Nowhere do these issues of culturally relevant education become more controversial than in the role home language plays in schools. Should students
be allowed to speak their home language such as Ebonics (African American
Vernacular English) or Pidgin/Hawaiian English Creole (a multicultural English) in school? In 1996, this debate gained national attention when California’s Oakland Public School District’s Board of Education and teachers passed
a resolution stating that Ebonics was not a dialect, but a language that teachers should value, learn, and integrate into the school environment to teach
mainstream English language and literacy skills. The resolution was based on
research that showed that children who spoke a language different other than
the dominant language can best learn the mainstream language by teachers
legitimizing and drawing on the home language of students. The Linguistic
Society of America supported the resolution as a linguistically and pedagogical sound practice.
Though well intentioned, this resolution created divisive camps between European Americans and African Americans, and within the African American
community. Some opponents to the Ebonics resolution misread its goals, believing that Ebonics was to supplant standard English, ultimately doing a disservice
to students of color. African American activists like Maya Angelou and Jesse
Jackson viewed this resolution as a mistake. They believed that it was an attack
on African American students’ potential to speak standard English and a conspiracy to keep African American children illiterate. The intent of the resolution,
to improve the academic achievement of African American students, quickly
became buried under media sensationalism and distortion.
The controversy over Ebonics highlights the relationship between language,
culture, personal identity, and the “power of language” and “language of power”
(Ladson-Billings, 1994). Skeptics of culturally relevant education ask, “Will talkstory help them on Wall Street?” Delpit (1995) believes we must encourage students to hold on to their sense of self, identity, home language, and culture, but
also learn the “culture of power,” the codes or rules of the dominant groups’ ways
of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing, and ways of interacting. For example, this means teaching marginalized students standard English and discussing
its importance, appropriateness, and need. In doing so, teachers help students
learn to “code-switch” or identify appropriate times to speak home language and
standard English. Students then learn to function in home culture, community,
school culture, and within and across other cultural groups and the global community.
Finally, there is the issue of the feasibility and practicality of implementing
culturally relevant education. “It can be a dizzying pedagogy,” teachers sometimes express. Teachers might initially feel overwhelmed when thinking about
what it means to be culturally congruent. Does this mean behaving one way towards a particular student and then turning around and act another way towards

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a different student? Culturally relevant teaching does not call for schizophrenic
teaching, but first awareness of one’s own preferred ways of learning, teaching,
and communicating. This allows teachers to make transparent the rules and
norms of the classroom to students. For example, discussing classroom norms
and making the rules explicit for the need to take turns when talking creates
a learning environment that is accessible to all children regardless of different
cultural communication styles. Simultaneously, teachers need to be open to
incorporating diverse styles of learning and communicating so as to reach all
students.
The quest to acknowledge particularities should not prevent looking for universal ways of teaching students from diverse backgrounds. In synthesizing the
latest research on “educational diversity,” Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi
(2000) offers five universal principles that maximized teaching and learning
for all students, especially students of color, language minority, and disabled
students. They organized their findings into “Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy”: (1) Teachers and Students Producing Together; (2) Developing Language
and Literacy across the Curriculum; (3) Making Meaning: Connecting School
to Students’ Lives; (4) Teaching Complex Thinking; (5) Teaching through Conversation (p. 20).

ON-LINE RESOURCES ABOUT CULTURALLY RELEVANT EDUCATION
Center for Multicultural Education: http://depts.washington.edu/centerme/home.htm
Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence (CREDE): http://www.crede.
ucse.edu
The Diversity Kit: http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/diversity_kit/index.shtml
Rethinking Schools: http://www.rethinkingschools.org
Teaching Diverse Learners: http://www.alliance.brown.edu/tdl/
Teaching Tolerance: http://www.teachingtolerance.org

CONCLUSION
The debate over culturally relevant education will remain so long as the fundamental assumptions over the mission and goals of our schools are challenged.
After all, what is the purpose of education? Is it merely to ensure that students
learn a pre-defined set of facts, concepts, and principles? Or should teachers be
charged with the responsibility of inspiring students to learn and developing our
children into life-long learners?
Critics of culturally relevant education contend that it is impractical, unnecessary, and, ultimately, will prevent students from accessing mainstream
curriculum. However, advocates of culturally relevant education do not necessarily believe that students’ cultural communication styles need to be abandoned or mainstream content be sacrificed. They do not automatically oppose
the content that is being taught; rather, they favor an alternative method of how

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that content should be taught. Culturally relevant education proponents not
only put a premium on knowledge; they also value how that knowledge is being
learned.
It is well settled that when delivering a speech, the speaker must tailor his
message to the audience. The most successful speakers focus on the traits and
characteristics of their audience members in order to determine the best way
to connect with them, which in turn, helps them get their message across more
effectively. This is not much different from the foundational elements of culturally relevant education. Under culturally relevant education, students are placed
at the center. They are the focus. Teachers find the best ways to deliver their
message to their particular students. With culturally relevant education, the requisite knowledge is learned and, most importantly, the learning experience is
richer and will make our children better students in school and in life.
Further Reading: Chinn, P., 2006, Preparing science teachers for culturally diverse students:
Developing cultural literacy through cultural immersion, cultural translators and communities of practice, Cultural Studies of Science Education, 1, 367–402; Delpit, L., 1995,
Other people’s children: Cultural conflicts in the classroom, New York: The New Press; Gay,
G., 2000, Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice, New York: Teachers College Press; Kleinfield, J., 1975, Effective teachers of Eskimo and Indian students,
School Review, 83(2), 301–344; Ladson-Billings, G., 1994, The dreamkeepers: Successful
teachers of African American children, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Tharp, R. G., Estrada,
P., Dalton, S. S., & Yamauchi, L., 2000, Teaching transformed: Achieving excellence, fairness, inclusion, and harmony, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Patricia Espiritu Halagao
CURRICULUM
There is a sense in which the sum total of what is taught in school, which
for the moment we can think of as the curriculum, is ignored as a debatable
topic as educational theorists and practitioners worry more about how to teach,
how to group, how to find and organize materials, how to assess, and how to
report results for what is assumed should be taught because it is included in
the textbook, the curriculum guide, or district or state directives that were issued just recently or during some long-ago period. That is, the critical examination of the actual academic content, skills, dispositions, appreciations, and
ways of learning to be planned, designed, taught, and assessed in an educational setting is taken for granted, approached as unproblematic, and accepted
as the conventional and commonsensical wisdom, not the object of thorough
and sustained scrutiny. Books and articles that tout “best practices” of curriculum design and organization and instructional and assessment strategies help
teachers and administrators to do better what presumably needs to take place
in the classroom.
On the other hand, a careful examination of educational discourse and policymaking, starting from the early years of the twentieth century—contained in
scholarly books and journals as well as countless articles that appear in popular
newspapers and magazines—belies this sense of consensus about and lack of

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attention to substantive issues of curriculum. Indeed, it is not uncommon for
the title of this collection or something very much like it to be referred to in
headlines that highlight the contested terrain that is curriculum work, as in a
recent article in the Wall Street Journal that announced one content area (sex
education) as having become the “latest school battleground.” If “culture wars”
exist, as many scholars and media pundits would have us believe, they involve
not just political parties, professional organizations, and national and community interest groups, but our classrooms as well.
Put simply, there exists a universe of knowledge, skills, etc., from which to
select a relatively small amount to comprise a curriculum; the curriculum can
be planned and organized in a variety of ways; deliberations about curriculum
choices can take many different forms and involve many different stakeholders;
and the results of what we plan for and do in the classroom can be assessed in
a range of ways, with regard to both its educational and sociopolitical ramifications. There continues, always, somewhere to be many choices to make, and
there is much contention, even if in partially stifled voices, about whether or not
we are resolving curriculum questions—of content selection, for example—in
the best, most effective and most equitable ways for/in a democratic society.

SELECTIONS FROM THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN CURRICULUM
1870s–1890s

Mental discipline theory and faculty psychology (Yale Report, 1828)
Humanistic tradition (C. W. Eliot, W. T. Harris)
Herbartians (C. DeGarmo, F. and C. McMurry)
Committee of Ten Report, 1893

1900s–1930s
• Child Study Movement (G. S. Hall)
• Social Efficiency and Scientific Curriculum Making (F. Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, R.
Finney, D. Snedden)
• The Project Method and Activity Curriculum (L. T. Hopkins, W. H. Kilpatrick)
• NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Cardinal Principles
Report, 1918
• Progressive Education Association
• John Dewey (Democracy and Education and Experience and Education)
• Social Reconstructionism (T. Brameld, G. Counts, H. Rugg)

1940s–1950s

Essentialism (Council for Basic Education, W. Bagley)
Life Adjustment Education (C. Prosser)
Structure of the Disciplines (J. Bruner, P. Phenix, J. Schwab)
The Tyler Rationale and Behavioral Objectives (R. Gagne, J. Popham, R. Tyler)

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1960s–1980s
• Open Education and Radical Criticism (S. Ashton-Warner, G. Dennison, J. Holt,
H. Kohl, J. Kozol, A. S. Neill, C. Silberman)
• Career Education (S. P. Marland)
• Back to Basics and Academic Excellence (A Nation At Risk, M. Adler, W. Bennett,
E. D. Hirsch)
• Critical and Feminist Theories (J. Anyon, M. Apple, H. Giroux, M. Greene, M. Grumet,
J. Macdonald, N. Noddings, W. Pinar)
• Multiculturalism (J. Banks, G. Gay, C. Grant, C. McCarthy, S. Nieto, C. Sleeter)

1990s–2000s
All of the above . . . and, for example: arts-based education; “at-risk” programs; authentic assessment; brain research; character education; cognitive pluralism; computer-based
education; concept-based education; constructivism; cooperative learning; critical thinking;
curriculum integration; democratic schooling; distance learning; ecological education; gaylesbian-bisexual studies; gifted education; globalization; high-stakes standardized testing;
HIV/AIDS education; inclusive education; multi-age classrooms; multiple intelligences;
national standards; No Child Left Behind Act; poststructuralist and postmodern theories;
religion-based education and spirituality; school-university partnerships; school vouchers
and charter schools; shared decision making; whole language; etc.

DIFFERENCES OF DEFINITION
Several different areas of controversy regarding curriculum can be identified, starting with its very definition. While arguments about definition can
seem stodgy and irrelevant to what takes place in the classroom, in fact the
way one conceives of curriculum can have a significant impact on its study
and practice. The fact that there are estimated to be more than 120 definitions
in the professional literature, taking us well beyond the word’s Latin root of
“racecourse,” perhaps testifies to the importance and variance of its basic characteristics.
Thus, for example, James Popham and Eva Baker’s well-known definition
in Systematic Instruction stresses “all planned learning outcomes for which
the school is responsible.” Such a definition places a priority on what has been
planned and what can be determined to be learned. Curriculum developers and
evaluators (and scholars) would have such characteristics uppermost in their
minds when studying, planning, organizing, and assessing the curriculum. But
what about what occurs and is observable in classrooms that are not planned,
e.g., what are often referred to as “teachable moments”? Do they have no significance with regard to student learning and what can be considered part of the
curriculum that students experience? And what about those experiences that are
planned (or unplanned) for which learning outcomes are not easily determined,
especially in the short run, such as appreciations and more expressive ways of

Curriculum

learning? Should they be excluded from consideration and perhaps downplayed
with regard to their potential educational value?
Another definition focuses on all experiences children have under the guidance of teachers, which de-emphasizes the planned and at the same time specifies the teacher’s role. Some might argue that the experiences students have in
school that are not under the direct guidance of teachers should also be considered (and assessed) as part of the curriculum, for example, what occurs in
playgrounds, hallways, cafeterias, and the like. Some curriculum scholars posit
curriculum as the interrelated complex set of plans and experiences that students have under the guidance of the school. This definition highlights “plans”
but does seem to allow for the unplanned (experiences) as well (though what
exactly is meant by “interrelated” is unclear). Moreover, it does not specify the
teacher as the only school participant who is involved with what can be considered the curriculum, placing the emphasis instead on what “a student undertakes.” Anyone adopting such a definition, then, will give careful attention to all
experiences that students have in school, which will include more than just what
the teacher does in the classroom.
Another definition was offered almost 100 years ago by J. Franklin Bobbitt in
his book, The Curriculum (1918), which is generally recognized to be the first
textbook focused specifically on “curriculum.” For Bobbitt, the curriculum was
“that series of things which children and youth must do and experience by way
of developing abilities to do the things well that make up the affairs of adult
life; and to be in all respects what adults should do” (p. 42; emphasis in original). This definition implies a broadening of the scope beyond what takes place
directly in school. At the same time, it specifically fosters the notion that the
curriculum should be primarily (or exclusively) about “abilities to do things.”
Enhanced understandings and deeply held appreciations, for example, are apparently not included. In addition, preparing for “the affairs of adult life” is primary, rather than, for example, what children are experiencing (or reflecting
about) currently in their lives or critically examining social conditions. This
definition also appears to assume that there is a consensus about the things that
all “children and youth must do and experience,” that is, what the most important “affairs of adult life” actually are and what specifically “adults should do.”
All aspects of a definition have serious repercussions not only for one’s view of
what is (should be) taught and evaluated in school but also with regard to what
researchers might emphasize in their own work in addressing the curriculum.
If one accepts Bobbitt’s definition, much time needs to be spent in determining
the specific “things” that children and youth must learn to do in school and how
they align with what adults presumably should do.
There are many other definitions of curriculum that could be considered. The
point is that the curriculum is an applied field of inquiry whose very definition
has been a “battleground” of sorts, with significant implications for the way one
determines school knowledge as well as approaches to teaching, learning, and
evaluation. The definition one adopts also sets parameters for the kind of research that is most meaningful, including the extent to which one attends to the
hidden curriculum (i.e., institutional norms and values not openly acknowledged

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by school officials that are in fact immersed in classrooms and schools) and the
null curriculum (i.e., subject matter and ways of learning that are not selected to
be a part of school life). It can even indicate whether or not the exclusive focus
of one’s attention should be on the classroom or school life in general, or, perhaps, broader institutional and discursive practices, structures, images, and experiences that go beyond the school setting. Different conceptions, while in the
background of debates, do lead to significant differences regarding curriculum
study, development, implementation, and assessment.
THE STRUGGLE OVER THE CURRICULUM
As Herbert Kliebard (2004) makes clear, the historical struggle over the curriculum, including its definition, has involved a variety of competing interest
groups. Their debates, sometimes quite heated in the scholarly writings and
popular journals of the field, have focused on a number of related, crucial issues,
for example the nature and effects of societal forces, the nature of learners and
learning, the nature of subject matter, and the purposes of schooling.
One of the fundamental questions of curriculum deliberation, though not
always explicitly articulated, involves the extent to which and how the curriculum should respond to social change. For example, throughout the past century various educators and others have expressed concerns about the lessening
influence of the family and the church. Should the school be expected to play
a more expansive role in children’s lives, such as regarding what is taught in
the classroom? Should the curriculum focus on aspects of daily life that other
institutions previously could be expected to address, for example involving personal character, physical health, and domestic affairs? Likewise, concerns about
economic and technical-scientific changes have convinced some educators that
the curriculum should place a high priority on preparing students for work (vocational skills), for utilizing the latest technologies, and for proficiency in mathematics and science. Others have been more concerned with what they perceive
to be a significant decrease in civic participation and have advocated a curriculum that places more emphasis on the active and critical engagement of social
issues and problems.
Another broad issue involves the extent to which children should be involved
in their own learning experiences, that is, in directly helping to plan them or
at least to have their personal interests and concerns providing guidance when
planned by others. Some educators have argued that active engagement with
activities and materials, so that children initiate and direct (construct) their own
understandings, is in fact necessary for authentic learning to take place. If so,
then the curriculum would need to be organized with the learners’ experiences
uppermost in mind. Standardized content and a top-down design approach
would be downplayed and flexibility, creativity, and direct student (and teacher)
involvement would be expected.
Issues involving the nature of subject matter for schools have also been intensely addressed during the last century. For example, some have argued strongly
for curriculum to follow the structures of the recognized and longstanding

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academic disciplines, building on the work done by recognized scholars over
several centuries. Thus, children might study the discipline of history and in
essence become “junior historians” at a young age. Others have argued that subject matter needs to be more broadly conceived and made more “relevant” to
learners; thus, it is argued, a field like social studies that focuses on citizenship
rather than the discipline of history would be more appropriate for a population
of students who are not necessarily college bound. And others have suggested
a more integrated approach to curriculum, with multidisciplinary content and
skills being brought to bear on projects or social problems that children are
studying and that may be of more personal interest to them.
Finally, the larger social purpose of schooling has always been a matter of
considerable dispute. What is the primary goal that schools should aspire to?
Is it extensive knowledge of the academic disciplines; critical understanding of
the social and natural worlds; advanced literacy skills; development of the full
range of intelligences; preparation for adult careers; advanced reasoning and
problem-solving abilities; active involvement in democratic citizenship; a passion for learning and self-understanding; or some other overall aim? Indeed, to
what extent should there even be predetermined goals toward which curriculum
decisions should be directed? Such fundamental questions can lead to very different perspectives on what the curriculum is, what it is for, and how it should be
determined.
There were at least four interest groups during the first half of the twentieth
century that competed for supremacy in the determination of the curriculum
(Kliebard, 2004). The first group, which held sway on curriculum matters during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the humanists, who could
be considered “the guardians of an ancient tradition tied to the power of reason
and the finest elements of Western cultural heritage” (p. 23). They sought to provide all children with a common curriculum that stressed mental discipline and
the powers of reasoning on the one hand and the classical traditions (including
religious) and academic (university-based) disciplines on the other. Reacting to
this approach were at least three groups of reformers who sought to change what
schools taught and how the curriculum was organized. The developmentalists
or child-centered progressives were educators who sought curriculum that was
more “in harmony with the child’s real interests, needs, and learning patterns”
(p. 24). Some adherents, such as William Heard Kilpatrick in 1918, believed that
children should not be taught directly but instead should engage in projects that
essentially linked their immediate experiences and interests with worthy living.
Academic content would be brought to bear when necessary for the fulfillment
of “purposeful acts.”
Another group consisted of social efficiency educators or scientific curriculum makers who were particularly concerned with “creating a coolly efficient,
smoothly running society,” which included “applying standardized techniques
of industry to the business of schooling” (Kliebard, p. 24). Like Franklin Bobbitt, they sought to ascertain, with expanded testing and counseling, the expected futures of children and then differentiate the curriculum so that children
would receive the kind of education that would best prepare (fit) them for their

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predicted life after school. In such a way, schools would be less wasteful and
the curriculum could more directly link to the presumed adult roles that future
citizens would occupy. Identifying precise objectives for each subject area, creating more school subjects to transmit the knowledge that was needed to live
and work in an increasingly industrialized and urbanized nation, and providing
different kinds of education for the different potential futures of students were
important aspects of this group’s agenda.
A fourth group of educators took a social meliorist or social reconstructionist approach to curriculum work, whereby they “saw the schools as a major,
perhaps the principal, force for [progressive] social change and social justice”
(Kliebard, p. 24). When in 1932 George Counts asked, “Dare the school build a
new social order?” it wasn’t a question of whether it could or not, but whether
it would strive to do so. Emphasizing the political character of the curriculum
choices that are made, the primary question for these educators was not whether
to advocate or not, but the nature and extent of one’s advocacy; not whether or
not to encourage a particular social vision in the classroom, but what kind of
social vision it would be. For these educators it was to be one dedicated to the
elimination of poverty, inequality, and prejudice.
While other important interest groups could be mentioned, especially for the
last half-century (for example, see Michael Apple’s book Educating the “Right”
Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality, for a discussion of the New Right
alliance consisting of neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populists, and
elements of the professional managerial class), the point being made here is that
groups of educators and others have long advocated for different approaches
to certain fundamental issues of schooling. Their different ideas, policies, and
practices relating to curriculum have in fact helped to shape the battleground
that is our schools today.
WHAT KNOWLEDGE IS OF MOST WORTH TO SCHOOLS?
Issues of planning and development have been arguably the least contentious
aspect of this applied field of study, but in fact here too differing approaches have
served as a source of conflict. The dominant approach that was made famous by
Ralph Tyler and others has been challenged by those seeking an approach to
curriculum design that is based less on linearity, specificity, and observable and
measurable performance than on reflective inquiry, flexibility, expressive outcomes, and democratic life.
Probably the most evident source of conflict in schools involves what should
be taught to which students at what time, involving issues of scope and sequence.
Here, the contentious nature of the debates appears more regularly in the popular
media as well as in the work of curriculum theorists and policymakers. This may
be of little surprise when one considers the fact that in the state of Florida, for example, 440 viable high school majors were recently approved for school adoption
(and, college-style, for students to choose from). Obviously no school can select
more than a handful to offer. Who will make these choices, using what criteria?
What will make up the actual sequence of courses in each major chosen? What

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will comprise the content of the courses offered? From animal caretaker, business
publishing, cabinetmaking, florist assistant, and eurhythmics to art and theatre,
social studies, English and journalism, mathematics, and biological sciences, the
options for what can be studied in school—the universe of knowledge that can be
viewed as legitimate for school adoption—is made more explicit here.
The conflicts that rage over the courses to be taught as well as the character of
the courses chosen can often be found in bold form in the headlines of local and
national newspapers and popular periodicals. What follows are 40 representative examples from the last several years that provide an indication of the wideranging debates over content selection that are currently taking place:
• As AP expands, studies disagree on its value
• Panel sounds alarm on science education
• Can less equal more? Proposal to teach math students fewer concepts in
greater depth has divided Maryland educators
• Yoga, hip-hop . . . This is P.E.? Updated programs are more active and varied, but new tests, finances, training, and traditions slow their adoption
• Rethinking recess: As more schools trim breaks, new research points to
value of unstructured playtime
• Law tells schools to teach students about on-line safety
• Computer science fighting for time
• Driver education hits dead end
• High schools teach more kids basics in Finance 101: 14 states require
money management to graduate
• Arabic, the new French? Pressure to compete globally and boost national
security is driving interest in less-common languages such as Chinese and
Arabic
• U.S. students need more math, not Mandarin
• Traditional social focus yielding to academics: Instead of a year to adjust to
puberty, 13-year olds now given algebra and other demanding coursework
• Giving voice to teen’s thoughts: Programs in Miami-Dade and Broward
counties give high-schoolers the opportunity to learn through poetry
slams and spoken word workshops
• Students set the rules at New York City high school
• High schoolers combine service learning projects with classroom learning
• As the evolution-creationism debate rages, Florida picks a new generation
of textbooks
• Intimidation alleged on “intelligent design”: Teacher cites school board
pressure
• Ohio board undoes stand on evolution
• Vocational education conflict heating up
• Vocational education: “It’s not your grandfather’s trade school”
• Educators divided over what to learn from 9/11
• Have we forgotten civic education? Two centuries after Jefferson, social
studies are lacking at public schools
• Philly schools to require African history class

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• Tennessee creates official curriculum for African American history: Many
schools offer the subject, but now classes will be uniform
• International studies a hard sell in U.S.
• Today’s textbooks labor to be careful with Clinton scandal
• Need to celebrate Constitution Day called into question
• How can we fix the world if we can’t read a map?
• Social Studies losing out to reading, math
• Teaching Thanksgiving from a different perspective
• Clauses and commas make a comeback: SAT helps return grammar to class
• Some teachers say tests stifling creativity: Drilling for exams replaces
hands-on learning activities
• Facing obstacles to sex education: Maryland schools reach to parents from
different cultures
• Sex-ed class becomes latest school battleground: Some parents and states
object to restrictions linked to federal abstinence funds
• Education Commission of the States wants to put arts back on states’ highpriority list
• Democrats in 2 southern states push bills on Bible study
• For teachers, much gray if curriculum adds gays
• Lawsuit in Massachusetts challenges use of gay-themed storybook
• School must teach back-to-basics “phonics”
• Teach the simple joys of reading
One can see from these and other examples that many of the issues discussed
earlier in this chapter are embedded in our more public debates, with reference
to the purpose of schooling, the nature of learners and learning, the nature of
subject matter, and the relationship of schools to social change, as well as issues
more directly involving, e.g., standardized testing, legislative and school board
activities, the decision-making process, scholarly research, and cultural differences. Indeed, the curriculum represents the essence of what schools do—that
is, what they teach, or, put more broadly, what experiences they provide for
students—and so it is hardly a surprise that this is where the conflicts sometimes
rage most intense. Headlines trumpet; politicians legislate; advocacy groups
lobby; parents inquire or insist; and teachers and their students are left to work
out the possibilities for teaching and learning in their classrooms.
As Fred Inglis (1985) suggests, at a basic level the curriculum is “another
name for the officially sanctioned and world-political picture which we produce,
circulate and reproduce in our society” (p. 63). It does not merely imply but
actually teaches particular versions of not only what is “good” in life and what
is not but also who is good and who is not. The curriculum represents a kind of
battleground in which contrasting messages of who we are and what we should
become, both individually and as a society, are played out. In effect, the curriculum comprises “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” (p. 31). What “stories,”
then, are we telling by the arguments that we have and the choices that we make?
Are they ones that emphasize democratic social relations, an expansive view of
intelligence, and critical understandings of the social and natural worlds, or do

Curriculum

they instead stress competitive individualism, “basic skills,” and preparation for
work? It is clear that these are truly stories that matter.
Further Reading: Bobbitt, F., 1918, The curriculum, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Eisner, E. W.,
2002, The education imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs, Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall; Inglis, F., 1985, The management of ignorance: A political
theory of the curriculum, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell; Jackson, P. L., ed., 1992, Handbook
of research on curriculum, New York: Macmillan; Kliebard, H., 2004, The struggle for the
American curriculum, 1893–1958, New York: RoutledgeFalmer; Marshall, J. D., Sears,
J. T., & Schubert, W. H., 2000, Turning points in curriculum: A contemporary American
memoir, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill; Ornstein, A. C., Pajak, E. F., & Ornstein, S. B.,
eds., 2007, Contemporary issues in curriculum, Boston: Pearson; Schubert, W. H., Lopez
Schubert, A. L., Thomas, T. P., & Carroll, W. M., 2002, Curriculum books: The first hundred years, New York: Peter Lang.

Kenneth Teitelbaum

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DESEGREGATION
For all too many, the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education in 2004
provided an opportunity to celebrate the decision as a victory for racial justice and
to presume that large-scale racial inequality was an artifact of the past, of little
concern to us today. Yet it is clear that segregated or near-segregated schools continue to exist, and that school resegregation has been on the rise since the 1980s.
Public school segregation has increased over the past two decades not
because we have learned that desegregation failed or because Americans have
turned against it. In fact, there is now more information about the benefits of integration than ever before, and public support for integrated education remains
high, particularly among those who have personal experience with desegregated
schools. Rather, resegregation has been primarily a result of the changing legal
and political landscape, which in recent years has severely limited what school
districts must—or may—do to promote racial integration in their schools.

WHY DESEGREGATION?
Why should we care about segregation? Public school segregation can
have a powerfully negative impact on students, an impact that prompted the
Supreme Court to declare segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954. One
of the common misconceptions about desegregation is that it is simply about
seating black students next to white students in a classroom. If skin color were
not systematically and inextricably linked to other forms of inequality, perhaps
segregation would have less educational or legal significance. But when we talk

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about schools that are segregated by race, we are also usually talking about
schools that are segregated along other dimensions as well, including poverty
and English language learner status.
Racial segregation is highly correlated with the concentration of student poverty, and the differences, by race/ethnicity, in students’ exposure to poverty are
striking. Nationally, about half of all black and Latino students attend schools in
which three-quarters or more students are poor, while only 5 percent of white
students attend such schools. No fewer than 80 percent of students in schools
of extreme poverty are black or Latino. As a result, minority students in these
segregated schools are isolated not only from white students, but from schools
with students from middle-class families, and exposure to students with middleclass backgrounds is a predictor of academic success. Further, Latino ELL students are even more isolated from whites than their native-speaking Latino
peers and, as a result, have little exposure to native English speakers who could
aid their acquisition of English.
Racially isolated minority schools are also often vastly unequal to schools with
higher percentages of white students in terms of other tangible resources, such
as qualified, experienced teachers and college preparatory curriculum, as well
as intangible resources, such as lower teacher turnover and more college-bound
peers—all of which are associated with higher educational outcomes. Social
science research, then, confirms that the central premise of Brown remains true:
Racially minority segregated schools offer students an inferior education, which
is likely to harm their future life opportunities, such as graduation from high
school and college. While a handful of successfully segregated minority schools
certainly exist across the nation, these schools represent the exception to the
general trend and are typically places with stable, committed leadership and faculty that are difficult to replicate on a large scale.
Desegregation has offered an opportunity to study how interracial schools can
affect the education of students. Research generally concludes that integrated
schools have important benefits for students who attend these schools and for
the society in which these students will one day be citizens and workers. While
early studies of the effects of desegregation focused on its impact on minority students, more recent research has revealed that white students, too, benefit
from racial integration. Of course, these benefits depend on how desegregation
is structured and implemented within diverse schools.
Over 50 years ago, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport suggested that one
of the essential conditions to reducing prejudice was that people needed to be in
contact with one another. Research in racially integrated schools confirms that,
by allowing for students of different races and ethnicities to be in contact with
one another, students can develop improved cross-racial understanding and
experience a reduction of racial prejudice and bias.
Additionally, black and Latino students in desegregated schools have higher
achievement than their peers in segregated schools, while the achievement of
white students in racially diverse but majority white schools remains unaffected.
Some evidence also suggests that diverse classrooms can improve the critical
thinking skills of all students.

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Benefits from such environments extend beyond the time spent in schools to
improved life opportunities. Students in integrated schools are also more likely
to graduate from high school and go on to college than their segregated peers,
meaning that integrated schools result in a more highly skilled workforce. These
students are also connected to social networks that give them information about
and access to competitive colleges and higher-status jobs. Perhaps because of
this access or the fact that students who attend integrated schools tend to be
more likely to attain graduate degrees, labor market studies show that African
Americans who attend integrated schools have higher salaries than their peers
from segregated schools. Finally, students who attend racially diverse schools
are more likely to be civically engaged after graduation and to feel comfortable
working in diverse settings.
There are important benefits for communities with racially diverse schools.
For example, students who graduate from integrated schools will have experience and be adept working with people of other racial/ethnic backgrounds,
an important skill for the demands of the workforce in our global economy.
Research also indicates that communities with extensive school desegregation
have experienced declines in residential integration. Further, desegregation
that encompasses most of a region can stem white flight. Communities with
integrated schools tend to experience higher levels of parental involvement in
and support for the schools.
It is no wonder, then, that over the years, many school districts have come
to realize the value of racial and ethnic diversity and its important influence on
educating our future citizens. A number of these school districts, as a result,
have voluntarily enacted policies and student assignment methods designed
to promote racial integration in their schools. In other words, more and more
school districts are trying to create diverse learning environments not out of
legal obligation, but on their own accord, as an essential part of their core educational mission. They do so in recognition of the critical role schools play in
fostering racial and ethnic harmony in our increasingly heterogeneous society,
and of the significance of an integrated school experience in shaping students’
worldviews. Yet even these efforts may be imperiled.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL DESEGREGATION LAW
Most scholars and laypersons alike consider Brown v. Board of Education
the most famous U.S. Supreme Court ruling in American history. That landmark 1954 decision was the culmination of decades of civil rights litigation and
strategizing to overturn the deeply entrenched doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896) of “separate but equal,” which had applied to 17 southern states where
segregated schools were required. Brown held for the first time that racially segregated public schools violate the Equal Protection guarantees of the Fourteenth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Although an enormous moral victory for civil rights advocates—indeed for
the entire nation—Brown itself did not require the immediate elimination of
segregation in our nation’s public schools. In fact, one year later, in a follow-up

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decision popularly known as Brown II, the Supreme Court allowed racially
segregated school systems to move forward in dismantling their segregative
practices “with all deliberate speed”—an infamous phrase that, for many years,
meant without any speed or urgency at all. What’s more, Brown II placed the
duty to supervise school desegregation squarely on local federal district courts
and then provided these courts little guidance.
Thus, despite the efforts of countless black communities across the nation
demanding immediate relief in the wake of the Brown decision—often at the
risk of grave danger and violence, and mostly in the segregated South, where
resistance was greatest—a full decade passed with virtually no progress in desegregating schools. By 1963, when President John F. Kennedy asked Congress
to pass legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in all programs receiving
federal aid (including schools), well over 98 percent of Southern black students
were still attending segregated schools.
A social and cultural revolution was sweeping the country during the civil
rights era, however, and by the mid-1960s and early 1970s, school desegregation too began to take hold. Congress enacted Kennedy’s proposed legislation
as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which empowered the Department of Justice
to initiate desegregation lawsuits independent of private plaintiffs. The act also
authorized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to deny federal
funds to segregating school districts. With these new governmental tools and
allies, civil rights attorneys used the power of America’s courts and television
sets against recalcitrant school districts that refused to comply with the law.
During these critical years, the Supreme Court, also frustrated by the lack
of progress in school desegregation, issued a number of important decisions
that lent valuable support and legitimacy to the cause. For instance, in Green v.
County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Court expressly defined
what desegregation required: the elimination of all traces of a school system’s
prior segregation in every facet of school operations—from student, faculty, and
staff assignment to extracurricular activities, facilities, and transportation.
Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) that lower courts supervising the
desegregation of individual school districts could order the use of transportation, or busing, to achieve desegregated student assignments. In so doing, it
rejected the argument that formerly dual school systems had discharged their
desegregation duties by assigning students to segregated schools that happened
to correspond with segregated neighborhoods.
Shortly thereafter, the Supreme Court decided Keyes v. School District No. 1
(1973), a case originating in Denver, Colorado, that extended school desegregation obligations to systems outside the South that had employed discriminatory policies. The Keyes case was also the first to order desegregation for Latino
students. Federal district courts took guidance from these and other Supreme
Court decisions as they ordered desegregation plans unique to the communities for which they were responsible. In response to these decisions, the federal
judiciary began more actively issuing detailed desegregation orders and then

Desegregation

monitoring the school districts’ progress, or lack thereof, on a regular basis.
Segregation was on the run.
JUDICIAL RETRENCHMENT
By the mid-1970s, significant changes in the Supreme Court’s composition
rendered its reputation as a champion of civil rights relatively short-lived. In
perhaps the most significant case from this latter era, Milliken v. Bradley (1974),
the Court dealt a serious blow to school desegregation by concluding that lower
courts could not order “inter-district” desegregation remedies that encompass
urban as well as suburban school districts without first showing that the suburban
district or the state was liable for the segregation across district boundaries. The
practical impact of the decision was the establishment of a bright line between
city and suburban school systems beyond which the courts could not traverse
in designing their desegregation plans: Whites who for decades had tried to flee
school desegregation finally had a place to go where they could avoid it.
Just one year prior to Milliken, the Supreme Court had decided a case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), that seriously undermined
a parallel strategy of the educational equity movement. There, the Court refused
to strike down a public school financing scheme that resulted in significantly
lower expenditures for poor and minority children who lived in school districts
with lower tax property bases in comparison to their more affluent, white neighbors who lived in the neighboring district. In so doing, the Court foreclosed an
important argument that civil rights lawyers had tried to advance in both school
funding and segregation cases: that public education was a “fundamental right”
under the Constitution, which must be available on an equal basis. With this
legal avenue shut down by Rodriguez, and with inter-district remedies effectively
eliminated by Milliken, the Supreme Court’s brief, forward charge on school desegregation law had officially come to a screeching halt.
Soon the executive branch of government, which had been fairly aggressive in
litigation and enforcement of school desegregation cases, followed the increasingly more conservative federal courts. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration
adopted a new philosophy that focused on school choice—rather than on the
firm insistence of compliance with court orders requiring mandatory student
assignments—to accomplish school desegregation. As a result, scores of school
districts abandoned busing as a remedy and began more actively employing
strategies and tools such as “magnet schools” and “controlled-choice plans” as
the primary means of advancing desegregation. In general, the government’s
focus during this era turned away from educational equity and toward other issues, namely, an emphasis on standards-based accountability to improve student
achievement.
The 1990s ushered in another phase of judicial retreat from school desegregation. Between 1991 and 1995, the Supreme Court handed down three important
decisions: Oklahoma City Board of Education v. Dowell (1991), Freeman v. Pitts
(1992), and Missouri v. Jenkins (1995). Taken together, these cases essentially

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invited school districts to initiate proceedings to bring their desegregation obligations to an end. They permitted federal district courts overseeing desegregation plans to declare a school system “unitary” if they determined that the system
had done all that was feasible to eliminate the effects of past racial discrimination. In contrast to earlier decisions, now, according to the Supreme Court, a
good faith effort to desegregate along with reasonable compliance with prior
desegregation orders for a decent period of time were considered sufficient for
a school district to achieve unitary status and thus have its desegregation orders
permanently dissolved—even if severe racial isolation or other racial disparities
remained. Advocates of school desegregation view these changes as a significant dilution of the desegregation obligations the Supreme Court had placed on
school districts in the previous decades.
In the years since that trilogy of cases was decided, a large number of school
systems have been declared unitary. In some instances, the school district itself
sought to end federal court supervision, arguing it had met its constitutional obligations. In others, parents opposed to desegregation led the attack to relieve the
school district of any continuing legal duties to desegregate, leaving the district in
the awkward position of having to defend the kinds of policies that it had, ironically, resisted implementing in prior decades. Recently, in fact, a handful of federal
courts have declared districts unitary even when the school district itself argued
that its desegregation policies were still necessary to remedy past discrimination.
Once a school district has been declared unitary, it is no longer under a legal
duty to continue any of the desegregation efforts that it had undertaken in the
decades when it was under court order. The school district remains, of course,
under a broad constitutional obligation—as do all districts—to avoid taking actions that intentionally create racially segregated and unequal schools. However,
courts presume that the school district’s actions are innocent and legal, even if
they produce racially disparate results, unless there is evidence of intentional
discrimination. The past history of segregation and desegregation is completely
wiped away in the eyes of the law. These fully discretionary, “innocent and legal”
policies in many instances have contributed to a disturbing phenomenon of
racial resegregation in our public schools, which are more racially separate now
than at any point in the past two decades.
TRENDS IN DESEGREGATION AND RESEGREGATION
As a result of the courts’ guidance, there were dramatic gains in desegregation for black students in the South, a region with the most black students
and the most integrated region of the country by the late 1960s due to courtordered desegregation and federal enforcement of desegregation plans. Desegregation of black students remained stable for several decades; by 1988,
43.5 percent of southern black students were in majority white schools. During
the 1990s, however, the proportion of black students in majority white schools
in the region steadily declined as desegregation plans were dismantled. In 2003,
only 29 percent of southern black students were in majority white schools, lower
than any year since 1968.

Desegregation

When there was a concerted effort to desegregate black and white students in
the South during the mid- to late-1960s, there was major progress, demonstrating that desegregation can and has succeeded. We are experiencing a period of
steady decline in desegregation since the late 1980s and much of the success
that led to several decades of desegregated schooling for millions of students in
the South is being undone. Nevertheless, black and white students in the South
attend schools that are considerably more integrated than before the time of
Brown.
The judicial changes discussed above have had a major impact on the desegregation of schools at a time of racial transformation of the nation’s public
school enrollment. Since the end of the civil rights era, the racial composition of
our nation’s public school students has changed dramatically. The United States
was once overwhelmingly white, but that is no longer the case. Minority students are now more than 40 percent of all U.S. public school students, nearly
twice their share of students during the 1960s.
Not only are there more minority students than ever before, but the minority population is also more diverse than it was during the civil rights era, when
most nonwhite students were black. Black and Latino students are now more
than a third of all students in public schools. The most rapidly growing racial/
ethnic group is Latinos, who have almost quadrupled in size from 1968 to 2000
to 7.7 million students. Asian enrollment, like that of Latinos, is also increasing. Meanwhile, by 2003, whites comprised only 58 percent of the public school
enrollment. There were seven million fewer white public school students at the
beginning of the twenty-first century than there were at the end of the 1960s. As
a result of this growing diversity, nearly nine million students in 2003 attended
schools with at least three racial groups of students.
U.S. public schools are more than two decades into a period of rapid resegregation. The desegregation of black students has now declined to levels not seen in
three decades. Latinos, by contrast, have never experienced a time of increased
integration and today are the most segregated minority group in our schools.
Remarkably, almost 2.4 million students attend schools that are 99–100 percent minority, including almost one in six of black students and one in nine
Latino students. Nearly 40 percent of both black and Latino students attend intensely segregated schools (90–100 percent of students are nonwhite); yet less
than 1 percent of white students attend such schools. Nearly three-fourths of
black and Latino students attend predominantly minority schools.
Whites are the most racially isolated group of students in the United States. In
a perfectly integrated system of schools, the racial composition of every school
would mirror that of the overall U.S. enrollment. The typical white public school
student, however, attends a school that is nearly 80 percent white, which is much
higher than the white percentage of the overall public school enrollment (58 percent). This means that white students, on average, attend schools in which only
one in five students are of another race, which, conversely, reduces the opportunities for students of other races to be in schools with white students. Schools
with high percentages of white students are also likely to have overwhelmingly
white faculties, meaning that such schools have few people of color.

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Black and Latino students are also extremely isolated from students of
other races, and they are particularly isolated from whites. Blacks and Latinos
attend schools where two-thirds of students are also black and Latino, and
over half of the students in their schools are students of their same race. Despite earlier progress in desegregation, the percentage of white students that
attend schools with black students, another measure of school desegregation,
has been declining since 1988. Asians are the most desegregated of all students; three-fourths of students in their schools are from other racial/ethnic
groups, and only a small percentage of Asian students are in segregated minority schools.
The resegregation of blacks and Latinos is a trend seen in almost every large
school district since the mid-1980s. One reason is that the public school districts
in many of our nation’s largest cities, which educate one-tenth of all public school
students in the 26 largest districts, contain few white students—without which
even the best designed desegregation plans cannot create substantial desegregation. While the largest urban districts (enrollment greater than 60,000) enroll
over one-fifth of all black and Latino students, less than 1 in 40 white students
attend these central city schools.
Minority students in suburban districts generally attend schools with more
white students than their counterparts in central city districts, although there
is substantial variation within the largest suburban districts. In over half of
the suburban districts with more than 60,000 students, the typical black and
Latino student attends schools that, on average, have a white majority. However,
black and Latino students in these districts are more segregated from whites
than in the mid-1980s. In some large suburban districts there has been drastic
racial change in a short time span, and these districts are now predominantly
minority like the urban districts discussed above. Countywide districts, or districts that encompass both city and suburban areas of a metro, have often been
able to create stable desegregation. In rural districts there is generally less segregation since there are fewer schools for students to enroll in, although in some
rural areas private schools disproportionately enroll white students while public
schools remain overwhelmingly minority.
CURRENT STATUS OF THE LAW
In more recent years, a number of school districts that have been released
from their formal, constitutional desegregation obligations—as well as some
that had never been any legal duty to desegregate in the first place—have
adopted voluntary measures to promote integration in their schools. These socalled “voluntary school integration” measures, in other words, are designed not
by courts to be imposed on school districts, with the goal of curing historical,
illegal segregation, but rather by the districts themselves, often with the support
of and input from parents, students, and others in the community. They are future-oriented and intended to assist the school districts realize Brown’s promise
and vision of equal opportunity and high-quality integrated public education
for all.

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Odd as it may seem, however, it may turn out that a unitary school district’s
voluntary consideration of race for the laudable goal of stemming resegregation
and promoting integration is illegal. Despite the success and popularity of welldesigned voluntary school integration plans, opponents of desegregation in a
handful of communities have sued their school systems for adopting them, alleging that such efforts violate the same Constitution’s Equal Protection guarantees
that outlawed segregated schools 50 years ago in Brown. Indeed, in June 2007, the
U.S. Supreme Court issued a much anticipated and sharply divided ruling in two
cases challenging voluntary integration plans in Seattle and Louisville. The court
struck down aspects of the student assignment plans because they were not sufficiently tailored to achieve those goals. But a majority of Justice’s left the window
open for school districts to take race conscious measures to promote diversity.
Even though it dramatically changed the landscape of school integration, this
Supreme Court decision did not provide a clear set of rules and principles for
school districts, creating some confusion about what can be done to promote
integration. How communities and school districts will react to the ruling, and
whether they choose to forge ahead with new ways to fulfill Brown’s promise of
equal, integrated public education remain open questions.
Further Reading: Boger, J. C., & Orfield, G., eds., 2005, School resegregation: Must the
South turn back? Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Frankenberg, E., &
Orfield, G., eds., 2007, Lessons in integration: Realizing the promise of racial diversity
in America’s schools, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press; Kluger, R., 2004,
Simple justice: The history of Brown v. Board of Education and black America’s struggle
for equality, 2nd. ed., New York: Knopf; NAACP Legal Defense Fund, June 28, 2007,
Statement from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on the Supreme Court’s Rulings in Seattle and Louisville School Cases, retrieved October 15, 2007 from http: //www.naacp/
df.org/content.aspx?article=1181 Orfield, G., & Lee, C., 2006, Racial transformation
and the changing nature of segregation, Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project at
Harvard University.

Erica Frankenberg and Chinh Q. Le
DISCIPLINE
Year after year, results of Phi Delta Kappan surveys show school discipline
to be rated by educators and the larger community as one of the most important educational issues. Teachers consistently rate student discipline issues as a
major impetus for leaving the profession and as a source of stress. Along with
its important place as an educational issue, school discipline is one of the most
controversial and hotly debated school issues of our time. Key stakeholders
(parents, students, community members, educators) have personal views of
school discipline that are tied to one’s belief and value system, sociocultural
background, and the larger societal context in which schools operate. Other
factors that greatly impact school discipline include local, state, and federal
legislation that require procedural safeguards, the dominant political structure at any given time, and media depictions of school events related to discipline and student behavior.

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The word discipline is literally taken from the Latin root word “disciplus,”
meaning “to teach.” Over time, school discipline has been equated with “punishment” or retribution for an unacceptable act. In exploring the historical
context that has led to modern-day debates about discipline, some of the most
controversial school discipline topics emerge, such as suspension and expulsion, zero tolerance policies, corporal punishment in schools, possible ethnic
biases in exclusionary discipline methods and more recent work and federal legislation focused on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) as a
prevention-oriented approach to school discipline.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SCHOOL DISCIPLINE
School discipline and related policies have been found in schools for at least a
century. Schools increasingly viewed discipline as a means of teaching obedience
and compliance when industrialization occurred in the United States. Schools
were viewed as institutions important in training a primarily immigrant population in the behaviors of timeliness and deference to authority. Standards for order
and control of students through discipline were also viewed as important with
the advent of mandatory schooling. School discipline was an avenue for containment and control of students who perhaps were not necessarily considered part
of the mainstream society and would now be mandated to attend school.
It is within this context that written standards for behavior were developed,
termed discipline codes of conduct. Standard written discipline policies were
enacted that outlined behavioral infractions and consequences for noncompliance. These written standards for behavior have been found in schools since at
least 1916.
In the years following, public opinion of schools as failing to control students
who were viewed as increasingly violent prompted legislation and additional
scrutiny of school discipline methods. For example, in 1978 Senator Evan Bayh
chaired a subcommittee to study school violence based on public concern about
student behavior and the ability of schools to maintain order. As a result, legislation based on the Safe School Report to Congress was written to commission a
study about the amount and type of violence in schools. In 1978, the National
Institute of Education conducted this study and had three main conclusions:
(1) school violence had actually decreased in comparison to previous decades,
the 1970s and 1960s, (2) despite this data, the media and larger community continued to perceive school violence as a problem, necessitating the action of school
personnel to address student behavior through school discipline, and (3) school
rules were more difficult to enforce when they were arbitrary and enforced by
those who were considered excessively punitive. A major recommendation of
this national study was the development of uniform codes for behavior for all
of the nation’s schools, with the intended outcome of making rules clear and
consistent on a preset basis.
In roughly the same time period, the Goss v. Lopez case (1977) had direct
implications for the ways in which school discipline was addressed. In this
federal case, it was determined that suspensions could not be determined by

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a single administrator and that due process rights were to be provided for any
student removed because of discipline. These findings were in keeping with the
focus at that time to document fairness in school discipline. However, the court
case was very controversial with school personnel, many of whom felt the legislation limited their ability to satisfy the larger societal priority of maintaining
order and control in the classroom.
In 1980, the National School Resource Network (NSRN) developed a handbook providing recommendations for schools to follow when writing behavioral
guidelines in discipline policies. Specific language that schools could use to balance the rights of the individual student with the rights of the larger community
was provided.
RELEVANT LEGISLATION
The course of school discipline at the time of the NSRN report and the two
decades following it (the 1980s and 1990s) was greatly affected by legislation,
particularly federal legislation drawn to protect the rights of individuals with diagnosed disabilities. Indeed, a related reason for having written discipline codes
of conduct was the opportunity for schools to show compliance with more substantive discipline legislation. For example, the pioneering federal education
legislation in 1975, Public Law 94–142, mandated that all students with disabilities were to receive a free and appropriate education among other due process
provisions. Particular to discipline, these individuals were required to receive
specific due process rights when suspension (or removal from the school due to
discipline) was considered.
The federal courts intervened to more clearly define these requirements pertaining to discipline. For example, Hoenig v. Doe (1987) specified the number of
days of suspension that were considered a change of placement from the school.
This legislation led to federal language related to discipline in more recent versions of Public Law 94–142, particularly the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (1997) and more recently, the Individuals with Education Improvement
Act (signed into law by President Bush in December of 2004). This more recent
federal legislation requires school districts to conduct a “manifest determination
hearing” if the student has reached the maximum allowed 10 days of suspension.
The purpose of the hearing is to determine whether the behavior of a student in
special education is related to his disability. If it is related to the student’s disability, the school cannot discipline the student like others. Further, if the individual
education plan (the school’s specific educational goals for the student) is not
appropriate, the school may not further suspend the student. Certain exclusions
exist, such as when a student brings weapons or drugs to the school or, in the
most recent legislation, is involved in serious bodily injury (although the courts
have not yet clearly defined this meaning).
This legislation may also apply to students who are not in special education,
but about whom the school is aware of behavioral concerns that are impacting learning. Significant controversy has centered on this legislation. Some have
continued to argue that they are increasingly limited from maintaining order

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and that the law has gone too far in protecting the rights of individual students
and hindering the rights of the school as a whole. Some have argued that due
process rights give unruly students better protection and create more chaos and
disorder in the educational process. Disability rights advocates, on the other
hand, have pushed for increased due process rights for students with disabilities
and have pointed to evidence that those caught in the web of suspension and
expulsion are among the most powerless and disenfranchised members of the
school community.
SUSPENSION, EXPULSION, AND ZERO TOLERANCE POLICIES
Arguably, among the most controversial issues in the school discipline arena
are procedures that, in some form or another, remove students from the school
setting for varying lengths of time. Suspension involves removal of a student
from school for a set number of days following the violation of a school-defined
offense. A student who receives in-school suspension is removed from the classroom but stays in the school building and may or may not be allowed to do
academic work, depending on the school policy. Expulsion, on the other hand,
is associated with long-term removal of a student, typically a period of one year
or more. Zero tolerance procedures are an outgrowth of expulsion that became
widespread in the 1990s. Under zero tolerance, certain offenses would not “be
tolerated” under any circumstances and students would automatically be removed from the school if they engaged in such behaviors. Each of these related
concepts will be considered separately, culminating with a discussion of implications of these procedures for ongoing educational policy debates.
Suspension is the most widely used discipline procedure in policy and practice. Empirical documentation of reliance on suspension dates to the early 1970s.
School personnel have relied on and, in some cases, supported their use of
suspension because of their perceived need to maintain order and to curb school
violence. Alternatively, researchers and policymakers have argued that suspension tends to be used for nonviolent offenses and actually is associated with less
safe schools. That suspension tends to be used repeatedly with the same students
is an additional argument that it does not work. While suspension is intended to
be uniformly applied based on the written discipline policies and due process procedures described above, several researchers have pointed to factors that increase
the likelihood of suspension. Student academic problems, not the offense itself,
were the biggest factors that predicted those who would be suspended.
Still others have questioned whether suspension is applied fairly (as well
as expulsion and related zero tolerance procedures) with ethnic minority students, particularly African American males. That suspension and expulsion are
disproportionately applied to ethnic minority students has been documented
over the past 40 years. These results are also corroborated in other countries
for students who are perceived to be ethnic minority students in the particular
societal culture. In The Color of Discipline, authors Skiba, Michael, Nardo, and
Peterson reviewed studies of ethnic disproportionate representation in discipline
from 1975 to 2000. Every study included in their review showed that ethnic

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minority students, in particular African American males, were overrepresented
in the exclusionary discipline consequences of suspension and expulsion. There
have been several explanations for this phenomenon. Advocates for the use of
suspension and expulsion have argued that these long-standing practices do not
imply bias, as other factors besides ethnicity are plausible explanations. In the
same publication, Skiba and colleagues analyzed data collected in the Midwest
to rule out the most common explanations. Their findings were that ethnic disproportionality remains when factors confounded with race, such as socioeconomic status, the severity of the offense, and the statistical procedures used to
analyze the data were controlled for.
In recent years, others have further explored the issue of equity in school discipline. In 2003, a joint research conference co-sponsored by the Civil Rights
Project and Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice (IRJ) was
held to explore possible links between the removal of students of color through
suspension and expulsion, and dropping out of school and their entry into the
juvenile justice system. Prison data parallels school drop out data in terms of who
is represented. In addition, the removal of students due to suspension is associated with dropping out of school, which is also related to ending up in prison.
Much of the related debate around the issue of zero tolerance policies centers
on issues of equity and justness. Zero tolerance policies have their origins in
the Gun Free Schools Act of 1995, which stated that school must automatically
expel students for at least one calendar year for drug or weapons offenses. Zero
tolerance policies have their origins in the amount of drugs that were permitted
on vessels. This concept was then directly applied to school discipline offenses.
As with other discipline policies that have occurred across the century, zero
tolerance policies arose amidst a public perception that schools are not in control
of student behavior. For example, in the early to mid-1990s, highly publicized
school shootings led to media attention about the nature of schools and reported
violence in them. The alternative side to this argument was that school violence
overall at this time was actually decreasing instead of increasing, according to the
Surgeon General’s Report on School Violence of 2001. Indeed, schools have remained the safest places for children to be, much safer than a child’s own home.
Much of the debate about zero tolerance was fueled by factors outside of
schools, such as public perceptions of school safety, the political climate at the
time, and media portrayals of schools. As a result, there were numerous conflicting opinions about the topic. Many policy analysts have come out against the
use of zero tolerance policies, citing possible ethnic biases as one of the reasons.
Likely one of the most cited works to date about zero tolerance is the written proceedings from a conference sponsored by the Harvard University Advancement
and Civil Rights Project. Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating Consequences
of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies chronicled the overuse of zero
tolerance policies with the most disenfranchised in schools, primarily ethnic minority students and those in poverty. The findings of the report were that minority
students, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, were overrepresented in
zero tolerance procedures and not as a result of committing more severe offenses.
In addition, the application of zero tolerance was done in an overzealous manner

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and without consideration for the offense. For example, a young elementary student was expelled for bringing a butter knife to school for lunch. The media frequently publicized these incidents. Zero tolerance procedures were criticized for
failing to achieve the intended outcome of making schools safer. At the same
time, others counter these findings and cite their need to comply with this federal
legislation and necessary for the functioning of schools.
In sum, zero tolerance procedures have been controversial. They are legislated procedures for schools to follow, receive extensive media publicity, and
have arisen at a time when schools are perceived once again as lacking control,
as was the case in the 1970s prior to the Safe Schools Study. As a result, they are
among the most debated topics in school discipline and are core to our personal
values and belief system about the rights of individual students and the rights of
schools to remove students from the educational process due to behavior.
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
Corporal punishment has been used in schools for centuries. Typically, the
practice involves physical pain inflicted on a student for a school offense. There
remains a great divide on this issue among parents and educators. While popular lore may consider this issue something of the past, corporal punishment is
banned in only 27 states in America. The most recent data available (Office of
Civil Rights in 2002) indicates that 70 percent of instances of corporal punishment occurred in five southern states.
A number of influential professional associations, such as the American
Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Schools Psychologists, the American Psychological Association,
and the American Psychiatric Association, have strongly opposed corporal
punishment in schools and have advocated for its elimination. The National
Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools and the National Center
for the Study of Corporal Punishment and Alternatives have been instrumental
in enacting legislation to ban corporal punishment in schools. The negative impact on the self-esteem of students and the chance of significant physical injury
(as has been cited in numerous court cases) are arguments made by these groups
for the elimination of this practice. In addition, opponents of corporal punishment cite the likelihood of the perpetuation of abuse as an additional reason
for abandoning this practice. Continued findings that this form of punishment
is more likely to be used with African American students, boys, and those who
are poor is seen as further evidence that corporal punishment has no place in
schools. It is further argued that schools with corporal punishment have lower
achievement and higher rates of vandalism. Similar to the disproportionate
representation of ethnic minorities in suspension data, these findings are not
a result of these individuals committing more severe offenses. Views of corporal punishment, however, remain less tied to outcome data than one’s personal
background, own child-rearing practices and treatment as a child, sociocultural
background, and religious allegiance. Therefore, while the debate continues,
and more and more legislation is enacted on a district, state, and national level,

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proponents of this practice will remain likely and unchanged in the face of the
increasing empirical data that is counter to its use.
ALTERNATIVES TO SUSPENSION, EXPULSION,
AND PUNITIVE PROCEDURES
A significant part of the debate has been the tension between the use of punitive and exclusionary discipline procedures, such as suspension, expulsion, zero
tolerance, and corporal punishment, and those who have argued that these responses do not work. In particular, researchers, policymakers, and the larger
community have suggested that punitive practices associated with discipline
promulgate biases that unfairly impact ethnic minority students and put those
with academic problems at further risk for failure. Many who feel that suspension and expulsion do not work have had limited alternatives at their disposal
until relatively recent changes in the use of prevention-oriented approaches to
discipline. Most recently, special education legislation (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004) has called for the consideration of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) with those whose behavior impacts
their own learning or that of others. PBIS is an approach to school discipline that
is based on the prevention of behavioral problems through the direct teaching
of expected behaviors on a school-wide basis. Students who continue to need
additional support are then provided support on a group and individual basis.
George Sugai and Robert Horner are pioneering researchers who have developed and evaluated this model. Their work has shown that discipline referrals
for behavioral infractions can be greatly reduced through the direct teaching
and acknowledgment of expected behaviors. In addition, they have reported improvements in school climate. In contrast, they argue that the use of punishment
in isolation is actually associated with increases in undesirable behaviors, drawing on the previous work of other researchers.
PBIS is increasingly being evaluated in thousands of schools across the country, with the greatest amount of empirical study concentrated in elementary and
middle schools to date, with emerging study in high schools. The premise of
this model is that discipline is equated with its original word “disciplus” (or “to
teach”). The tension between philosophies of discipline and the role of schools
in teaching behaviors remain. According to prevention-oriented models such
as PBIS, schools need to teach behaviors in order to increase instructional minutes associated with achievement. On the other hand, others argue that the role
of school is strictly academic and that the teaching of behavioral or social skills is
not the domain of schools Again, legislation has a strong hand in directing these
issues. For example, in Illinois, public schools are now required to teach socialemotional learning standards because of the Illinois Mental Health Act of 2004.
CONCLUSION
School discipline has been a center of controversy since the inception of
formal schooling. It remains one of the most salient issues in education and one

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that is tied to our sociocultural backgrounds and personal values and beliefs.
A primary debate has been the limits by which school personnel can deliver
consequence by using punitive procedures such as suspension, expulsion, and
corporal punishment. The impact of school discipline on those who are most
disenfranchised (e.g. ethnic minority students, those with academic problems)
has been center stage throughout our struggle with this issue.
The role of discipline in schools has been greatly affected by factors outside
of it, such as legislation, the political climate, and the media. History in school
discipline has a way of repeating itself. In times when schools are perceived as
lacking control or in chaos (whether the data supports this or not), educators
have been more influenced by these external factors and have been greatly encouraged to regain order and control. Often the means have been an increased
use of punishment as a major component of school discipline procedures. While
this is counter to the original intentions of discipline policies advocated strongly
in the late 1970s as a means of clearly describing behaviors on a preventionbasis, exclusionary discipline (through suspension and expulsion) remains the
most widely used in schools.
Recent system-wide reforms, such as PBIS, have gained momentum in recent
years in redefining the meaning of discipline and aligning it with the original root
word, “disciplus” or “to teach.” Periodic waves of community concerns about discipline appear to have followed a cyclical pattern. Examining our history in school
discipline will help us to chart a future path that, hopefully, will be beneficial to the
education and development of our youth. As one of the most controversial topics
in education that is given top billing in education, it will be interesting to see what
the next decade in school discipline inquiry and debate will bring upon us.
Further Reading: Harvard University, the Advancement Project and the Civil Rights
Project, 2000, Opportunities suspended: The devastating consequences of zero tolerance
and school discipline policies, retrieved October 9, 2002, from http://www.law.harvard.
edu/groups/civilrights/conferences/zero/zt_report2html; Noguera, P. A., 1995, Preventing and producing violence: A critical analysis of responses to school violence, Harvard
Educational Review 65(2): 189–212; Skiba, R. J., Michael, R. S., Nardo, A. C., & Peterson, R., 2000, The color of discipline: Sources of racial and gender disproportionality in
school punishment, retrieved August 20, 2006, from http://www.indiana.edu/~safeschl/
cod.pdf/minor.html; Skiba, R., & Rausch, M. K., 2006, Zero tolerance, suspension, and
expulsion: Questions of equity and effectiveness, in C. M. Evertson and C. S. Weinstein
(Eds.), Handbook of classroom management: Research, practice, and contemporary
issues (pp. 1063–1092), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Wald, J., & Losen,
D. J., eds., 2003, New directions for youth development: Deconstructing the schoolto-prison pipeline, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pamela A. Fenning, Sara Golomb, and Taylor Morello

DROPOUTS
Colloquially, the term “school dropout” refers to a young person who has not
completed high school. Linguistically the choice of the word “dropout” places

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the responsibility and onus of leaving school solely on the individual. It deludes
the pathways by which students ultimately “choose” to leave school, and the
structures that lead to dropout remain blameless. School dropout reflects not on
the structures of the school the youth attended, on their schooling experiences,
nor on their worlds and realities outside of school.
School dropout is a term that refers to a young person who does not graduate from school with a traditional diploma. These youth either leave school, by
choice or by force, or are pushed out due to “rationalized policies and practices
of exclusion that organize” public high schools (Fine, 1991, p. 6). In any event,
the ultimate result is the same: a young person does not finish high school.
Historic educational policies and practices mask the phenomenon of school
dropout such that it rears itself as an outlier: a rare dysfunction of an individual
failing within a system, and, like all social outcomes resulting from structural
preclusion, it carries a detrimental “blame the victim” ideology. In the context
of education, this ideology presents young people who drop out as failing to
measure up to academic standards, and their subsequent bleak social status and
life outcomes as a natural consequence of education’s ethos of equal opportunity
for all.
Given that the graduation rate crisis disproportionately plagues students of
color and low-income and special education students; recent immigrants; lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender/sexual, and queer/questioning youth; students with
disabilities; homeless youth; youth caught in Foster care; and youth caught in the
criminal and juvenile justice systems, school dropout has a disparate impact, affecting youth who are already lacking in resources, opportunities, and voice.
A miseducation, however we name its end results, has substantial costs. For
each youth and community disenfranchised by their school system, there are
staggering economic and social impacts, heavy consequences for criminal justice, costs to civic and political participation, and grave implications for health.
Dropouts are more likely to receive public assistance, be unemployed, live in
poverty, end up in prison and on death row, die earlier, and suffer from a wide
range of chronic and acute diseases and health problems. On average, dropouts
earn $9,200 less per year that high school graduates and $1 million less over
their lifetime than do college graduates. Beyond dropping out, children forced
out of the school system are more likely to engage in conduct harmful to the
safety of themselves, their families, and communities.
THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE OF GRADUATION
Nationally, 68 percent of all students graduate from high school over the traditional four-year period; yet ethnic disparities in these graduation rates are
striking. While 76.8 and 74.9 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and whites, respectively, graduate from high school, American Indians, Blacks, and Latinos
all have graduation rates that hover right around the 50 percent margin. In
some cases, Asian refugees, particularly Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese and
Hmong, and Pacific Islander students graduate at rates similarly as bleak. Immigration and socioeconomic status are important contextual variables in the

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success of immigrant students. On average, males graduate at a rate 8 percent
lower than their female counterparts, and graduation rates for youth attending
high-poverty, racially segregated, urban schools fall between 15 and 18 percent
behind their peers.
The data is just as dissimilar for the special needs population, where only 32
percent of classified “students with disabilities” graduate from high school. Lowincome children and children of color are overrepresented in special education
(including being labeled as having emotional or behavior problems), school disciplinary actions, and in the juvenile and criminal justice systems—all of which
correlate to school dropout. Compounding these statistics is the fact that children
from low-income families are twice as likely to drop out of school as children
from middle-income families and are six times more likely than children from
high-income households. Ninth grade is thought to be the most critical year in influencing school dropout. A silenced history exemplifies this trend: Between 1970
and 2000, the rate at which students disappeared from school between 9th and
10th grade tripled. And we don’t even look at the leakage from 8th to 9th grade.
Data this staggering has inherent antecedents, leaving the current graduation
rate crisis to illuminate a historical genesis of an institution that systematically
fails entire groups of youth.
HISTORICAL CONTROVERSIES OF SCHOOL DROPOUT
In closely examining the history of schooling, it becomes readily apparent
that school dropout is a dialectic: It is both a deliberate and an unintended consequence of a system structured to maintain the status quo. This becomes evident through the ways by which schools ensure the development, success, and
privilege of the white, dominant classes at the expense of those on the margins.
The process of schooling is a means to assimilate and acculturate on one hand,
and to provide liberation, freedom, and educational, social, and economic equity
on the other. Deeply contested, and holding these two antithetical meanings,
school dropout can no longer remain invisible. It has seeped through the cracks:
appearing in the staggeringly low graduation rates and in real dollar costs to the
criminal justice and health care systems at the expense of the educationally disenfranchised. The façade of “educational opportunity” and the influence of differing ideologies seem to be the interface between these two conflicting forces.
The Muddled Roots of “School Dropout”
Several educational practices throughout the history of schooling have been
discussed in relation to school dropout. Academic tracking, a practice that has
been around since the post–Civil War era, has always had the greatest percentage
of low-income and students of color occupying the lower academic tracks. These
students are labeled and tracked into a marginal future, without the personal
growth of one’s own soul, aspirations, and spirit. With limited occupational and
economic opportunity, being placed in a low academic track has always been a
practice that serves as a precursor to school dropout.

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One of the biggest misconceptions about young people who drop out is that
they have no desire and motivation to learn, place little value on an education
and learning, and aren’t interested in school. As it turns out, and as is detailed
in the following section, schools often prevent young people from enacting their
desire and motivation for learning and success. In fact, history is pervasive with
examples of social movements for education, acts that can only be explained by
both individual and a collective’s desire and motivation for schooling.
Underfunding, chronic overcrowding, and poor schooling conditions are
also historic educational practices that contribute to school dropout. Schools
and districts that serve large immigrant, low-income, and communities of color
have been underfunded, overcrowded, and not well maintained. Subsequently,
the quality of education achievable in these conditions pales in comparison to
the educational opportunities and access to resources of their more privileged
and white counterparts. Deliberate underdevelopment and a decrepit physical
environment significantly shape educational limitations. For example, it has
often been reported that overcrowding schools was a way to get young people to
drop out. This was achieved through the practice of double-shift schooling, in
which schools were filled beyond overcapacity to the extent that they needed to
run several shifts of students throughout one single day. As a result, class time
and total hours spent in school for each pupil decreased, and the time spent out
of school increased. This practice, in essence, manufactured dropouts.
CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS IN SCHOOL DROPOUT
School dropout is the end stage in a cumulative and dynamic process of educational disengagement and dispossession. The controversy and conflict surrounding who is to “blame” for dropout—the individual or the school system—are
embedded into each category and represented by the range and scope of the
data. The research reflects a diverse array of ideological and theoretical positions. Themes of alienation, lack of school engagement, and the nature of the
school setting and culture that emerge from the literature are presented.
Causes of School Dropout
Individual Level Characteristics
Individual attributes associated with school dropout include feelings of alienation, disliking or feeling disconnected from school, decreased levels of school
participation, and low educational or occupational self-expectations. Diminished academic aspirations may reflect the changing labor market and economic
forces operating at higher levels of social organization. Additionally, when
students feel that the locus of control for their success resides outside of themselves, they report feeling less academically inclined.
Compared to their counterparts who complete school, dropouts are less
socially conforming; more likely to challenge openly their perceived injustice of the social system; less accepting of parental, school, social, and legal

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authority; more autonomous; more socially isolated; and less involved in their
communities. For some young people, dropout may be a form of resistance or
critique of the educational system. And the effect of self-esteem on school dropout is contested, with some research showing an association and others not.
Behaviors associated with dropout include disruptive conduct; truancy; absenteeism; lateness; substance use; pregnancy and parenting; mental, emotional,
psychological, or behavioral difficulties; and low participation in extracurricular
activities. These behaviors may be influenced by differing school environments,
again pointing to the role that inequitable schools play in shaping the production of school dropout.
The foremost cause of school dropout for adolescent women is teenage pregnancy, accounting for between 30 and 40 percent of the young women who leave
school, although alternative evidence demonstrates that often young women
stop attending school and then get pregnant. Adolescent men are also affected
by teen pregnancy, as they may drop out to earn money to support a child.
Compared to school completers, dropouts are more likely to be substance abusers, and to have started substance abuse early; more likely to be involved in the
sale of drugs; and more likely to have friends engaging in behavior deemed to
be socially deviant. Mental illness and emotional disturbance also account for
a significant percentage of high school dropouts—reports state that anywhere
between 48 and 55 percent of young people with mental and emotional troubles
fail to graduate high school.
Individual school experiences greatly impact the likelihood of graduation.
Students held back in school are more than 11 times as likely to leave school
as their peers, and several studies identify grade retention (being held back a
grade) as the most significant predictor of school dropout. Poor academic
achievement, low self-expectations, low grades, lower test scores, and course
failure all contribute to school dropout. Here too, these individual factors must
be viewed as manifestations of accumulating poor educational experiences. In
fact, 45 percent of students report starting high school very underprepared by
their earlier schooling.
Economic constraints also influence dropout. Surveys of dropouts show that
having to get a job, conflicts between work and school, and having to support
a family are important reasons for leaving school. However, the overwhelming
majority of all dropouts report that education and graduating are important to
success in life. Data indicates the strong value and desire for education, despite
rhetoric on dropouts that argue the opposite.
Family Characteristics
Family characteristics associated with dropout are low levels of family support, involvement, and expectations for education achievement; low parental
education attainment; single-parent homes; parenting style; few study aids available at home; less opportunity for nonschool learning; financial problems; and
low socioeconomic status. Low expectations for a child’s academic success by
adults have been shown to increase a child’s likelihood of dropping out five-fold.

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And residential or school mobility are also considerably linked to school dropout. Importantly, what often appears to be lack of parental involvement in education is actual life constraints of living in poverty, having to work more than
one job, employment where parents cannot take time off of work, language barriers between the family and school personnel, and/or the symbolic representation of schools as unwelcoming institutions for parents who were not successful
in schools themselves.
Many adolescents, especially young women, carry the burden of caring for
their family, forcing them to leave high school due to social or health needs
of their loved ones. Compared to school completers, dropouts are more likely
to translate for family members, help to find health care for their family, and
care for the elderly and children in their families. Young men are often forced
to economically sustain their families. Family stress, parental substance abuse,
physical or sexual abuse of children, lack of health insurance, family health
problems, having to care for a family member, or the death of a loved one can
contribute to the decision (or need) to drop out.
Neighborhood and Community Characteristics
Communities with high levels of crime, violence, drug-related crime, and
arson have higher rates of school dropout than communities with fewer of these
problems. Some studies indicate that communal social support promotes school
engagement and improves chances for school graduation among racial and
ethnic minority students. Similarly, cultural norms of schools and cultural and
linguistic tensions between the home and community (and often country) from
which students come contribute to educational disenfranchisement, leading to
school dropout.
School Characteristics
Attributes of schools and school systems significantly influence dropout rates.
Poverty again plays a central role, with a school’s mean socioeconomic status
being the most significant independent influence on graduation rates. In addition, higher levels of segregation, more students of color, more students enrolled
in special education, and location in central cities or larger districts are also associated with lower graduation rates. It is neither an accidental correlation nor
coincidence that race/ethnicity, class, and level of urbanization are implicated in
higher rates of school dropout.
School climate is a central component of school engagement and, therefore,
school completion. Punitive school policies (standardized testing, changing
academic standards without supports, tracking, unfair/stringent discipline
policies, frequent use of suspensions) all affect academic engagement and
success. When social support and positive relationships with adults in the school
are diminished, so is a young person’s connectedness to school. And school
engagement and connectedness are two widely supported causes of staying in
school.

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School Policies
High-stakes testing, a practice whereby student advancement is determined
primarily by tests, also influences dropout. Comparing states that employ highstakes testing to those that do not shows that states using such tests hold students back at much higher rates than states that do not.
More recent studies publish findings of “school pushout”; in which school
dropouts are in fact forced out of school through a variety of policies and practices, like policing, discipline, and educational-tracking measures. School pushout is a concept that reframes the choice to leave school as a reflection of the
larger educational systems, structures, and policies that have failed youth, and
that often ultimately force young people out of schools. Stemming from this phenomenon is the associated school-to-prison pipeline, a term that refers to policies and practices that ensure that when young people “misbehave” in school,
they are turned over the police and juvenile justice system.
School safety and discipline policies appear to have a strong effect on dropout.
Student perceptions of unfair discipline, of low teacher interest in students, and
of lack of attachment to an adult in the school all predict dropout. School disciplinary contact is among the strongest predictors of school dropout. Surveys
of dropouts show that being suspended often and getting expelled contribute
to the decision to drop out. Propensity for being a target of school discipline
actions (number of office referrals, suspensions, and expulsions) is overwhelmingly racialized: Low-income children, children of color, those in special education, and those labeled as emotionally disturbed are disproportionally impacted.
Developmentally, school discipline has severe effects on a child’s perception of
justice, fairness, trust, capability, and self-worth and may contribute to feelings
of social isolation and alienation and to engaging in high-risk behaviors.
Other school policies that have been associated with dropout include high
student-to-teacher ratios, academic tracking, and a discrepancy between faculty
and student demographic characteristics. Low levels of engagement to school
also predict dropout. Related, a lack of sufficient programs for pregnant and
parenting teens as well as comprehensive health and sex-education programs and
availability of social services build barriers that make the success of particular
groups of students nearly impossible. Schools that adopt such programs buffer
school dropout with tremendous success.

The Controversy over Data Reporting
The issue of reporting data becomes controversial due to its absence and lack of
any standardized, reliable, and valid data-collection formula. Until the No Child
Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2002, there was no federal mandate requiring graduation rate reporting. Before this, only some states kept graduation rate data. This
law, while unearthing the chasm in public education, has also positioned itself in
a way that can promulgate the crisis. This NCLB mandate provides little protection for low-performing students to not be pushed out of schools. Districts, in
order to meet the incentives for improving their graduation rates and for meeting

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the annual yearly progress requirement, push lower-performing students into
alternative school programs, where they are not counted as dropouts.
Also undermining any real attempt by NCLB to ensure equal educational attainment are two principles of the law. First, unlike the accountability mandates,
which require test score and achievement data to be kept demographically—by
income, race/ethnicity, special education status, and limited English proficiency
students—and for which adequate yearly progress must be made in at least one
of these historically low-performing groups, when calculating the graduation
rate, states must only count the overall rate; they do not have to record by demographics. This allows young people on the margins to be practically ignored,
and disparities in graduation rates to be silenced. Second, and also incongruent
with the accountability mandates that stipulate that 100 percent of all students
receive “proficient” test scores by 2014, states can establish their own formula for
calculating graduation rates and their own graduation rate goals, which can range
between 50 to 100 percent. What NCLB has effectively done is to create a loophole
that ensures, if not requires, students to be pushed out of schools in order to meet
the more stringent accountability mandates—to which funding and school takeover sanctions are attached. By giving federal permission for states to aspire to
a mere 50 percent graduation rate without having to record demographic data,
the federal government has given the doorway for how to achieve 100 percent
proficiency while maintaining the historic class and racial structure of society.
In recent years, several reports have published studies that examine and develop
more accurate, comprehensive, and representative methods for calculating and
capturing the landscape of educational attainment. Specifically, these measures
are indicators of high school graduation rates rather than of the more traditional
and common statistics that measure either dropout rates or high school completion rates. (Dropout rates can be calculated in one of three ways: event dropout
rates, status dropout rates, and cohort dropout rates.) Each of these different measures will produce very different results. To date, most states calculate dropout
rates, a figure that is not the equivalent of graduation rates (those reported here).
While these newer reports calculate nearly identical statistics on high school
graduation rates, data used here are from a formula developed by Christopher
Swanson of the Urban Institute. This formula is the best proxy for current graduation rates, and the subsequent research details the most “extensive set of systematic
empirical findings on public school graduation rates available to date for the nation
as a whole and for each of the states” (Swanson, 2004b, p. 1). The method developed is called the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI), and it is applied to data
from the Common Core of Data (CCD), the U.S. Department of Education’s database, as the measure to calculate high school graduation rates. The CCD database
is the most complete source of information on all public schools and local education agencies in the United States. The CPI is a variation of cohort dropout rates
in that it “approximates the probability that a student entering the 9th grade will
complete high school on time [in four years] with a regular diploma. It does this
by representing high school graduation as a stepwise process composed of three
grade-to-grade promotion transitions (9 to 10, 10 to 11, and 11 to 12) in addition
to the ultimate high school graduation event (grade 12 to diploma)” (Swanson,

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2004a, p. 7). It is important to emphasize that the CPI only counts students who
receive high school diplomas as graduates and not those who earn a GED or other
alternative credentials, thus overrepresenting the number of people “graduating”
from high school. This is in keeping with the new NCLB mandate for what constitutes a diploma. This index was created as a response to extant methods that are
commonly used to determine educational attainment.
The more common statistical measures of dropout rates and high school completion rates have significant limitations. Dropout rates, meant to capture only
the percentage of students that actually drop out of school, are based on underreported and underrepresented data, since there is no standard mechanism for
reporting, coding, or accounting for students who drop out. Districts often title
students who may have indeed dropped out or been pushed out as having transferred or moved or as missing. This false representation leads to an exaggerated
picture of how well a school is doing. High school completion rates count General
Educational Development (GED) graduates and students receiving alternative credentials as high school graduates. As such, data measuring high school
completion differs greatly from those measuring graduation rates. Incorporating
GEDs and other alternative credentials in graduation rates is problematic for
two primary reasons. First, recipients of the GED or alternative certifications are
not graduates of high school; therefore, their credentials cannot be attributed to
the school system. Second, the economic and higher educational returns from
students with a GED is not equivalent to those with a high school diploma.
The most common “graduation” and “dropout” statistics are cited from the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which calculates its data as high
school completion rates but reports its data as a high school graduation rate of 85
percent. The NCES statistic has very low levels of national coverage and is computed using data from only 54 percent of U.S. school districts and 45 percent
of the student population. Due to missing data, the 2001 NCES measure could
only estimate completion rates for 34 states.
The NCES uses data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS,
conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, is a simple self-report survey conducted in
noninstitutionalized settings and on people who are neither currently in school
nor recently graduated. This measure surveys the general young adult population
(ages 18–24), not school district information. Students may report GED attainment as high school completion, they may misrepresent their education level, and
it may underrepresent low-income youth who are disproportionately dropouts.
Youth in low-income communities are often harder to find and interview. The CPS
also underrepresents black and Latino youth, who are incarcerated at high rates
and are therefore excluded from participating in the survey because prisons are institutionalized settings. Collectively, this measure offers a much higher and nonreliable depiction of the state of high school graduation—one that masks the crisis.
CONCLUSION
The implications of how “dropout” is framed—either as an individual burden
or as the fault of the institution—have drastically different consequences. For

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each young person disenfranchised by their school system, there is a fraying of
the public belief in the common good, a threat to a collective sense of democratic
belonging, substantial losses to communities, economic and social impacts,
heavy consequences for criminal justice, costs to civic and political participation, and dire implications for health.
With increasing public and educational consciousness about the graduation rate crisis, many innovative and effective dropout-prevention programs
are being created and implemented. With the move for schools to incorporate
school-based health centers and other social service supports, young people are
provided supports and resources that make their engagement and success in
school possible. When schools and programs reflect the stance that schools need
to support students, and not that students are deficient of success, this crisis has
the ability to change.
Further Reading: Fine, M., 1991, Framing dropouts: Notes on the politics of an urban
public high school, Albany: State University of New York Press; Mishel, L., & Roy, J.,
2006, Rethinking high school graduation rates and trends, Washington DC: Economic
Policy Institute; Orfield, G., ed., 2004, Dropouts in America: Confronting the graduation rate crisis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press; Skiba, R., & Knesting, K.,
2001, Zero tolerance, zero evidence: An analysis of school disciplinary practice, New
Directions for Youth Development 92: 17–43; Swanson, C., 2004a, The real truth about
low graduation rates, an evidence-based commentary, Washington, DC: The Urban Institute; Swanson, C., 2004b, Who graduates? Who doesn’t? A statistical portrait of public
high school graduation, class of 2001, Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.

Jessica Ruglis

DRUG USE AND PREVENTION
Drug use and abuse among youth is a significant problem in the United
States. Although recent data suggest a slight decrease in youth drug usage from
past years, in 2003 almost a fourth (23 percent) of 12- to 17-year-olds engaged
in some form of tobacco use and over one-third (34 percent) reported using
alcohol. Youth behavior is often characterized by experimentation, curiosity,
rebellion, insecurity, and poor self-esteem. Many of these attributes if not
managed in positive ways can lead to problems such as truancy, gang-related
behaviors, suicide, and drug use. For many individuals, education of students
and implementation of school-based prevention programs may seem to be a
proactive approach to drug use and abuse in youth. Current research suggests
that if drug use is delayed during adolescence long-term adult use is often reduced or avoided. Throughout the last several decades, however, some drugprevention efforts have had a limited impact on youth drug-taking behaviors
and have cast doubts as to whether drug education and prevention has a place in
the schools. Moreover, some individuals perceive that the responsibility of youth
drug education and prevention should be the responsibility of parents. Others
suggest that providing materials and curricula on drugs may actually increase
the likelihood of drug use and abuse among children and adolescents.

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DEFINITIONS RELATED TO DRUG USE
When discussing the topic of drugs there are many terms used. The word
drug refers to any natural or artificial substance, other than food, that because
of its chemical nature alters an organism’s structure or function. One confusing
aspect of this definition is that sometimes a drug can also be considered a food,
for example, alcoholic beverages may also be considered a food. But usually, the
terms drug or drugs refer to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, over-the-counter substances used to induce a high, and illicit substances.
Drug abuse refers to the use of a substance in a manner, in amounts, or in
situations that causes problems or increases the risk of problems, which may be
physical, psychological, social, or occupational. Drug addiction is defined as frequent or daily use of a particular drug. With drug addiction a large portion of an
individual’s behavior is often focused on using, obtaining, or talking about the
drug or associated paraphernalia. The term drug misuse is often associated with
overuse of prescription medications or using a drug for purposes that it was not
intended to be used for. For example, various chemicals such as paints or solvents
may be used to obtain a high. The term binge drinking is used commonly in the
scientific literature to indicate a level of alcohol consumption. In males, five or
more drinks consumed in a row is considered a binge-drinking episode, and binge
drinking in females is defined as having consumed four or more drinks in a row.
THE EFFECTS OF DRUG ABUSE IN YOUTH
Some individuals may perceive drug-abuse prevention to be ineffective
or think that moderate use of drugs has little impact on the health status or
academic achievement of students. This perception may have developed from
the past when drugs were not as strong and potent as they are today. So-called
“natural” or soft drugs like marijuana are many times more powerful than they
were in the 1960s. Over the last several decades, these drugs have been modified
to create higher concentrations of the active ingredients that cause a person to
become “high.” The introduction of new drugs such as crack cocaine or methamphetamine has rapidly increased the rate and degree of addiction in many
individuals. Recently, youth have also increased usage of over-the-counter
medications for the purposes of getting “high.” Research has repeatedly contradicted the perception that drug use and abuse have limited effects on individuals, particularly youth. Moreover, there may be more pronounced effects
on youth who use drugs than previously thought. These effects may include impaired health, increases in violence, mental health problems, and decreases in
academic achievement.
There are many potential health consequences from the use and abuse of
drugs. While some negative health effects experienced by the user may be generic, some health risks are dependent on the specific drug used. Usage among
adolescents is particularly risky because of the potential lifelong damage that
may occur during critical periods of growth and development. Potential health
problems associated with drug use include impaired mental function and several

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Figure D.1 Past-month Illicit Drug Use among Youths Aged 12 to 17, by Participation in
Delinquent Behaviors: 2003
Source: 2002–2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

medical conditions including gastrointestinal problems, malnutrition, high
blood pressure, and lower resistance to disease. Drug use has also been linked
to several types of cancers including esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, and
colon. Steroid use in this population can be particularly harmful as it can impair growth, change or delay reproductive growth, and cause heart attacks and
strokes. For adolescents who begin smoking at a young age it can impair respiratory function and greatly increase their increased risk of cancer in adulthood.
Drug use among youth has been linked to other risky behaviors including
violence and criminal behavior. Periodically, the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Agency (SAMHSA) conducts the National Survey on Drug Use
& Health. Recently, this study found that youths aged 12 to 17 who used an illicit drug in the past year were almost twice as likely to have engaged in a violent
behavior as those who did not use an illicit drug (49.8 percent vs. 26.6 percent).
In the same study, engagement in violent behavior increased with the number
of drugs used in the past year: 45.6 percent of youths who used one illicit drug
engaged in violent behavior compared to 61.9 percent of youths who used three
or more illicit drugs.
Drug use can also dramatically impact the social and mental health status of
youth. While adolescence is already a period of time where personal changes
and insecurity cause significant fluctuation in mood, drug use can exacerbate
feelings of depression and isolation. In SAMHSA’s 2002–2003 National Survey
on Drug Use and Health, an estimated 9 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 17

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(approximately 2.2 million adolescents) had experienced at least one major depressive episode during the past year. Adolescents who had experienced a major
depressive episode in the past year were more than twice as likely to have used
illicit drugs in the past month compared to their peers who had not experienced
a major depressive episode in the past year (21.2 percent vs. 9.6 percent). These
findings are troublesome considering the fact that depression has been linked to
other self-destructive behaviors in adolescents such as suicide. Moreover, treatment for depression in youth is often not available or the signs of use go unrecognized by parents, teachers, or others. For example, in adolescents aged 12 to
17 who experienced at least one major depressive episode during the past year,
only 40.3 percent reported having received treatment for depression during the
past year.
Academic performance has gained significant attention due to the increased accountability placed on schools and the competitive nature of college admissions
and the job market. Numerous studies have shown how drinking alcohol and the
use of other drugs impact the academic achievement of college students and adolescents. Drug use can impede academic progress in many ways. For example,
use of marijuana may weaken mental ability and influence the capacity to learn.
Marijuana use has been found to impair memory and concentration and can impact the ability to solve complex problems and store new information in the brain.
According to the 2002–2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health an
estimated 70.4 percent of students aged 12 to 17 reported that they had an A or
B grade average in their last semester or grading period, while 29.6 percent had
a C average or less. In the same study, students who did not use alcohol in the
past month (72.5 percent) were more likely to have an A or B grade average than
those who drank alcohol but did not binge (67.1 percent) or those who binged
in the past month (57.7 percent). Students who did not use marijuana in the
past month (72.2 percent) were more likely to have an A or B grade average than
those who used marijuana on one to four days in the past month (58.0 percent)
or those using marijuana on five or more days in the past month (44.9 percent).
It is important to note that academic achievement of youth is not only impeded
by the use of alcohol and illicit drugs, but also by use of tobacco. Secondary
school students who used tobacco are also more likely to have lower level of
academic achievement.
RISK FACTORS
All youth are potentially at risk for drug use and abuse. Several risk factors
are associated with drug use, although it is often difficult to determine if these
risk factors are precursors for drug use or are actually caused by drug use and
abuse behaviors. For example, could a student who is depressed drink alcohol to
self-medicate or could the student’s symptoms be due to the depressive effects
of alcohol or a result of problems caused or exacerbated by alcohol use? The
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has identified both possible risk and
protective factors for youth drug use. Students at highest risk are those with
low expectations for education, low school achievement, school truancy and

Drug Use and Prevention
Table D.1 Potential Drug Use Risk and Prevention Factors
Risk Factor

Domain

Early aggressive behavior
Lack of parental supervision
Substance abuse
Drug availability
Poverty

Individual
Family
Peer
School
Community

Protective Factor
Self-control
Parental monitoring
Academic competence
Anti-drug use policies
Strong neighborhood
attachment

Source: National Institute on Drug Abuse. Preventing Youth Drug Abuse among Youth and Adolescents. A Research Guide for Parents, Educators, and Community Leaders. 2nd ed. Available at

misconduct records, low resistance to peer influence, peer use of substances,
lack of belief that use is harmful, and lack of parental support. Other groups at
risk include youth from families who use drugs; youth who are physically challenged; and gay and lesbian youth.
Availability of drugs has also been associated with use and abuse. According
to the 2002–2003 National Drug Use and Health Survey, approximately one in
six youths (16.1 percent) reported that he or she had been approached by someone selling drugs in the past month. Those youths who had been approached by
someone selling drugs reported a much higher rate of past-month use of an illicit drug (35.0 percent) than those who had not been approached (6.7 percent).
In the same study, slightly more than half of youths aged 12 to 17 indicated that
it would be fairly or very easy to obtain marijuana if they wanted some (53.6
percent).
PROTECTIVE FACTORS
A number of factors appear to deter youth drug use and abuse. Youth often
learn many of their behaviors from members of their own family; therefore,
when parents model anti-drug-use behaviors children often will adopt similar
beliefs and practices. This modeling is most influential when coupled with parental monitoring and a strong bond between parent and child. For example,
in the 1997–1998 National Survey on Drug Use and Health Survey, adolescents
surveyed indicated that those who would talk to a parent about a serious problem were less likely to report past-year marijuana use than those who would not
(11 vs. 30 percent). Further, 62 percent of those adolescents who thought that
their parents would be “not at all upset” if they tried marijuana used this drug
during the last year. Other potential protective factors include having friends
who do not use drugs, having a high self-esteem, and school connectedness.
HISTORY OF SCHOOLBASED DRUGPREVENTION PROGRAMS
Over the last several decades drug-abuse prevention has taken many directions. As drug use increased, particularly by middle-class youth in the late 1970s,

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concerned parents attempted to change social norms by confronting various
environmental influences they perceived as threatening to their children. During
this period most drug-prevention programs focused on dissemination of knowledge regarding the dangers of drugs. At the same time, parent and community
groups challenged governmental lack of interest and action and the entertainment industry’s perceived acceptance of recreational use of drugs. These groups
criticized the media for its glamorization of drugs, in particular use of marijuana
(Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke album, the Doobie Brothers band, and so on).
Efforts by these grassroots groups were key in identifying inconsistent messages
about the acceptability of drug use present in many sectors of the community.
In the 1980s, the social influence model was predominant in drug-prevention
efforts. As a result of the concern regarding inconsistent messages and the increasing involvement by community and parent groups in preventing drug use,
task forces, community partnerships, and coalitions formed with the goal of
developing a consistent and comprehensive no-use message given to children.
Most of these efforts focused on decision making, social skills, and stress management. When recalling past efforts using this methodology, one of the most
memorable media campaigns was the image of an egg in a frying pan with the
caption “This Is Your Brain on Drugs.” Many early programs commonly employed scare tactics and warned young people about the dangers of drugs. Some
early programs showcased samples or various drugs look-alikes or drug paraphernalia used to administer them without specific education on the various
effects of each drug.
Also during this time, drug-prevention programs were designed for and
implemented in the school setting, with structured curricula being the prime
intervention. For some individuals, the implementation of school-based drugprevention programs was controversial due to the perception that drug education should be the primary responsibility of parents. Moreover, some parents
expressed concern that educating youth about drugs may actually make them
more curious about experimentation and use. School administrators and teachers cited concerns over the loss of class time for academic material, lack of
expertise in teaching the prevention curricula, and the potential cost of implementation of the prevention program.
Later prevention strategies incorporated efforts directed towards domains
outside of the schools such as families, peer groups, the community, environmental modification, and drug-related policies. It became evident that
prevention efforts needed to be comprehensive, with interventions being developed for multiple settings and targeting various groups. These efforts were
consistent with the public health model, where the individual, environment, and
agent (drug) were independently and collectively addressed in the prevention
efforts. Recognition of youth drug use and abuse as a public health problem became a catalyst for drug-abuse prevention efforts taking on greater significance
at the state level, where commonly coordinators were brought on board to administer the prevention efforts within each state.
As efforts increased during the 1990s to implement youth drug-prevention
programs that were intuitive and often desirable, there was a steady increase

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in the recognition of the importance of crafting particular strategies that were
deemed effective in reducing and preventing youth drug use and abuse. Specifically, it became more and more important that youth-targeted programs become
based on these key strategic elements and result in positive changes in youth,
families, and communities rather than programs simply providing any information obtainable, disseminated by anyone, for any duration. This shift may have
been a result of the failed efforts of large-scale drug-prevention campaign in the
1980s such as the previously mentioned “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” media
message or the widely publicized slogan endorsed by former first lady Nancy
Regan, “Just Say No.”
As it became more and more apparent that funding for youth drugprevention programs was being utilized on poorly designed programs, funding
from philanthropic organizations began to be awarded with restrictions requiring programs to include key strategic elements or have shown some merit in
smaller-scale interventions. Policies were adopted at the federal, state, and local
level. For example, interventions provided under the federal government’s Safe
and Drug Free School program began to require that funded programs were to
be based on established scientific standards and interventions that have been
shown to be effective in drug prevention in youth. To establish these standards
various federal agencies and private sector organization began to establish procedures for identifying and creating effective drug-prevention programs. Groups
and organizations such as the Department of Education’s National Diffusion
Network, the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Center for Substance
Abuse Prevention’s (CSAP’s) National Registry of Effective Prevention Programs
have all worked to develop such standards.
CURRENT DRUGPREVENTION PROGRAMS
Drug-abuse-prevention programs have evolved to address the complexities of
both risk and protective factors as well as various settings and groups. Current
youth-centered drug-prevention programs, although perceived as controversial
by some individuals, employ a wide variety of strategies depending on the target
population. The current scope of these programs has broadened to include
increasing knowledge about drugs, reducing use, delaying the onset of first use,
reducing abuse, and minimizing harm from the use. There has also been promising new research on the importance of family-based drug-prevention programs.
In 2003, NIDA identified several fundamental principles that are considered
best practices when designing and implementing programs to decrease drug use
and abuse among children. These key recommendations include:
• Prevention programs should enhance protective factors and reverse or
reduce risk factors;
• Prevention programs should target all forms of drug abuse, including use
of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants;
• Prevention programs aimed at young people should be age-specific,
developmentally appropriate, and culturally sensitive; and they should be

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long-term with repeat interventions to reinforce prevention goals originally
presented early in a school career;
• Prevention programs should include a component that equips parents or
caregivers to reinforce family anti-drug norms;
• Family-focused prevention programs have a greater impact than those that
target parents only or children only; and
• Prevention programs should be adapted to address specific drug-abuse
problems in the local community.
In addition to these recommendations, prevention programs can also be
described by their target audience. According to NIDA, potential interventions
can be categorized as universal, selective, and indicated. Universal programs are
designed for the general population, such as students in a school setting. Selective
programs are designed to address specific risk factors or subsets of a given population, such as those who have poor grades or have parents who have substance
abuse problems. Indicated programs target those who may have already used or
experimented with drugs but who do not meet diagnostic criteria for addiction.
Although these recommendations are designed to improve the effectiveness
of youth drug-prevention programs, some individuals remain unsupportive
and skeptical of school-based and various other prevention programs due to the
fact that many existing programs have been shown to be ineffective at changing or preventing drug use. For example, the most widely utilized school-based
drug-prevention program is Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education).
This program was created by members of law enforcement and used specially
trained officers to teach drug education curriculum in the schools. Since its creation, 50 percent of school districts in the United States have used this curriculum. Numerous studies found the DARE program to be ineffective in producing
a long-term reduction in youth substance abuse. Even a published report issued
by the Office of the Surgeon General has deemed this program as ineffective, yet
this program continues to be implemented because of its wide popularity. To help
avoid the implementation of ineffective youth drug-prevention programs, several
federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Education, SAMHSA, and the
U.S. Department of Justice have begun to compile databases of programs that
have either been found to be effective or have shown promise in reducing youth
drug use and abuse. These compilations of program can be useful for parents,
teachers, and school systems when selecting youth drug-prevention programs.
SUMMARY
Drug use and abuse is a significant problem among youth. Many of the
behaviors that lead to adult drug use behaviors are developed through use and
experimentation during adolescence. Although some individuals may perceive
drug use to be relatively harmless, drug use and abuse can have a significant
impact on an individual in both the long and the short term. These effects can
lead to impaired health, social and emotional problems, increases in violent
and criminal behaviors, and lower level of academic achievement. Over the
last several decades there have been significant changes in the methods and

Drug Use and Prevention

programs implemented to reduce youth drug use and abuse. Initially, programs
focused solely on the acquisition of knowledge. Early prevention efforts were
also not drug specific and often focused on using scare tactics or broader issues
such as decision making or stress management. Today, much of the youth drug
use and abuse-prevention efforts are occurring at the school level. For some
individuals, this approach may seem to be controversial due to the perceptions
that drug-prevention efforts should be maintained by parents, participation in
drug education may actually make youth more curious about drug use, and
drug education and prevention efforts are neither effective nor cost effective. To
address many of these obstacles, recommendations and frameworks have been
created to help agencies, communities, and schools design and implement more
scientific and effective youth-targeted drug-prevention programs. Future drugprevention efforts will continue to focus on tailoring programs toward more
specific audiences and settings, addressing risk and protective factors, and involving family and community members in the dissemination and participation
in these prevention efforts.
Further Reading: Canadian Center on Substance Abuse, Drug Trends in the United States
and Europe, retrieved January 13, 2007, from http://www.unodc.org/youthnet/youth
net_youth_drugs_trends_drug_trends_eur_us.html; Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), Model Programs, retrieved from http://www.samhsa.gov/centers/
csap/modelprograms; Ennett, S., Tobler, N., Ringwalt, C., & Flewelling, R., 1994, How
effective is drug abuse resistance education? A meta-analysis of project DARE outcome
evaluations, American Journal of Public Health 84(9), 1394–1401; Goldberg, R., 2006,
Clashing views in drugs and society, 7th ed., Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill; National Institute on Drug Abuse, Monitoring our future, National results of adolescent drug use, Key
findings, 2005, retrieved from http://monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/over
view2005.pdf; National Institute on Drug Abuse, Preventing youth drug abuse among
youth and adolescents, A research guide for parents, educators, and community leaders,
2nd ed, retrieved from http://www.nida.nih.gov/Prevention/Prevopen.html; SAMHSA,
Office of Applied Health Studies, National survey on drug use and health 2002 and 2003,
retrieved January 13, 2007, from http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NHSDA/2k3NSDUH/
appg.htm#tabg.15; U.S. Department of Education (DED), Exemplary and promising:
Safe, disciplined, and drug-free schools programs, retrieved from http://www.ed.gov/
admins/lead/safety/exemplary01/report_pg9.html?exp = 0.U.S.; Department of Justice
(DOJ), Promising strategies, retrieved from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/docs/psrsa.pdf.

Amy Thompson

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EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
Early childhood education (ECE) is a controversial and contested field. Since
the Progressive Era, debate has existed over what role federal, state, and local
government agencies should play in providing families and their young children
with access to ECE programs. Within the field itself, there are disputes over
issues such as what type of care should be provided to children and their families;
what type of training should early childhood educators possess; and what type
of instruction should take place and at what age.
Even with a majority of mothers within the United States in the workforce and
numerous scientific studies demonstrating the importance of the early years of
a child’s life on later development and academic performance, society has yet to
accept the idea that access to high-quality ECE programs should be a basic right
for all children. A key reason for this is the patriarchal norms that dominate the
American psyche. In general, society still defines the role of the mother as the
primary caregiver of the child, and thus it is her responsibility to ensure that
the child is cared for and ready to enter elementary school. Ideally, the mother is
married and has husband who is able to support her and her child. While these
images have been contested across numerous fronts, the nuclear family is still a
key construct in federal policy and used by many who oppose an expanding role
of government into early childhood education.
A DEFINITION OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the
largest professional organization for early childhood educators, defines the early

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childhood years as those from birth through third grade, and thus this field of
practice balances between systems of compulsory and noncompulsory schooling. This entry focuses on early childhood programs that serve children from
birth through age five, including kindergarten.
THE STATUS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
WITHIN THE UNITED STATES
For children from birth through age five, early childhood services are offered
through a patchwork system of care that includes public and private nonprofit
agencies, religious organizations, corporations, for-profit enterprises, family
child care providers, and public schools. Programs serve a range of ages, offers
various types of services, and instill a range of curricula. For the most part, the
early childhood community represents a fractured group of practitioners who
are loosely coupled by licensure requirements that emphasize health, safety, and
teacher/staff issues rather than academic expectations or curricula.
Government Support
While the debate over the role of government support for ECE continues,
federal, state, and local governments do provide some funding for early childhood services and programs. As of 2007, federal support for ECE exists through
three funding sources: providing funding for child care services as an incentive to mothers who receive public assistance and are trying to enter the labor
force, providing funding for or access to services such as Head Start to children
whom governmental agencies deem to be at risk due to factors such as poverty,
language status, developmental delays, psychological issues, or a combination
of these factors, and providing financial support to families and corporations
through tax credits.
The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 altered previous federal social services
by mandating recipients to achieve particular goals and reducing the length of
time they could receive support, which increased the need for early childhood
services for these families. For instance, the Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families block grant, replaced programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC), provides states with funds that they are to use to assist families in taking care of their children at home, and provides childcare for parents
so that they can participate in job training. The Child Care and Development
block grant provides funds to states to subsidize the child care expenses of lowincome working parents, parents who are receiving training for work, and/or
parents in school.
The most well known federally funded early childhood program is Head
Start, which operates through the Department of Health and Human Services
(DHHS). The DHHS directly funds local grantees to provide Head Start programs
to promote children’s school readiness by enhancing their social and cognitive

Early Childhood Education

development. Head Start grantees are to offer children and their families’ educational, health, nutritional, social, and other services.
Finally, the federal government offers two types of tax credits: (1) the dependent care tax credit for families who use out-of-home ECE services (which
began as the child care tax deduction in 1954 and converted to a child care tax
credit in 1972) and (2) tax credits for employers who establish or provide access
for their employees to child care services (which began in 1962).
At the state and local level, funding is more eclectic. The availability of programs and services that extend beyond federal funding depends on the individual state or local community. Some state governments supplement these federal
funds, create their own programs for targeted populations, and encourage local
participation in the process, while others do not.
The most common form of state involvement in ECE is kindergarten, and the
fastest-growing program area among the states is prekindergarten (PreK) for
four- and sometimes three-year-olds. As of 2006, only 14 states require children
to attend kindergarten, 29 of the remaining 36 require school districts to offer kindergarten, and the remaining 7 states do not require school districts to offer any
type of kindergarten. Forty states offer some form of PreK funding to local school
districts and community organizations, and three states, Oklahoma, Georgia, and
Florida offer all four-year-old children in their states access to prekindergarten,
typically referred to as universal prekindergarten (UPK). Many states, such as
New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, are taking steps towards UPK.
Making the Case for Further Government Support of ECE
Those who support the expansion of federal, state, and local early childhood
services typically make their case through two interconnected lines of reasoning. The first frames ECE as an investment. The second sees ECE as a necessary
step to ready children for the increasing demands of elementary school.
The investment argument emerges from a collection of longitudinal studies
that examine the effects of specific early childhood programs on a child’s life.
This research demonstrates that children who participate in high-quality early
childhood programs are less likely as students to be retained or to require special
education service and are more likely to graduate from high school. As adults,
these children are more likely to be employed and not require social services and
are less likely to be incarcerated (e.g., Reynolds, Ou, & Topitzes’s [2004] analysis
of the effects of the Chicago Parent Child Centers). As a result, every dollar that
is invested in high-quality ECE programs will save taxpayers from having to
spend additional monies on supplemental education and/or social services for
that child through her lifetime.
The readiness argument, which follows a similar line of reasoning as the investment argument, states that in order to have students ready for the increasing
demands of elementary school, government agencies need to provide families
with access to high-quality early education services to ensure that their children
are ready to learn.

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Making the Case for Less Government Support of ECE
Those who oppose expanding the role of government also frame their argument through two lines of reasoning. The first, which takes a libertarian approach, contends that the government should limit its social responsibilities
in taking care of children, except in the direst consequences, and allow the
market to deem the need and role of ECE (e.g., the Cato Institute). The second,
which takes a more conservative approach, argues that the government should
implement policies that encourage family members to stay home and care for
their children, such as tax credits for stay-at-home family members or incentives for corporations to encourage part-time employment.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION
The following is a sample of organizations active in the debates surrounding early childhood education. Links to information about state early childhood education programs and
family participation in such programs are provided.

Professional and Research Organizations that Support ECE
National Association for the Education of Young Children: http://www.naeyc.org
National Institute for Early Education Research: http://www.nieer.org
Pre-K Now: http://www.preknow.org
Foundation for Child Development: http://www.fcd-us.org
Association for Childhood Education International: http://www.acei.org

Organizations that Oppose the Expansion of ECE
The Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org
The Reason Foundation: http://www.reason.org
Concerned Women for America: http://www.cwfa.org

Statistics on Family Participation in ECE Programs
National Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov

Information about State Early Childhood Programs and Kindergarten
Education Commission of the States: http://www.ecs.org

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION FROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
THROUGH TODAY
As the Progressive Era took shape, ECE emerged along two streams of care:
the kindergarten movement and the day nursery movement. Within these two
movements, issues of gender, class, and cultural affiliation not only affected the

Early Childhood Education

goals of each program but also which children and their families had access to
these care and education services.
Kindergarten
The U.S. kindergarten movement began in 1854 when Margarethe Meyer
Schurz founded the first kindergarten in Watertown, WI. These early kindergartens were supplemental programs that were designed to foster a child’s growth
and development and to provide mothers with a break from their children. (See
Beatty [1995] for a detailed history of the development of kindergarten in the
United States.)
Public kindergarten emerged in the 1870s through the work of individuals such as Susan Blow in St. Louis and spread across numerous urban cities.
As these programs became part of education systems across the United States,
stakeholders implemented them to achieve many goals—all of which framed
kindergarten as a necessary and not supplemental service. For instance, some
supporters saw these programs as a form of “child rescue,” others saw it as means
to Americanize the influx of immigrants that were arriving in this country, and
many viewed these programs as form of preparation for elementary school.
These programs steadily grew because education and community stakeholders began to see more children as being unprepared for elementary school, and
thus, this construct of the deficient child infuses itself within the need for an
expansion of early childhood services.
The idea of children following a normal developmental path emerged out of
the work of child psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, who began his child
study experiments in Pauline Shaw’s charity kindergartens in Boston. Hall’s
studies led him as well as many others psychologists to question what type of
experiences should be taking place in kindergarten as well as in the home to
prepare children for a successful life.
Day Nurseries
Prior to kindergarten or elementary school entry, the dominant understanding of children’s early childhood experiences was that their mothers were to raise
them in their homes. The day nursery movement emerged as an intervention for
mothers who had to seek employment to take care of their families so that they
would not have to institutionalize their children. These nurseries emerged as the
philanthropic projects of wealthy women who wanted to assist working poor
and immigrant mothers in getting back on their feet so that they could take their
rightful place in the home. Day nurseries emphasized patriotism and hygiene as
part of their instruction and only sought governmental assistance for regulatory
purposes to improve nursery program conditions. Even though these programs
had less than appealing reputations, the need for their services far outstripped
their availability. In most instances, particularly in the South, rural areas, and for
African American families, kith and kin provided the majority of care for these
families. Ironically, many of these working mothers struggled to find care for

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their own children while working for wealthier families as the caretakers of their
children. (See Michel [1999] for a detailed history of the day nursery movement
and the positioning of mothers and women in general within this and other debates over the role of government in child rearing and education.)
Nursery Schools
Academically, the increased interest in understanding child development
by the work of theorists and researchers such as Hall, Gesell, Freud, Piaget,
and others led to the growing child-study movement among universities. For
instance, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation awarded significant sums of money to several colleges and universities to establish child study
institutes. The institutes’ lab schools began the nursery school movement, and
middle-class families became attracted to the notion that science can enhance
their child’s development. Furthermore, this scientific emphasis on child development extended the view of ECE beyond the traditional academic notion of
cognitive development that dominates elementary education. Early education
included the child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. This
expanded view of learning caused conflict between early childhood educators
and their elementary school colleagues as these programs became part of the
elementary school environment.
The Federal Government Becomes Part of Early Childhood Education
The onset of the Great Depression resulted in a collapse of the day nursery movement for working mothers, and a majority of the ECE programs that remained
were supplemental nursery programs used by middle-class families. In 1933,
the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) changed this by starting a
federally funded nursery school program as a means of employing schoolteachers
and school staff. The custodial care of children was a secondary goal. The program
was incorporated into the WPA in 1934 when FERA was terminated.
As the Great Depression ended and World War II began, the funding for
this program dwindled. However, the need for female labor to support the war
industry led to the Lanham Act, which funded over 3,000 child care centers to
care for children whose mothers worked in defense-related industries.
When the Depression and the war ended, federal support for these custodial
programs subsided and mothers were to return home to care for their children.
However, the kindergarten movement had come to be seen by education stakeholders as a much-needed vehicle for preparing children for school. Kindergarten survived these two national crises, and by the 1940s it became a permanent
fixture of many school systems across the United States.
Project Head Start
For the next 20 years, the federal government abstained from funding ECE
programs until the implementation of Project Head Start in 1965. This project

Early Childhood Education

emerged from the Economic Opportunity Act and the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA) as a part of the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.
This legislation shifted the role of the federal government in developing ECE
and K–12 policy within the United States. Federal policymakers created legislation that defined the role of the federal government in ECE as a provider of
intervention services that could alter the academic trajectory of particular populations of children. These policies identified the root cause of academic failure,
which leads to economic failure, in the child’s home environment. By identifying educational attainment as the means by which this cycle of poverty can be
broken, policymakers defined the central role of ECE as readying students for
school. ECE became a tool for intervention.
As soon as the federal government took on these roles in ECE and K–12
education, controversy arose. For instance, the Nixon administration responded
to Johnson’s Great Society education policies by creating the National Institute of
Education, which investigated the return that society received for its investment
in education. Furthermore, Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development
Act of 1971, which was to expand the federal government’s funding of child care
and education while creating a framework for child services. Additionally, studies
such as the Westinghouse Learning House’s evaluation of Head Start in 1969
suggested that any gains in the IQs of students who participated in the program
quickly faded, which raised concerns over the effectiveness of these governmentfunded programs.
Researchers responded to these critiques of Head Start by arguing that while
increases in IQ might not be sustainable, students who participated in such
programs were more successful academically and socially as they continued
through school than those students who did not receive these services. These longitudinal studies, which examined a range of early childhood programs outside of
Head Start, spawned the investment argument, which is outlined in the above.
This argument shifts the premise for funding ECE programs slightly. Rather
than break the cycle of poverty for others, funding programs will save taxpayers
money. Thus, this argument for ECE deemphasizes assisting families to be able
to take care of their children at home, and rather, it contends that experts in ECE
can design and implement programs that prepare the child, and in some cases
the family, for success in compulsory schooling and later life.
Standards for Early Childhood Education
The emphasis on student performance that emerged during the Reagan
administration put pressure on early childhood educators to align their practices
with K–12 education. While such pressure on ECE programs has been around
since the 1920s, particularly for kindergarten programs (see Beatty, 1995), organizations such as NAEYC began to produce position statements and documents
that defined what empirical research identified to be appropriate teaching, learning, and assessment experiences for young children.
While these empirically based responses did deflect the pressures of accountability for children until later in their academic careers, recent federal and state

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standards-based accountability reforms have caused education stakeholders to
again scrutinize what types of experiences students are having prior to their
entry to elementary school. For instance, policymakers and early childhood
stakeholders are debating the role of early learning standards, readiness assessments, and literacy and math instruction in early childhood programs.
Additional reforms that stakeholders are considering to improve children’s
preparation for elementary schooling include requiring student participation in
full-day kindergarten programs, expanding prekindergarten services, improving the quality of early childhood programs, increasing training requirements
for ECE teachers, and aligning early childhood programs across the field as well
as with the K–12 education system. (See Cryer & Clifford [2003] for current
discussions surrounding ECE policy.)
Whatever policies emerge, the recent history of education reform demonstrates that these reforms will be linked to increased accountability expectations,
making the expansion of the field dependent on the ability of ECE programs to
improve student performance.
An added question that is somewhat unique to ECE is who should be providing
these services. For-profit centers have a long history in ECE and provide care for
a significant population of children and their families. These providers include
national and international companies (e.g., the Australian-based publicly traded
for-profit child care corporation ABC Learning, which is the world’s largest provider of childcare services and operates over 1,100 centers in the United States).
Additionally, nonprofit and church-based centers provide a large portion of infant and toddler care for families. Thus, expanding or reforming early childhood
services involves numerous stakeholders, and simply adding programs to the nation’s public schools or implementing unfunded mandates has the ability to upset
many who support as well as provide care for young children and their families.
SUMMARY
ECE has a long and unique history within the United States. Those who support the field have framed its need in numerous ways. Current advocates argue
that ECE is a necessity for families in which the primary caregiver works outside
the home, is a smart investment of public resources, or is a basic right for all
children. Those who oppose its expansion contend that the government agencies should not be involved in child rearing, should not pay for additional social
services, or should implement policies that encourage families to stay at home
and take care of their children. Either way, the battle over ECE boils down to
how stakeholders perceive the role of government agencies in financing the care
and education of young children, and thus the debate will continue as long as
there are children and families who need or desire out-of-home care.
Further Reading: Beatty, B., 1995, Preschool education in America: The culture of young
children from the colonial era to the present, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
Cryer, D., & Clifford, R. M., eds., 2003, Early education and care in the USA, Baltimore,
MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.; Michel, S., 1999, Children’s interests/mothers’

E-Learning |
rights: The shaping of America’s child care policy, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
Reynolds, A. J., Ou, S., & Topitzes, J., 2004, Paths of effects of early childhood intervention on educational attainment and delinquency: A confirmatory analysis of the
Chicago child-parent centers, Child Development, 75(5), 1299–1328; Siegel, C., 2000,
What’s wrong with day care? Freeing parents to raise their own children, New York:
Teachers College Press.

Christopher P. Brown

E-LEARNING
The digital revolution is transforming culture, communication, and commerce,
but nowhere is faith in technology’s power more clearly demonstrated than in
the classroom.
E-learning is about much more than just plugging in a classroom computer.
Some advocates predict that computers and modems will replace pencils and
books, and others believe that brick-and-mortar schools (and all but elite universities) will soon be obsolete. E-learning has been defined as becoming literate in
new mechanisms for communication: computer networks, multimedia, content
portals, search engines, electronic libraries, distance learning, and web-enabled
classrooms. E-learning is characterized by speed, technological transformation,
and mediated human interactions, but virtual learning environments are not
new. Institutionally sponsored distance education (correspondence courses)
was in place as early as 1873 in the United States.
Many technology advocates believe e-learning will revolutionize the traditional classroom by augmenting textbooks with on-line resources; making
lectures interactive and multimedia based; and extending discussions beyond
the classroom walls via new communication platforms. Education beyond the
classroom is also being transformed, with web-based tutoring, parental access
to real-time student evaluation systems (rather than report cards), and student
access to coursework from multiple locations. Advocates argue that e-learning
represents a powerful convergence of technological opportunity and economic
necessity, which makes it the basis of intimate contact between schools and
private, entrepreneurial businesses, such as the technology companies whose
hardware and software make e-learning possible.
The conventional wisdom in educational policy circles has been that children
need to be introduced to computers early and that technology should be a
strong presence in their school lives. In 1994, when the Clinton administration promised to connect every school to the Internet, only one in three schools
and just 3 percent of classrooms were wired. Now, according to the National
Center for Educational Statistics, 95 percent of schools and 63 percent of all
classrooms had Internet access—a project that has cost $100 billion according to
some estimates. Fourth-graders are now building their own Web sites, a suburban Chicago school district has purchased Palm Pilots for all their high school
students, and virtual schools have been in operation for years, with students as
young as five years old. The rationale most often proffered for e-learning is that

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it can more effectively develop knowledge workers with high-tech skills who are
necessary to sustain the growth of the “new economy.”
Recent polls indicate that most Americans believe PCs and the Internet are
benign or beneficial. They certainly aren’t afraid of technology and seem to
believe the conventional wisdom that early exposure to technology is a good
thing. More than 95 percent of parents of middle school and high school students
recently surveyed see educational technology playing an important role in their
children’s education. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study showed children
six and under spend an average of two hours a day using screen media, about
the same amount of time they spend playing outside, and well over the amount
they spend reading or being read to (39 minutes).
The public, however, is somewhat conflicted about the impact of technology
as they also blame it for accelerating already-frantic lifestyles or creating more
problems than it solves. This was evident at the Wired Culture Forum, held in
Toronto, when over 400 high school students raised serious questions about the
rate at which technology is taking over their lives—their growing dependence
on machines, the isolating nature of the Internet, and how technology threatens
their privacy and ability to relate to others. A growing number of technology
skeptics argue that the digital revolution has produced a variety of deleterious
effects, such as disconnecting people from nature, their communities, and one
another.
The generally laissez faire approach to technology adoption in education and
other parts of our culture has produced a disturbing lack of critical thinking
about technology’s impact. Critics point to the fact that warning messages of
environmental and child-advocacy groups about the negative impact of the automobile and television were largely ignored for decades. The public’s lack of
questioning about technology has been compared to the early euphoria over the
automobile. The benefits are personally experienced, but the downside is more
diffused. It took decades before people started to balance the advantages of individual mobility and convenience provided by cars, with the collective impact of
smog and unsustainable development patterns.
ELEARNING AND CHILDREN: A HARMFUL MIX?
The most remarkable fact about the rise of e-learning in K–12 and higher
education, however, is the speculative nature of the effort. There is little or no evidence to support the beneficial claims of proponents of e-learning for children.
The Alliance for Childhood (http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/) argues that
the use of computers in education has had no proven positive effects on children
and may even be physically, intellectually, and socially harmful, especially for
kids under the age of 11. The report Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers
and Childhood grew out of the founding gathering of the U.S. branch of the Alliance for Childhood—an international effort of educators, physicians, and others
concerned about the plight of children today and who believe that by working
together in broad-based partnerships of individuals and organizations the lives
of children can be improved. The alliance argues that the benefits of computers

E-Learning |

for preschool and elementary students are vastly overstated and the costs—in
terms of money spent, loss of creative, hands-on educational opportunities, and
damage to children’s emotional health—are not accurately reported.
Do Computers Motivate Children to Learn Faster and Better?
The Fool’s Gold report claims that 30 years of research on educational technology has produced just one clear link between computers and children’s learning:
“Drill-and-practice programs appear to improve test scores modestly—though
not as much or as cheaply as one-on-one tutoring—on some standardized tests
in narrow skill areas.” Furthermore, Larry Cuban, a Stanford University education professor and former president of the American Educational Research
Association, is quoted in the report saying that “there is no clear, commanding
body of evidence that students’ sustained use of multimedia machines, the Internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and other popular applications has any
impact on academic achievement.” When it comes to intellectual growth, the
Alliance for Childhood argues that what is good for adults and older students
is often inappropriate for youngsters. Rather than relying on information technologies, for example, face-to-face conversation with more competent language
users is the one constant in studies of how children become expert speakers,
listeners, and writers.
Cuban describes the strong support of technology advocates and educational
policymakers for investment in “hard” (e.g., wiring and machines) and “soft”
(e.g., technical support and professional development) infrastructure for schools
in the face of so little evidence as “irrational exuberance.” Moreover, while the
alliance acknowledges that for children with certain disabilities technology offers clear benefits, for the majority of children computers pose (or contribute
to) health hazards and serious developmental problems, such as repetitive stress
injuries, eyestrain, obesity, and social isolation. More generally, the rapid technology changes of our era have accelerated our daily lives and caused the development of what James Gleick—in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About
Everything—calls “hurry-sickness.”
Must Five-Year-Olds Be Trained on Computers to Get the High-Paying Jobs?
A major part of the argument for placing computers in classrooms has essentially been a vocational one: Students should learn computer skills needed in the
modern workplace. The need for “technological literacy” has become a myth that
masks the fact that it is credentials, like a college degree, not computer-related
skills that one needs to get a high-paying job in today’s economy. Technology
critics such as Cuban argue that the focus of education should be on developing
morally responsible citizens and helping children, especially those who are labeled “at risk,” gain the necessary skills and knowledge to earn those highly important credentials. The emphasis on technology is diverting us from the urgent
social and educational needs of low-income children. As Massachusetts Institute
of Technology professor Sherry Turkle, a clinical psychologist and author of The

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Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, has asked: “Are we using computer
technology not because it teaches best but because we have lost the political will
to fund education adequately?”
There is strong evidence that major investments in areas such as expanded
preschool and adult literacy education, reducing class size, and ensuring that
teachers are qualified and well paid help children to avoid academic failure and
produce more high school graduates who pursue higher education.
Do Computers Really “Connect” Children to the World?
The Alliance for Childhood claims that what computers actually connect
children to are trivial games, inappropriate adult content, and aggressive advertising. The “distance” education technology promotes is the opposite of
what all children need—close relationships with caring adults. The Fool’s Gold
report states, “Research shows that strengthening bonds between teachers,
students, and families is a powerful remedy for troubled students and struggling schools. Overemphasizing technology can weaken those bonds. The
National Science Board reported in 1998 that prolonged exposure to computing environments may create ‘individuals incapable of dealing with the messiness of reality, the needs of community building, and the demands of personal
commitments.’”
The bottom line for the Alliance for Childhood is that rather than placing
our faith in technology to solve the problems of education, we should look more
deeply into the needs of children.
Tech Tonic, a follow-up report to Fool’s Gold, proposes seven reforms in
education and family life that are aimed at freeing children from a passive
attachment to screen-based entertainment and teach them about their “technological heritage” in a new way, rooted in the study and practice of technology “as
social ethics in action” and in a renewed respect for nature. The seven reforms:
• Make human relationships and a commitment to strong communities a
top priority at home and school
• Color childhood green to refocus education on children’s relationships
with the rest of the living world
• Foster creativity every day, with time for the arts and play
• Put community-based research and action at the heart of the science and
technology curriculum
• Declare one day a week an electronic entertainment-free zone
• End marketing aimed at children
• Shift spending from unproven high-tech products in the classroom to children’s unmet basic needs
Few would disagree with their conclusion that “the renewal of education
requires personal attention to students from good teachers and active parents,
strongly supported by their communities.” We have yet to see the development
of K–12 educational policy that attends to the full range of children’s real world,
low-tech needs.

E-Learning |

Figure E.1

Online Course Offerings.

ONLINE DISTANCE LEARNING AND VIRTUAL SCHOOLS
The impact of e-learning, in the form of on-line distance education, on K–12
schools (and higher education) has been dramatic. A 2007 survey by the Sloan
Foundation reports that almost two-thirds of public school districts are now
offering on-line courses, and of those over 60 percent anticipate that on-line
enrollment will increase significantly in the next two years. In the 2005–2006
school year, over 700,000 students were taking on-line courses in K–12 schools
(compared to 40,000 in 2002). A 2006 survey of 2,200 colleges and universities
found that nearly 3.2 million students took at least one on-line course in the fall
of 2005, up from 2.3 million the previous year. Michigan recently became the
first state to require high school students to participate in an “on-line learning
experience.” And 39 states now provide some form of professional development
to educators over the Internet.
Virtual schools are in operation in 23 states. A number of states, such as
Florida, Kentucky, and Illinois, have funded and established statewide virtual schools designed to meet the needs of large numbers of students. Virtual
schools are primarily at the high school level; however, the number of enrolling middle school and elementary school students are growing. The Florida
Virtual School, founded in 1997, now enrolls more than 45,000 students in
grades 6 to 12.
There are currently 170 cyber charter schools (e.g., on-line schools that are
publicly funded independent of public school systems) serving nearly 100,000
students. With the recent proliferation of virtual schools, there are new policy
concerns regarding cyber-school funding, monitoring, and accountability.
Critics of cyber charter schools, including teachers’ unions and school boards’
advocates in some states, have complained about questionable spending by
some of those schools. Critics also argue that cyber schools are cheaper to run
and ought to receive substantially less funding than brick-and-mortar schools.
But advocates argue that costs for virtual charter schools are different and not
necessarily lower, and as in regular schools teacher salaries make up the bulk of
their budgets.
Distance learning proponents argue that on-line learning is more convenient
and flexible for students; that students receive speedier feedback on assignments
and get more personal attention; that students have more control over their
learning experiences; that on-line learning enhances information technology

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Figure E.2

Computers at Home and School.

skills and fosters new ways of constructing knowledge; and that it is quicker and
more efficient. The availability of on-line learning in small rural school districts
is seen as particularly important in order to provide students with a variety
of course choices and, in some cases, the basic curriculum courses. In 2005,
rural public schools were more likely than other localities to provide students
with access to on-line distance learning for courses that would not be available
otherwise.
As for the nature and quality of on-line education, it varies widely. Courses
may be delivered fully on-line; as a hybrid blend of on-line and face-to-face delivery; or Web-enhanced, that is, essentially face-to-face with a small portion of
the course material delivered via the Web-based technology. In some classes students merely read lecture notes and answer questions via e-mail. Other classes
are more elaborate, with interactive CDs, downloadable videos, chat rooms,
weblogs, wikis, and regularly scheduled sessions.
Distance education advocates point to a study by Thomas Russell as evidence
that distance learning is at least the equivalent of traditional education in terms
of narrowly defined outcomes. Russell’s report, “The No Significant Difference
Phenomenon” (2001), is a comparative research annotated bibliography on technology for distance education that examines the findings of 355 studies on various forms of distance learning—correspondence courses, televised classes, and
Internet-based courses. Russell concludes that based on test scores and grades
there is little difference between traditional and distance learning. Critics, on the
other hand, argue that distance learning can never replace the classroom and the
social experience that is a key part of life in schools.
The conflict between on-line education advocates and critics is at least in
part based on contradictory conceptions of education. Is education merely a
form of information-transfer (“banking” as Paulo Freire labeled it) or is education fundamentally about a relationship among people? Can computer-mediated
interaction substitute for the human interaction/experience that is at the heart of
learning? David Noble, a professor at York University in Toronto and author of
Digital Diploma Mills, believes on-line higher education is being driven by profit,

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not educational, motives. Noble argues that the trend towards distance learning in
higher education as implemented in North American universities today “is a battle between students and professors on one side, and university administrations
and companies with ‘educational products’ to sell on the other. It is not a progressive trend towards a new era at all, but a regressive trend, towards the rather old
era of mass-production, standardization and purely commercial interests.”
Noble sees on-line learning as an exact parallel to the correspondence courses
of the 1890s, where the main challenge was how to turn a profit and there was
no economic incentive to improve instruction. Elite universities like Columbia
and the University of Chicago lent their names to correspondence programs
promoted as a chance for the average person to get an elite education. The problem, according to Noble, was that even the better programs had to compete with
cheaper fly-by-night operations and, in an effort to cut costs, universities ended
up paying readers—often graduate students—a piece rate to grade students’
work. “The economics of correspondence learning was to put all your money
into hype and promotion,” according to Noble in a Washington Post article published last year, “You get a high rate of sign up. Students pay tuition up front, and
instructors are paid a piece rate.” The result was that quality suffered, and students (and then universities) got wise and abandoned correspondence learning.
On-line learning is a key element in the trend toward commercialization of
education (which includes vouchers as well as charter schools and the for-profit
educational management organizations running them). High-tech corporations
are eager to partner with educational institutions because they see a large undeveloped market in a $200 billion a year industry and desire the instant integrity that university and school partnerships can offer to their educational
products. Only 20 percent of schools districts with on-line programs deliver
them directly to students. The vast majority of schools district rely on external providers—either postsecondary institutions (47 percent) or independent
vendors (32 percent)—for fully on-line courses.
Recent business acquisitions confirm the commercialization trend in on-line
K–12 education. In January 2007, the Apollo Group Inc., which owns the forprofit University of Phoenix (the largest private university in the United States
and first to offer on-line courses) moved into the business of secondary education with its purchase of Insight Schools, which runs public, on-line high schools.
Shortly afterward, Kaplan Inc. became the second higher-education company to
move into the business of running virtual high schools. The company, which is
owned by the Washington Post Company, acquired Sagemont Virtual, which
runs a school called the University of Miami Online High School and a company that develops on-line high school courses.
Distance learning promises (perhaps vainly) to give cash-strapped education institutions the opportunity to peddle on-line versions of courses to new
markets and potentially even turn a profit—squeezing more surplus value from
faculty, the intellectual and creative sources of courses. On-line education also
threatens to intensify the work of teachers and university faculty and undercut
academic freedom. Faculty work harder and longer for on-line courses than for
traditional classes without increased compensation.

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Educational managers are also using technology to deprive educators of their
intellectual property rights by claiming copyright over their course material.
When an educator prepares a class Web page or an on-line course these are
legally works for hire. This means that they are the property of the school or
university, and the university can modify and distribute them as it sees fit, with
or without the permission of the educator who created the page or course.
Educators are deskilled and students short-changed when on-line courses are
constructed by teachers for a flat fee and then administered by technicians and
student work graded by graduate students.
Just as it does for culture, commerce, and communication, the digital
revolution harbors great changes, both good and ill, for education. We cannot,
however, expect that a laissez faire approach to technology adoption in education will necessarily produce positive educational experiences. Instead we must
be aware of the potential downside of e-learning and demand wise use of technology for the collective good. Clearly the potential benefits of e-learning for
learners and teachers are great, but what are the trade-offs? How do we employ
technology for appropriate educational ends, as opposed to quick-fix pedagogical or budgetary ends? These are questions that should compel us to consider
what role we want for technology in our lives and what might be missing in our
schools and communities in a machine-dominated age. As learning technologies
become more sophisticated so too must our critical assessments of their impact
on our lives.
Further Reading: Alliance for Childhood, 2000, Fool’s gold: A critical look at computers and childhood, College Park, MD: Alliance for Childhood; Alliance for Childhood,
2004 Tech tonic, College Park, MD: Alliance for Childhood; Noble, D., 2003, Digital diploma mills, New York: Monthly Review Press; Picciano, A. G., & Seaman J., 2007, K–12
Online Learning: A survey of U.S. school district administrators, Needham, MA: Sloan
Foundation; Russell, T. L., 2001, The no significant difference phenomenon, Montgomery, AL: International Distance Education Certification Center, retrieved from http://
www.nosignificantdifference.org/; Turkle, S., 1984, The second self: Computers and the
human spirit, New York: Simon and Schuster.

E. Wayne Ross

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS
Schools in the United States have responded differently at different times to
the reality, challenge, and opportunity afforded by the presence of immigrant
students and other English language learners (ELs). While many ELs are firstor second-generation immigrants, others may be Native Americans, Puerto
Ricans, or Native Hawaiians. Regardless, those who work in public schools and
the general public have thought about EL students typically in terms of how
they present a challenge to the system. The challenge has involved how to most
efficiently teach them English while at the same time making sure they are able
to meet the demands of the curriculum appropriate to their age and grade level.
As will become clear, the twin demands of simultaneously learning English and

English Language Learners |

working at grade level are enormously difficult to achieve both for students and
for the institutions serving them.
Current estimates place the total number of foreign-born in the United States
at around 35 million, or 12 percent of the total population. Fifteen million,
or 20 percent, of all U.S. school-aged children have immigrant parents and
many, if not most, of these students are ELs. These young people, however, are
very likely to live in poverty and less likely to complete high school, and their
failure to complete secondary schooling—at times referred to as “push-outs” as
opposed to dropouts—is related to the ways that English language instruction
is structured, delivered, and conceptualized by school personnel, policymakers,
and the general public. As such, English as a second-language instruction has
huge implications for the educational system as a whole.
The way that English language instruction is conceptualized is also connected
to how ELs themselves are positioned within popular discourses of nationhood. At present, they are lumped into the larger category of immigrants, which
is currently the subject of a frenzied shouting match. Within this unpleasant
interaction, descriptive statistics about immigrants and ELs produce anxiety
and even panic. The fact that foreign-born students are more than twice as likely
to drop out of school as native-born students is one of these numbers. Another
is the fact that there are now almost 40 million “Latinos” residing in the United
States, over half of whom are of foreign birth. Close to 20 percent of the schoolaged population is made up of immigrant children or the children of immigrants. These children of immigrants constitute 10 million of those enrolled in
schools, and their number will increase to 26 million by the year 2030. In other
words, a growing percentage of ELs in the future will be born in the United
States, they will be citizens of this country, and they will constitute the future
work force. As such, responding to this reality is of vital interest to all educators,
and indeed, to the nation as a whole.
DEMAGOGUERY CONCERNING IMMIGRANTS
Of course, the anxiety concerning immigrants and their effects on the nation
are nothing new. In fact, it should be pointed out that immigrants constituted
a larger overall percentage of the population at the turn of the last century than
they do currently. At that time, the English language was never in any danger of
being replaced, U.S. culture was not negatively impacted, and U.S. institutions
were not threatened. The presence of large numbers of non-English-speaking
residents, however, has always attracted attention in the United States. Language
becomes an issue whenever the majority feels threatened politically, socially, or
economically.
At present, immigrants are attracting more negative attention than ever from
the media, policymakers, and the public. In fact, the lines between foreigners,
terrorists, and immigrants—regardless of their legal status and particularly those
of Mexican origin—have been purposely blurred. Precipitating events include
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on New York and Washington D.C., the U.S. government’s war on terror, and nativist reaction to growing immigrant communities.

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This larger context influences decisions such as to deport high school graduates
raised almost entirely in the United States. It also shapes the kind of thinking
that blames English language learners for low local and state test scores.
Pierre Bourdieu in Practical Reason calls the development of these ways of
thinking about immigrants and ELs “the obviousness of ordinary experience.” He
goes on to explain that this obviousness or common wisdom is not neutral, natural, or without political consequences. There are those who benefit from these
ways of thinking and those who are excluded, marginalized, and scapegoated.
Immigrants, and by extension, many EL students, are presented as illegitimate,
illegal, criminal, undesirable, and unwanted. The recurring politicization and
scapegoating of immigrants reflects a public anxious about its national identity.
ELs have always found themselves squarely within this controversy.
Groups with political and economic power are positioned to shape and
influence the kinds of educational opportunities the state provides for children.
Those groups without political power are pressured and compelled to assimilate
in both the realms of language and culture. In the following section, we provide
evidence for our line of reasoning.
FOUR COMMUNITIES AND THEIR EXPERIENCES
IN U.S. SCHOOLS
From its beginning as a nation, the United States had a wide variety of
languages spoken within its borders. At that time, linguistic diversity was not
seen as a detriment to the country. However, this changed as these populations—
earliest among them the German-speaking enclaves in Pennsylvania—and the
country grew in size. Benjamin Franklin, specifically, was concerned about
what he considered to be the inability of the German populations to assimilate
to the prevailing American cultural ideals. Initial suspicion resulted in efforts
to insert the English language into the German communities through schooling. German parents, however, successfully resisted what they considered to be
a heavy-handed attempt to marginalize the German language by passing their
own protective legislation.
The rural areas of the United States contained large numbers of German speakers, and many of their schools provided instruction solely in German. The laws
of the day did not mandate the use of any given language in American schools,
and, in fact, by the mid-1800s any hint of requiring English in the schools often
provoked a political backlash. Specifically, German communities in Ohio fought
successfully to use the German language for instruction. German, in this case,
was intended as an addition to English, not as a substitute. The German population, then, over time, gained political and economic power, and they wielded it
effectively in order to secure educational opportunities for their communities.
This community established a network of German-language schools throughout the German triangle between Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. These
schools flourished up until the outbreak of WWI when anti-German sentiment
instigated legislation that specifically targeted and banned the use of German
in the schools. The use of both oral and printed German was criminalized, and

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the use of German in the schools, a legacy extending back to the founding of the
country, was almost entirely eliminated.
Some ethnolinguistic communities were not able to attain the same kinds of
political power as German-Americans to determine the scope of their educational opportunities. Indigenous populations, for example, were subjected to
extreme forces of linguistic imperialism, and the result has been language death
for many of these groups. One mechanism that accelerated this process was the
use of boarding schools, which were put in place by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
an agency of the federal government. Children were often forcibly removed
from their homes and communities, and use of their languages was prohibited.
In fact, they were punished for the use of any language other than English. As
a result of this treatment, generations of Native Americans experienced massive school failure. Further, it has been estimated that only 11 percent of the
languages currently spoken by indigenous peoples in North America are being
taught to children. Policies of forced assimilation and language extermination
speak to the lack of legitimacy, both politically and economically, afforded Native American populations within the greater American society.
Another example of language policy levied against a specific population is the
case of Puerto Rico. Similar to Native America policies, the language policies
enacted in Puerto Rico emerged from within a context of American colonialism.
Initially, English was installed as the language of instruction in lieu of Spanish.
Local response was that of defiance, which led to a 50-year period of revolving
language legislation. Of interest in this case is that with each subsequent shift in
policy, the civic action and the political power wielded by the citizens of Puerto
Rico led to an increased level of Spanish use in the classroom. What’s more, the
vacillation between mandates for the use of English and Spanish helped instill a
fierce nationalism in the people of Puerto Rico, who used the issue of language
as a political vehicle through which they could resist the forces of American
imperialism.
An example of a community utilizing its legitimate status toward educational
ends can be seen in New Mexico. In 1850, Spanish speakers were the largest
language group in the territory. In 1910, in pursuance of statehood, New Mexico
was required by Congress to make English the language of instruction and also
a requirement for holding state offices and positions. Despite this requirement,
the citizenry of New Mexico ratified a constitution that included provisions
protecting language rights for Spanish speakers. Specifically, the educational
regulations included in the constitutions provided that teachers were to learn
English and Spanish and protected the educational rights of Spanish-speaking
students. Effectively, New Mexico succeeded in making Spanish equal to English
through their constitutional provisions.
LANGUAGE LEGISLATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Interestingly, compulsory schooling was not firmly established in the United
States until the end of the 1880s. Up until that time schools needed to actively
recruit students, and they targeted immigrants and their children, particularly

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those of European backgrounds. These students and their families were attracted
by the offer of instruction in their native languages. This is one reason why
German-language schooling was so widespread up until anti-German hysteria
broke out around WWI. The WWI period was a watershed moment in the
United States for the history of teaching ELs.
During that period, the great Americanization campaign raged until the end
of WWI. The campaign was designed to protect the United States from “ignorant,
incendiary foreigners” but after the war, it lost momentum. The campaign’s goals
had been to push immigrants to seek citizenship, pressure them to learn English, and compel them to adopt unquestioning reverence for American institutions. Because of widespread failure, these goals were later transformed to that
of denying admission to future waves of immigration, a mindset that appears
to have reemerged in the last decade. Immigrants were considered incorrigible
and unassimilable after WWI; ironically, this conclusion is far from the modern
myth of enthusiastic immigrant response to nativistic pressure to learn English
and deny their cultural heritage.
From 1929 until 1941, an immigration hiatus, accompanied by an era of
arrests, deportations, and massive oppression of immigrants, lasted until the
labor shortages caused by WWII. At that time, the United States and Mexico
negotiated a binational treaty that came to be known as the Bracero (farmhand)
Program. This program, punctuated by economic downturns and periodic
harassing and deporting of foreigners, lasted until 1964. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers entered the United States both legally and illegally
during this period until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and then
Congress completely overhauled the Nationality and Immigration Act in 1965.
These changes resulted in the abolition of the Bracero Program. What is important about these legislative landmarks is that they were accompanied by both
growing numbers of English learners in the schools and a growing dissatisfaction with their academic progress. For many, this lack of progress was due to
these students’ lack of English proficiency.
This explanation for the unsatisfactory school progress of large numbers of
“language minority” students, particularly in the Southwest, drove passage of
the Bilingual Education Act in 1968. The Bilingual Education Act, or Title VII
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provided federal funding for
school districts to aid in the development of educational programs serving language minority students. This act made seed funding available to school districts
that wanted to provide some native-language instruction to their students. It did
not require native-language instruction, but the fact that the federal government
was making funds available was a sea change in thought concerning the education of English learners. The encouragement and use of languages other than
English in U.S. schools was something that, except in isolated cases, had not occurred since the onset of WWI, a period of almost 50 years.
The issue of equitable education for nonnative English speakers did not truly
come to a head until the landmark decision of Lau v. Nichols (1974). Essentially,
the Court determined that school districts had to make special efforts to make
instruction comprehensible to English learners. Failure to do so was considered

English Language Learners |

the withholding of educational opportunities and thus was a violation of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. As important as Lau v. Nichols was, the decision did not
prescribe how educators were required to implement instruction. Educational
administrators were provided with more guidance concerning how to best
meet the needs of ELs with the Castañeda v. Pickard (1981) decision. Programs
designed for ELs now needed to adhere to quality controls centered on theory,
practice, and results. Programs had to be based on sound educational theory,
and schools were required to hire qualified personnel. They also had to monitor
student progress while they were enrolled in the program. A number of recent
developments have occurred that prescribe English-only language assistance
and limit the amount of time students have access to even this service.
CURRENT ERA
The present time may be viewed in the future as a moment when raw ethnic
politics came to dominate instructional decision making for ELs in the form
of citizen- (corporate-?) sponsored ballot initiatives. These initiatives, known
as Proposition 227 in California, Proposition 203 in Arizona, Question 2 in
Massachusetts, and Proposition 31 in Colorado, have either banned or sought
to ban bilingual education. These referenda passed in California, Arizona, and
Massachusetts but failed in Colorado. Their effects on student performance are
now being debated, with antibilingual education advocates claiming higher levels of student learning and those in favor of bilingual education claiming that
student learning has been curtailed. With the failure of Colorado’s initiative and
increasing dissatisfaction with EL student performance in the other states, it
may be that attempts to impose instructional approaches via the electorate have
been exhausted. What is clear is that the learning gap between ELs and mainstream students has not yet been closed.
CONCLUSION
Special language services for ELs have always been plagued by the damned
if you do and damned if you don’t syndrome. If students do well in terms of
their English learning, they are mainstreamed into general education classes
where they are no longer considered ELs. If they do poorly and continue to need
special language assistance, the instructional services they receive are deemed to
be failures because of their lack of progress.
The syndrome is reflective of mainstream thinking of ELs as it places them in
an impossible situation. They are blamed for not knowing English or for coming
to school without the necessary linguistic and social capital to properly benefit
from the programs offered. Further, the programs themselves fail to deliver what
the students need in terms of language and cultural knowledge. At this point,
students’ failure is certified by the school system and made official because of low
rates of literacy, low academic achievement, and high dropout rates. These results are characteristic of colonizing practices. They reflect a dominating group’s
views vis-a-vis the colonized, the conquered, or the enslaved. These results are

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not characteristic of the kind of outcomes one finds for groups that are able to
design instructional opportunities for their own communities.
Current efforts to legislate rather than create instructional and programmatic
solutions to the achievement gap reflect mainstream assumptions of ELs, their
families, and their communities. These assumptions include the belief that ELs
must be forced to learn English, that they don’t value education, and, also, the
unsubstantiated view that they aren’t willing to work hard to profit from their
schooling. These legislative efforts illustrate our original contention that most
ELs and their associated communities have been marginalized and excluded
from the political and economic arenas. In other words, neoconservative reengineering of educational policy has eliminated minority voices almost entirely
from most influential decision bodies.
Further Reading: Bourdieu, P., 1998, Practical reason, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Heath, S. B., 1981, English in our language heritage, in C. A. Ferguson &
S. B. Heath (Eds.), Language in the USA (pp. 6–20), Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press; Larsen, L. J., 2004, The foreign-born population in the United States: 2003, in U.S.
Census Bureau: U.S. Department of Commerce, retrieved March 29, 2006, from http://
www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/foreign/cps2003.html; National Center for
Education Statistics, 2005, Highlights from the 2003 international adult literacy and
lifeskills survey (all), Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education; National Education Association of the United States, 1966, The invisible minority, Washington DC: Department of Rural Education, National Education Association; Schmid, C. L., 2001, The
politics of language, New York: Oxford University Press; Tienda, M., & Mitchell, F., 2006,
Multiple origins, uncertain destinies, Washington DC: National Academies Press.

Robert T. Jiménez and Brian C. Rose

EVALUATION
The genesis of educational evaluation is generally understood to be in the
stipulations of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Part
of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the ESEA provides federal assistance to
schools, communities, and children in need. With current funding of about
$9.5 billion annually, the ESEA continues to be the single largest source of federal funding to K–12 schools. Through its many title programs, and especially
Title I, ESEA has been a major force in focusing how and what is taught in
schools, as well as the ways those activities are evaluated.
Educational evaluation is itself a diverse sub-area within evaluation as a discipline and a profession. Educational evaluation may focus on the value, merit,
worth, or effectiveness of programs, curriculum, teachers, student learning,
schools, and school systems.
THE EIGHTYEAR STUDY
While the passage of ESEA marks the beginning of the formalization of
educational evaluation, one prior event, the Eight-Year Study, also played an

Evaluation |

important role in educational evaluation, although it is more often associated
with developments in curriculum theory and design. The Eight-Year Study involved 30 high schools dispersed throughout the United States serving diverse
communities. Each school developed its own curriculum suited to its community and each was released from government regulations as well as the need for
students to take college entrance examinations. With dissension early in the
project about how its success should be evaluated, a young Ralph Tyler was
brought on board to direct the evaluation, which was funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation. Out of the Eight-Year Study came what is now known as the Tyler
Rationale, the commonsense idea that what students were supposed to learn
should determine what happened in classrooms and how evaluation should be
done. The basic questions of the Tyler rationale are now famous:
1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain
these purposes?
3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?
The first three questions point most particularly to curricular and instructional intentions and plans, and the fourth is the stepping-off point for evaluation.
Tyler’s evaluation team devised many curriculum-specific tests, helped to
build the capacity for each school to devise its own measures of context-specific
activities and objectives, identified a role for learners in evaluation, and developed data records to serve intended purposes (including descriptive student report cards). All of these developments resonate with conceptual developments
in evaluation from the 1970s to the present. The notion of opportunity to learn
is related to the curriculum sensitivity of measures; the widespread focus on
organizational evaluation capacity building resonates with the Tylerian commitment to helping schools help themselves in judging the quality and value of their
work; democratic and empowerment approaches, indeed all stakeholder based
approaches, resonate with the learners’ active participation in evaluation; and
the naturalistic approaches to evaluation resonate with the use of behavioral descriptive data.
The Eight-Year Study ended in 1941 and was published in five volumes in
1942, an event that was overshadowed by its unfortunate coincidence with U.S.
troops taking an active role in World War II. Nonetheless, Ralph Tyler and the
Eight-Year Study evaluation staff provided a foundation, whether always recognized or not, for future education evaluators.
THE ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION ACT
When ESEA was passed in 1965, the requirement that the expenditure of
public funds be accounted for thrust educators into a new and unfamiliar role.
Educational researchers and educational psychologists stepped in to fill the need
for evaluation created by ESEA. But the efforts of practitioners and researchers

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alike were generally considered to be only minimally successful at providing the
kind of evaluative information envisioned. The compensatory programs supported
by ESEA were complex and embedded in the complex organization of schooling.
Since the federal politicians, especially ESEA architect Robert Kennedy, were
primarily interested in accountability, evaluation requirements for ESEA, especially for Title I—the largest compensatory program—emphasized uniform procedures and comparable data at the state and national levels, a direction many
evaluators found misdirected. During this period, the advances in educational
evaluation were, at least in part, over and against the federal approach to evaluating especially Title I programs, primarily a focus on student achievement
(expressed as normal curve equivalents). Evaluators like Elliot Eisner, Robert
Stake, Egon Guba, Lee Cronbach, and others challenged the idea that evaluations
of schools and education should be narrowly focused on student achievement.
Education, they suggested, was more complex and nuanced, and a broader range
of criteria and evidence were necessary for judging educational programs.
The tension between meeting federally mandated reporting requirements
and local needs for evaluative information was a significant part of the debate.
School districts did the minimum to meet the federal reporting guidelines, but
at the same time often looked for guidance in how to sincerely evaluate what
was happening in local schools. While school districts may have needed only
one person to meet the reporting mandate, a broader local interest lead to the
creation of evaluation departments in many, and certainly all of the large, school
districts.
The late 1960s and into the 1980s were the gold rush days of educational evaluation. During this time, models of evaluation proliferated, and truly exciting
intellectual work was being done, especially in education. Borrowing not only
from traditional social science approaches to inquiry, educational evaluators
mined other disciplines for strategies. Judicial approaches, auditing, systems
design, connoisseurship, investigative strategies, case studies, and ethnography
found their way into the literature on educational evaluation. In the late 1970s,
a number of professional education associations joined together to create standards for evaluating educational programs, which direct both evaluators and
consumers of evaluators to insure that evaluations are useful, feasible, conform
to professional senses of propriety, and are accurately done.
THE NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP), sometimes
referred to as the nation’s report card, was also created at about the same time as
the authorization of ESEA, building on and systematizing a much longer history
of efforts to use educational statistics to improve and expand public education.
Francis Keppel, the U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1962 to 1965 and a
former dean of the Harvard School of Education, lamented the lack of information about the academic achievement of American students.
Under the direction of Ralph Tyler (Tyler’s intellectual legacy in evaluation
is huge, as noted by his continued involvement in pivotal events in educational

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evaluation), NAEP developed as a system to test a sample of students on a range
of test items, rather than the simple testing of all students with the same test
items. And, to allay fears that NAEP would be used to coerce local and state
educational authorities, the results were initially released for four regions only.
NAEP has continued to develop, early on largely with the use of private funding from the Carnegie Corporation, and the early fears of superintendents and
professional associations (such as the National Council for Teachers of English)
turn out to be well founded. State level NAEP scores are indeed now available.
This shift in the use of NAEP occurred during the Reagan administration with
then Secretary of Education Terrel Bell’s infamous wall chart. With a desire to
compare states’ educational performance, indicators available for all states were
needed, and NAEP filled that bill. Southern states, such as Arkansas, under then
governor Bill Clinton, applauded the use such comparisons that would encourage competition, a presumed condition for improvement.
During these halcyon years in educational evaluation, much evaluation was
publicly funded, primarily by the U.S. Department of Education, but also by
other federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation in addition to
many foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and Weyerhaeuser. Discussions of how best to judge if education and schooling are good contributed to
a lively national debate about what counts as good education and schooling.
For example, the small number of meta-evaluations conducted during this
time focused primarily on whether the evaluation was fair and in the public
interest. Two good examples are the meta-evaluation of Follow-Through (that
thoroughly criticized Alice Rivlin’s planned variation experiment as an evaluation method that did not do justice to the unique contributions of followthrough models in local communities) and the meta-evaluation of Push-Excel,
Jesse Jackson’s inspirational youth program that was undone by Charles Murray’s (co-author with Richard Herrnstein of Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life) evaluation, which failed to consider the program on
its own terms in the context of local communities.
ACCREDITATION
One form of educational evaluation that has been in place since the 1960s is
accreditation, the process of self-study and visitation by a team of peers that is
common in professional education and post-secondary institutions. Abraham
Flexner’s report on the quality of medical schools created the process that is now
commonly used by accrediting bodies. While accreditation has been critical for
post-secondary and professional programs, it has never been a serious form of
educational evaluation for elementary and secondary schools.
THE NEW NEOLIBERAL ERA AND EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION
The recent reauthorization of ESEA, now called No Child Left Behind,
reinforces the need for evaluation. But unlike the more general expectation
for evaluation that typified the original ESEA evaluation mandate, NCLB is

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decidedly more prescriptive about how education should be evaluated, largely
because it includes sanctions for failure to perform. While earlier versions of
ESEA focused on student performance, there were vague standards and no
threats for failing to show progress. NCLB invokes the particular construct of
“annual yearly progress” (AYP), and continued funding from the federal government is now dependent on each school making “continuous and substantial
progress” toward academic proficiency by all subgroups of students. Sanctions
for poor performance changed the equation. Not making AYP can result in
districts paying to bus children to other schools, being required to provide supplemental and remedial services outside the regular school day, or restructuring
of schools (for example, new staff or schools run by educational management
organizations).
While the 1965 authorization of ESEA opened new frontiers and contributed significantly to the discipline of evaluation, NCLB has narrowed the scope
of evaluation. Few federal funds are now spent on educational evaluation, and
the burden of evaluation has been shifted to the state and local levels through
student testing. NCLB mandates what counts as evaluation (acceptable indicators, what counts as progress, consequences for lack of progress) but provides
no funding to carry out the mandate. George W. Bush declared that with the
reauthorization of NCLB, “America’s schools will be on a new path of reform,
and a new path of results.” No one would disagree. Teaching has become less
professional, more mechanical and test driven; business and profits for the testpublishing and scoring companies have increased markedly, even though the
testing is often misdirected or misused (such as using norm-referenced tests for
criterion-referenced purposes); and schools chase unattainable goals (like AYP)
out of fear.
The current narrow evaluation focus of NCLB (standardized tests for evaluating student learning and schools) evolved as a result of changes in political
values. The current public and governmental neoliberalist sentiment (an ideology shared by Republicans and Democrats) has had major implications for government policies beginning in the 1970s but increasingly prominent since 1980.
Concerns about a crisis in American schools are formulated around constructs
such as international competitiveness and work productivity. In other words,
our schools are meant to serve the interests of the economy. A Nation at Risk,
published in 1983, was the clarion call for educational reform: “The educational
foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people. . . . We have, in effect
been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”
Although it took a few years, in 1989 President Bush and the state governors called an education summit in Charlottesville. That summit established
six broad educational goals to be reached by the year 2000. President Clinton
signed Goals 2000 into law in 1994. Goals three and four were related specifically to academic achievement and thus set the stage for both what educational
evaluation should focus on and how.
In 1990, the federally funded procedures for moving the country toward
accomplishment of these goals were established. The National Education Goals

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Panel (NEGP) and the National Council on Education Standards and Testing
(NCEST) were created and charged with answering a number of questions:
What is the subject matter to be addressed? What types of assessments should
be used? What standards of performance should be set?
In 1996, a national education summit was attended by 40 state governors
and more than 45 business leaders. They supported efforts to set clear academic
standards in the core subject areas at the state and local levels, and the business
leaders pledged to consider the existence of state standards when locating facilities. Another summit followed in 1999 and focused on three key challenges
facing U.S. schools—improving educator quality, helping all students reach high
standards, and strengthening accountability—and agreed to specify how each
of their states would address these challenges. And a final summit occurred in
2001, when governors and business leaders met at the IBM Conference Center
in Palisades, New York, to provide guidance to states in creating and using tests,
including the development of a national testing plan. The culminating event to
this series of events beginning in the early 1980s was the passage of NCLB.
The heavy hand of business interests and market metaphors in establishing
what schools should do and how we should evaluate what they are doing is evident in the role business leaders have played in the education summits. The
infrastructure that supports this perspective is broad and deep. The Business
Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of U.S. corporations, and
the even more focused Business Coalition for Education Reform, a coalition of
13 business associations, are political supporters and active players in narrowing
evaluation of education to the use of standardized achievement tests.
Simultaneous with the passage of NCLB, the U.S. Department of Education
funds less evaluation partly because of a much-narrowed definition of what the
government now considers good evaluation and partly because the U.S. Department of Education sees itself as the judge of educational evaluation and research,
rather than its sponsor. Educational evaluation that is currently funded by the
U.S. Department of Education is overwhelmingly contracted out to large research
firms such as Mathematica Policy Research, Abt & Associates, Westat, RMC Research Corporation, MDRC, American Institutes for Research, and the like.
The U.S. Department of Education recognizes four kinds of program evaluation: (1) continuous improvement (employing market research techniques),
(2) program performance data (use of performance based data management
systems), (3) descriptive studies of program implementation (use of passive,
descriptive techniques like surveys, self-reports, and case studies), and (4) rigorous field trials of specific interventions (field trials with randomized assignment). It is this last sort of evaluation that is the pièce de résistance, what are
referred to as the “new generation of rigorous evaluations.” It is this evaluation
approach that permits entry to the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) of the
US. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and thus
an intervention, practice, or curriculum earns the governmental imprimatur of
an “evidence based best practice.”
Evaluations must preferably be randomized clinical trials, perhaps quasiexperimental or regression discontinuity designs. Few if any educational evalu-

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ations have been of this sort; indeed much of the work since the 1960s has been
directed to creating different evaluation methods and models of evaluative inquiry (not just borrowed psychological research methods) that answer evaluative questions. Questions about feasibility, practicability, needs, costs, intended
and unintended outcomes, ethics, and justifiability—essential questions in all
evaluation—are not the focus.
The demand to accept randomized clinical trials (RCT) as the gold standard
in evaluation has been forcefully championed and forcefully resisted—for example, the American Evaluation Association (AEA) responded to the U.S. Department of Education’s call for feedback on this policy. AEA’s response challenges
the notion that causation is knowable only when using RCTs, and declares that
RCTs are sometimes unethical in educational contexts and that there are many
other evaluation methodologies that are adequate, appropriate, and rigorous. A
group of current and past AEA members responded with a “not-AEA” position
defending the primacy of RCTs.
Educational evaluation has evolved and will continue to evolve. In its early
days educational evaluation bore the mark of progressivism. Education and its
evaluation were supported by public funding and defined as a public good, in
the interest of all. Evaluation reflected these values (including efficiency, social justice, and democracy) and was financially supported with public funds.
In the 1980s the values of progressivism gave way to the emerging values of
neoliberalism. All evaluation requires the specification of the good-making
qualities of what is being evaluated. And these good-making qualities are
socially constructed; therefore the dominant approach to education evaluation
reflects the current sociopolitical zeitgeist. In the current state of neoliberalism
and neoconservatism, the evaluation of education increasingly reflects those
values, including commodification, privatization, and Judeo-Christian morality. The practice of evaluation (like many social practices) is a reflection of the
values, beliefs, and preferences of the time.
Further Reading: Aikin, W. M., 1942, The story of the Eight Year Study, New York: Harper
and Brothers, retrieved February 13, 2007, from http://www.8yearstudy.org; Joint
Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1994, The program evaluation
standards, 2nd ed. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications; Jones, L. V., & Olkin, I., eds.,
2004, The nation’s report card: Evolution and perspectives, Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta
Kappa Educational Foundation; Mathison, S., & Ross, E. W., eds., 2004, Defending

public schools: The nature and limits of standards based educational reform and
testing, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Sandra Mathison

FINANCE
Education finance has a long history of substantial conflict. Since the inception
of the common school more than a century ago, battles have waged over the
level of funding a school district receives, whether additional resources are effective, or determining the best mix of resources to improve student achievement. Such contentious fiscal issues evolve from values deeply embedded in U.S.
ideology—efficiency, liberty, and equality. These three values are dynamic and
often in conflict with one another. Tracing the historical debate over the importance of the values of efficiency, liberty, and equality provides insight into the
controversies embedded in the evolution of education finance as a field.
CONTROVERSIES IN EDUCATION FINANCE:
FROM PAST TO PRESENT
U.S. education history can be characterized as a nineteenth-century effort at
constructing a scaffold for public schooling; the twentieth century, or at least
the latter half of it, as a quest to ensure access to the system; and an emerging
twenty-first-century challenge to render the system more effective. No doubt,
such a brief summary fails to appreciate the alterations in policy and practice
that have occurred during the financing of America’s schools. Nevertheless, it
captures the evolution of school finance as a field. The progression of education finance from the fringes of policymakers’ concern to a more central role
is not without debate. One can best appreciate controversies that have helped
shape the field of education finance by examining their genesis during past
periods.

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Equality I: Access
The principle challenge facing education policymakers in the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century was fashioning a system of common
schooling that could contribute to and sustain a democracy. Against the backdrop of a society transitioning from an agrarian way of life to an industrialized
economy, waves of immigrants in need of employment, housing, and schooling
sought the American dream. The primary means for achieving this goal was
education—the great equalizer.
This era was dominated by those who strove to promote democratic ideals
through the implementation of a system of financial mandates and incentives
to influence expansion of the education system. State and federal grants concentrated on inducements for local districts to construct public schools, staff
them, extend the range of grades and services offered, and share costs between
local and state sources. By the conclusion of the nineteenth and beginning of
the twentieth centuries, under the leadership of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley,
Paul R. Mort, and George D. Strayer, distribution formulas were developed that
combined revenue from local property taxes with state subsidies and established
financial incentives for localities to extend education offerings. State statutes
mandating the formation of schools had their intended effects—by the early
1900s, 80 percent of the nation’s school-age children were enrolled.
In the decades following the end of World War II, it became evident to policymakers and educators alike that the original system of common schools,
however well intended, had bypassed or shortchanged important populations.
Disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities, those with disabilities, the indigent
immigrant who spoke limited English, and students who resided in propertypoor locations became major targets for school improvement.
Inequalities in the availability of resources to provide various student groups
access to equitable education sparked decades of litigation and legislation. Commencing with the post–World War II civil rights movement, assessments of the
equality of educational opportunity among racial and other groups in the United
States were mandated. Judicial and legislative steps were taken, allowing a wider
portion of the population to gain access to public schools. Brown v. Board of
Education (1954) struck racially segregated schools. Lau v. Nichols (1974) facilitated provision of services to limited English proficient students. Disabled students were included in public schools by courts and then by Congress with the
Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1976). The 1978 Higher Education Act’s Title VI extended these issues of equity to include parity of resources
and services based on gender. In Plyler v. Doe (1980), courts extended the rights
of a public education to illegal immigrant students.
Beginning in the 1960s, education finance theorists provided the conceptual
foundation to support efforts aimed at achieving greater equity in revenue generation and distribution. Thanks particularly to the pioneering efforts of Arthur
Wise, John E. Coons, William H. Clune, and Stephen Sugarman, legal arguments
were constructed applying the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment Equal
Protection Clause to intrastate finance distribution disparities. A result of their

Finance

efforts was what today is known as the Principle of Fiscal Neutrality, specifying
that a link between local or household wealth and quality of a child’s schooling
is unacceptable. Formation of this idea enabled the education finance equal protection crusade to proceed.
The quest for fiscal equity sustained a major setback with the Texas Supreme
Court’s decision in San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973). Here the Court rejected
arguments that education was a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution.
Plaintiff ’s failure to prevail in Rodriguez redirected the equal protection crusade
to a state-by-state endeavor.
From the decade of the 1970s emerged watershed equity lawsuits challenging the state constitutionality of school funding arrangements. In New Jersey,
the judicial system’s decision in Robinson v. Cahill (1973) eventually undid the
state’s school funding structure, which failed to apportion funds equally between
school districts. Similarly, the California Supreme Court declared the state’s
funding disparities across schools districts in violation of the state constitution
in Serrano v. Priest (1976).
Defendants in early equal protection cases attempted to capitalize upon skepticism that “dollars did not make scholars.” This line of reasoning stemmed from
the 1966 release of the Coleman Report, also known as “Equality of Educational
Opportunity.” The federal report was commissioned in an effort to understand
the influence of variations in resources on student achievement. Among the
conclusions of this landmark publication was that school resources were less
important than a student’s social and economic circumstances.
Findings of the Coleman Report sparked a debate about the influence of
fiscal resources on student achievement, a controversy that remains problematic. Defendants in court cases continue, sometimes persuasively, to argue that
dollars may be a necessary threshold for operating schools, but beyond this, it is
difficult to determine a minimum spending level as it is not only money that
characterizes a good school.
Equality II: Adequacy
Whereas the challenge of equitable distribution and generation of school revenue has not, and likely will not, soon disappear as a concern, it may be overtaken by adequacy. The concept of adequacy is gaining in both legal and judicial
application and thus may represent the newest stage in the contentious evolution of education finance.
The legal assaults of the last three decades were mostly intended to ensure
the equity of statewide per pupil revenue levels, be they adequate or inadequate. Increasingly, legislative and legal scrutiny has broadened, as evidenced
in the Kentucky Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in Rose v. Council for Better
Education, Inc. In this legal battle, Kentucky’s entire education system was declared unconstitutional and the general assembly was directed to ensure that
every child had access to an adequate education. The court defined “adequate”
to be a level of knowledge and skills that enabled students to participate fully in
contemporary civic, economic, and cultural affairs.

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The evolving concept of educational “adequacy” builds upon prior components of equity, shifting from the prior era’s emphasis on educational inputs to
a concentration on student outcomes. Adequacy entails specifying resource levels minimally necessary to produce desired outcomes. However, few satisfying
answers exist to the question of how much fiscal revenue is adequate or what
standards compromise desired outcomes. While different conceptualizations of
adequacy have been introduced by contemporary decision makers, be it a judge,
education and finance expert, or elected official, the determination of a legally fit
definition has yet to be found.
Efficiency I: Operation
In the early 1900s, common schools were woefully unprepared to teach the
large number of enrollees caused by rapid increases in immigrant populations.
Operational inefficiencies plagued schools as they grappled with problems such
as shortages of classrooms and teachers. During this time period of rapid industrialization, the nation was deeply entrenched in harnessing and promoting
practices that increased productivity in a wide array of industries. Thus it was
natural that the American public turned its eye to education, demanding that
schools be organized and operated in a businesslike fashion.
A priority of educational leaders was to remediate educational inefficiencies
in the operations of schooling. To achieve this goal, Frederick Taylor’s new industrial management system, known as “scientific management” or “Taylorism,”
was applied to education. The principle concept of Taylorism, operating more
efficiently while minimizing costs, rapidly spread throughout education systems.
School leaders’ attention was turned away from the instructional facets of
schooling and focused instead on eradicating inefficiencies by translating
education, including classroom learning and instruction, into financial terms.
Educators also sought to maximize the utilization of school facilities by adopting the Gary Plan. Known as the platoon school, the Gary Plan utilized a departmentalized system permitting students to move from room to room, concepts
that were commonplace in factories but novel for schools.
Legitimate criticisms were raised of schools modeled after factories relentlessly pursuing a businesslike efficiency. Educational reformers, such as John
Dewey, characterized schools as repressive institutions promoting rote routines
that failed to endorse exploration and student growth. To be sure, countless education decisions were made not on instructional grounds but rather on motivations of cost minimization and output maximization.
The next major expression of Taylorism was the school district consolidation movement. Launched in the 1920s, this initiative to reduce the number of
schools and school districts has had lasting and dramatic effects. In 1920, the
United States had 127,000 local school districts. By the turn of the twenty-first
century, this number had been reduced to 14,000, a nine-fold reduction in a
three-quarter-century span. More importantly, the number of schoolchildren
expanded greatly during the same period. The result was the contemporary
condition wherein 25 percent of America’s school-age children attend school

Finance

in only 1 percent of the nation’s school districts. Fifty percent of all students
attend school in only 5 percent of America’s school districts. The school districts
consolidation movement is responsible for the dominance of the nation’s megaschool districts and its current reliance on large schools.
Efficiency II: Performance
Renewed interest in educational efficiency gained a foothold in the adequacy
movement. The concept of using adequacy as the baseline from which to determine the level of resources distributed per pupil finds its origins in the major
reordering of national education priorities in the 1980s. Declining productivity,
unmatched federal government deficits, unprecedented reversals in foreign
indebtedness, and growing personal debt are examples of dismal economic
conditions of the early 1980s that contributed to a growing unease about the
quality and productivity of the nation’s schools.
The uncertainty about whether Americans were getting the most value from
educational dollars became a national worry, fueled in part by the National
Commission on Excellence in Education’s 1983 release of A Nation at Risk: The
Imperative for Educational Reform. This influential report generated an awareness of the decrease in productivity of American public schools and spotlighted
the decline of excellence in education. The essential message from the report
was unsettling—the nation’s previously unchallenged position as an economic
and technological leader is at risk. The commission observed that worldwide
economic competition had overtaken the United States during the postindustrial age, identifying education as the primary contributing factor.
The release of A Nation at Risk triggered a sustained period of public concern
and policymaker attention to higher levels of performance in public schools.
Twenty years after A Nation at Risk, the education policy arena persists in engaging massive reforms directed at enhancing student performance. State and
local educational leaders’ efforts continue to develop an onslaught of learning
standards, curriculum guidelines, subject matter benchmarks, and academic
performance targets directed at increasing student performance and productivity from a beleaguered education system.
Policymakers and educators’ gravitation toward an outcome-oriented notion
of education forged with revenue matters was reinforced with the 2001 passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Enactment of NCLB signaled an intensification of efforts to improve student outcomes with mandated
requirements such as high-stakes testing and school accountability programs
linked with statewide learning standards.
While the American electorate heavily endorses the purposes for which NCLB
stands, the act has become a source of intense controversy as school districts claim
that they lack fiscal capacity to meet the federal requirements. Furthermore, educators and policymakers are deeply divided over using standardized examinations
to measure adequate yearly progress towards state learning standards. Mounting
pressure for higher student performance and a prospect of higher stakes for failure are key contributors to the debate over providing an adequate opportunity.

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Attempting to define an “adequate” opportunity to learn and thereafter to
translate such a definition into the reality of school finance has ignited legislative and legal warfare. Beginning in the 1990s, enactment in virtually every
state of learning objectives and curriculum standards provided a reference
point for plaintiffs arguing that funding was inadequate overall. Coupling
learning standards with performance tests, particularly high-stakes tests,
under the mantle of accountability programs offers a ripe opportunity to attach consequences for low and high performance of students, teachers, and
schools.
Accountability systems are utilized to varying degrees in every state, with
some states, such as Florida, measuring not only performance but also academic
return on public dollars investment. Since 1989, the constitutionality of funding
mechanisms in 39 states had been challenged on adequacy grounds. In 2005
alone, high-court decisions were handed down in eight states, including Kansas
and Texas, with a decision rendered in South Carolina that has national implications regarding state funding mechanisms.
It is against this political and judicial backdrop that modern policymakers
seek added information regarding the costs of offering services geared toward
elevated performance expectations. A variety of adequacy cost study approaches
are employed to estimate the amount of money actually needed to make available all the educational services required to provide each child an opportunity to
meet applicable state education standards.
Many of the adequacy cost-modeling methods tread on conceptually unstable ground. The evolving concept of fiscal adequacy requires researchers to ascertain far more elusive relationships between education inputs, processes, and
outcomes than is currently feasible with present-day methodology and information. In spite of what have often proven to be biased and unreliable estimates,
adequacy cost studies have proliferated. According to ACCESS, a project of the
Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc., a total of 58 cost studies had been conducted in
39 states as of October 2006.
The growing number of state court decisions, paired with the current policy
environment that values educational accountability, suggest that the national
adequacy debate will continue to thrive. Ensuring that sufficient resources are
available for all students to meet federal and state-specified learning standards
is a laudable policy objective. However, the concept of adequacy is evolving and
no one yet knows with any degree of certainty how much money it takes for a
student to meet set state-derived learning standards. While the query is significant, there is a regrettable lack of analytic capacity to construct credible answers
to questions about adequacy.
Liberty: Choice
Liberty and the associated freedom to choose among alternatives is a fundamental notion deeply rooted in American culture. When applied to schooling,
liberty is often a controversial idea, one with which the United States continues
to wrestle through courts and elective processes.

Finance

Contemporary liberty debates primarily involve the notion of family liberty.
Liberty proponents contend that parents have the right to direct their child’s education. Often the idea of family liberty in the education process is expressed as
school choice. This most often refers to the right of the parents to choose where
their child attends school; a choice between various public schools or between
public schools and private schools. Interest in school choice has predictably intensified with NCLB’s accountability movement. Under the guidelines of NCLB,
parents have the choice of enrolling their children in a school out of their zoning
district if the school in which they are zoned fails to make adequate yearly progress in student achievement.
A variety of proposals involving school choice have emerged as the public’s
dissatisfaction with the public school system has increased. One proposal provoking intense controversy is providing parents with a financial grant known as
a voucher. The 1965 publication of Milton Friedman’s voucher proposal helped
school choice gain purchase in the U.S. policy system. Scholars used Freidman’s ideas to develop and articulate the first notions of family choice in the
modern era.
Momentum for the voucher movement increased with the Ohio lawsuit, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). Zelman resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s
decision to pronounce that publicly funded tuition vouchers used at religious
schools are not in violation of the U.S. Constitution. From this seminal judicial ruling it was expected the voucher movement would expand dramatically.
Nonetheless, due to judicial and political obstacles, voucher programs currently
operate in only a handful of states.
The future of vouchers as a school choice option may rest in changes taking place in the adequacy movement. Lawyers are working on initiatives to ask
judges in adequacy cases to give vouchers to students, rather than more money
to public schools, until the school system is brought into compliance.
Another proposal for expanding parental liberty that is more palatable among
policymakers and the public is the establishment of charter schools. Charter
schools are public schools, approved by a government entity, operating outside
of the traditional system of public-school governance. Most are nonprofit, but
a growing proportion of charter schools are operated by for-profit educational
management organizations. Despite recent studies indicating overall achievement for charter school attendees is not significantly greater than their traditional school counterparts, the number of charter schools is growing at a rapid
pace. The Center for Education Reform reports that as of September 2006, there
are approximately 4,000 operating charter schools across the nation, a 13 percent increase from the previous year.
Other options capturing a surprising amount of attention in the school choice
wars include magnet schools, homeschooling, and education tax credits.
While magnet schools’ original purpose was intended to be a solution to
school integration, the present day concept of a magnet school is thematic.
Magnet school themes, such as foreign language, performing arts, or science,
typically attract students from throughout a school district who are admitted by
meeting district-determined qualifications and/or by a lottery system.

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Homeschooling is a fast-growing movement that finds its origins in parents
seeking religious freedom. Today, parental concerns ranging from increases in
school violence to curriculum inclusion of liberal values motivate a wide range
of parents to turn to homeschooling. The exact number of children schooled at
home is not known. Estimates indicate the number is small but growing. The most
recent survey by the Department of Education (2001) estimated that 850,000
students are homeschooled, or 1.7 percent of K–12 students nationwide.
Education tax credits for school expenses are an emerging preference in the
school choice movement. Education tax credits have various mechanisms that
operate as a tuition subsidy for schools. Most commonly, parents who choose to
send their children to private schools are eligible to claim a tax credit by directly
subtracting a proportion of private schooling expenses from their tax liability.
Education tax credit programs have been successfully enacted in six states, four
of which failed previous efforts to implement a voucher system. A strong political advantage of education tax credits over vouchers is that they sidestep the
issue of directing public money away from public schools to private schools.
Some educational theorists contend that adding choice, or liberty, to public
schooling will create the requisite environment from which a competitive market will emerge, competition that will force public schools be more effective. The
largest fiscal concern opponents of school choice raise is that privatization of education drains funds from traditional public schools. The financial implications
of expanding the concept of liberty in the school system add to the complexity
of determining if and how additional liberty should be legislated into the U.S.
schooling system.
SUMMARY
Prodded by public policy developments, societal movements, economic fluctuations, and judicial decisions, the field of education finance is playing a more
central role in schooling than ever before. Having forged a link between schooling outcomes and revenue matters, school finance is no longer considered independent of instructional practice and student achievement. Dramatic legal and
legislative decisions have occurred to fortify school finance’s purpose not as secondary to instruction and learning, but rather as an operative precondition.
The transition from prior policy preoccupation with per-pupil spending equity to a new predisposition toward resource sufficiency and system efficiency
has not always been smooth. From every vantage point, be it social, political,
economic, or legal, school finance is a controversial topic. Much tension exists
within the process of generating and appropriating school funds, tension created
by balancing values encapsulated in the core of the American experience—efficiency, equality, and liberty. Differing interpretations of these values is a sustained
contention in the field of education finance that shows no signs of diminishing.
Further Reading: Callahan, R., 1962, Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the
social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press; Cubberley, E. P., 1906, School funds and their apportionment, New
York: Teachers College Press; Huerta, L., & d‘Entremont, C., in press, Education tax

Foreign Language Education
credits in a post-Zelman era: Legal, political and policy alternatives to vouchers? Education Policy 21(1), 73–109; Peterson, Paul E., ed., 2006, Choice and competition in
American education, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

James W. Guthrie and Christina Hart

FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
A distinction is commonly made between second and foreign languages.
Second languages, e.g., English for a Spanish-speaking migrant worker in the
United States or French for the child of an Arabic-speaking immigrant to France,
are those learned (or not) by immigrants or other residents that are used as a
medium of wider communication in their new environment. Foreign languages,
e.g., Chinese, German, or Arabic for native speakers of English or French in
Canada, and English, French, or Japanese for native speakers of Spanish in Mexico, are those that are not languages of wider communication in the surrounding
society and are studied at school or learned some other way.
WHY LANGUAGES SHOULD MATTER IN SCHOOLS
Geopolitical forces make both second and foreign language education of considerable importance in the twenty-first century. To begin with, with the sad
exception of those living in more than usually repressive states, the advent of
better and cheaper systems of transportation means that people move about a
lot more than they did 50 years ago. Frequently, the movement is for positive
reasons and voluntary, e.g., for higher education, marriage, tourism, and employment opportunities. All too often, however, the reasons are negative and the
movement involuntary, as when individuals or large groups are forced to flee
the ravages of war, drought, famine, disease, abject poverty, or ethnic, religious,
and political persecution. In all the former cases save tourism, functional L2
proficiency is a must, and even for the tourist, it can help. In the latter cases, the
vast majority of migrants have to learn one or more new languages if they are to
survive, let alone do well, in their new surroundings.
Even for those not on the move, languages, and so-called “standard” dialects,
are increasingly important. Many ethnolinguistic minorities need proficiency
in the language(s) or dialect(s) of the dominant social, economic, and political group(s) for access to education, social services, and economic or political power. Other powerful forces for change—globalization, mass media, ever
wider access to computers, the Internet, and other new technologies, occupation
by a conquering army, and in many cases, naked cultural imperialism—whether
welcomed or resisted, bring with them exposure to, and in many, a desire to
communicate in, one or more foreign languages, especially those of the era’s
economic and military superpowers, currently, English and Chinese.
Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the teaching of foreign languages in schools is such an important topic in so many countries, and in some
cases, as we shall see, such a controversial one, especially with regard to when

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foreign languages should be introduced and how they should be taught. If anything is surprising, it is that languages are not considered more important in
some countries, particularly English-speaking ones.
DO LANGUAGES IN SCHOOLS MATTER IN PRACTICE?
In practice, the importance attributed to second and foreign language education in schools varies greatly. In many European countries, a foreign language
is compulsory in elementary school, and secondary school students often learn
two or more. In the People’s Republic of China, English is a compulsory subject
in all primary schools, and over 200 million children are studying the language.
In the United States, conversely, while foreign languages were recognized as part
of the “core” curriculum in the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, a 1997 survey
by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, D.C., found that only
about one-third of elementary schools (just a quarter of public elementary schools)
offered a foreign language, usually Spanish, and only 24,000 of roughly 54 million elementary or secondary school children were studying Chinese (27 percent
of the elementary schools offering foreign language instruction taught French,
down from 41 percent a decade earlier). English-speaking countries in general,
notably the United States, the UK, and Australia, tend to ascribe less importance
to foreign languages, perhaps on the tenuous, not to mention arrogant, assumption that “everyone (else) will learn English.” But while many anglophones remain
devoutly monolingual, the pattern is different in officially bilingual (English and
French) Canada, and in countries in Africa and South Asia where English is an
official language, even though not most inhabitants’ native language.
Since 2000, the numbers studying Chinese and other less commonly taught
languages (LCTLs), especially Arabic, in the United States have increased rapidly at both high school and university level, in part due to the sudden injection,
post-9/11, of federal funding into so-called “critical languages,” i.e., those considered critical for U.S. national security. The number of students studying Chinese
in public secondary schools, for example, is estimated to have risen to about
50,000 in 2006, and the College Board recently began offering an Advanced
Placement test in Mandarin. The figures are still tiny, however, compared with
those for English and Chinese as foreign languages in many other countries,
and the overall status of foreign languages in U.S. schools is still low. The 2002
Digest of Education Statistics found only 44 percent of high school students in
the United States studying a foreign language. Of those, 69 percent were taking Spanish and 18 percent French. Less than 1 percent was studying a LCTL.
Even these disappointing figures overestimate U.S. interest in foreign languages.
Many of those studying Spanish are the children of Latino immigrants happy to
find a class made easy for them by the language skills they acquired in the home
as young children. Others attend Spanish bilingual or immersion programs
because of their lack of adequate English skills, i.e., use language programs
originally intended for English-speaking learners of Spanish to access education
through their native language. Moreover, Spanish is arguably no longer a foreign
language at all in many parts of the country.

Foreign Language Education

Considerable lip service is paid to the importance of foreign languages by
American politicians, including some, like the younger Bush, not renowned
for their own language skills. Maintenance of immigrants’ heritage languages,
a potentially vast linguistic resource for the country, is ill-served, however, by
“English-only” legislation at the state level, by the minimal number of bilingual
programs in most heritage languages, and by the passage of the same federal
politicians’ regressive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation—or as it might
be referred to more appropriately, No Child Left Bilingual. Under NCLB, schools
face financial sanctions if students’ average mathematics and reading scores fail
to meet specified minimum standards. “Luxury” subjects like music and foreign
languages are typically among the first to be cut by principals and school districts fighting to avoid penalties.
The relative neglect of foreign languages in K–12 education in the United
States is even worse than the numbers above might suggest. Eighty percent of
elementary school programs offering a language (usually Spanish) aim merely
to provide an introduction to the language and culture, and only 20 percent
something more than that. In the 1997 CAL survey, only 22 percent of secondary schoolteachers reported using the foreign language in the classroom most
of the time. In many cases, foreign language teachers’ own command of the language is inadequate. The same problem was identified in Australia in a 1993
survey of elementary schoolteachers of Japanese, the majority of whom reported
being unable to conduct a whole lesson in the language they were teaching.
Compounding the problem, roughly 80 percent of secondary school and only
20 percent of elementary school foreign language teachers in the United States
are trained as such, and average class size is increasing, a particularly problematic factor for language teaching, where student talking-time is at a premium.
WHEN SHOULD FOREIGN LANGUAGES BE INTRODUCED?
There is overwhelming evidence to the effect that, like the hare and the tortoise, older children and adults progress faster through the early stages of learning
a foreign or a second language, but (assuming sufficient time, motivation, and
opportunity to learn) young children eventually overtake them and do better
in the long run. Research shows, in fact, that age of first exposure to a new language is the single best predictor of eventual proficiency (followed by language
aptitude). Researchers disagree as to the underlying cause or causes of the age
effect, however. Some believe the advantage for children to result from time on
task: Younger starters do better because they study longer. Others think changes
in the brain’s plasticity are implicated, that there are one or more so-called “critical periods” for language learning. Native-like pronunciation, the second group
believe, is impossible unless learning begins well before puberty, and unlikely if
not much earlier, probably before age six. They maintain that native-like grammatical accuracy and native-like knowledge of vocabulary and collocations
(knowing that snakes slither, not slide, a disease is cured, not mended, someone
has a gleam, not a flash, in their eye, etc.) are only possible among learners who
start a language before the mid-teens. Given the right kind of exposure, these

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researchers believe, younger learners can learn foreign or second languages implicitly and potentially reach very high levels of proficiency, the same way they
learn their native languages (successfully), whereas adolescents and adults have
lost that ability and have to rely increasingly on explicit learning, instead, which
is why they often fail, sometimes quite badly. The “critical periods” hypothesis
(CPH) is still controversial, however.
Regardless of whether the CPH turns out to be correct, the data on age differences suggest that if high levels of proficiency in a foreign language are important
in the long run, either to an individual, a family, or to society as a whole, an early
start will be an advantage. This does not mean that high levels cannot be achieved
by those who begin learning later, of course, just that the task they face is likely to
be harder. However, starting young will not help much if the way languages are
traditionally taught continues the same and is not modified for younger learners.
HOW SHOULD FOREIGN LANGUAGES BE TAUGHT?
At both elementary and secondary levels, the typical pattern in school systems
around the world is for languages to be taught for three to five hours a week—far
less than is required for children to obtain worthwhile functional ability. Distressingly often, moreover, they are treated as a school subject like any other, with
the focus on language as object, as if children learn languages the same way they
learn mathematics or geography, as opposed to the way they really learn them,
by using them and hearing and seeing them used, communicatively. In the
United States, only 8 percent of schools offer immersion programs, in which
other subjects, like mathematics or history, are taught through the medium of
another language, a system proven both popular and efficacious in many countries, notably by French immersion programs for English speakers in Canada.
Further compounding the problem, many children who have studied a language
at elementary school are then placed in classes with age peers once they reach
secondary level, even if the latter are complete beginners.
In some countries, however, the picture is gradually changing. Mostly due
to the consensus on age differences, and in some case, due also to acceptance
by education policymakers of the research evidence in support of some version
of a CPH, several countries have recently lowered the age at which children in
state schools start learning a foreign language, e.g., from 11 to 8 for English as
a foreign language in Spain. Private bilingual or immersion kindergarten and
elementary schools are springing up in many parts of the world, partly for the
same reasons. The hope is often that the earlier start will improve on what have
often been rather poor levels of achievement in the past. The problem is that
young school-age children require something different from the traditional
teacher-fronted, chalk and talk, grammar rules and decontextualized drilling
approaches to language teaching suffered by so many generations of adult learners (most of whom do poorly), especially if they are to take advantage of any
supposed implicit learning ability.
Depending on just how young the children are, to the extent possible, it will
typically be far more beneficial to recreate at school the conditions under which

Foreign Language Education

they successfully learned their native language at home. That can mean playing
in, and learning other subjects through, the new language, not learning about
it, as is typically the case, again, with all too many classes for adults. Much theory and research in the field of second language acquisition suggests that, certainly for young children, and for many adolescents and adults, too, languages
are acquired best when they are experienced in the classroom as the medium
of instruction, not as the object of instruction. Therefore, lowering the starting
age for foreign language education will probably achieve very little unless it is
accompanied by changes in the ways languages are taught, with bilingual and,
especially, immersion models clearly favored.
Needless to say, such changes are neither easy nor cheap to accomplish, for bilingual or immersion programs require teachers who are able to conduct whole
lessons in the target language, and who can also teach other subjects, such as
mathematics, science, physical education, theater, or art, through the language.
They also require subject-matter materials written in the language concerned.
Potentially as important as lowering the starting age, therefore, some research
on foreign language education in Quebec schools has shown that intensive instruction over a shorter period can be more effective than long, thin “drip feed”
courses of, say, three hours a week spread over many years.
Even for older school students, those in secondary or high school and college, there is increasing support for more communicatively oriented approaches
to foreign language learning, teaching, and testing. Grammar-focused or drilland-kill courses tend to present artificial-sounding, decontextualized language
models and to decrease student motivation to the point that many drop languages altogether. Such approaches fail to show students how the target language is really used and deny them opportunities for rich, stimulating input
from which to learn it. More and more second language acquisition research
has shown that not just young children, but older learners, too, acquire much
of a language through experiencing it used communicatively, and by using it
with others, however poorly at first, perhaps working with the teacher and interacting with other classmates as they collaborate on problem solving in small
groups. Realistic, meaningful, attention-holding samples of the language provide better input for acquisition. Communicative interaction from the very early
stages, with errors regarded as an inevitable by-product of early attempts to communicate, not as something to be avoided or “corrected” as soon as they occur,
improves motivation and stimulates attention. Students talk to learn, and learn
by doing, as they work collaboratively on intellectually stimulating problemsolving tasks. Instead of learning about a language in preparation for using it to
communicate some day, they learn by communicating from the get-go.
SUMMARY
Second and foreign languages have probably never been as important for so
many people and for as many reasons as they are now in the early years of the
twenty-first century. As a result, while the United States, the UK, and Australia lag behind in some respects, foreign languages have become a high priority

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in school systems in most industrialized countries, with English and, increasingly in many countries, Chinese, the two most widely taught. One indication
of the importance attached to foreign language capacity at both the individual
and the national level is the trend towards earlier introduction of a compulsory foreign language in elementary school in many state school systems, with
another language often added in secondary school. An early start is also supported by research showing that younger learners may start slower, but, given
sufficient opportunity, ultimately achieve higher levels of proficiency. An earlier
start, alone, however, is no guarantee of better results. The way languages are
taught needs to change, especially, but not only, for younger students. Far less
overt attention needs to be paid to grammatical accuracy and error correction
in the early stages, which can easily reduce motivation and is largely misplaced,
in any case, and greatly increased emphasis given to opportunities for creative
language use in intellectually stimulating communicative lessons, where what
children say is valued and validated as much or more than how they say it.
Further Reading: Baker, C., 2006, Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism,
4th ed., Clevedon: Multilingual Matters; Doughty, C. J., & Long, M. H., 2003,
September, Optimal psycholinguistic environments for distance foreign language learning, Language Learning and Technology, 7(3), 50–80, retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu;
Hyltenstam, K., & Abrahamsson, N., 2003, Maturational constraints in second language
acquisition, in C. J. Doughty, & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 539–588), Oxford: Blackwell; Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N., 2006, How
languages are learned, New York: Oxford University Press; Long, M. H., & Doughty,
C. J., eds., in press, Handbook of second and foreign language teaching, Oxford: Blackwell; Rhodes, N. C., & Branaman, L. E., 1999, Foreign language instruction in the United
States: A national survey of elementary and secondary schools, Washington, DC: Center
for Applied Linguistics.

Michael H. Long
FOUNDATIONS AND SCHOOLS
Foundations’ involvement in K–12 education in the United States has a long
history, from foundation efforts to help establish universal education in the latter
parts of the nineteenth century to more recent programs to reform or even transform school systems. Throughout, foundations have played many different roles
and employed various strategies in an attempt to make their contributions have
lasting impact. School issues, however, have often involved political and institutional dimensions that have complicated, limited, and even derailed many foundation endeavors. Nevertheless, at times foundations have played key roles in shaping
crucial aspects of our nation’s education system. Our understanding of modern
school systems is necessarily incomplete without considering their impact.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
From the era following the Civil War to the end of World War II, seven
major foundations devoted significant efforts to public schooling: the Peabody

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Education Fund, the John Slater Fund, Rockefeller’s General Education Board,
the Russell Sage Foundation, the Jeanes Fund, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and the
Rosenwald Fund. Most of these foundations focused their efforts on expanding
and developing the education system in the South and, nationally, for blacks.
Strategically, these foundations gradually moved beyond filling social needs
unmet by the state (the “foundations-as-charity” model) to strategies of conditional giving that stimulated government and citizen support (“partial succor”
strategy) and provided funds to expand administrative capacity (“outsider
within” strategy). These efforts helped to develop public school systems in the
South though, in interaction with changing racial politics, they ultimately had
mixed impacts on the equality of education between blacks and whites. Access
for blacks and poor whites increased but often via segregated schools.
By the middle of the twentieth century, a comprehensive public school system
had been largely established and foundation goals shifted from increasing access
to promoting improvement and innovation within the existing system. Because
funding and management of school systems now lay largely in the hands of governments, the success of foundation efforts required political support. Some
foundations funded research and innovation efforts and relied on the federal government to take such initiatives to scale (the “research-development-diffusionimplementation” strategy). One example was the Rockefeller-funded General
Education Board, which attempted, with relatively little success, to develop and
promote a national high school curriculum. Such efforts proved to be difficult as
successful diffusion required governmental cooperation, and the political nature
of the issues often derailed cooperation.
The publication of A Nation at Risk report in 1983 brought further changes in
the political and fiscal environment of education. In the context of increased international competition, the report framed public education as a national crisis,
and businesses and foundations were called upon to play a more central role in
helping to reform the nation’s public school system. In this context, foundations
began to take critical stances toward the government’s role in the provision of
public education. This focus on education reform has continued and has recently
been accompanied by a change in the landscape of foundations involved in elementary and secondary education. Older foundations such as Ford, Carnegie,
and Rockefeller are ceding prominence to newer foundations such as the Gates
and Walton foundations. These newer actors have tended to adopt “catalyzing”
strategies that attempt to mobilize new sets of actors that can pressure for systemic transformations, with the goal of stimulating waves of change in deeply
institutionalized public school systems.
CURRENT SCENE
Since the 1980s, foundations have paid greater attention to K–12 education. Based on a sample of grants from large foundations, the Foundation
Grants Index (created by the Foundation Center) estimates that grants given
specifically for elementary and secondary education rose from approximately
3 percent of total foundation grants in 1980 to 3.5 percent in 1989, and then to

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4.5 percent in 1998. Over this time, foundations have also become more directly
involved in school reform efforts. Major initiatives by prominent donors such
as the Annenberg and Gates foundations have increased the visibility of such
efforts. According to Jay Greene (see Hess, 2005), as of 2002 the annual total of
private giving to K–12 education was approximately $1.5 to $2 billion. Although
impressive, this sum is dwarfed by the $427 billion of public money spent on
elementary and secondary schools each year.
The current philanthropic landscape in the K–12 education sector is characterized by geographical concentration among both the foundations and the
recipients. In particular, the largest donors and major recipients of grants for
K–12 education cluster in a few major U.S. cities and states (i.e., large cities in
New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Washington, Pennsylvania, etc.) While
many of the prominent foundations give nationally, others focus almost exclusively on their home regions—for instance, the Lilly Foundation concentrates its
educational giving in Indiana, and the Albertson Foundation similarly focuses
on Idaho. Numerous smaller, community foundations are also active in K–12
education, though the total sums of their grants and their geographic distribution are not well documented by Foundation Center data.

Table F.1
2001

Top 20 U.S. Foundations Awarding Grants for Elementary and Secondary Education in
Foundation Name

State

Dollar
Amount

No. of
Grants

1. Lilly Endowment Inc.
2. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
3. The Annenberg Foundation
4. Walton Family Foundation, Inc.
5. J. A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Inc.
6. The Ford Foundation
7. Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds
8. Carnegie Corporation of New York
9. J. Bulow Campbell Foundation
10. The Brown Foundation, Inc.
11. John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
12. The Packard Humanities Institute
13. Bank of America Foundation, Inc.
14. Oberkotter Foundation
15. Chicago Annenberg Challenge Foundation
16. The New York Community Trust
17. Barr Foundation
18. The Pew Charitable Trusts
19. Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
20. The Goizueta Foundation

IN
WA
PA
AR
ID
NY
NY
NY
GA
TX
FL
CA
NC
PA
IL
NY
MA
PA
MI
GA

$152,820,849
135,411,411
64,551,230
29,269,938
24,902,326
23,731,489
21,305,000
20,757,000
16,000,000
15,802,082
14,275,300
13,280,388
12,530,482
11,975,856
11,331,874
10,961,059
10,891,563
10,827,000
10,711,089
10,407,800

68
124
69
152
111
106
89
24
56
37
29
94
61
74
178
27
10
53
27

Source: The Foundation Center (www.fdncenter.org/fc_stats)

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In terms of purpose, Foundation Center data for 2001 suggest that the area of
school reform attracts approximately 22 percent of funding and is dominated by
large grants from large foundations. Additional purposes include direct grants
to schools and school systems as well as support for teacher education, special
education, reading initiatives, private school endowments, scholarships, and
various other school programming.
FOUNDATION IMPACTTHEORIES OF CHANGE
AND IMPLEMENTATION
To understand how foundations attempt to create impact in schools and
school reform, given the limited size of their grants relative to public spending, it is useful to consider general theories of change about educational reform
that inform both philanthropy and public policy. These are summarized in
Table F.2.
Foundations’ strategies toward school reform have tended to be based—either
explicitly or implicitly—on these theories of change, and ultimately, a foundation’s
theory of change must be relatively accurate if its initiatives are to have a chance
at impacting in the desired ways. Foundations are, however, not exclusively tied

Table F.2

General Theories of Change Underlying Contemporary Education Reform Efforts
Theory of Change

Recent Examples

1. Change will follow from extra resources
and increased ﬂexibility

• The Lilly Endowment’s Marion County
Public and Private School Initiatives
• J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation
• The Annenberg Challenge
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• The Broad Foundation’s support for
governance and school leadership
• The No Child Left Behind Act (signed
into law in 2002): Key features include
the annual testing of students,
requirements for schools to achieve
“adequate yearly progress” regarding
student proﬁciency levels, and increased
accountability for schools.
• Walton Family Foundation

2. Change requires the provision of
expertise, technical assistance, and social
support from outside the school system
3. Change requires greater centralization,
enhanced control, and explicit standards
(i.e., “standards-based reform”)

4. Change will follow from market-like
systems of choice, driven by the
preferences and judgments of parents and
students as consumers of educational
services
5. Change requires reshaping current
political alignments in school systems

• Alliances between foundations and
mayors or superintendents
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Philadelphia Annenberg Challenge

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to single strategies, but employ different variations and combinations. Within
the Annenberg Challenge, for example, the Chicago project was controlled by a
consortium outside the school system that was sometimes at odds with school
district leadership, particularly after a strong move toward recentralization engineered by Mayor Daley. In Philadelphia, by contrast, the Annenberg Challenge mobilized an alliance of nonprofit organizations and philanthropists with
school district leadership. In many cases, greater experience with educational
giving has pushed foundations to pay more attention to local educational politics. Thus, in advancing its program of small high schools, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation has come to require strong commitments from—and trust
in—school superintendents.
Both philanthropic experience and public policy research suggest that foundations need to focus not only on the design of their initiatives but also on the
process of implementation. In this regard, foundations are in a position similar
to that of government agencies attempting to implement public policies adopted
and funded at one level of government but requiring cooperation from other
levels and actors to produce results. In both instances, the funding entity is an
outsider that is attempting to leverage change without provoking hostility among
the insiders whose cooperation is necessary for successful implementation. Foundation efforts to promote systemic educational reform may be resisted by teachers and administrators who wish to maintain professional autonomy, by local
interests that wish to maintain control of their neighborhood school, by parents
and students who prefer traditional pedagogies, etc. The difficulty of striking
a balance between reform and cooperation complicates implementation, as
does the challenge of forging cooperative agreements among multiple parties
(including nonprofits, school districts, teacher unions, individual schools, etc.).
In Pressman and Wildavsky’s (1984) influential study of a federal economic development grant to the city of Oakland, for instance, they make the arithmetic
point that, even if there is an 80 percent probability that any single agreement
needed for successful implementation is made, the probability of final agreement
falls below 50 percent as soon as four agreements are needed.
In addition to the politics of implementation, foundations often find that their
impact is contingent on the design of the implementation process. Brian Rowan
et al. (2004) suggest that a clear specification of the initiative and provisions for
an adequate infrastructure for implementation increase the chances that school
reform initiatives will be successfully implemented. Furthermore, the initiative
is unlikely to be successfully implemented if it is at cross purposes with those
responsible for implementing it. If, for instance, teachers see the initiative as
conflicting with their views on instructional purposes, they are unlikely to faithfully implement it or may alter it for their own purposes.
MAJOR INITIATIVES
Given the complexities of design and implementation, foundations’ initiatives
face significant challenges in creating impact in the complex political and social systems of schools. Nevertheless, a number of foundations have undertaken

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major initiatives in K–12 education in recent years. These include the Annenberg Challenge (comprehensive school reform), particular initiatives by the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation (small high schools), and the Walton Family
Foundation (school choice).
The Annenberg Challenge was launched in December 1993 with a $500 million “Challenge to the Nation” from Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. At the
time, it was the largest gift to public education in U.S. history. The Annenberg
Challenge provided grants ranging from $10 to $53 million to nine major urban
areas—Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and South Florida. Following a “partial
succor” strategy, these grants were contingent upon various matching amounts
provided by other nonprofits, businesses, foundations, universities, etc. The remainder of the gift was given as special opportunity grants to other cities, to
establish a national rural challenge, to enhance arts education, and to support
various related institutes and projects. For each of the nine major sites, a local
planning group of education, foundation, community, and business leaders designed and administered the funds to the local public schools. The Annenberg
Foundation gave great discretion to these entities in determining how to use and
implement the funds, so long as the attention was dedicated toward improving
the public school system. Not surprisingly, the success of the Annenberg Challenge has varied greatly from city to city depending not only on the strategies
used but also on the local political and school context. Though the Annenberg
Challenge has left various important legacies, such as increased nonprofit capacity and the creation of networks of schools, there is general consensus that
the Challenge did not lead to large-scale systemic improvement in those public
school systems.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s small high schools initiative is driven
by the goals of increasing high school graduation rates and preparing more students for college, particularly disadvantaged students. To achieve this, the Gates
Foundation sees small high schools as a more effective context in which to provide the relevance, rigor, and relationships (the 3 Rs) that they view as necessary
for success in high school, college, and the workforce. Upon launching their formal education program in 2000, the Gates Foundation has provided large grants
to help create small, innovative high schools and to transform certain large,
underperforming districts into collections of smaller learning communities. In
their grant making, the Gates Foundation has employed a modified “innovation
and diffusion” strategy that involves the grantees directly in the research and
development of the small high schools. The Gates Foundation also attempts to
continuously monitor, evaluate, and refine their initiatives, while simultaneously
focusing on mobilizing advocacy groups and shaping political alliances.
In contrast to many of the other large foundations’ initiatives, the Walton Family Foundation has focused its reform efforts on promoting school choice through
their support of private school scholarships, vouchers, and charter schools. By
fostering choice, the foundation attempts to improve the public school system
through competition. In particular, it has provided thousands of scholarships
to help disadvantaged children exit low-performing public schools to attend

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private schools. The Children’s Scholarship Fund is one of the major organizations the Walton Foundation has helped establish to provide such scholarships.
These initiatives by no means exhaust the many recent foundation efforts in
the realm of elementary and secondary education. They do, however, provide a
brief overview of some initiatives that have captured significant attention and
involved large sums of money. They also illustrate some of the varied approaches
that contemporary foundations are utilizing in their continued attempts to improve America’s education system.
Further Reading: Clemens, E. S., & Lee, L. C., 2008, Catalysts for change? Foundations and
school reform, 1950–2005 in H. K. Anheier & D. C. Hammack, eds. Roles and contributions of American foundations, Washington, DC: Brookings Institutions; Finn Jr., C. E.,
& Kanstoroom, M., 2000, Afterword: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge, in Can
philanthropy fix our schools? Appraising Walter Annenberg’s $500 million gift to public
education, Washington DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Hess, F. M., ed., 2005, The
best of intentions: How philanthropy is reshaping the landscape of K-12 education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press; Pressman, J. L., & Wildavsky, A., 1984 (1973),
Implementation: How great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland; Or, why
it’s amazing that federal programs work at all, this being a saga of the economic development administration as told by two sympathetic observers who seek to build morals on a
foundation of ruined hopes, 3rd ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press; Walters, P. B., & Bowman, E., 2007, Foundations and the making of public education in the United States, 1865–1950 Washington DC: Aspen Foundation.

Linda C. Lee and Elisabeth S. Clemens

GED (GENERAL EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT)
CREDENTIAL
The General Educational Development (GED) credential is widely perceived as
an alternative to a high school diploma, though it is questionable whether the
GED credential is widely recognized as equivalent to a high school diploma.
Three interrelated themes of controversy surround the GED credential: the
GED exam, the use of the GED in American education, and the value of the
GED credential.
The GED is offered throughout the United States and its territories and
Canada and is sponsored by the GED Testing Service of the higher-education
lobbyist group the American Council on Education (ACE). Many are surprised to learn that the GED is not a public-run institution, but rather, like the
SAT, is a privately run exam corroborated by private and public institutions.
Thus, colleges, employers, and the military have no civic requirement to accept
or support GED earners, nor are they compelled by anything beyond public
perception to view the GED as an equivalent to the high school diploma.
A series of five parts, testing proficiency in mathematics, reading, science,
social science, and writing, the GED is administered by official GED testing sites
that are overseen by provincial, state, or territorial governments. Each year, the
exam is administered by the ACE to a set of graduating high school seniors in
order to establish the passing score. In order to pass the GED exam, the GED
candidate must meet or achieve a higher score than the top 60 percent of high
school diploma earners on each of the five parts. In the United States in 2005,
680,874 people took at least one GED test; 587,689 people completed the battery
of tests; and 423,714 passed the battery of tests, earning a GED credential.
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In the United States, one in seven secondary school completion credentials is a
GED. In cities like New York City, this number has grown in the past ten years
to be one in four. Individuals from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds
and who identify across diverse racial and ethnic categories earn the GED credential. The credential is earned by more men than women, and is earned by
men and women of many ages, although between the years of 1975 and 2000,
the percentage of youth GED earners aged 19 and younger grew by 11 percent,
while the percentage of GED earners aged 25 and older declined by 8 percent. In
the United States in 2005, of the GED earners who reported their age, 45 percent
were aged 16 to 19; 26 percent were aged 20 to 24; and 30 percent were aged 25
and older.
THE GED EXAM
The first GED exams were developed in the 1940s to accommodate returning WWII veterans whose secondary schooling was interrupted by military
duty. Colleges and universities used the GED exam, based on the Iowa Test
of Educational Development, as the major tool for evaluating the 2.2 million
veterans who entered higher education under the GI bill. Throughout the years
immediately following, the GED quickly became an exam for civilians rather
than veterans. While established as an exam for adults, the rise in social capital
and market value of a high school degree coupled with increasingly higher
regimentation in secondary schooling has contributed to the growing population of teenagers who opt out of a traditional high school diploma for a GED. In
its over 60-year history, over 15.2 million people have earned the credential.
Over the years, the exam has seen many revisions, the most historic occurring
in 2002. The ACE revised the exam to reflect contemporary issues of citizenship
and include a more extensive written essay component. Two concerns that educators raised around the revisions centered around the potential leaning toward
patriotism of the exam material and how an extensive written essay might exclude speakers of first languages other than English and international candidates
from earning a GED. Impressions that the 2002 version would be more difficult
to pass than the 2001 version generated a massive wave of GED takers in 2001
and a reported drop in takers in 2002.
Perhaps more controversial were the two new, but largely under-wraps,
developments put forth by the ACE that accompanied the revision: corporate involvement in the development of the exam and changes in reporting
emphasis.
Corporate representatives largely informed the 2002 revision in order to
reconnect the qualifications of GED earners with the needs of corporate employers. The new GED exam was developed with the help of a committee featuring representatives from businesses and organizations such as Taco Bell,
Safeway, Motorola, and the National Alliance of Businesses, at least in part because of a history of employer complaints about the quality of GED holders. An
analysis of this corporate involvement put forth by the Collective of Researchers

GED (General Educational Development) Credential |

on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD) contends that the 2002
revision of the GED seeks to align GED earners to low-wage jobs rather than
higher education.
In addition, the 2002 revision included a change in the ACE’s reporting practices
around the GED. The General Educational Development Testing Service of the
American Council on Education shifted the focus of their annual statistical reports from a focus on “Who Took the GED Tests?” to “Who Passed the GED
Tests?”
THE USE OF THE GED IN AMERICAN EDUCATION
Historically, the GED has been seen as synonymous with a high school diploma. It has been so strongly viewed and valued as an equal alternative that it
was not until over 50 years after the GED’s inception that GED earners were differentiated from high school diploma earners in U.S. census data. Though this
change took place in 1998, GED earners are most often still calculated as high
school graduates in statistics of local, state, and federal education systems and
agencies. For instance, the 1998 Education at a Glance report put forth by the
Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) puts the
United States in the bottom third of 24 industrialized countries in secondary
school completion, whereas if the GED is included, the United States would be
among the top half, where most Americans would expect to place. The subsequent shock that rippled through U.S. popular media in response to the report
demonstrates the GED contribution to a myth of declining dropout rates and
a superior American education system. The GED is used to mask dismal secondary school completion numbers not only at the international and national
scales, but also at the school level. Federal mandates such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and state accountability (such as the state-mandated exit exams
required in over 20 states such as Alaska, New York, Florida, Louisiana, Texas,
and New Mexico and, as of 2006, four new states including California and Arizona) put a new kind of pressure on schools to achieve high test scores at any
cost. Under NCLB and state administered high-stakes standardized testing (and
in some cases, offerings of financial bonuses to administrative individuals who
achieve utmost compliance with these mandates) schools benefit by siphoning
out academically weak and/or disruptive students. Schools also benefit by the
widespread practice of removing students who are pushed out or leave school
for GED programs from school rosters, but not counting them as “dropouts.”
Because of the lopsided enforcement of NCLB, schools are held more highly accountable to success in standardized tests than success in student retention and
reducing dropout rates.
CREDD’s research in New York City reveals the ways in which this pressure
is expressed by both school personnel and by students. A surprising number of
current and pushed-out students that participated in CREDD’s Gateways and
Get-aways study reported being advised of the GED option by school personnel as early as the seventh and eighth grades, up to two years before ever setting

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foot in high school. This, combined with students’ sensing that “school is not for
me” as early as the fifth grade, has exacerbated the general school cultural belief
that students who will not perform well on standardized tests should not be in
school.
Struggling students, seeing state graduation exams like the New York Regents
around the corner, make an early exit for the GED, mistakenly believing that they
are merely swapping one set of tests for another, without having to sit through
four or more years of high school. CREDD’s research also reveals that this is
a largely uniformed or misinformed decision, as many GED-seeking youth
reported that they had no prior knowledge of the rules pertaining to age and
length of time out of high school that delay youths’ eligibility for the exam, or
the months and sometimes years of preparation required that may delay youths’
passing of this rigorous exam. Further, in the climate of standardized testing
described above, and in a school culture of ever-shrinking genuine alternatives
to an exit-exam based curriculum, for many students it is a forced decision, a
nondecision to get out of a schooling situation in which they have been systematically excluded from success.
In these ways, a controversy in the use of the GED can be understood as an
overuse or abuse of the GED option as a cover for pushing out unwanted students.
Recent immigrant students who are speakers of languages other than English are
often dissuaded from enrolling in high school and pushed toward GED programs.
These common, yet covert practices concretize the de facto reliance on the GED
as a last alternative to contemporary schooling, effectively getting school leaders
off the hooks of figuring out ways to honor all students’ rights to attend school
until the age of 21; to develop and implement meaningful curricula, pedagogies,
and assessments; and to reassess the purpose of schooling.
THE VALUE OF THE GED CREDENTIAL
Across most of the literature around the GED, the most contentious controversy is connected to the value of the credential. The discordant analyses that
mark the credential as “meaningful,” “meaningless,” “valuable,” “depleted,” and
as representing an education or just another piece of paper spur from a range
of academic and journalistic disciplines and as a whole point to the GED as a
contested degree, likely due at least in part to its status as the last alternative
standing in many school systems, as described above. Nearly all of the reports
analyze the value of the GED from a higher-education value or a market-value
perspective. From these perspectives, the value of the GED is questionable, or
better, complicated.
Over 66 percent of those who seek their GED cite access to higher education
as their major motivator. However GED earners who enter associate’s degree programs are half as likely as high school diploma earners to complete their degrees,
and only 2–8 percent of GED earners who seek bachelor’s degrees attain them,
as compared to 20 percent of high school diploma earners. The 1992 National
Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) indicates that GED earners are equal or more
achieved than high school diploma earners in terms of literacy and cognition, so

GED (General Educational Development) Credential |

the fewer numbers of GED earners who complete their higher education goals
can be understood as an issue of the value of the GED credential as diminished
in comparison to the high school diploma. In many ways, it appears that the
difference in values of these credentials in higher education has to do with socialization and the ways in which those who complete high school are more
cogently socialized for a college classroom that mirrors secondary schooling.
Obvious perhaps, this aspect of socialization is important to make transparent
in any analysis or process that seeks to determine the purposes of secondary and
higher education.
Similarly, GED earners do not experience the same rates of success in the U.S.
labor market. Much of the literature does not support the GED as a distinguishing factor in getting a job. Employment rates are much higher for high school
diploma holders than for GED recipients. Men with GEDs have higher jobturnover rates than men who have “dropped out,” and actually do not work as
often. This is not true for women who have GEDs. Overall, high school diploma
earners work more and have lower job turnovers than GED earners. While
GED earners’ yearly wages are 8 percent higher than those of dropouts, they are
9–12 percent lower than high school diploma earners’ wages.
The ACE’s decision to include employer perspectives on the 2002 revision of
the GED exam was due in part to employers’ complaints about the work habits
or the socialization of GED earners. Informing both the material covered and
preparation practices for the GED exam has been a way for corporations to access and mold a future generation of workers, socializing them to meet corporate needs.
In many ways, the value of the GED is rooted in public perception. For instance, in 1992, the army stopped accepting recruits with GEDs, citing that GED
earners’ attrition rates were double those of high school diploma earners and
almost indiscernible from rates of high school dropouts. However, the current
unpopular, multifront, “no end in sight” war has invited a recruitment crises for
the U.S. military, and youth report that “help in getting a GED” is a part of the
propositions of military recruiters.
Because the value of the GED is linked to public perception, the value is
vulnerable to racist and misogynist attitudes. The 1992 NALS study established
the strikingly similar literacies of GED earners and high school diploma earners
across the board, but that employers continue to stereotype GED holders based
on race, and further that white men have greater access to both higher-paying
jobs and higher-quality GED preparation programs than do white women, black
men and women, and Latina/o men and women. Thus, the GED will probably
work as an equivalent to the high school diploma for white young men, but
probably will not work as an equivalent to the high school diploma for white
young women and young women and men of color.
That the higher educational value and market value are so susceptible to admissions officers’ and employers’ subjectivities is highly problematic. As part of
the Gateways and Get-aways project, CREDD surveyed 50 of the 2006 U.S. News
and World Report’s Top 100 Colleges and learned that while most but not all
did not specifically exclude GED earners from applying, it was overwhelmingly

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rare for a GED earner to be admitted. CREDD also surveyed 100 employers,
many appearing on the 2006 Fortune 500 Best Companies to Work For list, others common employers cited as ideal employers by young people. While GED
earners were hired, it was difficult for human resources representatives of these
companies to provide instances of GED earners in leadership positions.
The higher educational value and market value approaches fail to answer a
crucial question: Why are so many young people and adults flocking to a seemingly depleted credential? Because these approaches to the valuation of the GED
are limited by their exclusion of youth and adult GED earners’ voices and experiences, they miss the main component of the value of the GED credential
entirely. By moving to a frame that considers the lived value of the GED, a whole
series of otherwise unseen explanations unfolds. CREDD’s research has that the
value of the GED is not only in it as a gateway to higher employment and higher
education, but also is in being a get-away from dehumanizing high schools. The
Gateways and Get-aways study had revealed the ways in which the GED holds
a lived value for GED earners in bringing them a sense of accomplishment and
completion, an educational setting decidedly unlike school, a way to move on in
life, and most importantly, a way to get away from a school setting that is “eating
(them) alive.”
CONCLUSION
The GED can be read as cultural artifact, as political, as acquiescent, as subversive, as cover-up and at the same time as a magnifying lens for what is and
isn’t working in secondary schooling. In these ways, it is a powerful public space,
and as other public spaces are, is vulnerable to the privatized, corporatized,
militarized political economies that seek to streamline, anaesthetize, and close
down genuine, satisfying, sustainable options for youth and disenfranchised
communities. The use(s) and value(s) of the GED are supremely tenuous, yet
hold profound implications for the purposes of schooling and learning when in
nexus with the lived value of the GED.
It is important to read the controversies surrounding the GED not as
condemnation, but as evidence of the way in which the GED is a powerful yet
punished alternative to the high school diploma. It is important to read a student’s
jettisoning from school toward the GED exam as a critique of schooling. Finally,
it is important to read the overuse and abuse of the GED option in secondary
schooling as the canary in the mine, indicating the need for multiple paths to
secondary school completion, not just one exit to the mine.
Further Reading: Boesel, D., Alsalam, N., & Smith, T., 1998. Educational and labor market
performance of GED recipients, Washington DC: U.S. Dept. of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, National Library of Education; General Education
Testing Service, 2006, Who passed the GED tests? 2005 statistical report. Washington,
DC: GED Testing Service, American Council on Education; Quinn, L., 2002, An institutional history of the GED, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Employment and Training Institute; Rivera-Batiz, F., 1995, Vocational education, the general
equivalency diploma, and urban and minority populations, Education & Urban Society,

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27(3), 313. Smith, T. 2003, Who values the GED? An examination of the paradox underlying the demand for the General Educational Development credential, Teachers College Record 185(3), 375–415.

Eve Tuck

GENDER
The persistence of “gender turf battles” in the battleground of the schools has
two main features. On the one hand, they often tend to obscure and divert attention from class and race pressures and inequalities that, if properly addressed,
would take care of many problems falsely masquerading as gender issues. On
the other hand, gender inequalities are real. The identification of and the struggles against their perpetuation have illuminated much about the ways gender
has constructed schooling, and schooling gender, over the years.
As a central issue for our homes, our workplaces, and our culture, gender
equity is a perfect example of concerns that both occupy and extend beyond
classrooms and schools. Women have made major inroads into almost every
previously male-dominated career and now make up half of the country’s workforce. Yet they still earn little more than two-thirds of every male-earned dollar and are responsible for the bulk of housework and child care, even when
they work full-time. The “double day,” the persistence of sexual harassment and
domestic violence, and the dominant cultural stereotypes of “the feminine” all
show us that over 25 years after the failed passage of the ERA, women are still
“the second sex.” While these are problems and barriers for white middle-class
women, they are worse for working-class women and women of color.
These contradictory patterns may also be seen in schools. In 1972, the same
year that Congress narrowly failed to approve the Equal Rights Amendment,
Title IX, mandating equal treatment of girls and boys in all school programs, was
passed. Ever since, girls have been in shop classes and boys in domestic science
courses; and, perhaps more importantly, women’s teams have flourished in many
sports. Many credit women’s sports for producing several generations of young
women with increased abilities, ambitions, and self-confidence both on and off
the field. Yet gender (and racial and sexual) stereotyping in the classroom, the
curriculum, and the school community remains an issue with many facets. While
formal equalities have been set up by Title IX and other legislation, the working
dynamics of gender and other societal inequalities are harder to change.
Schools are part and parcel of society. Since schools both reflect and contribute to the social construction of gender and other cultural norms, and because
gender relations are such a central dynamic of all societal relations, it is useful to sort out the debates about gender issues in terms of wider political and
ideological orientations. The conservative viewpoint emphasizes the maintenance of women’s important traditional roles in the family and the community
and calls for classrooms that stress discipline, character building, and academic
achievement for all children. Liberal-progressives focus on the need for schools

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to promote gender equality as a central feature of a democratic and studentcentered educational philosophy. “Women-centered” approaches look at the
qualities of caring, connectedness, and concern for each other, central values of
the private sphere missing from most classrooms. Finally, a social reconstructionist view emphasizes gender as a key aspect of multifaceted patterns of societal inequalities and suggests how schools and classrooms can promote practices
leading towards a broader agenda of social change.
CONSERVATIVE VIEWS
Conservatives believe that schools should be focused on academics, not the
promotion of a victim mentality, particularly in girls and minority group students. They argue that feminists and other critics offer nothing in the way of
improving individual student progress and indeed offer rhetorical excuses in the
place of the hard work that is needed for all children to succeed. The aim of the
educational system should be to produce well-educated women (and men) and
to support them in whatever career choices they may make, even if they choose
to stay home or pursue traditional jobs and careers such as nursing and teaching. Who else will be our nurses and our teachers and who will stay home with
our children? Girls and young women should be allowed, even encouraged, to
adopt the values, attitudes, and training that will enhance their essential roles
as homemakers, wives, and mothers. These roles are invaluable—they provide a
critical service to American families and to American society.
The main business of schools should be academic achievement. American
students are behind in basic skills, and more and more high school and college
graduates lack exposure to the great works of Western literature, history, and
philosophy. Workers need thorough training in the skills needed to compete in
an increasingly internationalized workforce, and our leaders need a firm grounding in the classics of Western civilization. Instead of steady progress in these
directions, building on the strengths of the past while looking towards a more
prosperous and unified future, schools have fallen victim to a series of foolish
gender and culture wars. The result: a watered-down curriculum in the name of
“multiculturalism” and “gender equity” and the substitution of a social agenda
and “self-esteem building” for the much-needed inculcation of basic skills.
LIBERALPROGRESSIVE VIEWS
Liberal progressive views focus on the need for equality between genders and
on the removal of the barriers to individual success in our schools and elsewhere.
All Americans have equal social, political, and educational rights, and public
institutions have a broad responsibility to guarantee those rights to all. Schools
and workplaces should be places where individuals are encouraged and rewarded
to do their best, regardless of racial, ethnic, disability, age, or gender differences.
The past has bequeathed a legacy of discrimination and inequality, which laws,
public policies, and educational systems have often reflected and perpetuated.
Schools must become places where all students, boys and girls, are helped to

Gender |

do their best, where they are treated above all as individuals, and where the
discriminatory practices of the past have no place. In a fully gender-equal society, neither women nor men would be hindered by sex-role stereotyping from
pursuing a life that draws on their individual talents and leads to personal satisfaction and fulfillment. American society can only benefit from encouraging
all its members to fully explore a range of options and choices, away from the
traditional limitations of gender.
Unfortunately, in spite of the passage of Title IX, school practices have tended
to exacerbate these gender differences rather than challenge them. Thus teachers emphasize differences in the ways that they treat their students. Elementary
schoolteachers give boys much more attention than they give girls, of both positive and negative kinds. Boys are praised for initiative and imagination, girls
for obedience and conformity. Teachers usually discourage cross-gender play,
partly for fear that the girls will get hurt. As for the curriculum, literature texts
include many more male heroes than females, and the social studies curriculum
emphasizes male exploits over female lives and experiences.
In the upper grades, these patterns persist. Girls are still expected to do better in reading and languages, boys in math and science. The curriculum is often
still gender biased as well, with few female authors in English and few female
topics in social studies and history classes. In spite of Title IX, many schools and
school systems emphasize boys’ sports at girls’ expense. Female (and gay and
lesbian) students are often victims of harassment, although many schools are
now instituting sexual harassment policies and LGBT clubs. Finally, at all levels
of schooling, women are still the teachers and men are the administrators. The
vast majority of elementary school teachers are women, and high school teachers tend to be split along gender lines by subject, with women more common
in English and men in math, science, and social studies. The leadership of most
school systems is still predominantly male.
Along with including women’s lives in the curriculum, liberal-progressives
advocate programs to bring women and girls up to speed in math and science, so
that they may take advantage of new and lucrative career options. There should
be more women administrators to be role models for teachers and for students.
Title IX must be stringently enforced, as athletics is a primary setting for the
growth in self-esteem needed for women to compete on an equal basis with
men. Classrooms organized in these ways will produce both men and women
able to take advantage of the full range of opportunities in our society.
“WOMENCENTERED” VIEWS
In American society, as in almost all others, women and men have always
inhabited different spheres of activity and different frames of reference. Women
have been responsible for the private sphere of home, family, and relationships, men for the public sphere of work, politics, and public affairs. Moreover,
women’s inferior place in society and their long association with mothering and
child rearing has rendered them universally vulnerable to male dominance in all
aspects of our life: from economic and political hegemony, to domestic violence,

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to the manipulative controls over our bodies in the form of restricted access to
birth control, media exploitation, and pornography.
These dynamics have profoundly shaped the educational system. Children are
socialized in schools into the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they will need
to succeed in our society—a society where male traits and activities predominate.
Thus competition and individual achievement take precedence over cooperation
and interconnections in the ways that educational practices are organized and
students rewarded. The curriculum is similarly male-centered—topics in literature and social studies emphasize male exploits in the public sphere. Teachers,
who are primarily women because their particular qualities of nurturance well
fit them to work with children, are prevented from responding to the interests
of all their students, particularly girls, by this overwhelmingly male bias. Female
students are also victims of sexual harassment and male bullying in classrooms
and playgrounds.
In the short run, because of the differences between the ways girls and boys
learn and the biases towards boys in many classrooms, it is a good idea in certain
circumstances to institute single-sex classrooms and schools. Girls learn more
math and science in settings where they are not being forced to compete with
boys; some boys learn more with the firmer discipline and absence of feminine
distractions signaled in all-boys classrooms.
In the long run, however, the curriculum content, learning styles, and above
all, the relational values associated with women and their activities and experiences in the world should form a basis for rethinking the educational system.
The lives of women represent a new world of knowledge and creativity, from the
whole range of literary and artistic achievements, to a rich and complex history,
to different perspectives on a number of issues. These values are missing not
only from schools, but from all public institutions, to their great harm. Starting
in schools, we can use the qualities and values associated with women to build a
more humane society.
To conclude, while liberal feminists want to remove the barriers from women
entering into the public sphere, women-centered feminists want to bring to the
public sphere, and to the schools, a badly needed emphasis on the connections
among people needed for democracies to thrive. Diversity can only be valued if
all members of the community are fully heard and learn to care for one another.
SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTIONIST VIEWS
The most important challenge teachers face today is to reach children in
terms of this basic understanding: that all children have gender, race, cultural,
and class positions, that they live in cultural contexts, and that these contexts are shaped by societal dynamics of power and privilege. Teachers ought
to engage with the whole child, build democratic classroom communities based
on the perspectives the children offer, and confront societal inequalities to help
their pupils envision a more just and equitable society. In this perspective, as
Judith Warner indicates, gender is but one dimension of the multiple societal
inequalities enacted and reproduced in schools.

Gender |

Liberal and progressive educators focus too much on individual children and
teachers. They downplay gender differences, think the problem is mainly about
stereotypes, and ignore the sex-based power arrangements on which gender
difference and inequality rest. “Women-centered” theorists are concerned with
women’s oppression and gender difference in ways that liberals are not, but they
ignore differences based on race, class, and culture. Diversities of race, class, and
gender must be addressed in the classroom and connected to issues in the wider
community.
At no time in American history has there been such a gap between the rich
and the poor. It is low wages, rather than feminism, that take women away from
home and children and threaten our so-called “family values.” In the educational
arena, we face disintegrating public schools in many communities and a loss of
public money and support for public education. Community, state, and federal
funding for schools is notoriously inadequate, often due to property tax and
other inequities. Yet the people blamed are often women, such as poor women
of color who have too many children, working mothers who spend too little
time with their children, and women teachers who don’t know how to teach.
Schools, indeed, are places where such prejudices are nurtured. Teachers,
themselves derided in the public consciousness, are encouraged to see many
children as primed for failure; boys who act up are cast as future gang members,
girls as future teenage mothers. Through tracking systems and other practices,
schools reinforce rather than challenge long-standing social class, race, and gender hierarchies. Such scapegoating conceals the fact that it is not the children’s or
teachers’ fault that schools are falling apart. The educational status quo ignores
the societal context that explains the persistence and growth of societal inequalities and blames the hardest-hit victims of poor schooling for their educational
failures.
Differences of gender, race, class, and culture should be understood as bases
for the strength and vitality of any culture and any community. Yet in our
schools today, they represent differential positions in societal hierarchies of inequality. They are used as excuses for why children don’t do well and form the
bases for hierarchies within the school, whether in terms of the tracking system or the grounds for popularity on the playground. Thus schools reinforce
inequalities and provide excuses for them, through an individualized rhetoric
of competition and achievement. The organization of many school subjects reflects and reinforces these societal status hierarchies of gender, race, and class. In
the case of mathematics, for example, women and members of racial minority
groups are still routinely assumed to be incapable of and uninterested in the
kind of advanced work that is a prerequisite for many prestigious occupations.
All students should have access to all types of subjects. (For example, introductory algebra, a gateway subject for advanced math, is offered not offered in
working-class and poor middle schools to any students.) Both inside and outside the classroom, teachers should help their students understand how gender
structures kids’ lives in all areas of school.
Children reflect and reproduce the gender and racial/cultural roles they learn
through family, school, and the culture at large. Schools must confront such

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issues as the toleration of sexual harassment and homophobia, the valorization of
traditional masculinities and femininities in the guise of football and cheerleading, and all the ways gender and other stereotypes structure school life. Indeed,
a power analysis of these dynamics could be central to the curriculum. How
do gender differences provide a template and a justification for other forms of
inequality? How do race and gender stereotypes intersect, so that white girls’
passivity is set against the supposed aggressiveness of black girls and all boys? By
forcing all kids to face such expectations as they negotiate their identities, such
prejudices limit all children’s potential.
Schools and teachers must begin to “center” children in all curriculum, pedagogies, and school cultures. Teachers, students, and administrators can work for
reforms such as “detracking” and heterogeneous grouping, as well as setting up
committees devoted to multiracial and antihomophobia training and other initiatives. They can also begin to reach out to parents and citizens in the wider
community, who can then begin to see the schools as centers for community
building and renewal.
THE CENTRALITY OF GENDER IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS
If we began looking at schooling through the lenses of gender awareness,
coupled with attentiveness to race, ethnic, and cultural factors as well, we could
see schools in a completely different way. Sexist assumptions and practices,
enforced by gender differences and gender expectations, shape the ways we
think about our schools, our teachers, and our children in schools, and some of
these assumptions need to change.
As a prime example of a needed change in thinking, what would happen to
our ideas and hopes about schools and classrooms if we understood the multiple
implications of the fact that most teachers are women, and that furthermore
the idea of the teacher in our society is that she is a woman? (About 80 percent
of our elementary teachers are women, about 50 percent of high school teachers are women, and the majority of school administrators are men.) In the first
place, we could begin to see why teachers are poorly paid and devalued by
most people. After all, teaching is a women’s profession, like nursing, and of
course, mothering. Many people believe, without even realizing that they hold
this belief, that teaching is easy and comes naturally to women because of their
inborn capacities for caretaking and nurturance. Therefore, the training that
they need is minimal, and the pay they deserve is the same. College professors,
who are of course teachers as well (and are mostly male), are respected on the
other hand mainly for what they know, not how well they convey it. In other
words, good teachers are either experts in their field who know their subject
matter, which is what males who dominate the upper grades and colleges are
noted for, or kindly nurturers, which is what women who dominate the younger
grades are noted for. The idea of pedagogy as a demanding intellectual activity is
absent from educational discourses.
What are some results of this kind of thinking on our teachers and our
schools? How could some peoples’ sexism and lack of understanding of how

Gender |

demanding teaching is, intellectually as well as socially and psychologically,
actually affect educational policy? Consider the following:
• In many schools, the curriculum and even the pedagogies are not determined by the teachers, but by districts and curriculum coordinators.
Teachers are not presumed to be knowledgeable and skilled enough to plan
curriculum on their own. It is questionable whether this kind of contempt
would be visited on a profession dominated by or even participated in by
men.
• Schools today are utterly dominated by NCLB testing programs; and
increasingly teachers must take teacher tests to be certified. Passing these
tests has become a substitute for undertaking formal teacher education
programs, so that people with little or no classroom training in education
whatsoever enter the classroom—and, frustrated, often leave after one or
two years.
• Teachers are the least well paid of any professional group, and none of the
current reform initiatives is addressing this issue.
Perhaps most harmful, if teachers were supported and respected for the work
they do, there might be more attention given to the actual challenges they face
in schools. The shocking conditions in urban schools might come into view: the
persisting patterns of segregation (both between and within schools), sharply
unequal funding, burgeoning class sizes, and inferior materials and equipment.
Indeed, this emphasis on testing as the main facet of today’s “education reform”
initiatives might lead one to think that education reform is not about what
schools really need; it is about blaming children themselves and their largely
female teachers for the failures in our schools. The result of these kinds of
prejudices and policies is that teachers are not given the support and the training
they need to function as thoughtful and autonomous experts in helping all their
students learn. To see teachers as “transformative intellectuals,” as the educator
Henry Giroux puts it, is to imagine how they can bring the necessary combination of intellectual rigor, culturally relevant knowledge, and personal sensitivity
to all their pupils.
Inside the classroom teachers need to be aware of and knowledgeable about
their own and their students’ gender and cultural identities and assumptions.
This includes a keen and informed understanding of their own race and gender
positions and the likelihood that, as middle-class professionals, they inhabit a
privileged status in relation to many of their students. Social reconstructionist
teachers challenge societal inequalities reflected in their classrooms and make
sure the curriculum contains explicit references to inequality and resistance. In
classrooms where social and cultural differences are not swept under the table,
but in fact are confronted and dealt with, crises of disagreement or misunderstandings form part of ongoing journeys of exploration with their students. It
is difficult to teach in this way, but much more difficult and costly to teach as
if sexism, racism, and other forms of prejudice and unequal treatment did not
exist. In spite of today’s barriers and obstacles, of racism and elitism as well as
sexism, it is in the classrooms of individual teachers, helped by allies in their

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schools and communities, that our best hopes lie for resolving “gender turf battles” and building democracy.
Further Reading: Feminist teacher, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, Box 1829, Brown
University, Providence, RI 02912, retrieved November 22, 2006, from http://www.
uwec.edu/wmns/Feminist Teacher/; Raised by women, Rethinking schools, retrieved
November 22, 2006, from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/; Sadker, D., & Sadker, M.,
1994, Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat girls, New York: Scribners;
Schniedewind, N., & Davidson, E., 2006, Open minds to equality: A sourcebook of
learning activities to affirm diversity and promote equity, 3rd ed., Boston: Allyn and
Bacon; Woyshner, C., & Gelfond, H. S., eds., 1998, Minding women: reshaping the
educational realm, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review.

Frances A. Maher

GIFTED AND TALENTED EDUCATION
The field of gifted and talented education is relatively new, with the need
for such programs heightened after the launching of Sputnik. After losing this
space war, U.S. decision makers, in a reactionary fashion, began to devote more
attention and resources to students who might be able to place the United States
first in various global competitions. It has been asserted or argued that gifted
students, often defined as those in the top 3 to 5 percent on an intelligence or
achievement test, are in the best position to keep the United States competitive.
Despite this assertion, gifted education, like all of education, is ripe with controversy. As James Gallagher has noted, America has a love-hate relationship with
gifted education. During competitions and times of global challenge, Americans
love gifted education; at other times, gifted education is devalued and disparaged, as will be discussed later.
There are three key concerns and controversies surrounding the field of
gifted education: (1) terminology and definition issues; (2) service and programming issues; and (3) diversity issues. All three issues are longstanding, with
seemingly little possibility for change in the near future. That is to say, not all of
these concerns and controversies are easily resolvable; however, there are some
possibilities for addressing them.
TERMINOLOGY AND DEFINITIONS: GIFTED, TALENTED,
OR BOTH?
Three terms are often used to refer to students who perform higher than others
of their age, experience, and environment, and who need more challenge than
what is provided by the general education curriculum—gifted, talented, or gifted
and talented. The terms tend to be interpreted differently among educators and
laypersons, with each interpretation carrying controversy. In general, students
who are viewed as gifted are those with high IQ and/or achievement scores. They
score in the top 3 to 5 percent on achievement and/or intelligence tests (roughly
an IQ of 130 or higher and achievement score at or above the 95th percentile).

Gifted and Talented Education

These students are considered intelligent and highly able. Others prefer the term
talented; talented students are viewed as creative and/or excel in the visual and
performing arts. They may not have high IQs, achievement scores, or grades.
Students’ work or performance (e.g., painting, singing, photography, acting, and
dancing) is often evaluated by experts to identify talented students.
Since its beginning, the term gifted has sparked controversy. Some opponents
contend that the term and field are elitist because the term gifted, like intelligence, is connoted with genetic endowment. From this perspective, the argument
goes that gifted students inherit their skills and abilities; thus, there is little that
the environment (including education) can do to change one’s destiny or genetic
makeup.
A related concern is that the field is viewed as elitist. Some argue that gifted
students are offered a higher quality public education than other students, and
that since gifted education is a part of public schools students should not receive
special benefits (e.g., different curriculum, more challenging books, more field
trips) or entitlements that are unavailable to all public school students. If more
funds and resources are devoted to gifted (and talented) students in public
schools, this is viewed as fundamentally inequitable. Further, the argument goes
that gifted education gives more to those who already have a lot and who will
be successful on their own. This “Matthew Effect” viewpoint troubles advocates
seeking equity, especially when schools are funded by public dollars.
Less controversial is the term talented, which is less often viewed as elitist.
This term seems to be more palatable, as talent speaks less to genetics and more
to environment. Talent is viewed as environmental and dynamic—exposure
and opportunity can improve creativity as well as skills and accomplishments in
the visual and performing arts. Further, hard work and effort can improve one’s
talent or skills and performance.
A compromise has been the term gifted and talented, which embraces those
students with high IQ scores, high achievement scores, high grades, high creativity, and/or strong skills in the visual and performing arts. Using the two
terms simultaneously implies that students with these varying gifts or talents are
valuable, that one skill is not superior to another.
Robert Sternberg has published several works indicating that few scholars
and laypersons can agree upon the definition of intelligent or gifted. He has
identified over 100 definitions of intelligence. Several definitions (and theories)
of gifted and talented have been proposed by the U.S. Department of Education
(six definitions since 1970), Joseph Renzulli, Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, Albert Tannenbaum, Lewis Terman, and others. Ongoing discussions and
debates include: Which type of gift and/or talent should we identify and serve?
Who is gifted and/or talented? How can these gifts and talents be assessed? What
are the best delivery and programming options?
A final issue is identification; too often, schools rely extensively or solely
on one test to identify, label, place, and serve gifted and talented students.
While the federal government and professional organizations have highlighted
that such a practice is indefensible or unjustifiable, and although they call for
multidimensional assessment approaches, this practice of relying on one test

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score in gifted and talented education persists. Stated another way, high-stakes
testing is prevalent in the process of labeling and placement.
SERVICES AND PROGRAMS FOR GIFTED
AND TALENTED STUDENTS
Once students have been identified as gifted and/or talented, educators wrestle
with how best to serve them. Questions regarding services and programs are most
controversial regarding ability grouping, tracking, and acceleration. That is, to
what extent is gifted and talented education a form of ability grouping or tracking?
How much are students harmed by ability grouping and tracking? Likewise, is acceleration a viable option for meeting the needs of gifted and talented students?
Generally, ability grouping and tracking have been criticized for limiting the
college and career opportunities of students in lower track groups and classes,
while privileging those in higher track groups and classes. On this note, some
scholars maintain that gifted and talented education is a form of ability grouping or tracking that is riddled with inequities. Those in higher track classes and
groups have the added benefit of receiving educational experiences that increase
their future options and their chances for succeeding in life. Given, again, that
gifted and talented education is publicly funded, it is argued that such programs
are inequitable. Opponents offer data indicating that students in lower-ability
groups are confronted with lower expectations, lower quality curriculum, and
fewer resources. It is further argued that once placed in a low group, it is virtually
impossible to move to a higher group, or from a vocational track to an academic
or college preparation track. This inability to move from one group or track to
another is delimiting for students.
Conversely, advocates of gifted and talented education often avoid the confounding effect of equating ability grouping and tracking with gifted and talented
education. Instead, they propose that gifted students need to be appropriately
challenged, and that these students often benefit from being grouped with peers
who are like them emotionally, cognitively (intellectually), and academically.
In such settings, it is maintained that peer pressure decreases and achievement
rises. Advocates who do not equate gifted and talented education with ability
grouping and tracking often compare gifted and talented education with special
education—giftedness is an exceptionality, and gifted and talented education is
designed to meet students’ exceptional or unique needs. From this view, charges
of elitism are unwarranted.
In 1993, the U.S. Department of Education offered a definition that differed
radically from previous definitions:
Children and youth with outstanding talent perform or show the potential for performing at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when
compared with others of their age, experience, or environment. These children and youth exhibit high performance capacity in intellectual, creative, and/or artistic areas, and unusual leadership capacity, or excel in
specific academic fields. They require services or activities not ordinarily

Gifted and Talented Education

provided by the schools. Outstanding talents are present in children and
youth from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all areas
of human endeavor.
Noticeably, the term gifted is absent and has been replaced by talented. Also
included in the definition is the notion of potential, the recognition that gifts
and talents are difficult to develop without opportunity and exposure. The definition addresses the concept of relativity—comparisons must be justifiable; for
instance, comparing low-income students to high-income students, comparing
minority students to majority students, is not defensible. Asking them to compete for slots or gifted and talented placement is unfair. Finally, the definition
boldly states that no group has a monopoly on gifts and talents; gifts and talents
exist in low-income and diverse groups.
No theory of gifted and talented, or even intelligence, seems to prevail. Notwithstanding theories and models by Thurstone, Guilford, Wechsler, Binet, and
others, contemporary theories by Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, and Joseph Renzulli seem to be in competition, with little consensus on the horizon.
Another contentious topic is acceleration. Often, concerns about acceleration
surround issues of social-emotional development. Are students hurt in any way,
especially socially-emotionally, when they are placed in classes with older students? In A Nation Deceived, James Borland warned against emotional, impulsive, and uninformed assertions about acceleration and, instead, documented
that acceleration benefits gifted and talented students when their needs and
development— social emotional, cognitive, and academic—are considered in
the decision-making process and addressed when teaching students.
DEVELOPING TALENT IN STUDENTS LIVING IN POVERTY
Data from several reports indicate that students who live in poverty seldom
participate in gifted and talented classes, including AP classes. The majority of
students in such classes come from families of high income and high education.
This underrepresentation of low-income or low-socioeconomic status students
adds fuel to the fire regarding issues of equity. Recognizing that students living
in poverty can be and are gifted and talented, some scholars have developed talent development programs. As with the newest federal definition of gifted and
talented presented earlier, these programs acknowledge that lack of opportunity,
experience, and exposure pose limits on students; thus, given high-quality educational experiences, these students will rise to the challenge. Such additional
opportunities hold much promise for overcoming backgrounds that stifle their
intelligence, achievement, and creativity.
DIVERSITY: EQUITY VERSUS EXCELLENCE OR EQUITY
AND EXCELLENCE?
A controversial issue is the underrepresentation of black students in gifted
education. At no time in the history of gifted education has national data indicated

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parity for black students. Specifically, in 2002, black students comprised
approximately 17 percent of the school population nationally, but less than 9
percent of those identified as gifted. Reports indicate that underrepresentation
often ranges from an average of 50 percent to 70 percent. At the high school level,
blacks are also poorly represented in AP classes and among those who take the
AP exam. White students take AP examinations at nearly six times the rate of
Latino students and more than 13 times the rate of African American students.
There is a clear need to desegregate gifted and talented education. Mindful of the
loss of talent among diverse and low-income students, Congress passed legislation (i.e., the Javits Act of 1988) with the primary goal of supporting efforts to
identify and serve diverse and low-income students.
Debates persist regarding changes that can be made to improve the quality of
programs and services for gifted and talented black and other culturally diverse
students. This discussion comes in the form of debates regarding excellence versus
equity, with some works arguing that the two cannot coexist or that they are,
somehow, mutually exclusive. Our belief is that excellence and equity can and
must coexist.
Most recommendations regarding the identification and assessment of culturally diverse gifted students stress the need to find more reliable and valid
ways to recruit them. These alternatives include less-biased or culturally sensitive instruments (e.g., nonverbal tests), multidimensional assessment strategies,
and more inclusive philosophies, definitions, and theories of giftedness. While
most explanations point to testing issues, the principle barrier to the recruitment and retention of diverse students in gifted education is the deficit orientation that prevails in society and its educational institutions. Deficit thinking
impacts gifted education in several ways:
1. Testing and assessment issues. Tests are used extensively, sometimes exclusively, to identify and assess students. Despite concerns regarding bias
and fairness, test scores play a dominant role in identification and placement decisions. Over 90 percent of school districts use these test scores.
This heavy reliance on test scores for placement decisions keeps gifted
programs racially segregated. While traditional intelligence tests may be
effective at identifying and assessing white students, they have been less
effective with diverse and low-income students. This raises the question of
why we continue to use these tests so exclusively and extensively.
2. Eurocentric definitions and theories. There are many definitions and theories of giftedness and/or intelligence, and there is little agreement regarding
how to effectively and equitably define “intelligent” or “gifted.” Most states
continue to define giftedness in limited ways, based on their experiences
and views of middle-class whites. IQ-driven and test-driven definitions effectively identify this one group of students but neglect to identify or capture
the strengths of students who: (a) perform poorly on paper-and-pencil tasks
conducted in artificial settings; (b) perform poorly on culturally loaded and
linguistically loaded tests; (c) have different learning and/or cognitive styles;

Gifted and Talented Education

3. Static policies and practices. Procedural and policy issues also contribute
to underrepresentation. Educators consistently under refer diverse students for gifted education screening and services. When teacher referral
is the first (or only) recruitment step, gifted black students are likely to be
underrepresented.
4. Lack of multicultural preparation among educators. Too few preservice
teachers are provided multicultural educational experiences; they are seldom taught how to develop multicultural curriculum and instruction, and
too few have internships and practicum in urban settings, etc. That is, too
many college students graduate with a colorblind or ethnocentric curriculum that fails to prepare them to work with culturally diverse students.
Not surprising, they misunderstand and misinterpret cultural differences
among such students relative to learning styles, communication styles, and
behavioral styles.
5. Inadequate teacher preparation in gifted education. Nationally, most
schools struggle with the low representation of blacks who choose to
become teachers. In 1999, the senior author surveyed culturally diverse
teachers about their decisions to enter the field of gifted education, general education, or special education. Many teachers reported having little
exposure to gifted education in their teacher preparation programs, and
most teachers, including those who held degrees in special education,
lacked any formal preparation in gifted education. This lack of preparation in recognizing the many different characteristics of gifted students, a
lack of understanding of the social, emotional, and psychological needs of
gifted students, and a lack of attention to underachievement among gifted
students, obstructs teachers’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make
fair and equitable referrals. Again, findings indicate that teachers who
lack preparation in gifted education are ineffective at identifying gifted
students. Such under prepared teachers may hold stereotypes and misperceptions that undercut their ability to recognize strengths in students who
behave differently from their biased expectations.
6. Inadequate communication with black families and communities. When
a deficit orientation exists in their minds, school personnel may not communicate with black families about gifted education services, AP courses,
and other opportunities (e.g., summer enrichment programs). Parents and
caregivers who feel rejected and unappreciated are less likely to involve
themselves in school settings.
7. Black students’ decisions not to participate in gifted and talented education. Perhaps the worst consequence of deficit thinking is its impact on
the social-emotional and psychological development of black students.
Too many gifted black students internalize deficit thinking orientations.
They question their own abilities and then sabotage their own achievement. For example, some black students adopt the role of class clown or
athlete to hide their academic abilities and achievements, and they may
refuse to participate in AP classes, academic clubs, and/or gifted education

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programs. These students may also give in to negative peer pressures, such
as associating academic achievement with “acting white.”
SUMMARY
All of education, including gifted and talented education, faces challenges
as it seeks to appropriately educate students. Concerns include (a) charges of
elitism, (b) different views on terminology, definitions, theories, testing and assessment, services, and programs, (c) problems of under identifying students in
poverty, and (d) problems regarding minority student underrepresentation, particularly black students. Despite some attempts to address these longstanding
and ongoing debates, problems persist.
Further Reading: Ford, D. Y., 1996, Reversing underachievement among gifted Black students: Promising practices and programs, New York: Teachers College Press; Ford, D. Y.,
& Harris III, J. J., 1999, Multicultural gifted education, New York: Teachers College
Press; Kozol, J., 2006, The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling
in America, New York: Crown; Suskind, R., 1998, A hope in the unseen: An American
odyssey from the inner city to the Ivy league, New York: Broadway; U.S. Department of
Education, 1993, National excellence: A case for developing America’s talent, Washington, DC: Author.

Donna Y. Ford and Gilman W. Whiting
GLOBAL EDUCATION
Global education is a curriculum field that emerged in the 1960s with a heritage that derives from academic disciplines, curriculum practice, and sociopolitical phenomenon. As curriculum it has ebbed and flowed in various places
around the world over the past four decades, though it has received increasing
attention in the most recent decade sparked by interest in and concerns about
globalization. Throughout its relatively brief history as a curriculum area, certain
themes have coursed through its development, namely connectivity, identity,
controversy, and urgency. These themes are highlighted in three approximate
stages: Awareness and Interdependence (1960–1980), Diversity, Culture, and
Controversy (1980–2000), and Urgency and Contested Visions (2000–present).
ORIGINS
Academic
Global education traces its origins to three broad areas—academic, curricular, and sociopolitical. While global education is not a recognized academic
field of study, its heritage is rooted in many disciplines, including foreign
policy/international relations, world history, geography, and anthropology.
These academic roots are all similar in their focus on connectivity among
phenomenon rather than seeing events, people, places, and patterns in isolation.
Political scientists with an interest in the relations of nation-states often pursue

Global Education

comparative politics as a means of understanding interstate relations, rather than
domestic politics whose unit of analysis is the nation. World history, a subfield
of history that has had difficulty gaining a foothold in the academy, works from
the premise that social phenomena and intellectual developments in one part of
the world shape events in distant civilizations and are thereby connected. While
history has been a field that values specialization and precise focus, world historians have favored connectivity and interaction as their founding presumption.
Geographers, in a similar light, are predisposed to researching the specific in
reference to the universal. While there are geographic anomalies throughout the
world, such as the white cliffs of Dover and the fjords of Norway, the differences
of Earth’s landscape is more of kind than of type. The study of human culture, or
anthropology, emerged as a separate discipline out of history in the nineteenth
century. Most anthropological study in the latter half of the twentieth century
onward has emphasized the fundamental similarity of cultural groups in meeting the basic human needs of the group, despite apparent variability.
Curriculum
While global education involves knowledge from these disciplines and even
resembles them at times, it is unique in its purposes. Global education is principally aimed at (1) developing awareness about and appreciation for people who
are culturally different, (2) recognizing the interdependent nature of life on the
planet, (3) acknowledging challenges related to social injustice and environmental degradation, and (4) committing to thoughtful social engagement on some
of these myriad issues. Unlike a disciplinary perspective that aims to educate
young people in a way of knowing through a specific set of facts or tools, global
education’s goal is to produce social changes beyond itself rather than being
an end unto itself. Further, unlike most academic disciplines, global education
does not employ nation-states as the primary unit of analysis. Rather, it explores
diverse relations that people, social groups, and supranational bodies like the
United Nations have between and among themselves, irrespective of nations.
Though global education does not ignore the importance of the nation-state, it
also does not presume its sanctity, overtly challenging what otherwise appears
natural to most disciplines.
The origins of this problem-based, social agency view of curriculum can be
traced to educational progressivism associated with the early twentieth century.
Social progressives such as John Dewey, George Counts, Boyd Bode, and Harold
Rugg, for example, viewed the school as a means of transforming society and
curriculum as the engine for that change. These curriculum leaders had somewhat different views about how to achieve the ends of social change, be it through
child-centered curriculum or a more directive approach to teaching problems
on the horizon, but their motivation to use education as a means beyond being
simply educated in the traditional sense was clear. Ideally, schools would become
incubators of social change rather than institutional-like organizations aimed at
supplying workers for their productivity and efficiency. Teachers and students,
in such a conception, would be intellectually engaged in the problems of the day

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and engage in action to address these problems. While there have been pockets
of this type of progressive education over time and in some places, this idea
of the school as an engine for social change has never been a central focus of
education in the United States.
Sociopolitical
The emergence of global education in the 1960s is not coincidental. This was a
period of massive social upheaval around the world as formal colonialism mainly
ceased, people organized for empowerment through various social movements,
and a growing consciousness of the holistic quality of life on Earth developed.
Some of this awareness was precipitated by the iconic image of Earth from space,
a seemingly lonely planet floating in the void of eternity. For the first time in
human history, people could see in Earth-rise the singularity and relatedness of
our existence on this fragile planet. This sense of connection was also evident in
the struggle for power as liberation movements in one part of the world echoed
in others. The civil rights movement in the United States, for example, took cues
from India’s casting off of more than a century of British rule. The end of legal
segregation in the United States was echoed in the anti-apartheid movement of
South Africa. The rise of feminism in Nordic and Western European countries
resonated throughout the world. Efforts by indigenous people in North American to gain legal recognition shaped discourse for native populations elsewhere.
It was a time of social change and upheaval, and global education was one example of how these changes affected the curriculum of schools.
The 1960s was also a period of international upheaval, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons globally, the proxy war in Southeast Asia between the
United States and the U.S.S.R., principally in Vietnam, along with the increased
bipolarization and related struggles for power in Latin America, Africa, and
Asia. Given this context, the Cold War was a prominent sociopolitical force in
the origins of global education. As international affairs began to affect domestic
life, as in the anxious autumn days in the southeastern United States during the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, there was a growing sense in the United States that
schools should be more than simply bomb shelters or places to propagandize
anticommunist sentiments (though they were used towards those ends). Rather,
global education arose from an earnest desire to teach about the points of contention in the Cold War, the use of propaganda on all sides of this divide, and
the importance of avoiding annihilation through the build-down and eventual
denuclearization of nations through peaceful negotiations.
AWARENESS AND INTERDEPENDENCE 19601980
The first period of global education is characterized by growing awareness
that the planet is a fragile place that required stewardship if humankind was to
survive. R. Buckminster Fuller’s publication of Operating Manual for Spaceship
Earth in 1963 juxtaposed the fragility of Earth’s limited resources with the
limitless want of people. He likens the planet to a mechanical system that, if not

Global Education

properly maintained, would surely fail to operate. This seminal work, though
widely criticized, developed into an intellectual hallmark and a springboard for
further discourse about planetary awareness.
This nondisciplinary work had disciplinary implications in the academy. A
new generation of scholars who grew up in the tumultuous 1960s was emerging. One of their primary challenges was to the nature of higher education that
rigidly adhered to disciplines and failed to engage students in relevant studies.
This shift towards relevancy, however unrealized it may have been, did shape the
creation of cross-disciplinary courses, programs, and departments. Hybridization was the result as studies such as history and earth science became environmental history and sociology and psychology morphed into social psychology.
The move towards relevancy also spawned discourses that largely shook off their
disciplinary roots, as women’s studies, peace studies, ethnic/area group studies,
and sexual identity studies became increasingly prominent.
The notion that knowledge and being were more connected than modern
discourses up to the early twentieth century had fully recognized also took
shape in K–12 education. Experimentation with knowledge constructs occurred, particularly in social studies curriculum, as life, issues, and problembased curriculum made significant inroads into schools. Global education was
very much a part of this turn. In November 1968, Social Education, the national
professional journal for social studies teachers, published a special issue entitled
International Education for the Twenty-first Century. This was a collection of articles from disciplinary scholars in fields such as social psychology, economics,
geography, political science, and international relations who attempted to outline the rationale for and development of an international education curriculum.
This journal represents the first collection of global education scholarship in one
forum, and arguably, the birth of the field. Parenthetically, it is important to note
that the term “international” was and continues to be used synonymously with
“global.” There is an important distinction, however, between these terms, which
was alluded to previously: While international presumes the nation-state as the
central unit of analysis, global recognizes the nation as significant but does not
privilege it in light of the many other means of communication, interaction, and
border crossing that exist.
Global education in this formative era was concerned with the Cold War.
Much of foreign policy and international relations studies was centered on the
relationship between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and their many satellites. Global education was offered in response to, though simultaneous with,
curricula such as the once-mandatory course in Florida, Americanism versus
Capitalism, wherein the course objectives required students to study communism such that they would recognize the supposed superiority of the American
way of life. Similar notions, perhaps less overtly, have and continue to be a mainstay of American history and government courses, though the anticommunism
theme has less saliency today. In contrast with such curriculum, global education aimed to explore the nature of economic and political difference through
a comparative framework, hoping to engage students in earnest consideration
of different ways of organizing society. Global education aimed to demonstrate

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that even though societies organized in different manners, we remained interdependent, or one world, despite these differences. The Cold War notwithstanding, the United States and the U.S.S.R., and by implication the rest of the world,
were dependent on each other for peace, if not a total peace and if only through
an anxiety-ridden deterrence policy of mutually assured destruction.
Global education had a degree of relativity built into its curricular outlook,
to the extent that it was needed to have a fair, full, and free interplay of ideas
about the nature of human life and its interdependent character. A manifestation of global education in this period was the now infamous federally funded
course, Man: A Course of Study (or MACOS). The National Science Foundation
funded this course from 1964–1975, and it aimed to use disciplinary methodologies in secondary schools so that students could engage in analytic comparisons of societies and their own. One of those groups, the Inuit people of
Northern Canada, to whom the study referred as “Eskimos” [sic], allowed such
comparisons. MACOS aimed to give students a set of comparative models for
thinking about the world while fostering an appreciation of human diversity. A
wave of popular press and scholarly reports in the mid-1970s contended that
MACOS encouraged students to be morally relativistic about divorce, senilicide,
murder, female infanticide, and cannibalism. Despite empirical evidence to the
contrary, MACOS was not funded and ended rather abruptly. In terms of global
education, it foreshadowed the very controversial nature of such curriculum
that would become its undoing in the next era.
DIVERSITY, CULTURE, AND CONTROVERSY 19802000
Global education, as if to turn away from the systemic difficulties associated
with pressing for world peace, developed a smaller focus in the second era: people. Coupled with increasing attention to diversity within multiculturalism, global
education took a sociological and anthropological turn. Courses of study such as
world geography, world literature, global cultures, and multicultural studies were
increasingly in evidence in K–12 schools during this era. The central focus of many
of these courses was a parade and pageantry of difference. Some have referred to
such curriculum as the foods, festivals, and fairs approach, as culture was presented
to students in celebratory and reified ways. Whereas the earlier era of global education emphasized the world as a whole, its systemic nature, and our stewardship
of it as peace-makers and ecologically aware beings, the middle era downsized this
focus to look at people in communities and as members of social groups.
Diversity discourses carried the day in schools rather than global education.
While many viewed global education as too broad, incomprehensible, far away,
and politically untenable, they took refuge in multiculturalism that celebrated
differences within a national context. Most multiculturalism, even to the current
day, presumes diversity remains bound by the nation-state. This is due in part to
the development of multiculturalism around issues of social justice and towards
antidiscriminatory education. As education was almost entirely a matter bound
by nations, to redress the social inequities of education systems required a focus
on the nation by definition.

Global Education

Global education employed diversity in a similar vein, though it moved the
conversation towards a consideration of global others, however complicated a
focus that may be. A few sociopolitical phenomena guided this focus, as society
and schools in the United States increasingly dealt with immigration from Latin
America, specifically Mexico, refugees from Cambodia, Haiti, and elsewhere,
and tensions within the United States and Western Europe around demographic
changes. As technology capital led a period of economic expansion among
Western and some Asian countries such as Japan, the North/South gap of living
standards grew. This difference created an increase in immigration to economically developed societies, or a south to north flow of people. Tensions arose in
this period, and remain today, around the cultural identity of immigrants. In
the United States, this new group of immigrants from Pacific Rim countries and
Latin America sought to maintain a strong ethnic identity through cultural ways
and language.
Schools, to varying degrees, accommodated these changes in various ways.
Multicultural education was increasingly evident, particularly as textbook companies began to ride the wave of identity. Teaching English as a Second Language (or TESOL) and bilingual education grew programmatically across the
country, as schools needed to serve an increasingly polyglot population. Global
relief efforts were also increasingly evident in schools, evidenced by the surge
of interest about famine in East Africa in the mid-1980s sparked by the We Are
the World music video and related MTV attention to this crisis. The teaching
of world languages in U.S. secondary schools more than doubled in the period
1982–2000, courses that were for some students the only contact they would
have with a culture outside the nation.
Increased attention to diversity, in global education, per se, and in other
aligned studies such as world languages, multiculturalism, and world literature
led to an aggressive backlash against “other” discourses by educational conservatives, mainly at the state and local level. Many of these groups, such as the
Fordham Foundation and Eagle Forum, provided financial support. In 1979,
the U.S. Department of Education created a Task Force on Global Education to
support its development, but by 1986, support waned. The Denver office of the
U.S. Department of Education published a report entitled “Blowing the Whistle
on ‘Global Education,’” accusing the field of being anti-American, one-sided,
relativistic/nihilistic with regard to moral issues, and obsessed with promoting a
redistributive economic world order. There were many state challenges to global
education that undid much of the curriculum policy achieved in the initial era.
By the mid-1990s, global education seemed to be just another passing fad in
education relegated to minor curriculum status.
URGENCY AND CONTESTED VISIONS 2000PRESENT
The current era is characterized by a growing sense of urgency for something
like global education and a cacophony of contested visions about what that something should be. Thomas Friedman’s widely read books about globalization, The
Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) and The World is Flat (2005), along with an array

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of academic publications that reached a wide audience, created a palpable energy
about global discourses. Friedman’s basic thesis is that the world has irrevocably
changed in a way that has decentered nation-states and centered technology sectors and corporate capital who can effectively morph to survive in this new, flat
world. This intellectual climate coupled with the events of September 11, 2001,
and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq provided a gravity and impetus
for renewed urgency about world affairs. Additional developments added to this
attention, such as definitive scientific evidence of global warming, increasing evidence of a beleaguered ocean system that threatens much of aquatic life in the
near term, numerous studies documenting an unprecedented period of mass extinction among nonhuman animals presently, and catastrophic natural disasters
including hurricanes and tsunamis that destroyed flood prone regions and their
inhabitants. The interest in global education, which had languished for over a decade, was rekindled out of a sense of urgency for some, desperation for others.
Yet this third era of globalization promises to be much more diffuse and contested than the previous ones. Where the period 1960 to 2000 involved a relatively
small group of people interested in and dedicated to expanding global education, in the current period, a much wider audience has become engaged in those
efforts. Global education projects are no longer largely the domain of scholars
in education, as academics across academe have taken an interest. Colleges and
universities increasingly fund and develop a variety of global programs, from
student exchanges to launching universities in other countries to developing research networks among various countries. One would be hard-pressed to find a
four-year college or institution that does not include a world, international, or
global focus as part of its core mission. And the same can be said of many high
schools as they increasingly get on the global bandwagon.
The contested visions of global education that are beginning to emerge can
be roughly categorized into five clusters: neoliberal, cosmopolitan, disciplinary, critical, and social justice. The neoliberal argument for global education
follows closely with Thomas Friedman’s critique, that an economically interconnected world that is hypercompetitive requires entrepreneurial skills, business acumen, and an adroitness to change rapidly among the next generation.
The National Center on Education and Economy, for example, released a report in 2006 entitled “Tough Choices, Tough Times: The report of the new
commission on the skills of the American workforce.” This report epitomizes
the global education advocated by neoliberals, or an education that is internationally benchmarked, is equal to leading economic countries, and affords
students the knowledge and skills to be internationally competitive. The cosmopolitan notion of a global education is also outwardly oriented, though
focused on the ethics of such interactions. Cosmopolitan global education
emphasizes the commonality of all people, rather than focusing on particular
identities, and seeks to explore and develop the many ways in which people
are more alike than dissimilar.
A disciplinary global education is one that values knowing the world but within
an academic framework that allows it to be comprehensible. World historians, for
example, advocate knowing about the world’s history of interconnection so that

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actions taken are grounded in a thoroughgoing examination of our shared past.
Geographers and those in international relations, similarly, advocate knowing the
world but are largely dismissive of the notion that such knowing can occur beyond
the boundaries of well-honed, disciplinary way of knowing. Critical perspectives,
and they range in kinds from those related to gender, deep ecology, and neo-Marxist, are highly suspect and critical of globalization. As to global education, their
notion is one that aims to critique the base economic and power moves that are
at work in globalization. For the various critical perspectives, a global education
must be suspect of the very phenomenon that gave rise to its urgency, globalization, and must engage in a strident critique of its means, objects, and aims.
Civic global education is one that is also of a critical nature, but does not see
the global system as inherently unworkable. Rather, civic global educators aim
to push the global community in the direction of creating structures for global
citizens to be part of a larger civic than their localities and nations. This aim
is perhaps best illustrated by the move to adjudicate the most heinous human
rights violations through supranational bodies like the newly founded International Criminal Court. The recently integrated European Union is a model for
civic global education advocates, as it has numerous supranational bodies that
work in, through, and with nations of Europe to achieve a broader notion both
of a European identity and a global civic ideal. The urgency of the current era
of global education is apparent as it manifests in multiple areas and at various
levels of curriculum, becomes cross-fertilized by other areas of discourse, and
is increasingly viewed as contested terrain. Predicting the future of the next era
of global education is impossible. Yet based on a curricular history that consistently reflects and mirrors wider social concerns of the day, we can be reasonably certain of an interplay between significant global events and phenomena in
the world to come and the curriculum era that awaits.
Further Reading: Bigelow, B., & Peterson, B., 2002, Rethinking globalization: Teaching for
justice in an unjust world. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools Press; Gaudelli, W., 2003,
World class: Teaching and learning in global times, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates;
Hanvey, R. G., 1976, An attainable global perspective, New York: Center for War/Peace
Studies; Heilman, E., 2006, Critical, liberal, and poststructural challenges for global
education, in A. Segall, E. Heilman, & C. Cherryholmes (Eds.), Social studies the next
generation: Researching in the postmodern, New York: Peter Lang; Merryfield, M. M.,
2001, Moving the center of global education: From imperial world views that divide
the world to double consciousness, contrapuntal pedagogy, hybridity, and cross-cultural
competence, in W. B. Stanley (Ed.), Critical issues in social studies research for the 21st
century, Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing; Pike, G., & Selby, D., 1999, In the
global classroom: Volumes 1 & 2, Toronto: Pippen Publishing.

William Gaudelli

GOVERNMENT ROLE IN SCHOOLING
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the role of government in schooling was to provide free public schools for children. So it was at the fin de siècle.

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What, then, changed? In 1900, schools were almost entirely the creatures of
local governments. States played little role in their financing and operations, and
the federal government was wholly absent. Come 2000, the role of local governments in schooling had ebbed while the role of state governments and the
federal government had grown. Expressed as dollars, in 1900, local governments
provided more than 80 percent of school funds; state governments contributed
the rest. The federal government contributed none. By 2000, localities provided 43 percent of school funds, states 48 percent, and the federal government
9 percent.
These funding figures exhibit the growth of state influence over the schools.
To cite just a few examples: State governments set high school graduation
requirements, operate student learning testing and assessment programs, and
dictate the certification requirements for teachers.
However, these numbers obscure arguably the most profound transformation
in the government role in schooling, which is the dramatic rise in the power
of the federal government to influence school operations. During the twentieth
century, the federal government went from having no role whatsoever to playing some part in virtually every aspect of schooling. Policies and actions of the
federal government have affected schools’ curricula and school policies toward
minority (racial, language) and handicapped children, provided school lunches,
funded cultural and arts programs and drug and alcohol abuse deterrence
programs, and more. Furthermore, the growth of state education agencies and
their development into highly professionalized entities was spurred, largely, by
the federal government. Increasingly, the roles of state and local governments
have been sculpted by actions of the federal government. As will be seen, the
growth of the federal government’s role in schooling has come through two
means: federal court decisions and federal grants-in-aid policies.
GOVERNMENT ROLE IN SCHOOLING ENTERING THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Government’s role as the provider of free education developed in fits and
starts since the earliest settlement of North America. Though many children
were educated by their parents or in private academies, some early localities and
colonies did provide schools. In 1642 the Massachusetts Colonial Court decreed
that due to the “great neglect of many parents and masters, in training up their
children in learning and labor, and other employments, which may be profitable
to the commonwealth,” that we the court “do hereby order and decree, that in
every town, the chosen men appointed to manage the prudential affairs . . . shall
henceforth stand charged with the redress of this evil.” The leaders of the towns
could be fined and punished if they failed to remedy illiteracy among children,
who were thought ignorant of “the principles of religion and the capital laws of
this country.”
The establishment of public schools was encouraged by the land management
policies of the earliest federal governments of America. For example, the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 provided for the sale of Western lands by the federal

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government. As a condition of sale, it required that “[t]here shall be reserved
the lot N. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within
the said township.” During the nineteenth century, the growth of governmentsponsored schools accelerated. Many local governments, often nudged by states
and zealous educators, established simple schools that would provide rudimentary educational skills training, such as reading and writing. Progress, though,
was uneven, particularly in rural and low-income communities, where limited
tax bases and the agrarian way of life inhibited the development of modern
schools.
GOVERNMENT PROVISION BUT NOT COMPULSION
Private schools have existed since the European settlers arrived in North
America. While all levels of government have recognized a community interest
in the education of children, this has not meant that government has an absolute
power to compel student attendance to government-funded or “public” schools.
This limited power was stated forcefully by the Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (268 U.S. 510 [1925]) when
it struck down an Oregon law that required parents to send their children to a
public school. The Court declared,
We think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes
with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing
and education of children . . . under their control. As often heretofore
pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged
by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within
the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon
which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power
of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of
the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right,
coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional
obligations.
Throughout the twentieth century, this antagonism between the professed interests of communities in schooling children and the rights of parents over their
children has recurred. Frequently, these disputes have been litigated and judges
have had to rule on nettlesome issues, such as the right of parents to homeschool
their children.
HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ASSUMED A ROLE IN
SCHOOLING
In its enumeration of the powers of the federal government, the U.S. Constitution
makes no mention of schooling or education. Moreover, the Tenth Amendment
of the Constitution declares: “The powers not delegated to the United States [government] by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to

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the states respectively, or to the people,” How, then, was the federal government
able to assume a role in schooling? In great part, the vehicle has been grants-inaid. Put succinctly, a grant-in-aid is an offer of funding by the federal government
to states or localities. In exchange for the funds, the recipient of the grant must
expend it on the purposes stipulated by the grant and obey the grant’s mandates
(i.e., “conditions of aid”). Thus, grants-in-aid, have provided the primary means
through which the federal government has leapt over the federalism divide,
which purported to separate governing responsibilities between the federal and
state governments, and assumed a role in schooling.
The Growth of the Federal Role in Schooling, 1917–1958
In a pattern that was to be repeated during the twentieth century, the establishment of the first major federal education policy was spurred by a crisis. As
the federal government began to draft men to fight in World War I, it found
that 25 percent of them were illiterate. President Woodrow Wilson, a Ph.D. and
former university president, found this troubling and favored education legislation to remedy this problem. He believed that the modern industrial economy
and military needed workers and soldiers who were literate and skilled in industrial trades. Thus, one month before the United States formally entered World
War I, President Wilson signed the Smith-Hughes Vocational Act (P.L. 64–347)
on February 23, 1917.
The Smith-Hughes Act appropriated money “to be paid to the respective states
for the purpose of co-operating with the states in paying the salaries of teachers,
supervisors, and directors of agricultural subjects, and teachers of trade, home
economics, and industrial subjects, and in the preparation of teachers of agricultural, trade, industrial, and home economics subjects.” The act established
the surprisingly powerful Federal Board for Vocational Education, which was
empowered to set the requisite qualifications for an individual to be hired as a
vocational education teacher. The board also could withhold federal funds from
schools that violated federal education standards of what constituted appropriate agricultural, home economic, vocational, and industrial educational curricula. The statute mandated that states set up state vocational education boards
that would work with the federal board.
Over this breakthrough, however, the federal government’s role changed little
over the next three decades. During the Great Depression, agencies such as the
Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National
Youth Administration provided emergency funding to cash-strapped schools.
In 1934, emergency aid reached approximately $2 to $3 million per month. By
1940, PWA had helped local and state authorities build 12,704 schools with
59,615 classrooms. This brief expansion of the federal role in schooling, though,
contracted once the Great Depression passed.
Between 1946 and 1958, the federal role suddenly spurted. On June 4, 1946,
the School Lunch Act (P.L. 79–396, 60 Stat. 231) was signed into law by President
Harry S Truman. The law declared it “to be the policy of Congress . . . to safeguard

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the health and well-being of the Nation’s children and to encourage the consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other foods, through
grants-in-aid.” The school lunch program required schools to provide low-cost
or free lunches to children; in exchange, schools receive cash subsidies and food
from the Department of Agriculture.
Impact aid (P.L. 81–815; 64 Stat. 967 and P.L. 81–874; 64 Stat. 1100) was
enacted into law four years later (September 23, 1950, and September 30, 1950).
This policy grew out of a 1940 program to fund infrastructure projects (sewers,
recreational facilities, etc.) in areas where the federal government had a large
presence (e.g., military installations, federal agencies, etc.) Mobilization for
World War II created a huge growth in the size of the federal workforce. Military
facilities occupied large swaths of land, which removed them from state and
local tax rolls. (States and localities may not tax the federal government.) In time,
the presence of these facilities and workers brought forth children who needed
schooling. Impact aid was devised to reimburse these federally affected areas.
Each year, communities provide the federal government with data on costs (e.g.,
educational costs) and receive reimbursement based upon a formula.
The launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, set
off a media and political firestorm in the United States. While President Eisenhower downplayed the significance of the event, many inside and outside of Congress whipped up a frenzy. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson made especially fantastic
claims. Control of space, he told the press, would make for control of the world,
as the Soviets would have the power to control the weather and raise and lower
the levels of the oceans. The schools were blamed for this situation. Prominent
persons, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Henry Jackson
(D-WA), claimed that Soviet schools were producing far more brainpower than
American schools. In the name of national defense, many said, more federal education aid was needed. Less than a year later, the National Defense Education
Act (NDEA, P.L. 85–864; 72 Stat. 1580) became law on September 2, 1958. Much
of the NDEA benefited colleges, showering them with funds for research grants
for technical training and advanced studies. Public high schools also benefited.
Secondary schools were given funds to identify “able” students who should be
encouraged to apply for federal scholarships for collegiate study in foreign languages, mathematics, and science.
Despite this growth in the federal role, many attempts to expand it further
failed. Between 1935 and 1950, dozens of bills were introduced into Congress to
provide general aid to public schools. Some of the bills would have raised teachers’ salaries; others would have provided grants and low-interest loans to districts that needed to build bigger and more modern schools. In a hint of things
to come, a number of bills were introduced that would have provided federal
monies to create a floor in per pupil spending. This latter proposal would have
helped poor school districts, where property values were low, leaving schools
grossly underfunded. All of the proposals to increase and equalize school funding stalled in Congress, blocked by members who saw little sense or propriety in
an expansion of the federal role in schooling.

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The Federal Government’s Promotion of Equity in Schooling, 1954–1975
For much of its existence, the federal government did little to expand access
to schooling for special needs and nonwhite children. On occasion, the U.S.
Congress provided aid. For example, in 1864, the federal government helped
found the Columbian Institution for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind, which later
became Gallaudet University. The federal government also aided in the development of schools for nonwhites. Subsequent to treaties signed with American
Indian tribes, the federal government funded and operated schools on Indian
reservations. The federal government aided blacks by chartering Howard University in 1867 (Chap. CLXII; 39 Stat. 438). At the close of the Civil War, the
federal government also forced confederate states to rewrite their constitutions
to include provisions to require states to provide schooling for all children.
(Previously, many black children and those in isolated rural areas lacked access
to schooling.) Between 1954 and 1975, however, the federal government moved
to the fore in expanding access to schooling.
The federal government’s first major effort at ensuring equity in education came in the form of a Supreme Court decision. The case, Oliver Brown
et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. (347 U.S. 483), popularly known
as Brown v. Board of Education, came on May 17, 1954. The Court noted that
education was “perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” That said, it denied that states and localities could require children to
attend racially segregated schools. Separate schooling was “inherently unequal,”
said the Court, and violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
States must, the Court declared, make schooling “available to all on equal terms.”
The upshot of the Brown case was the gradual demolition of states’ racially segregated schooling. The Brown decision and those federal court decisions that
followed it led to the federal policy of busing children to achieve racial desegregation. This policy was largely abandoned after 1980.
In the wake of America’s “discovery of poverty” and rising violence in urban
areas, the federal government greatly expanded its role in schooling and its
funding of schooling through the enactment of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 1965 (ESEA, P.L. 89–10; 79 Stat. 27) on April 11, 1965. The act
lifted the federal contribution to school funding to over 8 percent of total school
funding. The ESEA provided funds for a number of school programs, the largest
of which was Title I (also known as Chapter I). This program provided funds for
schools to expend on compensatory education programs for nonwhite and poor
children. The ESEA also provided funds to help state education agencies professionalize their operations. Over time, ESEA funds and mandates helped build
state agencies into formidable educational administration agencies.
The federal government further expanded its role as promoter of equity in
schooling with the enactment of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (P.L. 90–247;
81 Stat.783, 816 ) on January 2, 1968, and the Education for All Handicapped
Children Act of 1975 (P.L. 94–142; 89 Stat. 773) on November 29, 1975. Both
of these acts established programs to helps public schools to better teach under
served children. The former act provided funds for instruction in English and

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foreign languages. The latter act forbade school systems from excluding children
with mental or physical handicaps from schools and provided funds for programs to help school these children.
Finally, the federal government expanded its role further still when it forbade
states from denying schooling to the children of illegal immigrants. When the
state of Texas enacted a statute to deny children of illegal immigrants the right
to attend school, the Supreme Court struck it down. In Plyler v. Doe (457 U.S.
202 [1982]), the Court stated that although these children did not have a fundamental right to schooling, the law did deny the children the equal protection
under the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
because it erected “unreasonable obstacles to advancement on the basis of individual merit.”
The Proliferation and Diversification of the Federal Government’s Role in
Schooling, 1976–1999
Over the next quarter of a century, the federal role in schooling became more
diversified. The Office of Education was replaced by the Department of Education on October 17, 1979 (P.L. 96–88; 93 Stat. 668). This upgrading of federal
administration solidified the federal government role in a number of areas, including compensatory education, bilingual education, vocational education, and
educational research. New grants-in-aid programs proliferated; come the end of
the century, the federal government funded school programs in arts education,
physical fitness, school technology, anti-drug and alcohol dependency classes,
character education courses, and more.
During this period, criticism arose over the efficacy of federal programs, such
as Title I of the ESEA. In response, the federal government began creating policies to increase student learning as measured by tests. Congress enacted Goals
2000 (P.L. 103–227; 108 Stat. 125) on March 31, 1994, and amended the ESEA’s
Title I grants-in-aid program via the Improving America’s Schools Act of 1994
(P.L. 103–382; 108 Stat 3518) on October 20, 1994, and the No Child Left Behind
Act of 2002 (P.L. 107–110; 115 Stat. 1425) on January 2, 2002. Under the new
Title I, the conditions of aid required states and localities to experiment with
school choice or voucher programs. Funds were provided for the development
of privately operated but open-to-all-children charter schools. The new Title I
also required local school districts to permit students attending underperforming schools to choose the public school they attended. As a further condition of
aid, these policies required states to develop accountability systems consisting of
academic standards and tests that would be used to hold schools accountable for
student learning.
CONCLUSION
States and localities provide the vast majority of funds for public schools. It is
these two levels of government that have the greatest power to prescribe schools’
curricula, set the compensation and standards for the licensure of teachers and

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administrators, and oversee day-to-day school operations. Nevertheless, as the
federal government has assumed a larger and larger role, more and more of what
states do occurs within a context set by the federal government. Through court
decisions and grants-in-aid programs, the federal government, despite its modest contribution to school funding, has taken a broad and significant role in the
public schools.
Further Reading: Angus, D. L., & Mirel, J. E., 1999. The failed promise of the American high
school, 1895–1995, New York: Teachers College Press; Howell, W. G., 2005, Besieged:
School boards and the future of education politics, Washington: Brookings Institution
Press; Kosar, K. R., 2005, Failing grades: The federal politics of education standards,
Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers; National Center for Education Statistics, 2006,
Digest of education statistics, 2005, Washington: NCES; The No Child Left Behind Act
of 2002 retrieved January 4, 2006, from http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/
index.html.

Kevin R. Kosar

GRADING POLICIES
Four school policies impose procedural barriers to the implementation of
standards-based reforms, and there are specific strategies for correcting them.
These policies all relate to grading and reporting practices; that is, how students’
learning progress is summarized and communicated to parents, students, and
others. Despite their importance, grading and reporting are seldom mentioned
in discussions of curriculum or assessment reform. Nevertheless, they exert
powerful influence and can prevent even modest success in any standards-based
reform initiative.
POLICY 1: GRADING “ON THE CURVE”
Grading and reporting must be done in reference to specific learning criteria, rather than in reference to normative criteria or “on the curve.” This means
that students must be graded in terms of what they have learned and are able
to do, not in terms of their relative standing among classmates. Using the
normal distribution curve as a basis for assigning grades ensures consistent grade
distributions from one teacher to the next. Consequently, every teachers’ classes
have approximately the same percent of As, Bs, Cs, etc. But the consequences of
this practice are overwhelmingly negative. Strong evidence shows that it’s detrimental to the relationships among students and to the relationships between
teachers and students.
Grading “on the curve” makes learning a highly competitive activity in
which students compete against one another for the few scarce rewards (high
grades) distributed by the teacher. Under these conditions, students readily see
that helping others become successful threatens their own chances for success.
High grades are attained not through excellence in performance, but by doing
better than one’s classmates. As a result, learning becomes a game of winners

Grading Policies | 295

and losers, and because the number of rewards is kept arbitrarily small, most
students are forced to be losers.
Perhaps most important, grading “on the curve” communicates nothing about
what students have learned or are able to do. Rather, it tells only a student’s relative standing among classmates, based on what are often ill-defined criteria. Students who receive the high grades might actually have performed very poorly
in terms of the established learning standards, but simply less poorly than their
classmates. Differences between grades, therefore, are difficult to interpret at
best and meaningless at worst.
If the purpose of grading is to reflect what students have learned and are able
to do, then grading “on the curve” falls far short. Furthermore, modern research
has shown that the seemingly direct relationship between aptitude or intelligence and school achievement depends on instructional conditions, not a normal distribution curve. When the instructional quality is high and well matched
to students’ learning needs, the magnitude of this relationship diminishes drastically and approaches zero. Moreover, the fairness and equity of grading “on the
curve” is a myth.
Solution
In any educational setting where the central purpose is to have students learn,
grading and reporting should always be done in reference to specific learning
criteria. Because normative criteria or “grading on the curve” tell nothing about
what students have learned or are able to do, they provide an inadequate description of student learning. Plus, they promote unhealthy competition, destroy perseverance and other motivational traits, and are generally unfair to students. At
all levels of education, therefore, teachers should identify what they want their
students to learn, what evidence best reflects that learning, and what criteria
they will use to judge that evidence. In other words, they should clarify their
standards and base their grading criteria on those standards. Grades based on
specific learning criteria and standards have direct meaning and serve well the
communication purposes for which they are intended.
POLICY 2: SELECTING THE CLASS VALEDICTORIAN
Although most teachers today understand the negative consequences of grading “on the curve” and have abandoned the practice, many fail to recognize other
common school policies that yield similar negative consequences. One of the
most prevalent is the selection of a class valedictorian. There is nothing wrong,
of course, with recognizing excellence in academic performance. But in selecting
the class valedictorian, most schools operate under the traditional premise that
there should be only one. This commonly results in severe and sometimes bitter
competition among high-achieving students to be that “one.” Early in their high
school careers, top students figure out the selection procedures and then, often
with the help of their parents, find ingenious ways to improve their standing in
comparison to classmates. Again, to gain that honor a student must not simply

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excel; he or she must outdo the other students in the class. And sometimes the
difference among these top achieving students is as little as one-thousandth of a
decimal point in a weighted grade point average.
Solution
An increasing number of high schools have resolved this problem by moving
away from the policy of having just one valedictorian and, instead, name multiple
valedictorians. This is similar to what colleges and universities do in naming graduates cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude. West Springfield High
School in Fairfax County, Virginia, for example, typically graduates 15 to 25 valedictorians every year. Each of these students has an exemplary academic record
that includes earning the highest grade possible in numerous honors and Advanced
Placement classes. Instead of trying to distinguish among these exceptional students, the faculty at West Springfield High School decided that all should be named
valedictorians. In other words, rather than creating additional, arbitrary criteria in
order to discriminate among these high achieving students (considering, for example, their academic record from middle school or even elementary school), they
decided to recognize the excellent performance of the entire group. And because
the faculty at West Springfield High School believes their purpose as teachers is not
to select talent, but rather to develop talent, they take great pride in these results.
All of the valedictorians are named at the graduation ceremony, and one student,
selected by his or her fellow valedictorians, makes a major presentation.
Some might object to a policy that allows multiple valedictorians, arguing that
colleges and universities demand such selection and often grant special scholarships to students who attain that singular distinction. But current evidence
indicates this is not the case. In processing admission applications and making
decisions about scholarships, college and universities are far more interested in
the rigor of the curriculum students have experienced. In fact, an index composed of the number of Advanced Placement courses taken, the highest level of
math studied, and total number of courses completed has been shown to be a
much stronger predictor of college success than standardized test scores, grade
point average, or class rank. The rigor of the academic program experienced
by the valedictorians from West Springfield High School has helped them gain
admission and win scholarships to many of the most selective colleges and universities in the nation.
Recognizing excellence in academic performance is a vital aspect in any learning community. But such recognition need not be based on arbitrary criteria and
deleterious competition. Instead, it can and should be based on clear models of
excellence that exemplify our highest standards and goals for students and for
ourselves. If many students meet these high standards of excellence, all the better.
POLICY 3: USING GRADES AS A FORM OF PUNISHMENT
Although educators would undoubtedly prefer that motivation to learn be entirely intrinsic, the existence of grades and other reporting methods are important

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factors in determining how much effort students put forth. Studies show that
most students view high grades as positive recognition of their success, and some
work hard to avoid the consequences of low grades.
At the same time, no studies support the use of low grades as punishments.
Instead of prompting greater effort, low grades more often cause students to
withdraw from learning. To protect their self-images, many regard the low grade
as irrelevant and meaningless. Other students may blame themselves for the low
grade, but feel helpless to make any improvement.
Sadly, some teachers consider grades their “weapon of last resort.” In their
view, students who do not comply with their requests must suffer the consequences of the greatest punishment a teacher can bestow: a failing grade. Such
practices have no educational value and, in the long run, adversely affect students, teachers, and the relationship they share.
Solution
Rather than attempting to punish students with a low grade in the hope it
will prompt greater effort in the future, teachers can better motivate students
by considering their work as incomplete and then requiring additional effort.
Recognizing this, some schools have initiated grading policies that eliminate the
use of failing grades altogether. Teachers at Beachwood Middle School in Beachwood, Ohio, for example, record students’ grades as A, B, C, or I (Incomplete).
Students who receive an I grade are required to do additional work in order to
bring their performance up to an acceptable level. This policy is based on the
belief that students perform at a failure level or submit failing work largely because teachers accept it. If teachers no longer accept substandard work, however,
they reason that students will not submit it and, with appropriate support, will
continue to work until their performance is satisfactory.
Beachwood Middle School teachers believe strongly that giving a failing
grade to students who have not performed well, despite their ability to do so,
offers them an easy way out. If, on the other hand, teachers insist that all assignments designed to demonstrate learning be completed and done well, then students will choose to do their work in a timely fashion and at a satisfactory level
of quality. The guiding maxim of the teachers at Beachwood Middle School is “If
it’s not done well, then it’s not done!”
Implementing such a grading policy requires additional funding for the
necessary support mechanisms, of course. Students who receive an I grade at
Beachwood, for example, are required to attend afterschool make-up sessions
or special Saturday school programs staffed by teachers, volunteer parents, and
older students. Those who are unable or unwilling to do the make-up work during the school year must attend required summer school sessions designed to
help them bring their performance up to an acceptable level. Although these
support mechanisms demand commitment and additional funding, schools
implementing such programs generally find them to be highly successful. Many
also discover that in the long run, they actually save money. Because this regular and ongoing support helps students remedy their learning difficulties before

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they become major problems, less time and fewer resources need to be spent in
major remediation efforts later on.
At all levels of education, we need to think seriously about the use of failing grades. Although honesty must prevail in assessments and evaluations of
student learning, we also must consider the negative consequences of assigning failing grades to students’ work or level of performance. Especially in the
early years of school, the negative consequences of failing grades are quite serious and far outweigh any benefits. Even in upper grades, the fear of failure is a
questionable motivation device. Better and more effective alternatives to failing
grades need to be found, especially in a standards-based system. The use of Is
or incomplete grades present one meaningful alternative, especially if the necessary policies and resources are put in place to support those students who need
additional assistance.
POLICY 4: USING ZEROS IN GRADING
Another related grading policy that hinders the implementation of standardsbased reforms is the use of zeros. Many teachers assign zeros to students’ work
that is missed, neglected, or turned in late. That zero, however, seldom reflects
what a student has learned or is able to do. Instead, zeros are assigned to punish students for not displaying appropriate effort or demonstrating adequate
responsibility. Obviously, if the grade is to represent how well students have
learned or mastered established learning standards, then the practice of assigning zeros clearly misses the mark.
The impact of assigning zeros is intensified if combined with the practice of
averaging to attain a student’s overall course grade. Students readily see that receiving a single zero leaves them little chance for success because such an extreme score so drastically skews the average. That is why, for example, in scoring
Olympic events like gymnastics, diving, or ice-skating, the highest and lowest
scores of judges are always eliminated. If they were not, one judge could control
the entire competition simply by giving extreme scores.
Some teachers defend the practice of assigning zeros by arguing that they
cannot give students credit for work that is incomplete or not turned in—and
that’s certainly true. But there are far better ways to motivate and encourage
students to complete assignments in a timely manner than through the use of
zeros, especially considering the overwhelmingly negative effects.
Solution
Students must learn to accept responsibility for their actions and should be
held accountable for their work. Nevertheless, no evidence shows that assigning
zeros helps teach students these lessons. Unless we are willing to admit that we
use grades to show evidence of students’ lack of effort or inappropriate responsibility, then alternatives to the practice of assigning zeros must be found.
One alternative approach is to assign an I or “Incomplete” grade with explicit
requirements for completing the work, as described above. Students who do not

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complete their work or do not turn it in on time, for example, might be required
to attend afterschool study sessions and/or special Saturday classes until their
work is completed to a satisfactory level. In other words, they are not “let off the
hook” with a zero. Instead, students learn that they have certain responsibilities
in school and that their actions have specific consequences. Not completing assigned work on time means that you must attend special afterschool sessions to
complete the work. Implementing such a policy may require additional funding
and support. Still, the payoffs are likely to be great. Not only is it more beneficial
to students than simply assigning a zero, it’s also fairer. In addition, it helps make
the grade a more accurate reflection of what students have learned.
SUMMARY
While grading will always involve professional judgment, making those
judgments requires careful thought and continuous reflection on the purpose.
If grades are to represent information about the adequacy of students’ performance with respect to clear learning standards, then the evidence used in
determining grades must denote what students have learned and are able to do.
To allow other factors to influence students’ grades misrepresents their learning
attainments.
Grading requires careful planning, thoughtful judgment, a clear focus on
purpose, excellent communication skills, and an overriding concern for students.
Such qualities are necessary to ensure grading policies and practices that provide
high quality information on student learning in any standards-based learning
environment.
Further Reading: Guskey, T. R., 2002, How’s my kid doing? A parents’ guide to grades,
marks, and report cards, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Guskey, T. R., ed., 1996, Com-

municating student learning. 1996 yearbook of the association for supervision and
curriculum development, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development; Guskey, T. R., & Bailey, J. M., 2001, Developing grading and reporting systems for student learning, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press; Guskey, T. R., & Marzano,
R. J., 2002, Grading and reporting student learning—Professional development inquiry
kit, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Thomas R. Guskey

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HEAD START
Head Start is a comprehensive program serving low-income families with young
children. Since its inception in 1965, Head Start (HS) has served more than 23
million young children and their families.
HEAD START HISTORY
In 1964 the Head Start Planning Team recommended that HS begin as a
comprehensive program that would include health, dental, educational, social,
and parent involvement services. Head Start was established on the basis of two
assumptions: comprehensive early childhood services could positively affect
the social competence of young children; and low-income children, whose home
environments could not provide the stimulating environments of their middle
class peers, would benefit greatly from such early childhood services. The planning team recommended a pilot program of 50,000 children so researchers could
measure children’s performance and undertake longitudinal studies on the benefits of the program. The team estimated that it would cost $1,000 per child to
provide comprehensive services. Concerned over the costs of such a large-scale
pilot program, the federal government funded the initial HS summer program
at $180 for each of the 561,000 children served. (Zigler & Muenchow, 1992).
Head Start’s first summer program in 1965 served 561,000 in 2,400 communities. Participation rose to 733,000 children in the second year of the summerbased program in 1966. In 1971 the program was converted from a summer
program to a school-year program. However the overwhelming support that HS
had enjoyed during its first stage waned so that by 1971 the number of children

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Head Start

served had dropped to 397,000. The slowdown in funding was, in part, a reaction to the conclusions of the Westinghouse Study, the first major evaluation
study of HS that was released in 1969. The study found that elementary aged
children who attended HS did not score higher on standardized tests than their
peers. This challenged the notion that HS would eradicate school failure and
subsequently poverty. The Westinghouse Study’s results, paired with the changing political climate, which focused less on social programs, had a significant
impact on HS’s history.
From 1969–1978 (see Table H.1), HS funding remained relatively flat and
there was little growth in the program. Federal performance standards were
developed during this time as well as a national Child Development Associate (CDA) credential for HS teachers. Head Start added disability services and
mandated that at least 10 percent of the enrollment include young children
with disabilities. In 1978 Congress increased the HS budget by 33 percent, increasing the number of HS children served by 43,000. Training and technical
support services were developed to assist local grantees (Zigler & Muenchow,
1992).
In the 1990s the HS budget increased to provide services for an additional
180,000 children. Another program, Early Head Start, was begun. Early Head
Start is a program for expectant families or parents with infants and toddlers.
Grantees provide services through both home- and center-based programs. In
response to welfare reform, Head Start legislation mandated that grantees develop or partner with child care programs to provide full-day services to HS
families.
The increased funding for HS was coupled with increased expectations of
grantees and program staff. A child assessment system was developed and implemented, and half of the HS teachers were required by 2003 to obtain a twoyear degree in early childhood education or child development. More intensive
monitoring of local programs was implemented, resulting in some grantees losing their HS program funding.
Several studies were released or begun during the 1990s. Begun in 1997, the
Head Start Family and Child Care Experiences Survey (FACES) described, assessed, and evaluated the programs, children, and families enrolled in 40 HS
Table H.1 Head Start Budget and Number of Children Served
Year

Budget

Enrollment

1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005

96,400,000
325,700,000
403,900,000
735,000,000
1,075,059,000
1,552,000,000
3,534,128,000
5,267,000,000
6,843,114,000

561,000
477,400
349,000
376,300
452,080
540,930
750,696
857,664
906,993

Head Start | 303

programs. The Head Start Impact Study focuses on two questions: What impact
does HS have on children’s development (particularly school readiness), and
under what circumstances and for which children and their families does HS
have the greatest impact? The Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project
assessed children and families who were randomly assigned to 17 Early Head
Start programs (home-based, center-based, or combined center- and homebased programs) or a control group. Findings from these three studies include
that children attending HS had significant developmental gains (particularly for
African American and Latino children); families had greater access to health and
dental care; specific preschool curricula positively impacted children’s outcomes;
and children who attended two years of HS had greater gains than children who
attended the program for one year. However, HS children scored below the national average on developmental assessments regardless of how long they were
enrolled in the program.
HEAD START TODAY
In 2005 1,604 local grantees served 906,993 children in HS programs at an
average cost of $7,287 per child. The children are a diverse ethnic and racial population: 35 percent are Caucasian, 31 percent are African American, 24 percent are
Latino, and 4 percent are Native American. The majority are 3- and 4-year-olds:
52 percent are 4-year-olds, 34 percent are 3-year-olds, 10 percent are under 3
years of age, and 4 percent are 5 year olds.
Head Start Eligibility Guidelines
Over 90 percent of families qualifying for HS do so based upon their income.
HS uses the federal poverty income rate to determine eligibility for the program.
In 2004, the federal poverty rate income for a family of four was $22,000. Families with young children with disabilities may apply for HS regardless of their
incomes since HS regulations mandate that young children with disabilities
comprise 10 percent of the enrolled population (in 2005, 12.5 percent of children enrolled in HS have a diagnosed disability).
Head Start does not provide services to all eligible families. Current estimates
are that 60 percent of income eligible families with preschoolers and 10 percent
of income eligible families with children under three years old are served.
Family Structure and Income
Since the inception of the Personal and Responsibility Act, or welfare reform,
most HS parents are in the paid workforce: 75 percent are working, 18 percent
receive public assistance, and 7 percent are enrolled in school or some other
activity. Traditionally HS has served more single parent families than two parent families. The percentage of single parent families is higher than two parent
families, and two parent families are more likely to have a full time parent in the
workforce.

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Head Start Services
There are three models of HS services: home-based (a home-based teacher
conducts regularly scheduled home visits); center-based (child attends an infant/
toddler or three- and-four-year-old program); or a combination of both home
visits and a center-based component. Over 90 percent of the children served attend center-based services. Currently 49,000 children are enrolled in the homebased program.
HS programs provide dental, physical, mental health, social, nutritional, and
educational services to families enrolled in the program. Children receive annual health and dental screening, and Head Start helps coordinate any required
follow-up treatment or care. Center-based programs provide meals and educational activities to the children enrolled in the program. Head Start family support personnel work directly with individual families to assist them in accessing
educational and training opportunities, employment, housing, physical and
mental health services, and other community resources.
Parent Involvement
Head Start has a long-rooted commitment to working with parents and children.
In 2005 890,000 parents volunteered in their child’s classroom. A two-generational
model provides services to parents/caregivers and children. Partnerships with
adult literacy and English as a Second Language program are features found in
many HS programs. Since the inception of welfare reform, Head Start grantees
are increasingly offering full day services or partnering with child development
centers in the community to provide full day services for working parents.
Head Start Staff
Head Start staff are racially and culturally diverse and include program directors, coordinators, classroom teachers, classroom aides, family support personnel, home visitors, and bus drivers. Twenty-nine percent of HS staff are fluent in
two languages, and 27 percent of staff members are parents of children who are
currently or were formerly enrolled in the program (Hamm & Ewen, 2005). In
2005 69 percent of HS teachers had at least a two-year degree in early childhood
education. Recent legislation mandates that 50 percent of Head Start teachers
obtain a bachelor’s degree by 2008.
Head Start Governing Structure and Funding
Head Start is organized as a federal-local agency partnership operating under
the auspices of the Administration for Children and Families, Department of
Health and Human Services. It is funded through a Head Start Reauthorization
Act that is passed by Congress every four years. The federal government provides 80 percent of program funding to local grantees, and the grantee contributes a 20 percent match. In addition to funding, which amounted to $6.8 billion

Head Start | 305

in FY 2006, the act includes new policies and directives that, over time, have
helped shape the current form and operations of the HS program.
Head Start agencies (or grantees) submit a grant proposal every three years to
the regional HS office that includes a service plan based upon the needs of the
community. This plan must comply with the Head Start Performance Standards,
which are divided into three major components: early childhood development
and health services (implementation of a curriculum and assessment system to
prepare children for kindergarten and providing health, dental, and nutrition
services); family and community partnerships (parent and community involvement on governing boards and daily operation of the program); and program
management/operation (programs comply with HS procedures and mandates
that are evaluated with on-site visits). Depending on the funding available,
grantees may request additional funding for increasing enrollment, specialized
services, or teacher salaries.
Every three years each HS grantee undergoes a peer review, an intensive onsite evaluation of the program operation that includes classroom observations,
examination of records and operating procedures, and interviews with parents
and community members. The peer review team includes the use of the Program Review Instrument for Systems Monitoring of Head Start and Early Head
Start Grantees (PRISM), designed to assess program compliance in the following areas of service: health, environment, disabilities, mental health, family and
community, transportation, education and early childhood development, fiscal
management, and program design and management. If the peer review team
reports that a grantee is out of compliance with HS standards, the grantee will be
required to make the necessary changes. In some cases, grantees lose their funding and the HS grant in the area is open to applications from other agencies.
Head Start grantees are governed by a policy council and board of directors
with the authority to make decisions regarding the operating budget, personnel,
and program operation. Federal policy stipulates that HS parents comprise
51 percent of the policy council membership, and the remaining 49 percent are
community members. Members of the board of directors represent the community and have the expertise to insure that HS funds and operation are in compliance with federal policies and standards.
ONGOING ISSUES
One of the ongoing issues facing HS is funding constraints; only a fraction of
the income-eligible families are enrolled in the program. In 1965, during its first
summer program, Head Start served over 500,000 children; after that time enrollment dropped dramatically. It was not until the early 1990s that HS enrolled
the same number of children as it did in 1965. Another result of the budget is
that HS teachers, 50 percent of whom are required to obtain a bachelor’s degree
by 2008, earn $26,500 per year compared to the average public school salary of
$42,000. Teacher turnover is 18 percent, and most teachers report that salary is
one of the major reasons for changing jobs. In the proposed HS bill, there is no
additional funding for HS teacher salaries.

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The quality of HS classrooms varies greatly, and there is concern about this
disparity and how to improve the quality of services for all children and families. There are increased measures to monitor program quality and provide
grantees with training and technical assistance to improve services. In addition,
proposed legislation would implement procedures to defund poorly performing grantees and open the bid to other community programs.
With the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 there is increased
pressure for program accountability including measuring children’s performance.
The new HS assessment system, the National Reporting System (NRS) implemented in 2003, assesses all preschool children at the beginning (430,000 fourand five-year-old children in fall 2003) and end of the program year in the areas of
mathematics and literacy. Like the testing results from other studies, NRS findings
are that HS children made gains in these areas but scored lower than the national
norm. Since the assessment began, questions about the reliability and validity of
the test have been raised including a letter of concern from 100 early childhood
educators and psychologists indicating that test scores predict 25 percent or less
of the variance in children’s academic performance in kindergarten and first grade
(Hill, 2003). Because of these concerns, the proposed Head bill requires that the
National Academy of Sciences review and revise the National Reporting System.
Further Reading: Ceglowski, D., 1998, Inside a Head Start center: Developing policies from
practice, New York: Teachers College Press; Hamm, K., & Ewen, D., 2005, Still going
strong: Head Start children, families, staff, and programs in 2004, retrieved January 5,
2007, from http://www.clasp.org/publications/headstart_brief_6.pdf; Hill, W., 2003, The
National Reporting System: What is it and how will it work? Head Start Bulletin, 76;
National Head Start Association, n.d., Head Start basics, retrieved January 5, 2007, from
and Human Services, 2005, Head Start impact study: First year findings, retrieved
January 5, 2007, from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/
firstyr_sum_title.html; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006, FACES
2003 research brief: Children’s outcomes and program quality in Head Start, retrieved
January 5, 2007, from http:www.acf.hss.gov/programs/opre/hs/faces/reports/research_
2003/research_2003_title.html; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2006,
Head Start program fact sheet, retrieved January 5, 2007, from htttp://www.acf.hss.gov/
programs/hsb/research/2006.html; Zigler, E., & Muenchow, S., 1992, Head Start: The
inside story of America’s most successful educational experiment, New York: Basic Books.

Deborah Ceglowski and Janet Ceglowski
HOMELESS CHILDREN AND SCHOOLS
As the waters of hurricanes Katrina and Rita receded from Gulf Coast cities
in the fall of 2005, America and the world witnessed evidence of the persistent
social and economic inequality in the United States despite the nation’s record
gains in productivity and wealth during the last two decades. Homeless children and youth are emblematic of this duality in American society, and it is important to focus on the growing population of homeless children in the United
States and the challenges to educating them.

Homeless Children and Schools | 307

In the past 15 years, homelessness has increased dramatically across the
United States. An estimated 800,000 people are homeless on any given night,
and overall, between 2.3 and 3.5 million Americans—roughly 1 percent of the
U.S. population—experience homelessness during a given year. Historically the
majority of homeless people were white, single, middle-aged men. However, in
recent decades, families of women and children have become a sizable segment
of the U.S. homeless population. Children and adolescents are almost half of the
homeless population. Forty-four percent of homeless individuals are members
of homeless families, and they are disproportionately from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds.
HOMELESSNESS AND POVERTY
The relationship between poverty and homelessness is clear. Poverty is the
result of the interaction between structural forces, tragic circumstances, and
sometimes, bad choices. However, structural forces such as the restructuring of
the U.S. economy, especially the disappearance of manufacturing jobs; an inadequate minimum wage; inadequate affordable housing, public transportation,
and child care; and the growing holes in the social safety net are key factors contributing to the growth of poverty in twenty-first-century America. Although
the United States has one of the highest per capita Gross National Products
(GNP) in the world, the United States also has higher levels of poverty than
most developed countries. As of 2005, over 37 million Americans lived in poverty. Children account for 25 percent of the total U.S. population, but 35 percent
of the population of poor Americans. Additionally, America’s child poverty rate
is significantly higher than that of the majority of other Western industrialized
nations.
Homeless citizens in central cities account for over 70 percent of the total
homeless population in the United States. The links between urban poverty and
homelessness rest on two economic trends. First, the transformation of the inner
city labor market for poorly educated workers has resulted in growing income
inequality. Skilled jobs that paid living wages and benefits have been relocated
either to the suburbs, the Sunbelt, or overseas. Urban job growth has been largely
in the tertiary sector (finance and information sectors). Poorly educated inner
city residents typically do not have the credentials and skills to compete for such
jobs. The lack of skills and education among the poor, especially in inner cities,
and the changing labor market contribute to the economic marginalization of
millions of Americans.
The second trend is the diminishing stock of affordable housing in urban
centers where many poor people live. Urban renewal in many American cities led to the destruction of affordable housing as older, less expensive housing
was destroyed and few suitable replacements were built. Although low-income
housing is generally located in central cities, there is still a significant shortage of
affordable housing in the metropolitan regions. Inadequate federal housing policy for the poor and the lack of affordable housing are key contributing factors
to homelessness. This situation was exacerbated by the devastation of homes by

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hurricanes Katrina and Rita. An estimated 302,000 housing units were lost, the
vast majority of which were affordable to low-income families.
HOW MANY HOMELESS STUDENTS?
Counting the number of homeless persons in the United States historically
has been challenging. For example, estimates of the number of homeless children
reflect only children from families that passed through public or private agencies serving the homeless. The estimates do not account for homeless students
who are doubled up with relatives or friends or are living in hidden places. Enumerations of homeless children rarely include homeless youth.
Homeless youth should not be confused with homeless children who are
members of homeless families. A homeless youth is as an individual who is not
less than 16 or more than 21 years of age for whom it is not possible to live in a
safe environment with a relative and who has no other safe alternative. Homeless youth often are “family-less” because they ran away from their homes (or
institutional placements), usually because of conflicts with parents (or guardians); they were forced from or locked out of their homes by their parents or
step-parents; they feel they no longer have a home to which they can safely return because of irreconcilable differences with their parents; or they lost track
of their family’s location. A significant proportion of homeless youth flee from
sexual or physical abuse, high levels of familial conflict, or virulent intolerance
of their homosexuality.
The best estimates indicate that, at any given time, between 300,000 and
500,000 young people are living out of the home in unstable and unsupervised
environments. The difficulty in estimating the actual size of the population of
homeless youth, like homeless children and adults, lies in the challenge of accurately counting people who are transitory and, in the case of youth, who are
relatively secretive about their lives.
EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES OF HOMELESS YOUTH
Arguably, homeless children and youth continue to be the most at risk for school
failure of any identifiable student population. Like other low-income students,
homeless youth suffer disproportionately from the effects of hunger, disease, and
family crises that undermine achievement and learning. Children whose families
are in crisis are less able to learn in school; children with no safe place to sleep,
wash, or relax are less able to learn in school. Poor nutrition is a serious threat
to their school performance. School districts themselves rarely provide medical
and dental care, clothing, job referrals, housing, or other social services to homeless children and their families. Therefore, students who do not otherwise receive
these services are at a marked disadvantage relative to their peers.
Homeless students face economic deprivation, family loss or separation, insecurity, social and emotional instability, and, in general, upheaval in their lives.
Those who are enrolled in schools may receive some services, depending upon

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which school district they attend. But many homeless children and youth are not
enrolled in school. Homeless parents who do not enroll their children in school
may be embarrassed about their living situation or too exhausted from trying to
meet daily needs for food and shelter to navigate what seems to be an impenetrable school bureaucracy. Some parents feel forced to keep their children out
of school because of their lack of access to laundry or bathing facilities. Many
homeless children refuse to attend school for fear of taunts from other students,
lack of clean clothing and school supplies, or their inability to perform well.
Nevertheless, most homeless children attend school. They are enrolled in
traditional classrooms or in special programs that serve as transitions to regular
classrooms. The proportion of homeless youth who attend school is far lower.
A variety of barriers prevent homeless youth from continuing their educations.
These include the effects of living on the streets, work schedule conflicts, substance abuse, health problems, extreme poverty, developmental lags, and emotional and psychological problems. Schools are rarely equipped to accommodate
adolescents without homes or families.
Once homeless children are in school, their problems in obtaining an appropriate education often continue. Homeless families are highly mobile. Each
change of residence may involve a change in school. Teaching largely transitory
and impoverished students poses numerous challenges, and teachers rarely have
the necessary expertise to address the complexity of homeless students’ needs.
Among the problems that teachers confront is the gap in skills and knowledge
that many homeless students possess due to their low rate of past school attendance. In addition, homeless children typically face all of the educational
difficulties faced by other youngsters from low-income families. They frequently
come to school unprepared and/or exhibit behaviors that are not socially acceptable in the school setting.
Homeless students may find the traditional classroom curriculum and learning activities irrelevant because they are so detached from students’ lived experiences. The way schools are organized for instruction assumes continuity. High
student mobility also makes it more difficult for schools to provide meaningful
services. When children move from school to school, continuity of instruction
is virtually impossible. If children remain in a school for only a short period
of time, it is difficult to provide any educational services of lasting value, or to
begin to repair the damage done by the combination of their prior spotty attendance, instructional instability, and the conditions of living in poverty.
Students with disabilities are an identifiable homeless subpopulation with
particularly acute and often unmet needs. Even the stipulations within special
education statutes designed to bring services to eligible students do not overcome
the formidable barriers providing appropriate education to homeless student
with disabilities. For example, by the time a referral has been made, eligibility has been determined, and a placement can be provided, homeless students
may well have moved to another school. Children with limited English proficiency who require bilingual services, students with academic problems who
require remedial services, gifted student who are eligible for special programs,

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and children who are undocumented immigrants frequently fail to obtain the
special services they need and to which the law entitles them.
THE STEWART B. MCKINNEY HOMELESS ASSISTANCE ACT
The U.S. Congress recognized the threat to school success posed by homelessness when it passed the first comprehensive legislation to aid homeless students. The 1987 Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, its subsequent
Amendments in 1990 and 1994, and more recently, the reauthorized 2001
McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act provided considerable protection for
the educational needs of homeless children and youth by removing many formal barriers to schooling faced by this population of students. Individual states
receive funds from the McKinney Act and then channel grant monies to local
educational authorities that provide services to these youngsters.
The 2001 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act was reauthorized as a
part of the No Child Left Behind legislation. McKinney-Vento clarifies definitions
and standards for determining eligibility and helping homeless children obtain an
education. Currently, it is the only federal guideline for the education of homeless
children. The central provisions of the McKinney Act and its amendments are:
• Equal access to public school education. The act requires states not only to
provide appropriate education but also to ensure that local school districts
do not create a separate education system for homeless children.
• Preschool. States are required to ensure that homeless preschoolers have
equal access to the same public preschool programs that housed children
enjoy.
• Removal of barriers to access. Educational authorities must remove barriers to enrollment and attendance. Typically these include immunization
requirements, guardianship requirements, lack of transportation, birth
certificates, school records, or other documentation.
• Choice of school placement. Homeless children may attend their school of
origin (the last school in which the child was enrolled) or transfer into any
school in the attendance area in which the child is currently living.
• Equal access to school programs and services. Educational authorities
must ensure that homeless students and preschoolers have the same access
to special education or gifted education as their housed peers.
• Direct services. The 1990 amendments permit schools to use McKinney
funds to provide before- and afterschool programs, tutoring programs, referrals for medical and mental health services, preschool programs, parent
education, counseling, social work services, transportation, and other services that may not otherwise be provided by public schools.
• Interagency coordination and communication. School systems are required to coordinate their efforts among state social services agencies
and other relevant programs and service providers (including programs
for preschoolers and runaway youth) in order to improve the provision of
comprehensive service.

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STATUS OF EDUCATION FOR HOMELESS STUDENTS
States and local school districts have improved their services to homeless students during the past 20 years. With few exceptions, states have reviewed and
revised their laws, regulations, and policies to remove obstacles to the education
of homeless children and youth. There is a high level of success in identifying
and eliminating the barriers once posed by policies on residency and school
records. Enrollment barriers related to immunization and guardianship records
persist and are not so easily modified. Yet, even with improved access through
removal of residency barriers, homeless students in different districts within the
same state often have uneven access to educational services. State policies that
exempt homeless students from enrollment requirements do not eliminate barriers unless schools and districts are aware of and enforce these policies; unfortunately, many do not.
There remain discernible subgroups whose educational and social needs are
particularly striking and require special attention that is typically not provided
in most schools. Among these subgroups are independent youth, gifted and talented children, students with learning or physical disabilities, and children of
undocumented immigrants.

Figure H.1 Information for School-Aged Youth, National Center for
Homeless Education.

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Successful Approaches to Educating Homeless Students
Once homeless students arrive in schools and receive the various services
they need as a prelude to learning (these can include nutrition, clothing, shelter, diagnostic assessments, counseling, transportation, and medical and dental
care), they require rigorous curricula engagingly taught by qualified instructors.
Indeed, this is what all students require. In addition, homeless students require a
host of ongoing services. Successful approaches to educating homeless children
include the following:
Address family needs. Homeless students whose families receive social services are better able to succeed in school.
Coordination and collaboration in service delivery. A coordinated, collaborative approach across programs, institutions, and other service providers seems to be especially important when dealing with homeless students
and their families.
Implementation. State and local educational authorities must remove all barriers to implementation of the McKinney-Vento Act so that all homeless
children between the ages of 3 and 21 obtain the educational opportunities to which they are entitled by law. Although there have been noteworthy improvements in the removal of barriers to the education of homeless
children and youth, serious implementation problems persist.
Attention to homeless youth. Independent homeless youth require flexibility
in school procedures in the areas of admissions criteria, attendance policies, course offerings, and class assignments. School officials must attempt
to accommodate independent homeless youth’s job requirements, the absence of places suitable for them to do homework, and other related problems they face. They also require emotional support, access to community
resources and services such as special education and transportation.
Parental involvement and support. Parental involvement and support are
essential for homeless children. Although parents of homeless students
may recognize the importance of education, they often are too preoccupied with securing their family’s needs to effectively advocate for their
children’s educational needs. Services to parents that include information
on the importance of involvement as well as strategies that they can employ despite their own educational limitations can facilitate their effective
involvement in their children’s education.
LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE
The aftermath of 2005, hurricanes Katrina and Rita illustrated how the problem of homelessness itself is inextricably connected to the larger issue of poverty
in America. Until the sources of social, political, and economic inequality that create poverty and homelessness are addressed, homeless families and their children
will be found within sight of the skyscrapers, museums, and luxury apartments
of major cities, and homeless students will be a presence in American schools.
Adequately educating homeless children cannot be delayed until poverty is ad-

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dressed. McKinney-Vento requires public schools to educate homeless students.
Whether schools can or should provide high quality, equitable education to
homeless students without also providing the same to other children in poverty
remains an unanswered moral and practical dilemma beyond the scope of this
chapter. However, recognition that the phenomena of poverty and homelessness
are linked may be helpful for policymakers and educators charged with the responsibility of educating homeless children and youth in America’s schools.
Further Reading: Burt, M., 2001, What will it take to end homelessness? Washington, DC:
Urban Institute; Cunningham, M., & Henry, M., 2007, Homelessness counts, Washington, DC: National alliance to end homelessness; Iceland, J., 2006, Poverty in America: A
handbook, Los Angeles: University of California Press; Mickelson, R., 2000, Children on
the streets of the Americas: Globalization, homeless, and education in the United States,
Brazil, and Cuba, New York: Routledge; Newman, R., 1999, Educating homeless children,
New York: Garland; Nuñez, R., 2004, A shelter is not a home . . . Or is it? New York: White
Tiger Press.

Roslyn Arlin Mickelson and Rajni Shankar-Brown
HOMESCHOOLING
The contemporary homeschool movement in the United States began in the
late 1960s and has since steadily gained momentum, numerically, politically,
and socially. Differences in policies regulating the registration and tracking of
students being homeschooled vary across the states, and the desire of many
families to protect their privacy makes it difficult to obtain precise figures. Estimates place the numbers of homeschooled students in the mid-1980s at between
200,000 and 300,000, and demographers currently believe the number to be approximately 1.35 million. This represents a 450 percent increase over approximately 20 years’ time and suggests that the homeschool population is growing
10 times as fast as that of students in public school.
As the homeschool movement has grown, key research has been conducted
about parental motivation for homeschooling and the socialization and academic achievement of homeschooled children. At the same time, criticism has
been leveled at proponents of the homeschool movement by those who see it as
a threat to public education and social cohesiveness.
THE GROWTH OF THE HOMESCHOOL MOVEMENT
Although homeschooling occurred prior to the widespread legalization of
its practice, it was considered a rare and isolated phenomenon, an unthinkable
practice for the majority of Americans. Those who did engage in it were often
considered deviants and were frequently persecuted by public school and law enforcement officials. Sociologist James S. Coleman’s (1990) recollection of his first
encounter with the idea of homeschooling, in the late 1940s, illustrates this point:
I worked one summer while still in high school, as a counselor in a
summer camp. Exploring one day, I found in the woods near a cliff,

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which overlooked the Ohio River, a beautiful house built entirely of
cedar wood. A more idyllic, rustic setting would have been difficult to
imagine. But the house was vacant. When I inquired about it, I learned
the owner was an artist who had lived in the house with his wife and
children. The family had left, moving to another state, because of a conflict with the state law: He and his wife wanted to educate their children at home, but the state law required them to send their children to
school, either a public school or a state-approved private school. The
family, strong in its convictions, left the house and moved to a state in
which home-based education in lieu of school attendance was legal.
I was unprepared for this experience. I had attended small-town
public schools in rural Ohio which approximated the “common school”
that was Horace Mann’s ideal. I scarcely knew of private schools, and
certainly not of education at home. True, some of the farmers grumbled about having to send their able-bodied sons to high school during
planting or harvest when they were needed, but even they fully accepted
the principle of the public school. (pp. x–xi)
Through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, homeschooling was
illegal in most states. The few states that permitted it did so primarily because of
geographically isolated populations of children without access to public schools.
As the numbers of American families choosing to homeschool their children

Figure H.2 Estimated Number and 95 Percent Confidence Interval for Number of Homeschooled
Students, Ages 5 through 17 in Kindergarten through 12th Grade: 1999 and 2003.
Source: National Center for Educational Statistics http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2004/2004115.pdf.

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grew, especially during the 1980s, they also engaged in effective lobbying efforts
that resulted in legislative changes, and by 1993 homeschooling had become
legal in every state. Three reasons have been suggested for this. First, homeschool parents faced a relatively simple political task because they focused on
educational policy and not broader issues of public policy. Second, their desire
for less state intrusion required little, if any, state fiscal support and appealed to
budget conscious lawmakers. Third, the relatively small size of the homeschooled
population made it difficult to oppose or justify stringent regulations on the
grounds that it posed an overriding threat to public education. And, if opponents drew too much attention to the growth of the homeschool movement, it
could backfire and instead raise more questions about why public schools had
fallen out of favor with a growing number of parents in the public sector.
Five phases summarize the development of the home education movement
from 1970 to 1990: contention, confrontation, cooperation, consolidation, and
compartmentalization. The contention and confrontation phases, which occurred from 1970 through the early 1980s, were periods of legal combativeness and court challenges during which parents and school districts battled
over compulsory attendance laws. The cooperation phase started in the early
to mid-1980s and marked the beginning of the implementation of policies allowing homeschooled children to benefit from public school facilities and programs. Despite the beginning of cooperation, there was still much contention
and disagreement between homeschoolers and public school districts. The consolidation phase took place in the late 1980s and was characterized by numerical
growth, networking, legislative lobbying, and public acceptance. The compartmentalization phase, which emerged in the 1990s as a result of a diminished
need for a united front among homeschoolers as they succeeded in legitimizing
their practice, showed signs of ideological division and dissent among various
homeschool factions.
The growth, visibility, influence, and arguably the ideological direction of
the homeschool movement have been strongly influenced by two organizations
that were founded to promote its legitimacy. In 1983, Michael Farris and Mike
Smith, two attorneys who were also homeschooling parents, began the Home
School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) as a nonprofit organization to fight
for the legal rights of homeschooling families. The HSLDA identifies itself as a
Christian organization, although it is careful to say that its mission is to protect
the rights of all homeschoolers, regardless of religious persuasion. It limits support to parents engaged in private homeschooling, and will not accept as members parents whose children are in public or charter school independent study
programs. The HSLDA has also formed close ties with conservative politicians
and activists whom many would identify as being members of the “Religious
Right” or Christian conservative persuasion.
The organization has grown over the years and now employs 9 attorneys and
over 50 staff members. It is also closely aligned with Patrick Henry College in
Leesburg, Virginia, which was founded in 2000 as an independent Christian college to prepare and develop students, especially those who have been homeschooled, to forward the HSLDA worldview and its political agenda. Michael

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Farris served as its first president, and he is currently its chancellor. He also
serves as general counsel to the HSLDA.
In 1990, Brian D. Ray, a former college professor and homeschool parent,
founded the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), a nonprofit
organization to conduct and collect research about homeschooling. Although
NHERI does not publicly adopt the overtly Christian stance of the HSLDA, its
research agenda is clearly one that is intended to provide research that supports
and forwards the cause of homeschooling. Among its goals are working with
legislators on Capitol Hill and at the state and local level “on issues related to
parental rights, the freedom we have to teach our children at home, and homeschoolers coordinating with local school officials.” Ray has written numerous
articles about homeschooling, virtually all of which promote it as superior to
public schooling, both socially and academically.
As a result of the relatively high profile of these organizations inside and
outside of the homeschool community, as well as their aggressive promotion
of homeschooling in the popular media, homeschooling is being favorably portrayed in circles where less than 20 years ago it was often maligned. Much of its
popular portrayal is due to studies and reports that consistently seem to suggest
that homeschools are academically superior to public schools.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH RELATED
TO HOMESCHOOLING
Homeschooling has been the subject of research for the past several decades;
however, homeschooling is difficult to study and the research is limited. Samples
in quantitative studies tend to be small in size, nonrandom, and difficult to generalize from. Many people who homeschooled early in the movement feared exposure or persecution and actively eschewed contact with anyone who wanted
to examine their methods or motives. Even after legalization and widespread
acceptance, homeschoolers have been reluctant to provide information about
themselves to traditional researchers, feeling they might have ulterior motives
that would compromise their privacy or misrepresent their views.
Parental Motivations for Homeschooling
Early researchers of the contemporary homeschool movement suggested it
was initiated by “pedagogues,” parents who wanted to remove their children
from traditional public and private schools because they believed that the curriculum and teaching methods being promulgated inhibited their children’s development and learning. These parents felt schools were overly bureaucratic and
depersonalized their children’s education. Some parents thought the schools were
just inept at preparing students. Another group soon joined the pedagogues in
their desire to control their children’s education. They were called “ideologues”
and described as parents who were religiously motivated and wanted to protect their children from secular humanism and other antireligious forces they
believed were being promoted in public schools. The ideologues were also

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portrayed as wanting to forge closer bonds with their children, and the family
relationship was seen as central. Later researchers have suggested that the
pedagogue/ideologue dichotomy was somewhat simplistic and incomplete, and
that it is now thought to be an outdated identification scheme.
Some research studies undertaken during the mid- and late 1980s indicated that
Christian parents identified politically as a part of the conservative right became
more vocal and active in lobbying for homeschooling. Other studies suggested
that there was a middle ground, and that parents’ motivations were more multidimensional and complex, even mainstream. The reasons cited range from libertarian perspectives with parents not wanting involvement with the government, to
unsatisfactory experiences parents had in school as children, to fear about student
safety and a desire to protect children from negative peer influences.
The Socialization of Homeschooled Children
Much of the criticism of the homeschool movement has been grounded on
the premise that children who don’t attend school will suffer adverse effects in
terms of their abilities to communicate and interact with others, both adults and
peers. Not surprisingly, groups that tend to support traditional education, such
as teachers’ unions, warn that homeschooled children will have difficulty getting
along with others, or with eventually leaving the home environment in “real
life.” Homeschoolers vehemently disagree, contending that schools and schoolyards are inherently bad models for positive socialization and relationships.
A review of this research suggests that children are not kept at home in isolation from others and society. Parents report that their children participate in organized athletics, attend music and dance lessons, have part-time paid jobs, do
volunteer work, belong to clubs and participate in hobby groups outside of home
and visit cultural and educational institutions such as museums and concerts. In
addition, fewer than 3 percent of fourth-graders who are home-schooled watch
more than three hours of television a day, as compared with 38 percent of
fourth-graders who attend school.
The research about how content homeschooled students are with the frequency and quality of contact with their peers outside of home is inconclusive.
Older children report missing friends at school events such as dances and games
and feel behind about “what’s in style,” leading to the conclusion that they feel
socially isolated. In a later study, homeschooled middle school age children reported satisfaction and no sense of isolation.
A handful of studies have examined the question of how well homeschooled
students are learning rules for appropriate social behavior and forming positive
attitudes about themselves. This research suggests they are successful and faring
no worse than their school attending peers. It is important to note, however, that
neither the numbers of studies nor the sample sizes are particularly large, and
that social adjustment and attitude formation is a complex area, so inferences
must be made with these considerations in mind.
Now that two generations of students have been homeschooled, studies are
beginning to focus on how well they do in their post-homeschooling lives. A

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small group of families who homeschooled their children in Hawaii demonstrate
that they all attended college, many attaining graduate degrees, and that they all
were working or parenting (or both) and contributing to society. In a survey of
more than 230 homeschool graduates, 69 percent had gone on to post-secondary
education while 31 percent were employed, figures that closely mirror those of
traditional high school graduates. Homeschoolers attending a small private college scored highest among the groups on two-thirds of the indicators, many in
areas related to leadership.
Academic Performance of Homeschooled Students
There have been numerous studies of the academic performance and achievement of homeschooled students. In general, research suggests that homeschooled students do at least as well or better academically than their peers
in public school. In all but a few studies, students taught at home consistently
scored higher than the average public school student. In one of the largest studies of homeschooled students’ academic performance, homeschooled students
had above average achievement in all academic areas.
The growing body of research seems to suggest that homeschooled children
are well adjusted and are achieving academically at least as well as their peers
being educated in public schools. Sampling methods and sizes are a problem,
however, and there are questions of how much of the research has been conducted and promoted by people with an interest in portraying homeschooling
in a positive light. Most of the data that have been collected and analyzed were
obtained from families who were willing to share this information, and it is possible that those with less than optimal outcomes might be reluctant to share
them. And while most states have procedures for monitoring homeschooled
children’s progress, they vary considerably and aren’t widely reported, making
any sort of independent verification difficult.
Social Critics and Future Trends in Homeschooling
As the homeschooling movement has gained acceptance and is portrayed in
a positive light by the popular media, it has come under criticism from scholars
and educators who feel that it poses a threat to public education by removing
social capital (both in the removal of students and concerned parents to support
schools), and by undermining the democratizing effects that shared experiences
can impart on students. The two most vocal critics have been Michael Apple and
Chris Lubienski. They see the embracing of homeschooling as an ominous trend
toward pursuit of private interests and a move away from support for public
education and local communities.
A major trend in the homeschooling movement is the proliferation of on-line
and virtual schools. Parents currently may choose from over 30 virtual schools
available on the Internet, representing both Christian and secular perspectives.
Many states have on-line charter schools that cater to homeschoolers (with some
accepting out-of-state students who pay tuition), making it possible for students

Homework

from one state to “be homeschooled” in another state. And there is mounting
evidence of homeschooling gaining in popularity in other countries, such as
Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Africa. It is possible, therefore, that American students of the future could remain at home and receive
their education from a virtual school in another country, potentially changing
the very definition of homeschooling.
Further Reading: Apple, M. W., 2000, The cultural politics of home schooling, Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1&2), 256–271; Beilick, S., Chandler, K., & Broughman, S. P., 2001,
Homeschooling in the United States: 1999, Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education,
National Center for Educational Statistics; Coleman, J. S., 1990, Choice, community, and
future schools, in W. H. Clune & J. F. Witte (Eds.), Choice and control in American education, Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press; Green, C. L., & Hoover-Dempsey, K. V., 2007, Why do
parents homeschool? A systematic examination of parental involvement, Education and
Urban Society, 39(2), 264–285; Knowles, J. G., Marlow, S. E., & Muchmore, J. A., 1992,
From pedagogy to ideology: Origins and phases of home education in the United States,
American Journal of Education, 100, 195–235; Lubienski, C. 2000, Whither the common
good? A critique of home schooling, Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1&2), 207–232;
Mayberry, M., Knowles, J. G., Ray, B., & Marlow, S., 1995, Homeschooling: Parents as educators, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press; Ray, B. D., 1990, A nationwide study of home education: Family characteristics, legal matters, and student achievement, Salem, OR: National
Home Education Research Institute; Stevens, M. L., 2001, Kingdom of children: Culture and
controversy in the home-schooling movement, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stacey B. Roberts
HOMEWORK
Homework is a source of friction between home and school more often than
any other teaching activity. Parents protest that assignments are ineffective, too
long or too short, too hard or too easy, or poorly described. Teachers complain
about a lack of support from parents and administrators, poor training in how
to construct good assignments, and insufficient time to prepare effective assignments. Students object to the time homework takes from their leisure activities,
if they understand the value of the exercise at all.
A DEFINITION OF HOMEWORK
Homework can be defined as tasks assigned to students by schoolteachers
that are intended to be carried out during nonschool hours. This definition excludes (a) in-school or out-of-school guided study (e.g., test preparation classes)
or tutoring; (b) home study courses delivered through the mail, television, on
audio or video cassette, or over the Internet; and (c) extracurricular activities
such as sports teams and clubs.
THE EFFECTS OF HOMEWORK
Educators have suggested a long list of both positive and negative consequences of homework. The positive effects of homework typically begin with its

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immediate effects on achievement and learning. Proponents of homework argue
that it increases the time students spend on academic tasks. As such, the benefits of increased instructional time should accrue to students who do homework: (a) better retention of factual knowledge; (b) increased understanding of
material, and; (c) enrichment of the core curriculum. Proponents also suggest
that the long-term academic benefits of homework include (a) promoting better critical thinking and information processing skills, (b) encouraging students to learn during their leisure time, (c) improving students’ attitudes toward
school, and (d) teaching students’ study habits and skills. Homework also may
help students develop positive personal attributes that extend beyond academic
pursuits. Homework, proponents argue, can promote greater self-discipline and
self-direction, better time organization, and more independent problem solving.
Finally, homework may have positive effects on home life. Parents may become
familiar with and perhaps take part in the schooling process. Students become
aware of the connection between home and school.
Although proponents of homework argue that it can improve students’ attitudes toward school, opponents counter that attitudes may be influenced negatively. They argue that by spending more time on school learning children may
become satiated, or overexposed, to academic tasks, thus reducing achievement
motivation. Also, homework can lead to general physical and emotional fatigue.
Assignments can interfere with sleep or replace other valued activities that teach
important life skills. Further, involving parents in the homework process can interfere with learning. Sometimes parents pressure students to complete homework
assignments or to do them with unrealistic rigor. Parents may create confusion if
they are unfamiliar with the material presented in homework or if their approach
to learning differs from that used in school. In addition, parental involvement,
or the involvement of others such as siblings, can sometimes go beyond simple
tutoring or assistance and become cheating. Homework may lead some students to
receive inappropriate help from others. Finally, opponents of homework argue
that it can increase differences between high- and low-achieving students. They
suggest that high achievers from well-to-do homes are more likely to have greater
parental support for homework, quiet, well-lit places in which to do assignments,
and better resources to help complete assignments successfully.
THE AMERICAN PUBLIC’S ATTITUDE TOWARD HOMEWORK
Throughout the twentieth century, public opinion about homework wavered
between support and opposition. Homework controversies roughly have followed a 30-year cycle, with public outcries for more homework or less homework occurring about 15 years apart. Further complicating matters, at any
moment during the past century arguments and evidence both for and against
homework simultaneously could be found in both the popular and the educational literature. However, at different times the proponents and opponents of
homework have alternately held sway.
Early in the twentieth century, homework was believed to be an important
means for disciplining children’s minds. The mind was viewed as a muscle.

Homework

Memorization, most often of material like multiplication tables, names, and
dates, not only led to knowledge acquisition, but was also believed to be good
mental exercise. Because memorization could be accomplished easily at home,
homework was a key schooling strategy.
By the 1940s a reaction against homework set in. Developing problem-solving
ability, as opposed to learning through drill, became a central task of education. The use of homework to enhance memorization skills was called into question. Greater emphasis was placed on developing student initiative and interest
in learning. Further, the life-adjustment movement viewed home study as an
intrusion on students’ time to pursue other important at-home activities.
The trend toward less homework was reversed in the late 1950s after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite. Americans became concerned that a
lack of rigor in the educational system was leaving children unprepared to face
a complex technological future and to compete against its ideological adversaries. Homework was viewed as a means for accelerating the pace of knowledge
acquisition.
By the mid-1960s, homework came to be seen as a symptom of too much
pressure being placed on children. Contemporary learning theories were again
invoked that questioned the value of most approaches to homework.
In the 1980s, homework came back into favor, as it was viewed as a defense
against the rising international economic threat to American society, exemplified by the booming economies of Southeast Asia. The push for more homework
continued into the 1990s, fueled by educators and parents who felt it could help
meet increasingly rigorous state-mandated academic standards.
As the century turned, another backlash against homework set in. Media
accounts often pitted parents who felt their children were overburdened with
homework against educators pressed to improve achievement test scores.
Interestingly, while the battle over homework raged in the popular press and
among education pundits, there was historical evidence that practices regarding the amount of homework teachers assigned had changed little in the last
half of the twentieth century. Gill and Schlossman (2003) looked at national
surveys reporting time spent on homework and found little evidence of change
from the 1950s onward, except perhaps among the youngest students, age six
to eight, who experienced a jump in assigned homework at the very end of the
century.
FACTORS AFFECTING THE UTILITY OF HOMEWORK
Given the complexity of homework assignments it is not surprising that it
has been the source of much controversy. Indeed, both positive and negative
consequences of homework can occur and can even occur simultaneously. For
instance, homework could improve study habits at the same time that it denies
access to other leisure-time activities.
Whether homework has positive or negative effects, or both, and in what
combinations, can be influenced by many things. Such influences include differences in (a) student characteristics, such as age or grade level, ability, motivation,

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and study habits, (b) home circumstances, such as family economics and the
number of siblings, and (c) subject matter, such as reading, math, or science.
For example, the same assignment may be more or less effective depending on
the developmental level of the child and/or the resources available in the home.
One child may find reading assignments helpful but math assignments confusing while another dislikes reading but enjoys math problems. Factors that might
influence successful homework completion might also include whether an appropriate setting for study is available, be that the home or an afterschool program, whether other activities leave ample time for study, and whether other
people can provide positive assistance, if it is needed.
Educators and parents suggest that the way teachers introduce homework assignments in class can vary and that this can influence its effects. For example,
homework may be more effective if teachers provide the materials (or know that
the material is available in the home) needed to complete homework successfully. Similarly, homework may be more effective if teachers suggest helpful approaches to carrying out the assignment and show how the assignment is linked
to what is going on in class.
After assignments are returned to class, teachers can use different strategies
to make the relevance of assignments to the curriculum clear to students. Strategies may include giving different kinds of feedback (e.g., written comments,
grades), providing rewards for completion or accuracy, testing on homework
content, and using homework in classroom lessons. That is, homework may be
more or less effective depending on the strategy used.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS
The Causal Effect of Homework on Achievement
The best way to answer the question “Does homework cause better achievement” is to conduct studies that compare the achievement of students who were
purposively assigned homework with students who were purposively assigned
no homework. When doing these studies, students in the two groups need to
be as similar as possible, on average, so that difference in achievement between
the groups can be attributed to homework. To most closely accomplish this ideal
test of homework’s effects, the experiment would need to use a chance or random procedure, called random assignment, to determine which students do
homework and which do not.
We found six studies comparing homework and no-homework conditions.
Of the six studies, four used random assignment. The two studies that did not
use random assignment tried to make the students comprising the homework
and no-homework conditions as similar as possible, on average, by statistical control or by matching students in one group with a similar student in
the other group (and eliminating students who did not have a good match).
Students from grades 3 through 5 and 9 through 12 took part in the studies.
The topics of homework varied from math to vocabulary to history to social
studies.

Homework

All results involving unit tests revealed that the students doing homework did
better than the students doing no homework. These studies suggested that the
average student (50th percentile) doing homework had a higher unit test score
than 73 percent of students not doing homework.
Factors that Influence the Association between Homework
and Achievement
We also found 32 studies that contained correlations between the amount of
time a student spent on homework and some measure of achievement. Although
these studies do not permit causal inferences, they can be used to look for possible influences on the relationship between homework and achievement.
Measures of Achievement
One analysis compared average correlations involving class grades with average correlations involving standardized achievement tests. The relationship between homework and achievement was statistically significant for both grades
and achievement test scores. The absolute difference between the two average
correlations was quite small and probably not practically very important.
Subject Areas
Another analysis compared correlations looking at reading achievement with
correlations looking at mathematics achievement. Homework was statistically
related to both reading and math achievement. However, the average correlation
between time on homework and math achievement was statistically stronger
than the one for reading. But again, the absolute difference between the average
correlations was quite small and probably not practically important.
Grade Levels
The strength of the average correlation between time spent on homework and
achievement was noticeably different depending on the grade level of the students. The relationship was significantly higher and more positive for secondary school students (grades 7 through 12) than for elementary school students
(grades kindergarten through 6), for whom the relationship was close to nonexistent.
There are several possible explanations for why the relationship between
homework and achievement is so weak for young children. First, younger children are less able than older children or adolescents to ignore irrelevant information or stimulation in their environment. Therefore, the distractions present
in a younger student’s home would make studying there less effective for them
than for older students. Second, younger students have less developed study
habits. This lessens the amount of improvement in achievement that might be
expected from homework given to them. For example, research shows that older

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students allot more time to harder items compared with easier ones than do
younger students. Older students are also more likely to use self-testing strategies to monitor how much of the material they had learned. Third, evidence suggests that teachers in early grades may assign homework more often to young
students to help them develop management of time—a skill rarely measured
on standardized achievement tests or graded in class. Studies also provide some
evidence that young students who are struggling in school take more time to
complete homework assignments. Thus, it may be that in earlier grades homework is being used for purposes other than improving immediate achievement
outcomes.
Amount of Homework
Studies reported between 1977 and 1986 provide data on students’ levels of
achievement for different amounts of time spent on homework. Thus, the idea
could be explored that homework might have a positive effect on achievement
up to a point, but when time spent on homework passed this point it either resulted in no more improvement or started to have negative effects. These studies
again suggest that the relationship differed based on the student’s grade level. For
junior high students the positive association with achievement appears for even
the most minimal amount of time on homework (less than one hour) and grows
more positive until students spend between one and two hours on homework a
night. But two or more hours of homework a night is associated with no better
achievement. For high school students the positive relation between homework
time and achievement does not appear until at least one hour of homework per
week is reported. Then achievement continues to climb unabated until students
spend two hours of homework each night. However, for high school students,
spending more than two hours a night on homework is associated with no better achievement. Only one study was available for elementary school students,
grades one through six, making it unwise to draw any conclusions for elementary school students based on a single study.
Parent Involvement
Patall, Cooper, and Robinson (2007) found evidence that training parents to
be involved in their child’s homework can result in (a) higher rates of homework completion, (b) fewer homework problems, and (c) possibly improved
academic performance among elementary school children. Students in middle
school revealed no effects of parent training or involvement. Training targeted
at high school parents and students is yet to be tested. Also, it is important to
bear in mind that the training employed in these experimental studies (a) included relatively weak forms of training and (b) lasted for short durations. Thus,
it should come as no surprise that parent training had its greatest impact on the
outcomes that are most sensitive—homework completion rates and frequency of
problems—and for students for whom involvement of parents would be easiest
to provide effectively—elementary school students.

Homework

Children with Learning Disabilities
Studies involving students with learning disabilities indicate there is no reason
to believe that the generally positive effects of homework for students without
disabilities would not also accrue to students with learning disabilities. Clearly,
however, the ingredients of successful homework assignments are different for
the two types of students. A consistent theme in the literature is that completing
homework assignments is more difficult for students with learning disabilities.
This is not just because the same material might be more challenging, but also
because learning disabilities are often accompanied by other deficits in attention, memory, or organizational skills that influence the success of homework.
This suggests that homework assignments for students with learning disabilities
should be short and should focus on reinforcement of material already learned,
rather than the introduction of new material. It should also be closely monitored
by teachers and parents.
Assignment Characteristics
Studies examining practice and preparation of homework provide a convincing pattern favoring assignments that contain distributed practice rather than
massed practice. That is, assignments that allow the student to distribute his or
her study of any particular topic over several study sessions are more effective
than assignments that focus only on material covered in class that day. It also appears that interspersing easy and hard problems throughout an assignment can
improve its effectiveness, as well as the student’s perception of its difficulty and
enjoyableness. Finally, individualization of assignments by difficulty may have
little effect on students’ ultimate achievement. However, preparing assignments
that take into account students’ learning styles (e.g., preferences for the context
in which it is completed) may be more effective.
The research on other variations in assignments is less conclusive, most often
because there is simply not much of it. There is a small amount of evidence hinting that more frequent and shorter assignments are no more effective than less
frequent longer ones. Also, group assignments can be effective, depending on
the content involved, but these should be structured along the lines of successful
cooperative learning strategies and used most often with older students.
Research on variations in teacher feedback strategies reveals that feedback of
some sort may improve the effectiveness of homework assignments. However,
the research does not favor one feedback strategy over another. Finally, there is
sound evidence that providing incentives for completion of homework to students who have learning disabilities proves beneficial.
SUMMARY
Homework has been a controversial teaching strategy for over a century. While
attitudes toward homework have been debated in the American media on a regular basis, teachers’ homework practices have varied little over the past half century. Proponents and opponents offer long lists of positive and negative effects of

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homework. Any and all of these effects can happen, alone and in combination.
The effects of homework assignments will depend on the students involved, the
home circumstances, and the preparation and use of homework by the teacher.
Studies that have experimentally tested for the effects of homework found positive and statistically significant results. Generally speaking then, it seems reasonable to conclude that doing homework can cause improved academic achievement.
However, the positive effect of homework on achievement for young students may
be limited. Homework for young children can improve scores on unit tests, but
correlational studies suggest the homework-achievement link for young children
on broader measures of achievement appears to be weak, in fact, bordering on
trivial. For high school students, on the other hand, the effect of homework can be
impressive. But again, even for older students, too much of a good thing may not
be so good at all. Correlational evidence suggests that high school students doing
more than about two hours of homework a night achieve no better than those
doing about two hours. Finally, the benefits of homework for students with learning disabilities can be positive, but its success may lie in (a) teacher preparation
and planning; (b) assignments that are appropriate to the skill, attention span, and
motivation of students; and (c) successful involvement of parents.
Further Reading: Cooper, H., 2007, The battle over homework: Common ground for administrators, teachers and parents, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin; Cooper, H., Robinson, J. C., &
Patall, E. A., 2007, Does homework improve academic achievement? A synthesis of research, 1987–2003, Review of Educational Research, 76, 1–62; Cooper, H., & Valentine, J. C.,
eds., 2001, Homework. A special issue of Educational Psychologist 36; Gill, B., & Schlossman, S., 2003, A nation at rest: The American way of homework, Educational Evaluation
and Policy Analysis, 25, 319–337; Patall, E. A., Cooper, H., & Robinson, J. C., 2006, Parent
involvement in homework: A research synthesis, Manuscript submitted for publication.

Harris Cooper and Erika A. Patall

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
THE CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RIGHT
AND ITS CHALLENGE TO EDUCATION
There is a back-and-forth quality to the advancement of human societies. A
general reflection on history suggests that periods of regression and progress alternate in the spiral flow of civilization. On a smaller, perhaps less dramatic scale, we
see a similar pattern in the evolution of society from generation to generation.
Whether the political system is traditional and autocratic, or a variation on the
modern and democratic state, progressive ideas lap forward and then pull back,
creating a moving line of popular consensus about the basic values and tone of
society. These cultural oscillations generate explanations from the perspective of
science and technology, economics, political theory, and other disciplines.
A common example of this pattern is discussion on the sexual and countercultural revolutions of the radical years characterized as the 1960s. From the
point of view of some disciplines, we might see the role of the birth control pill

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as the catalyst, while economists may argue that the sheer size of the baby boom
generation, and their resultant economic clout, was the significant factor in fomenting these changes. Further yet, social scientists could say the draft and the
Vietnam War were fundamental to the upheaval of the 1960s.
In more recent history, the rise of the Religious Right in U.S. politics and culture has invited similar speculation from the disciplines. Have the rise of corporations and their deliberate program of channeling money into politics provided
the impetus for the movement’s success? Alternatively, could it be that we have a
demographic standoff between rural and urban America?
If we take the Religious Right at its word, their central motivation and key
narrative provide another rationale, which is to resist big government, protecting individual freedom, as well as traditional Christian values, in an era of relativism and secularity.
While these lines of argument have a contribution to make to our understanding, here, however, our purpose is to take a less-traveled, more subjective
path into the motivations of the Right, as well as those who oppose them.
The strict boundaries of disciplinary traditions have their limitations and as
such, leave the psychology of experience inadequately examined. How could
advances in human knowledge dispose the present times to be the most brutal in human history? Why are so many citizens of a democratic state, such as
the United States, antigovernment, when the people create those governments?
Why are voters on the Right restrictive of the civil liberties of others and determined to limit them on narrow, sectarian religious grounds?
By examining the cultural psychology underlying the confrontational politics
we now face one can attempt an explanation of that point of view. There are
hazards to this approach, given the abuses of “psychohistory” and other applications of psychoanalysis to social phenomena, but unless we do a deep psychological or symbolic interpretation of historical events, certain questions will be
left unasked and unanswered.
To respond by simply reverting to breakthroughs in technology or new economic forms is to forget the connection between cultural psychology and the
sociopolitical and economic climate in cities and towns, homes and classrooms.
In this process, however, we are attempting to understand the single-minded
hostility of the Right to contemporary education as manifested particularly in
the public schools and by the leadership of the education profession, including
those in higher education.
Whether for better or for worse, human beings, when so motivated, are capable of moving the course of history in spite of material factors. Somewhere in
our psychology there are resources and motivations that can only be explained
on their own terms: the language of symbol and meaning.
THE SPIRAL OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Despite attempts at popularization, such as Gail Sheehy’s Passages, and a history that goes back at least as far as the writings of Rousseau, theories of lifespan human development are not a part of general awareness.

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Thanks to the pressures of child rearing and conducting K–12 education, society has some appreciation of the stages of childhood and adolescence as revealed in the developmentalist work of Piaget, Erikson, Friedenberg, and others.
There is a tacit consensus, however, that these ages and stages end in adolescence
and are succeeded by a long, seamless path of adulthood.
In theories of psychological development, such as Jung’s, the unfolding of the
psyche takes form in the ego’s emergence and refinement from birth. This process is characterized by the experience of differentiation, that is, by awareness on
the part of the individual of the categories with which he or she is identified and
those from which he or she is separated.
Along with the acquisition of language, the sorting or differentiating process
goes forward from infancy. For example, a child accepts himself as being a white,
Protestant, Republican, Texan, American male athlete and he sets his identity
apart from other ethnicities, religions, political parties, nationalities, and so on.
This either/or quality of thought and experience also invites a simplified
worldview of binaries. We are familiar with the discomfort young people typically experience with shades of gray in meaning, relativity in thought and value,
and open-ended process as opposed to closure. We also understand that it is
normal for the adolescent to yearn for a black-and-white matrix through which
to categorize and understand the world. Those who teach undergraduates become quite familiar with the characteristics of this worldview; however, what we
are less aware of are the echoes of this simplified view in adulthood.
One of the major misconceptions of contemporary commonsense is that
upon entering adulthood, one reaches a level of understanding that is beyond
the need of fundamental renewal and transformation. Adults, by virtue of their
age, not their behavior or ideas, are “mature” and “grown up.” In the popular
mind, this uninterrupted stage of adulthood is broken at most by a midlife crisis
for which accessible remedies, such as divorce and Botox, are found.
Since our tradition is to presume that the personality is mature as one moves
into his or her twenties, there is little ongoing commentary on the impact of
egoistic, differentiating thought among adults in society. Further aggravating
this presumption of maturity and completeness is the attachment the ego has for
declaring its wholeness and supremacy by identifying with a set of traits, real or
imagined.
As Erik Erikson and others have pointed out, there is a basic mechanism of
stage development at play here. At each level of consciousness, we cling to the
concepts of that age and resist deconstructing our identity, even those who are
in pursuit of higher-order experience.
Following the theories of Jung and Erikson, among others, we can claim that
for those who have reached fulfillment of the ego and its differentiating techniques, this penchant for stasis is doubly strong. This is because the developed
ego is by definition the key instrument of will. Will is therefore turned to the purpose of elevating the ego to an unassailable status of centrality in the psychological life of the individual, and with this elevation come characteristic problems.
As suggested above, the ego-oriented personality looks for black-and-white
analyses and closure in addressing the world, and at this stage of development,

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the individual still needs categories such as “white, Protestant, male . . . ” to set
himself apart. The ego is ultimately solitary, having relations with others only in
terms of how these others serve the purposes of the egoistic individual. Eventually, at a point in the path of healthy maturation, this differentiating attitude of
the ego becomes counterproductive, stalling further development.
From an egoistic point of view, selfless relationships, broad acceptances of
others, tolerance for diversity, and the suspension of judgment in order to sympathetically understand new ideas are difficult or impossible experiences. Add
to this dynamic the presumption that adults need not pursue further refinement
of their personality and we have set the stage for reinforcing arrested development. What would seem the sensible and preferred attitude of humility is replaced with an invitation to arrogance and self-congratulation.
Jung defines the further pathway of maturation as that of self-realization. By
this he means the supra-ego emergence of another locus of personhood, the
Self. This culminating complex of associations subsumes the ego as a useful tool
in manifesting the will, but does not confuse the ego or any identification with
the individual’s mature personality.
Self-consciousness in this sense is an expression of an integrative impulse,
which is the inclination to freely experience phenomena of many kinds, including those that the ego would set aside. As the Self presumes that there are
purposes of cognition beyond identity formation, the attitude is, therefore, to
integrate within the individual even those experiences that ostensibly are alien
or “other.”
This is not an invitation to total relativism; one may still find many behaviors
that are morally reprehensible, for example. This attitude does, however, greatly
broaden one’s acceptance of the world as well as altering the dynamic of experience. Through the Self, the individual takes a leap of hope that he or she is secure
in his or her identity and can assume a functioning ego as one element of his or
her psyche. This dynamic has implications for useful engagement with society.
One underappreciated alternative route to these kinds of understandings is
in the various twelve-step programs. Alcoholics Anonymous and related groups
such as Narcotics Anonymous acknowledge in their literature a central debt to
Jung’s theory. The step programs introduce lifespan development and the possibilities of higher order experience, and if one observes the process and theory
of following the steps, the path of self-realization becomes transparently clear.
In contemporary society, ironically, only those in crisis tend to employ this well
conceived path to growth and maturation.
Obviously the theory requires a high level of confidence on the part of the
individual that he or she will not be lost in oblivion if an attitude of differentiation is suspended. For this reason, the individual’s evolution of consciousness as
outlined here is neither described nor understood as a trouble-free, automatic
process.
If an individual does not have a concept that such a developmental process
is possible, or if they have not been exposed to concepts of this type at home, at
church, in a step program, or at school, the likelihood of discovering and traveling such a path is negligible.

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ALIENATION AND EDUCATION
The effects of individual development as described here can manifest themselves in a number of ways. For our purposes, this analysis is being employed to
explore the origins and behavior of the contemporary political Right.
Educated elites, like other identifiable peer groups, interact frequently in their
own world of the like-minded, tending to have more in common intellectually
with parallel professionals around the world than with tradesmen or businesspeople living next door.
Alienation is a major effect of education that is little explored in contemporary discussions of the school and university experience. A frequent outcome of
education is that it loosens family and religious ties and inculcates students into
a new and broader world of peers.
It has not been in the interest of the mainstream education establishment to
publicize or meaningfully dialogue about this side effect of schooling. Few parents enthusiastically or deliberately sign their children up for such a process. On
the contrary, avoiding this socialization is a central motivation of homeschooling and private school initiatives.
In public education, on the way to diplomas and degrees that open up economic opportunity, this quiet subversion of tradition goes on. To a large degree,
teachers and professors are trapped in this hostile relationship with convention.
The mythic sensibility, as manifested in traditional religion, has rarely been
reconciled with the analytic view employed by science, social science, and the
world of scholarly inquiry. Professors and scientists neither feel qualified nor
motivated to attempt the reconciliation.
Faculty tend to be specialists in their disciplines, certified by the Doctor of
Philosophy degree, although the title is to some sense a misnomer. The extent of
their study in the philosophy of their respective disciplines is typically far overshadowed by their attention to more narrow disciplinary knowledge. They are
not prepared to conduct discussions on the belief systems that form the foundation of what, in an increasingly global and multicultural community, still tend to
be Western traditions, and they do not see this kind of persistent self-reflection
as part of their role.
The challenges of this type of discourse should not be minimized. Great minds
have found frustration in attempts to reconcile philosophy and science with
religion. In fact, the modern era left this fundamental challenge unresolved. The
dichotomy is one that defines the dynamic and limitations of modernity while
creating profound social consequences.
Although the Right may seem to be the aggressor in the culture wars around
education, it can therefore be argued that psychologically and culturally their
position is a defensive one. Partisans of the Right’s politics feel under siege in
terms of the legitimacy of their worldview and even their ability to maintain a
community of value in their families. There is, in this sense, a great deal of motivation to act out against the forces of the modern, secular state and its schools.
Progressive forces have overridden traditional views in numerous ways, setting a precedent for the use of political power to affect folkways in U.S. society.

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The Right remembers when their “sacred cows” were eviscerated: when states’
rights and Jim Crow allowed greater (if invidious) individual autonomy in public
spaces and businesses; when wives were clearly subordinated to their husbands;
when homosexuality was beyond public mention or legal tolerance; when abortion was illegal and birth control and sex education were widely restricted; when
schools were a place of Christian prayer and ceremony.
During the past several decades, political operatives have learned to harness this resentment to create voting blocks. The potential of identity politics
has been greatly refined in theory and practice and thereby given the means to
translate into votes at the ballot box. Additionally, advanced corporate media
are mobilized to solidify and propagate the movement. Linked in coalition with
Main Street Republicans and market fundamentalists, the cultural or religious
fundamentalists found themselves aligned and forming a majority, controlling
all major branches of government until they sustained the loss of both houses of
Congress in 2006.
Those who take part in the community of scholars have pursued their own
agendas, motivated by some combination of material appetite, competitive intensity, and an authentic love for the pursuit of knowledge. In the process, they
have left a wake of angry, resentful countrymen who have found their way into
communities of mutual understanding. The conservative religious segment of
the population was marginalized and forgotten until the New Right mobilized
them and gave them political standing. Now that both power and the citizenry
are divided, until there is a popular understanding of a new, unifying “social
imaginary,” we can expect further tearing of society’s fabric and damage to public institutions such as schools.
There is a burnt earth aspect to these culture wars, making the stakes for reconciliation high. If there is to be domestic tranquility, society must construct a
common view that allows peaceful coexistence, even when the heartfelt views of
religious or cultural tradition are not the law of the land. Otherwise, the power
of the ballot box will be used to override policies and ideas that scholars have
understood were unassailable.
Intelligent design can become the legislated curriculum of life science. Stem
cell research is already impeded. Women’s rights and those of the gay community may be rolled back, as through banning the morning after pill and defense
of marriage legislation, respectively. Vouchers may give full, public funding to
sectarian schools, ending the common school. Teaching as a discernible profession, with licensure and formal preparation, may cease to exist.
Given that the relative power of the Right and Left are in delicate balance at
the present moment, and given that this democratic principle still is dominant,
educators and other progressives face a stark reality. Effective propagation of
liberal, humane ideas is an urgent need. Either the political balance must be
shifted by a change in the public’s mind, or the pendulum, which has begun its
backward journey, will sweep exceedingly far.
Further Reading: Erikson, E., 1963 [1950], Childhood and society, New York: Norton; Jung,
C. G., 1976, Psychological types, Princeton: Princeton Bollingen Press; Noddings, N.,

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1993, Educating for intelligent belief or unbelief, New York: Teachers College Press; Rorty,
R., 1998, Achieving our country, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press; Sheehy, G.,
1977, Passages, New York: Bantam; Taylor, C., 2004, Modern social imaginaries, Durham
NC: Duke; Wilber, K., 2000, A theory of everything, Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc.

Paul Shaker

INCLUSIVE SCHOOLING
Inclusive education is an international movement that aims to have all students
educated in general education classes with support and collaboration from specialists, including children with mild to severe disabilities, students considered
gifted and talented, and students with other special needs. Inclusive education
had its beginning in the efforts of parents of children with disabilities, particularly severe disabilities, and professionals who were concerned about the segregated lives for which these children were being prepared in special education
classes and schools. The movement has built on language in laws of countries
throughout the world that has required, as in the United States, education in the
least restrictive environment for students with disabilities. Over time, advocates
of inclusive education for students with disabilities have broadened their focus to
include goals of achieving broad-based diversity embracing also those from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds, students considered gifted and talented,
second language learners, and others. Similarly, advocates of inclusive education
have joined with other initiatives to reform and improve schools overall.
The movement towards inclusive education promoted first by advocates of
students with disabilities naturally dovetails with other efforts to improve the
capacity of schools and educators to meet the needs of children—particularly
related to the education of children considered gifted and talented and the
critique of tracking in schools. Educators and parents were concerned with
limitations in traditional public schooling for children considered gifted and
talented. While some have sought separate classes and programs for these students, others have helped to foster new perspectives on curriculum and instruction in public schools. The movement to create differentiated instruction has
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sought to provide strategies to allow children with different abilities to learn the
same content together without separate and segregated classes while providing
appropriate supports and challenges to high functioning children. Having its
roots in the needs of children, this approach has been supported by advocates of
students with disabilities.
For many years other educators have sought to detrack schools. Tracking is a
practice in which separate series of classes are designed for children considered
at different functioning levels but not labeled as having disabilities—typically
low, average, and above average. While used in many schools, particularly in
middle and high schools, many researchers have argued that the practice has
only small positive effects on the academic and cognitive achievements of high
performing students while often impacting on them negatively socially. For
students considered average or below average, the practice is actively harmful,
contributing to a watered down curriculum and drawing out high functioning
students who act as good models and guides for other students.
Inclusive education, along with differentiated instruction and detracking, is
controversial. This controversy takes many forms and is imbedded in many different educational communities. For example, despite a reasonable amount of
research related to the value of heterogeneous, inclusive learning for students
who are gifted and talented, many concerned with those students continue to
believe and argue for separate, pull-out programs as the only viable option for
students who are gifted. Similarly, some in the special education and disability
community argue that only separate special education programs can serve students with disabilities well.
From another perspective, the debate about inclusive education deals with the
roles of professionals in the educational process. For general education teachers, inclusive education requires that they learn how to effectively teach students
at very diverse levels of abilities together who may also have other challenging characteristics. Some argue that this is what teachers must do regardless of
whether students who are gifted or have disabilities are present in the classroom.
These individuals believe that inclusive education helps improve teaching and
learning for all children. Others argue, however, that this is an unreasonable and
unlikely expectation for teachers.
Perhaps the professional debate is most intense in the professional groups
of many specialists who provide support and services in public schools. These
include social workers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, special education teachers, gifted education teachers, sign language interpreters, and many more. Inclusive education dramatically changes the roles of
these professionals. Traditionally, such professionals work with children in separate clinical environments, most often a room equipped with equipment and
tools used by the specialist. In inclusive education, however, specialists work in
collaboration with the general education teacher and provide their services in
the content of the general education class. Each of these specialists has a professional organization in which the merits of clinical and integrated services have
been highly debated. Within each of these professions, however, there is a strong
and enduring movement towards inclusive education.

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As the inclusive education movement has developed over the last 20 years,
it’s been interesting to watch the shift of the movement and the way that this is
expressed in language. In the United States, early on some called the concept supported education, adapting the language of the field of supported employment,
where individuals with disabilities would be trained and supported on a job, rather
than in a separate training environment. The term integrated education was used
related to having students with severe disabilities attend some general education
classes (most often nonacademic subjects like music, art, and physical education)
while maintaining their base in a separate special education classroom. However,
quickly the term inclusive education came to be used as the predominant term.
During a three-month period in 1990, numerous people began to use this term
based on a similar thinking process. They had an image of a group of people with
their arms around each other who saw individuals outside the group. “Come join
us!” the group would say. This was the concept of being included, thus the term
inclusive education. Over time, many have used the word inclusive as an adjective
to other key words including inclusive teaching and inclusive schooling. These
latter terms are most associated with educators, parents, and researchers who
see inclusive education as an integral part of effective school reform.
In the mid-1990s a new term for inclusive education came into use: inclusion.
This term was most fostered by special educators who felt that inclusive education was a bad idea. It is notable that, for the most part, advocates of inclusive
education use the word inclusive as an adjective to words like education, teaching, schooling, and more. However, using the term inclusion as a noun begs a
definition and becomes its own entity and program rather than being tied to the
integral mission of the school.
What is clear about inclusive education is that it challenges deeply held assumptions about the educational process. The traditional model posits that students of different abilities must be placed in different groups—separate classes,
separate schools, separate groups within classes. The assumption is that students
cannot learn at their own level well if they are in a heterogeneous group where,
for example, a highly gifted student and a nonverbal student with a severe cognitive disability are learning American history together. Interestingly, this oft-used
model truly is based on an assumption rather than research. In fact, the available
research tends to support an inclusive, heterogeneous approach to education. A
recent review of literature failed to find any research support for this practice.
Public education is filled with statements about commitment to diversity.
However, the elephant in the living room for schools is the natural distribution
of a range of abilities across the human spectrum. We’ve heard the radio show
from Minnesota where “all kids are above average.” That’s the myth that all parents would like to believe, that their children are above average. Of course, when
children are labeled with disabilities, part of what makes this hard for parents
is that such a label is an official pronouncement that dashes the belief that their
children are above average. In clear, cold, clinical terms they are told that their
children are below average.
With all the debates and discussion about education, it’s hard to find a realistic
discussion regarding how schools deal with ability diversity. However, talk to any

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teacher and ask the question: “What is the range of abilities of students in your
class?” Any teacher anywhere will tell you that abilities range a minimum of three
grade levels. Most will say six to seven grade levels. One high school teacher told
me she had a 10 grade level range—and all this is not counting students with
identified disabilities. Several research studies have validated these results in numerous school settings. Despite this reality, however, the closest real discussion
you find largely centers on what schools do with those special education students,
ignoring the ever-present reality of the wide range of student abilities.
The concept of inclusive education, along with other related educational initiatives and movements, posits a different thesis regarding teaching students
with ability differences. This thesis could be summarized as follows:
• Students learn and develop into full human beings when they learn together with students who are diverse in many characteristics including
gender, race, culture, language, and ability/disability.
• Educators have developed many strategies for instruction and teaching
that will allow such inclusive teaching to be manageable for teachers and
effective for all students, ranging from those with severe and multiple disabilities to students considered gifted and talented.
So what does the research say about the efficacy of inclusive education—
students with mild to severe disabilities, typical average students, students who
are gifted and talented, racially and culturally diverse students learning together?
As always, of course, research in any meaningful question is never finished. However, here are some conclusions that are clear from the present research base:
• Studies that have systematically compared outcomes from inclusive education and separate programs most often show that academic and social
gains are higher in inclusive classes. In some studies, the results were
mixed. It is notable that no studies are known that showed segregated education to produce greater academic or social outcomes. It is also notable
that research to date does not distinguish between quality of practices in
the general education classroom. The only comparison was between inclusive classrooms and separate classes. It would appear likely that quality
inclusive teaching practices would increase the positive impact of inclusive
education even more.
• For students with cognitive disabilities, the more they are included in
general education classes, the higher their academic, cognitive, and social
functioning.
• Students with mild disabilities make better gains in inclusive than in pullout programs.
• The quality and outcomes of individualized education plans is improved
for students with moderate to severe disabilities
• There is no evidence that academic progress is impeded, but there is evidence
that it is increased in inclusive classes for students without disabilities.
• Instruction may be improved for all students at all levels as teachers learn
skills of multilevel and differentiated instruction.

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• Friendships and social interactions for students with disabilities expand in
school and carry over to afterschool contexts.
• Students with mild disabilities are less often accepted and more likely rejected due to behavior than nondisabled students. However, teachers can
used numerous strategies for addressing issues of ability diversity that
change this impact and create better classroom conditions for all students.
• Students without disabilities view their involvement with peers with disabilities positively. They gain an increased appreciation and understanding
of diversity and often improve self-esteem and behaviors.
While research makes it clear that inclusive education is a desirable, effective
practice, some argue that educators are neither willing nor able to make inclusive education a reality. Numerous research studies have documented problems
that include: (1) poor planning and preparation; (2) inadequate supports for
students and teachers; and (3) negative and adversarial attitudes of educators.
Despite the fact that much segregated education exists, the movement towards inclusive education continues to grow—sometimes with major thrusts
ahead, sometimes with retrenchment for awhile and with a growth of quiet
efforts on the part of individual schools and teachers. Several comprehensive
studies have documented case studies of individual schools moving to implement inclusive education, including O’Hearn Elementary School in Boston,
Souhegan High School in New Hampshire, and Purcell Marion High School
in Cincinnati. The National Center for Educational Restructuring and Inclusion conducted a national study of hundreds of schools throughout the United
States who were implementing inclusive education. Sixteen states have engaged
in state-wide initiatives for inclusive education. Other researchers and school
change agents report that when change efforts involve training, administrative leadership and support, in-class assistance, and other special services, the
attitudes of teachers are positive. Some teachers view inclusive education as
building on their existing positive teaching practices. Initially, teachers are
often afraid of including students with severe disabilities. However, most often
as teachers come to know such students as human beings and work with them,
they come to value the experience and would volunteer to teach such students
again. Finally, most teachers agree with the concept of inclusive education but
are afraid they do not have the skills to make it work. As they have positive
experiences with good administrative support they become more comfortable
and positive.
While some courts have ruled in favor of segregated placements, typically
following failed attempts to include a child in a regular class, most have ruled
in favor of inclusive education. Courts have upheld the principle of least restrictive environment and have stated that schools must, in good faith, consider inclusive placement of all students, no matter the severity of the disability, and
students and teachers must be provided necessary supports and supplementary
services. While the courts allow costs, amount of teacher time, and impact on
other students to be considered, the standards are so high that denying an inclusive placement based on these issues is rarely supported.

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These related concepts—inclusive education, differentiated instruction, and
detracking—are being used in an increasing number of school reform models.
In some cases, the focus is explicit and clear. In others, it is more implied by the
stated values of the approach. The Coalition of Essential Schools, for example,
has identified 10 principles of effective schooling. Schools move away from the
50-minute class period in high schools and develop larger blocks of instructional time, in which teachers work as interdisciplinary teams to engage students in substantive learning activities. Students demonstrate learning through
substantive portfolios and yearly demonstrations to parents, other students, and
the larger community. Accelerated Schools stimulate the use of challenging and
engaging teaching, typically reserved for gifted students, for all students, particularly those with learning challenges. The goal is to accelerate, not slow down,
learning for all students through exciting, authentic teaching techniques or powerful learning. Accelerated Schools engage teachers, administrators, parents, and
the community work who work together in teams to develop improved learning
strategies for all students. The Comer School Development Program brings another important perspective. According to James Comer, a psychiatrist, children
need a sense of safety, security, and welcome if they are to learn. In his school
development program, schools develop teams to facilitate partnerships with parents and communities and an interdisciplinary mental health team, consisting
of teachers, a psychologist, a social worker, and others to deal with holistic needs
of both students and families. In each of these models, inclusive education is not
specifically articulated as a component. However, the values and visions upon
which each model is based often lead schools to incorporate inclusive education
as a component of their school reform efforts when they use these models.
Whole Schooling is a school reform framework that incorporates inclusive education as a central component of effective schooling for all children. The model
posits that the purpose of public schools is to create citizens for democracy and
the achievement of personal best learning for all students. The model is based
on eight principles:
1. Create learning spaces for all
2. Empower citizens for democracy
3. Include all in learning together
4. Build a caring community
5. Support
6. Partner with families and the community
7. Teach all using authentic, multilevel instruction
8. Assess students to promote learning
Throughout the world in recent decades, and very recently in the United States,
standards-based reform has been initiated with a goal to improve outcomes for
students in public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, aims
to have 100 percent of students pass standardized tests showing their proficiency
in math and reading by the year 2014. In the United States, standards-based
reform has been touted as a way of improving achievement and outcomes for
all students, playing higher levels of accountability and expectations on public

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schools. In the United States, the NCLB law has come under increasing criticism
as unrealistic and punitive, focusing on low levels of learning, limiting creativity
and the education of the whole child.
Inclusive education can be viewed as both an extension of and, at the same
time, in conflict with the concepts of standards-based reform and the laws designed for its implementation. On the one hand, many schools have decided that,
if they are going to be evaluated on the performance of all students in the general
education curriculum, students with disabilities need to be learning in general
education classes, thus increasing their exposure and likelihood of doing well on
standardized tests. On the other hand, standards-based reform identifies one set
of expectations for all students. Thus, a fourth-grade student who is highly gifted,
functioning on the ninth-grade level, will be expected to perform at the same
level as a student with a cognitive disability, reading at the first-grade level. It is
clear that, in this scenario, the gifted student is asked to perform far below their
capacity, thus making their public school program irrelevant to their needs. The
student with a cognitive disability is asked to function at a level far above her
capacity. The result will be frustration, humiliation. For this student, no matter
what effort she puts forth she will be considered a failure. In this regard, NCLB
and inclusive schooling could be seen as at odds with one another.
The movement towards inclusive education is truly international in thrust.
In 1994, the country members of the United Nations adopted the Salamonica
Statement, which articulated the rights of individuals with disabilities in society.
This document particularly focused on schools and supported the concept and
practice of inclusive education and called on member nations to use the document to reform their schools in this direction.
The idea of inclusive schooling can be expected to continue as a movement for
reform in education. Clearly, the concept is connected at its essence with the concept of democracy. It is not surprising, consequently, to find that inclusive education is most practiced in countries that have a democratic political tradition and
that segregated schooling is most firmly entrenched in authoritarian regimes.
One indicator of this trend has been the development of National Inclusive
Schools Week in the United States, which has been growing in visibility beginning in 2001 (see www.inclusiveschools.org). According to their Web site:
National Inclusive Schools Week highlights and celebrates the progress
of our nation’s schools in providing a supportive and quality education
to an increasingly diverse student population, including students with
disabilities, those from low socio-economic backgrounds, and English
language learners. The Week also provides an important opportunity
for educators, students, and parents to discuss what else needs to be
done in order to ensure that their schools continue to improve their
ability to successfully educate all children.
For those interested in the quality of schooling for students with wide ranges
of differences, monitoring the restructuring of schools to incorporate inclusive
education as a central component may provide one measure to watch in coming
years.

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Further Reading: McGregor, G., & Vogelsberg, T., 1998, Inclusive schooling practices: Pedagogical and research foundations: A synthesis of the literature that informs best practices
about inclusive schooling, Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes; Peterson, M., & Hittie, M., 2003,
Inclusive teaching: Creating effective schools for all learners, Boston: Allyn and Bacon;
Sapon-Shevin, M., 1994, Because we can change the world: A practical guide to building cooperative, inclusive classroom communities, Boston: Allyn and Bacon; Tomlinson,
C., 2001, How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms, Columbus, Ohio:
Merrill; Vitello, S., & Mithaug, D., 1998, Inclusive schooling: National and international
perspectives, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Michael Peterson
INTEGRATED MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES IN SCHOOLS
While the majority of schoolchildren sail fairly successfully through their
school years, a significant subset, or 25 percent of children and adolescents, suffers from some degree of psychological, social, or nonacademic concern that interferes considerably in their school life. The vast majority of these affected youth
get no help at all from professionals trained to help with specific issues. Children
and youth suffering from anxiety, depression, living in violent homes, or living
in conditions of poverty are found in today’s classrooms struggling to do reading, writing, and arithmetic. Most emotional or social problems emerge in the
school years, making schools an important cauldron to capture distress. Educators are well placed to view not only emergent problems of youth but also to be
in a position to support intervention in school settings. The issues confronting
youth and their families are complex and interrelated; rarely does a student suffer from one problem in isolation of other problems. For example, a child exhibiting poor academic performance at school may return to a home characterized
by violence, substance abuse, or the confounding effects of poverty.
Youth in American families suffer higher rates of fragmentation and indicators of at-risk youth behavior than other industrialized nations: higher rates of
divorce, teenage pregnancy, suicide, single parent homes, and poverty. Children
coming from these homes may need academic direction or supplemental education, health care attention, parenting skills, or a support system that offers what
may be difficult to get at home. Families typically suffer complex, interrelated
problems that rarely fit tidy definitions or respond neatly to single interventions.
Families need integrated and sustained interventions delivered by professionals who recognize and are able to respond to a family’s multiple problems and
needs. The agencies that offer assistance to families typically are only responsible
for their own services and may not be informed of another agency’s regulations
or qualifications or even ancillary services. Recently these different agencies
have sought to find more ways to deliver services based on family and child need
rather than an exclusively agency-driven service.
INTEGRATED SERVICES
Mental, physical, and social service programs targeting at-risk children and
youth often work in an isolated and fragmented manner, expecting students and

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their families to seek aid from a variety of disconnected agencies. To achieve
both the goals of families needing services and those of service providers, communities from policy analysts to researchers to private enterprise have urged
collaboration among the schools and service providers.
Although service integration models are varied, they all suggest collaboration
of independent institutions allowing for academic, mental, and physical health
services. The assumption is that integrated, comprehensive services will respond
more effectively to the interrelated needs of families, reduce overlap of services,
and make better use of community resources. The fundamental philosophy is
one of cross-disciplinary professionals working as a team to share knowledge
about how best to provide services to children and families.
At the very center of service integration is the idea of catering to the whole
child. The integrated services approach does not mean a substitution of one
service provider for another but rather that each provider contributes a service
and/or helps another provider do its job more effectively, and that a child and
his/her family receives appropriate services.
Historical Traditions
Elements of integrated service have a long tradition in the United States.
Perhaps the first seeds of collaboration between agencies were during the Progressive Era (1890–1917), which was dominated by problems of vast numbers
of immigration. With the influx of immigrants came waves of diseases such
as diphtheria, scarlet fever, and small pox. Mandatory schooling, child labor
laws, and burgeoning numbers of children and adults in close proximity of each
other forced the government to combat concomitant problems of infection and
contagious disease with preventive medicine. Advocates from many disciplines
such as journalism and immigration urged the government to take a strong role
in upgrading the health of children by transforming schools from rigid centers
of academic training to places where the effects of poverty might be mitigated.
Most modern professional community-based services for children were established during this era of reform. Schools were a logical target because (a) the
majority of schools were located in local communities, and (b) people had
access to these institutions. Beginning in 1870, the health department began to
collaborate with state boards of education to provide vaccinations to all schoolchildren. Thus began the first formal collaboration between health services and
public schools.
During the Depression of the late 1920s, services in schools were reduced, limited to health inspections, assessment, and first aid. With the onset of World
War II, the late 1930s and early 1940s again enjoyed a resurgence of public health
at the school site. The Bureau of Child Hygiene and School Health merged with
the Bureau of District Health Administration, which placed physicians in the
public schools. In the following years, school health services ebbed and flowed
depending on the political climate and funding priorities. Programs emerged
in response to perceived needs of an increasingly urban society. The idea of
“community-school,” where academic needs and community activities interacted,

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began to receive limited attention. Programs tentatively incorporated other
agencies and community involvement into school programs, although these did
not achieve fruition until decades later. Advocates for children saw early in our
history the logic of locating the many helping services at the public school.
The war years and after until the present witnessed a host of social and healthrelated programs authored by the different presidents who sought integration
specifically in the schools: Roosevelt’s 1935 Social Security Act and Aid to Dependent Children/Welfare; Eisenhower’s 1961 National Institutes of Health; the
Kennedy administration’s focus on mental retardation; the 1965 amendments
to Social Security included Medicaid and Medicare; the 1960s War on Poverty,
Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which provided
funds for schools with disadvantaged populations), and the Office of Child Development in the Department of Health Education and Welfare (Johnson); and
PL94–142 (now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA)
during the Nixon administration.
A liberal temperament in the years following the Vietnam War in the 1970s
fostered a climate in the United States of social activism. Large scale antipoverty
programs, preventive programming such as Head Start, and low-cost economic
help such as Legal Aid reflected the country’s acknowledgment that society
needed to respond in concrete fashion to the complex problems facing our
country. The federal government, in an acknowledgment of rising social problems and their influence on schools, funded training programs and positions for
school counselors.
The Reagan years are perhaps best known for reducing programs in the human
services. Decreased programming of the 1980s was a response to failed earlier
social programs, a feeling that the “magic silver bullet” did not work, so why
bother? There existed a persistent and naive faith that a simple solution would
“fix” a complex problem, and when this was found untrue, cynicism towards
programs grew.
These programs (with the exception of Head Start) continued to operate from
a deficit model, treating problems rather than looking at underlying causes or
preventive approaches. Research on the various social programs, however, found
that success lay in preventive approaches. The research community learned as
much from failed social programs including the tenets of the War on Poverty
as well as from the successful programming of Head Start. Family dysfunction
was best addressed by preventive programming rather than crisis-oriented,
remedial approaches. A proliferation of programs documented the enthusiasm
over emerging family support programs.
Need for Integrated Services Programming
Slowly, service providers began to collaborate on delivery of services. This
was in response to research that supported preventive programming, the positive effects of a larger, more “ecological” approach to service delivery, and the
documentation of increasing troubles experienced by families heading into the
twenty-first century.

Integrated Mental Health Services in Schools

The problems confronting youth and families in America today are not
abating. Achenbach and Howell, two child behaviorists, in 1993 published one
of the few investigations that concluded that there are small but pervasive increases in the number of problems and decreases in child competency. The
escalating problems of society are being felt in the childhood of our citizens.
When we put youth with these challenges in schools, in a relatively sterile, booklearning environment, no wonder the result is low commitment to the education process, a feeling of greater alienation, lowered levels of belief in the validity
of social rules and laws, and significant effects on youth competencies.
BENEFITS OF INTEGRATED SERVICE PROGRAMS
Some question whether schools should provide broader services to meet the
child’s educational, health, emotional, and other general welfare needs or stick to
fundamental education (the “basics”). But some services, such as health services,
do receive approval from the broader public. For instance, if a child wishes to enroll in a public school, s/he must provide documentation of inoculation against
childhood diseases (which have been eradicated to date in the United States). If
a child cannot show proof of inoculation, the school can deny entrance to that
student. Other signs of the presence of physical welfare programs are vision and
hearing screening, head lice treatment and inspection, and nutritionally sound
lunch programs. Some schools house medical clinics in an area of the building
where a medical staff offers treatment from first aid to the distribution of condoms to complete physical evaluations. What is lacking is the social-emotional
programming that an integrated services model would promote.
When students participate in integrated social and mental health programs,
preliminary research indicates long-term positive effects on attendance, school
retention, achievement, decreased pregnancy and birthrate, and decreased involvement with drugs. Other studies reveal the cost-effectiveness of providing
services to those who normally wouldn’t get them. Some programs tout the more
efficient staffing mix of integrated services. Effective programs include the full
participation of family and are empowering. The logic that drives the integrated
service format is offering services that are available and close, comprehensive,
and appropriate. This philosophy relies on a resiliency model of mental health
and development.
Service Delivery Site: Schools or Community?
Many integrated service models offer social and human resource services at
the school site. Others choose buildings located conveniently in the community
(“school-linked” or “community-based”). There are benefits and barriers to either location for delivery of services, but school-based programs seem a more
logical choice.
Delivery of services at the school site has a variety of benefits for both sides.
For those delivering the services, the “repositioned” service worker sees the student in a more familiar, “natural” school setting and may get a more complete

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picture of the specific problem. The worker who has a contextual understanding
of the problem may be influenced to choose a particular intervention or goal for
treatment. Reciprocally, the school can offer “overhead” (usually office space) to
the agency. A holistic approach to intervention is stressed. The problems for the
child are interrelated; the services offered in the school are integrated.
Those receiving the services, the students and parents, may view the school as
a less threatening and more accessible venue for services than perhaps the traditional setting (hospital, mental health center, social services building, police
station). The school setting is, at a minimum, geographically accessible. Most
communities have a centrally located school building, typically within walking distance. In the present system of service delivery where different agencies
provide different services at different locations, problems abound for the family
seeking these services. Transportation to and from offices as well as being able to
arrive at established business hours may be problems that are insurmountable.
Barriers
The integration of institutions, disciplines, and services is a formidable task
and has not been without problems. There are drawbacks to having schools as
the location of services. Many disenfranchised families continue to see schools
as a fortress and uninviting. For some, the school represents everything about a
system that has been denied to them, despite the rhetoric of education being free
to all and a key to future success. If the school serves as the service delivery site,
do the problems of service integration remain with the entire program or do
these become the school’s problems? This problem of perception may turn out
to be an insidious undermining factor if not dealt with appropriately.
Funding of programs and mingling of funds can be problematic, if not contentious, with the clash of three institutions: the school system, the medical
community, and social service agencies. On the one hand, schools are large, decentralized, public institutions that are funded mostly by individual state dollars (typically 50 percent), local dollars (typically 45 percent), and federal funds
(typically 5 percent). Populations (kindergarten through age 16) are mandated
to be in attendance. This monolithic system of education differs from health
providers, which are largely private and nonprofit, mostly financed through
employer-based and other third-party plans. Low-income populations are primarily served through third-party public programs, which are funded mainly by
federal and state governments. Typically, providers are used to offering services
to individuals who need acute care rather than ongoing treatment. Social services are funded by all levels of government—federal, state, and local. Comprehensive programs for children and families are expensive. It is difficult to secure
funding in the current era of budget consciousness.
One question is for what problem(s) to treat/provide service? Who is the
identified client/patient? Is the child seen, is the family seen, or are both? Does
one problem take precedence over another?
Other obstacles to service integration are equally problematic. The various service providers enjoy an autonomy that is maintained by professional differences

Integrated Mental Health Services in Schools

in training, management, discipline, and sources of revenue and funding. Jargon
and professional ways of doing business are different. The identified problem(s),
priority of need or response, assessment of severity, intervention(s), and goal(s)
may differ from each professional’s judgment. This long history of legislation,
payment-for-services, and public approval contribute to “turf ” issues: a (perceived) hierarchy of professionals negotiating for their own clientele claiming
better or more effective service.
Other issues will need to be addressed; different reporting forms, issues of
confidentiality, a lack of training in unknown areas, staffing ratios, physical
space, and insurance liability are all important concerns. A final organizational
issue that needs to be addressed is one of leadership. Traditionally a school principal’s role/priority has been one of education. S/he is empowered in this role by
the school board, a recognized extension of state law. The role of the principal
will need to be scrutinized: Support for and success of programs can depend
entirely on this leadership area, since the principal sets the tone for the school
building. If other agencies are to be integrated, to what extent will the authority
of community agency boards or other provider governing structures extend?
For example, will the foundation president have the same latitude in decision
making as the principal? How will conflicts be resolved in the decision-making
process?
Very few families fall neatly and consistently into “problem” categories. The
possibility that this will become a growing source of friction is great, as the population in the United States increasingly becomes more diverse. Five states will
soon have minority majorities (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and
Florida), and in over 30 of the largest school districts in the United States, Caucasian students have become the minority. A system whereby families feel that
they are an integral piece can lessen the possibility of disempowerment.
More fundamental will be the conservative forces who support strict academic boundaries confronting more liberal thinkers who maintain that children
need social supports in order to benefit from the academic training. Finally, the
pressure of immediate “payoff ” is at odds with long-term preventive approaches.
Collaboration with more systems and more staff typically, at least initially, will
use more of a very precious resource: time.
SUMMARY
The last two decades in the education field have been marked by tremendous
efforts towards innovations in school reform. One strategy that has attempted to
strengthen the school-family relationship and the school-community relationship is service integration (coordination of education, family assistance, mental health and counseling services, and various social service supports). While
service integration at the school building is not a new movement, it is enjoying
renewed attention partially due to a perceived crisis in children’s deteriorating
condition of life. This particular aspect of school reform is also influenced by
recognition that schools and communities work better together rather than as
opponents, and also acknowledges the importance of societal support for the

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education of today’s youth. Prevention researchers have made great strides in
increasing awareness of the benefits of prevention programming rather than
programs of remediation and crisis-response.
A plethora of barriers to implementation of integrated service programs confronts program developers, including financial constraints, bureaucratic sluggishness, professional turf issues, a history of failed programs, and limited time and
personnel resources. Despite these obstacles, the literature is replete with descriptions of integrated service ventures, from single case study programs to broadscale national programs. Emerging criteria of successful programs allows others to
capitalize on established programs’ strengths. Successful integrated services programs are reporting various program variables that emerge as critical components:
a unifying mission, planning time before program implementation as well as intentional periods of planning during the programs, responsiveness to staff needs of
authority and cross-disciplinary training, parental involvement, and a mechanism
for conflict resolution. Community support is necessary, and the program needs
a goal of targeting specific problem behaviors or pandemic prevention. Financial
soundness is an extremely complicated objective, but one that needs adherence, as
findings are that programs do not increase budget coffers but require coordinated
budgets. An evaluation plan reminds participants to be ever-mindful of a clientcentered approach, rather than the agency/institutional agenda.
Further Reading: Centre for Academic and Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) http://
www.casel.org; Dryfoos, J., 1994, Full-service schools: A revolution in health and social
services for children, youth, and families, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Ehly, S. W., 2004,
School-community connections: Exploring issues for research and practice,. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Lynn Miller
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF STUDENT
ACHIEVEMENT
No doubt when comparisons of test scores across nations were first made,
a number of people looked at the analysis and asked “Why?” Because a school
system is embedded in a larger culture and because the important outcomes of
schooling don’t show up until after it is over, the process can look meaningless.
The comparisons still evoke that attitude in some. University of Namur professor Marc Romainville (2002) expressed it in a discussion of the first Program for
International Student Assessment (PISA), from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD):
Hit parades have been flourishing here (Europe) for some years: the best
schools, the world’s best universities, the top-performing research centers, etc. Some 30 years ago this sort of ranking would have produced
a smile, as we were of the view that the broad and long-term effects of
education cannot be reduced to a few trivial indicators and that every
education system could be validly understood only by taking account of
its history, its aims, and the complexity of its structures.

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The “trivial indicators” are test scores. This raises the question, Are they
trivial? One could hazard a guess that because they cover a narrow range of
education, math and science, and, occasionally, reading, and because they are
given to teenagers or younger students, the answer might be yes. But that is
not the answer that one hears in most quarters.
The usual answer links test scores directly to international competitiveness.
Test scores are, therefore, important. A Nation at Risk in 1983 codified this linkage. The U.S. performance in international comparisons was listed as one of 13
indicators of the risk that the nation faced. The commissioners preparing A Nation at Risk looked to Japan and saw both a thriving economy and high test
scores. The report then made an inference that the high test scores caused the
economic boom: “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we
still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our
educational system.”
Thereafter, collective moans and dire predictions about our economic fate
greeted the arrival of the various international comparisons. The crescendo of
such wailing peaked in early 2005 following the publication of the latest PISA
and TIMSS results (TIMSS is the abbreviation for the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study):
The fact is that these results signify something real. Think of these assessments as early-warning signals for later economic welfare. Performance on the international math and science assessments directly
relates to labor-force quality and has been closely related to national
growth rates. (Hanushek, 2005)
Cause for concern? You bet. You don’t have to have the math scores of
a rocket scientist to know that in the new high-tech economic world,
math and science education is a key asset in global competition. (Carnevale, 2005)
I’m not here to pose as an education expert. I head a corporation and a
foundation. One I get paid for—the other one costs me. But both jobs
give me a perspective on education in American, and both perspectives
leave me appalled. When I compare our high schools to what I see when
I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.
(Gates, 2005)
Earlier, headlines in newspaper stories about the study had carried the same
assertion: “Math + Test = Trouble for the U.S. Economy” (Christian Science
Monitor, December, 7, 2004), “Economic Time Bomb” (Wall Street Journal,
December, 7, 2004). Of course, the results of international assessments had
been pretty much the same since the 1960s, so if they are an “early warning
signal” the timeline would have to be very long: At the time of these quotes, the
World Economic Forum ranked the United States first in global competitiveness among 114 nations. One could also speculate that Mr. Gates’ hosts in other
countries seldom if ever take him to poorly performing or even average high
schools.

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The perennial sounding of the alarm over the nation’s economic future is
analogous to the world seen in the movie Groundhog Day, in which the same
day repeats over and over but only one person notices. Even as the PISA and
TIMSS results arrived in late 2004, not only could the United States boast of the
most competitive economy, it could point to a growing economy. In fact, earlier
TIMSS results arrived in what turned out to be the longest sustained economic
expansion in the nation’s history.
While it is impossible to disprove predictions for times that have yet to occur,
a recent study using international comparisons from the past through the first
TIMSS from 1995 suggests that the impact of test scores on growth is modest at
best and is impossible to see in the some decades. Conceptually, we have little
reason to expect a large impact of test scores on growth.
Examining GDP and other variables from 1970 to 1990, the impact of math
and science achievement on economic growth is positive but modest. When the
researchers drop the four “Asian Tiger” nations in their study—South Korea,
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—the effect remains positive, but much
smaller. Much of the achievement effect is attributable to the worst test performers, and therefore the envy of the few countries with the highest achievement
scores is questionable.
Also, the effect is not causal. It occurs most in countries that decided simultaneously to focus on economic development and on math and science achievement. The effects were concurrent, not causal.
In the period from 1980 to 2000, there is a positive but statistically insignificant effect, which again becomes even smaller and disappears when the Asian
Tigers are removed from the analysis. Restricting the analysis to the decade
1990–2000, there is no effect. In the 1990s, of course, the Tigers turned into
pussycats. Their economies fell into free fall and Japan as well stumbled into an
almost 15-year period of recession or stagnation.
They also point out that tests don’t capture the degree to which schools promote important traits such as creativity, initiative, entrepreneurship, and a host
of other variables that have not been amenable to cross-national analysis.
It is unlikely that any single study can turn the tide of fear mongering about
America’s ability to compete in the global economy. Indeed, in January 2007,
Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Representative Vernon Ehlers
(R-Mich.) sponsored a forum, “Preparing U.S. Students for the Global Economy.” And how would one do that? The answer was: by establishing national
standards and assessments in mathematics and science. The two congressmen
introduced a bill that would require the National Assessment Governing Board
to create such standards and to international competitiveness.
It was noted above that the World Economic Forum ranked the United States
first in global competitiveness in its 2004–2005 report. The United States maintained that rank in the 2005–2006 report, but fell to sixth, quite a tumble, in the
2006–2007 report. Had lousy schools at last done us in? No.
The WEF analyzes competitiveness using categories that it has come to call
the “nine pillars of competitiveness.” The first two of these are institutions and

International Comparisons of Student Achievement | 349

infrastructure. The WEF examines the degree to which public institutions are
transparent and operate for the public good, not for private gain. Private institutions must maintain strict standards of accountability and trustworthiness. The
pervasiveness of corruption and cronyism in the public sector lowered the rank
for this pillar, as did the various scandals in the private sector along with questionable awards of no-bid contracts to preferred corporations.
Infrastructure refers to planes, trains, boats, highways, energy, and telecommunications. The mishandling of the Katrina disaster indicated that the
infrastructure was not as robust as it needed to be and called into question institutional (governmental) competence.
The United States also suffered in the pillar of health and primary education
not because of schools but because of AIDS, shorter life spans than many less
wealthy nations, and inadequate health care despite spending the largest proportion of GDP on it of any nation in the world. The United States spends 15 percent of GDP on health care. The next highest spenders are Germany (11 percent)
and France (10 percent). France and Germany, of course, have universal coverage
while about one in seven Americans is not covered, some 45 million people.
What bothered the WEF the most though, was the state of the pillar known
as macroeconomic stability. The WEF worries when a country spends, as we
do, a large proportion of GDP servicing debt, money that could otherwise be
available to improve productivity. It equally worries over trade deficits. But what
the WEF found most troubling was that the governments had an open ended
commitment to coffer-draining spending on war and homeland security while
simultaneously planning to reduce the treasury with further tax cuts. On macroeconomic stability, the United States ranked 69th out of 125 nations, just ahead
of Armenia, Croatia, and Cyprus; just behind Uganda, Moldova, and the Slovak
Republic. The next lowest ranking was 40th for the pillar that combines health
and primary education, an improvement from 43rd in the previous year. Most of
the remaining rankings were in the top ten.
SAMPLE MATH AND SCIENCE ITEMS FROM PISA
Seal’s Sleep
A seal has to breathe even when it is asleep in the water. Martin observed a seal for one
hour. At the start of his observation, the seal was at the surface and took a breath. It then
dove to the bottom of the sea and started to sleep. From the bottom it slowly floated to the
surface in 8 minutes and took a breath again. In three minutes it was back at the bottom of
the sea again. Martin noticed that this whole process was a very regular one.
After one hour the seal was
a)
b)
c)
d)

at the bottom,
on its way up,
breathing,
on its way down.

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Note: Obviously, to answer this question, test takers have to play the “testing game.” For

instance, they must assume that “very regular” means that it always takes exactly eight
minutes to rise up, zero seconds to breathe, and exactly three minutes to dive. Given the
speed of a seal in water, Martin couldn’t possibly see to the depth it reached after a threeminute descent. One wonders how well children who have never seen a seal would fare with
this question.

Chocolate Diet
A newspaper article recounted the story of a 22-year-old student named Jessica, who
has a “chocolate diet.” She claims to remain healthy, and at a steady weight of 50 kg, whilst
eating 90 bars of chocolate a week and cutting out all other food, apart from one “proper
meal” every five days. A nutrition expert commented: I am surprised someone can live with
a diet like this. Fats give her energy to live but she is not getting nearly enough vitamins. She
could encounter serious health problems in later life.
In a book with nutritional values, the following data are applicable to the type of chocolate Jessica is eating all the time. Assume also that the bars of chocolate she eats have a
weight of 100 grams.

Protein
(g)

Fats
(g)

Carbohydrates
(g)

Minerals
(mg)
Calcium
50

Iron

Vitamins
(mg)

0.20

Total Energy
(kJ)

2142

The nutrition expert said that Jessica “ . . . is not getting nearly enough vitamins.” One
of those vitamins missing in chocolate is vitamin C. Perhaps she could compensate for her
shortage of vitamin C by including a food that contains a high percentage of vitamin C in her
“proper meal every five days.” Here is a list of types of food:
1.
2.
3.
4.

fish
fruit
rice
vegetables

Which two types of food from this list would you recommend to Jessica in order to give her
a chance to compensate for her vitamin C shortage?
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.

1 and 2,
1 and 3,
1 and 4,
2 and 3,
2 and 4,
3 and 4.

Note: Most of the information in this “item” is irrelevant to the problem (a second question does ask if all of the energy comes from fat). To get at the question’s intent, which is

International Comparisons of Student Achievement | 351
“demonstrating knowledge and understanding of science in life and health,” the following
stem would do as well: “The doctor tells you that you aren’t getting enough vitamin C and
that this might lead to health problems later on. Which two of the following foods might you
increase to reduce or eliminate your vitamin C deficiency?” One wonders how much students might be distracted thinking about the quirkiness of a girl who eats almost 20 pounds
(19.84) of chocolate a week (the story is real, taken from a newspaper account).

INTERNATIONAL TEST RESULTS: AN OVERVIEW
However one feels about the utility of international comparisons, the fact is
that since the early 1990s they have constituted a growth industry, supported a
number of careers, and assumed increasing importance in the media and among
some policymakers. It thus behooves us to take a look at the principal findings.
The principal comparisons carry the acronyms TIMSS, PISA, and PIRLS.
PISA stands for Program of International Student Assessment and is conducted
from Paris by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD). OECD conducted PISA in 2000, 2003, and 2006. The 2006 results will
be available late 2007. PISA tests mostly 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics,
and science, with each assessment concentrating on one of the three areas.
TIMSS originally stood for Third International Mathematics and Science
Study, but after the 1995 administration, developers decided to repeat it every
four years and the “T” now stands for “Trends.” The 1995 TIMSS tested students
in grades four and eight and in the “Final Year of Secondary School”—which,
internationally, is not always comparable to the senior year in the United States.
In addition to math/science literacy, the final year study assessed physics and
advanced mathematics. After 1995, TIMSS tested only grades four and eight,
but another attempt at a final year study of physics and advanced mathematics
is scheduled for 2008. TIMSS is administered by the Hague-based International
Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, which always abbreviates to IEA. Most of the technical work is done by the TIMSS and PIRLS
International Study Center at Boston College (http://timss.bc.edu).
PIRLS stands for Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and is also
overseen by the IEA. It assessed reading skills of fourth-graders in 2001 and
2006 with the 2006 results scheduled to be released in December 2007.
On the 1995 TIMSS, American fourth-graders scored above average in math
and third in the world in science among the 26 participating nations. American
eighth-graders scored slightly below average in math and slightly above average
in science among the 41 countries that took part. These results are shown in
Table I.1.
We can note that ranks force differences among participants without revealing the size of those differences, which are often quite small. There might
be virtually no differences in the scores of countries that are ranked, say, first
and second. American students correctly answered 58 percent of the items in
eighth grade science. This performance, only two percentage points above the

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Table I.1

Ranks and Percent Correct, TIMSS 1995
Mathematics
Grade Four
Grade Eight
Rank
% Correct
Rank
% Correct

United States
International

12/26 (7)
59

United States
International

3/26 (1)
59

24/41(17)
55
Science
13/41(6)
56

Note: The numbers in parentheses are the number of countries that had statistically significantly
higher scores than the United States. Thus, in fourth-grade math, the United States ranked 12th,
but only seven countries had significantly higher scores.

international average, gave them a rank of 13th among the 41 participating
countries. Had American students managed to get 63 percent correct—a mere 5
percent more—they would have vaulted to 5th. Had they gotten 5 percent fewer
correct, they would have plummeted to 32nd.
American seniors apparently scored at or near the bottom among the 16 to
21 nations participating (the number varied for the various topics). In some instances, though, the operative word was “apparently.”
LOCATING THE REPORTS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
U.S.-oriented reports on TIMSS, PISA, and PIRLS are available through the National Center
for Education Statistics: www.nces.ed.gov. More extensive reports on TIMSS and PIRLS can
be found at the International Study Center, Boston College: http://timss.bc.edu. Similarly,
more extensive reports on PISA can be found at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development: www.pisa.oecd.org.

The apparent downward arc of achievement over the grades gave rise to a cliché as voiced by former secretary of education William J. Bennett: “In America
today, the longer you stay in school, the dumber you get relative to your peers
in other industrialized nations.” However, the final-year study can be characterized as an “apples to aardvarks” comparison. Subgroups of American students
most like their foreign peers achieved about the same ranks as in the eighth
grade, in the middle of the group (Bracey, 2000). American students were much
affected by the fact that so many of them worked so many hours at paid jobs,
something uncharacteristic of most countries. One group of American students
included “just to see how they’d do” was those who had taken pre-calculus. They
scored 100 points lower than American students who had taken calculus. The
latter group more closely resembled their foreign peers and also scored in
the middle of the group. And, in order to test as near to the end of the school
year as possible, the tests—irrelevant to students, teachers, administrators, or

International Comparisons of Student Achievement | 353

parents—were administered in May, maximizing the impact of that uniquely
American phenomenon, the “senior slump” (TIMSS is constructed like NAEP
with about 140 items, only one-third of which are taken by any given student; as
with NAEP, there are no scores for individuals).
One can only conjecture about the reality of the decline in ranks from fourth
grade to eighth grade, but it does consistently appear. American textbooks may
bear some responsibility—they are about three times as thick as those in other
nations. American teachers teach many more topics in the course of a year, and
it is quite possible that the “coverage” is too brief and shallow to be effective.
In addition, historically, the middle grades have often been viewed as a time of
consolidation of material learned earlier in preparation for high school. Other
countries are more likely to treat them as high school years in terms of introducing new material.
In the repeats of TIMSS, American eighth-graders gained more than students
in a number of other nations. Among the 22 nations that took part both in 1995
and 2003, American eighth-graders ranked 17th in 1995 and 12th in 2003 in
mathematics. In science, American eighth-graders ranked 14th in 1995 and 7th
in 2003.
American fourth-graders scored the same in 2003 as in 1995, and this caused
them to lose a few ranks, from sixth to eighth in mathematics and from second
to fifth in science. However, with only 15 nations taking part in both assessments at the fourth grade, it is not clear that this is a meaningful change.
PISA may be an unimportant indicator since American students generally
attain average ranks—it is not at all clear what PISA measures. The administrators at OECD contend that it measures the ability of students to apply what
they’ve learned in school to new situations, to “real life” problems. It is obvious
from some of the released items, however, that no cognitive scientist would find
PISA’s notion of “apply” to be either a clear or unitary construct. Different items
clearly call for different cognitive skills.
In addition, many of the item stems in mathematics and science are rambling and discursive. This means that they will be heavily affected by reading
skills. An acquaintance in Germany has advised that PISA reading and math
tests correlate beyond +0.90, above the reliability coefficients of most tests. The
stems also sometimes contain information that is irrelevant to answering
the question, and it is likely that this information affects the performance of
some students.
PIRLS is the successor to the IEA study, How in the World Do Students Read?
(Elley, 1992). In that 1991 study (published in 1992), American 9-year-olds finished
second among 27 nations and 14-year-olds finished ninth among 31 nations, although only one nation had a statistically significantly higher score. It is said that
the assistant secretary of education at the time, Diane Ravitch, told the staff at the
Office of Educational Research and Improvement to make the data disappear.
PIRLS tested only fourth-graders. American students finished ninth among
35 countries, with three nations having statistically significantly higher scores.
Sweden finished first (Finland did not participate) with a score of 562, while the
United States came in at 543, and the international average was 500.

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In all of the international studies, American students’ rankings depend a
great deal on the poverty level of the school. For PIRLS, these results are shown
in Table I.2. The 13 percent of American students who attend schools with 0 to
10 percent of the students living in poverty score 589, well above top-ranked
Sweden. The 17 percent who attend 10 to 25 percent poverty level schools also
outdistance the Swedes. The 28 percent in 25–50 percent poverty schools scored
551. If this group constituted a nation, it would rank fourth among the 35 PIRLS
countries. Only students attending schools where more than 75 percent of the
students live in poverty score below the international average.
It might be argued that this is not a particularly meaningful analysis because
poverty exists in other nations. This is true, but not nearly to the extent in other
developed nations as in the United States. Other nations have taxes and social
programs that transfer wealth to offset poverty that attain significantly greater
reductions than the modest efforts here. The proportion of children in poverty
in the United States is second only to Mexico and remains quite large after transfers and taxes. For the United States, taxes and transfers cut the poverty rate
only from 26.6 percent to 21.9 percent. This contrasts with, say, France, where
the poverty rate is actually higher, but transfers and taxes reduce it sharply from
27.7 percent to 7.5 percent (poverty is defined by a family income of less than
50 percent of the median family income in a nation).
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
As noted at the outset, some people have expressed skepticism about the value
of studies such as the ones described here. The resulting “league tables” have
been described as a horse race or a “cognitive Olympics,” which they most assuredly are not. They are point-in-time snapshots of a long-term process. Questions
have been raised about translations, test reliability coefficients, comparability of
samples, response rates, and relationship of the tests to the curricula.
Indeed, some would argue that the important outcomes of education are not
visible until well after schooling has ended. Thirty years ago, for example, Finland decided to invest a great deal of resources in music education. Today there
are proportionately more Finns who play music as a profession or avocation

Table I.2

The Impact of Poverty on Achievement—Data from PIRLS

International Average =
U.S. Average =
Sweden (highest average)

500
543
562

Percent of Students in Poverty

Score

Percent Students Nationally

0–10
10–25
25–50
50–75
75+

589
567
551
519
485

13
17
28
22
20

Figure I.1 Poverty in 21 developed nations before and after taxes and transfers.
Source: Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005. Available at: http://www.unicef.org/brazil/repcard6e.pdf.

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than anywhere else in the world. In the classical field, Finland dominates in producing conductors. Finnish conductors lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the
Minneapolis Symphony, the City of Birmingham Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Belgium, the Ensemble Intercontemporain (Paris), and the Finnish
National Opera. Jukka-Pekka Saraste recently returned to Finland from years of
leading the Toronto Symphony and the BBC Symphony. This is quite remarkable for a nation of less that 5.5 million people (about the same as the Boston
metropolitan area).
Finland’s dedication to music is unusual for a nation and said to be due in part
to the role of composer Jean Sibelius in springing Finland loose from Swedish
and Russian domination and unifying the nation through his first and second
symphonies. The United States has had similar programs, formal and informal,
applied to technology. Europeans still often cite Thomas Jefferson today as a
major influence on the role of science and technology in the nation. Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” campaign during World War II can
likely be regarded as such a thrust, and John F. Kennedy’s determination to land
a man on the moon certainly can.
Today, though, no one is taking the long view. Corporate CEOs have their
eyes on the quarterly profit, and educators are constrained to Adequate Yearly
Progress. Politicians, businessmen, and education reformers speak vaguely, if
anxiously, about the “global economy.” Someone needs to take the long view.
Further Reading: Bracey, G. W., 2000, May, The TIMSS final year study and report: a critique, Educational Researcher, pp. 4–10; Bracey, G. W., 2002, The war against America’s
public schools, Boston: Allyn & Bacon; Carnevale, A. P., 2005, February 2, Education
and the economy: If we’re so dumb, why are we so rich? Education Week, pp. 40–41;
Forster, M., 2000, A policy maker’s guide to international achievement studies, Melbourne, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research Press, retrieved from
Washington, DC, retrieved from http://www.nga.org/cda/files/ES05GATES.pdf;
Hanushek, E. A., 2005, February 2, Education and the economy: Our school performance matters, Education Week, pp. 40–41; Lopez-Claros, A., Porter, M. E., Sala-iMartin, X., & Schwab, K., 2006, The global competitiveness report 2006–2007, Davos,
Switzerland: World Economic Forum; Ramirez, F. O., Luo, X., Schofer, E., & Meyer, J.,
2006, November, Student achievement and national economic growth, American Journal of Education, pp. 1–29; Romainville, M., 2002, Du bon usage de Pisa, Revue Nouvelle, 115(3–4), 86–99.

Gerald W. Bracey

KNOWLEDGE
TEACHING AND LEARNING FOR OUR FUTURE
Contemporary society is rife with text messaging, podcasts, Blackberries, web
sites, and e-mail, all which have dramatically changed the way we, and especially our children, communicate and think. Music and movie downloading,
chat rooms, and video games have become an essential part of everyday life. For
many of our children, it is simply impossible to imagine life without a cell phone
that doubles as a camera, music player, and Internet browser. We have many
more educational and entertainment options than ever before and they are pulling us in many different directions. Yosemite National Park, known for its majestic views, mystical waterfalls, and the magnificent Half Dome, is experiencing
steadily declining attendance for the first time in over a decade. This decline is
blamed, in part, on the fact that Half Dome is now competing with PlayStation
and Xbox for people’s attention.
Technology impacts nearly every aspect of our lives, yet its impact on teaching and learning is, at best, modest and, in many cases, negligible. Even with
impressive corporate and governmental investments resulting in billions of
dollars being spent to build digital learning networks in schools, teaching and
learning at the beginning of the third millennium remains relatively unchanged
from the early days of the twentieth century when the country was in the throes
of the industrial revolution. Almost 100 years after the industrial revolution,
we are moving away from an industrial age to an information society. Today’s
centralized control, standardization of the curriculum, top-down administration of courses, and high-stakes testing reflect a model of schooling inconsistent

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with our era of information. Our current system of public education was created
for an industrial age and is no longer adequate to address the challenges of our
twenty-first-century society (Brown, 2006).
LIFE IN 1900
To understand the speed and impact of change, it is useful to look back a little
over a century ago to gain some perspective. The United States was emerging as
a nation of fantastic opportunity. Over 1,500,000 people per year were leaving
their homes in other countries and arriving in the United States. Most immigrants were leaving grinding poverty in Europe, and were better off upon arriving in the United States. However, most immigrants were consigned to become
the legions of “have-nots” whose only choice was to take the worst and most
dangerous jobs for the lowest pay. Foreign-born persons and their children were
in the majority, but prejudice was common and social class determined how
people were treated.
In 1900, wealthy families were considered to be “upper class.” The upper class
comprised 1 percent of the population, but they owned 99 percent of the country’s wealth. Young upper class girls were tutored at home until they were about
13, and then they were sent off to “finishing schools” to learn homemaking and
intricacies of social etiquette. Females entered society and became eligible for
marriage at about age 16, and their goal was marriage to a husband from the
same class as their own. Boys of the upper class were home-tutored and sent off
to “preparation school,” followed by college or university, most commonly to
prepare them to run the family business.
In 1900, middle class citizens worked as shop owners or employees in factories. This was a time that was unique. Members of this new middle class had
many opportunities to build their fortunes. Depending on when middle class
children started school, they usually dropped out about the time they were 12–13
years of age. Then they had to find full-time jobs, but some of the more affluent
members of the middle class (mostly children of small business owners) were
able to attend a college or university.
The largest class in 1900 was the lower class, and it was they who struggled
daily to survive. Many were immigrants who lived in large cities or on farms in
rural areas in unhealthy, unsanitary living conditions. In the city, it was common that several families often occupied a cramped, dingy apartment intended
for a single family. Most could not read and many spoke very limited English.
They usually worked 10- and 12-hour factory shifts, six days a week, in dangerous working conditions for paltry wages. It was common for eight-year-olds
to work on farms and in factories instead of attending school. Many children
worked at jobs that adults were unable to do, such as crawling into small places
to fix or change machinery parts. Many children were injured or killed doing
this work. It was common for families to have more than five children who
could work and bring home money so that the family could survive. If one child
happened to be killed in their work, the survival of the family was not put in
jeopardy. Many children lived on their own, away from their families, selling

Knowledge | 359

newspapers, sewing, cleaning chimneys, and the like. Those children who were
more fortunate developed a skill or trade as an apprentice with a blacksmith,
carpenter, seamstress, or other skilled worker.
New York City in 1900, with a population of 3.4 million people (its current
population is 17 million) was the nation’s largest and most exciting city; Los
Angeles, with a population of 102,000, was not even in the top 20 cities in the
United States. Great Britain was the most powerful country in the world, with
Queen Victoria, its longest reigning monarch. Life expectancy of people in the
United States was 47 years of age. One in seven persons graduated from high
school ion 1900. Forty-two percent of the workforce was involved in farming;
the average worker, toiling in dangerous conditions and long hours, earned $9.70
per week. One in 13 homes had a telephone and the vast majority of homes
had no electricity or indoor plumbing. There were fewer than 1,000 miles of
paved roads throughout the United States. Wilbur and Orville Wright were still
three years away from their first flight. Horses, railroads, and travel by foot were
the main forms of transportation. There were 4,000 cars on the road, worldwide,
with speed limits of 20 miles per hour. There were more lynchings (116) than
auto deaths (96) in the United States in 1900. The three largest companies in the
United States were United States Steel, Standard Oil, and the American Tobacco
Company. John D. Rockefeller, leader of the Standard Oil Company, was to
become the single most important individual in shaping the rise of the modern
corporation. These companies not only were the driving forces of the Industrial
Revolution, they also represented the ruthless pursuit of profit, more often than
not in direct defiance of the law.
Progressive education was emerging, and at the University of Chicago, John
Dewey established the first elementary school. Progressive ideas, rooted in democratic practice, were quite popular, but in 1900 their impact on schools was
minor. The annual teacher salary was $350. Italian educator Maria Montessori
was becoming widely known for her new teaching method. Due to the influx of
immigrants, the biggest problem for education was the lack of room in schools
for the rapidly expanding population.
The development and change that the world has seen since 1900 is remarkable,
and to the person living in 1900, the change to come was unimaginable. The fundamental connection between then and now is revolution. In 1900, the revolution
was steeped in manufacturing and rapid social change, and now, ours is borne of
technology and information. This information revolution provides a set of challenges—not unlike those in 1900—in which we must consider how best to prepare
students for their future, how best to develop schools that are responsive to our
future, and what it means to be educated persons in our rapidly changing world.
The task is difficult and it requires that all of us imagine a future into which our
students are entering. The potential is limitless, and what results most likely will
impact our society for the next 100 years and beyond. Planning for an education in
an era that may hold some of the most profound changes of our time may prove to
be among the most important challenges facing our society this century. In order
to move our thinking into the realm of the future, it is important to consider the
generation of students who comprise our immediate and long term future.

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TOP 20
In 2007, the National Academy of Engineering listed the top 20 achievements of the
twentieth century:
1. electrification
2. automobile
3. airplane
4. water supply and distribution
5. electronics
6. radio and television
7. agricultural mechanization
8. computers
9. telephone
10. air conditioning and refrigeration
11. highways
12. spacecraft
13. Internet
14. imaging
15. household appliances
16. health technologies
17. petroleum and petrochemical technologies
18. laser and fiber optics
19. nuclear technologies
20. high-performance materials

THE MILLENNIALS
Born after 1980, the millennials—also known as the Echo Boom, Generation Y, Generation XX, Generation 2K—are more than 60 million strong in the
United States. These are the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of the “baby
boomer” generation. The millennials grew up in a time of uninterrupted economic prosperity and are among the most protected generation in history in
terms of government and safety regulations. They are used to being consulted
regarding family decisions. As a result, they tend to exhibit strong bonds with
their parents. According to one survey, 75 percent of millennials said they
share their parents’ values. They are more racially diverse; one in three are not
Caucasian. One in four lives in a single parent household, and three in four
have working mothers. Diversity is the embodiment of the millennials. They
encounter messages on a daily basis that reflect a stunning array of political
viewpoints, consumer choices, and cultural perspectives. The global reach of
the Internet has made it possible for persons who have similar interests to talk
with one another, provide immediate assistance and aid, and share divergent
points of view irrespective of their national boundaries, ethnic differences, or
cultural chasms.

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The millennials who sit in our elementary and secondary classrooms are getting a vast majority of their news from such nontraditional sources such as Jon
Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and a wide array of blogs. An estimated 32 million
people have read a blog, while 8 million have created their own blogs. When the
millennials use these blogs and other technologies, they are encountering a mindboggling assortment of issues, at once complex and contradictory. For example,
issues that are facing the millennials are: determining the moral implications of
fighting the “war on terror,” balancing the rights of the logging industry to make a
profit with the rights of those who wish to preserve the environment for the sake
of future generations, the uncertainty of not being able to think of one political
party as exclusively conservative or liberal, and global warming; and these are but
a few of the issues that the millennials are bumping into on a daily basis.
In the world of the millennials, technological communications have the capacity to transmit billions of messages simultaneously to almost anywhere on the
planet. News of a tsunami in Indonesia, a civil war in Darfur, or an earthquake
in California reaches the millennials literally minutes after the events occur and
places our students in a virtual world where they are “on the scene” as the event
unfolds. With this myriad of messages, one must ask: Do these messages that the
millennials receive on a daily basis help them form a perspective that accurately
reflects the world? It is critical that teaching and learning help millennials and
future generations answer this question so that they can gain a reliable and valid
sense of world conditions. With the unprecedented resources that are generating
huge amounts of information about the state of the planet and its people, there
is a need for teaching and learning that provides for the sharing and processing
of information to help the millennials—and those that follow them—to gain a
sense of important patterns, divergent points of view, and future trends.
COLLEGE MINDSET
Beloit College annually publishes its “College Mindset List ” for students entering each
fall. Below are some cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of college students who
were born in 1988.

They have known only two presidents.
The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is as scary as the student union.
“Google” has always been a verb.
“So” as in “Sooooo New York,” has always been a drawn-out adjective modifying a
proper noun, which in turn modifies something else.
They are wireless, yet connected.
They always have been able to watch wars and revolutions on TV.
They have always had access to their own credit cards.
DNA fingerprinting has always been admissible evidence in court.
Bar codes have always been on everything from library cards to snail mail and retail
items.
Ringo Starr has always been clean and sober.

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THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF KNOWLEDGE
For millennials in the information age, knowledge has become more unsettled, less predictable, and rapidly changing. Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their
book, Revolutionary Wealth, talk about the “law of obsoledge,” where as change
continues to accelerate, the knowledge that we currently possess rapidly becomes obsolete, hence the term “obsoledge.” For example, our knowledge of our
own solar system forever was changed with the demotion of Pluto from its status as a planet, while our vocabulary was enhanced with the American Dialect
Society’s 2006 Word of the Year—plutoed—meaning “something that has been
devalued.”
With knowledge having a more limited “shelf life,” the need increases for
students to change from memorizing facts to problem solving augmented by
a community of groups and learning teams. To overcome a growing sense of
anxiety and uneasiness about our own “obsoledge,” we need to develop cognitive
tools that will help us visualize concepts as variations of larger themes. Big concept thinking, systemic analysis, and model building will replace the less useful
memorization of disconnected facts. Sophisticated online search engines will
lead learners to specific facts and details that students will discard after their use
and resurrect when necessary. Unlike the end-of-chapter, recall-based questions
students answer in today’s textbooks, the ever-changing landscape of knowledge
will demand that learners in the future engage with knowledge rooted in problems that are contextual, complex, and messy. For example, students will learn
to access specific knowledge related to the Bill of Rights because it is essential
to helping them complete a problem centered task, rather than to receive a high
score on a Monday morning quiz or a standardized test. Software will track an
individual’s learning proficiency and generate a personal learning profile that
will help teachers to provide support and guidance for all students. Knowledge
in the future will emphasize students probing, questioning, and learning how to
do something, as opposed to memorizing facts for a standardized examination.
Millennials want to engage in authentic, real life activities that connect the
curriculum to their lives while challenging their creativity. But most importantly,
teaching our children and preparing them for their future means acknowledging the unique technological and communicative abilities they currently possess
so that they can connect these skills with the knowledge they need to know for
tomorrow’s world.

A Glimpse into Our Future
Forecasting the future can be fraught with problems. Once predictions of the
future included a world where we were destined to a future replete with flying
cars and robots that would serve our every need. However, forecasts of the future should not be interpreted as predictions of what the future will be; rather,
a forecast is a glimpse of what may happen, or proposals for what should happen. Futurist Eric Garland argues that the skill of predicting the future helps to
expose our assumptions, blind spots, and ignorance. The Futurist, a journal that

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forecasts trends and ideas about the future, provides an annual outlook for the
future. This forecast, combined with other perspectives on the future, clearly
presents some significant implications for education during the next 100 years.

business and economics
• The ratio of total income of people in the United States in the top five percent
and bottom five percent of income has grown from 6 to 1 in the 1980s to 200
to 1 in 2006. Disparities between rich and poor will continue to grow.
• An estimated 3.3 million high-tech service jobs will move out of the United
States over the next 15 years; the shift of high-tech jobs may be a permanent feature of economic life in the twenty-first century.
• The development of nanotechnology will result in breakthroughs in food,
agriculture, more powerful computers, and alternative energy systems.
• Workers over the age of 55 will grow from 14 percent of the labor force in
2005 to 19 percent by 2012. Companies will see the age range of its workers
span four generations.

science
• Biotechnology, nanotechnology (molecular manufacturing), and closedenvironment agriculture will efficiently feed the world’s population.
• Thousands of people will work in space communities in orbit, on the
moon, and on Mars.
• Hydrogen, fusion, third-generation fission plants, solar powered satellites,
and renewable energy sources will provide a safe and abundant mix of
energy.
• By 2030 the use of fossil fuels for power and transportation will be all but
eliminated.

environment
• Water supplies and energy choices will make or break the Chinese and
Indian economies with sustainable sources of energy critical for their economic survival.
• Costs of global–warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year
worldwide in 10 years.
• By 2100, coastal fisheries along Florida’s coast and estuaries could be lost
to flooding related to global warming.
• By 2025, 75 percent of U.S. residents will live on the coasts. The impact of
hurricanes and global warming will impact more people than ever before.

technology
• Computers will have artificial empathy for users, picking up on body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice.
• Computers will be one billion times more powerful in 30 years, rivaling
the human brain.

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• Wireless technology will be incorporated into our thought processes by
2030, allowing us to boost memory and thinking capacity and moving us
beyond the basic architecture of the brain’s neural regions.

education
• Education will become more portable and on-demand via downloading. Teachers will upload information, lectures, and other educational resources to students to access at their own convenience.
• Content will change from disciplines to a broader interconnectedness
of information, with digital learning that will promote multidisciplinary
thinking, multiple perspectives, and nonlinear thinking.
• Interactive, virtual learning rooms that can be adapted to whatever is
being learned will replace the classroom—virtual trips will be taken to any
part of the planet and to the communities in space and allow students to
view and question scientists and other professionals as they do their daily
work.
• Students will have individual, lifetime web sites that provide information,
feedback, and updating regarding their individual learning styles and that
will guide students to resources that fit their specific learning needs and
interests.

A FUTURE ORIENTED PERSPECTIVE
In the next 100 years, radical changes in social and political mores, education,
cultural awareness, medicine, and transportation will be part of everyday life.
Simply put, we cannot imagine all that the future holds for us. By focusing on
the future as we think about, plan, and develop our schools and their curricula,
we must consider what society might be like for millennials and their children,
and the essential knowledge and skills they will need to be successful 50 to 100
years from now.
A future oriented perspective assumes that the schools and curriculum we develop will not be static and mired in standardized accountability measures that
inhibit creativity. Schools need to be structured so that they are able to quickly
adapt to the changing world in which our students live. One can often hear the
phrase, “if only schools were run like businesses . . . ” as a call to change and innovation for schools. This simplistic phrase is an indication of a fundamental
misunderstanding of how businesses and schools work in our society. Businesses
are always thinking toward the future, and in order to do this, they have created
structures that are flexible and easily changed. Profits are the ultimate measure
of accountability for businesses, and businesses are never hesitant to throw out
old notions and change rapidly to meet the demands for profits from their stockholders. Unlike schools, businesses have never established a rigid accountability
system that is difficult to change, prescribes their every movement for years to
come, and limits their ability to respond to future problems. The current system
of accountability in our schools was developed primarily by persons outside of

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education (e.g., politicians, policymakers, and business leaders) that is not only
antithetical to a business accountability model but is difficult to change and is
not responsive to the current or future needs of students.
Currently, we are confronted by issues that raise complex and perplexing
problems that have no obvious answers: How will the free world address terrorism without infringing on human rights? What will be the role a free and open
press in a world heavily influenced by multinational corporate control? How do
we address the rights of all people with respect to marriage? How will we feed a
world population that will more than double in 60 years? The answers to these
questions will be found in our future. They will involve thinking that we can
only imagine. If we are to prepare our citizens to make thoughtful decisions,
now and in the future, our schools must be open to thinking about unfathomable and uncertain outcomes. A future oriented perspective will need to constantly monitor and forecast change—and its costs and consequences—in order
to guide our progress more wisely. And future oriented planning will result in
change that focuses on where we are going, as well as where we have been, so
that the decisions and plans we make today will position us for success in our
uncertain future.
A future oriented perspective demands rigorous, research based curricula
and planning involving higher education, public school personnel, parents, and
community leaders. We know more about teaching and learning that we knew
20 years ago. We know that we must connect knowledge to the lives of the students, and we know that it takes citizens who question and who are imaginative
to keep our democracy healthy and strong. However, we cannot hope to reform
the schools without a future oriented perspective that involves all of us working
more closely with schools. This means thinking and working with those who are
in schools on a daily basis: administrators, teachers, students, staff, and community members. Through working together, there is an infinite universe of
possibility regarding how knowledge can be taught and delivered. Curricular
redesign efforts that focus on qualitative and quantitative research-based best
practice can help jump-start a sweeping reform of the teaching and learning.
Some educators are beginning to use “scenario planning,” to help prepare for
the future. This is a process that helps planners create “plausible realities” that
are most likely to influence our future by analyzing trends in the surrounding
environment, interpreting how these trends might interact with each other, and
theorizing how these trends will impact and shape the future. An example of one
school district that is actively planning for the future is the School District of
Kettle Moraine, Wisconsin. The superintendent has convened a task force whose
goal it is “to transform the educational delivery system to better and more efficiently meet the needs of all students.” The task force is engaged in activities
such as scenario planning to understand the changes the district may encounter
in future decades.
As we consider the future, we should not move rashly to adopt a singular,
national perspective that is driven by ideology and special interests. Rather, we
need to take the time to conscientiously consider a wide array of perspectives
that could help to reinvent schools and curriculum and make them relevant and

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flexible to meet the unknown demands of the future. Perhaps we will discover
that a curriculum should be regional rather than national to better serve the
diversity of the nation. Whatever the forum and its outcome, the time has come
for educators to discuss how its schools meet the needs of future generations of
learners, unlock the learning potential of each student, and ensure an exciting,
engaging, and rigorous course of study.
Just as those who lived in 1900 would marvel at our world, the world in 2110
will be one that many adults living today would not recognize or understand.
More emphasis may be placed on what Richard Samson calls “hyper-human”
skills such as caring, judgment, intuition, ethics, inspiration, friendliness, and
imagination. Jobs of the future may have titles such as: bioaesthetic coach; intercommunity farmer; personal genome optimizer; telemedicine technician;
underwater hotel manager; offshore outsourcing coordinator; manager of diversity; skycar mechanic; or transhumanist technician. However, no amount of
research and educated forecasting makes the future wholly knowable. What we
do know is that untold social, political, economic, and cultural problems will
be facing our citizens 100 years from now and beyond. Social problems in the
future such as overpopulation, disease, threats to individual freedom, and ecological disasters may be avoided or at least better addressed through recognition
of their dangers and discussion of their consequences. A reasoned and intelligent view of the future is more likely when there is a willingness and ability for
educators to develop schools that can adapt to change. Futurist Arnold Brown
poses the future as a choice between being carried helplessly into the future or
controlling it, by “getting people to forget what they think they know, and open
their minds to what they now need to know.”
Fundamentally and most importantly, societal impetus may be affected by
a future oriented perspective in planning our curriculum and our schools. We
can no longer continue with schools, curriculum, and instructional approaches
that are based upon twentieth-century assumptions and perspectives. Since all
predictive techniques may influence the perception of reality, a future oriented
perspective will play an important role in the education of our citizens. The decisions that we make about schools today will inevitably impact how curriculum
is developed and delivered in the next 100 years and beyond. Undeniably, if the
schools are not attentive to the future, our schools and their curricula may be
“plutoed,” thus failing our citizens and the very democracy that we all so deeply
cherish.
Further Reading: Brown, A. 2006. The Problem Is Not What You Don’t Know, It’s What You
Think You Do Know, Futures Research Quarterly, Spring 2006, Vol. 1; Toeffler, A., & H.
Toffler, 2006, Revolutionary Wealth, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006

Perry M. Marker

LEADERSHIP
Leading schools as we know it today is a vastly different concept and praxis
from the days of its inception, when American schools were primarily church
based, elitist, designed to uplift oppressed people, and reflective of societal
norms that contrast dramatically with those deemed acceptable today. Leading
schools is a theoretical and practical endeavor that is intimately connected to
the traditions, values, and beliefs of the leader and the people being led. So what
has remained the same, and what are the enduring, and even nagging issues
with which school principals must wrestle? What is different today, and how has
this evolution of leadership set the stage for a new focus?
The role of the school principal continues to change, often creating conflicting demands and expectations. A culturally relevant historical perspective is
presented to provide a proper reference point, but historical references also suggest political, social, and economic nuances that affect perceptions and receptions of school leaders. It is out of this muddled mix of influences and priorities
that communities have become divided, as they have sought earnestly, although
often selfishly, to get the best educational experiences for their own children.
And always at the center of such turbulence is a principal who is responsible for
the success of every child.
A tremendous number of books and articles have been written about school
leadership as a craft. Most of these begin with a historical perspective. Few, however, have done so accurately, for they assume that everyone in the United States
has had similar desires and experiences referent to their quest for an education.
School leadership in this country is as much a dichotomous and disparate phenomenon as are race, economics, and politics. For authors and publishers to
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discuss role conceptions of principals and not include those role conceptions
held by African American educators, by Native American parents, or by Latina/o
students is to have totally and consciously misinformed the reader. Color-blinded
preparation for school leadership roles is naive and destructive to the generations for whom we are responsible.
The primary goal of the following sections is trifold: (1) to consider the varied perceptions of the role of school principal in light of the many publics and
sociocultural norms, (2) to discuss the realities of the role as assigned by school
boards and superintendents, and (3) to offer recommendations for building
consensus around these conflicting role conceptions of the school principalship.
SCHOOL LEADERSHIP’S ORIGINS IN THE UNITED STATES
History books tell us that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
American public appealed to leaders like Thomas Jefferson to lead the cause
for free public education, although many of the richest citizens did not want
their tax dollars used for the education of the less fortunate, a concept more
connected to ethnicity than economics. Given that African Americans had not
yet won their freedoms (the Emancipation Proclamation was not signed until
1865) they were really not yet part of this reference to “the American public.”
Establishing public schools in African American communities would therefore fall to the members of those communities. As wealth would have it, rich
dissenters won the battle and no public schools were opened. Those who could
afford it continued to educate their children at home or in private schools
where demands for racial justice were not an issue. The idea of public education took hold when two school leaders, Horace Mann and Henry Barnard,
started what we have come to know as the common school movement. The initiative shocked many who did not know the extent to which Horace Mann, in
particular, was dedicated to Jeffersonian principles that say there can be no
freedom without literacy, and that there can be no freedom without equality
for all men and women regardless of race, sex, politics, or religion. The common schools, opening first in the North, were open to all children, including
those of color.
Even before Mann’s and Barnard’s school efforts however, were those of Tunis
Campbell and Marshall Twitchell, African American activists who started public schools in the South during reconstruction in places like the Georgia islands
of St. Catherine’s and Sapelo and in the state of Louisiana. Freed slaves who had
some connections with teachers in the North sought financial assistance from
the Freedman’s Bureau (which was supported by tax dollars) to establish schools
that served groups of black children throughout the day, in three- to four-hour
shifts, and taught the parents at night. Native Americans of course had been
banished by the government under President Andrew Jackson in 1930 and more
officially moved out to reservations with the westward expansion in the late
1800s. This meant that wealthy white Americans did not have to worry about
educating these children with their tax dollars.

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Because the history and contributions by people of color are often not
acknowledged or credited by publishers, it is imperative that we as educators
do our part in presenting the fair and balanced accounts. There were, of course,
more national origins represented in the United States at the time of these events,
but the largest ethnic group was African American and some of the toughest political issues for our schools have continued to be racial issues between blacks
and whites. What remains complex and intriguing is the oft heard denial that
school leadership is a phenomenon colored by years of separatist policies and
behaviors, and that the battles being fought to this day are about how to lead
schools where diversity has called upon people to change their practices, their
attitudes, and their expectations. In the face of this denial, school principals are
expected to be the salvation of the very people oppressed because of the lack of
a good education.
As the role of principal evolved, the common schools took note of what
the European academies (especially German) were doing, which meant that
more often than not, men served as principals. When the principal was a
woman, she often was selected because there were no available, trained, or
interested men and because she was seen as stern (even hateful), much like
Miss Trunchbull in the children’s book, Matilda. The schools for black people
in the South, however (even since their inception), relied on men and women
who could read, to start and run these schools—therefore women were very
much a part of the leadership. Despite the fact that nearly all superintendents
have been married white males, middle-aged, middle class, and Protestant,
Ella Flagg Young, an African American woman who was a colleague of, and
coauthor with, John Dewey, was appointed the first woman superintendent of
the Chicago schools in 1909. Drs. Anna Julia Cooper (from Raleigh, North
Carolina) and Helen Burroughs (from Orange, Virginia) are other examples
of black women who were out front leading schools in the early to mid-1900s.
Another model of school leadership by an African American woman is that
of the Palmer Institute’s (near Burlington, North Carolina) founder, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown in 1902. In 2006, Dr. Brown was posthumously inducted
into the North Carolina Association of Educators Hall of Fame for her work
in school leadership. Some years after Dr. Brown’s leadership efforts, Quakersponsored institutions for black students were led by Jeanes supervisors, named
for their founder, Anna T. Jeanes, a Quaker woman. These supervisors were
educators—80 percent women, who trained teachers, developed curriculum,
conducted professional training workshops on child growth and development,
and performed all of the duties principals were doing in schools across the
United States. Most worked in rural areas, where there was a dire need for
professional teachers and teacher-leaders.
THE DUTIES OF THE PRINCIPAL
The first public schools, whether in the North or the South, whether led by a
black principal or a white principal, woman or man—established specific duties
for principal teachers, a term likely taken from the English schools, synonymous

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with the terms headmaster and headmistress. Among their responsibilities,
these experienced teachers (who may have only had three or four years of service) did the following:
1. Assume charge of the school.
2. Decide on courses taught.
3. Assign children to teachers and rooms.
4. Check the building for maintenance and needed repairs.
5. Inform authorities of problems.
6. Direct the duties of their assistants (later referred to as assistant principals).
Today, the role of the principal looks like this:
1. Assume charge of the school.
2. Decide on courses taught.
3. Assign children to teachers and rooms.
4. Check the building for maintenance and needed repairs.
5. Inform authorities of problems.
6. Direct the duties of their assistant principals.
7. Manage the budget.
8. Solve complex problems of practice.
9. Manage demands by parents and students.
10. Manage the demands of state and federal government.
11. Manage the demands of the business sector.
12. Be accountable to the media and general public.
13. Keep up with ever-changing trends via courses and workshops.
14. Serve as guardian of legal protections such as IDEA and Title I.
15. Proactively support the expansion of technological communication.
16. Interact with politicians in an effort to acquire necessary resources.
17. Attend community events that provide a link between home and school.
18. Handle crises and report incidents of violence to the state.
19. Hire, supervise, and mentor employees.
20. Establish parameters for fair and respectful human interaction.
21. Insure the safety of the children and employees in the building.
22. Assume major responsibility for effective instruction and learning.

The Public’s Conceptions of the School Principal’s Role
The public’s expectation of school principals has changed with the times,
which makes sense. There are a few factors that have contributed most significantly to the public’s view of what a principal should do. One of the factors that
has defined the role of the principal has been the changing social and demographic landscape. In short, when schools were small, principals had less to do.
As cities grew, and big cities became more ethnically mixed, the conditions and
problems around schooling grew, initially due to residual negative sentiments
attached to the outcome of the Civil War. These attitudes progressed through

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the 1950s despite the Supreme Court’s decision on May 17, 1954, and persisted
through the 1960s even after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Act, and through the 1970s when Charlotte, North Carolina’s schools became the
first in the nation to really desegregate via the method called busing—the official
end to what was known as the Southern Strategy, which essentially said, “ . . .
go to any school you want—as long as it is in your neighborhood.” The neighborhoods were segregated.
Some of the conditions and problems that have helped the public to redefine
the role of the principal over the last century include:
1. vastly disparate economic conditions among families
2. parents who have little formal education
3. schools that teachers do not want to teach in
4. low expectations on the part of many white teachers, administrators,
and middle class teachers in general (including some whose ethnic backgrounds are the same as the children they were failing)
5. property tax advantages that contribute to wider disparity in resources
6. the absence of teachers of color, who before desegregation served as role
models and surrogate parents for African American children
7. the discontinuous relationship for many students of color whose home
culture is seldom reflected in school curricula
8. the academic achievement gap between white children and all other children
9. tracking and other forms of segregation within desegregated schools
10. decreasing numbers of teachers, especially those who are highly qualified
and experienced
11. schools of choice that have contributed greatly to the resegregation of
American schools
Since the birth of public education, the general public has toyed with what
makes for an effective principal, but not until more recent times have we seen so
many oppositional camps, each with definite role conceptions considered most
desirable for their children’s schools. In the early years there were three distinct
frameworks for school leadership: (1) the moral and ethical (because so many
principals were associated with the ministry); (2) the social and community;
and (3) the instructional. The preference for one or the other had everything to
do with cultural and sociopolitical events as well as one’s personal values about
education and schooling. For instance, the leaning in the African American
community toward school leadership as a social and community framework
speaks directly to the initial purpose for black schools—to uplift an oppressed
people and provide opportunities for them to compete equally with white
people. Preference for the instructional leader framework has come to be a
strong preference among middle class families who do not look to the school as
much for social and cultural skill building for their children—they assume that
role themselves, and have the resources to do it. Among this group are parents
and business people who believe the school’s major purpose is intellectual stimulation and/or career preparation, depending on the family’s value system. The

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moral and ethical framework perhaps is less a preference today, when so many
parents believe that school leaders are crossing the line when it comes to moral
behavior. Parents express concerns about Internet use by students, the surge
in the gay student movement, the inclusion of religion discussions as a part of
history and culture courses, and the immoral and unethical behavior of educators that occurs all too often. This moral/ethical framework is most sought by
those who send their children to private or parochial schools, which is not to say
that these parents do not question leaders’ decisions and actions. Nonetheless, it
makes sense that one who selects a private school is legitimately seeking a highly
principled school philosophy, if not seeking a refuge from the more complex
politics of public schooling.
Today, given the reality of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and vestiges of
age-old values that dictate beliefs, the public still is quite divided about the role
of the principal. This legislation has pitted child against child, teacher against
teacher, and principal against principal. Subgroups, bonus pay, opt-out provisions for parents, funding forfeitures as punishment, and narrow-minded forms
of student evaluation have created a monster with which few principals are comfortable. Many principals (at a time when natural attrition is already high) are
deciding that the work is no longer what they saw upon coming to the profession and see little hope that it will return to that vision. Consequently, principals
prepared in the traditional manner for school administration are leaving, and
alternative preparation programs are emerging to fill the gap. Herein may lie a
whole new framework for school leadership.
Superintendents’ and School Boards’ Role Conceptions of Principals
Principals are truly caught in a web of conflict where role conceptions are
concerned. They often are asked to be all things to all people. The public, as
noted above, has its own views about how the schools that their children attend
should be led. The people to whom the principal reports, however, have other
criteria. Many school districts over the last few years have actively sought principals who are more culturally responsive, especially since the influx of so many
children of Hispanic descent, and in some communities, large numbers of Vietnamese children. Principals now are expected to work even more closely with
families, at a time when Homeland Security issues have only lessened people’s
sense of safety and in some cases created an added measure of racial bias. Working closely with immigrant families may mean creating language classes for the
parents so that they can better help their children to succeed. It may mean contracting agency services for families who have no income or medical insurance.
These are expected roles for principals in today’s highly diverse schools. Principals are expected to reduce the dropout rate, establish alternative learning settings for hard-to-reach students, and train teachers to work with these children
often referred to as “at-risk.”
Principals must understand tests and test data, and how to determine the significant changes needed in the curriculum to address the test results. They are
expected to turn schools around in one to two years or, in many cases, lose their

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positions. They are expected to hire the best teachers at a time when few high
school students want to enter this profession. Principals are told while preparing
for the role of administrator that they will be in a position of power—power to
make a difference in the lives of children, but once in the role, find their hands tied
and their voices silenced, all too often. They find that the disparities are huge—
that not only are some schools far wealthier than others, but that the assignment
of principals is biased, political, and many times not about the children’s needs.
They discover that what they have grasped through all of their years in education
to be sound principles of learning and development is often manipulated to please
and appease influential pockets of the citizenry. In schools where NCLB has imposed severe demands and constraints, many principals have had to trade in their
license to innovate. Of course there are the success stories of principals who have
turned troubled schools around despite the odds. So we might ask: What kind of
preparation can contribute to the creation of principals who will be successful in
the face of extremely daunting socioeconomic and politically isolating challenges?
What is the likelihood that given the global challenges, principals will continue to
view their roles with attitudes of resilience, intentionality, and vision?
Finding Common Ground amidst Role Conceptions of the School Principal
The United States has been in conflict over school desegregation, integration,
busing, tracking, and NCLB. The country has suffered because of disproportionate and ethnically unequal rates of dropout and punitive measures, the longterm effects of having lost at least 50,000 African American educators between
Brown v. Board’s blatant dismissal and the 1980s—when new teacher licensure
exams (that just happened to be concurrent with school districts’ latent integration initiatives) dismissed large numbers of black teachers.
We will forever be divided on these issues, and perhaps, rightfully so. We did
not all come to this country at the same time, under the same conditions, or
with the same opportunities. Sadly, even the U.S. Constitution tells us this.
School leadership and education itself must reflect as well as possible the values,
traditions, and aspirations of the people in that school and in that community.
This does not mean that white principals should only teach in middle class white
schools. It also does not mean that school districts should experiment with the
lives of children of color and send a young white principal who has never had
(or taken) the opportunity to learn about African American or Latino or Vietnamese children to run a school where these children are the majority and the
community only knows failure and oppression at the hands of white leaders.
Not all principals are cut from the same cloth nor should they be. Principals
who seek to know their students and their families, who intentionally learn
the history and challenges associated with that school, who spend lots of time
with the parents—listening and trying to understand, who hire really sincere and
imaginative teachers, who take their roles as supervisors seriously to ensure success, and who refuse to play politics at the expense of children’s achievement—
are exemplary principals—culturally proficient principals who realize success
wherever they are asked to lead, regardless of demographic idiosyncrasies.

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Further Reading: Anyon, J., 1997, Ghetto schooling, New York: Teachers College Press;
Carter, S. C., 2001, No excuses: Lessons from 21 high performing, high poverty schools,
Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation; Dantley, M. E., 1990, The ineffectiveness of
effective schools leadership: An analysis of the effective schools movement from a critical perspective, The Journal of Negro Educational Administration Quarterly, 59, 585–598;
Gaillard, F., 1988, The dream long deferred, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press; Hacker, A., 1992, Two nations: Black and white, separate, hostile, and unequal,
New York: Ballantine Books; Sather, S., 1999, Leading, lauding, and learning: Leadership in secondary schools serving diverse populations, Journal of Negro Education,
68(4), 511–528; Shapiro, S., Harden, S. B., & Pennel, A., eds., 2003, The Institution of
Education, 4th ed., Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing; Tatum, B. D., 1997, Why are all
the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?, New York: Basic Books.

Joanne Chesley
LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, TRANSGENDERED,
AND QUEER YOUTH
The status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth
has been an ongoing source of contention in public schools, particularly since
the latter part of the twentieth century. While these youth and their allies seek
recognition, support, and equitable treatment in schools, opponents of such visibility argue that schools are not appropriate domains for discussion of sexuality
or that schools should not promote nonheterosexual sexualities. Controversies
around LGBTQ issues in schools relating to the curriculum, extracurricular activities, and roles of school personnel are framed by opposing views of sexuality,
homosexuality, and youth, or who LGBTQ youth are, what they need, and what
the role of schools should be.
DEFINING LGBTQ YOUTH
L and G, or lesbian and gay, refer to stable identities founded on same-sex
desire and practices. B, or bisexual, has a similar stability even though it refers
to possibilities of same and opposite sex desires. T, or transgender, refers less
to sexual orientation, desire, or practice than it does to gender presentation or
expression. While it takes different forms, transgender broadly refers to people
whose “biological sex” does not match their “gender,” or whose gender expression or identity does not conform to binary ideas of male and female. Q can refer
to questioning or to queer. Queer differs from L, G, and B in that it signals fluidity and the instability of identities and practices and complicates binary understandings of gay and straight, disrupting straight-as-normal and gay-as-other.
Youth is a variable term culturally and historically. In late capitalist, Western
societies, it generally refers to young people in their preteens through as late as
their mid-twenties. Often it is used interchangeably with adolescence. LGBTQ
youth, then, is an umbrella term that includes young people who do not conform in varying ways to dominant constructions of sexual desire and/or gender
expression.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Youth

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAMESEX SEXUALITY AND SCHOOLING
Early twentieth-century public schooling saw the influence of sexologists’ research on human sexuality. With the naming in the late nineteenth century of
the homosexual and the heterosexual, and experts’ deeming homosexuality an
unhealthy developmental outcome that violated gender norms and procreative
sexuality, fear of homosexuality in schools grew. Curricular content, student
dress and conduct codes, extracurricular activities, and school personnel policies were designed to encourage gender conformity, which was, and continues to
be, conflated with heterosexuality. Unmarried school personnel were portrayed
as possible negative influences on young people’s sexual and gender development. During World War II, these norms relaxed somewhat due to labor needs,
but the clustering of individuals claiming “homosexual identities” in urban areas
brought about a backlash in which suspected homosexuals were purged from
the military, the government, and schools. The McCarthy era intensified public fear and persecution of homosexuals and communists as a danger to youth
throughout the 1950s.
In the 1970s, gay and lesbian issues and schooling became a significant element of public discourse. As a response to the beginning of a visible gay liberation movement following the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City,
homophobic forces created a moral panic around lesbians, gays, and schooling.
One of the more famous antigay campaigns was Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our
Children” campaign in Florida, which warned that homosexual teachers recruit
schoolchildren into the “homosexual lifestyle” and convinced voters to overturn
a nondiscrimination ordinance inclusive of gay men and lesbians. Shortly afterward, California Senator John Briggs also raised the specter of pedophilia when
he proposed the contested and unsuccessful Briggs Initiative (Proposition 6),
which would have banned openly gay teachers from working in schools.
With the consolidation of antihomophobic activism and research since the
1980s, a predominant tactic for promoting LGBTQ-inclusive practices in public
schools has been based in arguments that homophobia, or the fear of and/or
prejudice against individuals perceived as same-sex-desiring, creates inequitable
educational opportunities. Arguing that LGBTQ youth are denied equal educational access due to harassment, bullying, and discrimination, antihomophobic
allies and youth employ rights- and needs-based strategies for inclusion that
follow those of mainstream multiculturalism: promoting nondiscrimination
policies inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression, implementing comprehensive antiharassment (bullying) policies, encouraging teachers and administrators to come out (to serve as role models), offering positive
curricular representations of gay men and lesbians, and supporting the development of Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs).
Resistance to such change is strong. Religious Right organizations such as
the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, and Focus on the Family have positioned LGBTQ issues in schools as part of a larger “culture war” that includes
abstinence-only sex education programs, banning books from school libraries,
filtering the Internet, and calling for the teaching of creationism. They argue that

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the inclusion of sexual orientation in nondiscrimination policies grants “special
rights” and that curricular inclusion or the presence of a GSA legitimizes homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality, eroding parental authority to instill moral
values in their children. These groups often see public institutions generally, and
public schools specifically, as inculcating secular values and hostility toward
people of faith. Further, conservatives argue that teachers and students critical
of homosexuality are forced to stifle their views in schools, thus having their free
speech rights curtailed.
While youth from past generations grew up in contexts that were largely silent about or sought to repress same-sex desire and ensure gender conformity,
contemporary youth grow up with multiple media representations, access to
communities, and increasing awareness of, and, at times, hostility to, LGBTQ
issues and people. This proliferation of discourses and images includes adult understandings of LGBTQ youth.
DISCOURSES ABOUT LGBTQ YOUTH
Throughout the twentieth century in Western societies, adults defined youth
as innocent, having either asexual or developing heterosexual identities. As a
critical, transitional period of “storm and stress,” adolescence is considered a
dangerous developmental passage between childhood and adulthood, fraught
with risks through which adults must guide youth. Central, then, to adults’ relations to youth are ideas of protecting them from risk and danger in order to
support a healthy transition to adulthood. On one hand, this idea supports conservatives’ beliefs in the need for firm parental authority to avoid the dangers of
gender nonconformity or sexual deviance; on the other, it grounds activists’ arguments that institutions should support the healthy development of all youth.
Arguing that pathology is not intrinsic to LGBTQ individuals, supportive researchers, educators, and youth development workers have emphasized youth’s
suffering and isolation as an effect of victimization due to oppression. After the
release of the 1989 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “Report of
the Secretary’s Task Force on Youth Suicide,” which revealed that gay and lesbian youth commit a disproportionate 30 percent of teen suicides, the dangers
LGBTQ youth face due to society’s hostility became the dominant framework
for representing them. A risk discourse based on narratives and statistics related
to drug and alcohol abuse, dropping out, physical and verbal assaults, homelessness, sexually transmitted diseases, depression, and suicide framed understandings of LGBTQ youth and ways to help them. This discourse has been used as a
rhetorical fulcrum for school reform.
Concerned that framing LGBTQ youth as victims perpetuates “LGBTQ as
problem,” another discourse of resilience and agency is emerging. Resilience refers to an end state of positive adaptation and development, particularly in the
face of adversity. Researchers look for “protective factors,” or those that promote
healthy development and counteract risk, whether individual (personality, background) or contextual factors (school, peers, family, culture). Prominent in their
findings has been the development of communities in and out of schools. The

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Youth

proliferation of on-line, Internet communities among sexual minority youth
is said to create opportunities for youth to explore identities and ideas, access
sexual health information, and share narratives and resources across geographic
contexts. In schools, GSAs are said to enable community-building, visibility, a
positive school climate, the development of leadership and social skills, coping
strategies, identity formation, and positive self-esteem.
The nonprofit Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN),
founded in 1990 with a mission of supporting equitable educational opportunities for all youth, has conducted several nationwide school climate surveys
across the United States. Its 2004 State of the States report examined state laws
and policies affecting school climates and safety for LGBT students. The report
gave 42 states a grade of “F,” citing a lack of legal and policy protections against
anti-LGBTQ harassment. GLSEN’s related biennial National School Climate
Survey (the last of which was conducted in 2005) documents the impact of harassment and violence directed at LGBT youth on their academic performance.
The survey of LGBT students found that three-quarters report hearing remarks
such as “faggot” or “dyke” often at school; faculty and staff often failed to act
when they heard such remarks; three-quarters of students felt unsafe in school
due to personal characteristics; nearly two-thirds had been verbally harassed
because of their sexual orientation and nearly half due to their gender expression; and over a third had experienced physical harassment at school on the
basis of sexual orientation and a quarter on the basis of gender expression. In
response to arguments that LGBTQ youth’s learning is hindered because they
are or feel unsafe in schools, professional organizations, including the American
Federation of Teachers, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the National School Boards Association, and the National Education
Association, have passed declarations of support for LGBTQ youth.
LEGAL BATTLES
There are no federal or constitutional protections for LGBTQ people. Thus,
states, cities, counties, and local school districts become responsible for creating
LGBTQ-related policies. Presently, 13 states provide equal protection measures
on the basis of sexual orientation and 14 states bar consensual sodomy. Eight
states (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Washington, New Jersey, and Vermont) and the District of Columbia have enacted
legislation that prohibits discrimination and harassment on the basis of sexual
orientation in schools. Of those, California, Minnesota, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia include gender identity/expression.
Students have successfully sued school districts for failing to address harassment. For example, in the 1996 case Nabozny v. Podlesny, a federal court ordered the Ashland, Wisconsin school district to pay a student, Jamie Nabozny,
$900,000 for failing to protect him from repeated antigay abuse by other students. The court based its decision on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, finding that the school failed to provide Nabozny equal protection. In similar cases involving harassment due to

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gender expression or perceived sexual orientation, advocates have successfully
turned to the federal-level Title IX, which guarantees equal educational opportunities by prohibiting discrimination based on sex in schools that receive
federal funding.
Parental protests to inclusive practices have resulted in parental notification laws in four states—Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah, which require
students to obtain written consent from their parents when topics such as AIDS,
sex, and (homo)sexuality are discussed. Other laws (in South Carolina, Arizona,
Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, and Utah) collectively referred to as “no promo
homo,” prevent teachers from mentioning the words “homosexual” in classrooms or mandate that they present homosexuality only negatively.
At the federal level, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that schools
receiving funds to purchase computers and Internet-related technology must have
a policy for “Internet safety” that protects youth from visual depictions that are
“harmful to minors.” This measure has resulted in Internet filters that effectively
bar youth from access to information and community-building. Also included in
the NCLB Act are two provisions, the Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act
and the Vitter Amendment, which threaten public schools with the loss of federal
funding if they prevent the Boy Scouts of America or the U.S. military from using
public school facilities for meetings or recruitment. These provisions were created
in response to antihomophobic activism that led an increasing number of districts
to limit access due to the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the Boy Scouts’ right as
a private group to discriminate against gay scouts and scoutmasters and of the
military’s discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
SCHOOL CLIMATE
Activists point out that schools are intrinsically heternormative institutions,
or that school culture, curriculum, and extracurricular activities enforce normative gender binaries and heterosexual norms. As a challenge to such heteronormative practices as school dances and proms, students have attended with
same-sex dates or created alternative “gay proms.”
Since 1996, GLSEN has sponsored a national Day of Silence in the United
States, during which hundreds of thousands of high school and college students
spend the school day without speaking in order to draw attention to LGBTQ students’ experiences of isolation, bullying, and harassment. In response, in 2005,
a Christian legal group, the Alliance Defense Fund, instituted a Day of Truth, in
which students wear T-shirts with the slogan “The Truth Cannot Be Silenced”
and pass out cards stating that they will not condone “detrimental personal and
social behavior.”
Gay Straight Alliances
One of the most significant developments to counter the effects of a hostile school climate has been the formation of Gay Straight Alliances. GSAs

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer Youth

are in-school, extracurricular groups that include LGBTQ students and their
straight allies, who meet to socialize, discuss issues, and organize activities.
In 2003, GLSEN estimated that there were nearly 2,000 GSAs in U.S. public
schools. Despite their controversial nature, these groups are protected under
the federal Equal Access Act of 1984, a law originally designed to permit
after-school Bible and Christian clubs. The act stipulates that student clubs
are protected regardless of religious, political, philosophical, or other speech
content.
GSAs have roots in both activist and institutional practices. LGBTQ youth
have been organizing in and out of schools for several decades. From the
late 1960s to the 1970s, such groups as the Gay Teenagers in San Francisco,
the Sodom Radical Bisexual Free Communist Youth in Hayward, California,
the Young Peoples Group in Miami, and Alternatives for Teenage Gays in Chicago, took part in the burgeoning gay rights movement. Gay Youth formed national chapters and conducted outreach in schools and through the press. In
1972, some 15 years before the first recognized GSA, students initiated a gaystraight club at George Washington High School in New York City.
Alternative institutions such as the Harvey Milk High School (1985) in
New York City or the private Walt Whitman Community School (1993) in
Dallas, as well as programs such as the Triangle Program (1995) in Toronto
and Project 10 (1984) and its offshoots in Los Angeles, were created to respond to challenges LGBTQ youth face in schools and to act as “safe spaces”
for students whose educational needs were not met in conventional school
settings. These programs took segregation as a strategy, separating students
from school contexts, and thus did not challenge dominant homophobia.
At the same time, these organizations paved the way for the development of
GSAs.
One of the first wide-scale initiatives involving GSAs in the United States
came as part of Massachusetts’s Safe Schools Initiative (1993), after the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth documented the negative effects of a hostile school climate. The funded initiative, which grew to include
over a hundred GSAs within several years, created inclusive nondiscrimination policies, offered school personnel training, encouraged support groups
for gay and straight students, and offered counseling for families of LGBTQ
students.
Parental outrage and administrative resistance to GSAs has resulted in legal
battles nationwide. Courts have regularly found in favor of GSAs’ right to meet
on school property. The most publicized legal case involving a GSA took place
in 1996 at East High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. Parents argued that the club
promoted immoral and illegal behavior, given the state’s antisodomy law. Due
to the Equal Access Act of 1984, the school could not single out the GSA to ban
and instead banned all extracurricular groups. After five years of court battles
reaching the federal level, the GSA was allowed to meet at East High and to
advertise its activities on school bulletin boards, the public address system, and
the school newspaper.

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CURRICULUM
To counter systematic silencing of LGBTQ issues in schools, antihomophobic
educators argue that positive representations offer LGBTQ youth role models
and build their self-esteem while promoting tolerance and understanding
among non-LGBTQ people. Two dominant discourses define curricular
inclusion: a public health model and a multicultural inclusion model. The public health model focuses on health promotion and risk prevention, whereas
the multicultural model teaches tolerance and respect for diversity, framing
LGBTQ individuals as a minority, akin to racial and ethnic groups. While the
public health model tends to locate LGBTQ-related issues in the health and
sexual education curriculum, the multicultural model seeks infusion throughout the curriculum.
In addition to the “no promo homo” battles, one of the most public struggles
over curricular inclusion occurred in 1992 in New York City, with the proposal
of the Children of the Rainbow Curriculum. The curriculum, which followed
the multicultural model and contained a reference to children with same-sex
parents and stories about lesbian and gay parents in the bibliography, ignited
fierce battles within the community—many based on arguments that LGBTQ
people do not constitute a “legitimate” minority. The defeat of the curriculum
ultimately led to the ouster of the chancellor of schools, Joseph Fernandez.
Both types of curricula avoid explicit discussion of the social meanings of
sexuality and stress safety, health, and tolerance. Thus, some argue that curricular inclusion informed either by ethnic models of identity or by safety from
LGBTQ “victimization” positions LGBTQ as an identifiable and problematic
minority population, perpetuating divisions of “LGBTQ” and “straight” people
and cultures. This division fails to challenge norms by presenting LGBTQ and
non-LGBTQ identities as stable, separate, and predictable. Moreover, it does not
examine how processes of differentiation and subordination work as political
and social relations create and maintain norms.
CONCLUSION
Issues around LGBTQ youth constitute an ongoing controversy with moments of opening and of closure. They are, and will continue to be, defined not
only by social ideas about sexuality and gender but also by adults’ ideas of the
needs of youth and the role of schools.
Further Reading: Blackburn, M. V., & R. Donelson, eds., 2004, Special issue: Sexual
identities and schooling, Theory into Practice, 43(2); Kumashiro, K., 2002, Troubling
education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy, New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer; Rasmussen, M. L., 2006, Becoming subjects: Sexualities and secondary
schooling, New York and London: Routledge; Rasmussen, M. L., E. Rofes, & S. Talburt,
eds., 2004, Youth and sexualities: Pleasure, subversion, and insubordination in and
out of schools, New York: Palgrave; Talburt, S., & S. R. Steinberg, eds., 2000, Thinking
queer: Sexuality, culture, and education, New York: Peter Lang.

Susan Talburt

Literacy Education

LITERACY EDUCATION
PROMISES BROKEN AND KEPT: OUR PURSUIT
OF K12 UNIVERSAL LITERACY
Literacy is the one area in which everyone is expected to be successful, that
is, we don’t expect all kids to be gifted, or even successful, athletes, artists, musicians, or scientists. In fact, in those areas we recognize and expect wide ranges
of abilities without stigma. Not so when children are learning to read. Failure
to learn to read on time (“on time” here means at the same pace that most other
children learn to read, or at least by the end of first grade) is the source of real
stigma and suffering in school, and the window of opportunity to be successful is small indeed. Any first grade teacher (and today, possibly kindergarten
teachers as well) will tell you that just minutes after three reading groups are
formed in a first grade classroom every child in that class can tell you which
is the high, the medium, or the low group. And no matter what names are
used to disguise the levels, the children always know. They are not fooled by
the seemingly neutral group names “Cardinals,” “Blue Jays,” and “Wrens;” what
they understand is that these names represent something akin to what Jane
Davidson calls the “Fierce Eagles,” “Mediocre Magpies,” and “Buzzards.” Even
when groups are sent to different classrooms, the children always know which
classes are the high groups and which are the low groups. And from the moment of group formation on, those who are not immediately successful learning to read—that is, those not in the middle or high group—must endure both
the social and academic consequences, and the chances of ever moving “up”
from the low or even middle reading group to a higher group are rare indeed.
It is from this event—when children fail to learn to read on time and then
struggle for the rest of their academic career with reading and writing in
school—that the great controversies in literacy education have arisen. There
have been the “Reading Wars,” the phonics versus whole language debate, and
the “Great Debate” of the 1960s and 1970s. Right now talk is of “evidencebased” instructional practice (specifically with respect to early instruction in
phonemic awareness, fluency, and phonics). In fact, the most recent reauthorization of federal education legislation—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, previously referred to as ESEA, now better known as No Child Left
Behind or NCLB—was predicated on a requirement for evidence-based instruction and early intensive phonics instruction. The crux of the controversy
lies in the enduring phenomenon of children who are not successful in learning to read and write in school. Much literacy theory and research throughout the twentieth century and continuing today has been focused on finding
(1) the reasons this situation endures, and (2) solutions that will make it go
away, and almost all of the discussion has centered on the role of reading skills
in early reading instruction. Contrary to much popular belief, the question
was never, “Should we teach phonics in early reading instruction?” The question that sparked the controversy was and always has been, “How and when
should phonics be taught?”

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U.S. LITERACY INSTRUCTION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The 1940s and 1950s
Elementary School
If you learned to read in the 1940s or 1950s you probably began with preprimers and primers (pronounced “pri” as in “prim,” not “pri” as in “price”) in a series
of reading books (called basal readers or basal series) that introduced you to the
children (and pets) in the family that formed the nucleus of the readers’ stories:
Dick, Jane, and Sally, and Spot; Alice and Jerry; Bob, Nancy, Tom, Susan, and
Flip. Most of these basal series taught phonics using an analytical method—that
is, by teaching whole words in context and then using a pool of known words to
guide students’ analysis of the phonic elements of those words. For example, in
the first primer of the Dick and Jane series, the first page is a picture of the dog
Spot; underneath the picture is the word “Spot..”
Instruction began with the children associating the picture of the dog Spot
with the word “Spot” (thus it became known as the “look-say” method). Later,
children learned to identify the “sp” consonant blend at the beginning and the
short “o” vowel rule for words ending in a consonant (“t”). As you continued
through the grades stories became longer and more difficult and expanded to
include more neighborhood characters. In all likelihood you were in a reading
group for at least the first three grades, with each group in the classroom reading
in a different level book of the reader series; alternately, one or more groups read
in a different series. Following reading group, you worked in your Think and Do
Book, or other workbook, to practice phonics and comprehension skills; for example, identifying other words with the short “o” sound—Tom, cot, shop, hop,
sob, and so on. In those three early grades, you may also have done whole class
phonics drill using a workbook that taught phonics skills in a sequence separate
from the sequence taught by the reading series. If you had trouble learning to
read you may have gotten some additional help from your classroom teacher,
probably additional phonics instruction and practice, and by the mid- to late1950s, help from the reading teacher in another room.
By the time you reached fifth or sixth grade, academic subject instruction
began to overshadow formal reading instruction, with the possible exception
of whole-class reading in basal books using the dubious practice called Round
Robin Oral Reading in which students took turns reading paragraphs aloud,
up and down the classroom rows, from a variety of classroom texts (a source of
great anxiety for struggling readers and much reading-ahead behavior by the
best readers).
Secondary School
If you were in junior high and senior high school during these decades,
classes were wholly subject matter focused because it was assumed at the time
that students had only to apply reading skills they already had to newly (and
increasingly) difficult secondary school texts. Some very few secondary schools

Literacy Education

had remedial services available for those students who could not. Writing instruction assumed new emphasis in English classes and included a great deal
of grammar study and practice (possibly in the Warriner’s grammar text) along
with formal essay and other writing guided by that very same text. During these
decades most mandatory school attendance laws ended at age 16, so by the time
you reached graduation, a relatively large number of classmates had dropped
out of school (almost half in the 1940s and early 1950s; slightly over a third by
1960); many, but not all of them, were unable to keep up with the school’s academic demands.
1960s and 1970s
Elementary School
By the early to mid-1960s, reading series used in the 1940s and 1950s were
changing to reflect social and demographic changes in the United States. Dick,
Jane, and Sally, and Alice and Jerry, were joined by a host of new characters with
skin shades that began to reflect the growing integration and diversity of the U.S.
school populations (interestingly, these characters originally maintained the middle class, mainstream culture of Dick and Jane and Alice and Jerry and only in later
editions became truly diverse). If you learned to read in the 1960s you may have
been taught from a growing variety of basal reading series; so, instead of reading
Dick and Jane you may have begun reading stories using the initial teaching alphabet (i/t/a) in which the alphabet was altered to provide a direct sound-symbol correspondence for each letter and sound (instead of the confusing standard English
in which one letter may represent a number of sounds and/or a single sound may
be represented by more than one letter—e.g., the hard “k” sound of both the c and
k in “cook,” the soft “c” and “s” sound of both the s and the c in “since” and on and
on). At about third grade you transitioned from i/t/a to standard written English.
Or, you may have been taught using a synthetic phonics approach in which instruction began by associating the sounds of letters with their print counterparts,
which, once learned, were then blended into words, phrases, and then stories you
could read. Another kind of series used a linguistic approach in which early text
was comprised of nonsensical, but highly consistent, word families—“Dad had a
sad lad.” By the late 1960s and into the 1970s basal series enjoyed high popularity for early and continuing reading instruction; the series, as well as instruction,
expanded to include grades four to six, and by the end of the 1970s, virtually every
basal series had books that extended into the seventh and eighth grades.
Popular also in these two decades was the Language-Experience Approach
(L-EA) to early and continuing reading instruction. If you were in an L-EA
class, you spent lots of time first dictating stories or sentences that the teacher
recorded and then used for comprehension and phonics skill practice; as your
ability to write your own stories progressed, you assumed more responsibility
for independent writing of accounts, which, in turn, led to book reading. You
may have had your very own Word Bank of words collected from the stories
you wrote (maybe collected on 4” x 6” cards and kept in a recipe box). You were

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encouraged to read widely from both the classroom and school libraries. Skills
instruction in L-EA was taken from children’s stories and word banks; for example, to reinforce the short vowel rule, the teacher would have you sort your
word bank words to find all the words with a short “o” sound.
If you experienced trouble learning to read or struggled with literacy in elementary school during these decades, you probably had access to remedial
reading instruction in the remedial reading classroom. By the mid-1960s, newly
credentialed reading teachers and newly developed remedial reading programs
were common components of U.S. elementary schools. Using a “pull-out” model
of instruction, reading teachers scheduled struggling readers daily for additional
reading instruction; children left their home classroom and went to the reading
classroom for this instruction.
Secondary Schools
Secondary remedial programs continued to expand during the 1960s and
were widespread by the end of the 1970s. If you were in one of the classes you
may remember the SRA Reading Laboratory, a box with color-coded comprehension skill cards (a color for each reading level); working individually you read
short passages and answered comprehension questions on each card and took
“level” tests, with the goal of working your way up through the purple level.
Or you may remember the Be a Better Reader series or other skills workbooks.
Widespread also were “basic English” and “developmental reading” classes in
junior and senior high schools intended to give yet additional support to students who were struggling readers in school. Even with increased availability of
remedial instruction in secondary schools, little, if any, efforts were made in secondary subject area classes to support students in adapting their literacy skills
to reading and writing in those classes. Most secondary schools at this time administered some form of minimum competency tests to students and provided
compensatory programs to assist those students who did not pass the tests on
the first try. By the early 1960s mandatory attendance age extended to 18 in
most states and high school graduation became the minimal education level for
getting a good job, so more students continued to graduation (about 80%), and
schools were becoming increasingly diverse.
1980s and 1990s
Elementary School
By the early 1980s basal reading series had changed or were changing again,
dramatically. Gone completely were Dick and Jane, replaced by characters from
children’s literature excerpted for inclusion in the series; into the educational
lexicon came the word, “unbasalized,” which referred to text taken directly and
unchanged from its primary source and not written specifically to include lots of
repetition or to have narrow vocabulary constraints (as in, “See Spot run. Run,
Spot, run!”). You may have learned to read in the 1980s using the old basals of

Literacy Education

the 1960s or 1970s, or you may have used the new, anthologized basals. In each
case, more than likely you practiced phonics or comprehension skills using a
“skills pak” or workbook.
In addition to basal reading series that more closely resembled literature
anthologies than they did the old series, elements and aspects of the whole
language movement began to filter into early and continuing reading instruction. Whole language instruction grew from many of the principles underlying
language experience; early whole language instruction included lots of reading to children from rhyming and predictable texts, such as any and all Doctor Seuss books and the Bill Martin Jr. books—e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear
(“what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me. Red Bird, Red Bird, what do
you see? . . . ”)—and children’s dictation and early writing of their own stories
and accounts. As with L-EA, in whole language classrooms, skills instructions
grew from the language of the class; that is, the Dr. Seuss books Hop on Pop or
Green Eggs and Ham would be the catalyst for teaching/reinforcing the short
vowel rule and/or words that rhyme with “op” or “am”; children’s word banks
and stories were primary sources for teaching phonics and comprehension
skills.
Whether in a whole language classroom or not, you may have also participated in something called “writing workshop” or “writers’ workshop” in which
as a very young child you began drafting, revising, and polishing stories and
other written accounts, read them aloud to your classmate audience, and then
published them in a class book or individual portfolio. Specific writing skills
(e.g., writing dialog, punctuation, transitions) were taught as students needed
them in daily mini-lessons and in writing conferences between the teacher and
individual students. Writing workshop tended to permeate throughout elementary schools rather than stop at third grade.
As you reached fourth or fifth grade you may have used full-length works
of literature as the main text for reading instruction; this was “literature based
instruction” and was implemented more or less effectively by teachers, schools,
and districts depending on the amount of professional development for teachers to learn how to move away from using basals (with their elaborate Teacher’s
Manuals) to using literature. Actually, literature based instruction brought another basal-related word into the lexicon: “basalize”—a term used to describe
instruction in which literature was taught in the same way basal reader stories
had previously been taught; for example, one could teach in such a way as to
“basalize” Bridge to Terabithia. Alternately, you may have participated in “reading workshop” in which you self-selected your own books to read or worked
in literature circles of five to six students, all reading the same book and then
discussing it in the small group with teacher guidance.
Secondary School
If you were a pre-teen in the mid-1980s or since you may have attended a
middle school instead of junior high. Beginning in the early 1980s more states

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required secondary teachers in selected or all content areas to take a literacy
course and to incorporate into their instruction methods that guide students’
reading and writing in that subject area. Thus, you may have done journal writing in your mathematics or physical education class, as well as your English
class. Or, your entire high school may have stopped for 15 minutes of Sustained
Silent Reading (SSR) every day. However, systematic instruction and support
for students’ literacy development in all subject areas remained a goal more discussed than achieved at that time in secondary schools, although advances were
being made.
By the end of the 1990s U.S. schools were increasingly diverse, with large
populations of students who did not speak English as their first language, and
concern for their academic success, as well as that of other students who struggled in school, became paramount. Dropout rates in 1990 and 2000 had leveled
off at about 14 percent; thus, about 85 percent of this more diverse population of
students were staying in school to graduation. This statistic, however, masks the
disparity of graduation rates between urban poor districts and affluent schools.
Jonothan Kozol in his 1995 book Amazing Grace notes the “human ruin” of just
200 graduating seniors in a school of 3,200 students in New York City. So once
again, at the end of the 1990s the number of students struggling with literacy
alarmed the nation.

UNIVERSAL K–12 LITERACY—LEGISLATION, RESEARCH, EVENTS
1955: Publication of Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, taking U.S. schools to
task for not teaching phonics using the synthetic method.
1957: Launching of the Soviet Union’s space satellite Sputnik and resulting questions regarding the quality of U.S. education.
1958: Passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), providing massive funds
for research, teacher education, and curriculum development in reading, mathematics,
and science. Title I of NDEA created remedial reading programs and funded graduate
education and credentialing to prepare qualified remedial reading teachers.
1964 –1965: Implementation of the U.S. Office of Education Cooperative Reading Studies, better known as the First Grade Studies, funded by NDEA to compare early reading methods of instruction to find the one best method. This effort coordinated 28
studies across the nation in which 33 thousand children and thousands of teachers
participated. Results: For every method of instruction many children learned to read;
for every method of instruction, some children did not learn to read successfully. At the
end of the first year, children in the synthetic phonics method had a slight lead over
the others.
1965 –1967: Continuation of some of the first grade study projects into second and third
grades. Results: By the end of the third grade, differences found in first grade washed
out; for all methods, the students who learned to read were reading on a par as were
the students who were not successful.

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1965: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act replaced NDEA with a focus on economically disadvantaged students. It established interest-free, deferred payment student loans for college students preparing to be teachers; for each year new teachers
taught in low-income—“Title I”—schools, 10 percent of the loan was forgiven for up to
five years of teaching. It also increased funding for Title I reading classes and teacher
preparation.
1970s: The Right to Read campaign was launched, with a goal of universal literacy by
1980. “Every teacher a teacher of reading” was the rallying cry to encourage greater
attention to systematic development of literacy in secondary classrooms and schools.
1983: Publication of A Nation at Risk took the nation to task for failure to educate all of its
children and triggered a major wave of education reports and calls for reform.
1990s: National standards for performance and graduation were developed by professional education associations in response to the calls for reform in the 1980s.
1994: Enactment of Goals 2000 federal legislation to support and fund standards-based
educational reform targeted to higher achievement for all students.
2001: ESEA (NCLB) was reauthorized and signed into law with a goal of universal reading proficiency by 2014. The Reading First initiative provided funding to schools for
improved reading instruction. Sanctions were imposed if schools failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) criteria.

CONTROVERSY, NEW CONCERNS, AND NEW CHALLENGES
Controversy
Near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, probably the single biggest controversy in U.S. public education is the implementation of and
fallout from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Originally enacted in
2001, NCLB has as its goal achieving educational equity by eliminating the gaps
between high and low achievers (and especially the gaps that have persisted between racial and socioeconomic groups for many years) and achieving the goal
of all students reading at “grade level,” K–12. The ultimate goal of NCLB is for
all students to be at a “proficient” level by the year 2014. The framework for this
reform includes requirements for “highly qualified” teachers in every classroom,
yearly mandated tests, and stringent requirements for Adequate Yearly Progress
(AYP) for all students and schools. Strong sanctions are applied for schools that
fail to meet AYP standards.
In elementary schools, requirements associated with implementation of
NCLB have resulted in early intensive reading instruction in phonemic segmentation (separating the sounds in words), reading fluency, and phonics. In many
schools, particularly underperforming schools, the reading series adopted for
this early instruction is “scripted,” in which the teacher reads from a script to
conduct the entire reading lesson. The idea here is that the material controls the

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instructional event so that what happens in one classroom happens in all others.
These scripted programs and NCLB requirements have now been in place for
five years, and while some progress has been made, these efforts have been no
more (nor less) effective than instructional approaches of the last-half of the
twentieth century in reducing the number of children who fail to learn to read
on time.
In secondary schools high stakes testing is equally prevalent, along with requirements for meeting AYP goals; various forms of academic tracking have been
reintroduced, especially proliferation of Advanced Placement (AP) courses; and
many, if not all, states have or are contemplating exit exams to determine which
students graduate from high school (unlike the minimum competency tests
of the 1970s and 1980s, failure to pass these exit exams denies students a high
school diploma). The U.S. Department of Education is exerting new pressure on
secondary schools for AYP and for solving the problems of older students who
continue to struggle with literacy in school. And issues of race, socioeconomic
status, and gender on academic performance continue to plague us.
Concerns
Reading is the one area where we expect everyone to be successful. Many,
many children and adults are, indeed, successful readers, and a good portion
of them have the schools and their teachers to thank for their success. We must
not lose sight of that. However, the fact continues to remain that others are not.
And we keep asking the same old question (“How and when should phonics be
taught?”) in our attempts to solve the issue of students who struggle to read and
write in school. We have ample evidence from research and experience to suggest that when our attempts to solve the problem focus solely on instructional
method, we continue to get the same result: Current test results indicate that still
some children do not learn to read on time after five years’ implementation of
highly-touted “evidence-based” instructional methods. This is the exactly the
result we got using basal readers of every kind, whether analytical or synthetic
phonics, i/t/a or linguistic, the Language- Experience Approach, whole language, and other approaches for early reading instruction.
A second concern is the punitive nature of many of our current solutions and
school reforms, most of which are related directly or indirectly to NCLB. In fact,
NCLB is the first federal education legislation in which punishment (sanctions)
accompany funding (and NCLB has never been fully funded) rather than incentives (support). A recent California Educator article points out,
In California 44 percent of all schools failed to make Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP) in 2005–06. The percentage of students that must be
“proficient” rises each year under NCLB to 100 percent by 2014. That
impossible target means that 100 percent of California schools are likely
to be labeled failing schools.
Under NCLB, schools labeled as failing may be taken over by the state, “reconstituted,” or restructured. That is punitive indeed and has led to numerous,

Literacy Education

equally negative school practices. Retaining students—not passing them to the
next grade—is regaining popularity in the United States after nearly 100 years of
research that shows retention to be ineffective and unlikely to result in students
catching up with their promoted peers. As mentioned, high-stakes tests begin in
early grades and continue through high school with both AYP and exit exams,
for which the price of failure is denial of a high school diploma (even if all high
school units are complete and all courses passed). In some schools, resources and
energy are being directed predominantly to the “bubble kids”—those most likely
to be able to raise their scores to the accepted level—thus neglecting the ones
farthest behind (and for whom the law was presumably written). And finally,
assigning huge amounts of homework—as much as 30 minutes a day for kindergarteners and three to four hours per night for high schoolers—has become
common practice with little or no research evidence to support that practice. All
of these practices fall under the heading of “intensification” of schooling and “getting tough” on students and schools. Such punitive reforms are likely to have an
effect absolutely opposite of the NCLB goal of educational equity: deeming low
achieving (and oftentimes low income and minority students) as failures, pushing them out of school before graduation, and thereby creating a rise in dropout
rates and an increasingly large adult population of undereducated people.
New Challenges
Our Diverse K–12 Student Population
As you consider our progress through the twentieth century, consider first the
contrast between the students of 1900 and those of today. In 1900, only 7 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school; in 1940, 50 percent graduated;
today, roughly 85 percent graduate (some percentage of those pass the GED test
or its equivalent). In 1900 only half of those entering school went beyond sixth
grade; one in three finished eighth grade, and fewer than one in five went to high
school. So at least part of the continuing phenomenon of students who struggle
to read and write in school can be attributed to the changing population of the
schools themselves. Thus our secondary schools are no longer the purview of
the academic and economic elite, and our efforts toward universal literacy must
accommodate that change by supporting students’ literacy development in all
classes, K–12.
Grade Level Performance
Reading at “grade level” has long been a standard for acceptable achievement
in the minds of the general public, policy makers, legislators, and educational
pundits. Most people, when they think of “grade level” performance—in any area,
not just reading and writing—generally have something in mind along the lines
of being able to do the things we expect a fourth grader or sophomore to do. Unfortunately, that definition is not congruent with how tests that are used for AYP
to determine grade level. These tests are constructed to differentiate between high

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and low achievers, so they do two things that make it impossible for all students
to achieve grade level. First, they are administered to a large group of like-age students whose scores are used to establish achievement levels (the norms). Grade
level is assigned to the median, or middle score; by definition, half the population
must fall below grade level. If scores go up, the median score also rises, keeping half the population below grade level. Second, as the tests are then given to
the general population, those items that everyone, or nearly everyone, gets right
are discarded because the items no longer discriminate between high and low
achievers. They are replaced by items that do. Thus, grade level is an ever-moving
target that gets more difficult after each renorming, and the goal of universal
grade level achievement—and the even grander goal of “proficiency,” above grade
level—is an unrealistic and unreachable goal. Add to that the yearly increase in
the percentage of students required to achieve proficiency, and you see the triple
jeopardy our students and schools are in. We must address this untenable situation by changing the definitions of grade level and proficiency or by changing the
way we measure students’ and schools’ progress toward these ideals.
Universal K–12 Literacy
Achieving universal literacy has been a promise of U.S. public education from
its inception and has been a stated goal of legislation since the middle of the
twentieth century. Clearly, however, simply changing instructional methods for
early reading instruction does not meet that goal for all children and does not
even address reading instruction beyond beginning stages and into secondary
schools. We must ask and answer broader and deeper questions that yield multiple solutions that may be applied flexibly to the complex task of helping students learn to read on time and refine their literacy abilities successfully as they
continue through school. In short, we must take seriously our often-expressed
belief that one size does not fit all and begin just as seriously matching instruction to individual strengths. We must do this, if for no other reason, than to
eliminate the experience of failure and stigma that come to all who do not learn
to read on time and who, because of this, face unremitting struggle throughout
their school careers, and a stigma that can last a lifetime.
Further Reading: Allington, R. L., 2005, The other five “pillars” of effective reading instruction, Reading Today, 22(6), 3; Kozol, J., 1995, Amazing grace: The lives of children and
the conscience of a nation, New York: Crown; Posnic-Goodwin, S., 2006, Punitive laws
fail to get results: NCLB gets an F, California Educator 11(1), 6–9; Ruddell, M. R., 2004,
Literacy research and educational reform: Sorting through the history and the myths,
in E. W. Ross, ed., Defending public schools (pp. 31–45), Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers; Ruddell, M. R., 2001, Teaching content reading and writing, 5th ed., New York:
John Wiley & Sons; Smith, N. B., 1934/2002, American reading instruction, Newark, DE:
International Reading Association.

Martha Rapp Ruddell

MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
Mathematics education in North America since 1900 has oscillated between two
poles, each of which is associated with a political stance, a conception of what
mathematics is, and a set of assumptions of the place of mathematics in society.
These two polarities have been characterized as progressive and conservative or
traditionalist views.
The history of twentieth-century battles around mathematics education in
North America clusters around three periods and movements:
1. the Progressivist movement for mathematics through activity and inquiry
(circa 1910–1940), led primarily by John Dewey
2. the New Math reform movement of the 1960s
3. the so-called “Math Wars,” based on NCTM Standards reforms, from the
1990s to the present
Conflict in mathematics education ideologies continually return to a few,
perhaps falsely exaggerated, dichotomies. These continue to be revived, even
when material and social circumstances change drastically, and point to the
conservatism that has long been associated with mathematics education in the
schools. We find ourselves fighting similar battles over and over again. Passionate arguments, ostensibly over details of mathematics teaching and learning,
are often more closely related to broader arguments over the nature and location of knowledge, the democratization of education, and views on authority
and obedience.

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ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLYING DIFFERENT STANCES
ON MATH EDUCATION
The dichotomies that ground opposing arguments in math education are
summarized in Table M.1:

Table M.1 Dichotomies Underlying Different Stances in Mathematics Education
Area of
Interest
Goal of
mathematics
learning
Modes of
mathematics
teaching
Nature of
student work
Attitudinal
goals of math
education
Nature of
mathematics as
a discipline
Nature of the
objects of
mathematics
Nature of
knowing in
school
mathematics

Reason for
teaching school
mathematics in
public schools
Assessment of
mathematical
knowledge and
abilities
Locus of
mathematical
knowing

Conservative

Progressive

Fluency

Understanding

Presenting

Eliciting

Absorbing and applying facts

Inquiry and sense-making

Obedience and a valuing of
precision and correctness

Original thinking and generic
problem-solving skills

Authoritative, permanent, and
infallible

Exploratory and evolving

Perfect Platonic forms

Patterns emerging from lived
experience

Facts and algorithms should be
learned through deductive
explanations and then applied
appropriately to solve problems.

Starting from nonstandard
problem solving and inquiry
activities, learners should invent
and test algorithms, ﬁnally
moving toward standard theorems
from a basis of socially and
individually constructed
understandings.
Minimal numeric/calculation
Stimulation of inherent human
survival skills for most; high-level
problem-solving skills for all,
abstract technical skills for a
using a variety of modes of
small elite
instruction
(Standardized) pencil/paper and
Multiple individual and group
multiple choice tests based on a
assessment strategies with an
single correct answer (product)
emphasis on process and
evidence of mathematical
thinking.
Knowledge is in the mind (or
Knowledge is distributed among
head) of the individual knower.
problem solvers and the tools and
technologies they use to solve
problems.

Mathematics Education |
Table M.1 (Continued)
Area of
Interest
What should
drive
curriculum
design in
public
schooling

The role of the
teacher in
school
mathematics

Conservative

Progressive

The end-uses for the mathematics Present engagement with and
learned: for the masses, the need development of mathematical
to do simple, practical calcumodes of thinking that will expand
lations and be numerate
learners’ modes of thought and
enough to be informed citizens;
develop ﬂexible problem-solving
for the scientiﬁc elite, postabilities
secondary courses and
university research approaches
to mathematics
Teachers should be the conduit
Teachers should be expert
for the delivery of approved
diagnosticians of student
curriculum. Assessment should
knowledge and skill levels, and
act as a quality check for the
designers of active learning
delivery system. “Teacherexperiences that advance
proof” methods of curriclearners’ understanding.
ulum delivery are
Teachers must maintain a
sought.
high level of knowledge
about mathematics and
mathematical learning and
should be given a great deal of
autonomy.

COMPLICATING FACTORS: NEGATIVE PUBLIC VIEWS OF
MATHEMATICS, TEACHERS WHO FOUND SUCCESS IN A
CONSERVATIVE SYSTEM, TEACHERS WHO ARE MATHPHOBIC,
AND UNQUALIFIED MATH TEACHERS
The picture is further clouded by a number of attitudinal factors in society
in general and among mathematics teachers in particular. There is a prevalence
of math phobic attitudes among many adults in North America. These attitudes
are socially sanctioned as normal based on a complex of cultural assumptions,
including the presumptions that:
• mathematics is hard, cold, distant and inhuman
• it is only necessary and appropriate for a small elite to understand mathematics
• those who like mathematics are (generally male) eggheads, nerds, absentminded professors, and mad scientists, unable to cope with the world of
human interactions, and not fully mentally competent (ranging from the
mildly autistic to the completely mad)
• there is no shame, and lots of positive social valuation, for those who claim
to be incapable of doing and understanding mathematics
Coming from this complex of assumptions, many educators, policymakers, and parents approach school mathematics fearfully, remembering negative

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experiences from their own schooling and believing that there is no other way to
inculcate new generations with a rigorous mathematical training apart from the
skill and drill that they once hated.
In contrast to this fearful and excessively reverent (and at the same time dismissive) view of mathematical education is a positive but highly conservative
valuation of mathematics learning. It reflects the views of those mathematics
teachers and professors who thrived as students in the orderly, obedient world
of certainty represented by traditional, conservative mathematics classrooms.
These are the people who excelled under a transmission model of presentation
combined with lots of exercise and drill in applying algorithms. Most will have
found ways to make sense and understand the mathematics they were presented,
and expect that anyone who is good at math should be able to succeed as they
did, under a similar system. Anyone who does not do well under such a regime
may be written off as not meant to do math in the first place.
Many other mathematics teachers do not have the strong background knowledge of mathematics and mathematics teaching and learning that a successful
progressivist program would require. Math phobia coupled with a lack of understanding of mathematical concepts is endemic among the majority of elementary school teachers in North America, many of whom got by in school
mathematics by memorizing procedures and algorithms without much sense of
why they worked, or that any alternative approach was possible. It is difficult to
counter deeply held fears and lack of confidence held by many such teachers
through one or two courses in a teacher education program, and many of these
teachers go on to inculcate similar attitudes in their own students.
At the secondary school level, there is a shortage of specialist math teachers.
In some jurisdictions non-mathematics specialists (gym teachers, science teachers, technology education teachers, and others) teach the majority of mathematics
courses in the lower secondary grades. The presumption on the part of administrators is that mathematics is clearly spelled out in teacher-proof textbooks, and in
a pinch (or the financial dire straits now facing many school districts), nearly any
teacher can lecture and assign homework problems straight out of the textbook.
The interaction of fearful, math phobic parents, administrators and policymakers, a large number of satisfied, unquestioning traditionalist specialist
teachers, and a preponderance of unqualified math teachers without the background to see alternatives, has led to an exceptionally conservative baseline for
mathematics education in North American public schools.
THREE TWENTIETHCENTURY REFORM MOVEMENTS
IN MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
Twentieth-century reform movements in mathematics education (and the resultant curricular wars associated with them) can be grouped into three movements: Progressivist reform (circa 1910–1940), the New Math of the 1960s, and
the NCTM Standards-based Math Wars, which have been fought especially
fiercely in California since about 1990. Each of these movements can be seen as
pitting conservatives against progressivists, although such a simple dichotomy

Mathematics Education |

is a reduction of some of the complexity of the opposing views in these curricular battles. Similarly, the combatants can be characterized as university research mathematicians, schoolteachers, and parents, but these struggles have
been marked by alliances across social roles in terms of political commitments
and beliefs about mathematics, teaching, and learning.
Polarization into conservative and progressivist camps has served to obscure some of the actual commonalities between the two camps. For example,
in terms of the goals of mathematics teaching, few progressivists would argue
against some necessary degree of fluency in basic mathematical procedures, and
few conservatives would be as radical as to advocate fluency exclusively to the
point where understanding would be discouraged.
Progressivist Reform (circa 1910–1940)
Critique of the mathematics curriculum dates back to the earliest days of
public schools in North America. By the late nineteenth century, there were
many public criticisms of school mathematics as a process of mere inculcation
of meaningless memorized procedures. Complicated but opaque techniques like
the infamous “rule of three” for solving proportional equations were particularly targeted. It was argued that students learned complicated series of steps
that showed them how to arrive at an answer with no sense of why those particular procedures worked, nor any ideas about possible alternate ways to get to an
answer, nor even any way to know whether the answer they found was correct
(apart from the authority of the teacher or textbook saying it was so).
As society in the United States and Canada changed rapidly with increasing
international immigration, World War I, and accelerating industrialization and
urbanization, pressure increased for a more meaningful mathematics curriculum to prepare students for productive roles in a democratic, industrial society. A perceived need for an increasingly scientific and technologically capable
populace pushed mathematics to the forefront as the prerequisite for knowledge
in these areas.
Some reforms of this era addressed the topics covered in the prescribed curriculum—for example, the Chicago Movement curricular reforms of the early
twentieth century, which sought to unify algebra and geometry, and to bring
both pure and applied mathematics to the secondary school curriculum. More
fundamentally, however, other reform efforts addressed the nature of mathematics teaching and learning and questioned the concept of covering topics in
the curriculum through lectures and demonstrations.
John Dewey’s work is particularly associated with the mathematics reforms
of this era and is closely associated with predecessors like Pestalozzi, Froebel,
and Montessori. Dewey challenged the Cartesian split between knowing and
doing, or abstract and applied knowledge, proposing that students must engage
in doing mathematics as part of a reflective inquiry if they were to increase their
intelligence and gain knowledge.
Dewey recognized that the process of experimentation and inquiry was
more difficult to control than simply lecturing to large groups of students sitting

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quietly in rows. Inquiry could be messy, uncertain, and unsettling compared to
the certainty of accepting pre-made facts based on obedience to the teacher’s
authority. But if the desired outcome of American public education was to
develop scientific and democratic thinkers rather than rigidly obedient rulefollowers, students must be given the challenge of doing and experimentation in
mathematics, accompanied by the sense-making activities of reflective practice.
Rather than trying to cover a large number of mathematical topics in a given
time, Dewey advocated the development of high quality mental processes and a
scientific attitude. Where conservative traditions of schooling pushed for quick,
correct answers and a short-circuiting of uncertainty and doubt, Dewey’s progressive education embraced the problematic and a degree of uncertainty as the
incentive for students to form and test hypotheses and perceive patterns and
relationships.
Like Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori, Dewey’s teaching techniques involved “programming the environment” so that students would encounter
teacher-structured materials and situations that sparked experimentation, inquiry, and interpretation. Rather than sitting still and taking in what the teacher
presented, students would be actively engaged in movement, talk, and activity
around the materials provided, working individually and socially to build mental models of their mathematical experiences, supported and guided by occasional teacher intervention. The role of the teacher in a Deweyan or Montessori
classroom involves careful structuring and advance preparation of learning
situations and materials, followed by a phase of facilitating and orchestration
as students carry out their own supported inquiries. This contrasts sharply with
the tradition of teacher as lecturer, checker of homework, and setter of tests in
what is still the predominant model of the predictable, closely controlled school
mathematics class.
Dewey’s recommendations were never taken up in a wholesale fashion across
North American schooling. However, their emphasis on independent, democratic thought processes and a kind of can-do scientific know-how accorded
well with American values in the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when blind obedience to authority and lack of independence of mind were being played out in
the nightmare scenarios of fascism. The all-American ideals of egalitarianism,
individuality, experimentation, innovation, and practicality were celebrated as
the Allies won victories in World War II. Dewey’s ideas won a high degree of
acceptance in progressive teachers’ colleges and were put into practice in some
classrooms; the rest carried on with the traditional pattern of teacher lectures
and homework exercises that is so familiar in much of school mathematics.
The New Math (1960s)
In the post-war period of Cold War scientific and technological competition
with the Soviet Union, mathematics education became the focus of national
anxieties in the United States. There were worries that school mathematics was
not keeping pace with changes in research-level mathematics at universities, and
that the United States would be facing a shortage of qualified college students

Mathematics Education |

who could become highly trained scientists. These anxieties came to a head with
the surprise launching of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957. It was suddenly
shockingly clear to Americans that the USSR was beating the United States in
the space race. There was a public outcry for better preparation of American
children to become the elite rocket scientists of the future, and for university
mathematicians to get involved in improving mathematics education at the
K–12 level to this end.
The resulting movement was known as the New Math. This initiative was led
by the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG), an offshoot of the American
Mathematical Society, headed by Yale University mathematics professor Edward G. Begle. Other university groups and the National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics (NCTM) soon joined in the effort of rewriting mathematics curriculum for both elementary and secondary schools in the United States, and
later the world.
Their work was strongly influenced by the Bourbaki group of mathematicians
in France. This secretive, by-invitation-only group of elite French mathematicians had been in existence since the 1930s, publishing members’ collective work
under the pseudonym Nicholas Bourbaki. The Bourbaki group embarked upon
a complete rewriting of mathematics to create a unified, logical, highly abstract
algebraic structure based on set theory. Their preference for abstraction (in the
form of mathematical symbolism) led them to ban all diagrams and to call for
the rejection of the teaching of geometry at a 1959 international mathematical
meeting in Royaumont, France.
The Bourbaki-influenced New Math curriculum proposed the inclusion of a
number of areas from modern mathematics in school math programs. Set theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, calculus and other topics from university
mathematics were to be taught throughout the K–12 system, to familiarize students with the mathematical basis for future careers as scientists.
As the New Math movement gained momentum through the 1960s, its influence spread worldwide. University mathematicians involved with a variety of New
Math initiatives were given large amounts of government funding to write curricula, textbooks, and teaching materials and to disseminate them internationally.
Many countries, particularly less-developed nations concerned that they might
be left behind the developed world in matters of education, agreed to adopt New
Math curricula wholesale. Far too often, the jet-setting curriculum developers
showed little regard for local conditions, cultures, or educational traditions, and
imposed very Western, collegiate, highly abstract mathematical curriculum materials in situations where this was wholly inappropriate.
Even in the United States and other developed Western countries, there
were huge problems with the implementation of the New Math program. Many
teachers had little or no familiarity with the mathematical topics they were suddenly expected to teach and could not understand why new ways were being
introduced. Parents who had learned math under the old curriculum found
they were unable to help their children with their math homework, even at the
elementary school level. Since many students did not plan to pursue careers in
math and science, parents and teachers questioned the level of abstraction being

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demanded of all learners, not only those headed for university mathematics and
physics programs.
By the early 1970s, the New Math program was being denounced in the press
and popular media (satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer’s song “The New
Math” being a well-known case in point). Even research mathematicians like
Morris Kline spoke out against the New Math as a misguided experiment, and
the movement quickly came to an end.
Interestingly, the New Math movement differed from Progressivist Mathematics and standards-based “Math War” reforms in the constitution of its supporters and opponents. While Progressivists and NCTM Standards supporters
fit firmly in the progressive column in Table M.1, the supporters of the New
Math combined mainly conservative with some progressive features. New Math
supporters espoused only a few of the progressive ideals: they supported understanding over fluency, and to some extent, inquiry and sense-making over
absorbing and applying facts. In every other aspect, New Math proponents were
highly conservative, reflecting the ongoing traditions of university mathematics
teaching: their mode of teaching was largely through presentation; they valued
precision and correctness; they favored deductive methods to the exclusion of
all others; they viewed mathematics as infallible and authoritative and its objects
as unchanging abstract Platonic forms; evaluation was through individual
pencil-and-paper tests; knowledge was assumed to be in the head of the individual learner; and the movement aimed to produce “teacher-proof ” curricular
materials that could be delivered by teachers anywhere in the world, under any
circumstances. In common with conservative views, New Math supporters
aimed to educate future elite scientists and mathematicians but refused the view
that some students might not be interested in or capable of learning highly abstract mathematical concepts. The New Math took the (oddly) democratic view
that every student was a potential future rocket scientist.
Math Wars over the NCTM Standards (1990s–Present)
The late 1970s and 1980s brought a turn toward right-wing, neoliberal social
and economic politics in most of the English-speaking world. With the election of leaders like Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and then Ronald
Reagan in the United States, educational policies began to focus on calls for
a back-to-basics curriculum, national standards accompanied by standardized
testing, and a reining-in of teacher autonomy in the name of accountability. In
the UK, school league tables were published, based on inspections and standardized testing, and funding or even the continued operation of individual
schools were decided based on their rankings. Both Thatcher and Reagan took
political and legislative actions aimed at breaking unions, including teachers’
unions.
In a proactive move that anticipated the imposition of national curricular
standards in the United States, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) moved to develop its own standards program in the mid-1980s. By
1989, the first of several iterations of the NCTM Principles and Standards for

Mathematics Education |

School Mathematics was published, with further revisions appearing throughout the 1990s, and a definitive second edition published in 2000.
The NCTM Standards were initially well-received by both governments and
teachers. Governments saw the publication of the standards as a sign of teachers’
compliance and cooperation with the new accountability agenda, while many
teachers saw the content of the standards supporting a balanced, progressive
approach that fit their own aspirations toward curricular reform. The NCTM
Standards were used as a model to develop standards in other school subject
areas: English language arts, science, social studies, and others. Initiatives were
undertaken through the NCTM as well as particular states, school boards, and
individual schools to bring about reforms to school mathematics in line with the
NCTM Standards. The development of curricular materials, professional development workshops, and courses for teachers, new modes of assessment, and the
involvement of parents and educational technology initiatives were all important features of implementation reforms.
California state legislators had been working to develop a new school mathematics curriculum concurrently with the drafting of the first NCTM Standards
in the mid-1980s, and the new California Mathematics Framework (and textbooks based on it) were influenced by the same progressive and constructivist approaches that shaped the NCTM Standards. Both documents emphasized
the development of flexible problem-solving skills (beyond the solution of word
problems), the ability to represent mathematical relationships in multiple forms,
the appropriate use of emergent technologies like graphing calculators and personal computers, and the ability to communicate mathematically. Both aimed at
instilling in students an appreciation for the power and beauty of mathematics,
and both valued depth of understanding and an ability to make mathematical
connections above calculation skills, although fluency in calculation was still
considered an important goal.
In the mid-1990s, a backlash began against standards-based curricular reforms in a number of different school subject areas, including English language
arts and mathematics. Conservative attitudes towards mathematics education
were adopted by a number of right-wing evangelistic Christian religious lobby
groups. Traditionalist, antiprogressive views on mathematics teaching and learning quickly became affiliated with a patriarchal, authoritarian, fundamentalist
religious agenda, including antigay rights, antiabortion, and pro school prayer
lobbies.
Populist media jumped into the fray, encouraging the polarization that
makes for exciting radio phone-in shows and inflammatory letters to the editor.
Alarmist worst-case-scenario reports with little basis in fact appeared on radio
and television, newspapers and Web sites, raising parental anxieties about the
quality of education in their children’s schools. Newly formed parent lobby
groups like HOLD (Honest Open and Logical Debate), sometimes supported
by traditionalist university mathematics professors, took up an anti-standards
position, motivated by worries that their children were being shortchanged by
teachers experimenting with their education. Other parent and student groups,
like ProBalance, strongly supported the innovations that had been brought in

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through the implementation of the standards. A number of influential Web sites,
including the anti-reform Mathematically Correct site, further inflamed the
situation by promoting name-calling attacks on opponents based on anecdotes
and hearsay.
More anxieties were raised by the 1996 release of results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a comprehensive comparative study of educational levels in 48 countries. The TIMSS study found
American eighth-grade students ranked 28th in the world in mathematics, well
behind countries like Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, whose
economies were also growing at unprecedented rates. Detailed video analysis
of school classes through TIMSS supported the idea that a deeper conceptual
understanding of mathematics was key to success in international rankings, a
finding that supported the progressive aims of the NCTM and California state
standards. Despite this, anxiety based on the low TIMSS ranking sparked calls
for a more rigorous (and traditionalist) set of standards for school mathematics.
A number of research mathematicians joined the fray, some speaking out on the
traditionalist side, others on the progressivist side. The Math Wars in California
were in full swing.
Similar battles over mathematics curricula and teaching methods continue to
be enacted in other American states like Massachusetts and New York. To date,
there is no end in sight. The recent publication (in 2006) of the NCTM’s new
Focal Points, which specifies appropriate curricular topics for each grade from
K–8, has brought about a new flurry of polarized media coverage, either decrying or supporting the initiative. Mathematics education has itself become a focal
point for a left versus right political standoff that is being played out on many
fronts, and there appears to be little public appetite for concepts like balance and
consensus.
Further Reading: Kilpatrick, J., 1997, October, Five lessons from the new math era, paper
presented at a National Academy of Sciences symposium, Washington, DC, retrieved
February 5, 2007 from http://www.nas.edu/sputnik/kilpatin.htm; Kline, M., 1973, Why
Johnny can’t add: The failure of the new math, New York: St. Martin’s Press; Wilson, S. M.,
2003, California dreaming: Reforming mathematics education, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Susan Gerofsky
MEDIA AND SCHOOLS
Corporate news about education is rarely new. It frequently relies on assumptions about declining standards, badly behaved kids, teachers who don’t care,
and the superiority of private education over public. These narratives or frames
have persisted regardless of how high students score on tests, how many teachers spend their own money to resource classrooms, or how severe government
cutbacks have been to education. However, not all coverage falls within these
frames and there is room to create alternatives stories.

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People largely come to their common knowledge about the education system
through news media, television programs, and movies about schools. This entry
will look at corporate media coverage and later move to what educators, students, and others concerned about education can do to create more socially just
representations of themselves and others.
James Winter argues that the media is “democracy’s oxygen,” a vital element
that has been depleted due to years of government subsidies to media conglomerates and policy making that has allowed for monopolies to form. The majority
of what most people listen to, watch, and read is owned by a handful of multinational corporations whose primary goal is to make a profit. Corporate media
coverage of education affects policymakers, journalists themselves, and the public. The media do not only reflect public opinion about education, they play a
large role in creating it.
Media come with their own biases and ideologies. What issues get discussed
is dependent on the framing the media uses. How things are framed appears to
be natural or make common sense but is actually based on ideological positions
and power. In other words, if schooling is primarily framed as the key to global
competitiveness, how testing and achievement are discussed will be different
than if schooling is framed as an institution that promotes equity and citizenship.
Frames diagnose problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest
remedies. Media, especially corporate media, determine the public framing of
discourses and thus play a central role in influencing the issues that are debated
and ultimately how policymakers and the public interpret these issues.
SOURCES FOR NEWS ABOUT EDUCATION
A great deal of research has pointed to how the corporate news media rely
on framing from government and other influential actors. Most governments
in North America have cut social programs and education. However, communications budgets have increased, so governments are now able to provide constant ready-made news for journalists who require quick stories. Thanks to the
advent of 24-hour and on-line news, journalists have more deadlines to meet.
This, combined with large cuts to investigative journalism, means less time to do
stories that could delve beneath the surface or even contradict copy provided by
government and large organizations.
That governments provide stories does not mean that their point of view is
always positively reported. However, there is evidence that coverage on K–12
stories is usually done in a way that reflects positively on government educational policies, especially when it comes to policies operating within the dominant framework of seeing the central role of education as preparing children to
be economically competitive in a capitalistic society. For example, when George
W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy was first introduced, there was
little national, critical press coverage. It took a few months and resistance from
important audience markets before the media came out with more critical stories about the policy. Journalists and government officials engage in a quid pro

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quo. On the one hand, journalists gain scoops by being friendly with government. On the other hand, government officials can put the pressure on journalists by calling or writing to their editors, or rejecting interview requests if they
are critical.
It is not only government that provides an information subsidy. Large business
organizations, unions, and professional organizations spend money on public
relations. When they can, school districts also spend money on public relations
aimed at influencing the education agenda or marketing their product. In fact,
most large school districts have a communications person or department, now
that public relations plays an increasingly important role, with schools being
seen as commodities that must compete in a marketplace for students. Marketing of schools has become vital for their survival and can be devastating for
schools that cannot afford the programs and the marketing to attract students
who can pay for the extras that are not provided for by the state.
Organizations and individuals do not get equal attention; some are viewed as
more legitimate than others. Marginalized groups, such as African Americans
and aboriginal peoples try and get a voice in the media, but there is a hierarchy
of influences. This hierarchy puts the interests of those who are marginalized at
the bottom of the priority list, so that their demands for deep, systemic change
in the education system are overpowered by the preference for those in power to
make quick fixes, such as more testing and privatization of the system.
FOCUSING ON THE INDIVIDUAL AND IGNORING THE SYSTEMIC
Corporate media can create a sense of panic that the education system is in
a state of crisis, while creating a sense of numbness about the ability to change
it at a macro level. The corporate media do sometimes talk about marginalized people, but the coverage is usually focused on individual acts of charity
towards the disadvantaged, families who have apparently made bad choices,
or heroic teachers and principals who turn kids from bad families around to
become productive members of society. Most often absent in this coverage is
any notion of holding government to account for a lack of funding, or schools
and universities to account for policies and practices that discriminate against
some groups.
It is important to remember that the corporate media are “renting eyeballs”
from their audience, and the most lucrative eyeballs are of those deemed to be
good consumers by advertisers. Therefore, issues of poverty and injustice—as
systemic issues rather than personal failings—are less likely to be covered than
issues deemed by media to be of greater concern to the middle and upper classes.
There are dominant story lines but sometimes media outlets create small spaces
for alternative frames. These spaces are created when the media are effectively
lobbied for alternative frames, or occasionally when a journalist or editor with
substantial power in a media outlet pushes for an alternative frame. Alternative frames require journalists or editors who either see the economic benefit
of diversifying the frame or have a personal interest in diversifying frames and
the power to do so. The former would be determined if anecdotal or marketing

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research points to audiences that want different frames. Frames that challenge
capitalism by looking at inequity are frequently treated as coming from fringe elements of society and therefore ignored or ridiculed. However, alternative frames
can sometimes move a dialogue toward discussion of inequality by co-opting
the language of accountability and standards, or creating independent media
that resists these frames.
Standards and the “Boys’ Crisis”
Media coverage of education is frequently ritualized and episodic. Coverage
usually takes place at the beginning of each school year and when standardized
tests results, which are often used to rank schools, are released. There is a shelf of
narratives that is continually used, but it is updated to deal with current worries.
For example, in 2001 when the United States scored in the middle of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA)—a test given to 15-year-olds in more
than 30 countries (Schouten, November 13, 2001)—senator Sherwood Boehlert
declared it a “a national security issue.”
Test results, such as the OECD assessment, have generated the appearance
of a “boys’ crisis,” which has been manufactured based on test scores that show
boys are scoring lower in tests than girls, particularly in reading and writing. The
most common stated cause of the apparent crisis is the feminization of teaching
and the curriculum, rather than larger issues of masculinity, race, class, and sexuality. When these issues are dealt with, it is frequently to take a deficit approach
in which the problem is the children and the apparent culture of poverty and
low expectations that the children come from, rather than larger issues of racism
and classism. The answers, when framed as a problem of families and teachers,
are measures to make children and teachers more compliant.
An alternative frame would be to look at issues of racism and poverty. For
example, girls of color do worse on assessment tests than upper class white
boys. Perhaps it is just as apt to say there is a girls’ crisis, given that women still
earn less than men and are still rarely seen in the highest levels of the government and corporate worlds, even when they do have higher test scores than
their male counterparts. These frames still center test scores as an accurate
measure of how boys and girls are doing. The frames attempt to move the debate to look at different variables, but they do not disrupt the test as a central
indicator of schooling. Another frame would be to challenge the whole notion
of these tests as good indicators of how children are faring in school. This frame
is sometimes treated as being promoted by teachers who do not want to be accountable or by radicals.
All the above frames could be used to talk about schools that are resisting
dominant notions of schooling as purely based on standardized measures, and
instead are challenging children to reach their individual and collective potential by acting as laboratories for participatory democracy based on principles of social justice. This frame is exceptionally difficult to “sell” because it
does not fit within the dominant neoliberal framework of education. It also

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requires looking at the redistribution of resources to ensure poor schools receive
adequate funding.
School Violence
Out-of-control violent children and youth is another common narrative,
which is decontexualized from larger issues of gender, race, class, disability, and
sexuality. For example, in Canada in 1997, seven teenage girls and one teenage
boy killed a 14-year-old South Asian girl named Reena Virk. The media coverage focused on girl violence and bullying, but they said very little about racism,
despite the fact that the perpetrators burned a cigarette into the middle of Virk’s
forehead, imitating a common marker of cultural identity for many women
from South Asia, and that the court case included testimony that pointed to
racism.
According to media coverage, the violent girls seemed to come out of nowhere—this could be your girl! The sensationalized coverage saw the solution
to violence as stricter discipline and zero tolerance for children and youth who
bullied. An alternative frame would involve talking to youth about their lives
and what they think is needed to deal with violence. The media rely on personalizing the news with stories of individuals. It is possible to write stories of individuals who have worked to change violence, rather than just reacting to news
of violence. For example, at the time the story about Reena Virk’s death was in
the news, there was a project involving a group of aboriginal youth who talked
to aboriginal and nonaboriginal youth across the province of British Columbia.
They wrote about what they saw as central issues to youth, and what could be
done to improve their lives and their communities. They came up with ideas
such as more connection with adults, programs to deal with racism, better recreational facilities, better housing and transportation. The story of youth talking
to youth was not part of an existing narrative; however, there was in the end a
small number of stories that highlighted what the youth had learned and their
recommendations for change. The stories were still marginalized when compared to the overwhelming number of stories about violent girls.
Another alternative frame to looking at youth violence would be to look at
school violence in the larger context of a violent society. What in society (beyond the simplistic notion that violence is all the fault of television) is happening that results in children and youth being violent? A final frame would be to
look at communities that have had substantial success in decreasing violence.
What have they done? What could governments, communities, and media do
together to decrease violence?
WHAT CAN THOSE CONCERNED ABOUT EDUCATION DO?
Critique is key and should be a crucial component of any media education
plan, or for any communities that are exploring how to engage with corporate
and independent media. However, critique alone can lead to numbness and inaction. To push for changes in how we see and treat children and youth, and those

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who raise and work with them, requires a multipronged strategy that would see
children, youth, and adults creating their own media as well as engagement with
independent media and corporate media.
There is a growing media education movement that aims to encourage
students and teachers to critique media and create their own. Youth-created
media is a growing phenomenon. There is a need for adults and youth to
connect in making and distributing media that offers hopeful alternatives to
neoliberalism.
Creating media, whether games, Web sites, videos, or zines provides an opportunity to participate in constructing representations that are absent in corporate media. It also provides people with the opportunity to deconstruct how
media is made. For example, how do camera angles affect emotion? How can
parody both disrupt and entrench common story lines? Media education requires that children and youth be taken seriously in their attempts to participate
in the political and social world.
There is also a movement of what journalist David Beers calls future-focused
journalism, which he has practiced through a Web site called the Tyee. Beers sees
the Tyee as both “muckraking” and “future-focused.” He explains, “muckraking
asks ‘what went wrong yesterday, and who is to blame?’ Then future-focused
journalism asks ‘what might go right tomorrow and who is showing the way?’ ”
Those concerned with education need to critique government, corporations,
and themselves as well as provide alternatives for tomorrow. Those concerned
with education can play a key role in the health of future-focused and independent media by disseminating it, providing stories, supporting it financially, and
otherwise participating.
Changing the reporting of policies and representations of children, youth,
and the people who work with them also requires engagement with the corporate media. Corporate media have massive influence over policymakers and
therefore have influence over what happens in schools. The key to engaging with
corporate media is strategizing on how to frame a story. For example, inner-city
schools that have had their budgets cut need corporate media to put pressure
on policymakers. They might frame the cut by involving children and youth,
and asking them why their future right to fully participate in the economy and
democracy is being destroyed. They could also compare the funding of these
schools with that of rich districts. They could use the argument that harm will
be done to the economy when groups of children are not provided with the
means to an education that would allow them to seek higher education and find
meaningful employment.
The use of another’s language requires a weighing of consequences. Does the
language open up alternative framing (albeit often small) or further entrench
dominant narratives? For example, providing an economic argument for why
inner-city schools should be properly funded may be the most effective in terms
of getting funding, but does it maintain a model of thinking about education that
is based in an unsustainable economy that is bad for vast numbers of people and
the environment? Those concerned with education need to debate these issues
within their particular contexts. How, within the framework of corporate media,

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can an issue be framed in a way that might disrupt narratives that pathologize
people who are marginalized and valorize those who already have a surplus of
power? It is crucial to remember that the job of corporate media is to make
a profit rather than to promote a strong public education system. Certain stories
will make it to the front pages of corporate media but many will not. Equally important is to remember that the media consists of individual journalists and editors, who depending on where they are in the hierarchy of their outlet, do have
some power to offer alternative frames. It is with these journalists and editors
that those concerned with education need to build relationships and provide
strong ideas for alternative stories about education.
Children and youth spend more time engaged with media than they do in
school. Arguably, the media is a primary pedagogue. Policymakers and educators look to the media to sell policies and schools to taxpayers and voters. The
media will continue to be a field in which different players attempt to gain control of the education agenda and ultimately how we come to understand and
treat children, youth, and the people who live and work with them. Therefore, to
influence the agenda requires a deep and ongoing engagement with producing and interpreting, consuming and influencing independent and corporate
media.
Further Reading: Kenway, J., & Bullen E., 2001, Consuming children: Education-entertainment
advertising, Philadelphia: Open University Press; Salzman, J., 2003, Making the news:
A guide for activists and nonprofits, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Stack, M., & Kelly,
D. M., 2006, Special issue, popular media, education and resistance, Canadian Journal of
Education, 29(1), 1–4; Thomson, P., 2004, Special issue on media and educational policy,
Journal of Education Policy, 19(3).

Michelle Stack

MENTAL HEALTH
Children and adolescents need to be healthy, both physically and psychologically, in order to learn and succeed in school. Although schools are primarily
charged with providing a quality education for all students, the reality is that
schools must also be concerned about the barriers that prevent effective learning
from occurring. A number of children and adolescents come to school every
day facing significant challenges that are likely to impact their school performance, a fact that is now commonly accepted by many professionals in the fields
of education and mental health. Risk factors, both biological and environmental, may lead to long-term social, behavioral, and emotional impairment that
can adversely influence students’ academic achievement and impede their ability to take advantage of the educational opportunities offered in schools. School
administrators and educators are compelled to understand how emotional and
behavioral impairments might affect academic performance given the emphasis
that national and state academic standards, as outlined by the No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, place on the performance of all children, including
those with mental health needs. Schools and mental health professionals must

Mental Health

therefore partner to address the social emotional concerns exhibited by students
and ultimately ensure their academic success.
CHILDREN’S MENTAL HEALTH AS A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS
Statistics indicate that mental health problems occur commonly among youth
and that even very young children are not immune from serious emotional or
behavioral problems. The “normal” child is constantly developing and improving his/her skills, capabilities, and aptitudes; however, serious deviations from
expected cognitive, social, and emotional development may be early signs of
mental disorders or may constitute a mental health problem. Children and adolescents with unaddressed or chronic mental health issues are at much greater
risk of being suspended or expelled, dropping out of school, participating in
criminal activities and becoming involved in the juvenile justice system, and
experiencing a number of co-morbid conditions that negatively impact the
trajectory of their lives. The 1999 Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health
called national attention to the dire state of mental health services for children
and youth and the need to focus on mental health as a critical component of
learning. A number of federal sources and national experts agree that at least
one in five children and adolescents in the United States exhibit the signs and
symptoms of mental health problems and that at least 1 in 10 have an emotional
disturbance severe enough to significantly impair functioning and warrant immediate clinical intervention.
Although many children and youth must handle a number of mental health
issues in addition to managing the stresses associated with normal development,
the majority of them do not receive the help they need. Estimates range from
75 percent to 90 percent of children with mental health needs who fail to receive
appropriate treatment or support, with factors such as socioeconomic status and
ethnic minority background increasing one’s chances of remaining disengaged
from traditional mental health service delivery systems. The limited number of
qualified and culturally competent providers, the cost and availability of mental
health services, the lack of comprehensive coverage provided through insurance
plans, the diminishing streams of public funds available, and the stigma still
associated with being the recipient of mental health care all contribute to the
reasons why so many children and youth in need continue to struggle without
professional intervention.
Data confirm that when mental health services are sought and received, they
are most often provided in schools. Public schools are now known to be the
leading providers of mental health care to school-aged children. The Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a report
that summarized results from the first national survey involving 83,000 public
elementary, middle, and high schools and the school mental health services they
provide. The SAMHSA report indicated that approximately one-fifth of students
enrolled in public schools receive school-supported mental health services during the school year for a number of concerns, including the top three general
problems: social, interpersonal, and family problems.

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The importance of school-connected mental health services is confirmed by
the results of other large-scale inquiries. President George W. Bush established
the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in 2002 to examine the gaps
in the mental health system and to provide recommendations on how to improve
the quality of available mental health services throughout the United States. The
commission’s findings, published in the President’s New Freedom Commission
Report, concluded that the national mental health system requires a significant
transformation and that schools play a critical role in identifying, assessing, and
treating the mental health problems exhibited by children and adolescents. The
commission advocated for an increase in mental health programs in schools that
would make empirically supported screening approaches, prevention programs,
and treatment services available to all students in need, either through on-site
services or referrals to community providers. They recommended that delivery
systems improve and that efforts be made to expand school mental health programs as a key service delivery model to address the nation’s growing public
health concerns.
MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES PROVIDED IN SCHOOLS
Many public schools are required by law to provide or facilitate treatment or
counseling for students with mental health conditions if they are found eligible for
services, as specified by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),
reauthorized in 2004, but there are few mandates for schools as they relate to students in the general student population who have mental health problems that do
not directly impair their academic performance. Public schools and the mental
health professionals working within them have traditionally provided a variety
of psychological, counseling, guidance, and social services to students and their
families for decades. As schools have moved to address the complexity of emotional and behavioral problems exhibited by the general student population, they
have looked to partner with community-based agencies and other mental health
organizations in order to increase their capacity to serve more children. Schools
now increasingly utilize a number of mechanisms that allow access to additional
on-site mental health services, including hiring a variety of professionals as employees of the school district, utilizing centralized school mental health units,
integrating mental health services through school-based health centers, and
contracting with community-based mental health providers.
Mental Health Providers Delivering Services in Schools
School-hired mental health providers (i.e., school counselors, nurses, school
psychologists, and school social workers) are the most common types of mental
health professionals addressing the mental health concerns of school-aged youth;
however, arrangements made between schools and community mental health
agencies are becoming more common across the United States. Although formal
arrangements with community-based organizations can increase the capacity of
schools to provide mental health services and supports to all students in need,

Mental Health

the presence of community mental health professionals in school-based settings
may result in tensions between school-hired and community-hired professionals.
Concerns about job security, the delineation of roles and responsibilities, coordination of services among providers, and general “turf ” issues may overshadow
potentially successful partnerships and impact how effectively school-hired and
community-hired mental health providers collaborate. School administrators
therefore need guidance and practical assistance on how to ensure the smooth
integration of community providers within the school building.
Levels of Mental Health Care
As mental health problems experienced by youth become more complex and
as interventions become more specialized, school staff are faced with the burden
of implementing and/or coordinating systems of care that take into account the
intensity, frequency, and duration of mental health problems exhibited by students. School mental health programs can, therefore, be as diverse as the students
they serve and the schools within which they operate. Progress has been made
to build consensus around the key components and conceptual models that define comprehensive school-based mental health programs. One framework, the
Expanded School Mental Health model, aims to enhance the services already offered in public schools by supplementing the prevention, early intervention, and
treatment services provided by district-hired mental health staff. An even more
sophisticated paradigm for school-based mental health services encompassing
an array of activities related to mental health promotion; universal, selective, and
indicated prevention; and treatment services is presented in Table M.2.
A greater number of comprehensive school mental health programs now include mechanisms for identification and triage and follow with a menu of interventions to address the varying levels of need expressed by students. Mental
health promotion activities and universal prevention programs are intended for
the broad school population and are created to reduce risk, prevent the onset
of mental health problems, and promote positive mental health. There are
Table M.2 School Mental Health Levels of Care
Health Promotion/Positive Development Strategies target an entire population with the
goal of enhancing strengths, nurturing prosocial skills, and fostering positive development.
Universal Prevention Strategies are approaches designed to address risk factors in
entire populations of youth without determining which youth are at increased risk.
Selective Prevention Strategies support groups of youth identiﬁed because they share a
signiﬁcant risk factor and conduct interventions designed to ameliorate that risk.
Indicated Prevention Strategies address signiﬁcant symptoms of a disorder exhibited by
youth although they do not meet diagnostic criteria for the disorder.
Treatment Intervention is conducted with youth who have high symptom levels or whose
cluster of symptoms meet criteria for diagnosable disorders.
Source: Weisz, J. R., I. Sandler, J. Durlak, and B. Anton, 2005, Promoting and protecting youth
mental health through evidence-based prevention and treatment, American Psychologist, 60(6),
628–648.

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numerous school-wide approaches and universal prevention programs aimed
at promoting positive mental health that contribute to skill development and/or
highlight nurturing environmental factors that help prevent the development
of mental health symptoms. Although specialized training in psychology, social
work, or counseling is not usually necessary, it is often mental health providers
who advocate for and take the lead in implementing such programs.
For children and youth who exhibit warning signs of dysfunction, selected
prevention interventions are developed to intervene early after the onset of behavioral or psychological symptoms. Intervening after problem behaviors are
first apparent can change the course of and reduce the long-term consequences
associated with many mental illnesses. Nowhere does the importance of early
intervention become more evident than in a recent study by Walter Gilliam, of
the Yale Child Study Center, entitled “Pre-kindergartners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Pre-kindergarten Programs.” Dr. Gilliam found that Pre-K
students were three times more likely to be expelled from school than children
in grades K–12. Students were significantly less likely to be expelled from school
if their teacher had access to and a relationship with a behavioral consultant that
provided teachers with assistance in behavior management. These types of prevention programs often rely, to some degree, on the expertise of mental health
professionals, because information about normal/abnormal development, assessment, and effective triage and referral procedures are often necessary for the
successful implementation of early intervention programs.
Schools with well designed and implemented prevention and early intervention programs still find that a percentage of their student body will experience
symptoms that require more coordinated care and greater clinical expertise.
These students may not meet criteria for a mental health diagnosis, but indicated prevention activities could help prevent the worsening of symptoms and
the need for a more restrictive educational placement for a student. A smaller
percentage of students will exhibit symptoms that do warrant a diagnosis and
who need more intensive mental health treatment services. Although much of
the research on specific mental health disorders and their associated treatments
has been conducted with adults, with results extrapolated to children and youth,
a greater amount of information is now available to improve our understanding
of the development and effective treatment of mental health disorders among
youth. Modalities of treatment offered in schools for more significant mental
health problems include individual, family, and group therapy, crisis intervention, substance abuse counseling, and psychopharmacological treatment. Each
level of mental health care has evidence-based, promising, or model programs
that have been developed for use in schools. See Table M.3.
CONTROVERSIAL SCHOOL MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES
Screening for Mental Health Problems
The President’s New Freedom Commission report insists that early mental
health screening, assessment, and referral to services are critical to a healthy,

Table M.3 Examples of Mental Health Programs and Interventions Provided within Schools
Level of
Care
Health
promotion

Universal
prevention

Selective
prevention

Indicated
prevention

Program
Name

Description

Goal

Positive Behavior Places an emphasis on
Establishing a climate in
Intervention
school-wide systems of
which appropriate
Supports
support that include
behavior is the norm and
proactive strategies for
where school-identiﬁed
deﬁning, teaching, and
academic and behavior
supporting appropriate
targets can be met
student behaviors to create
positive school environments
Social and
A unifying concept for
Acquiring social and
Emotional
organizing and coordinating
emotional skills to
Learning (SEL)
school-based programs that
reduce behavior
focus on positive youth
problems and enhance
development, health
academic performance
promotion, prevention of
problem behaviors, and
student engagement in
learning
Second Step
A classroom-based social
Reducing impulsive, highskills program for preschool
risk, and aggressive
through junior high students
behaviors, and
(4 to 14 years old)
increasing children’s
social-emotional
competence and other
protective factors
Primary Mental
Use of nonprofessionals to
Detection and prevention
Health Project
establish caring and trusting of school adjustment
relationships with primary
problems among youth
grade children
and children
Columbia
Screens middle and high
Ensuring students at risk
TeenScreen
school students for mental
for suicide are identiﬁed
Program
health problems
and referred for
treatment
Toward No
Interactive school-based
Reducing cigarette use,
Drug Abuse
program with 12 lessons
hard drug use, alcohol
designed to help high school use, and weapons
youth (14 to 19 years old)
carrying
resist substance use
CognitiveShort-term group counseling Reducing symptoms of
Behavioral
sessions for children in
PTSD and depression
Intervention for
grades 5–9
and behavior problems
Trauma in
among youth exposed
Schools (CBITS)
to trauma
Three DimenWeekly group sessions for
Facilitating normal
sional Grief
students who have lost a
mourning and grief
signiﬁcant person to death
reactions and
improving functioning

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Mental Health
Table M.3 (Continued)
Level of
Care

Program
Name

Description

Treatment
Multisystemic
Family-oriented, home-based
intervention
Therapy (MST)
program that targets
chronically violent,
substance-abusing juvenile
offenders 12–17 years old

Goal
Reducing youth criminal
activity and antisocial
behavior, including
substance abuse

functioning system designed to address the needs of young Americans. According to the commission, an effective mental health system would include mechanisms for early detection of mental health problems in children and adults and
suggests that interventions should be available in low-stigma settings, such as
schools. Screening for mental health problems in schools has become a topic for
public debate in recent years.
There have been widespread misconceptions about the recommendations
made by the New Freedom Commission with regard to screening in schools. The
commission recommended universal screening, meaning voluntary screening of
as many students as possible, but myths were perpetuated that they endorsed mandatory screening of all students enrolled in school. Furthermore, requirements
for parental consent and assent from youth are central aspects of the screening
programs supported by the commission. One of the most popular screening programs, Columbia University’s TeenScreen program, strongly recommends that
local schools use active consent, which requires parents or guardians to sign and
return a consent form indicating they want their child to participate in screening. Passive consent, on the other hand, requires parents or guardians to return a
form if they would prefer to have their child opt out of the screening.
There are also some who remain skeptical of the benefits of psychological
screening and who maintain that any benefits of screening do not necessarily
outweigh the costs. Screening instruments are thought to identify a large number of individuals who do not need psychiatric evaluation—called a false positive result. Yet, proponents of screening measures point out that although false
identification might increase the burden on school systems, those results are
arguably more desirable than missing warning signs that may lead to disastrous
outcomes, such as suicide.
Much attention has been given to screening for very high risk, and potentially
fatal behaviors such as suicide attempts. Suicide continues to be a significant public health concern as it remains one of the leading causes of death among 15- to
19-year-olds. Due to the amount of regular contact made with students and the
trusting relationships often formed with school personnel, trained school staff
can very effectively identify the early warning signs of suicide, provide risk assessments, and conduct necessary crisis interventions. Some school personnel
cite a number of barriers that prevent them from undertaking mental health
screening, including limited qualified staff, budget constraints, legal and ethical
concerns, scheduling conflicts, and the fear of negative responses from parents

Mental Health

and caregivers. Yet, few can disagree that schools are in a unique position to help
prevent suicidal behavior among such vulnerable populations.
The issue of screening for mental health problems in schools has entered the
political arena. IDEA and associated state laws require that states screen students
to determine if they might qualify for related services, including screening for
emotional and psychological impairments. Some laws, such as the Protection
of Pupil Rights Amendment, limit the ability of schools receiving federal funds
to conduct screening for select mental, emotional, and social health conditions
without the explicit consent from a parent or guardian. Other federal activities,
such as the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act enacted in the fall of 2004, fund
and encourage the development of youth suicide prevention and intervention
programs, including screening.
Opponents of mental health screening in public schools argue that universal
screenings violate parental rights and established civil liberties to direct the education of their children. The Parental Consent Act of 2005 was introduced into
the House of Representatives to “prohibit the use of Federal funds for any universal or mandatory mental health screening program.” Although it did not pass,
the bill illustrates that not all Americans agree with the commission’s conclusions
that school mental health programs should grow in number and that therapeutic
interventions, beyond counseling, play a critical role in public school operations.
Legal Issues in Treatment: Consent and Privacy
Psychological and school counseling records, as well as general school records, kept by school-hired professionals are subject to privacy protections
under FERPA, HIPAA, and other federal privacy laws. Some states require mental health providers to adhere to even stricter laws around the protection of sensitive personal health information than stipulated in federal statutes. Answers to
questions such as where mental health records can be stored, who has access to
the information in the records, the process by which information can be shared,
and who can authorize the disclosure of information (the parent, child, and/or
both) differ among states. When a community-based mental health agency partners with a local school to provide needed mental health services, rules about
privacy and sharing of information may become even more complex. Agency
policies, city-wide regulations, and stipulations tied to streams of funding may
dictate the conditions under which information can be disclosed and utilized.
All states stipulate requirements around consent for services, but some (like the
District of Columbia) protect the rights of minors of any age to consent for psychological and substance abuse assessment and treatment services but require
parental consent for more invasive treatments such as medication management
and hospitalization.
Use of Psychotropic Medications
There has been significant controversy around the use of medications to
treat various psychiatric disorders with children and adolescents. One issue

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contributing to the public debate is the lack of research that has been conducted
with children on the effects of psychotropic drugs on emotional, intellectual,
and behavioral functioning. For example, to date only one antidepressant drug
has been tested and shown to be effective in treating childhood depression, yet
many others are commonly prescribed for youth. The use of antidepressant medication by adolescents received prominent attention when the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) issued a warning in 2004, extended to all antidepressant
drugs, that there may be an increased risk of suicidal behavior and thoughts in
children and adolescents treated with a specific class of medications. A related
concern expressed by some parents is that children are overmedicated and that
stressed teachers and frustrated school administrators simply want to control
children’s behavior through the use of prescription drugs. School mental health
providers are generally caught in the middle of this controversy because they are
frequently concerned about the severity of behavioral or emotional symptoms
that may lead to a psychiatric evaluation but are not knowledgeable about the
efficacy of psychopharmacological treatment recommended for their students.
Psychologists, social workers, and counselors do not prescribe medications used
to treat mental disorders, but they are often relied upon to evaluate the impact
of this treatment with little or no education about potential side effects, expected
outcomes, and warning signs.
The controversial use of medication with children has also fueled legislative
activity. A federal bill introduced in the House of Representatives in 2003 and
reintroduced in 2005, The Child Medication Act, requires states that receive
federal funding to create policies that prohibit school personnel from “coercing
children to receive, or their parents to administer, a controlled substance . . . as
a condition of attending school or receiving services.” Several states currently
have active legislation that prohibits school officials from recommending that
students use psychiatric medications (Connecticut, Illinois, and Virginia), while
other states explicitly prohibit schools from requiring that students participate
in mental health treatment (including psychopharmacological treatment) as a
condition of their participation in school activities (Texas). Other states have
passed legislation prohibiting disciplinary action, such as charges of neglect,
against parents who refuse to administer psychotropic medication to their children.
CONCLUSION
Mental health services have been a part of the educational system for many
decades, but the influence of such programs on the academic performance of
children and youth has become more evident with the growing emphasis on
outcomes, achievement, and performance. The complexity of needs exhibited
by today’s youth, the pressure for accountability felt by schools, and the charge
to effectively address the public health crisis driving mental health professionals creates a climate of urgency, and at times uncertainty about how to effectively collaborate across systems. The goal, shared by every faction involved in
the school system, is for all students to come to school ready to learn and able to

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take full advantage of the educational opportunities available for them. Although
greater federal attention has been given to the importance of school-community
partnerships to develop effective school-based mental health services, very little
direction is offered on how to accomplish this goal. At the very least, it will take
strong and transparent partnerships among educators and mental health professionals and a willingness to learn about how both systems work in order to
ensure that all students are included in this shared mission. Many will agree that
no matter how difficult or controversial the issues related to mental health in
schools become, our neediest children have an equal right to a quality education
and should be able to rely on our help to increase their chances of success.
Further Reading: Acosta, O. M., N. A. Tashman, C. Prodente, & E. Proescher, 2002, Establishing successful school mental health programs: Guidelines and recommendations,
in H. Ghuman, M. Weist, & R. Sarles (eds.), Providing mental health services to youth
where they are: School and community-based approaches, New York: Brunner-Routledge;
Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, retrieved August 22, 2007, from http://
www.healthinschools.org; Center for Mental Health in Schools, retrieved August 22,
2007, from http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu; Center for School Mental Health Analysis and
Action, retrieved August 22, 2007, from http://csmha.umaryland.edu; Collaborative for
Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), retrieved August 22, 2007, from
J. Teich, 2005, School mental health services in the United States: 2002–2003, DHHS Pub.
No. (SMA) 05–4068, Rockville, MD: Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration; Gilliam, W., 2005, Pre-kindergartners left
behind: Expulsion rates in state pre-kindergarten programs, retrieved January 12, 2007,
from http://www.fcd-us.org/PDFs/ExpulsionFinalProof.pdf; New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, 2003, Achieving the promise: Transforming mental health care
in America: Final report, DHHS Pub. No. SMH-03–3832, Rockville, MD: Author;
Rones, M., & K. Hoagwood, 2000, School-based mental health services: A research review, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 3(4), 223–241; U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services, 2000, Mental health: A report of the surgeon general, Rockville, MD: Author.

Olga Acosta Price

MIDDLE SCHOOLS
In many ways the middle level of education can be considered a real success
story. When followed from its beginnings in the junior high schools through
its evolution into middle schools, it is one of few educational reforms that have
lasted. But the history of the middle level movement has been marked by conflict from start to present. The sources of these conflicts can be found in a number of places: in the sketchy beginnings of the junior high in early 1900s, in
the rhetoric of the movement, and in the so-called middle school concept. The
conflicts themselves include a laundry list of items: the middle level’s basic identity, its emphasis on development, the question of what kind of curriculum it
ought to have, the recurring debate over which grade levels to include, and its
emphasis on suburban schools and their students. Underlying all of these is the

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fact that the junior high school, and now the middle school, has survived largely
out of compromise. While that may seem like a good idea, it has also resulted in
a school and a movement that often tries to be all things to all people. And that’s
a sure way of asking for trouble!
MIDDLE SCHOOLS: FISH OR FOWL?
As we have seen, the junior high school was formed partly out of a desire
to introduce high school courses earlier and partly because elementary-type
schooling was seen as too childish for early adolescents. In these ways, the junior high school was intended to be exactly that: a junior version of the high
school. Middle school advocates, on the other hand, have defined the so-called
middle school concept in terms of such things as more sensitivity to the developmental characteristics of early adolescents, affective mentorship for students,
small teaching teams, less subject-centered curriculum, and use of engaging
methods.
Even when billed as a transition from elementary to high school, the middle
school concept sounds more like the former and less like the latter. In this sense,
a major point of conflict around middle schools is the longstanding debate over
whether they should be more or less elementary- or secondary-oriented. While
this may sound like a harmless debate, it surfaces around questions about how
much responsibility early adolescents should have for their own behavior, how
much freedom of movement they ought to have, how much homework should
be assigned, and, as we shall see later, whether the curriculum should be generalized for all students or specialized for different abilities, aptitudes, and postsecondary plans.
Beyond that debate is another arising from the claim by many middle school
advocates that the middle level should be clearly identified as a third level,
distinct from the other two. This too may sound like a harmless point except
when those who make it continue to argue for separate teacher certification,
recognition in state education statutes, special funding to support ideas like team
teaching, and teacher contract recognition for arrangements like team planning
time. Where matters of money, authority, and working conditions are raised,
conflict is certain to follow.
In many cases middle school advocates have been successful in seeking state
recognition and contract adaptations. And certainly the overwhelming number
of middle level schools named “middle” rather than “junior high” is some evidence of success. But it is still interesting to listen outside the schools for what
this level is called. Media reporters use “middle” when referring to a specific
school but just as often seem to use “junior high” when speaking generically. The
same goes for politicians and policymakers. Most state and federal laws are still
largely tied to the two-level terminology, as in the United States federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind).
Where, then, does the middle school fit? Is it elementary or secondary? Or
is it a third level with its own discreet features and programs? Again, these may
seem like harmless or irrelevant questions. To some they probably are. But when

Middle Schools | 417

you are advocating for middle schools, making certification regulations, seeking
funding, and trying to avoid contract grievances, they take on tremendous importance.
WHAT TYPE OF CURRICULUM?
The early junior high school was forged out of an alliance of several interest
groups. Among these were advocates for a two-track curriculum. One track
would be aimed at getting some students to college at an earlier age by offering
entry-level high school courses in the junior high. The second track would be
aimed at preparing the rest of the students for entry-level factory and trade jobs
through vocational “guidance” and manual training courses. Not surprisingly
the two tracks divided privileged youth from those nonprivileged, the latter
largely minority and immigrant youth. In this way, the junior high school took
on a share of the “sort and select” role historically played by the high school in
framing the post-school destiny of students.
Beginning in the 1930s, social reformers and developmentalists argued that
early adolescents were not ready for career definition, nor was it fitting for
schools in a democratic society to participate in social class sorting. Instead,
they argued, the junior high school ought to continue the general education
program of the elementary school by offering a general core curriculum to all
students, augmented by an exploratory program in which they could explore
individual interests.
This debate evolved into the question of whether the junior high school ought
to offer a common general education aimed at all students or a specialized education consisting of strands or tracks based on ability and aptitude. And it has
carried over into the middle school, particularly in the form of conflicts over
grouping. Arguments over homogeneous versus heterogeneous grouping depend at least partly on whether the curriculum is intended to be general or specialized. If it is general, heterogeneous grouping is much more easily defended. If
specialized, then some kind of homogeneous grouping is more easily defended.
The flare points for these current conflicts are usually specialized mathematics
courses and selective instrumental music classes. In diverse schools, enrollment
in those two selective areas has historically favored white, upper middle class
students who have the cultural capital and economic resources to participate
and achieve in them over time. When a group of those students are enrolled in
both, they tend to stay together across the day, thus creating a kind of schoolwithin-the-school based on race and class. For parents and others who wish that
distinction to continue, these courses become “turf ” to be defended.
As the push for social equity in middle schools has intensified, as well as the
demand for all students to meet content standards, the general education curriculum has become more common. Along with that has come a push for teachers
to create differentiated plans so as to accommodate individual differences within
lessons and units. Whether this will be sufficient to hold off the advocates for
a specialized, tracked curriculum remains to be seen. But clearly so long as
there are parents who want their children to gain an advantage over others, and

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educators willing to go along with them, the question of whether the middle
school curriculum ought to be general or specialized is bound to be debated.
A MOVEMENT WITHOUT AN IDEOLOGY?
Advocates for the middle school concept have pushed a number of themes,
most notably that middle level educators be knowledgeable about and responsive
to the “developmental characteristics” of early adolescents. Hardly a conference
or journal article goes by without devoting space to a litany of characteristics
suggested by research or the observations of the author or presenter.
This is not a bad idea, because research does suggest there is a critical mass
of characteristics like seeking more autonomy and independence, engaging in
more self-assessment based on social comparison, becoming more capable of
using higher level cognitive strategies, increasing concern about peer relationships, and the need of close adult relationships outside the home. On the other
hand, researchers draw a picture of schools in which there is a high level of
teacher control, few opportunities for student participation in decision making,
an emphasis on whole-group instruction, frequent comparison of student ability
and achievement, and relatively low teacher efficacy. This poor fit, they claim,
helps to explain young adolescents’ loss of motivation, decline in self-esteem as
learners, and other identified trends at this age.
Important as this kind of analysis is, some middle school enthusiasts have
made the litany of characteristics the central dogma of middle school rhetoric
rather than one piece of an educational theory. In so doing, they have attempted
to elevate puberty to the status of an ideology. Worse yet, some, along with the
media, have characterized early adolescents as simply “hormones with feet,”
suggesting that characteristics are entirely physically determined and beyond
self-control. This kind of demeaning rhetoric has not only diminished the middle school concept, reducing it to a movement without an ideology, but has also
made the concept an easy target for critics who deride its overemphasis on development. And within the schools themselves, many educators have come to
see curriculum and teaching as a game of “hide and seek,” with teachers always
in search of tricks to motivate students and anxious to avoid deeper questions
about structural “fit” and curriculum irrelevance.
Responsible education is responsive to students, but the social construction
of early adolescents by some middle school advocates has created a point of serious conflict with others who seek a broader theory of middle schooling. It has
also created conflict with critics outside the movement who see development
as either irrelevant or incomplete as a theory of education. And so long as an
over-emphasis on development continues, real or simply perceived, the middle
school concept will itself be incomplete and always under fire.
WHOSE MIDDLE SCHOOL IS IT?
During the 1960s and 1970s, in large metropolitan areas grades five to eight
middle and intermediate schools played a role in efforts to racially integrate

Middle Schools | 419

schools, as children could be moved out of segregated neighborhood elementary schools earlier. Still today, that involvement in desegregation is a sore spot
for conservatives who selectively remember the early days of middle schools as
tools for social activism.
Meanwhile, middle schools also became a source of contention in many rural
communities. The move to create middle schools by consolidating the top grades
from small community K–8 schools was argued as a way to provide more financial and program resources for early adolescents. But the loss of enrollment, and
subsequent state or county aid, left many community elementary schools financially strapped. In addition, many parents were concerned about long bus rides
to the new middle schools and community leaders worried about the potential
loss of the school as a community center.
While urban and rural middle schools did play a part in the larger movement, by far the larger emphasis was on suburban communities and their early
adolescents. As a result much of the literature and research on early adolescence
drew conclusions from a mostly white, upper middle class sample, ignoring the
possibility of race and class differences. The weight given to suburban schools in
middle school discussions and research has been at least partly responsible for
the relatively low rate of participation among urban and rural educators and,
no doubt, has made the move back to K–8 schools in these areas all the more
possible.
WHICH GRADES TO INCLUDE?
From the start middle school advocates claimed that the movement was not
about grade levels but about appropriate education for young adolescents. But
the question of which grade levels to include in the middle school could hardly
be avoided. After all, the move from junior high schools to middle schools was
largely driven by moving the upper grades out of the elementary school to relieve
overcrowding or break the stranglehold of segregated neighborhood elementary
schools. Grade nine was moved to the high school to make room for that shift.
Over four decades, in fact, the one certain thing about the middle school movement was the sharp decline in the number of grade seven through nine schools
and the rapid growth in schools with grades five or six through eight.
In the past few years the question of grade levels has again surfaced as large,
urban school districts have begun to dismantle middle schools in favor of a return to K–8 schools. Their reasoning is supposedly driven by evidence that early
adolescents in K–8 schools have better academic achievement and fewer behavior problems than peers in dedicated middle schools. Indeed, some evidence has
shown just that, although researchers are quick to point out that the differences
are likely a result of better quality teacher-student relationships that are possible in smaller K–8 schools. Moreover, some research indicates that even where
there are such differences, they tend to erode by the end of the middle school
and either disappear or reverse in high school. There is certainly something to
say for the possibility of relationships as an influence on achievement and behavior. But it is also important to remember that students in urban schools are

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far more likely to be in poverty, and that factor alone accounts for a good share
of the variance in school achievement.
If the current debate were simply about grade levels, the research just cited
would pretty much put an end to it. However, the call for K–8 schools, with the
accompanying use of incomplete data, has been picked up as a cause by conservative critics who have never been happy with the child-centered tone of the
middle school movement. Chief among these is Cheri Yecke, whose Mayhem
in the Middle monograph criticized nearly every aspect of the middle school
concept and argued instead for K–8 schools replete with direct instruction, selfcontained classrooms, abstinence-only sex education programs, and other programs favored by conservative critics.
Less dramatic than these debates are lingering questions regarding grade
levels. For example, are two-year middle schools (e.g., grades 7–8) desirable or
should they be avoided because students are always in transition? Should grade
five be included in the middle school or are these students still too young for the
move out of elementary schools?
While the move to dismantle large, impersonal middle schools in urban
centers may continue, the return to K–8 schools is unlikely to catch on in suburban and rural areas that have smaller enrollments to begin with and whose
more affluent students struggle less with academic achievement. For most middle school advocates, however, the question of which grade levels to include in
the middle matters less than the quality of education wherever early adolescents
are enrolled.
NO END IN SIGHT
Schools in general are continuously caught in the crossfire of debates among
parents, educators, and policymakers about the purpose and form of schooling.
Middle schools are no exception. But debates about the middle level are also
complicated by its compromised origins, unclear identity, and frequent overemphasis on developmentalism.
Short of an unlikely large-scale consensus that finally settles the questions
of purpose and form, these debates are sure to continue. And, notably, so is the
middle school movement. For so long as those who agree with its basic concept
have space to make their case, those who do not are unlikely to send the movement to the crowded graveyard of reforms that did not last.
Further Reading: Abella, R., 2005, The effects of small K-8 centers compared to large 6–8
schools on student performance, Middle School Journal, 37(1), 29–35; Beane, J. A., 1993,
A middle school curriculum: From rhetoric to reality, rev. ed., Columbus, OH: National
Middle School Association; Beane, J., & B. Brodhagen, 2002, Teaching in middle schools,
in V. Henderson (ed.), Handbook of research on teaching, 4th ed. (pp. 1157–1174), Washington, DC: America Educational Research Association; Beane, J., & R. Lipka, 2006,
Guess again: Will changing the grades save middle-level education? Educational Leadership, 63(7): 26–32; Cuban, L., 1992, What happens to reforms that last: The case of
the junior high school, American Educational Research Journal, 29, 227–251; Eccles,
J. S., C. Midgley, A. Wigfield, C. Miller, C. Buchanan, D. Reuman, C. Flanagan, & D.

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MacIver, 1993, Development during adolescence: The impact of stage-environment fit
on young adolescents’ experiences in schools and in families, American Psychologist,
48(2), 90–101; Everhart, R. B., 1983, Reading, writing and resistance: Adolescence and
labor in a junior high school, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Gay, G., 1994, Coming of age ethnically: Teaching young adolescents of color, Theory into Practice, 33(3),
149–155; Offenberg, R., 2001, The efficacy of Philadelphia’s K-8 schools compared to
middle grades schools, Middle School Journal, 34(3), 23–29; Yecke, C., 2005, Mayhem in
the middle, Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

James A. Beane
MILITARY IN SCHOOLS
Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) units in public high schools
serve as a major vehicle for military recruitment. The role of JROTC will become even more critical, as it becomes abundantly clear that U.S. military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to be protracted wars rather than brief
military interventions and as public support for the war in Iraq continues to decline. The current administration’s tactic of linking the “war on terrorism” with
these protracted wars will compound the militarization of our nation’s public
schools.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF JROTC
Several points in our nation’s history serve as historical benchmarks for
Junior ROTC: (1) a successful effort in the nineteenth century to erect federal
and state military educational institutions; (2) the passage of the 1862 Morrill
Act and its reauthorizations; (3) the Preparedness Movement, spearheaded by
President Theodore Roosevelt and General Leonard Wood that ultimately led
to passage of the 1917 National Defense Act; (4) The Junior ROTC Revitalization Act of 1964 and the military’s use of the American educational system
as a vehicle for recruitment. These benchmarks establish that Junior ROTC
is rooted in preparedness ideology and that it is, without a doubt, a tool for
recruitment.
Military Academies: Establishing the Educational Foundation
for Preparedness
Since its inception, the U.S. government has sought to educate its youth in
military processes to ensure preparedness for national defense. Precipitated by
the myriad failed Revolutionary War battles and skirmishes, there was a need
in the mind of General George Washington to establish an educational system
that included a military academy and national university. As such, his first official efforts to formalize such training at the national level began at the onset
of his presidency. As early as 1789, he had sought support for a national university. The national university model offered two imperative points. First, its
creation would have answered concerns many of the United State’s founders

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had in terms of perpetuating the newborn nation. Second, and connectedly, the
role of an educated and trained citizenry would deter the rise of a military autocracy. While ideas that circulated placed less emphasis on military training,
this concept was the first attempt at a national program for educating American
youth. The idea never fully materialized, due, in large part, to poor financial
planning and lack of public support.
Washington’s cabinet and other prominent Federalists, like Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, were also strong advocates of a military academy structure.
Such an institution seemed an appropriate answer to the question distressing
Washington and his colleagues: how would an army truly be able to protect and
defend the nation in the event of an attack? While Washington and his cadre
saw its value, the antimilitary establishment instilled deep fear in the nation’s
populace with claims of military elitism and military dictatorship. Washington’s
colleagues tried providing compelling arguments for an academy. Benjamin
Rush, for example, made the following case: “In a state where every citizen is
liable to be a soldier and a legislator, it will be necessary to have some regular
instruction given upon the art of war and upon practical legislation.”
The military academy concept came to fruition when Thomas Jefferson and
The United States Congress founded West Point Military Academy (known
more commonly as the United States Military Academy) in 1802. Jefferson
viewed the military establishment with some skepticism (hence the irony of
his support to found West Point), but he believed an educated citizenry was the
best safeguard against tyranny. As such, the proposal for a military academy
at West Point seemed to be a positive step in the direction toward educating
U.S. citizens. Furthermore, there was concern that military officers were undereducated and lacking in skills that would benefit American forces in time of
conflict. West Point Military Academy was viewed, at least in Jefferson’s mind,
as having the potential to address these two major issues. As the nineteenth
century progressed and more branches to the U.S. military were established,
military academy education both at the state and federal levels proliferated.
Indeed, West Point’s creation was critical in setting in motion the concept of
military training and education.
Solidifying Military Training in the Nation’s Colleges and Universities:
The Morrill Acts
The Vermont Republican politician Justin Morrill’s imprint is firmly embedded in state universities and colleges across the United States. Although initial
legislative attempts failed during the late 1850s, his proposed bill became law
in 1862. Upon passage, the 1862 Morrill Act allowed for several million acres
of public land to be set aside for the construction of Land Grant colleges. Its
1883 reauthorization led to military instruction requiring that each new college
or university’s curriculum include military drill, history, tactics, and strategies.
This congressionally imposed course of military instruction would lay the foundation for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and its junior counterpart in
1916.

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The Preparedness Movement: The Establishment of Junior ROTC
The period of 1898 to 1916 is critical for several reasons. Theodore Roosevelt
assumed the presidency upon President McKinley’s assassination. Roosevelt’s
military views, embodied in preparedness ideology, permeated American domestic and foreign policy. The preparedness concept is simply defined as a nation or state maintaining a program or desiring a program of military readiness
to effectively defend its national or international sovereignty. Essential to the
United State’s survival as a growing power, preparedness would slowly build into
a powerful ideology. Its advocates (Roosevelt among them) began making the
case that the nation was poorly equipped to handle any threat, particularly the
growing specter of war in Europe.
Prior to 1900, the U.S. approach to military preparedness was seen as laissezfaire. However, near the turn of the century (1898), the Spanish-American War
prompted some shift in attitude. Following the war, military officials, including “Rough Rider” Theodore Roosevelt, exhorted deep concern over American
troops’ preparedness. Equally important, was Roosevelt’s assertion that “whether
we desire it or not, we must henceforth recognize we have international duties
no less than international rights.” For the first few years of the twentieth century,
the preparedness advocates were gaining some momentum, claiming that if the
United States was to remain a prominent force in world affairs and continue
protecting its people from foreign attack, strengthening military processes was
critical—including the training of young men in military process.
However, Woodrow Wilson’s election to the presidency struck a severe blow
to preparedness rhetoric. Wilson (along with William Jennings Bryan) developed what historians label “The New Freedom.” This concept would encourage
international order resulting in greater economic competition and free market
capitalism among nations. Henceforward, the new Wilsonian doctrine worked
tirelessly to avoid wars by establishing persistent and detailed analysis of what
constituted “revolutions for change,” or uprisings that became deleterious movements serving as impediments or threats toward democracy. Wilson’s political
savvy handling regional and international conflicts gave him much needed credibility for what many viewed as his stance of neutrality (or by some accounts,
isolationism), thus temporarily thwarting preparedness advocates’ prospects for
winning the public relations campaign.
The arrival of World War I in 1914 drastically affected the pacifistic leanings
of the country, eventually causing President Wilson to reverse his philosophy.
Over the next two years, several members of the Wilson administration, most
notably General Leonard Wood, began voicing opposition to antipreparedness.
Wood believed that if the United States were drawn into a war with Europe or
were attacked, its military forces would be rendered useless. Wood began to
implement military training camps for youth and spoke at numerous colleges
and universities in an attempt to generate support for his preparedness platform.
He eventually received support from corporate executives and clubs devoted to
the military. In addition, the National Education Association advocated military
discipline and training as relevant to a young American male’s education.

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The success of the camps (hundreds of young men enrolled the first year),
together with the attacks against American merchant ships, the sinking of the
Lusitania, and economic issues deeply eroded the U.S. positive stance on neutrality and thus prompted further support from Congress and even Wilson himself. As a result, on June 3, 1916, the most comprehensive congressional act for
military reorganization in history was passed, known as the National Defense
Act. Among many other components of the act (including strengthening of
the Army, establishment of the National Guard, and strengthening the power
of the Department of War), the legislation established the Senior and Junior
Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The original conception viewed JROTC as the
feeding element to ROTC. Although its impact was minimal at the onset, its objectives to establish an educated reserve officer commission were clear.
By 1918, the Junior ROTC program was being reviewed to ensure that processes and effective curricula were put into place. The Committee of Education
and Special Education was empowered by General Orders 15, 1918. In outlining
the committee’s report, General Lytle Brown recommended his vision of the Junior ROTC. While Junior ROTC was voluntary (requiring potential cadets and
parents to sign a permission slip), it was made clear that school personnel would
actively encourage participation.
Nevertheless, Junior ROTC did not initially enjoy either the popular or institutional support that it does today. Numerous military and political officials
questioned its viability from the moment the National Defense Act was ratified.
Increasing criticism surrounding recruitment and JROTC’s drain on military
resources was persistently voiced. In 1917, a report from the Bureau of Education by W. S. Jeswein reviewed international efforts to train youth and espoused
the position that such training enhances military preparedness and operations.
As a result of the war effort and the mounting criticism, both Senior and Junior
ROTC programs were temporarily dismantled, leaving approximately 30 units
in operation nationally.
The ROTC Revitalization Act of 1964 and American Schools
As Military Recruiting Grounds
Prior to 1964, Junior ROTC’s development can best be defined as stagnant.
Junior ROTC finally garnered enough political and public support, however,
that on October 13, 1964, Public Law 88–647, commonly known as the JROTC
Revitalization Act, was signed into law. This strengthened the amount of resources for the JROTC, even though many of JROTC’s detractors drew concern
out of the fact that it did very little in terms of providing the military with officers, let alone enlisted troops. The act of 1964 proved critical, however, as Robert
McNamara (Secretary of Defense) and military officials redirected JROTC to be
more aligned with recruitment efforts. There were several major requirements
outlined in the act to ensure consistency and quality. Each stipulation ensured
the minimum health of the program for years to come.
Over the past 42 years since the Revitalization Act was passed, the Junior
ROTC has seen extensive growth. In almost every administration since, the caps

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on both enrollments and operating units have been increased. In the 10-year
period prior to 2002 (including military draw downs), cadet enrollments surged
over 101,000. Between school years 1999 and 2002 cadet enrollment increased
by 38,275. In the school year 2002–2003, over 1,500 units were in operation with
272,476 cadets enrolled. The Junior ROTC leadership has maintained for years
that the program does not aim to recruit, but merely serves public school constituencies in a humanitarian fashion. Yet, this position is at best insincere in light
of the Memorandum of Understanding released March 18, 2000. This document
solidified the relationship between the United States Army Recruiting Command
(USAREC) and Army Cadet Command, permitting recruiters to play an active
role in working with area high schools in making their pitch about the U.S. Army.
In light of recent legislation requiring high schools to submit information on
students to recruiters, the memorandum provides a critical understanding that
Junior ROTC is, or at least is presently, a mechanism for recruitment:
Cadet Command brigade Recruiting Officers coordinate the high
school marketing and visitation plan with USAREC battalions. The
Cadet Command high school marketing and visitation plan brigade
point of contact will ensure that USAREC battalions are provided a
copy of the brigade’s plan which lists all high schools and responsible
Cadet Command element. Whenever possible, combined, coordinated
efforts for marketing the Army will be exercised. The U.S. Army Recruiting Command battalions will ensure that each USAREC company,
recruiting station, and recruiter knows the Cadet Command element
responsible for each of their assigned high schools. USAREC brigades
will invite representatives from appropriate Cadet Command regions/
brigades to brigade-level USAR Recruiting Partnership Council (RPC)
meetings. Cadet Command elements responsible for high schools will
know the responsible USAREC company (sic), recruiting station, and
recruiter visiting their high schools. Brigade Recruiting Officer/PMS
will assist USAREC recruiters in gaining access to any high school that
USAREC has a problem entering (emphasis added).
The evidence points to Junior ROTC as rooted in preparedness and designed
as a recruiting mechanism. The question remains: who does it target and why?
Furthermore, what impact does this have on potential recruits?
THE MYTHS OF MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Duplicity has always been standard operating procedure for military recruiters.
There are at least four major deceptions central to the proliferation of JROTC.
The first two of these deceptions are embodied in the assertion that JROTC will
contribute to a reduction of violence and drug abuse in the public schools and
enhance educational attainment and academic success. After the Los Angeles
riots in 1991, Colin Powell contributed to this myth by claiming that the armed
forces could provide an alternative leading to a reduction of drug trafficking and
gang activity. But then as the deception unfolded, the Pentagon assured itself

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of the appearance of success by excluding many of the very students it claims
to help. JROTC requirements include a minimum grade point average of C for
admission and no prior history of behavior problems. Furthermore, the image
of the Pentagon as a role model for violence reduction requires the suspension
of logic. The Pentagon institutionalizes the centrality of violence as a mode of
conflict resolution. The JROTC specifically raises mixed messages to new levels,
as the study of weapons, marksmanship, and membership in the National Rifle
Association (NRA) are central to its curriculum in school systems attempting to
enforce “zero tolerance” policies regarding the possession of weapons.
It is interesting to note that despite the abundant knowledge base, research,
and programs committed to the nonviolent resolution of conflict and violence
prevention, the federal government has chosen the militarization of public high
schools as its priority. This policy decision was certainly not grounded in research, because Colonel Arthur T. Coumbe, a Pentagon historian, acknowledges
that, “There is no convincing quantitative proof that the JROTC delivers the
results its supporters claim it does.”
If we acknowledge the ability of JROTC to impart leadership skills, we must
also take note of the fact that skilled leadership does not assure constructive
outcomes. Manuals dealing with leadership emphasize “following the orders of
those above you” as the central element of leadership. History has demonstrated
that the confusion of authoritarianism with leadership facilitates atrocities such
as the Nazi death camps and the infamous massacre of the My Lai villagers in
Vietnam. The Pentagon blithely ignores such connections in their JROTC history textbooks.
The Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors (CCCO-Western Region) has gathered relevant anecdotal evidence to substantiate the claim that the
institutionalization and glorification of violence in JROTC actually contributes
to violence among its students.
1. In Detroit, Michigan, a JROTC squad leader at Cooley High School reportedly formed a gang called the Fenkell Mafia Killers. The squad leader
personally shot and wounded one person. Police say that on September 26,
1994, she ordered “a hit” at school in which a student was shot twice in the
thigh.
2. Members of a Long Beach, California JROTC unit formed a gang called
the Ace of Spades (based on a Special Forces unit in Vietnam known for
leaving cards on people they killed), went on crime sprees (including vandalizing a gay bar), then murdered Alex Giraldo, age 16, one of their members who they believed was talking with the police.
3. A year later, also in Long Beach, in August of 1993 a member of the JROTC
drill team scheduled to be the commander of this unit was arrested and
charged, along with a former member of the JROTC program, with kidnapping and murdering an elementary school crossing guard.
4. In Arizona, Jonathan Doody, a 17-year-old ROTC enthusiast, murdered
nine residents of a Buddhist temple. He was wearing military fatigues as he
committed the crime.

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5. In Clifton, New Jersey, one member of the Sea Cadets, a Navy program for
high school youths, conspired with his gang to murder, execution style,
another member of the Sea Cadets.
6. In South San Diego County, JROTC students dressed in camouflage fatigues led “war games” in which they attacked and robbed immigrants
coming across the border from Mexico.
7. On February 22, 1994, three JROTC cadets at Balboa High School in San
Francisco were physically assaulted by the rest of the drill under the orders
of the senior commander. One student suffered a punctured eardrum. The
three have filed a suit. A secret city attorney’s report, leaked to a reporter,
revealed a more than five-year tradition of hazing, including “a drill team
initiation in which cadets jumped their victims, stripped off their clothes
and paddled them with their hands and with a wooden slab from a broken
desk. The investigation also found that members of the Balboa high drill
team commonly beat fellow cadets as punishment.”
8. An anonymous student in JROTC at a second San Francisco high school,
Wilson, has admitted to taking part in a hazing at that school in 1991.
9. At Lowell, a third school with JROTC in San Francisco, the student paper
reported “friendly” hazing is a tradition there too.
10. In Houston, Texas, in May of 1993, despite similar problems in previous
years, the assembled drill teams were ordered to stand in formation in the
hot sun. Over 50 students were overcome with dizziness and/or fainted.
Twenty-six students were hospitalized.
11. The most recent incident occurred in April 2001, involving an 18-year-old
JROTC cadet from New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was charged after police found a small arsenal of explosives and machine gun bullets in his
home. Ironically, he appeared in district court wearing the Army shirt and
pants issued by the JROTC.
The third deception of JROTC recruitment is the notion that such training
enhances employability. Proponents of JROTC appeal to the popular belief that
the military service increases employability by increasing discipline and by developing skills transferable to the civilian labor market. Available evidence indicates that this argument is as weak as the first two.
Among Vietnam-era African Americans, both veterans and nonveterans had
a 9 percent rate of unemployment in contrast to a rate of 4.3 percent for whites.
In a longitudinal study of more recent cohorts, funded by the assistant secretary
of defense, it was reported that only 12.4 percent of male veterans and 5 percent
of male attriters reported any use of occupational skills acquired in the military
in their post-military employment. Their data on males who never served in the
military revealed higher degrees of labor force participation and higher income.
The fourth deception of JROTC recruitment perpetuates the myth that the
armed forces are a sanctuary from the racist abuses prevalent in civilian life. Using
General Colin Powell as their African American spokesperson, the Department
of Defense has attempted to make the case that the military is a meritocratic
sanctuary for those seeking refuge from the patterns of racist discrimination in

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civilian life. Despite the military’s claim to be an equal opportunity employer,
people of color currently constitute 32 percent of enlisted personnel while only
13 percent are officers. The rates of conviction in court martials, less than honorable discharges, and incarceration in military prisons are more than triple for
people of color. Thus patterns of racist discrimination in the military are comparable to the civilian criminal justice system. It should come as no surprise that a
society in which racist patterns of structural violence are central would replicate
these patterns in its military. Perhaps the myth of a meritocratic military is the
cruelest hoax.
The advocates of JROTC, who are endeavoring to transform their schools into
military academies, target “urban underclass” school children for recruitment.
Defense Department guidelines for JROTC specifically seek “the less affluent large
urban schools” and populations who are “at risk.” These children are trapped by
a form of economic conscription referred to as the “push-pull phenomenon,” in
which they are pushed by poverty and the economics of racism and pulled by
the promise of military benefits. Once enrolled in JROTC, they are locked in by
JROTC requirements, which are so time consuming that they preclude most college preparatory courses. The JROTC further channels these students by enticing
them with a menu of “watered down” academic courses. In an informational paper
by the Department of the Army titled “Blacks in the Vietnam Conflict,” it was reported that between 1961 and 1966 the casualty rate for African Americans was
20.1 percent The proportion of African Americans in the general population during this period was only 10 percent and in the armed forces it was 13.7 percent.
Patterns of participation in the Gulf War reveal that the trend to disproportionately subject African Americans to the perils of combat is accelerating. Out
of a general population of 12.4 percent, they were 30 percent of the troops in the
Gulf. African American participation in the Army was 29.1 percent, in the Marine
Corps 16.9 percent, in the Navy 21.3 percent, and in the Air Force 13.5 percent.
Considering the complicity of JROTC in the economic conscription of disproportionate numbers of underclass African American youth, revised strategies of resistance must be developed. Peace organizations must overcome their
lack of racial diversity and accept African American leadership if they are to be
effective in their struggles against the militarization of public education.
Further Reading: Berlowitz, M., 2000, Racism and conscription in JROTC, Peace Review
12(3), 303–308; Berlowitz, M. J., N. A. Long, & E. R. Jackson, 2006, The omission and
distortion of African American perspectives in peace education, Educational Studies
39(1), 5–15; Long, N., 2003, The origins, early developments and present-day impact of
the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps on the American public schools, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati.

Marvin J. Berlowitz and Nathan Andrew Long

MORAL EDUCATION
Few other issues in education are more controversial than the issue of moral
education. Disagreements have existed for more than a century regarding almost

Moral Education

every question pertinent to it: What is moral education? What is its purpose?
Should it be part of public schooling? How can it be done? The most telling
question remains today: How can public schools in a liberal democracy and
multicultural society, such as the United States, engage in moral education both
legitimately and effectively?
A WORKING DEFINITION
There is no universal understanding about what moral education means and
what purposes it serves. For many, moral education is about the moral development of students and how schools can assist in this process. For some, it is
more about the moral nature of school, and how school practices can be morally defensible. Addressing the moral education of students, some emphasize the
cultivation of moral virtues in children, while others highlight the development
of moral reasoning and ethical decision making of students, and still others
simply focus on teaching students basic manners and maintaining a civil order
in schools. It is important to note that different understandings of what moral
education is often stem from people’s deeply held beliefs and assumptions about
human nature, the nature of moral life, the relationship between the individual
and society, religion, and the mission of schools. It is also important to recognize
that divergent interpretations of the meaning of moral education significantly
affect its practices. This might be one of the reasons why policies and programs
in moral education often vary from school to school.
Despite all the differing emphases and understandings, a common theme
is identifiable. Moral education is often referred to as what a school provides
in terms of curriculum, programs, services, structures, or culture, with the
purpose to help students grow into “good” individuals and to fulfill the moral
mission of the school. This general definition emphasizes moral education as a
form of education of students that concentrates on producing moral persons.
From this perspective, moral education in schools may include any broadly
based school efforts to influence the morality, values, and character of children
and youth.
MORAL EDUCATION: A CONTESTED HISTORY
Moral education has a history as long as schooling itself. The common school
movement of the mid-nineteenth century made state-funded public schools the
most important educational institutions in the United States. Moral education
was seen as a necessary means to achieve a common culture. Horace Mann,
the champion of the common school movement, argued for a central place for
moral education in the new public schools. Moral education was integrated
into the entire life of the school, especially in elementary schools. For example, moral lessons were diffused through textbooks—readers, spellers, and even
arithmetic books. Famous spellers and readers, such as the McGuffey Readers,
expressed pronounced moral emphasis. The moral values taught were a blend
of traditional Protestant morality and nineteenth-century conceptions of good

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citizenship. Educators believed in absolute rules in moral training and left little
room for interpretation and flexibility.
The dawn of the twentieth century was a time of turbulence in American
society. The fast-paced technological advances, increasing urbanization, industrialization, and immigration dramatically transformed society and people’s
lives. The schools responded to changes in society by changing their attitudes
toward, and practices of, moral education. Educators began to give far more attention to academic and social competence to meet the increasing demands of a
modern industrial economy. Religious-based traditional moral training declined
in the increasingly secular schools. At the same time, however, many people, including those who deplored this decline of traditional moral education, began
to develop new approaches to moral education. In a response to the new social
order, the reformers all attempted to go beyond the nineteenth-century moral
training framework but ended up with different schemes of moral education.
Two opposing views on moral education emerged during this period: The view
of character education and the progressive view of moral education. Progressive
voices did not receive a significant hearing until the mid-1920s. The victor in the
battle over moral education during the early twentieth century was character
education.
The Character Education Movement in the Early Twentieth Century
The call for character education was commonly justified by a perceived moral
decline in society. Dramatic social changes at the turn of the century brought
about break-ups in the home, rampant individualism in the workplace, negativity
in the media, political corruption, shifting cultural values, rising crime rates,
and the decline of religion. A moral and character breakdown was thought to
be behind all of these trends, and a renewed moral education was expected to
solve the social problems. Some influential organizations of the time, such as the
National Education Association, also joined the choir to call for the building of
children’s character as the central aim of schools. Recognizing the inadequacy of
the old-fashioned moral training scheme, advocates hoped a newly defined program of character education would operate effectively under the altered modern
circumstances.
Responding to the rising new faith in science and the secularization of
morality, advocates of character education accepted the state in general and
the school in particular as the new bearers of morality. They also tied moral
education more closely to the growing modern society. Character building was
thought to be crucial for an individual’s life adjustment, citizenship, vocational
efficiency, and worthy use of leisure time. The call for character education was
also greatly reinforced by World War I, which not only cemented the need for
character training, but also provided a particular emphasis. The nationalistic,
jingoistic fervor in the United States during the war pushed the schools to place
a stronger emphasis on patriotism, duty, and civic training. Morality largely
became civic responsibility. The concept of the good person was redefined to
become synonymous with that of the good citizen.

Moral Education

A virtues approach characterized character education in schools. The virtues
were often called character traits or conduct codes. It was this “traits/codes
approach” that clearly set character education off from other moral education efforts. One of the first character education programs was developed in
Toledo, Ohio, in 1901. It consisted of a five-minute talk each morning on such
traits as obedience, kindness, and honesty. One topic was scheduled for each
month (McKown, 1935). This was probably the earliest form of the one-virtueper-month approach, which is popular in today’s character education movement. In 1909, the Character Development League of New York City initiated
a plan of using the biographies of great men for character education in public
schools and homes. James Terry White’s 1909 book, Character Lessons in American Biography, was especially written for this purpose. In White’s book, the series
of “character lessons” subdivides good character into 31 traits, including obedience, honesty, perseverance, purity, self-control, and patriotism. The author
suggested that several traits be taught in each grade. As a whole, the character lessons were to be taught systematically throughout each year of the school
course. Pupils were not only to understand these lessons but also to practice the
virtues. All subject teachers were required to combine moral lessons with their
class instruction. The use of character traits was highly regarded by character
educators; there were many competitions to encourage its development and use.
Schools across the country quickly adopted similar character traits or codes as a
focus of their programs in character education. Educators attempted to integrate
character traits or morality codes into all aspects of school life. The codes provided themes for both formal instruction and extracurricular activities.
The Decline of Character Education and the Progressive View
of Moral Education
Character education was pervasive in American schools in the first three decades of the twentieth century. However, its influence began to decline in the late
1920s, partially due to a concerted attack by progressive educators. Led by such
prominent figures as John Dewey, the progressive education movement challenged the long-standing educational tradition and sought to guide schooling with
a new humanistic and constructivist approach. Progressives considered character
education of the time a continuation of traditional moral education, which they
felt was obsolete and should be abandoned in order to make moral progress in
the new social order. They embraced science and reason rather than religious or
other orthodox doctrines for solving complex moral and social problems. They
targeted the use of morality codes and the teaching of particular virtues in character education, arguing that memorizing the codes would not help make moral
persons. They saw an emphasis on particular virtues not only as useless but also
as harmful to ethical living in modern society. Simple codes of conduct were unable to guide individuals in an ever-changing modern world. Under these highly
specialized and segmented modern situations, progressives urged that obedience
to authority and conformity to tradition, as represented by character education,
must be thrown away. They argued for ethical flexibility and relativity. Because

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ethical behavior is subject to particular situations, moral education must ensure
that the child’s moral character develop in a natural social atmosphere. Schools
must teach constructive reactions to life’s extraordinarily varied contingencies.
Progressives advocated a moral education that did not teach specific moral precepts or encourage particular character traits, but rather cultivated in students
open-mindedness and a general ability to make moral judgments. This model of
moral education encouraged a spirit of inquiry and imagination and emphasized
reasoning and problem solving in real-life situations.
Reflecting the progressive voice, some studies were done to critically examine
character education. Among them, the empirical studies of Hartshorne and May
(1928–1930) were most influential. These studies found that popular character education programs had no significant positive effect on the conduct of students. Many later theorists and educators often draw from the conclusions of the
Hartshorne and May studies to critique traditional character education ideas.
Formal character education was abandoned in many schools. Yet, the opposing
progressive approach was never as popular and widespread as character education was. Moral education in general declined. Although both World War II and
the early stages of the Cold War seemed to emphasize the importance of character and motivate schools to keep offering activities to promote moral and civic
growth of students, the post-World War II era witnessed a significant shift in
both cultural values and educational priorities in the United States. Academic
“rigor” began to reign supreme again in schools, largely fueled by the nation’s
economic and military competition with the Soviets, while issues of morality
were increasingly seen as personal and private. Dramatic social movements and
upheavals throughout the 1960s and 1970s, along with a deepening cultural
pluralism and a growing demand for individual rights and freedom, worked to
make moral questions more controversial and moral education in schools more
difficult than ever before. The atmosphere that supported moral education as a
primary goal of public schools was lost. Deliberate moral education entered a
full-scale retreat.
Nevertheless, the mid-1960s started a slow revival of interest in new forms of
moral education. Several new approaches gradually emerged and entered some
schools. Among them, values clarification and the cognitive-developmental approach became most influential. Influenced by and largely remaining within
the progressive tradition, these two approaches opposed character education in
many respects. Embracing the spirit of the time, they advocated moral education efforts thought to promote both individual freedom and social/cultural diversity. Although never as pervasive as character education was in schools, these
two approaches represented the most influential alternative approaches to moral
education since the progressive era.
Values Clarification and the Cognitive-Developmental Approach
in the 1960s and 1970s
According to the theory of values clarification, values constitute a central part
of a moral and civil life. However, there is no consensus about values and there is

Moral Education

a wide range of competing value systems existing. Furthermore, a value is simply a psychological factor that tends to direct some of the behaviors of a person.
Any set of values a person holds does not have to be accepted according to a
particular moral standard; yet, values should be internally consistent. Hence, the
objective of moral education in a democracy is to help students develop internally consistent sets of values and to live deliberately by whatever sets of values
they individually develop. Like the progressives, advocates of values clarification
consider the process of moral decision making important and situational.
They emphasize personal and individual valuing, while denying the necessity
of learning any fixed values. Unlike character educators who stress socializing
and inculcating students according to presumed moral norms of society, values
clarificationists help students choose and develop their own values. Teachers are
not the authority figures they are in character education. They should be nonjudgmental and nonindoctrinating to help students discover, choose, and refine
their own values. It is unjustifiable for a teacher to impose his or any other’s
values on students; this act of intervention would undermine the individuality
and autonomy of students. Role modeling and exhortation of virtues favored
by character education are downplayed in values clarification. Instead, teachers
encourage dialogue and discussion among students.
The cognitive developmentalists, led by Lawrence Kohlberg, differ from values clarification proponents in that they accept the existence of specific values
such as justice, the perceived universal principle. They maintain that people develop morally through a series of stages, and at different levels of moral development, they differ in their underlying conceptions of justice and their solutions
to ethical problems. Moral education for developmentalists means education
for moral development, but the process of moral development is not a straightforward acquisition of established norms of the society. They reject character
educators’ view of values as rules for behavior; rather, they believe that moral action is mainly a function of moral judgment and that moral reasoning underlies
moral judgment. Therefore, the purpose of moral education is to improve students’ ability and skills in moral reasoning and help them attain the highest level
of moral development. Educators promote moral reasoning through reflection,
perspective taking, conflict resolution, and autonomous choice in democratically run school communities.
Values clarification and the cognitive-developmental approach enjoyed some
popularity until the 1980s, but criticisms accompanied them from the very beginning. Critics of values clarification argue that this method takes values as
ultimately personal and promotes the message that there are no right or wrong
values. Thus, values clarification offends community standards and undermines
accepted values. It does not value the search for standards and consensus; neither does it stress truth and right behavior, nor does it distinguish morality
from personal preference or whim. Some of the criticisms seem to target the
commercial materials produced by advocates of values clarification, which
might have oversimplified the original theory of it. So, it is wise to read both
the original materials and several critiques before making a judgment about
values clarification.

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Critics of the cognitive-developmental approach argue that developmentalists’ focus on justice as a central value is unwarranted and their emphasis on
moral reasoning is too narrow. The claim of universal stages of moral development is also questionable. Moreover, its emphasis on rights and fairness reflects
a masculine bias. Feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings
argue that cognitive-developmentalists overemphasize moral reasoning, a cognitive process, while overlooking the affective components of morality. They
maintain that women speak in a different voice than men regarding moral issues. An “ethic of care” constitutes women’s presumably unique moral life that
emphasizes human connections and relationships. Along with this feminist critique that reclaimed the critical gender difference in moral development, other
important work on the roles of race, ethnicity, and social class in moral formation has emerged. This work has significantly reshaped theories of moral development and introduced a multicultural perspective in moral education.
The most severe criticism of both approaches has come from the unwavering supporters of traditional character education, such as former Secretary of
Education William Bennett, whose preference for traditional moral training
fundamentally clashed with the process emphasis and individualistic/relativistic
orientation of both new approaches. In a climate that favored a return to tradition, the United States witnessed a resurgence of character education in the
1980s.
The Contemporary Character Education Movement:
From the 1980s to the Present
The resurgence of character education began in the early 1980s, a special period in American education, marked by the publication of A Nation at Risk and
discourses about a crisis in youth culture and the failure of public schools. Similar to the case in the early twentieth century, character education was advanced
as an assault against a perceived moral decline in society. Noted leaders of the
modern movement include such political and educational figures as William
Bennett, William Kilpatrick, and Thomas Lickona. Their efforts in championing character education met with strong popular and political support. Governmental support of character education is particularly significant. The George
W. Bush administration’s support of character education is unprecedented in
terms of its endorsement through both policy and grants. As President Bush
himself declared during the 2005 National Character Counts Week, under his
watch over 60 state and local education agencies had received funding from the
Department of Education to provide programs in character education. To the
delight of advocates and supporters, character education is spreading rapidly in
schools across the country.
For many people today, “character education” has become an umbrella term
and it is used to refer to a varied array of approaches to moral education; thus, it
has become synonymous with “moral education.” However, the core of character
education, as illustrated by the popular modern character education movement,
still follows a tradition established by its predecessor in the 1920s and 1930s.

Moral Education

Informed by the Aristotelian philosophy and embedded in a larger conservative
political framework, character education today, as it was in the past, is heavily
virtue-centered. In schools, this traditional emphasis on the inculcation of virtues in students is often carried out through add-on, packaged programs. The
Eleven Principles of Effective Character Education, authored by Thomas Lickona
and his associates (1995) and distributed by the largest organization promoting
character education in the nation, the Character Education Partnership (CEP),
has become a guideline for many schools in developing character education programs. These principles emphasize a “comprehensive” approach to promoting
core ethical values in students.
Like its precedents, the modern movement is not short of controversy. Critics have examined its philosophical roots, political orientations, and pedagogic
practices, and raised serious doubts about its efficacy in terms of students’ moral
and character formation. While advocates claim that current character education is about the teaching of “universal virtues” through community consensus and that it adopts a comprehensive approach instead of the old-fashioned
moral training model, critics still point out that a mechanism of control characterizes character education programs. They argue that character education
places too much emphasis on the socialization of the young to the dominant
social order and values, while ignoring the development of critical thinking
in children. Critics also challenge the lack of contextualization of virtues in
character education and question the didactic moral training still prevailing in
many of the programs. The simplicity problem in character education becomes
a serious one, as most critics point out that moral education or character building is much more complicated than making children learn a set of virtues or
follow rules.
MORAL EDUCATION: AN UNSETTLING FUTURE
Character education dominates the practice of moral education in contemporary U.S. schools. Nevertheless, controversies surrounding moral education
remain and fundamental questions are unanswered. There still are people who
oppose any sort of moral education in public schools. They argue that the private nature of morality must be respected in a culturally diverse society and that
schools have no authority intervening in the job of parents and religious institutions in the moral education of children. However, for most people, the debate
has shifted from the “why” question to the “how” one. The general agreement
is that children should be educated morally, the moral mission of the school is
important, and moral education is necessary in public schools. Especially after
the introduction of the hidden curriculum concept, few would still deny the
existence of certain moral influences in schools, for good or bad. Then, the real
question becomes how moral education can be done, both legitimately and effectively.
Rejecting the virtues approach to character education, critics do suggest alternative models of moral education. There are the developmental psychologists. Carrying on a rich tradition established by such eminent scholars as Jean

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Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, developmental psychologists continue to study
the issue of moral development, and their work sheds important light on moral
education in schools. One of the most productive lines of research to come out
of this tradition is the domain theory advanced by scholars such as Elliot Turiel
and Larry Nucci. Domain theory aims to draw a distinction between the child’s
developing concepts of morality and other domains of social knowledge, such as
social convention. A “domain appropriate” moral or values education, therefore,
can have a more focused effect. For example, the identification of a domain of
moral cognition that is tied to the inherent features of human social interaction
means that moral education may be grounded in universal concerns for fairness
and human welfare and is not limited to the particular conventions or norms of
a given community. By focusing on those universal features of human moral understanding, public schools may engage in fostering children’s morality without
being accused of promoting a particular religion, and without undercutting the
basic core of all major religious systems. In an increasingly culturally and religiously diverse American society, this domain consciousness in moral education
is very important.
Theories of moral development are consistently open to philosophical critique. Moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind are particularly significant
for moral education. Issues at the heart of moral education controversies have
been consistently addressed in the philosophical literature: indoctrination, the
relationship between morality and religion, the nature of the teacher’s authority, moral relativism, and so on. The work of philosophers of education, such as
Clive Beck and Nel Noddings, often centers on moral education. For example,
Nel Noddings, arguably the most important philosopher of moral education in
the contemporary English-speaking world, continues to influence the field of
moral education. Leading a trend toward the Deweyan definition of moral education, which emphasizes the moral life of education as a whole, her caring approach to moral education follows the tradition of care ethics and emphasizes
establishing and sustaining caring conditions and relations in schools that support moral ways of life.
These psychological, philosophical, and other theoretical perspectives continue to influence the ways educators address the issue of moral education and
its practice in schools. There seems to be a tendency toward some eclectic efforts in which educators draw multiple theories and approaches in moral education. Even in the dominant character education movement, some schools
adopt comprehensive methods to break through the focus on the inculcation
of virtues. In schools where no formal character education is implemented, a
constructive integration of moral teaching in the regular school curriculum is
often emphasized. In agreement with many scholars, these schools recognize
that moral questions arise in every classroom every day and values always play
out in the lives of children and teachers. Therefore, it is vital to emphasize the
moment-to-moment moral aspects of teaching and learning and deal with trueto-life moral scenarios in a meaningful way. The role of the educator in this
integral approach to moral education is undoubtedly critical. He or she must
have a commitment to students’ moral development and character building,

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sensitivity to the complexity of various issues involved, an ability to establish a
positive moral climate in the classroom, and a skill to engage students in moral
discourse.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, American education enters a new era,
with an unprecedented emphasis on accountability and standards in national
legislatures and policies in education. As many critics point out, an erosion of
the moral mission of schooling marks the current national school reform movement. As an economic orientation increasingly drives the reform movement, the
moral purpose of education is forsaken. Forced into a uniform, standard curriculum and judged according to standardized tests, students are denied their right
to a well-rounded education that necessarily addresses their moral development.
The top-down and one-size-fits-all education approach also ignores the issues of
cultural diversity, social justice, and educational equality. The marginalization of
minority and poor children in and by the reform movement reflects the betrayal
of democratic principles in educational policy. Other influential reform initiatives, such as school vouchers and zero-tolerance policies, tend to promote the
privatization and militarization of education and schooling, while undermining
the well-being of children.
An urgent call has been heard: Educational reform must be guided by moral
principles and moral education must become a priority of schools. Perhaps Nel
Noddings’s argument is most insightful at this historical moment: “[Moral education is] not only a form of education that concentrates on producing moral
people but also an education that is moral in purpose, policy, and methods”
(1992 p. xiii). From this perspective, the goal of moral education is really to
make the entire school structure, school culture, and educational process morally justifiable and defensible.
Further Reading: Gilligan, C., 1982, In a different voice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press; Hartshorne, H., & M. May, 1928–1930, Studies in the nature of character, New
York: Macmillan; Lickona, T., E. Schaps, & C. Lewis, 1995, Eleven principles of effective character education, Washington, DC: Character Education Partnership; McClellan,
B. E., 1999, Moral education in America: Schools and the shaping of character from the
colonial time to the present, New York: Teachers College Press; McKown, H., 1935, Character education, New York: McGraw-Hill; Noddings, N., 1992, The challenge to care in
schools, New York: Teachers College Press; Noddings, N., 2002, Educating moral people,
New York: Teachers College Press; Sizer, T. R., & N. F. Sizer, 1999, The students are watching: Schools and the moral contract, Boston: Beacon Press; White, J. T., 1909, Character
lessons in American biography, New York: Character Development League.

Tianlong Yu

MOTIVATION AND LEARNING
Although there are different definitions of motivation, current cognitive
conceptions view it as a process that instigates and sustains goal-directed activities. Most contemporary motivation theorists and researchers could agree
in principle with this definition, but there is much debate on what that process

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includes, how motivation can be developed, and how it can influence outcomes
such as achievement, friendships, emotions, and aggression.
This debate on the causes, components, and consequences of motivation reflects the changing nature of motivation theory and research in education over
the past several years. This entry briefly reviews this history, beginning with the
early twentieth century and continuing to the present. As will be evident, the
early issues in the field of motivation have been resolved. The second part discusses some current motivational issues.

MOTIVATION THEORY AND RESEARCH
Early Views
For more than 100 years writers have emphasized the role that motivation
plays in behavior. William James discussed the self as purposive, active, and
dynamic. The self, according to this perspective, consists of subjective (the self
as knower) and objective (the self as known) aspects. James was one of the
first persons to use the term self-esteem, which he thought could be raised by
personal successes or by lowering expectations and goals. James also studied
volition, which was a type of motivation that involved translating intentions
into actions. Mental representations of goals or actions could motivate persons,
but volition became important when mental representations were insufficient
to motivate.
John Dewey also wrote about motivational topics. Dewey emphasized a close
relationship between thinking (cognition), feeling (affect), and willing (motivation). The will united one’s thoughts and feelings to produce intentions to act
and actual behavior.
The concept of motivation became better delineated as psychology emerged as
a science in the early part of the twentieth century. Conditioning theories dominated the field of learning, including Edward Thorndike’s connectionism, Ivan
Pavlov’s classical conditioning, and B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning. Conditioning theories do not define motivation as a separate variable because these
theories explain behavior in terms of observable events. Motivation involves an
increased rate, frequency, or duration of behavior.
Although conditioning theorists were not highly interested in studying motivation, other psychologists were, especially those whose theories of behavior
included such variables as needs and drives. Among these early psychologists,
motivation—derived from the Latin verb movere (to move)—was associated
with what propelled humans and animals to move from a state of rest to one of
activity. Many early experiments used animals; for example, rats were deprived
of food and then their speed of maze running to obtain food was measured. In
the early part of the twentieth century, motivation was viewed in a functional
sense of doing what was necessary in the situation.
To account for motivated behaviors, psychologists such as William McDougall,
Henry Murray, and Abraham Maslow formulated taxonomies or hierarchies of
instincts or needs, which presumably motivated behavior. The general notion of

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a deficiency in a biological need such as food or water was broadened to include
psychological needs such as achievement, affiliation, and self-actualization. Thus,
individuals who displayed high levels of achievement behavior were deemed to
be high in the need for achievement.
Other psychologists explored the role of drives, or internal forces that seek
to maintain homeostasis (the optimal states of bodily mechanisms). When individuals experience a need because of deprivation of an essential element (e.g.,
food), a drive is instigated that causes the individuals to respond. Responding
reduces the drive and satisfies the need. Motivation, therefore, resulted from a
drive to satisfy a need. Clark Hull’s systematic behavior theory in the 1940s was
the most elaborate drive theory formulation. Hull postulated that reinforcement
for behavior would lead to drive reduction and better learning.
However, this idea was not substantiated by research. Edward Tolman allowed rats to explore mazes without reinforcement. They subsequently ran the
mazes better than rats not allowed to explore the mazes, which demonstrated
latent learning (learning in the absence of reinforcement). Experiments by Tolman and others resolved the issue in learning theory of whether motivation was
needed for learning. Tolman and other researchers argued that motivation was
distinct from learning and pertained to the use of knowledge and skills rather
than to their acquisition.
This thinking remained the norm until the cognitive revolution occurred in
psychology beginning in the 1960s, the seeds of which had been planted earlier.
In the 1940s, Kurt Lewin explored the effects of level of aspiration, a goal-type
variable that referred to the outcome a person was trying to attain at a task.
In the 1950s, John Atkinson formulated an expectancy-value theory of motivation that included as motivators an individual’s expectancies for success and
value of the activity.
Beginning in the 1960s, the study of motivation emphasized cognitive motivators of behavior. Thus, it was not the receipt of a reward that motivated people to continue an activity but rather the expectation or belief that they would
be rewarded if they acted in a certain way. In the ensuing years several cognitive
variables have emerged as motivators. These include expectancies for success,
self-efficacy (perceived capabilities to learn or perform actions at designated
levels), outcome expectations (beliefs about the consequences of actions), values, goals, goal properties (e.g., specificity, difficulty, proximity), attributions
(perceived causes of outcomes), social comparisons, and feedback emphasizing
progress in learning.
The cognitive revolution in motivation also has relinked motivation with
learning. Its separation was not beneficial for education. Although students
spend some time in reviews and performing tasks that they have learned, most
of their time is spent learning new knowledge, skills, behaviors, and strategies.
In education it is useful to address motivated learning, or the motivation to acquire knowledge and skills rather than to simply perform them. Also, school
motivation is more complex than the simple behaviors displayed by animals in
mazes. To properly study student motivation requires taking into account variables associated with learners, teachers, peers, and instructional environments.

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Contemporary Theories
There are several contemporary theories that address motivation for learning
and thus are highly applicable to education. Five relevant theories are attribution, expectancy-value, social cognitive, goal, and self-determination.
Attribution Theory
Bernard Weiner’s attribution theory contends that people form attributions,
or perceived causes of the outcomes of their behaviors and those of others. Attributions answer the question of why something happened. In school settings
attributions often refer to the perceived causes of academic successes and failures. Students attribute their successes and failures to one or more attributions
such as ability, effort, task ease or difficulty, luck, fatigue, and environmental
conditions (e.g., help from others).
Attributions motivate because they inform students of their capabilities and
affect their future expectancies. Thus, students who attribute successes to high
ability or effort are more apt to expect future successes than are those who attribute the outcomes to task ease or good luck. In general, attributions that
are internal to the individual (e.g., ability, effort) or controllable (e.g., effort,
strategy use) affect motivation more than those that are external or uncontrollable. Attribution research has investigated ways to teach students who make
dysfunctional attributions that stifle motivation (e.g., failure due to low ability)
to make attributions with better motivational effects (e.g., failure due to low
effort).
Expectancy-Value Theory
John Atkinson’s expectancy-value theory postulated that motivation derives
from one’s expectancies for success and the value that one places on the outcome. Students who expect to succeed at an academic task and value that success should be more motivated to expend effort and persist than those who hold
lower expectancies for success or value.
Theorists such as Jacquelynne Eccles and Allan Wigfield have explored how
expectancies for success and values affect different motivational outcomes. Research shows that expectancies relate strongly to actual achievement, whereas
values are better predictors of choices. Choices are key motivational outcomes
because they reflect students’ selections of courses, majors, and careers.
Social Cognitive Theory
In Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, key motivators are individuals’
goals and expectations. Goals energize behavior and also are standards against
which individuals compare their performances to determine progress. There
are two types of expectations. Self-efficacy refers to one’s perceived capabilities
for learning or performing actions at designated levels. Outcome expectations
refer to the perceived outcomes of actions. Persons who feel efficacious about

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learning or performing an activity and believe that positive outcomes will result
from success should be more motivated to choose to engage in the activity, expend effort, and persist, than those who feel less efficacious or believe that positive outcomes may not result.
Social cognitive theorists such as Barry Zimmerman, Carol Dweck, Dale
Schunk, and Frank Pajares have explored the roles of goals and expectations
in motivation. Effective goal properties are specificity, proximity, and difficulty
level. Goals are better motivators when they denote specific standards than when
they are general (e.g., do your best), close at hand rather than more distant, and
refer to moderately challenging but attainable outcomes rather than those that
are either too easy or overly difficult. These properties allow students to compare
their performances against the goals to denote progress. The perception of progress helps to sustain self-efficacy and motivation.
Goal Theory
Goal theory posits that goal orientations, or integrated patterns of beliefs
reflecting the reasons why one engages in behavior, are key motivators. Goal
theorists such as Paul Pintrich and Andrew Elliot have identified two broad orientations: mastery and performance. A mastery goal orientation refers to the
desire to learn and increase competence; a performance goal orientation refers
to the desire to gain positive judgments of competence from oneself and others.
Persons with a mastery orientation seek challenges because these foster learning
and display persistence during difficulties. Persons with a performance orientation also may display these outcomes if they also hold high perceptions of their
capabilities, but if their perceived capabilities are lower then they tend to avoid
challenges and display lower persistence.
Mastery and performance orientations may be either approach or avoidance
focused. A mastery approach focus involves self-improvement and gaining understanding, whereas a mastery avoidance focus refers to avoiding not learning
or mastery of the task. A performance approach focus denotes motivation to do
better than others and get the best grades. A performance avoidance focus seeks
to avoid inferiority and not appear incompetent to others or get the worst grades.
A mastery approach orientation seems best suited for long-term motivation.
Self-Determination
The self-determination theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan assumes
that people are motivated to satisfy the basic needs of competence, autonomy,
and relatedness. The need for competence involves mastery of the environment. The need for autonomy refers to exerting a sense of control or agency
in environmental interactions. The need for relatedness refers to the desire to
belong to a group. Collectively these needs motivate people to act in ways to
satisfy them.
At the heart of self-determination theory is the notion of intrinsic motivation,
or the desire to be competent and self-determining in the environment. The

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process of self-determination—satisfying the needs for competence, autonomy,
and relatedness—is intrinsically motivating. This is contrasted with extrinsic
motivation, or the motivation to engage in an activity as a means to an end. Intrinsic motivation is the key to long-term motivation.
CURRENT MOTIVATION ISSUES
Early work in motivation involved a controversy over the role of motivation
in learning. Another issue concerned the role of the environment. Conditioning theorists contended that the environment controlled human action; people
responded to stimuli. Conversely, cognitive theorists postulate that cognitive interpretations of events are more important than the events themselves. The preceding contemporary views highlight the importance of cognitive motivators.
Several debatable issues remain in motivation. These issues are the role of
rewards, importance of social interaction, generality of motivation, the role of
emotions, and the relation of motivation to other processes.
Role of Rewards
A central issue is how rewards affect motivation. Historical theories viewed
rewards as motivating; people and animals would work to earn them. Cognitive
research subsequently showed that rewards were not motivators; rather, people
were motivated when they expected rewards to follow behavior and when they
valued the rewards.
Research also has shown that offering a reward contingent on behavior can
decrease individuals’ subsequent intrinsic motivation. One explanation for this
effect is that people view the rewards as controlling their behavior. People’s
interest in the task wanes when rewards subsequently are not offered. However, research also shows that when rewards are linked with actual performance
(e.g., greater reward for better performance) they can build intrinsic motivation
because they signal that the individual is developing competence, which raises
self-efficacy.
There are educational advocates of rewards and others who decry their use.
Teachers, parents, and others who use rewards should do so judiciously. The
best advice seems to be that rewards—if used—should be linked with actual
performance and given commensurate with progress in meeting learning goals
or acquiring skills. Such rewards inform students that they are developing competence, which should raise self-efficacy for continuing to learn and sustain motivation for learning.
Importance of Social Interaction
Variables representing the self dominate the study of motivation today (e.g.,
self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-determination). Most contemporary
theories view the self as the central source of information to assess past performance, gauge value, and judge future confidence for learning. The self is critical

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even in group settings, because socially comparing one’s performance to the
performance of others can motivate one to perform better.
Against this focus on the self, constructivist theories (e.g., Vygotsky’s) highlight the importance of social interaction for learning. Currently popular educational methods include social interaction, such as peer learning, cooperative
learning, and project-based learning (typically done by groups of students).
Although individual students have responsibilities, their collective effort produces success. Social interaction skills are highly valued outside of school by
employers.
The issue is how individual motivational variables merge with and affect
group motivation. This type of transformation has occurred in some cases. For
example, self-efficacy—an individual variable—also applies to groups (collective efficacy). Ongoing research is exploring the process whereby individual
(self) aspects of motivation are weighed and combined to influence group motivation.
Generality of Motivation
A third issue in motivation concerns the generality of motivational processes,
or the extent to which they apply to many domains (e.g., academic, social, sports,
and to subareas within each of these). Older theories assumed that needs motivated behavior and that those needs were general and operated across different
situations. Subsequent research, however, did not substantiate this assumption.
The need for achievement, for example, typically varies within the individual,
such that a student may be motivated to achieve in English and history but not
in mathematics and science.
Such domain specificity contributed to the decline of grand theories of motivation that attempted to specify general variables that applied to different
aspects of an individual’s life. The debate continues, however, because intuitively some motivation variables seem to have the potential for generalization.
Students who want to earn a college scholarship are apt to value achieving well
in all school subjects. Students who have high self-efficacy for learning in one
school subject are likely to be efficacious about learning in other subjects, because learning in different subjects involves some common skills (e.g., reading,
studying).
Motivation researchers continue to explore the generality issue. Self-concept
researchers, for example, postulate that one’s overall self-concept is influenced
by increasingly specific domain self-concepts. Thus, one’s academic self-concept
is influenced partly by one’s mathematics self-concept, which is affected by one’s
self-concept in areas such as algebra and geometry. Determining the extent that
the self is integrated or compartmentalized remains a controversial issue.
Role of Emotions
A fourth issue concerns the role of emotions in motivation. Contemporary
motivation theories emphasize cognitive variables. When theories include

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emotions they tend to cast them in cognitive terms. Thus, attribution theory
postulates that attributions have emotional consequences. Students may experience pride when they attribute successes to internal attributions (e.g., ability, effort) and shame when they fail due to perceived internal causes (e.g., low ability
or effort). Self-efficacy can be influenced by emotions (e.g., experiencing anxiety
signals that one may lack competence).
Whether emotions can be cast in cognitive terms or whether they are part
of motivation in their own right is debatable. Neuroscience research suggests
that emotions are represented in neural networks along with cognitions. The
implication is that learning is enhanced when accompanied by emotions, such
as when students are emotionally engaged in learning in a positive way and feel
excited about learning.
These points suggest that teachers should avoid boring lessons and lectures
and instead engage students more in learning, such as by using some of the social means mentioned earlier (e.g., cooperative learning). Although emotions
may not be necessary for motivation, researchers continue to explore the conditions under which they contribute to motivation and learning.
Relation to Other Processes
A final issue is the extent that motivation is involved in other psychological
processes as it is in learning. Self-regulation, for example, refers to self-generated
beliefs and behaviors that one employs to attain goals. Current views of selfregulation propose that it includes cognitive variables such as use of effective
strategies and self-monitoring of progress, as well as motivational variables (e.g.,
self-efficacy, attributions). A similar situation exists with volition. Some theorists
contend that motivation is a critical component of volition, whereas others distinguish motivation (what leads individuals to set goals and begin activity) from
volition (the process of keeping students focused on their goals and engaged in
the task).
Current cognitive accounts of learning hypothesize that cognitive, motivational, and environmental factors interact and reciprocally influence one
another. This notion of interacting influences also may be appropriate for conceptualizing the role of motivation in other processes such as volition and selfregulation. Resolving this issue will require conceptual clarity in definitions of
processes and valid ways to assess them.
CONCLUSION
Motivation is seen as a central process in learning and achievement, yet issues
remain to be resolved. Educational researchers increasingly are including motivational variables in their investigations and determining how motivation links
with academic and other outcomes. We can expect research that addresses the
issues raised here, and as the field of motivation continues to evolve there are apt
to be new issues that will provide greater clarity and understanding of the role of
motivation in human behavior.

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Further Reading: Eccles, J., 2005, Subjective task value and the Eccles et al. model of
achievement-related choices, in Andrew J. Elliot and Carol S. Dweck, eds., Handbook
of competence and motivation (pp. 105–121), New York: Guilford Press; Pajares, F.,
1996, Self-efficacy beliefs in achievement settings, Review of Educational Research, 66,
543–578; Pintrich, P. R., 2003, A motivational science perspective on the role of student motivation in learning and teaching contexts, Journal of Educational Psychology,
95, 667–686; Pintrich, P. R., & D. H. Schunk, 2002, Motivation in education: Theory, research, and applications, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill/Prentice Hall; Ryan, R. M., &
E. L. Deci, 2000, Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54–67; Weiner, B., 1990, History of motivational research in education, Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 616–622.

Dale Schunk and Frank Pajares
MULTICULTURALISM
Multiculturalism is a multidimensional and controversial concept. Although
many people have fought the inclusion of people from diverse cultural communities into society, in ways multiculturalism has become an integral aspect
of institutions from businesses to schools. There are “diversity” programs whose
primary function is to recruit and support outstanding candidates in educational
programs and businesses. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium
Scholarship program provides millions of dollars to African American, American
Indian, Hispanic, and Asian Pacific Islander American students, who without
the financial resources provided by the scholarship program, would not pursue a postsecondary or graduate degree in areas such as science, education, engineering, library science, and public health. Diversity programs, such as the
Gates Millennium Scholarship/Fellowship, are examples of how the concept of
multiculturalism has changed the makeup of many of our social institutions.
This entry will begin with a discussion of how multiculturalism is viewed by
various scholars, then describe how multicultural education and equal education are also tied to the discussion of multiculturalism, and finally describe how
multicultural education is influencing the policies, goals, expectations, and curriculum in schools.
WHAT IS MULTICULTURALISM?
To many educators, multiculturalism refers to cultural diversity. However,
the concept of multiculturalism is much more complex than the inclusion of
various cultures. The concept is continually evolving and will continue to have
great influence in the debate over the mission and purpose of schools since
the Brown Supreme Court decision. Generally speaking, the term multiculturalism refers to the reality of multiple cultures and subcultures being part of
our society. However, multiculturalism has been identified by historians like
Arthur Schlesinger as being divisive; in his view it threatens our unity as a nation. He would argue for cultural assimilation and the importance of transmission of core values rather than the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives.

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Americanization must be protected and transferred to the next generation of
students by conveying a united system of values that encourages assimilation
rather than pluralism.
Educators like Edmund Gordon argue that diversity must be seen along with
the concept of pluralism. He views diversity as a concept that refers to functional
characteristics of people such as culture, cognitive style, and ethnic identity.
However, Gordon believes pluralism refers to the “multiple criteria” that individuals must have in order to fully participate in an evolving society like the
United States. Pluralism has to do with the ability of individuals to become multilingual, multicultural in knowledge, and multiskilled; people are able to function in a variety of cultural environments. Historically, one of the champions of
cultural pluralism was Horace Kallen. In his work, Kallen explained how our
nation would be more vibrant and successful if it was a pluralistic one, one that
included contributions of individuals from many cultural communities. He was
originally concerned with the strong nativist viewpoint that pushed for a homogenous country. Kallen also believed it was important that individuals from
underrepresented groups have a voice in society and share in political and social
power. So it is important to note that multiculturalism includes characteristics
such as culture, social class, and linguistic abilities, but also the ability to address
the complex diverse nature of society.
Finally, it is important to keep in mind the point made by John Willinsky,
who reminds us that culture should be taught about in a way that unites rather
than divides people. One culture is not better than another; it may be different,
but not better. Each culture has a set of values, behaviors, identity, and social
order. Teaching about cultures should not contribute to increased racist viewpoints of others or heightened forms of nationalism; this is often referred to
as the “us versus them” orientation. Willinsky explains how many scholars and
teachers present members of underrepresented groups in such a way as to legitimize their lower political positions and economic status. Many academics of
multiculturalism have moved to change this orientation.
WHO SHOULD BE INCLUDED UNDER THE
MULTICULTURAL UMBRELLA?
In schools, the issues of culture, diversity, and pluralism have become linked.
Many educators recognize that students arrive at U.S. schools from many diverse
cultural and linguistic communities. However, there are ongoing debates about
who should be included within a multicultural umbrella. Some educators believe
multiculturalism refers primarily to ethnic groups such as African American,
Mexican American, Vietnamese American, or American Indian, because children from these groups have historically been underserved in our schools due
to historical institutional and societal racism. In addition, others also include
within the general multiculturalism term students who are gay, from working
class families, female, physically and mentally challenged, those who experience
linguistic diversity, and those with religious affiliations. These groups would include European American members also.

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HOW DOES MULTICULTURALISM INFLUENCE SCHOOLS?
The multidimensional concept of multiculturalism has become a key element
in schools because the concept has evolved into two fields of study in education—
multicultural education and bilingual education. The major aim of these disciplines is to provide equal educational opportunity and outcomes in schools.
One of the major pushes toward equity in education came out of the Supreme
Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. This decision stated that
segregated education was not and could not be equitable education. Later this
decision was further built upon with the passage of Title IV of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. This law banned discrimination based on race, color, or national
origin in any program that received federal funding. Later the Supreme Court
Decision of Lau v. Nichols also called for schools to provide educational settings to meet the linguistic needs of limited proficiency English speakers. The
United States Office of Civil Rights designed the Lau Remedies. This document
explained that districts had to implement bilingual education in order to provide equal education to non–English-speaking students. One of the repercussions of bilingual education has been the English-only movement that calls for
English to be named the national language. There are various reasons for this
call. First some individuals and organizations believe identification of a national
language will bring more unity to citizens. Others are concerned with the increasing numbers of immigrants. In contrast, there are citizens who believe that
a democracy founded upon equality, justice, and human dignity must support
cultural tolerance.
WHAT IS MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION?
Like most fields, theorists pose various definitions and goals of the discipline. Scholars such as James Banks, Cherry Banks, Geneva Gay, Carl Grant,
Christine Sleeter, and Sonia Nieto believe that total school reform is a major
goal. These scholars suggest changes in all aspects of schooling to reflect diversity
and culture. Building on their work and that of others, the National Association
for Multicultural Education (NAME), the main organization of the field, gives
the following definition on their Web site:
Multicultural education is a philosophical concept built on the ideals of
freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity as acknowledged
in various documents, such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence,
constitutions of South Africa and the United States, and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations . . . Multicultural education is a process that permeates all aspects of school practices, policies and organizations as a means to ensure the highest levels
of academic achievement for all students.
Multicultural education as a discipline must also include the theories of John
Dewey, Nel Noddings, and Lev Vygotsky. Multicultural education focuses on
building respectful, collaborative learning environments that prepare students

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for active participation in a culturally diverse democracy. In addition, teachers
see teaching and education as ethical endeavors founded upon the importance
of reciprocal, trusting relationships with students, an ethic of care. Within this
framework, teachers make an ethical commitment to do their best to ensure
that every student reaches her/his potential. In order to do so, teachers employ
culturally relevant education, building on the cultural knowledge and ways of
learning students bring to school. Without addressing issues of culture, community, care, racism, and social oppression, teachers may reproduce an environment of inequality. This framework is called caring-centered multicultural
education because the ethic of care forms the foundation. Education is seen as a
life-giving process of growth and education is seen as a process in the development of the whole person.
MULTICULTURALISM IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM
Many teachers believe the inclusion of multiculturalism is essential in today’s
schools because students are presented with multiple cultural perspectives in literature, history, political science, and other disciplines. Their belief in inclusion
rests on our democratic values of equality and equal representation. Therefore,
schools must include diverse viewpoints to represent the increasing diversity
of students from various cultural communities. This is important throughout
the school curriculum from art to literature to government.
Since this chapter describes multiculturalism in a variety of contexts, it is
important to identify a study that presented data that more fully explained the
meaning of the term. For a clearer understanding of multiculturalism in college curriculum, Bethany Bryson studied the views of 76 English professors and
found four arenas of meanings. These areas were not mutually exclusive; rather,
they presented how diversity influences pedagogy and discipline content. The
four elements of the meaning of multiculturalism are:
1. canon (a traditional collection of readings, authors, and curriculum that
forms the structure of the discipline)
2. cultural diversity
3. politics
4. pedagogy (ways of teaching)
Bryson’s research demonstrated the multidimensional nature of the concept
of multiculturalism. Many of the professors could not clearly define multiculturalism but did provide one to two of the elements listed above. As Bryson (2002)
carefully explains in her work, schools are cultural institutions that have been
given the task of addressing the inequalities in society. One way to tackle these
issues is to “transform the human mind.” Many professors did not address issues
of racism, sexism, or discrimination in their classes. In addition, Bryson found
that many traditional professors, those who taught from a mainstream canon
viewpoint, found the inclusion of literature from culturally diverse authors as
politicizing the field. However professors whom Bryson identified as progressive
felt that professors in highly ranked universities, who protested the inclusion of

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diverse authors, held to a highly politicized traditional canon; this canon was an
accepted part of mainstream society so the traditionalists did not see it as political in nature but rather a matter of aesthetics. Much of the discussion presented
by the English professors was abstract in nature and did not address current
issues of social oppression. Bryson also found that many professors did not believe multiculturalism was important; it was meaningless to them. Bryson concluded that unless there are serious discussions among English professors about
structural changes within the field, multiculturalism will continue to be found
in the margins of teaching literature.
CONCLUSION
The evolution of the concept of multiculturalism has led to the development
of multicultural education and bilingual education. However, the traditional
structure of schools has not changed to reflect Gordon’s pluralism, competence
to participate in diverse cultural settings, or academic equity for underrepresented students. Social change is slow, yet multiculturalism tied to our value of
equality has become a force in society as evidenced by the move to eliminate
school segregation, the inclusion of culturally diverse curriculum in schools,
and the discussion of educational equity in achievement. However, the issue of
cultural assimilation still remains a powerful force in schools and one in which a
balance is needed between shared citizenship and a shared humanity. Multiculturalism still seeks legitimacy.
Further Reading: Bryson, B., 2002, Working definitions: Educational organization and
the meaning of multiculturalism, The International Journal of Sociology and Social
Policy, 22(1–3), 175–207; Fullinwider, R. W., 1996, Public education in a multicultural society, New York: Cambridge University Press; Pang, V. O., J. G. Nembhard, &
K. Holowach, 2006, What is multicultural education? Principles and new directions, in
V. O. Pang, ed., Race, ethnicity and education: Principles and practices of multicultural
education (pp. 23–43), Westport, CT: Praeger; Willinsky, J., 1999, Curriculum, after culture, race, nation, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20(1), 89–112.

Valerie Ooka Pang

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NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND (NCLB)
“No Child Left Behind”—these words convey an inspiring idea, an admirable
goal for reform, and a shared value of universal access to high-quality education. NCLB, adopted as United States education policy in 2002, aims at societal
transformation by freeing historically underserved students from what supporters often call “the mediocrity of low expectations,” demanding that public schools educate all students to meet standards. Accomplishment of this aim
might finally resolve an argument that animated the Continental Congress that
produced the Declaration of Independence—whether a government of the people, by the people, and for the people can be sustained in a population not fully
literate, not fully educated—by educating everyone.
Yet NCLB has inspired more controversy than any previous educational policy in the United States To grasp the arguments and to contextualize them historically, three questions will be explored:
1. Is 40 years of federal education policy, culminating in NCLB, more accurately described as assisting and improving public schooling in muchneeded ways or as hostile and harmful incursions into the Constitution’s
reservation to the states of the provision of public education?
2. Are unintended consequences of NCLB-mandated testing outweighing
planned or actual benefits?
3. Is test-driven accountability rescuing schools and students from intolerably low expectations or abandoning them and the enterprise of public
education?

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The explosion of test-related legislation and litigation and some invisible but
inevitable problems of educational measurement will thread this discussion of
assessment-related aspects of NCLB.
FEDERAL ASSISTANCE OR CONSTITUTIONAL INCURSION?
Despite the Constitution’s reservation of public education to the states, federal
interest is nonetheless clear. In a democracy where it is the right and responsibility of all members to participate in decision-making, education is fundamental to ensuring the electorate’s capacity for comprehending complicated issues,
seeking salient information and judging its accuracy, and comparing the campaign promises of elected representatives with their performance. Problems associated with state-level failure to make satisfactory education available to all
were illustrated a half-century ago in the class action suit, Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954. The persistence of efforts to include and exclude evolution from science curricula suggest continuing problems associated
with the local level.
All three branches of the federal government have, in fact, played a role in public education. Brown and later cases demonstrate the role of the federal judiciary.
The executive and legislative branches became active a decade after Brown with
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Part of President
Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” ESEA’s centerpiece was Title I funding to assist
disadvantaged students. In 1988, as the numbers and categories of these students
grew, testing was introduced to monitor their progress and assure that federal
funds were well spent. The 1994 reauthorization of ESEA, called the Improving
America’s Schools Act or Goals 2000, called for development of national standards and standards-aligned assessments for all students, tasks set for two bodies
created by the same legislation, the National Council on Education Standards and
Testing (NCEST) and the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB).
Eight years later in 2002 as ESEA was again reauthorized, this time as NCLB,
Goals 2000’s six national goals remained unmet or unmeasurable—(1) all children ready to learn; (2) 90-percent high school graduation rate; (3) all children
competent in core subjects (including arts and foreign languages); (4) United
States ranked first in the world in math and science; (5) every adult literate and
competitive in the work force; (6) safe, disciplined, drug-free schools. Only 19
states had reached full compliance with the law; no “national system of assessments” had been created; the effort to “calibrate” state tests so that their scores
could be compared had been abandoned; and neither national content standards
nor opportunity-to-learn standards had been developed. Performance standards on
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had been set, but the
standard-setting process was found “fatally flawed” in multiple evaluations. Most
states had adopted content standards and ultimately, to comply with NCLB,
every state save Iowa had implemented standards-based assessments.
NCLB mandated reading and math proficiency by all students in grades 3–8
within 12 years, to be measured by states’ standards-based tests and confirmed
by the state’s NAEP scores; state participation in NAEP, previously voluntary,

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was required. State test scores were to be disaggregated for each of several
subgroups of students identified by major racial and ethnic backgrounds, by disability, and by limited English proficiency, and each group was required to meet
state proficiency standards. State improvement plans, including Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP) targets leading to 100 percent proficiency in 2014, were required
to be submitted for U.S. Department of Education approval, the first time in
January 2003.
The federal government could not compel states to attempt to meet NCLB
requirements. Rather, the financial reward of choosing to participate in NCLB—
the proverbial carrot—was continuation of the federal funding, an estimated
10 percent of most state education budgets, to which their struggling students
had been declared “entitled” 40 years earlier by ESEA. The corresponding stick
was a graduated series of penalties increasing in number and severity over time.
Schools failing to meet student achievement goals have been identified as “needing improvement” and required to do the following:
• In year two following NCLB implementation, develop an improvement plan,
accept technical assistance, and make school choice available to any student
in a school “in need of improvement” with district paying transportation to
the chosen school.
• In year three, all of the above plus provide approved supplemental services.
• In year four, all of the above plus take corrective action, such as hiring a
new staff or adopting a new curriculum.
• In year five, restructure or face takeover by the state or a contractor.
Some saw these provisions as holding schools appropriately accountable for
the educational outcomes of vulnerable students, giving the law “teeth.” Others

Figure N.1

Federal Standards and Accountability Legislation Leading to the No Child Left Behind Act.

Source: Andrew Rudalevige, 2003, The politics of No Child Left Behind, retrieved August 22, 2007 from http://www.hoover.org/
publications/ed next/3398406.html.

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saw them as threats to compel top-down change, which researchers had repeatedly
found to be a hopeless reform trajectory.
A variety of reactions followed enactment of NCLB. Some reactions suggested NCLB was oppressive. Initially, Vermont declared it would forego federal
funding and accountability but later reversed this decision. In subsequent years,
other states also considered and rejected “opting out,” but some did entertain
legislation that allowed districts and schools to do so. The numbers of districts
and schools that opted out grew.
A variety of reactions was also apparent in the first-round state improvement
plans submitted in 2003 for federal approval. More differentiated than the federal government had expected, these plans prompted the first in a series of adjustments to requirements.
With such a multiplicity of responses, perhaps NCLB might be considered in
terms of a multiple-choice item, for example,
NCLB is best described as:
a. representing President George W. Bush’s attempt to achieve ESEA’s original hope of equal outcomes for all students
b. furthering preexisting state trends toward testing and accountability and
expanding on a national scale the Texas system instituted when Bush was
governor, which produced (select one) the Texas miracle/the myth of the
Texas miracle
c. violating the U.S. Constitution
d. imposing on states, districts, and schools a test-driven educational accountability system with severe penalties for compliance failures
e. ensuring the failure of public education by setting unrealistic requirements for reading and math proficiency by all students in grades 3–8.
Or perhaps, since the “right” answer might depend on who was scoring this
item, an essay question might be better, for example,
Is NCLB more about “entitling” students and improving their schools or
threatening and punishing both?
Such a question can be taken as a frame for understanding the educational
testing and accountability debates intensified by NCLB. The history of educational
measurement has been dubbed a history of unintended consequences, to which
some consider that Bush has contributed with NCLB. Bush himself described
the policy as “real reform having real results” in a press conference December
20, 2004. Whether NCLB’s results are positive or negative and, if the former,
whether the gain is worth the pain are at issue.
GOOD POLICY, BAD EFFECTS?
Conflicting opinions exist not only among people but also within people. For
example, in a small school district in January 2005, an assistant superintendent
described NCLB to the author as “the moon shot in education. We might as well
go for a big goal. We’re going to be better for having tried,” but, by June, she was
saying:

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) |

I think [the law] has been both positive and vexing—positive in that it
really has forced us to look carefully at what students are learning, especially those who are not yet learning to any standard this state considers appropriate. At the same time, it’s been really vexing because,
although we have put into place things that really help students and
teachers, we don’t know how we can keep on . . . I don’t know if people
are ultimately going to love me or curse me for this, but I’ve said I
think it’s time to take Title 1 dollars off the table. We did refuse it for
two years, but we need the money, frankly.
Even the positive aspects can be vexing, as discussion of the following points
will show: (1) Rising scores come with significant caveats, and evidence that
they provide of school improvement does not always survive scrutiny. (2) While
states develop their own improvement plans, the federal approval process limits
their real options. (3) NCLB’s wording protects districts and schools from new
expenditures, but complaints and law suits charge that it is nonetheless an unfunded mandate.
Test Score Increases
There have been reports that scores on state reading and math achievement
tests for students in grades 3–8 are rising across the country. To NCLB proponents, this indicates that the bottom-line objectives are being attained, that
reform is working. Although achievement gaps persist, test scores also offer
evidence that some of the students who have been left behind in the past are
beginning to catch up. NCLB promoted the credibility of the score increases by
blocking some possibilities for “gaming the system” and thereby distorting test
results, problems that had been reported with state tests:
• By requiring testing every student in grades 3–8 every year, NCLB facilitated individual student progress monitoring. No longer was it necessary
to compare fourth-graders in year one with fourth-graders in year two, a
completely different student population.
• By requiring 95 percent student participation rates, NCLB diminished the
possibility of skewing results by such manipulations as scheduling field
trips for low-scoring students on test days, or by calling them to the school
office, or by suggesting their parents keep them home.
• By requiring comparison of each state’s test scores to its scores on NAEP,
NCLB checked any “dumbing down” of state tests that might raise scores
by lowering expectations.
Even if tests remain imperfect, as test developers themselves acknowledge,
few critics would argue that scores reveal nothing. Love tests or hate them, trust
scores or harbor lingering doubts about their accuracy and meaning, not even
the most acerbic critics can regret evidence from scores of improving educational outcomes for children and youth.

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Cautions
Across time, student socioeconomic status has been so strongly and consistently correlated with test scores that it has been argued that zip codes, identifying the affluence of neighborhoods, tell as much about student performance
as large-scale assessments do. It has even been joked that a high school senior’s
college performance can be better predicted by the number of cavities in his or
her teeth than by the student’s score on a college entrance examination, a whimsical allusion to the dental care available to the affluent. The correlation suggests
that accountability based on test scores amounts, in effect, to holding students
accountable for their parents’ income and holding public schools, which must
accept all the students in their catchment areas, accountable for factors beyond
their control.
While state scores are rising, the NCLB requirement to compare each state’s
test scores to its NAEP scores is often failing to confirm reported state gains.
For example, according to a 2006 New York Times investigation, NAEP math
scores between 2002 and 2005 improved for poor, African American, and white
fourth-graders, but NAEP reading scores declined slightly for African American
and white eighth-graders and for eighth-graders eligible for free or reducedprice lunches. Mississippi declared 89 percent of its fourth-graders proficient
readers, the highest percentage in the nation, but only 18 percent proved proficient in reading on NAEP.
The discrepancy signals invalidity. Because NAEP scores are less easily corrupted than scores on state tests, the discrepancy suggests that the invalidity is
located in state testing—not for the first time. In the 1980s, the credibility of
state test scores was called into question when a West Virginia physician, John J.
Cannell, discovered that every state was claiming above-average scores, ushering
into the measurement vernacular the “Lake Wobegon phenomenon,” a reference
to the fictitious community imagined by Garrison Keillor where “all the children are above average.” In the 1990s, Tom Haladyna and his colleagues found
tests susceptible to a variety of types of “score pollution.” In 2000, Center for
Research on Educational Standards and Student Testing (CRESST) co-director
Bob Linn showed that scores typically rise after a new test is implemented and
typically return to original levels when the second test takes its place, suggesting
that it is common for rising scores to exaggerate rising achievement.
That the achievement gains suggested by rising scores may be an illusion is
underscored by the fact that NAEP scores have remained fairly stable for 36
years. Flat NAEP scores also suggest that NCLB requirements are unrealistic.
Many doubt that all third- through eighth-graders could achieve proficiency in
literacy and numeracy. Assuming they could, Stanford measurement expert Ed
Haertel has calculated that the states with the best NAEP progress records would
nevertheless need more than a hundred years to reach 100 percent proficiency,
not NCLB’s 12 years.
Some of the cautions applicable to interpreting satisfactory progress toward
NCLB requirements are technical. For example, while NCLB has stimulated high
student participation in test-taking, it has also allowed each state to determine

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) |

how many students in each subgroup (e.g., English language learners, special
education students) must be enrolled for their scores to count in determining
whether AYP targets have been met. States have set different minimum numbers
of students in subgroups, which has proven problematic whether the minima
are high or low. With a “low n,” aggregated scores will be inconsistent (“unreliable”) from year to year, showing too much variability to tell whether progress
is being made. With a “high n,” the scores of students in the subgroup will not
count toward AYP targets, making it impossible to tell whether these students
are making progress or whether they are being left behind. There is no consensus as to the “right” minimum number.
The status models, which have been federally approved for most states, base
accountability on whether students reach a prescribed target or proficiency status, operationally defined as a cut-score on a test. Status models create uneven
playing fields where students performing at lower levels than their age-mates—
and the schools that serve them—have to make more progress to reach the required status. Alternatively, growth models have been developed, which compare
a student’s test performance in one year with his or her scores in succeeding
years. Growth models permit measuring a student’s improvement across time
and the impact of the schooling the student has experienced. Yet, the U.S. Department of Education has approved only a few state requests to use growth
models and, even for this minority, only on a trial basis. As a result, in most
states, poor students and their schools could be making greater progress than
the more affluent, yet be judged as “needing improvement” in comparison with
wealthier counterparts whom they have out-performed in terms of growth.
School Improvements
In 2001, the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C. policy group, listed 1,320
“high-flying schools” across the country in which half of the students were
poor and half minority, yet scoring in their states’ top thirds. Hope rose even
faster than the reported score increases until researchers investigated the claims,
which were based on single-subject gains, in single subjects, in single years.
When Douglas at Harris Florida State University checked to see how many had
made gains in two subjects, at two grade levels, over two years, all but 23 of the
high-flying schools were grounded.
Researchers with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University determined
that the states reporting the biggest gains were those with the lowest expectations, that experienced teachers were transferring out of low-income minority
schools, and that no significant headway had been made in closing the gap for
minority and poor children since the 1970–1980s with civil rights and antipoverty initiatives. Moreover, project researchers found that schools identified as
“needing improvement” tended to enroll low-income students, to be racially
segregated, and to fail to make the needed improvements. In an Hispanic P–5
school in Texas in 2005, Jennifer Booher-Jennings documented “educational
triage,” in which the overwhelming majority of instructional resources were
concentrated on the “accountable kids” whose scores would figure in AYP

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determinations, and the “bubble kids” whose scores were near passing, at the
expense of all others.
NCLB’s assumption that educational accountability systems based on standards and standards-based tests will improve education has been tested independently. In 1996, the Pew Charitable Trusts awarded four-year grants to seven
urban school districts to assist them in implementing standards-based reform.
Five years later, as NCLB was nearing enactment, the Trusts reported that highstakes accountability motivates educators to avoid penalties by raising test scores
through less ambitious teaching, especially for low-performing students, and
that emphasis on testing comes at the expense of curriculum, instruction, and
professional development and prevents real improvement in student achievement. This comparison suggests that NCLB’s logic was flawed from the start.
SAVING OR ABANDONING STUDENTS AND PUBLIC
EDUCATION?
Options?
States may refuse NCLB requirements and federal funding, although most,
like Vermont, found they could not afford to do so. And NCLB came with a local
price tag. Connecticut found itself facing $8 million in increased expenditures
by 2008 related to NCLB and filed suit against NCLB’s own prohibition against
unfunded mandates, as did a Michigan school district and the National Education Association. Despite increased federal funding related to NCLB, such as
grants to develop “smaller learning communities” in large high schools, NCLB
has drained state and district coffers, whether through increased data collection,
analysis, and reporting or through legal expenses.
Players
The special education impact has been problematic in two ways. One was
exemplified by the lawsuit filed by two Illinois districts on the basis of conflicts
between NCLB and the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The
other has been the difficulty in raising the scores of students eligible for special
services, a task so daunting that it became common knowledge in Washington
that every district in the state not meeting the first AYP targets had failed on the
basis of their special education subgroup. While some adjustments to the law
have been made, this difficulty was predictable by educators, but they were left
behind in the policy-making process.
Also left behind, according to an analysis of the policy-making process for
one part of NCLB, the Reading First provisions, were professional education and
educational measurement organizations, which have worked to provide policy
analyses, to conduct research on policy impact, and to issue public statements.
Commercial interests were not left behind, as witnessed by the recent furor over
the U.S. Department of Education’s narrowing of approved options regarding
curricula and supplementary materials and also by this parody: No Psychometrician Left Unemployed.

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As the 1990s shift toward state legislation focused on tests rather than such
things as curriculum and professional development, NCLB has operated on an
implicit theory of action that educators and students—the least powerful players in the system—would work harder if coerced. The results to date suggest
that coercion may raise scores without raising achievement and may not close
achievement gaps.
Reauthorization
Evidence suggests that schools “needing improvement” cannot bring all
students to proficiency and are closed, that experienced teachers are leaving these schools behind, and promising students who want to transfer out of
them outnumber the seats available in “high-flying schools.” With the 2007
reauthorization of ESEA, consideration should be given to the logical conclusion
of these trends: NCLB could leave public education behind.
Further Reading: American Evaluation Association public statements on high-stakes testing and on educational accountability, retrieved on August 22, 2007 from www.eval.org;
Baker, E. L., R. L. Linn, J. L. Herman, & D. Koretz, 2002, Standards for educational accountability systems, CRESST Line, Winter, 1–4; Booher-Jennings, J., 2005, Below the
bubble: “Educational triage” and the Texas Accountability System, American Educational
Research Journal, 42(2), 231–268; Harvard University Civil Rights Project, retrieved
August 22, 2007 from www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu; Hill, R. K., & C. A. DePascale,
2003, Reliability of No Child Left Behind accountability designs, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 22(3), 12–20; Linn, R. L., 2000, Assessments and accountability,
Educational Researcher, 29(2), 4–16; Linn, R L., E. L. Baker, & D. W. Betebenner, 2002,
Accountability systems: Implications of requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of
2001, Educational Researcher, 31(6), 3–16; Mabry, L., & J. Margolis, 2006, NCLB: Local
implementation and impact in southwest Washington state, Education Policy Analysis
Archives, 14(23), retrieved March 1, 2007, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n23/.

Linda Mabry
NUTRITION IN SCHOOLS
The percentage of obese children in the United States today has more than
doubled since 1970. More than 35 percent of our nation’s children are overweight, 25 percent are obese, and 14 percent have Type II Diabetes, a condition previously seen primarily in adults. At the dawn of the twenty-first century,
the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that of the children born in
2000, roughly one-third of all Caucasians and half of all Hispanics and African
Americans will develop diabetes in their lifetimes—most before they graduate from high school. At this rate, the CDC also reports, this group will be the
first generation in American history to die at a younger age than their parents.
Processed foods favored by schools and busy moms for their convenience not
only contribute to obesity; they also contain additives and preservatives and are
tainted with herbicide and pesticide residues that are believed to cause a variety
of illnesses, including cancer. In fact, current research shows that 40 percent of

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all cancers are attributable to diet. Many hundreds of thousands of Americans
die of diet-related illness each year. People in the United States today simply do
not know how to eat properly and they do not seem to have time to figure out
how, so fast food, home meal replacements, and processed foods take the place
of good, healthy cooking.
Parents, pediatricians, and school administrators are increasingly concerned
about children’s health as it relates to diet. Most parents do not even know what
constitutes good childhood nutrition and many feel they lack the time they
would need to spend researching it. They rely, instead, on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) approved National School Lunch program to
provide their children with nutritionally balanced, healthful meals. The trouble
is, they are not. While most schools continue to try to meet better nutritional
guidelines, they are still not measuring up, and many are actually contributing
to the crisis emerging over the last decade. Food is not respected; rather, it is
something that must be made and consumed with increasing speed. In part, this
is the result of the fact that there are more children than ever in schools with
smaller cafeterias (often actually “multi-purpose” rooms), forcing several short
lunch shifts. Decreasing budgets, in many cases, have caused a decline in the
quality of school meals.
For the most part, school lunch has deteriorated to institutional-style mayhem. Walk through the kitchen or lunchroom of almost any public or private
school and “fast food nation” will ring with striking clarity. USDA-approved
portions of processed foods are haphazardly dished out by harried cafeteria
workers to frenzied students hurrying to finish their food in time for 10 minutes
of recess. Nothing about the experience of being in a school cafeteria is calm—
the din is deafening. Lunch rooms are vast open spaces filled with long tables
flanked by dozens of chairs. There is no intimacy, no sense of calm, no respite
from a morning of hard learning.
The noise and activity levels are not the only unpalatable aspects of lunchroom dining. A full 78 percent of the schools in the United States do not actually
meet the USDA’s nutritional guidelines, which is no surprise considering the
fact that most schools keep the cost of the food for lunch under $1 per child.
Most children do not even like the foods that are being served. A recent survey
of local school children in northern Minnesota revealed the food is so abysmal
that not even old standby favorites like cafeteria pizza and macaroni and cheese
were given high marks. It is no wonder that kids are choosing fast foods, which
are chemically engineered in many cases to be better tasting, over regular school
lunch menu items. Children today are bombarded with food advertising that
is reinforced by the careful placement of fast food chains in strip malls, nearby
schools, and even on public school campuses. The big fast food chains have been
aggressively and specifically targeting children for decades—they have even
found ways to get inside schools and be part of the public school lunch menus.
A mother from Aurora, Colorado told us that there is one Taco Bell and one
Pizza Hut option available on every menu in her six-year-old son’s lunchroom.
She was told that the fast food program originally started as a “safety measure”

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to keep the high school and middle school students on school grounds, because
in spite of the fact that they had a closed campus students were crossing busy
streets to get to fast food restaurants near their schools. She thought “the fast
food thing just trickled down to the elementary program.” Of course the reality
is that those schools were, and are, making money off million dollar multiyear
contracts with fast food companies.
School lunch menus have undergone some changes in recent years and are
marginally improved, but nearly all our schools continue to operate under the
misguided notion that children actually prefer to eat frozen, processed, fried,
sugary foods. Because most parents do not have time to spend in the kitchen
the way the parents of generations past once did, the lunch lessons children are
getting in school are the primary guideposts available to them. Poor in-school
health and nutrition education is causing children and, by extension, their
families to make bad food choices that are translating directly into big health
problems—over $200 billion in health problems annually, in fact. Today, many
parents, administrators, and concerned citizens are fighting to get fast food out
of the nation’s lunchrooms and improve the quality of school lunches from nutritional content all the way to the atmosphere in our cafeterias. They believe
that the tax money allocated to fund school lunches, which totals about $7 billion annually ($3 billion less than what it costs per month to stay at war in Iraq!)
should be put to better use.
HISTORY OF SCHOOL LUNCH
Most people assume that the school lunch program is a modern American
initiative. Not so. The very first school lunch program was started in Europe in
the 1700s after teachers noticed that poor, malnourished children were having
more difficulty concentrating than their well-fed classmates. Even more than
three centuries ago the ill effects of poor nutrition on health and education were
so abundantly clear that they could not be ignored. The earliest programs were
funded through the efforts of private charities with the humble goal of providing the most nutritious meals at the lowest possible cost—hallmarks that remain
part of school lunch programs around the world today. When philanthropies
could no longer support the needs of their communities, local and national governments stepped in to help. Parents were relieved to know that not only were
their children being fed, but that school attendance was soaring. At the same
time, governments were able to almost guarantee themselves a larger number
of healthier men to enlist in the armed services. Right from the beginning the
primary motivating factors behind school food programs were both charitable
and political. The first American school food programs, which started decades
later, were no exception to this rule.
Major cities were among the first to put school food programs in place. Ellen
H. Richards, home economics pioneer, and the first woman admitted to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was a strong proponent, not only
for school meals, but also for in-school nutrition education. During her tenure

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at as a professor at MIT, Richards spearheaded an effort to establish a Women’s
Laboratory and was successful in persuading the Women’s Education Association of Boston to provide funding. Out of her work at the Women’s Laboratory,
Richards gathered research for several published works, two of which were: The
Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882; with Marion Talbot) and Food Materials and Their Adulterations (1885). In 1890, she helped open the New England Kitchen, whose purpose was to provide nutritious, yet inexpensive food
to working-class families in Boston while teaching them the principles of producing healthy, low-cost meals. Four years later the Boston School Committee
began receiving meals from the New England Kitchen and Richards had almost
single-handedly laid the foundation for a model of what was to eventually become the National School Lunch Program (NSLP).
Philadelphia’s first penny lunch program, organized and run by a private
charity, also began in 1894, and its most significant contribution to today’s
school lunch program was the creation of the Lunch Committee of the Home
and School League, the precursor to the modern day Parent Teacher Association
(PTA), which was instrumental in expanding the lunch program to nine other
area schools.
About a decade later, in New York, Robert Hunter published Poverty, in
which he made the assertion that between 60,000 and 70,000 children in New
York City arrived at school with empty stomachs. It prompted a firestorm of
investigative reports, including John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children,
published in 1906. In his book Spargo supported Hunter’s claims and urged
society at large to take action on behalf of the children. Spargo’s work in turn
spurred further studies by physicians who began publishing reports about the
malnutrition of New York City schoolchildren, which later led to a plea from
the superintendent of New York City schools, William Maxwell, for a school
lunch program where children could purchase healthy low-cost lunches every
day. Maxwell’s wishes were granted and two schools were elected to participate
in a trial run. Their success was undeniable, and two years later the New York
City School Board approved the program and opened the door for a citywide
school lunch program overseen by physicians with an eye towards honoring
the ethnic and cultural traditions of the various school populations. Not surprisingly, the overall health of New York City’s schoolchildren showed improvement very quickly. Ten years later 17 public schools were participating
in the program and the first food safety measures, which included physical
exams for food handlers as well as small pox vaccines, were established. As
school lunch programs gained recognition and enjoyed greater successes they
began to pop up in towns and cities all over the country. Before the start of
World War I, 13 states and Washington, D.C. had some type of school food
program in place.
As the war began the school lunch program was expanded, due in no small
part to the fact that approximately one-third of all young men attempting to
enlist were turned away because of diseases attributable to malnutrition. At
that time the programs were still generally funded and operated by private
charities, but when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, private charities and

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individuals could no longer support school feeding programs and hunger in the
United States became more widespread. It was clear that the federal government
would have to step in, both to combat hunger and to create much needed jobs.
People were hungry, not because there was no food available, but because
they did not have the money to buy it, and as a result American farmers were left
with enormous agricultural surpluses and were in danger of losing their farms.
In an effort to both assist farmers by purchasing their products and feed needy
families and schoolchildren using agricultural surpluses, the Congress passed
the Agricultural Act of 1935, Public Law 320, which required the cooperation
of federal, state, and local governments to implement, and establish a structure
upon which future commodity distributions programs were built.
During this time the Work Projects Administration (WPA) was organized to
provide work on public projects to the unemployed, and school lunches were a
perfect fit for the program. Not only did WPA workers cook and serve lunches,
but they canned the fresh fruits and vegetables provided to them through the
surplus program and through school gardens. Until that time, nothing had a
greater impact on the National School Lunch Program than the WPA. By 1941
school lunches were being served by the WPA in every state to a total of about
2 million school children. The program was also responsible for employing over
64,000 people in school lunch programs alone at that time. Just one year later 6
million children were participating.
Unfortunately, with the onset of World War II the school lunch program took
a hit as surpluses were redirected to feed troops, but in 1943 Congress amended
the Agricultural Act of 1935 to “provide school districts directly with funds for
implementation of their school lunch programs.”
At war’s end General Lewis Blaine Hershey, Director of Selective Services, declared that malnutrition was a national security risk and stated before Congress
that the United States had 155,000 war casualties directly related to malnutrition. It became clear that strong federal legislation was necessary, and in the
summer of 1946 the National School Lunch Act, Public Law 396, 79th Congress,
was signed by President Harry S. Truman. The new law specified “permanent
funding through the Secretary of Agriculture to assist with the health of the
nation’s children, and ensure a market for farmers” (USDA, 1946). Section Two
of the law states the purpose of the act:
It is hereby declared to be the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s
children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food, by assisting the States, through
grants-in-aid and other means, in providing an adequate supply of
foods and other facilities for the establishment, maintenance, operation, and expansion of nonprofit school lunch programs.” (USDA,
1946, p. 231).”
With the passing of PL 396 the National School Lunch Program was given
an unshakable foundation. The guidelines for administration of school lunch
programs under PL 396 include:

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1. Lunches must meet minimum nutritional requirements set by the Secretary
of Agriculture.
2. Free or reduced cost meals must be made available to children whom local
authorities determine unable to pay.
3. Discrimination against children unable to pay is forbidden.
4. The program must be operated on a nonprofit basis.
5. Foods designated by the secretary as abundant must be utilized.
6. Donated commodity foods must be utilized.
7. Records, receipts, and expenditures must be kept and submitted in a report to the state agency when required.
Funds were also specifically set aside for the purchase of equipment so that
money given to schools for food would be used only to purchase food. In 1954
the Special Milk Program was set in place, making surplus milk available to
schools in much the same way as other surplus agricultural foods had previously
been made part of the program.
Between 1955 and 1965/1966 a decline in nutritional intake was reported by
the Household Food Consumption Survey of 1965–66 and resulted in the Child
Nutrition Act of 1966, Public Law 89–642, allowing for increased funding to create programs whose sole purpose was to improve child nutrition. The Special Milk
Program became part of the Child Nutrition Act, and through the Child Nutrition Act schools were provided nonfood assistance, which made funds available
for the purchase of equipment as long as schools were able to cover 25 percent
of their equipment costs. In 1966 a Pilot Breakfast Program was given a two-year
test run and allowances were made for hiring more employees to run the school
food programs. It was at this point that all school food programs, including those
created for preschool children, were placed under the aegis of one federal agency,
standardizing the management of school lunch programs across the country.
In the 1970s nutritionists began taking a closer look at school meals and criticized the program for not taking into account students of different ages or with
different body types. The same meals were being served to all students—athletes, obese children, undernourished kids, first graders, and high school students alike. They also looked at sugar and fat content and questioned the general
healthfulness of school lunches. It was at this time that nutritionists first began
to look to the NSLP as a tool for educating children about good nutrition and
in 1979, school districts were required to include children and parents in their
school food programs, making them participants in the overall eating experience—from taste tests to menu planning and cafeteria design. After a decade of
discussion on the subject of the healthfulness of school meals, new regulations
were put in place that, among other things, included a provision that required
different portion sizes for children of different age groups.
Also in the 1970s vending machines made their appearance in public schools.
There was some immediate concern on the part of parents and educators at that
time as to the types of products being sold, and as a result the Secretary of Agriculture issued regulations in 1980 restricting the sale of sodas, gum, and certain
types of candy. Unfortunately the regulations were overturned in a 1984 lawsuit

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brought by the National Soft Drink Association. The judge presiding over the
case stated that the Secretary of Agriculture had acted outside the bounds of
his authority and was permitted only to regulate food sales within the cafeteria.
So, although they were not allowed in cafeterias, vending machines once again
found their way onto public school campuses around the country.
The 1980s were a time of great strain on the school lunch program. The Reagan administration forced budget cuts, causing meal prices to rise and some
children to drop out of the program altogether. In an effort to save money and
still appear to be meeting the federal guidelines for a healthy school lunch, the
government made attempts to add certain foods to the “permissible” list. The
one that made the most people sit up and take notice was the shocking allowance of ketchup as a vegetable. Also during the 1980s many schools were forced
to create noncooking kitchens, which, by default, increased the quantity of processed foods being served.
By the time President Clinton took office the USDA was still falling well short
of meeting its own dietary guidelines in the public school system, which was not
surprising in a program that for decades had been running on agricultural surpluses like milk, cheese, and high-fat meat products. As a matter of fact, the fat
content of school lunches was well above recommended dietary guidelines, and
meals were falling well short of students’ needed nutrient values. Ellen Haas was
appointed as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in charge of Food and Consumer
Affairs, and it became her job to oversee the National School Lunch Program.
Haas and Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy, held a series of national hearings
that were open to both experts and concerned citizens and put together their
School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children in the summer of 1994. It required
that schools meet USDA Federal Dietary Guidelines by 1998. The directive
that an average of 30 percent or less of the week’s calorie count come from fat
(and only 10 percent from saturated fat) angered the major players in the meat
and dairy industries who had been particularly reliant upon the school food
program to take their surpluses. Nevertheless, Haas pushed forward, making
her School Meals Initiative the first substantial revision to the National School
Lunch Program in nearly 50 years. The hallmark of Haas’s program was ease of
implementation through the reduction of bureaucratic red tape.
In spite of the fact that Haas’s proposal became a federal mandate in 1994, a
decade later schools still struggled to meet its demands. Poultry, soy (incidentally, both tofu and soy milk are not considered part of a reimbursable meal),
and a greater variety of fruits and vegetables were designated as permissible by
the USDA, but fat content was down by only 4 percent and remained at about
34 percent on average. And while 70 percent of all elementary schools met government mandated nutrient guidelines, only a mere 20 percent of secondary
schools had been able to do so. To make matters worse, more snacks were being
offered at school than ever before, and fast food chains were inching their way
into the school system. Cash poor schools looked to school snacks and fast food
to help raise money for, among other things, extracurricular programs. Today,
most schools still have no nutrition curriculum and those that do use heavily
biased educational materials donated by the meat and dairy industries. Students

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are being bombarded with an overwhelming amount of extremely persuasive
advertising for high-fat, low-nutrient foods every day. In fact, food companies
spend approximately $30 billion to underwrite about 40,000 commercials annually. It is nearly impossible for the National School Lunch Program to come out
ahead, no matter how nutritious the meals become, if fast foods are among the
choices in the lunch room. When presented, at school, with a choice between a
familiar Taco Bell selection and school cafeteria mystery meat it is really a nobrainer what most students will choose.
School meals reach nearly 27 million children a day and for some, what they
eat at school remains the most nutritious meal of their day, which is great news.
Still, the childhood obesity crisis is at an all time high. Children are getting fatter
and fatter—in fact, nearly 20 percent of all American children are considered
obese by today’s standards.
Some school districts, like Berkeley Unified School District in Berkeley, California, have found ways to work within the national guidelines while supporting
an innovative interdisciplinary gardening and nutrition program that gets children directly involved in growing and cooking their own food, in conjunction
with serving nutritious/delicious food in the cafeterias. Other schools have raised
money for salad bars, and many school districts around the country have banned
soda and vending machines. Private and charter schools like the Ross School on
Long Island and Promise Academy in New York City are creating school food
programs that are making their way, in bits and pieces, into the country’s federally funded school lunch program. Progress is being made, but it is slow.
In 2006, through the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004,
the federal government mandated that each school district form a Wellness
Committee and draft a Wellness Policy to establish standards for nutrition and
good health in the public school system. The policies were required to address
the quality of meals, regularity of exercise, and nutrition education. Unfortunately there is no real national standard, nor is there any significant funding
available to help school food administrators implement their plans. Parents and
administrators continue to express their frustration, and educators on the front
line continue to ask why the National School Lunch Program is overseen by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose primary purpose is to support the
nation’s farms through subsidy programs that require public schools to utilize
high-fat, highly processed foods that are contraindicative to good nutrition. At
the beginning of 2007 many school food administrators are advocating a change
of oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services to better reflect
the NSLP’s commitment to good health and nutrition.
Further Reading: Cooper, A., and L. M. Holmes, 2000, Bitter harvest, New York: Routledge;
Cooper, A., and L. Holmes, 2006, Lunch lessons: Changing the way we feed our children,
New York: HarperCollins; Nestle, M., 2006, What to eat, New York: North Point Press;
Pollan, M., 2006, The omnivore’s dilemma, New York: Penguin Press; Schlosser, E., 2005,
Fast food nation, New York: Harper Perennial; Spurlock, M., 2006, Supersize me, New
York: Putnam; USDA, 1946, National School Lunch Act.

Ann Cooper and Lisa M. Holmes

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOLS
Parental involvement is a set of activities parents engage in when responding to
the expectations of the school or the educational needs of their children. These
activities take place in the home; for example, when parents feed, clothe, and
bathe their children, prepare them for and take them to and from school, help
with homework, and respond to inquiries made by teachers. They also take
place at school through volunteer work in the classroom or on committees, by
attending parent-teacher conferences, Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meetings, and other events organized by school administrators, teachers, or parents.
Finally, they take place in the community at the local or policy level when parents sit on school boards or other school decision-making committees, or when
individual parents or groups petition or organize inquiries into school matters.
Whatever parents do, however, it never seems to be enough or to be what
schools really want or feel they need from parents. This is evidenced by the nationwide call to increase parental involvement in public schools and the insistence that parental involvement is a crucial, if not the primary, factor in fostering
student success. Indeed, whenever some plan for school reform is proposed,
parents should not be surprised to find that they are prominently featured, as are
multiple conceptions of their role.
Up until the 1960s, it was widely believed that differences in educational
achievement could be attributed to differences in intelligence and character. However, studies like the Coleman report in 1966 changed the view of a
static, immutable relationship between student and achievement, opening up
the widespread belief that inequalities of outcome could be changed if the appropriate intervention were found. The factors determined to make the largest
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difference in educational achievement, Coleman and his associates found, were
attributes of the home; primarily those that measured economic and social capital. Coleman also found that in general schools were ineffective at altering the
outcome of the family effect. The idea was born that schools might need to reach
out to families in order to be able to achieve their goals with all students. Programs oriented toward parental involvement, therefore, had at the outset the
specific goal of altering family practice, especially of poor and minority families,
who were seen to be deficient in the parenting, social, and educational skills
perceived to be practiced by the mainly white middle- and upper-class families
of children who were successful.
INVOLVEMENT AS OUTREACH
Although there are new understandings of home–school relations and new
conceptions of parental involvement, for the most part, the assumption that
some families are acting and participating in ways that they should and others are not still drives parental involvement programs and policies. This has led
to a plethora of home-based and school-based programs aimed at improving
the parenting, linguistic, and educational skills of parents. These programs are
based on the assumption that the mental and physical health of the child and
the quality of the parent-child relationship are crucial to the student’s academic
well-being. Furthermore, since parents who attend parent-teacher conferences
and other school events were seen to be more informed and involved, getting
parents to come to school for any event, social or educational, was seen as an
opportunity to build trust and rapport with the hope that parents would attend
parent-teacher conferences more regularly.
Studies that have explored teacher, administrator, and parent perceptions
of these efforts have reported mixed results depending on the school context
and the nature of the school program. For example, parents seem to respond
positively to instructional programs designed to teach specific math, homework, or reading strategies such as math nights. These programs are often well
attended and provide parents with current strategies and resources in subject
matters that may have changed since parents went to school. Other studies have
shown that parents respond less positively and feel unduly targeted by schools to
participate in instructional programs if there are already negative feelings about
the school, perceptions of racism and lowered expectations for certain students,
and overall distrust between parents and school personnel. These understandings have led schools to develop involvement models that seek to coordinate
home, community, and school resources in ways that foster the development
of community-wide responses to educational issues and allow parents and community members to participate in a variety of ways.
One of the most used and referenced models for this conception of involvement is Joyce Epstein’s Overlapping Spheres of Influence, which places the child
at the center of the interactions between school, family, and community. Within
this framework, she describes six types of involvement: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with

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community. The impetus for this model is primarily to increase involvement
across all of these dimensions in a way that supports students and school programs, improves parents’ abilities to raise their children and assist with their
children’s learning, and increase positive communication between homes and
schools. Unfortunately, what this model fails to consider is the way parents from
different social and cultural backgrounds have traditionally been categorized by
schools as belonging to one of two groups: (1) as being deficient in some way
and needing assistance, and (2) as resources to the school and needing to be
emulated.
Furthermore, even while educators talk of multiple forms of involvement, the
studies conducted to assess the effectiveness of involvement efforts have focused
primarily on student achievement or predetermined levels of parental participation using differences along ethnic, racial, gender, and class lines as categorical
variables. School achievement (usually in the form of test results) is presented
as a desirable goal without questioning whether the parents in the studies were
supportive of such outcomes. Not only does this assumption obscure other possible conceptions of educational achievement, but it also advances the belief that
parental involvement in all of its multiple spheres should be analogous to support. This fuels the belief that parents who are absent or those who are critical
of school practices don’t care, only wish to cause trouble, or are unstable, while
parents who participate agreeably are good, involved parents. As a result, these
models define parents in terms of their perceived qualities as educational resources
and neglect to consider the processes through which specific knowledge or attributes have power within particular settings, while others do not. Rather than
promoting multiple and equally valued styles of participation, these models tend
to reinforce the belief that some parents are not as caring or capable as others.
But more importantly, they take for granted the activities of people perceived
to be successful without considering how their successes may be the result of
other factors, such as their status in the community and the level of congruity
between their home and school values. In other words, what has been less talked
about but is gaining increased recognition is that it is not necessarily the activity
that makes a difference, but the status of the person carrying out the activity, so that
two parents, one white and middle class, the other white and poor, contacting
a teacher about an academic problem will probably get two different responses,
which will contribute to two different outcomes.
CONGRUITY AND INCONGRUITY BETWEEN HOMES
AND SCHOOLS
Studies that have looked more critically at how different groups of people interact with school settings show that differences in participation are often based
on different conceptions of what participation entails and that parent characteristics such as class, race, and gender affect how this role is conceptualized. For example, in Con Respeto: Bridging the Gap between Culturally Diverse
Families and Schools, a study of immigrant families from Mexico, Guadalupe
Valdés found that while the mothers did help their children with homework,

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they emphasized different aspects of the work than teachers did. Other studies
that have looked at how parents understand their role in homework and other
forms of involvement have confirmed these findings. Differences in social class
and ethnicity, as well as other cultural variables, play an important part in how
parents understand and carry out their roles as parents, and these different conceptions do not produce similar results when applied to school practices. What
has generally been learned is that homes and schools are different institutions
that may or may not share similar values and expectations. Therefore, promoting
multiple forms of involvement without a critical consideration of the multiple
values embedded in these forms of involvement may do little to alter the inequalities that prevail in school. As a result, more and more involvement models
have criticized activity-oriented models for failing to acknowledge and address
power and cultural inequalities. Researchers like Sara Lightfoot, interested in
understanding how cultural beliefs affect home–school interactions, conclude
that meaningful parent-teacher relations cannot emerge within an institutional
system that consistently serves the American elite while simultaneously representing the lower classes as deficient and degenerate.
The idea that schools should take on the responsibility to alter their practices and create learning environments that better reflect the population they
serve was raised in the Coleman report. However, that idea was initially taken
by schools to mean they should make their schools welcoming, flexible, and
family-centered—initiatives that mainly served to reinforce the patronizing attitudes schools had towards families they considered deficient. Studies that have
looked at cultural congruence and advocate for the integration of multicultural
communities’ social and cultural values, such as Luis Moll and Norma González’s
concept of “funds of knowledge,” have begun to challenge the perception that
schools hold the expertise when it comes to educating children from a diversity
of backgrounds. These studies are helping schools understand that involvement
is a relationship, rather than a set of activities.
These ideas, of course, are not new. Long before the Coleman report, before
school desegregation, especially in African American communities where rights
to education had been and were still being denied, parents and teachers developed strong ties to promote the best quality education the few resources they
had could achieve. As a result, many parents, regardless of their ethnic or economic status, had grown up with a view of involvement as a partnership between
schools and communities. It is almost as if the parental involvement literature
had to go full circle before it came back to emphasizing involvement as a partnership.
INVOLVEMENT AS A PARTNERSHIP
Although involvement as a partnership is currently the endorsed view and
can be found in parental involvement guidelines and policies such as the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Federal Education Act of 2001, there are reasons
to be cautious about the rhetoric. In that policy guide parental involvement
is defined as the participation of parents in regular, two-way, and meaningful

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communication involving student academic learning and other school activities,
including ensuring
• that parents play an integral role in assisting their child’s learning
• that parents are encouraged to be actively involved in their child’s education at school
• that parents are full partners in their child’s education and are included, as
appropriate, in decision making and on advisory committees to assist in
the education of their child
• that other activities are carried out, such as those described in section
1118 of the ESEA (Parental Involvement) [Section 9101132, ESEA] www.
ed.gov/programs/titleiparta/parentinvguide
Taken at face value, these guidelines seem to endorse a respectful two-way
partnership between school and home communities. But in many ways, guidelines such as these are misleading. Disagreements about involvement rarely lie
at the level of purpose: most parents want their activities to positively affect
their children’s experience with school and most parents would prefer to work
with the school rather than against it. Nevertheless, while schools talk about
involvement as a partnership, it is clear from these involvement guidelines and
the overall NCLB policy that its primary goal is to better align home practices
to school practices with the express purpose of supporting the school. Disagreements arise, therefore, regarding what that success and what those school
experiences should look like and who decides. It is only by considering the
concept of a partnership from a critical perspective that its controversial nature
is revealed.
A quality partnership between communities and schools involves negotiation and deliberation and give and take on the part of both. Learning about
each other and unlearning false stereotypes takes effort and time. For example,
teachers often have deficiency views of minority cultures and consider these cultures to lack parenting skills and knowledge that will benefit the school achievement of their children. Therefore, the process of learning what another culture
perceives to be good parenting and educational practice takes time, and even
then it is not always clear what the best solution is for applying what is learned.
In some areas teachers have taken the initiative to learn about their students’
home cultures and have found meaningful ways to incorporate these new understandings in their curricula. In other areas, however, what to do with differences between home and school cultures and values is not straightforward and
not always resolved through collaboration and discussion. For example, in Cobb
County, Georgia, parents won a lawsuit to get stickers cautioning students that
“evolution is a theory, not a fact” taken out of science textbooks. The parents
who filed the suit felt that the stickers represented a way for the government to
allow teachers to discuss religion in schools.
In Vancouver, Canada, where middle- and upper-class Chinese immigrants
represent the majority cultural group and white middle-class teachers a minority,
the clash between the two groups concerned differences in instructional strategies in reading and writing. In her book, Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles

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of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant
Parents, Guofang Li found that when the clash represents deep-seated values
such as, in this case, teachers insisting on using whole language literacy practices in the classroom, while the Chinese parents favored traditional methods
of reading and writing instruction, the ability to negotiate a common ground
was more difficult. When common ground cannot be found, parents often seek
alternate strategies, some placing their children in private schools, others home
schooling their children or initiating culturally responsive community afterschool programs, or enrolling their children in available after-school programs
in an effort to enhance or balance out the public school experience. Parental
involvement, therefore, needs to also be considered a strategy intended to foster
and protect home values, sometimes with mixed consequences to schools, communities, and other children.
There is a naive assumption that parents become involved either along shared
goals or in support of school efforts and programs. Parents become involved for
many reasons, but one of them is simply because they are critical of what the
schools are actually doing. Parents are not participating in their children’s education because they believe they ought to or because someone is telling them to,
they do so because they believe they must in order to produce the effects they
hope for. In fact the nature of their actions points to the ways in which they understand the school system to work for people like them and their children, and
these are different for people from different backgrounds. These understandings
and experiences affect the way parents think about involvement and education
and the actions they engage in to support their child’s education. What is at
stake, it seems, is the ability for communities to construct trustworthy and collaborative relationships among people for the purpose of developing instructional systems that have children’s interests and needs in the forefront.
WHAT FUTURE FOR PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT?
Parental involvement has been promoted as a way to empower parents, to
provide them access to and involvement in the educational experiences of their
children. According to a critical and activist perception of individuals as selfinterpreting beings, empowerment occurs when the self-understanding of people translates into actions that promote a redressing of the oppressive situations
people find themselves in. It is clear that the effects of past involvement policies
and practices have done little to work for empowerment.
When asked, parents have confirmed their deep desire and willingness to
work to make education a better place for their children. However, for schools
and communities to work together to create positive and successful educational
experiences for all children will require the willingness of all involved to commit themselves to that goal. This requires envisioning parent involvement as a
different activity altogether. What would parent involvement look like if it were
truly owned and designed by communities of teachers and parents? What would
need to occur for such a complex group of people whose interests often work
against each other to work together in the creation of such a design? A first step

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to developing a collective sensibility, it seems, would involve openly engaging
with “the parent-teacher/administrator struggle over power.”
Further Reading: Coleman, J. S., E. Q. Campbell, C. Hobson, J. McPartland, A. Mood,
F. Weinfeld, & R. York, 1966, Equality of educational opportunity, Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; De Carvalho, M.E.P., 2001, Rethinking family-school relations: A critique of parental involvement in schooling, Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum; Epstein, J. L., 1995, School/family/community partnerships: Caring
for the children we share, Phi Delta Kappan, 76(9), 701–712; Fine, M., 1993, (Ap)parent
involvement: Reflections on parents, power, and urban public schools, Teachers College
Record, 94(4), 682–710; Lareau, A., 1989, Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education, Philadelphia: Falmer; Li, G., 2006, Culturally contested pedagogy: Battles of literacy and schooling between mainstream teachers and Asian
immigrant parents, Albany: State University of New York Press; Lightfoot, S. L., 1978,
Worlds apart: Relationships between families and schools, New York: Basic Books; Moll,
L., & N. González, 1994, Lessons from research with language-minority children, JRB: A
Journal of Literacy, 26, 439–456; Valdés, G., 1996, Con respeto: Bridging the gap between
culturally diverse families and schools, New York: Teachers College Press.

Melissa Freeman
PEDAGOGY
Pedagogy, referring to the art or science of teaching, originates from the
Greek, meaning “to lead the child.” Historically, only male children of upper
class citizens were eligible to attend a school or academy. It is commonly reported that a paidagogos was an enslaved person who walked the master’s
child to school, carrying his books and equipment, but there appears to be
more to this story. Given the openness toward sexuality between younger and
older men in Greek society, an often unreported, and perhaps more important
function of the paidagogos (from the family’s point of view), was to protect
the young student from the sexual advances of his teacher at an inappropriately young age. Later, the Romans emulated Greek social and political institutions, including primary education. Young children of the aristocracy were
still walked to school by a family servant, but Romans referred to the teacher
as the pedagogue.
DIDACTIC PEDAGOGY
The Greeks are credited with many seminal ideas that continue to shape
teaching practices within Western societies, but they, of course, built upon previous cultures. The purpose of education in the early Greek city-states was holistic in a particular sense, as its purpose was to create brave and well-rounded
warriors who were also citizens. Starting around the age of six or seven, young
Greek boys of the aristocracy attended open-air schools called palaestra. Originally intended for gymnastic activities, by the fifth century b.c.e., instruction in
the palaestra included reading, writing, grammar, music and poetry. Character
education has been an enduring pedagogical theme; in particular, Homer’s Iliad

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and Odyssey were used to emphasize arête, that is, the honor gained from
personal heroism.
In evaluating pedagogy over the past 2,500 years, educator Joseph Axelrod
makes a useful distinction between didactic and evocative approaches. Didactic
pedagogy is a craftsman mode of teaching and involves passing on traditional
knowledge and ways of doing things through lectures and demonstrations. Students respond through various forms of recitation exercises, including reading,
writing, and memorization. The implicit assumption of a didactic approach is
that a student must first learn in order to think. This was the pedagogy of the
most primary level until the radical interruptions of educational innovations of
Enlightenment-influenced educators such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friederich
Froebel, and Johann Pestalozzi.
EVOCATIVE PEDAGOGY
A more evocative pedagogy—one whose methods and activities place responsibility on student thinking as a way to learn—has pre-Socratic roots and
occurred at the higher levels of education. A society’s development and use of
an evocative pedagogy is correlated with its social and political structure. Thus,
Athens’s harbor location and its flourishing trade activities resulted in a large
population of craftsmen and merchants. This new class of working people—
economically situated between slaves and aristocrats—increasingly demanded
full citizenship and an education commensurate with this status, well beyond
what was provided for the enslaved. The market for higher studies resulted in
the development of a distinctly professional group of teachers, called “sophists,”
during what came to be considered a Golden Age of Athenian society. The sophists introduced both skepticism and questioning as important pedagogical tools,
and the issues with which they involved their students produced many prominent and enduring philosophers of Western civilization. Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle, for example, are among the better known, but the stories of two who
preceded them, Protagoras and Pythagoras, broadly frame the two competing
pedagogical, cultural, and political traditions that continue today.
Protagoras: A Pedagogy of Challenge
Teachers in Greek city-states customarily made a living by charging fees for
teaching, a practice Protagoras (490–420 b.c.e.) pursued in the towns around
Abdera, a small Ionian colony located in ancient Thrace in Eastern Europe.
Master teachers became known for their “schools of thought,” that is, their
system of beliefs and assertions for defining and explaining the world to students. Most of these early schools of thought were, by definition, limited to
particular ideas and methods. To become and remain an accepted student of
a school, one had to accept its approach. The pedagogy of the Ionian school,
where Protagoras taught, stood in contrast to this closed approach, in terms
of both what knowledge was acceptable, and the method in which students
learned this knowledge.

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Protagoras shook up the religious and cosmological foundation of traditional
Greek society. He was convinced that all humans, once properly instructed, had
the ability to govern themselves. This idea challenged the beliefs and the teachings of the aristocrats, who saw themselves as the sole possessors of the right
to rule. Protagoras’s pedagogy reached into even more dangerous territory by
addressing the practical, arguing that man, and not the Greek pantheon, was
the “measure of all things.” Protagoras emphasized knowledge and skills that
students could use in their personal, social, and political activities. Before him,
only slaves received vocational education, while social and political knowledge
were reserved for the aristocracy.
Protagoras’s pedagogy foreshadowed many of the methods that would reappear with later Enlightenment and Progressive Era educators. He did not view
the development of practical, everyday knowledge as a separate process from
that of developing larger perspectives about the world. Regardless of individual
life experiences, Protagoras recognized the value to everyone of sound thinking
and of being able to speak persuasively. His approach promoted reading, writing, and especially discussion challenging the accepted views of the master or
of the society. Such pedagogical activities for developing a student’s rhetorical
and reasoning abilities are still considered the foundation of a classical liberal
education today.
Pythagoras: Traditionalist Pedagogy
Athenian aristocracy enjoyed the benefits of democracy intermittently for
several hundred years, but it was a democracy reserved for the elite and it
depended on the lower classes’ “knowing their place.” The system was based
on entering the formalized education of the upper class—military leadership
and public service, and for the lower classes on vocational training to perform
needed social functions. But rapid social, economic, and political changes
frightened Greek intellectuals. As a representative of this class and of these
fears, Plato advocates his ideas about government, education, and social justice
in the Republic. Members of Athenian society, including the enslaved, would
come to understand “just behavior” through participating in many social institutions, including religion and education. But within a world that was felt to be
constantly decaying, how could these institutions explain such ideals as justice,
truth, beauty, and goodness?
Pythagoras and his followers used evocative teaching techniques that later
came to be known as the Socratic or Maieutic method. The method of questions and answers placed an emphasis on students thinking their way through
problems; but this method differed in an important way from the one used by
Protagoras. Students of the Pythagorean school were expected to arrive at
“correct” conclusions, that is, those already reached by the master teacher. For
example, to explain how goodness and beauty could exist if the world were
decaying, a student was expected to reach a dualistic view of the world. The
main tenet of this teaching was that the real world (“reality”) is a world of
ideas, which exist permanently and separately from the much more temporary

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world that is physically experienced. The physical world was considered corrupt
and decaying, as were the people in it, unless they strove for the knowledge and
ideals of “reality.” Unfortunately, the Pythagoreans set the bar high for personal
redemption, in claiming that mathematics was the means for reaching this understanding, as mathematics represented knowledge that was available only for
an elite group. These ideas resonate in Plato’s Republic.
A Series of Footnotes to Plato
The distinctions between the pedagogies of Protagoras and Pythagoras are
more than mere differences over the best techniques for teaching. Their differences in approaches to teaching and learning relate to different social and
political ends and, most importantly, represent two different ideologies, that
is, basic beliefs about how humans should organize, and relate to, each other
and the world, usually based on distinctions of social class, religion, and ethnic backgrounds. Protagoras’s approach demonstrates a new pedagogic tradition with a different relationship between the teacher and student that better
complemented the Athenian democracy. That method of deliberately teaching
students how to challenge accepted beliefs was found to be an effective way
to prepare thoughtful, responsible citizens. It was an open method for a more
open society.
Pedagogy, like other human endeavors, reflects politics. In contrast to the
more open Protagorean approach, instruction became increasingly closed and
didactic from the classical Greek period (Socrates, Plato, etc.) to the Renaissance, even at the higher levels. The dogma of church theology replaced the
dogma of the Greek masters. It is often said that most of the writings of Western
civilization are a series of footnotes to Plato. Perhaps it is equally accurate to say
that the most enduring pedagogical tradition in Western civilization is Pythagorean recitation.
RENAISSANCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Like the military and other social institutions, education is essentially a conservative enterprise, and therefore, when times change there is more of a tendency to modify previous approaches than to start from scratch. Thus there was
much continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a time of cultural innovation in the arts and literature that began in fourteenth-century Italy.
During this period that lasted through the sixteenth century, education took a
humanistic turn and there was a revived appreciation of the culture of ancient
Greece and Rome.
While the medieval palace schools remained and Renaissance education continued to be focused on the education of the aristocracy, the emphasis shifted
to education for leadership—leadership in governing as well as in the professions of medicine, law, and ministry. Leadership potential was also recognized
in some of the gifted lower class boys, who often received instruction through
their benefactors. Little thought was yet given to educating girls, although some

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were educated in convents and some at home. At the primary level, instruction
was provided at the palace schools but also by some parish churches and monasteries, as well as by private tutors. Speaking, reading, and writing in Latin, as
well as arithmetic were taught. The main areas for instruction for the aristocracy
were classical literature, theology, and philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, which aimed at cultivating discipline. Some leaders of the period promoted
a broader curriculum that included aesthetics and skill development in other
areas, including managing the economic enterprises of the realm.
During this period, in 1452, came Gutenberg’s printing press, bringing together the existing technologies of paper, oil-based ink, and the wine-press to
print books. However, this important development did not immediately create a
major change in education as the books that were printed were conservative in
content, mainly bibles and other works of antiquity, rather than books with new
ideas. In addition, no distribution network existed for many years to market and
transport books and very few Europeans were literate anyway.
The Enlightenment era (1600s to 1789) originated in France, evolving from
the Renaissance. In this period arose modern science and the idea of individualism—the concept of the supremacy of the individual human mind and its
rationality. In the sixteenth century France differed from the rest of Europe because of the flourishing of its many public, tuition-free classical day schools.
These schools were controlled by local elected officials and staffed by secular
teachers, who often were willing to engage in social critique. During the Enlightenment came a paradigm shift in thinking about education. Now the child’s
development (intellectual, physical, and even emotional) was the goal, nature as
opposed to religion became the focus of studies, and the pedagogy of encouragement replaced that of punishment.
John Locke’s writings on education (1632–1704) were especially influential.
His empiricist belief that ideas emerged from experience (from the senses and
then reflection) countered the older view that rationality was innate. It was
Locke who introduced the idea that the mind at birth was a tabula rasa (blank
slate), which needed experience to develop.
Another towering figure of the period was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–
1778), author of Émile, published in 1773. Rousseau saw education as an essential aspect of the social revolution from authoritarianism to freedom. He
opposed the conformity and conventionality of traditional schooling. He advocated a return to nature. Rousseau’s fellow Swiss countryman, Johann Pestalozzi
(1746–1827), took his ideas further in establishing a school and putting them
into practice. Instead of emphasizing reading and writing, he argued that children should learn through activities and objects and that they should have the
freedom to pursue their own interests. His “object method” popularized the idea
of relating an object of the child’s world to the ideas to be taught. Pestalozzi
valued student spontaneity and autonomy and the education of the whole child,
“hands, heart and head.”
Friederich Froebel (1782–1852) is best known as the founder of the kindergarten. He did not see childhood as the preparation for adulthood, but as
a worthwhile period in its own right. He advocated educational environments

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that involved practical work and “hands-on” materials. He saw children’s play
both as creative activity and as a way that children develop awareness. He developed special materials and teaching methods, such as movement activities. At
first his concern was the teaching of children in the family but he later became
interested in the education of children outside the home.
While these Enlightenment thinkers were influential, particularly at the primary level of schooling, most schools of the nineteenth century continued on
with the traditional curriculum and methods, dominated by recitations and
harsh punishments that produced in many children a disdain for further academic studies. This situation set the stage for the progressive education movement of the twentieth century.
PEDAGOGICAL PROGRESSIVISM
Progressive pedagogy developed as part of a liberal social and political reform movement permeating every major social institution in the United States
from the last part of the nineteenth century into the first 30 years of the twentieth. Revolutionary economic and social transformations were occurring as
the United States went from an agrarian, rural, religious society to one that was
increasingly industrial, urban, and secular. At root, the social unease resulting from these dramatic changes stimulated intellectual leaders at every major
point of society—law, economics, history, education—to join in a new movement of reform. Although there was no one set of principles defining who was a
progressive and who was not, progressives shared a common reform spirit and
discourse, argued against what they considered an excessive formalism of outmoded social institutions and ideas, and, in their various capacities, developed
pragmatic ways to reconstruct American democracy. Both the schools and pedagogy were viewed as a means for doing this.
John Dewey (1859–1952), whose name is most closely associated with progressive education, revolutionized educational theory through his belief that an
inextricable relationship existed between education and democracy, a relationship that pedagogy, accompanied by an understanding of the needs of the child,
could shift toward a greater social good. Dewey and other progressives were not
beginning from scratch. They were influenced by Froebel and Pestalozzi (1782–
1852), who had been among the first to establish a philosophy of educating the
“whole child.”
The child-study movement, which attempted to use scientific methods to examine the “laws” of child development, had been introduced to the United States
from its German antecedents by G. Stanley Hall in the 1880s. Inspired by the
permeating influence of Darwinism in all areas of study, a variety of empirical
methods was used to find these laws, but the unifying theme of this movement
was that the social and behavioral sciences were useful in examining the moral,
cognitive, and physical development of children. All of these were based on Jean
Jacques Rousseau’s early idealizing of the natural, innocent stage of childhood.
Dewey’s educational concern was, at root, a moral one. The industrial change
in society fragmented the production process—the transition to a workplace

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that was separate from where a person lived also removed opportunities for
the young to observe their parents and develop habits of order and thinking by
emulation. The change also removed opportunities for the young to understand
production processes, and to formulate the idea of a personal obligation to produce something useful for the world. Dewey wanted schools that were relevant
to their times and communities, but he found that traditional vocational education was narrowly focusing on the productive capacities of the worker without
considering the larger context. He saw school as an opportunity for a form of active, community life, rather than a narrow, class-based training for work, as the
contemporary divisions of liberal arts and vocational education had made it.
Dewey did not abandon traditional subject matter in the curriculum but built
on it to create an experienced-based curriculum, one developed by students
and teachers in collaboration. In Dewey’s mind, the teacher’s role was a special
one that combined a deep knowledge of and affection for children with upholding the intellectual demands of the subject matter. He admired the contributions
of science in his day and emphasized understanding the methodology of science as a prototype for engaging problem-solving activities with students. He
believed that teaching was always a matter of constructing and applying ideas. The
core of Dewey’s pedagogy of experience-based learning was learning by doing
and thinking, linking home and school, and engaging in inquiry and problem
solving. The kind of learning that Dewey advocated was the kind in which the
child might become aware of how his or her effort has a bearing on society.
He believed that education should help children engage in purposeful behavior
and that their own freedom and democracy in the wider society was contingent
upon children having the opportunity to develop their own purposes through
reflective thought.
The implementation of progressive pedagogy has always been a very challenging, complex task. Dewey created a laboratory school at the University of
Chicago. Other early model progressive schools were Dewey’s student Margaret Naumberg’s Walden School and the Lincoln School, the laboratory school
of Teacher’s College, both in New York City, the Little School in the Woods at
Greenwich, Connecticut, Marietta Johnson’s Organic School in Fairhope, Alabama, and Elizabeth Harrison’s Baker Demonstration School in Evanston, Illinois. Progressive schooling also found expressions in large school systems, such
as the public schools of Gary, Indiana and Winnetka, Illinois.
ADMINISTRATIVE PROGRESSIVISM
Dewey is most often associated with progressive education (especially by
modern critics), but a completely different kind of educational progressivism
actually has had a more enduring impact. While Dewey and his colleagues were
developing a progressive pedagogy that involved a sophisticated consideration
of relating student needs, subject matter, and social ends, a new generation
of school administrators also developed reforms in the name of progressivism. The latter development was completely in tune with the ascendancy in the
1920s of corporate capitalism, which resulted in the growth of bureaucracies,

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regardless of the proclaimed free market ideology. Applying Frederik Taylor’s
ideas of organizational efficiency and E. L. Thorndike’s research on a narrow
stimulus-response approach to intelligence, school leaders and policymakers neglected Dewey’s attempt to relate thinking and doing, but embraced
Thorndike’s theories and the results of his research, which provided them with
“scientific” evidence in favor of administratively controlling techniques such
as testing and grouping and sorting students, and perpetuated existing patterns of educational and social inequities. Because progressivism was such an
overarching reform that focused on deliberately directing knowledge toward
democratic ends, both Dewey and the administrators were able to justify themselves in the name of democracy. In common with Dewey, the administrators
rejected traditional methods of organizing schools. They also relied greatly on
science to support many of their reforms, but unlike Dewey’s progressivism,
their view of science lacked a consideration of epistemology (how one comes
to know) and was narrowly directed toward creating an efficient and centralized system of education based on bureaucratic order, division of responsibilities, and massive use of testing. Their version of schooling was the very version
of industrialization Dewey was responding to, where the ends are separated
from the means.
POSTPROGRESSIVISM
While those on the left see the progressive education movement as a model
for democratic schooling, conservatives like Chester Finn, Arthur Bestor, and
Diane Ravitch claim that the consequence has been a general loss of respect for
authority and a weakening of standards. Two events at mid-century diminished
the reform energy of progressive education.
First, as part of the anticommunist fervor of Joseph McCarthy, educational
critics tirelessly charged that progressive educators were responsible for promoting weak, anti-intellectual education. To some extent these critics could point to
the effects of the depoliticized Life Adjustment movement of the 1940s which
adopted child-centeredness as its theoretical core to justify organizing schools
based on the personal, physical, and emotional readiness of students to acquire
industrious habits of mind. However, this could not have been further from
Dewey’s moral vision of progressive education.
Second, in the aftermath of the successful launching of Sputnik by the Soviets, reformers garnered public support to make American schools more rigorous, particularly in the areas of mathematics and science, and, eventually, in
all areas of the curriculum. From the late 1950s until the end of the 1970s, the
pedagogy of teachers in the United States was influenced by the infusion of massive amounts of federal money through the National Science Foundation and
other federal agencies. Scholars in every field were involved in K–12 innovations. “Hands-on” curriculum kits and resource materials were introduced for
“discovery,” “inquiry,” and “concept” learning; unfortunately, little support was
provided for professional development about these new methods for the teachers, with evaluative studies showing that most teachers ended up using materials

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for the “new” math, science, and social studies in the same manner as they had
used the old materials, that is, through lecture and recitation, toward the goal
that students could recall the information.
A RETROSPECTIVE ON PEDAGOGY
When asked to summarize pedagogical developments since the post-Sputnik
era, the more experienced teachers will often mention the recurrence of educational fads, such as management by objectives (MBO) and outcomes-based
education (OBE). Regardless of the introduction of instructional innovations,
vestiges of administrative progressivism continue to shape the organization of
American schools and, consequently, the working pedagogies of teachers. A few
examples will suffice, including the beliefs that:
• schooling is organized to maximize learning
• educational reforms are progressive improvements
• a “normal curve” is a statistically useful tool for measuring educational
progress
And, one tightly embraced by “progressive” minded administrators, that
• Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives scientifically describes a hierarchy of thought
Critics point out that each of these beliefs involve, at best, some combination
of wishful thinking or pseudoscience. They argue that these ideas justify the selection, sorting, and grading of students along class, race, and gender lines.
Advocates point to the positive effects of these ideas in making a mass education system both possible and effective. Beginning in the mid-1980s, there has
been a resurgence of administrative progressivism. Echoing some of the same
concerns about rapidly changing economic needs, contemporary pedagogical
practices are increasingly shaped by the language of neoliberal global market
policies such as “accountability,” “standardization,” and “efficiency.” What does
all this mean for teaching and learning?
First, federal- and state-mandated standardized testing imposes an impression that students are responsible for learning large quantities of content within
a prescribed period of time. Increasing the pressure on teachers to “cover” all
the material on the annual standardized test contributes to teachers feeling the
need to employ didactic rather than evocative methods of teaching. A teacher’s
decision to go in depth in any one subject creates insecurity that the rest of the
required material will be compromised.
Second, it leads to a deskilling of teachers as professionals. Increasingly, both
the specific curricula and strategies for instruction are being selected and prescribed for teachers and school districts. This eliminates the judgments a teacher
makes about both the ideas to be taught, and the methods of teaching. Many
teachers fear that if they deviate significantly, their job may be endangered.
Third, a resurgence of the influence of textbooks has further restricted teacher
autonomy and professionalism. Textbooks now embody complete programs of

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Pedagogy

learning—workbooks, activities, intended standards, strategies to follow, supplemental media, and Web-based resources, as well as what student outcomes
to expect.
One might infer that the pedagogical practices teachers feel forced into because of government regulation are reflective of the closed schools of thought
once promulgated by teachers such as Pythagoras. By ignoring substantial developments in scholarship about teaching and learning, these practices narrow the
relationships between students and teachers, and, equally important, between
students and knowledge.
A PROSPECTIVE ON PEDAGOGY
“Child-study” is no longer the focus it once was in educational psychology,
but the rapid developments in cognitive studies offer significant insights into
how learning occurs, and how teaching relates to it. For example, as pioneers
in the most recent “constructivist” movement in education, mathematics and
science educators have made use of research into “conceptual change theory.”
Harvard’s Project Zero has been the conceptual birthplace of significant developments for pedagogy, including Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and
David Perkins’s pedagogical proposal for “smart schools,” which begin with the
understanding that student thinking brings about student learning. While not
diminishing the usefulness of memory, Perkins directly challenges its overemphasis in traditional pedagogy, at the expense of developing a student’s thinking
abilities. Since his involvement in the post-Sputnik education reforms, Bruner’s
work on the development of the mind has further discredited behaviorist theories and pedagogical techniques. His introduction of Lev Vygotsky’s research to
American educators has made the co-construction of knowledge a major tenet
of learning and teaching, magnifying the importance of social and cultural pedagogical components.
And, finally, the politics of pedagogy has assumed an increasingly important
role. Social and cultural events have encouraged the development of a more
evocative pedagogy. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped
make the political roles of schooling more obvious. Heightened cultural awareness has also fostered more attention to both the “null” and “hidden” curricula of
schooling, such as the omission of certain cultures and groups. The educational
work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, along with the intellectual and critical
pedagogy of educators such as Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren are helping
contemporary educators to recognize how the political, as well as the social and
cultural, is involved in every teaching act. Critical theorists argue that the fragmentation of curriculum and instruction negatively affects one’s consciousness
and the development of thinking. For example, Jonathan Kozol points to how
students are socialized to avoid making inferences or finding relationships between phenomena. The curricular fragmentation that has been so exaggerated by
the administrative progressivism of today’s standards-based, high-stakes testing
has political ramifications in terms of distracting students (and citizens) from a
greater awareness of the global ecological crisis and an analysis of social reality.

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Like Dewey, many of the early progressive educators were utopian in aspiring
to a more just society. Their ideals of respect for the child and his or her ability
to learn, and that teaching and learning ought be enjoyable and inspired, are still
worth our emulation today.
Further Reading: Ducharme, E. R., M. K. Ducharme, & M. J. Dunkin, 2002, Teacher education, in J. W. Gutherie (ed.), Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 7 (pp. 2438–2448), New
York: Macmillan Reference, USA; Gardner, H., 1985, The minds new science: A history
of the cognitive revolution, New York: Basic Books; Gay, G., 2000, Culturally responsive
teaching, New York: Teachers College Press; Harmin, M., & M. Toth, 2006, Inspiring
active learning: A complete handbook for today’s teachers, expanded 2nd ed., Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; Kincheloe, J. L.,
S. Steinberg, & P. H. Hinchey, 1999, The post formal reader: Cognition and education,
New York: Falmer Press; Loss, C. G., & C. P. Loss, 2002, Progressive education, in J. W.
Gutherie (ed.), Encyclopedia of Education, vol. 5, 1933–1938, New York: MacMillan Reference, USA; Smith, L. G., & J. K. Smith, 1994, Lives in education: A narrative of people
and ideas, New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Stephen C. Fleury and Michael L. Bentley

PHYSICAL EDUCATION
THE PURPOSE OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION
From a historical perspective, perhaps nothing has been more cyclic in the
field of physical education than issues surrounding the purpose of physical education programs. Physical education programs have their roots in health. The
idea that their purpose lies in the health benefits of physical activity and fitness
is pervasive throughout our history, gaining momentum with each war and national health crisis. In between these times, broader perspectives encompassing
social and emotional development, quality of life issues, and the notion that participation in sport and physical activity provides opportunities for children and
adults to participate in our culture gain prominence. While most physical educators see health as the product of a good program and not the purpose of a good
program, clearly, the public attaches great importance to health and perceives
health benefits as the primary purpose of physical education programs.
Recently the field has reached some consensus on the notion of education for
a physically active lifestyle as the primary purpose of school programs. National
attention given to the health problems caused by a physically inactive population has served to propel this orientation to the forefront and has allowed health,
sport, and affectively oriented perspectives on physical education programs to
come together under one purpose. As with most slogan systems, the devil is in
the details and there is no real consensus on what constitutes an effective program designed to educate students for a physically active lifestyle.
Professionals have sought to focus and preserve the purpose of physical education as an education for a physically active lifestyle, both as students and
the adults they will become. Sometimes this goal conflicts with the notions that

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physical education should provide students with vigorous physical activity during
the school day, since education for a physically active lifestyle does not always
involve participation in vigorous physical activity. The national physical education content standards have taken the position that program goals related to the
development of motor skills, and knowledge about activity, fitness, participation
in physical activity, and social skills are all important to the development of a
physically active lifestyle.
Physical education programs have also struggled with their close affiliation
with athletics and sport. Many potential health advocates and nonathletes have
failed to see the value of traditional goals of physical education programs, particularly the idea of developing motor skill competencies. The profession defends
its stance on motor skill competency, citing the idea that children who are active
are largely those participating in youth sports, and adults who are physically
active are largely those who have been active youth. However, the profession
does not support traditional programs dominated by team sports that require
the development of complex motor skills. Recent curricular directions of physical education programs have instead sought to reach the nonparticipant by expanding curricular offerings to different kinds of movement activities and those
that do not require high levels of complex motor skills. For example, it is not uncommon to see dance, fitness activities, adventure activities, individual sports,
martial arts, and activities such as in-line skating as part of today’s secondary
physical education programs. It is also not uncommon to see programs focus on
helping students make the transition to participation outside of physical education class by working together with community resources for participation, and
providing students with the skills to assess their own fitness levels and develop
personal goals in that regard.
Another recent development spawned by the physical activity crisis in the
country has been to replace education oriented curriculums (those that teach
the skills, knowledge, and dispositions to be physically active) with physical activity programs that provide students opportunities to be physically active without necessarily educating them to be so. For both elementary and secondary
physical education teachers using the physical activity approach, participation
in physical activity, interest, and enjoyment are believed to be the avenue to
guide students toward being physically active later in life.
THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PHYSICAL EDUCATION PROGRAM
In the early 1900s when secondary physical education was primarily based on
physical training, calisthenics, and fitness activities, physical education at the elementary level rarely existed. Recess was the only form of physical activity provided children in the school day. When many school systems across the country
included elementary physical education it was often in response to finding a way
to provide release or planning time for classroom teachers rather than providing
quality physical education to children. In most situations physical education was
nothing more than supervised play time that really required few teaching skills
and little content. The primary goal was for children to have an opportunity to

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release energy. As the demand for elementary physical education increased, so
too did the demand for structured, quality programs.
Early elementary school physical education curriculums either focused on
low organization games (playground games) or were watered down versions of
secondary sports programs. In some places these programs still exist. Recent
national policy documents over the past few decades have defined developmentally appropriate curriculum design:
1. Secondary curriculum is not appropriate at the elementary level as the
curriculum should instead match the developmental levels of the students
taught.
2. Content focus should be on the basic motor skill development in the areas
of games, gymnastics, and dance.
3. Games are selected to assist children’s learning, skill attainment, and enjoyment but never as ends within themselves.
4. Fitness should be interwoven in the content with goals for enjoyment,
understanding of the components of fitness, and an understanding of the
health benefits as opposed to fitness through formal exercises and calisthenics.
5. Content selection should aim toward increasing activity and learning time.
Small sided teams, appropriate amount and size equipment for all students, tasks designed in a progression as well as designed to meet the differing levels of students, and minimal wait times are crucial to the content
delivery.
Differing philosophical perspectives on what content is best for elementary
children will continue to exist in our country due to the flexibility that accompanies a standards-based approach. These philosophical differences are evident
through the variety of elementary physical education programs across the United
States, the teacher education programs that present one approach over the other,
and, more recently, the use of packaged programs trying to “sell” the content to
be used in physical education. In essence, this is the topic that promotes controversial dialogue today and will continue into the next few decades.
SPECIALISTS VERSUS NONSPECIALISTS
A question that has spurred sustained study and some controversy concerns
the value of a certified physical education specialist. The issue is most relevant
at the elementary school level, where certified physical education specialists are
commonly recommended but by no means universal throughout the states. In
cases where specialists are not hired to teach physical education, the onus of
responsibility tends to shift instead to the classroom teacher.
Can nonspecialists facilitate program goals as effectively as physical education
specialists? Do specialists make a difference in the quantity and quality of teaching and learning in physical education? Answering these questions is important
for a wide audience, including those allocating resources for training and hiring physical education teachers. Central to the idea of program effectiveness in

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physical education is an orientation toward creating conditions for optimal student
learning and growth toward a physically active lifestyle. Many argue that realizing this goal requires teachers of physical education to possess specialized values,
knowledge, and skills in physical education curriculum and instruction. From
this perspective, the physical education specialist should have an advantage over
the nonspecialist in developing and maintaining an effective program.
The overall trend indicates that specialists provide better physical education
than nonspecialists. Presently, the goal of physical education to facilitate growth
toward a physically active lifestyle requires teachers to provide students with
maximum opportunities for motor skill learning and appropriate levels of physical activity. Studies of elementary schools have found that specialists focused
more on teaching skills as opposed to playing games, allowed for more time on
skill practice, and produced higher levels of student activity, energy expenditure,
and fitness. In contrast, classroom teachers used less effective and less productive teaching behaviors (e.g., limited interaction with and monitoring of students during activity), minimally engaged students in activity, and had negative
attitudes toward teaching physical education.
Longitudinal research suggests that, with specialized training, classroom
teachers can learn to provide more quality physical education, although certified physical education teachers still produce the best results. Since it is not currently realistic to ensure that all schools be equipped with physical education
specialists, an important measure being taken is the incorporation of physical
education training for preservice classroom teachers. Such training provides the
classroom teacher with both a framework for teaching motor skills effectively
and the means for increasing students’ daily activity levels closer to recommended amounts. Although the classroom teacher can be looked to as a source
for providing physical activity during the school day, it is unlikely that limited
training can prepare this teacher to effectively teach motor skills, and effective
physical education programs will be dependent on the extent to which children
receive instruction from a specialist.
GENDER ISSUES
An ecosystem is at work in the classroom environment, wherein a web of relationships builds and breaks according to the interplay of professional practices
and personal beliefs. In physical education, a major focus of inquiry concerns
itself with classroom ecology and the positioning and function of gender in the
teaching-learning process. Although the need for gender equity in modern education has pervaded U.S. schools for well over 100 years, it was not until the
1960s that the issue received widespread attention through the women’s liberation movement. Title IX was created in 1972 to give equal rights in education
to girls and boys, and soon afterward, physical education guidelines were established specifying that classes be coeducational and that boys and girls receive
the same education and equal treatment. However, this approach has mostly
failed to accomplish the goals that presuppose it. In fact, it may even have exacerbated the problem, since within this context, girls must struggle to succeed

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amid curricular and instructional conditions that preserve and propagate a male
dominant hegemony.
Since the mid-twentieth century, the physical education curriculum has typically revolved around sports, games, and activities that cater to a dominant form
of masculinity, privileging boys with characteristically “male” physical and social dispositions (e.g., strong, aggressive, “macho”). By and large, this type of
curriculum has sustained itself, even where the shift from gender-separated to
gender-integrated classes has occurred. Girls, and boys, who do not fit this prototypical male profile, are forced to contend with a masculine-charged climate
that is both restrictive and retrograde in an educational sense. Girls inclined toward participation in this type of curriculum have had difficulty gaining access
to, finding acceptance in, or acquiring legitimacy among its empowered male
members. A girl who displays masculine characteristics and strives for excellence in sports traditionally played by males is likely to meet with some scrutiny
and even some derision. Thus, the culture created by such a curriculum reasserts socially constructed views of gender appropriateness.
A “hidden curriculum” is also at play in physical education classes. A number of research perspectives have shed light on the implicit curricular and instructional choices physical education teachers make, which convey gendered
beliefs and may produce powerful effects on student self-efficacy and achievement. Two prominent examples of such perspectives are research on the effect
of teacher expectations on teacher behavior and student learning, termed “the
Pygmalion Effect,” and research on girls’ and boys’ participation patterns in
physical education classes. It is clear that physical education teachers interact
with boys and girls differently in accordance with perceptions of ability, which
are based on gender. In short, a belief that boys are more capable than girls in
physical education leads teachers to develop higher, more skill-based expectations for boys and lower, more effort-based expectations for girls. It is also clear
that boys participate in class more actively and with higher success than girls,
although some girls may enjoy both the physical and social challenges presented
in coeducational physical education.
While there is no easy solution to achieving gender equity in school physical education, some professionals believe the right move is returning to single
gender classes and some programs have done so. The most promising path to
take, however, may be that leading to a more flexible and more inclusive curriculum. There is some evidence that girls are responding positively to the push
for increased physical activity outside of school, but a broader, more diverse curriculum must be put in place for both girls and boys to receive a fair and equal
chance at receiving quality physical education.
MARGINALIZATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY
IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION
Turn on any movie or cartoon depicting a physical education teacher or
coach and you have evidence of marginalization. Typically this character is overweight, boisterous, blows a whistle every few seconds, and of course, is having

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the class play dodge ball, kickball, or climb the dreaded rope to the ceiling. On
the surface, these stereotypes might seem harmless and even humorous, but on
a deeper level they push physical education to the fringes of school culture and
discourse, widening the rift between attention and resources provided to core
subject areas and what is allocated to physical education programs.
In recent history, this divide has continued to grow in response to high stakes
assessment and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Placing increased emphasis on certain core academic content areas has resulted in a decrease in time
or total elimination of physical education in many states or school systems.
Despite the research stating 95 percent of parents and 92 percent of teens believe
physical education should be included in the school curriculum, only 35 states
mandate the number of high school credits required for a student to graduate.
Nationwide, middle and elementary school time allotted to physical education varies by length of class time, number of meetings per week, and duration
within the year (9 weeks only, one semester, etc.). The Guidelines for Elementary Physical Education (NASPE, 1994) recommend that class size for elementary physical education should be consistent with that of the classroom teacher,
and the length of the class time should match the developmental level of the
learners. A suggested guideline is 30 minutes for grades K–2 and 45 minutes for
grades three and up with a total time of 150 minutes per week. Guidelines for
secondary schools recommend 225 minutes per week. However, only 8 percent
of elementary, 6.4 percent of middle, and 5.8 percent of high schools meet this
recommendation.
The focus in schools on core subjects seems to be a complacency among administrators about what goes on in physical education as long as no one gets
injured. Within this system of priorities, physical education teachers have rarely
been held accountable for the quality of their teaching. On report cards, grades
in certain core areas carry more weight and physical education is often a pass or
fail grade. Only 22 states require physical education to be included in a student’s
grade point average. This alone informs the student and parents that physical
education does not “count.” In many states, secondary schools allow substitutions such as marching band (11 states), ROTC (18), and athletics (17) as replacements for instructional physical education. In elementary schools, physical
education is often viewed by teachers and administrators as release time for
classroom teachers to plan as well as an avenue for children to release energy.
The instructional benefits of a quality physical education program are often
overlooked.
The marginalization of physical education has been sustained with the lack of
accountability at all levels for good programs. Unlike classroom teachers, physical education teachers and programs are largely not accountable for student
learning. Parents are unaware of expectations for student learning or the quality
of the program their students are receiving. At the secondary level many physical educators serve a double role as both teacher and coach. While teaching
is the primary professional responsibility for which the individual is hired,
coaching is often seen as the more important role. The results of effective
coaching receive widespread attention and acclaim and are easily identifi able

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across society. Win/loss records are reported by the media, making the performance of the coach visible to the public and measurable in common terms. In
contrast, the results of effective physical education teaching remain little noticed
or largely unidentifiable on a scale large enough to create accountability.
Often, the result of marginalization and a lack of accountability is teacher
complacency, burnout, or a change in professions. In order to be accountable,
clear program outcomes and ways to measure those outcomes need to be established. The national professional organizations, states, and local districts are
beginning to move in this direction, but progress is slow. Because physical education programs are institutionalized as marginalized subjects and the present
focus on academic excellence is so pervasive, accountability may need to be established with state, district, and school policy.
Further Reading: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and
Dance, 2003, Shape of the nation, Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance; National Association for Sport and Physical
Education, 2000, Appropriate practices for elementary physical education, Reston, VA:
National Association for Sport and Physical Education; National Association for Sport
and Physical Education, 2001, Appropriate practices for middle school physical education, Reston, VA: National Association for Sport and Physical Education; National
Association for Sport and Physical Education, 2004, Appropriate practices for high
school physical education, Reston, VA: National Association for Sport and Physical
Education; National Association for Sport and Physical Education, 2004, Moving into
the future: National content standards for physical education, 2nd ed., Reston, VA:
National Association for Sport and Physical Education.

Judith Rink, Tina Hall, and Collin Webster
POPULAR CULTURE AND SCHOOLS
If one considers the Ancient Greek Lyceum as a form of institutionalized
schooling, then the tension between schools and popular culture has existed for
at least 2,400 years. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates, speaking through the words
of Plato, argues that poetry should be outlawed from their utopic city experiment. Socrates was critical of poetry because the poets, in their public performances, openly criticized his ideas. Plato wrote for Socrates, because the latter
believed the written word was a poor imitation of truth and numbed the mind
while speech was an authentic imitation of truth. Just as the written word was
removed from truth, poets were as well. The poets rarely spoke in their own
voices, choosing instead to put words in the mouths of Greek gods and Athenian
heroes. Today, critics of hip-hop artists make the same claim. Critics assert rappers rarely use their own words and steal the songs of other musicians.
Socrates’s complaints about popular culture did not stop there. In the final
book of The Republic, Socrates warns that poetry lowers the intellectual abilities
of even the best scholars. Poetry appeals to the base of all human beings and
does nothing to elevate our abilities to discern. Perhaps even worse for Socrates,
poetry, like painting, is not original in its creation, easily fooling the masses into
believing their works of art are real or representations of reality. The debates

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Socrates had with his students and critics still remain a major part of criticism
against popular culture today and all of the twentieth century. When studying
history from the Ancient Greeks to the present there is a cyclical response to
new modes of popular expression. As a new mode of popular culture emerges it
is instantaneously dismissed. This dismissal is then followed by dire warnings of
a decline in tastes and the intellectual abilities of young people.
During the twentieth century new forms of mass communication including
comic books, cinema, television, music, popular literature, and video games
have increased access to newer and more exciting forms of entertainment. As
each of these forms of popular expression emerged and were disseminated, critics of popular culture warned that these new mediums would dumb the masses
down because most people are unable to understand the meanings of popular
culture. Just as Socrates viewed his city as the haven against crass popular culture, many critics of popular culture view public schooling as a haven from the
anti-intellectual nature of new forms of mass communication. Unfortunately,
rarely has anyone argued that individuals possess the intellectual abilities to discern the meanings of popular culture and that schools need not try to outlaw
popular culture from their compounds. The reality is schools have failed, and
will continue to fail, in limiting the impact of popular culture on the minds of
young people. But alas, schools continue with their futile efforts.
When the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, showed their short film of
an arriving train at a Paris train station, some spectators fled the darkened theater thinking a train was actually bursting through the screen. Even when the
cinema became more common and popular in the early 1900s, people went up
to the screen and poked it, thinking someone was actually there. Viewers sometimes threw debris at the screen, thinking they were at a theater performance of
live actors and showing their dismay for a poor performance. Ever since these
early experiences, people have suspended their beliefs and assumed what they
were viewing on a screen was actually a real life experience. Suspending belief
while at the movies is an essential part of the reality of cinematic viewing and a
major reason why people continue to enjoy going to the movies. Unfortunately,
critics of film have interpreted this suspension of disbelief as a sure sign that
films will dupe many into believing what they see is reality, giving movie producers seductive powers over the minds of the gullible and naive. The first major
critics of film were Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. While others, such
as Rudolph Arnheim and Erwin Panofsky, interpreted film as a new form of art,
Adorno and Horkheimer warned that film was nothing more than a distraction
from real issues that plagued the working class. Film, for these famous critics,
was the main way the rich and powerful duped the masses into accepting the
unequal distribution of wealth and power.
The idea that films negatively shaped the minds of young people did not escape school officials. For many years schools simply refused to show films in the
classroom until more suitable “educational films” were created to “educate” the
young about various topics, including safe driving, the evils of drugs and sex, and
the proper behavior of young people in society. These films lacked artistic value
and can be classified simply as propaganda films. As a result, most young people

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gained an understanding of current events through newsreels shown before a
feature film in the local theater, thus setting a trend for students learning more
from popular culture and less from their formal schooling experiences.
Recently, teachers have begun to use films to teach various subjects, including literature, science, and history, but this has not been accomplished without
controversy and suspicion of films. It is most common, and least controversial,
to use films as a supplement to a book. The assumption, however, is that the film
is inferior to a book and sometimes considered a threat to the book in general.
There are wonderful examples of films that introduce cutting-edge work in the
sciences, such as Jurassic Park, dealing with chaos theory and the latest theories
about dinosaurs, Gattaca about genetics, Frequency, a film with Jim Caviesel and
Dennis Quaid, about time travel and String Theory, or Johnny Neumonic, a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick, about information technology and data
storage. All of these films introduce students to current scientific theories. The
problem and controversy is that school science curriculum rarely covers these
topics or covers them in such a uncontroversial and sterile way that students get
a better understanding of science from films rather than the classroom.
Usually controversies surround films dealing with historical events. When
D. W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation, premiered in 1915, Woodrow Wilson praised it as an accurate portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and Reconstruction, while many African Americans rose up in protest to condemn obvious
stereotypes of African Americans as lazy and a threat to white women. A recent
controversy surrounded Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Spielberg created this
film to raise the historical awareness of young people in the United States who
were not being educated about the Holocaust. Because of this concern, he paid
for many young people to see the film. Some parents in Boston objected to their
children attending a viewing because the film contained nudity, and schools refused to show the film in class for the same reason. What parents and schools
refused to accept is that the Holocaust represents the total denial of the German
people to accept Jews as human beings, and one way to take away the Jewish
people’s dignity as humans was to strip them of their clothing. The assumption
behind the rationale of parents and schools was that all nudity in films was done
for one reason and one reason only: titillation and exploitation. They were afraid
students would be exposed to human sexuality before they were physiologically
and mentally ready. Parents and schools were unable to see that there are many
different nuances to the human body and many ways that film, as an art form,
can represent the human body. While Spielberg wished to show the complete
loss of human dignity, some parents and schools were not sophisticated, or educated, enough to see the complexity of Spielberg’s artistic message. As a result,
schools again remained outside the educational experiences of young people.
Comic books were even more controversial when they emerged as an important part of mass culture. Between the 1930s and 1950s, comic books were
read by millions of adolescents. Unlike today, they did not just include historical staples that children still read today like Batman, Superman, and Wonder
Woman. There were numerous comics that dealt with real crime stories and
graphic violence. As the popularity of comic books grew, so did parental alarm

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and hysteria. By the late 1940s adults viewed comic books as the cause of the
rise in juvenile delinquency including suicides, murders, and petty robberies.
Some of the most famous cases included a case in Oklahoma where two adolescent boys stole an airplane. When they landed safely, they told authorities they
learned to fly from comic books. In other cases, the comic book Superman was
blamed for numerous incidences in which young boys were injured trying to
flying as they leapt out of windows.
As the hysteria toward comic books grew, Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist,
lobbied Congress and the American public to censor comic books. He claimed
comic books could be causally linked to the rise of juvenile delinquency and
seriously undermined the authority of parents. He also suggested that comic
books preached racial hatred and gender superiority. As he noted, every hero in
comic books was a white male, while every villain was either of Jewish, Asian,
Slavic, or African descent, and women were portrayed as submissive and sexual
objects. Wertham urged Congress to censor, and schools to ban, comic books.
Both institutions were more than eager to do so. As a result, the comic book industry experienced a short decline in sales, only to rebound by the late 1950s.
Critics of Wertham, however, did emerge. The comic book industry countered with its own experts to testify that comic books cannot be linked causally
with the rise in juvenile crimes. When the comic book industry finally submitted to some publishing guidelines to curtail some of the more graphic and lurid
comic books, they sarcastically issued a statement proclaiming that with this episode behind them they, like all Americans, looked forward to the dramatic decline in juvenile crimes. The major critic of Wertham was Robert Warshow, who
was one of the first intellectuals to write with some respect for popular culture.
Along with Gilbert Seldes, Warshow saw that popular culture had some artistic
experiences to offer the mass audience. He recognized that comic books were
crude and base at times, but he doubted Wertham’s causal claims. Warshow’s
most interesting criticism of Wertham was the tendency of Wertham to use the
same sensationalistic and base hyperbole that comic books used to gain the attention of adolescents. Warshow referred to Wertham’s report on comic books,
titled Seduction, as a comic book for adults. The title was meant to draw parents
in, and once they were inside the report the pages would grip their imaginations and spur them to act against the comic book industry. Warshow successfully demonstrated that when it comes to popular culture, adults overreact and
hysterically accuse young people of succumbing to their visceral and hormonal
emotions when it is, in fact, the adults who are acting in such a manner. As we
saw with Socrates and later will see with popular music and video games, this
moral panic among adults is not uncommon when the topic of discussion is
popular culture.
Although not as controversial as comic books, television since its inception
has been criticized as a dangerous form of popular culture. Couched strangely
inside a group of essays on film as art is an essay Rudolph Arnheim wrote on
television in 1935. In this prophetic essay Arnheim suggests that television has
the potential to either elevate the imaginative abilities of people or numb their
minds. Given that television was 15 years away from any actual programming,

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Arnheim was astute to capture one of the major concerns about this medium.
This debate continues today as scholars debate the effect of television on young
people. The argument has not changed over the years, only the programming. In
the 1960s, the Public Broadcasting Service was created because concerned citizens worried that television did not offer any educational programs. Today, the
concern is over the violent nature of television and the mind-numbing reality
television shows. Public schools generally have stayed clear of any of the debates
around television. Instead they have relied on public television programming
or noncontroversial documentaries to help educate young people. This benign
stance helps schools avoid any more controversy than what they already experience because of accountability and performance-based testing. However, this
stance also assures that schools will remain disconnected from one of the major
debates about television: what is the role of television in a democracy?
Historically, the airwaves through which television corporations transmitted
their programming were considered public. As a result, corporations had a sense
of duty to dedicate some of their creative powers and air time to public programming. With the advent of cable, this mindset no longer exists. The airwaves are
still considered public domain, but there is no longer a sense of duty to respect
this public domain. Instead, any vestige of public airwaves has been relegated
to public access television and C-SPAN (a small gift from cable companies who
have made billions from public airwaves). Schools can remedy the decline of
corporate responsibility and the decline of a democratic ethos by teaching students about the power of television to enhance public values and democratic
ideals. In a fascinating interview with Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher Jacques
Derrida was asked what people should do with television. More than anything,
Derrida suggested that young people and adults should be taught how to create
with, and from, television production equipment. Television should not be left in
the hands of corporate producers, but young people should be taught in school
how to use the equipment and how to use the airwaves to express their views
and become a part of a great democratic conversation. Unfortunately, schools
continue to approach television with suspicion and believe television does not
have anything of value to offer the intellectual development of young people. As
a result, young people continue to view television mainly as a device that entertains rather than one that creates and stimulates. While television will always
serve as a mode of entertainment, schools need to realize its power to educate.
Along with comic books, music is perhaps the most controversial of all forms
of popular culture in schools. The British Punk rock group Pop Will Eat Itself
has an interesting song titled PWEI vs. The Moral Majority. The song begins with
a preacher citing Plato, Aristotle, and Lenin, who stress the power music has to
change the will of the people. The minister is correct, music has power. Traditionally, public schools have been very suspicious of the influence of music on
the young. With the rise of jazz in the early part of the twentieth century, schools
have periodically banned music from schools. Today is no different except the
form of music has changed. Replacing jazz and rock and roll is rap. Rap has become a target ever since Ice T produced the song “Fuck the Police” in 1991. Listening to the song, one hears Ice T warn at the beginning that what he is about

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to sing is what he hears on the streets of urban centers throughout America.
Ignoring Ice T’s anthropological statement, critics such as William Bennett and
Charlton Heston demanded that concerned parents boycott Ice T’s producer
Columbia Records. Bennett and Heston argue that lyrics such as Ice T’s advocate
the killing of police officers, and if young people hear these words they may just
do as Ice T suggests. When asked if he had listened to the song, Bennett said no.
Bennett’s response is a common one when it comes to all forms of popular culture and presents a common bind for critics. If one does not listen to the music
then how can one comment on the meaning of the lyrics?
Since 1991 schools have banned almost every dimension of hip-hop culture.
Rap music continues to be banned not only because it supposedly advocates violence but because it promotes misogyny and drug use. Hip-hop dress has also
been banned, because baggy pants, for instance, are viewed as an easy way to
smuggle weapons into schools. Such a draconian response to a popular culture
movement reduces hip-hop culture to one particular genre of rap: gangsta rap.
While there are many songs that appear violent, are misogynist, and speak of
drug use, there are just as many that contain insightful messages for social justice and other positive messages. Houston Baker, who is a professor of English
at Duke University, goes as far to suggest that rap is an exciting way to teach literature. He cites a visit he took to a British public school in which he argued that
Shakespeare was the first rapper. The young people, through rap, became interested in Shakespeare’s writings. Their teachers meanwhile told Baker before his
talk that these young people would never be interested in reading Shakespeare.
Rap became the conduit through which young people saw the importance and
value in reading good literature.
While the uproar against rap music has simmered recently, video games have
now taken the forefront in the struggle to regulate popular culture in schools.
Some video games, such as SimCity, have been adopted as learning tools, and
there are plenty of educational video games that teachers utilize in elementary
school especially. However, there is a concern that some video games, such
as the series of games called Grand Theft Auto, promotes violence and numbs
young people to the effects of violence. The argument against such games is the
same one used to condemn music and comic books: if young people play too
many video games, then they will do what they see in these games. If this logic
is true, then it is important to ask why more cases of video-induced violence
are not springing up all over the place in the United States and other countries
such as Japan? The reality is if video games cause violence then these cases are
statistically insignificant and dwarf in comparison to other causes of adolescent
violence such as bullying and parental abuse. In all of these debates, very few
parents and school officials ask young people what they think about the controversy. The uproar over the effects of video games represents another case of
parents and schools overreacting to a form of popular culture they know very
little about.
The last struggle between popular culture and schools deals with what the
educational scholar Dianne Smith refers to as unpopular popular fiction. Perhaps more than any form of popular culture, this struggle over fiction is the

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most lasting in the realm of schools. One can trace recent roots to the early
1900s, when schools attempted to ban any science textbook that painted a favorable picture of evolution. This debate continues with the rise of the latest scheme
called intelligent design, which is nothing more than creationism renamed. The
most famous case of banning popular fiction is the controversy around J. D. Salinger’s 1945 story The Catcher in the Rye. This book has been banned in numerous states because parents and schools argue that it contains foul language and
promotes student apathy. Most people who take the time to read the book cannot deny the use of profanity and can conclude that its main character, Holden,
is indeed apathetic. However, one can also interpret the book as a struggle of
one young man to make sense out of a strange world as he tries to become an
adult. By banning the book, schools once again have set the precedence that
public education is not a place where young people learn about themselves and
the world or where interesting, and sometimes controversial, ideas are debated. Instead it is a place, aptly described by Salinger himself, where people are stifled
and stymied from intellectual curiosity and social development.
Controversies over unpopular popular fiction continue with such books as
Bastard out of Carolina, over incest, and the Harry Potter series, over the alleged
promotion of witchcraft. These two cases will certainly not be the last, nor will
music, films, television, and video games remain uncontroversial. It will be hard
to predict when and where the next struggle between schools and popular culture
will emerge, but it is certain that parents and schools will continue adhering to
the Platonic tradition of banning popular culture from schools in fear that if
young people hear or see something they will mimic it.
Further Reading: Baker, H., 1993, Black studies, rap and the academy, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press; Bloom, A. (trans.), 1991, The Republic of Plato, New York: Basic Books;
Daspit, T., & J. A. Weaver (eds.), 2000, Popular culture and critical pedagogy, New York:
Routledge Press; Seldes, G., 1924, The seven lively arts, Mineola, NY: Dover Books; Spigel, L., 1992, Make room for TV, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Warshow, R.,
2001, The immediate experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Wright, B.,
2001, Comic book nation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

John A. Weaver and Leslie B. Mashburn

PROGRESSIVISM
Progressivism is a term used to refer to a particular approach to education,
associated with a broad reform movement that began in the closing years of
the nineteenth century in the United States, and extended through the first six
decades of the twentieth century. Progressivism, or progressive education, was
a source of controversy and conflict almost from its beginning, engendering debates about teaching and learning, and basic principles of human development.
Embracing a broadly humanistic conception of the educational process, progressivism has long been linked in the popular mind with the idea (or slogan)
of “child centered” schooling, where curricula and instruction are guided by the
interests of students. Traditional educators often critiqued such approaches as

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being “soft” on standards, and pandering to the whims and impulses of children.
Debate over these questions also occurred within the movement itself, as reformers pursued widely divergent purposes in changing the schools. Prominent
figures such as John Dewey were immersed in these conflicts, eventually arguing
that many progressive educators had gone too far in the direction of surrendering control of the educational process. Following a barrage of criticism in the
postwar era, the movement ultimately declined. But progressivism still exerts
a powerful influence on American schools, even if its legacy is rarely acknowledged outside of academic circles.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The years between 1890 and 1920 are often referred to as the Progressive Era
in American history. This term is probably best known in reference to the reform
activities of political figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and
the muckraking journalism of Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens, among
others. But it also has been used to characterize a wide range of other reform
campaigns, touching on virtually all facets of life at the time. Among the more
important aspects of progressivism was educational reform, and the period was
marked by many different educational ideas and innovations.
The forces of industrialization and urban growth defined the basic tenor of
the period. By the start of the twentieth century, the degree of industrial development and the rate of urbanization in the United States had reached a point
scarcely imaginable just a few decades earlier. The disjunction posed by largescale industrialization and urbanization proved quite distressing, to say the least.
After all, the newly emerging metropolitan society of the twentieth century was
a far cry from the bucolic and relatively uncomplicated farm life that previous
generations of Americans had lived. This discontinuity became a source of new
anxieties and eventually was the focal point of innumerable campaigns for social
amelioration.
Progressivism, in short, represented an effort to respond to an imposing new
era of dramatic industrial development and urban growth. In the words of Lawrence Cremin, it was “a vast humanitarian effort to apply the promise of American life . . . to the puzzling new urban-industrial civilization that came into being
during the latter half of the nineteenth century.” Whether or not it was entirely
humane is open to question, but there can be little doubt that education was an
integral part of this reform impulse. It was an age that called for new forms of
schooling, designed to serve a multitude of different purposes.
Reform touched on many aspects of life, but few issues were affected as much
as schooling. It was a response to the tidal wave of change: inventing new institutional mechanisms to mediate the impact of social transformation. In this
case the institution was the school, and the response was an explosion of new
ideas and programmatic innovations aimed at making education better attuned
to the needs of society. Of course, there were many ways of defining social needs
at the turn of the century, and progressive school reform included many different types of innovation, some of them quite contradictory in spirit and intent.

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Consequently, there was considerable debate and disagreement about school
reform during this era. In fact, the volume of argument about educational issues
increased audibly, as schooling became an ever-bigger public concern.
As a general principle, historians have identified two broad impulses that
characterized educational reform during this period. The first was a humanitarian disposition toward making education more responsive to the needs of children, and integrating the school more closely with its immediate community.
Identified with such renowned reform figures as John Dewey, Francis Parker,
Ella Flagg Young, and William Heard Kilpatrick, this movement has influenced
a relatively small but highly visible cadre of educational reformers throughout
the twentieth century. Historian David Tyack has described this band of educators as “pedagogical progressives,” an apt title for the men and women who
historically were primarily interested in changing instructional practice. A
second group of educational reformers was less idealistic by temperament and
more concerned with issues of efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes
of schooling with the needs of the economy. Tyack dubbed these individuals
“administrative progressives,” because they were especially interested in improving the organizational arrangement of educational institutions. Historically, even
though they did not produce heroic reform figures to point to, the administrative progressives came to exert enormous influence on the development of
American schools.
EDUCATIONAL DEBATES AND ACCOMMODATION
As one might imagine, the differences in perspective and basic values embraced by these two wings of progressive educational reform were vast. At various times, proponents of these rather diffuse groups engaged in sharp debates
over particular educational issues. For the most part, however, they managed
to coexist, partly because they generally were interested in different spheres of
the educational enterprise. As suggested earlier, pedagogical progressives were
most concerned with matters of instruction, and related issues of how children
learn and links between the school and its proximate community. Their primary
focus was inside the classroom, and on kindred issues of personal growth and
understanding. It also is probably accurate to say that their greatest influence
was on primary education, especially for younger children. Theirs was a fundamentally compassionate impetus, one that aimed to make schools better attuned
to children’s needs and interests. But at the same time they were also acutely
aware that education was a fundamentally social institution. The ultimate goal
of the reforms advocated by the pedagogical progressives was to create a better
society.
John Dewey was the by far the most influential and theoretically advanced
of the pedagogical progressives, and his name continues to be almost synonymous with progressive education. Dewey was a philosopher, still one of
the most respected of all American philosophers, and the leading proponent
of the Progressive Era school of philosophy known as pragmatism. The intellectual precursors for Dewey’s pragmatism were Charles Peirce, a logician and

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philosopher of science, and the humanistic philosopher/psychologist, William
James. Dewey’s own philosophical theory, which he referred to as “instrumentalism,” was “a theory of the general forms of conception and reasoning.” His
philosophy of education was a melding of psychology and logic into an epistemological theory whose principles encompassed both subject matter and
learner. A central purpose of education was to impart truth, and truth, defined
by Dewey as “warranted assertion,” was to be understood in terms of the usefulness or value of a proposition in the solution of human problems. In a sense,
therefore, the school’s purpose was quite practical (or pragmatic), to prepare
students to be effective problem solvers. This could only be accomplished by
skillfully guiding students in a quest to discover truth.
Because of this perspective, the pedagogical progressives rejected much of
both the standard curriculum and the common instructional methods of the
nineteenth century. In this respect, they represented a grand tradition in educational reform, extending from the enlightenment radical Jean Jacque Rousseau
and such nineteenth-century theorists as Henrich Pestalozzi and Johann Herbart. In place of the “classical” curriculum that had previously defined higher
learning, they believed that schools should emphasize subjects that prepared
students for effective participation in a society characterized by rapid social
and technological change. Rigidly formal and strictly disciplined classrooms in
which students were treated as empty vessels into which information could be
poured were to be replaced not only because they were dehumanizing, but also
because they did not work. Neither were students to be expected to direct their
own education, because this too was based on an erroneous understanding of
child psychology. Rather, the school should strive to make learning a continuous
process of discovery in which teachers guide students to ever-greater levels of
discovery and understanding.
One of the most appealing qualities of progressive educational thought is the
goal of providing a seamless melding of academic learning and moral development. Dewey believed that the habits of thought and dispositions to be encouraged by progressive schools—traits like curiosity, open-mindedness, objectivity,
and imagination—were as crucial and germane to the solution of social and ethical problems as they were to the advancement of science. The school itself was
to be a microcosm of a well-integrated society, avoiding both the rigid control of
authoritarianism and the chaos of anarchy. Dewey believed that without a democratically constituted, progressive school, it would not be possible to prepare
children for effective citizenship in an increasingly complex and ever changing
society. For this reason, he titled the most thorough and influential statement of
his educational philosophy Democracy and Education (1916).
For their part, the administrative progressives focused most of their attention on matters outside the classroom. Unlike the pedagogical progressives, they
were distrustful of the ability of ordinary people to govern their own schools and
of the ability of regular teachers to function without close supervision. These
concerns were particularly prominent in rapidly growing cities with large immigrant populations, where, they believed, an important function of schooling
was to socialize (in the case of immigrants this meant “Americanize”) rapidly

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increasing populations of working-class children. Schooling in a modern industrial
society was simply too important to be governed or taught by the populace, especially when many had not themselves been educated to understand and appreciate traditional American values.
Consistent with these concerns, much of the administrative-progressive program was designed to make schooling more rational and efficient, to professionalize educational governance and administration and to “take the schools out of
politics.” School boards decreased in both number and size, especially in large
cities, which, along with a number of other changes in how school board elections were conducted, had the effect of making it very difficult for anyone who
was not well-to-do to be elected. Newly enlarged school districts adopted a bureaucratic system of organization, patterned on the industrial model, designed
to standardize educational practice and to provide the perceived necessary supervision for teachers. Large-scale programs of student testing and assessment
and school surveys conducted mostly by university-based consultants were the
Progressive Era precursors of today’s focus on issues of accountability and accreditation. Universities began to offer advanced degrees, even doctorates, in
educational administration, which changed rapidly from a nineteenth-century
calling to a twentieth-century profession. Although philosophically and politically
at odds on many issues, the pedagogical and administrative progressives could
agree on the need to base education on scientific principles.
Debates between advocates of these positions raged throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century. Dewey and other pedagogical progressives
railed against the efforts of administrative progressives to classify students into
categories using standardized tests and the creation of sharp curricular distinctions based on perceived differences in abilities or educational goals among
various groups of children. Administrative progressives, on the other hand, adopted the language of Dewey in declaring that their pursuit of efficiency made
it possible to educate ever larger numbers of children, thus making the schools
more democratic. In the case of some reform efforts, such as William Wirt’s
famous “platoon schools” in Gary, Indiana, it was possible to see elements of
both points of view, and representatives of each wing of progressivism claimed
to draw inspiration from particular innovations (including Dewey). Of course,
many educators and parents believed that progressive education was little more
than children running amok, a view that was reinforced by certain institutions,
largely private schools, that permitted students great freedom in determining
the means and ends of education. In 1938 Dewey published his principal corrective statement, Experience and Education, wherein he acknowledged the accuracy of such observations, arguing that modern schooling must have both clear
purposes and democratic principles of operation.
Altogether, the lived reality of most educators at the time was considerably
more complex than suggested by these broadly divergent categories. Many undoubtedly took inspiration from both wings of progressivism in education, without seeing them as necessarily at odds with one another. It was a time of frenetic
change in schools, and reforms of one stripe or another were considered modern
innovations intended to improve education. Consequently, elements from both

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sides of the reform impulse often were adopted pragmatically to move school
systems forward. The result was a rather disjointed process of change, one that
pushed and pulled the educational system in different directions, often producing a confusing and contradictory array of outcomes. This was progressive educational reform in all its disparate and paradoxical glory, a process that helped to
shape many features of the current American school system.
THE MOVEMENT’S DECLINE
By the 1940s progressivism had become an important intellectual force in
professional thinking about schools and learning, even if it still represented
a relatively small segment of the nation’s educational system. Although most
Americans may have been suspicious of progressive ideas about education,
they were rarely openly hostile to them. This changed in the years following
1950, as a number of prominent academics and journalists took aim at progressive education, linking it in the public mind with failure in the schools.
This was partly due to the climate of the Cold War and ideological misgivings that progressive educators were “soft-headed” or left-leaning and therefore susceptible to communist influence. It also reflected widespread concerns
about the lack of discipline in American children, particularly teenagers, and
fears of juvenile delinquency, sex, and violence. Many critics of progressive
ideas believed that a return to authority and traditional values was necessary,
especially in the classroom. Consequently, there were calls for return to traditional teaching methods, and a renewed emphasis on core academic subjects such as history, mathematics (especially algebra and geometry), English,
and the sciences. Above all, however, there was an outcry for more order and
control in the daily lives of children. Many of these criticisms were based on
misconceptions concerning the ideas and programs of the pedagogical progressives, in particular of Dewey.
This general tendency was bolstered by widespread public concern about
the nation’s schools in the wake of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the
Sputnik spacecraft in 1957. The first man-made satellite, and the opening event
of the much-anticipated “space age,” Sputnik’s success was a major source of
embarrassment for American national pride. The seeming superiority of Russian scientists focused attention on the need for higher standards of academic
achievement, especially in mathematics and the sciences, leading to passage of
the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. This was a major step in
expanding federal aid to schools, although it was focused on math and science
programs and programs for teachers. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation and other agencies began to support programs to improve instruction
and curricular materials, and antiprogressive sentiments reached a peak. The
Progressive Education Association, long an advocate of progressive school reform, dissolved itself in 1955, and two years later the magazine Progressive
Education ceased publication. Although proponents of the ideas of Dewey and
other progressive educators still existed, especially in colleges of education,
the tide of national opinion had clearly taken a conservative turn with regard

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to schooling and childrearing practices. While it is questionable whether these
attacks on progressive ideas had any immediate effect on the actual conduct
of educators, it does appear that the influence of certain progressive ideas was
weakened as a consequence.
PROGRESSIVISM’S LEGACY
Today there is widespread skepticism of the term “progressivism” among
educators and the general public, largely because of the mistaken belief that
the pedagogical progressives stood for a lack of academic rigor. At the same
time, many of the ideas and programs of the pedagogical progressives have
been so fully incorporated into standard notions of schooling that we hardly
notice them. Few today would advocate a return to the preprogressive urban
classrooms of 50 or more students crowded behind desks bolted to the floor
and engaged for much of the day in recitation, repetition, and rote learning.
Nor would there be much support for schools devoid of science and language
labs; publications, plays, and music; vocational education; and physical education and sports, all products of the progressive principles that schools should
educate the “whole child” and that students learn best when actively engaged.
Special education and all programs that seek to tailor instruction to the characteristics and needs of the individual student are an outgrowth of the progressive doctrine that effective education depends on an understanding of the
child.
Likewise, the administrative progressives have left an enormous imprint on
the way schools are organized and governed. Largely as a result of Progressive
Era reforms, school boards continue to be dominated by members of the business and professional elite, especially in larger cities. The progressive-inspired
quest for greater efficiency and standardization has lead to significant consolidation of schools and school districts in every state. There are now fewer than
15 percent as many school districts as there were in 1930. Curriculum and
instructional decisions, once almost entirely the province of individual school
districts and schools increasingly are made at the state and (with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act) at the
federal level. Credentialing continues to play a major role in the selection of
educators, with not only superintendents but also principals and other administrators and even teachers in many states and districts required or expected to
have advanced degrees. These too can be considered a part of the progressive
legacy.
Further Reading: Cremin, L., 1963, The transformation of the school; Progressivism in
American education, 1876–1957, New York: Vintage; Dewey, J., 1938, Experience and
education, New York: Macmillan; Kliebard, H. M., 2004, The struggle for the American
curriculum, 1893–1958, 3rd ed., New York: Routledge Falmer; Ryan, A., 1995, John
Dewey and the high tide of American liberalism, New York: Norton; Tyack, D., 1974,
The one best system: A history of American urban education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

John L. Rury and Michael Imber

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PURPOSE OF SCHOOLS
POLITICS AND SCHOOLS
Education has always been political. The public, politicians, corporate leaders,
and educators have always disagreed about the purposes of schooling, curriculum, and pedagogical processes and will undoubtedly continue to do so. One of
the central conflicts focuses on whether education should prepare students to be
efficient workers or democratic citizens.
Vocational education and scientific management both began in the late 1890s,
in part as a response by industry to the economic recession of 1893. In 1897,
the National Association of Manufacturers sent representatives to study German schools. They were convinced that the United States should develop separate vocational schools as a “training ground for the workplace.” More efficient
workers, the association claimed, would better enable corporations to compete
within an increasingly globalized economy and lift the country from economic
recession. As it happened, 1893 was also the year Frederick Winslow Taylor, “the
father of scientific management,” delivered his first paper on increasing worker
productivity and motivation by studying the operations and motions of efficient
workers, standardizing the movements, and then forcing all workers to adopt
the standardized movement by implementing a piece rate system so that inefficient workers would be paid less. Industry began implementing more hierarchical practices to control workers. The assembly line became the dominant model
not only for factories, but also for schools. Moreover, the call by the National
Association of Manufacturers to use education to remedy a recession, an essentially economic and political problem, began a long history of shifting the blame
for economic difficulties onto education.
Almost 100 years later, A Nation at Risk (1983) blamed the economic recession of the 1980s on education, beginning: “Our nation is at risk. Our once
unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological
innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . The
educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising
tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” More
recently, in reviewing the “achievements” gained under No Child Left Behind
(NCLB), President Bush stated that NCLB “is an important way to make sure
America remains competitive in the 21st century. We’re living in a global world.
See, the education system must compete with the education systems in China
and India. If we fail to give our students the skills necessary to compete in the
world of the 21st century, the jobs will go elsewhere.”
For over a century, then, Americans have debated the purpose and nature of
education. For some, like the National Association of Manufacturers and education commissioner David Snedden, education should serve corporate interests.
For others, like John Dewey, education should facilitate personal growth and
democratic practices. Such differences in purposes, predicated on divergent conceptions of democracy, led to differences in curricular content, pedagogical practices, assessment, and school governance. Some differences may be inevitable,

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given the variety of stakeholders: families, educators, politicians, and corporate
leaders. The following brief overview of some of the historical debates will demonstrate that the current push for standardized testing and accountability within
a globalized, knowledge-based economy is hardly new.
THE SNEDDENDEWEY DEBATE
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management principles were quickly
adopted by educators in the early 1900s, not only as a way to better prepare students for industry, but also in response to increasing immigration from southern
and eastern Europe. David Snedden, who assumed the powerful post of commissioner of education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, declared that
the fundamental idea in education “is to make men efficient.” In his 1924 article,
“Education for a World of Team Players and Team Workers,” he compared society to a crew on a submarine, with a commander, a few officers, and numerous
subordinates, and asserted that schools should prepare a few students to be leaders
while preparing the vast majority “to follow.” Which students would be chosen to be leaders, wrote Snedden, only required knowing students’ “probable
destinies,” which, for Snedden, coincided with students’ gender, race, and class. A
few white males would be tracked into leadership positions; the remainder were
consigned to subordinate roles.
The efficiency movement emphasized hierarchical decision making, with experts conceptualizing educational goals, curriculum, and pedagogy. For Snedden,
teachers were to carry out the instructions of others and to be neutral, “disinterested” presenters of the opinions of the majority. Schools existed to contribute to
economic growth, not to promote economic equality or critical citizenship.
However, social efficiency was not uncontested. Dewey was one of many progressives who opposed social efficiency, arguing that the primary purpose of
education was to develop critical, democratic citizens. While Dewey was not
against students developing the skills necessary for the workplace, he believed
that all social institutions, including workplaces, should facilitate personal
growth and be judged on the contributions they make to the “all around growth
of every member of society.” For Snedden education was the means to an end
while for Dewey students’ education was an end in itself.
In 1915, Dewey and Snedden publicly debated one another in The New Republic, where Dewey disagreed that students were to be prepared to meet the
needs of business and that the kind of education in which he was interested was
“not one which will ‘adapt’ workers to the industrial regime . . . but one which
will alter the existing industrial system and ultimately transform it.” For Dewey,
schools should be assessed on their contribution to human development rather
than “a senseless pursuit of profits.”
For Dewey, schools should be democratic communities in which teachers
and students develop the “democratic habits of thought and action” necessary
for effective participation in the democratic process. The democratic process
required that individuals deliberate with one another and practice habits of

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open-mindedness, tolerance, fairness, rational understanding, respect for truth,
and critical judgment. Dewey believed that democratic schools are essential for
developing a democratic society.
THE SHIFT FROM LOCAL TO STATE AND FEDERAL CONTROL
The educational system in the United States is unique insofar as it has historically been controlled locally rather than at the state or federal levels. Corporate
leaders and other elites have often expressed concern that, as Ellwood Cubberly
put it in 1916, the “poorer classes” rather than the “better element” would be
elected to school boards. Yet until recently, most curricula and pedagogical decisions were made at the district, school, and classroom levels.
However, over the past two decades control over education has shifted to the
states and, more recently, with the passage of NCLB, to the federal level. In response to A Nation at Risk (1983), some corporate and political organizations
began to call for reforms that emphasized outcomes over process, the vocational
over the liberal, and quantitative measures of success over qualitative. The National Alliance of Business, for example, summarized its educational goals as
follows: “A standards-driven reform agenda should include content and performance standards, alignment of school processes with the standards, assessments
that measure student achievement against world-class levels of excellence, information about student and school performance, and accountability for results.”
Consequently, by the late 1990s, 49 of the 50 states had subject-area standards,
and most had standardized tests in various grades to assess students, teachers, and schools. By 2002, 18 states, including the four most populous—Texas,
Florida, California, and New York—made high school graduation contingent
on passing several standardized tests. Corporate and educational policymakers
pressed on, arguing that standardized tests were needed to hold teachers accountable for student achievement, while No Child Left Behind extended what
the states had begun. NCLB mandates that all states conduct standardized testing in reading and math in grades 3 through 8. By 2008, science will be added
and testing extended to grades 9 through 12. Further, schools face severe penalties for failing to sufficiently increase test scores, including being converted
into charter (privately administered, publicly funded) schools. Moreover, the
test-score threshold that schools must meet increases each year so that by 2014
all students, regardless of background or ability, will be required to achieve proficiency on every test.
NCLB also infringes on other aspects of local control, including requiring
schools that receive federal funds to adopt a small set of federally approved reading programs, to hand over student contact information to the armed services,
to hire only “qualified” teachers (as defined by the federal government), and to
open up school facilities to groups that discriminate (such as the Boy Scouts).
NCLB does not mandate that teachers use a specific curriculum, but because of
the high-stakes nature of the standardized tests, most schools are compelled to
focus on test preparation in order to avoid sanctions. NCLB therefore represents
the single largest shift in power in the history of American education.

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MARKETS AND PRIVATIZATION
Early versions of NCLB included proposals by the Bush administration for
school vouchers, or the public funding of private and parochial schools. These
proposals were dropped because of political opposition. The push for vouchers reflects efforts by those who believe that equity and efficiency in education
can only be addressed through choice and constructing families and individuals
as consumers of educational services. Nobel prize winning economist Milton
Friedman has argued that educational services should be provided by for-profit
industry, while other neoliberals have gone so far as to argue that education
should not be supported by taxes at all.
Although unable to include vouchers in its NCLB legislation, the Bush administration has been successful in using NCLB to promote the marketization
of education by requiring students in schools designated as failing schools based
on their students’ scores on standardized tests to use for-profit and nonprofit
tutoring services (rather than those provided by the school), and by allowing
students to transfer to schools that are not failing. Furthermore, failing schools
may be required to contract with a private company to provide administrative
services or to be reconstituted as charter schools.

AGGREGATIVE VERSUS DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY
Promoting markets, choice, and privatization radically transforms democratic
decision making. Rather than the deliberative model that Dewey promoted, in
which people participate in the decisions and processes that affect their lives and
use their knowledge and skills to affect those around them, markets and choice
promote market or aggregative forms of democracy.
Dewey conceptualized a democratic society as “a mode of associated living” in
which people collectively decide what and how to be and what to do. The deliberative model described by Dewey provides opportunities for people to provide
justification for their preferences, listen to others, and, where possible, work out
new understandings and compromises. In school this means, for example, that
educators, parents, students, and community members would deliberate their
educational goals and methods. Rather than having the curriculum content and
assessment determined by others, such as the state or federal government or by
the corporation operating the school, such issues would be discussed and debated within schools and school districts.
Such discussion and debate has the positive outcome of deepening people’s
understanding of the purposes and processes of schooling as they defend their
own views and listen to the views of others. The process of setting social and educational goals becomes educative as citizens work to refine their views in light
of increased understanding. Further, it is important for Dewey that civil society
be strengthened and remain relatively autonomous from government, thereby
limiting state power and making its exercise more accountable and democratic.
In contrast, aggregative or market forms of democracy focus not on the
decision-making process but on tallying individual preferences. Such systems,

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while focusing on individuals’ choices, ignore the reasons for those choices.
There is no account for how the choices have been arrived at or their quality. For
example, under NCLB parents and students in “failing schools” are to be given
the choice of attending another school. Since such choices are individual family
choices, individuals never need to leave the private realm of their own interest,
that is, they can choose without engaging others regarding the consequences of
the choice beyond their own family. Such decision making “lacks,” writes Iris
Young, “any distinct idea of a public formed from the interaction of democratic
citizens and their motivation to reach some decision.” Furthermore, NCLB restricts democratic debate over which subjects are valued and when and what
kinds of assessments are to be make. NCLB positions individuals as consumers
who are to choose among the choices provided. Under NCLB civil society is
weakened and is held accountable by the government rather than holding the
government accountable.
GLOBALIST DISCOURSES
In the 1890s, representatives from the National Association of Manufacturers
traveled to Germany to inspect the schools, because they feared the United States
was failing behind other countries within an increasingly globalized economy.
Since then, the same fears have driven educational reform efforts from A Nation
at Risk to No Child Left Behind. President Bush, echoing best-selling books such
as Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005), uses the specter of a highly educated and efficient China or India to
promote his reform proposals.
However, as Norman Fairclough describes, such “globalist discourses” present
economic globalization and the shift of jobs from high- to low-wage countries as
inevitable and detached from human decision making. In fact, these phenomena
are the result of deregulation, a political decision to reduce or eliminate public
control over corporate behavior that enables corporations to seek out employees
and resources wherever and on whatever terms they wish. Globalist discourses
are used to assert that education must be transformed to serve corporate needs,
because to choose otherwise would be to undermine our economic competitiveness. Such globalist discourses support the notion that we all live in a transformed knowledge based economy in which students must learn the skills to
become flexible workers, even though most new jobs are in low-skilled occupations such as retail clerk, janitor, and security guard. As Fairclough concludes,
globalist discourses have been used to promote a corporate vision of markets
and free trade rather than rights and equality. In sum, he states, globalist discourses are a strategy for hijacking globalization in the service of particular national and corporate interests.
CONCLUSION
Education will continue to be contested by those offering differing visions of
society. For some, education should serve the needs of the economy by developing

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workers with the skills desired by corporations. In the beginning of the century,
such efforts led to modeling schools after factories, with uniform classrooms and
pedagogical practices. More recently, corporate and government leaders have instituted standards, standardized testing, and accountability in an attempt to ensure
that students learn what policymakers want them to learn. Neoliberals and conservatives continue to push for the privatization and marketization of education.
For others, following the Deweyan tradition, schools should be democratic
communities in which teachers, students, parents, and other members of the
community share in deciding what and how students learn. Innovative public
schools that make up the Performance Assessment Consortium in New York
City and those described by Mike Rose in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public
Schooling in America and by Deborah Meier in The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons
for America from a Small School in Harlem are examples of schools where students are held to high standards but not a standardized curriculum.
The aims of education, how and what should be taught, and by whom and
how that should be decided, will continue to be contested. Such differences not
only cannot be avoided, but it is in how we sort through and resolve these differences that we define what it means to be educated and the nature of society.
Further Reading: Kliebard, H., 1995, The struggle for the American curriculum: 1893–1958
(2nd ed.), New York: Routledge; Lauder, H., P. Brown, J-A. Dillabough, & A. H. Halsey,
2006, Education, globalization and social change, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Lipman, P., 2004, High stakes education: Inequality, globalization, and urban school reform,
New York: Routledge; Ross, E. W., and R. Gibson, eds., 2007, Neoliberalism and education reform, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

David Hursh

508

RACE, RACISM, AND COLORBLINDNESS IN SCHOOLS
Some of the most controversial issues in education, particularly in public schools
across the United States, are those that focus on race and racism in education.
Indeed, issues of race and racism are often viewed as taboo topics that many
find difficult to discuss or even consider. Race guides the kinds of experiences
people have in our society and consequently in schools across the United States.
According to many scholars, race is socially, historically, legally, and politically
constructed. The meanings, messages, results, and consequences of race are developed and constructed by human beings. Genetically and biologically, individuals are more the same than they are different.
Racism has to do with discrimination that occurs due to race. Inherent
in racism are notions of power. Racism occurs both implicitly and explicitly.
For instance, an explicit or overt example of racism may occur when a Latino
American is passed up for a promotion because of his race. An implicit or covert
example of racism may occur when a company has as an implicit policy—one
that is not necessarily stated or written in a document—that it will not hire any
Latino American workers for whatever reason(s). This is still a form of racism,
even though the discrimination cannot be seen or necessarily documented
through explicit or overt evidence.
There are rules of race that are common in the United States of America. Not
only are the meanings and consequences of race often socially constructed by
individuals within a race, other groups can also contribute to the ways in which
groups of people are categorized and perceived. Within groups, some people are
grouped and classified according to the tone or hue of their skin. Darker-skinned
African Americans, for instance, may be grouped and perceived in a certain way
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while lighter-skinned African Americans may be grouped and perceived in a
somewhat different way. There is also categorizing and grouping of people outside
of a particular race, a more societal classification. White people, for instance,
are often perceived as the race of power, and this categorization and classification often emerges both from within and outside of the group. In fact, research
suggests that white people as well as individuals from other racial groups often
perceive whiteness as “normal” and individuals from other groups such as Asian
or Latino/a are often measured or compared to the “norm”—whiteness. A prime
example of such comparison is when we look at standardized test data or other
high-stakes test data in P–12 education.
Certain groups of people are often viewed as inferior to whites. The negative
construction of certain groups of people, and frankly inaccurate portrayals and
perception of certain groups of people, emerge from a variety of factors. African American students, for instance, are often viewed as intellectually inferior
to their white counterparts. The portrayal of African American students, in
this sense, often surfaces from analyses of standardized test data that show African American students falling behind their white counterparts on almost every
academic measure. The entire race of African Americans can be portrayed in
a negative light because society has constructed this view based on data from
standardized test items. However, people (from various racial groups) rarely
question who develops the test questions. People rarely question who decides
what knowledge is and what knowledge is “tested.” In other words, questions
need to be posed such as who decides what knowledge is valid and testable and
why. Knowledge and knowing then becomes knowledge that is constructed by
individuals—individuals construct knowledge just as individuals can construct
the meanings of race. In short, people from various walks of life possess some
form of knowledge and knowing. However, some knowledge is not tested or
measured because it is not considered important, valid, or central to be considered a learned person.
At the same time, those in schools—in education—are quick to point out disparities between white students, “the norm,” and other groups of students, such
as disparities between white students and Latina/o students. They will discuss,
outline, and argue quantitative evidence of the disparities in public and private
schools. However, rarely will these same individuals have serious conversations
about the state and reality of racism in education. Candidly, from where does
inequity emerge? What is at the core of the disparities that exist between different races of people? In short, many believe that racism ended with desegregation, Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights Movement. More direct and deeply rooted
questions about race and racism are avoided. Some people do not want to talk
about race, and they do everything in their power to avoid such conversations
and considerations. Critiquing issues of equity and thinking about how we
(or a person individually) contribute to the oppression of others are indeed difficult exercises, which may be why it is so difficult for people to think about or
talk about the ever-presence of race and racism in society and in education.
Race and racism are so ingrained and endemic to our society that it is almost impossible to avoid it or to ignore it. In other words, issues of race and

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racism are likely not going to disappear, because racism is passed down from
one generation to the next. But because the world works for certain individuals,
it is difficult for them to critique the world and thus work to change or to improve it. Thus, many people, teachers, policymakers, teacher educators, parents,
and citizens adopt colorblind ideologies because it is more comfortable for them
to adopt such ideologies than to pose difficult questions about race and racism
or to address issues of power and equity.
COLORBLINDNESS
Colorblindness can be defined as a person’s inability (whether consciously or
subconsciously) to recognize other peoples’ race, their skin color. In the social
sciences and, in particular, in the field of education, teachers often claim that
they do not recognize their students’ race in the teaching and learning process.
They claim that they “just see students,” and they “treat all their students the
same,” mainly because the teachers claim that they do not recognize students’
race. In essence, the teachers often believe that if they recognize difference, they
may treat their students differently. Such an approach or philosophy—to treat
students differently—is counter-intuitive to the standards-based movement in
our country. Thus, teachers adopt colorblind approaches wherein they deliberately and often subconsciously do not think about the enormous, central, and
profound influences of race in teaching and learning. The research is clear that
when teachers do not “see color,” or at least acknowledge that race matters, there
may be institutionalized discriminatory practices, such as higher suspension
rates for African American males, and students of color being disproportionately
referred to special education and lower tracked courses in general. Conversely,
students of color are often overlooked for gifted education programs—those
programs are typically highly enrolled with a majority of white students, even
in highly diverse school settings. Colorblindness reveals a privileged position
that ignores the important of racial identity and is often used to maintain the
status quo. Indeed, research suggests that it is advantageous for teachers to reject colorblind approaches and ideologies and work to meet the needs of individual students—an idea that rejects a “one-size-fits all” approach to teaching
and learning.
Many teachers enter the teaching profession with very limited prior knowledge and understanding of other individuals’ racial backgrounds. They often
know a world that is pretty consistent with their own racial backgrounds, that
is similar to their own life worlds and ways of knowing and experiencing the
world. However, research is clear that teachers need to reject the colorblind approach in teaching because they can miss important features of their students’
experiences (and their own as teachers with racial backgrounds) when they do
not recognize the importance and centrality of other peoples and their own racialized ways of knowing.
In Lewis’s 2001 study of colorblindness, she discovered that many teachers
refused to discuss or acknowledge the ever-present social and institutional racerelated matters in the school; the teachers adopted a colorblind approach to

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teaching and learning. When a student brought up racist experiences, the teachers in the community ignored them—dismissed them—and rationalized that
the student was “playing the race card.” The teachers’ responses are consistent
with experiences and interactions in the broader context of society. For individuals of color, such as African Americans, they may find similar responses from
colleagues or supervisors on their job. To illuminate, when an African American employee complains to a white employer that she or he has experienced a
form of racism, the white employer may be more apt to dismiss the claim as
the employee’s “playing the race card.” The idea is that it is more comfortable
for employers to dismiss the charge than to engage in the arduous task of discovery—the posing of tough questions to discover a reality that may disconfirm
what they have known: a luxury to not have to experience racism. To be clear, it
is possible that the African American employee may have been “playing the race
card,” or it is possible that there was actually some form of racism that existed;
however, the problem with such a dismissal is that the employer (similar to the
teachers in Lewis’s study) adopts colorblind ideologies. Indeed, power, in both
position and race, allows individuals to avoid issues such as race because they
are not or have not been in the space of hurt because of discrimination. Accordingly, power, privilege, and race are closely interconnected.
RACE, PRIVILEGE, AND POWER
In a sense, issues of privilege and power are inexorable. Because of the history
of our country, there is a level of privilege that white people possess—simply by
virtue of their skin color. In many ways, white people in the United States have
an advantage, a “benefit of the doubt” advantage, in society. They are privileged.
Race and power are also very closely connected. Where classroom interaction, teaching, and learning are concerned, Lisa Delpit described five aspects
around power:
(a) issues of power are enacted in classrooms; (b) there are codes or
rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture [and race]
of power”; (c) the rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the
rules of the culture of those who have power; (d) if you are not already
a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of
that culture makes acquiring power easier; and (e) those with power are
frequently least aware of—or least willing to acknowledge—its existence.
Those with less power are often most aware of its existence. (p. 24)
In essence, it is often difficult for those individuals who have power to accept
or to acknowledge that racism still exists. People with less power, quite often
those individuals who are nonwhite, are able to point out issues of inequity and
racism because they have experienced it, seen it, and lived through it.
At the same time, it is important to note that perceptions of different races of
people are often held by people in general. In other words, African Americans
may believe the negative stereotypes and misconceptions about other African
Americans. They may believe that the group is inferior because they have heard

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this for so long in the media or even from their own parents. In a sense, these
individuals who believe the negative stereotypes about themselves and others in
their racial group have been “kidnapped.” They do not realize that much of what
they have heard or been exposed to is designed to provide perceptions that place
certain groups of individuals as inferior to others. As Tatum (2001) explained,
In a race-conscious society, the development of a positive sense of racial/
ethnic identity not based on assumed superiority or inferiority is an important task for both White people and people of color. The development
of this positive identity is a lifelong process that often requires unlearning the misinformation and stereotypes we have internalized not only
about others, but also about ourselves (my emphasis added). (p. 53)
Accordingly, it is important for all individuals to develop the kind of consciousness that questions the perceptions of others as well as themselves where
race is concerned.
The effects of stereotypes for African Americans can be tremendous (Steele,
1997). Because of pervasive societal stereotypes about African Americans and their
intellectual ability (or perceived inferiority in this sense), many African American
students did not perform as well as their white counterparts on examinations. According to the research and the theory, when African Americans are placed in a
situation where they are at risk of confirming or disconfirming a pervasive stereotype (e.g., that African Americans do not perform well on standardized tests),
they experience added anxiety and stress and thus do not perform well. The idea
is that they are going to reify the stereotype. Indeed, effects of stereotype threat are
vast, and according to this important research, many African Americans suffer.
It is also important for white people to think about their own racial identity
and to feel comfortable with their own whiteness. Quite often, white people either (1) avoid issues of race because they do not experience racism and thus find
it irrelevant to consider; they find it to be untrue to their experience; (2) reject
their own racial identity and heritage because they are ashamed of their history
(such as their role in slavery); or (3) embrace a reality that race and racism still
exist and understand that they do not have to contribute to racism. People who
identify as white should realize that as individuals they do not have to contribute
to racism and can work to eradicate it and not pass it down to their children.
However, at the same time, they should recognize that they will still experience
a certain amount of privilege because of their race and not assume that racism
and inequity will end just because they do not contribute to it personally.
People of color as well as white people may want to work to change racism
and to teach their children to live with others in a truly multicultural society
as our country becomes increasingly diverse; this diversity includes, but is certainly not limited to, race.
CONCLUSION
Race is grossly under-theorized in the field of education. This may be the case
because so many people find it difficult to discuss the topic. While issues of race

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may be some of the most important topics in education to consider, the topic
is still marginalized when many attempt to develop solutions for problems in
education. To be clear, racial inferiority does not exist because of some gene or
biological trait or characteristic. To the contrary, disparities may exist because
we, as members of a human race, refuse to deal with and change our own biases,
misconceptions, stereotypes, and racist actions and attitudes.
Further Reading: Banks, J. A., 2003, Teaching literacy for social justice and global citizenship,
Language Arts, 81(1), 18–19; Delpit, L., 1995, Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in
the classroom, New York: The New Press; Gordon, B. M., 1990, The necessity of AfricanAmerican epistemology for educational theory and practice, Journal of Education, 172(3),
88–106; Johnson, L., 2002, “My eyes have been opened”: White teachers and racial awareness, Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 153–167; Ladson-Billings, G., & B. Tate, 1995,
Toward a critical race theory of education, Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–67; Lewis,
A. E., 2001, There is no “race” in the schoolyard: Colorblind ideology in an (almost) all
white school, American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 781–811; Milner, H. R., 2006,
Preservice teachers’ learning about cultural and racial diversity: Implications for urban
education, Urban Education, 41(4), 343–375; Ross, E. W., & Pang, V. O., 2006, Race, ethnicity and education (Vols. 1–4). Westport, CT: Praeger; Steele, C. M., (1997). A Threat in the
Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance. American Psychologist,
52, 613–629. Tatum, B. D., 2001, Professional development: An important partner in antiracist teacher education, in S. H. King & L. A. Castenell (eds.), Racism and racial inequality: Implications for teacher education (pp. 51–58), Washington, DC: AACTE Publications.

H. Richard Milner

RELIGION AND PUBLIC SCHOOLING
[Jesus] did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to
heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your
pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject
that, you belong in hell. (New Jersey public schoolteacher’s classroom
discussion on the U.S. Constitution, September 2006; Kelley, 2006)
The politics of religion and U.S. public schooling provide an interesting pointcounterpoint for those who study conflict in education. During the twentieth
century, conflicts over public school practices largely arose from basic constitutional issues with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, many involving
either the Establishment Clause (the state cannot establish religion) or the Free
Exercise Clause (individuals are free to follow their own beliefs or unbelief). As
applied to public schools, there are three questions to consider when addressing religion and public education: Does the policy, procedure, material, and/or
practice advance religion (which is unconstitutional), inhibit religious freedom
and the right to be free from religion (which are both unconstitutional), or are
these issues neutral toward religion—neither advancing or hindering belief and/
or unbelief (which meets the constitutional standard)?
The quote at the beginning is an example of a clear constitutional violation.
Public schoolteachers, as representatives of the state, are to be scrupulously

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neutral toward religion—neither advancing nor hindering religion. The teacher
quoted above favors his own understandings of Christianity and uses his position as a public school teacher to advance his beliefs to a captive audience of
impressionable students (education is compulsory in the United States, and students are legal minors). Following are discussions of two of the most contentious
and reoccurring battles involving religion and public schooling: evolution, and
religious practices; and then some observations about these persistent tensions.
EVOLUTION
Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, the teaching of
evolution has been particularly problematic. Although evolutionary science had
become part of the intellectual mainstream by the late nineteenth century, conservative Protestants who were biblical literalists saw it as a specific threat to
their faith. Since evolutionary science directly contradicted both creation stories
found in the book of Genesis, evolution was considered by the newly named
Christian Fundamentalists as an unbiblical heresy. Consequently, in some conservative religious regions, like Tennessee, the teaching of evolution in public
schools was banned under state law.
By 1925, Tennessee’s law was put to the legal test. In Scopes v. Tennessee
(1927), science teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating Tennessee’s ban
on teaching evolution after a sensational trial that drew reporters and commentators from around the globe. Additionally, the Scopes controversy erupted when
U.S. high schools experienced unprecedented growth. Between 1920 and 1927,
enrollment in public high schools ballooned from 2,199,000 pupils to roughly
4,000,000 students. As a result, increasing numbers of Americans were exposed
to evolutionary biology. While Scopes initially lost the legal case, the decision
was appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court. In 1927, the court threw the case
out on a technicality. Meanwhile, the savage lampooning in the mass media of
Christian Fundamentalists forced them to reconsider their involvement in the
public sphere. The intense media coverage also curtailed enthusiasm to pass additional antievolution laws. In 1925, while 15 states were considering banning
the teaching of evolution from public schools, only two additional states enacted
such legislation (Mississippi and Arkansas).
Nevertheless, these laws remained “good law” until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that the state’s antievolution law violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The state’s objections to
evolution were religiously based (not neutral toward religion), which violated
the Establishment Clause. The Court subsequently invalidated all laws that had
banned teaching of evolution in public schools.
Religiously conservative state legislators responded by passing a variety of
“equal” or “balanced treatment” bills in roughly 20 states, which required “creation
science” be taught if evolution was taught in public schools. Creation science was
nothing more than a tarted-up version of the biblical creation stories that lacked
any real scientific content—but it had enormous appeal for Christian Fundamentalists. Again, “balanced treatment” laws violated the Establishment Clause because

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they substituted religious belief for scientific evidence. These were invalidated in
a series of federal court cases, first in McClean v. Arkansas (1982), and finally in
the U.S. Supreme Court case, Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), a case from Louisiana.
Drawing on the legislative histories of each law, the courts noted that the legislation held a religious purpose and that the curriculum materials promoted one specific religious doctrine—humanity was created by a supernatural being.
Evolution’s opponents went back to the drawing board. In their rulings, the
federal courts clearly noted the religious underpinnings of “creation science.”
Consequently, creation science could not be science, but was, instead, religious
dogma masquerading as science. Opponents retooled and developed “Intelligent Design,” or ID, as a counter to evolution. Unlike the promoters of creation
science, ID’s advocates were very careful to strip off any overt religious trappings
in either their curriculum materials or in public discussions. Instead of directly
mentioning a specific creator, one was merely, but strongly, inferred. Observers
were left to draw their own conclusions.
While some earlier creation science proponents rejected the ID movement
for being not “godly” enough, ID found a foothold in several states and local
school districts. Throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, ID was
promoted as the “alternative” scientific explanation to questions of creation.
Furthermore, unlike the political debates over creation science, a few academics
embraced ID, which gave the movement a patina of scholarly respectability.
Unfortunately for proponents, ID suffered from many of the same ills as creation science. It ignored counterfactual evidence and skipped over entire scientific disciplines like biogeography. Furthermore, while proponents followed
a secular script with general audiences, they were open about their theological
goals with like-minded adherents. ID was devised and embraced by Christian
Fundamentalists, who encouraged public schools to “teach the controversy”
stating that ID was a competing scientific theory. This assertion was laughable,
since there were no ID-based research papers in the scientific literature (there
were a few ID advocacy papers—but this is a different matter).
ID was put to the judicial test in Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education (2005).
In late 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania public school board decided to include ID
in its science curriculum over strong objections of its own science teachers. The
board also crafted a disclaimer to be placed in science textbooks, claiming that
evolution was merely a theory—not a fact. The matter quickly headed to federal
district court. The court’s decision traced the history of Fundamentalist objections to evolution in public schools, as well as the evolution of creation science
into ID. In doing so, the court noted that ID was creation science relabeled.
Consequently, ID was an impermissible state endorsement of religious belief
and thus not teachable as science in public schools.
The Kitzmiller v. Dover decision also addressed textbook disclaimers that
claimed evolution was a theory and not a fact. The court noted that no other
scientific theory received such scrutiny or disclaimer, nor did any other aspect
of the entire curriculum. Furthermore, the court drew on the history of debate
over the Dover science curriculum, observing that board members had voiced
specific religious agendas. The court concluded these disclaimers were serving

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a religious purpose and therefore unconstitutional. Since 2005, other federal
courts have also invalidated textbook disclaimers in other school districts. While
the legal controversy regarding evolution may well be resolved for a time, these
iterations of the evolution debate underscore that school board members and
those charged with curriculum decisions and textbook selection can still slip
religious dogma into public schools.
RELIGIOUS PRACTICES
Another highly contentious area regarding public schooling and religion is
the matter of religious practices. Historically, nineteenth-century public schools
embraced a “vague Protestantism” as a form of moral education. Public recitation of the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer, readings out of the King
James Version of the Bible, and readings based on biblical stories were common
fare in the early U.S. public schools. These practices tended to be controversial
in religiously diverse areas, sparking riots on several occasions. By contrast, in
other locales, nineteenth-century school boards worked out “peaceable accommodations” regarding religious practices and public schooling to maintain the
viability of the public school.
Nevertheless, state-sponsored prayers prevailed in many communities. By the
1960s local variations that challenged the separation of church and state led to a
series of important Supreme Court decisions, which remain the legal standard
to this day. Opening exercises in public schools varied but they often contained
prayers and Bible readings. Attempts by local and state authorities to provide for
“religiously neutral prayers” ran afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation
of the First Amendment. The New York State Board of Regents, the government
body overseeing the state’s public schools, had agreed on a nondenominational
prayer intended for daily classroom use. Parents in New Hyde Park, part of the
New York City metropolitan area, objected to the recitation of that prayer, arguing that the practice was a state endorsement of a religious activity in a public
school. In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with these
parental objections—that governmental sponsored prayer, a religious activity,
violated the Establishment Clause, and consequently was impermissible.
Table R.1
1927
1962
1963
1963
1968
1982
1987
1992
2000
2002
2005

Key Court Cases Related to Religion in Schools
Scopes v. Tennessee
Engel v. Vitale
Abington v. Schempp
Murray v. Curlett
Epperson v. Arkansas
McClean v. Arkansas
Edwards v. Aguillard
Lee v. Weisman
Santa Fe v. Doe
Newdow v. U.S. Congress
Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education

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Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar ruling in Abington
v. Schempp (1963). Pennsylvania required the reading of Bible verses in public
schools during opening exercises. Although individual students could be excused
from participating if their parents made written requests, the decision held that
the practice was a religious activity and coercive given compulsory attendance
laws. Abington was bundled with Murray v. Curlett, with the media-savvy and
highly controversial Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the leader of American Atheists,
as one of the litigants. These decisions ignited fears among school prayer proponents that federal courts were “taking God out of the classroom.” Advocates for
state-sponsored religious acts redoubled their efforts, aligning with like-minded
politicians to search for “gaps” in educational law and policy to provide space for
collective prayer.
Nevertheless, while some local practices remain inconsistent with Supreme
Court rulings, there has been a gradual reduction in the permissible zones of
“official religious acts” within U.S. public schools. In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the
Supreme Court ruled that prayers offered by adults at graduation ceremonies violated the Establishment Clause. This case differed from the previous cases in that
graduation ceremonies are not compulsory—students are not required under law
to attend their own graduations. However, the court observed that high school
graduation is such a profound cultural “rite of passage” that most graduating students believe they must attend. Consequently, by sponsoring an official invocation during a ceremony where students felt compelled to attend, the district was
sponsoring a religious activity, something that violates the Establishment Clause.
In light of the Lee v. Weisman decision, most public school districts have been
careful not to list prayers or invocations on the graduation program, nor have
adults lead prayers. However, in some religiously conservative communities, student speakers have offered prayers in the midst of their graduation speeches.
Such practices are constitutionally suspect, but at present, there is no clear ruling
from the judiciary on this precise point.
Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Santa Fe v. Doe (2000) that student-offered prayers broadcasted over the school’s loudspeakers before the start
of a football game also violated the Establishment Clause. In Santa Fe, the court
noted that the local school board had a long history of endorsing the religious
practices of a given sect (Southern Baptist). It also observed that the litigants
in the case were both Mormon and Catholic parents, who demonstrated that
their children encountered religiously based hostility against them because of
their religious faith (hence their court-approved anonymity). The school board
claimed that by using a student election to decide who would offer the invocation, the students were merely choosing their collective representative. The court
noted, however, that this mechanism did nothing to ensure that religious minority views or nonreligious views were broadcast. As a result, student elections effectively imposed a specific religious viewpoint on those who attended the game.
The court also observed that the cheerleaders and band members were expected
to attend the game, since their membership in these organizations hinged on
their attendance. Given these factors, the court ruled that the practice of studentled prayers at extracurricular events violated the Establishment Clause.

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In Newdow v. U.S. Congress (2002), Newdow, an atheist with a child in public
school, brought suit challenging the daily public school practice of reciting the
Pledge of Allegiance, which was required by the state of California. The pledge,
originally penned by a minister with socialist leanings in the late nineteenth
century, contained no reference to a deity prior to the 1950s. However, in 1954
the U.S. Congress amended the pledge, adding the words “under God” to distinguish the United States from the “godless” Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR), in an embrace of anticommunist religiosity. Referring to the pledge’s history, Newdow claimed that requiring public school children to recite the pledge
was both a state-sponsored religious act, and as such, a violation of the Establishment Clause as well as his child’s right to be free from religion—a religious
liberty violation. At the appellate level, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld
Newdow’s claims. On appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court did something unexpected: It dodged the case entirely. Instead of ruling on the merits of
the case, the Court instead ruled that since Newdow did not have legal custody
of his daughter (his ex-partner did), he had no legal standing to bring suit. Consequently, his suit was thrown out. However, Newdow now holds joint custody
of his child and has begun litigating the case anew.
The final issue addresses individual student religious practices. While statesponsored religious practices have received far greater legal scrutiny, there are
instances where students have had their rights violated by public school personnel. For example, in June 2004, a federal judge sanctioned the Muskogee, Oklahoma, public school district for violating the Free Exercise rights of a Muslim
student. The district had established a sweeping policy banning all head coverings, claiming this measure was to reduce gang activity within the schools.
However, the sweeping ban also applied to Muslim girls who wore the hijab to
school. As a result, a Muslim sixth-grader was suspended twice for wearing the
headscarf. The judge noted that wearing the hijab had no discernable impact on
either the learning environment or student safety and discipline. He also observed that such a sweeping policy substantially interfered with a student’s individual religious expression. Consequently, the federal judge ruled that the policy
was not religiously neutral, but was, in fact, hostile towards one religion in particular: Islam. While many religious practices, if state-sponsored, are impermissible, individual student religious expression is generally protected speech under
the First Amendment.
SOME OBSERVATIONS
Typically, Establishment and Free Exercise violations occur when public
school officials (including school board members) embrace majoritarian notions (there are more of “us” than you, so you lose) of what are “acceptable”
practices, policies, and/or curricula. In a country that is increasingly religiously
diverse, with 2,000 new religions appearing since 1960, such attitudes will only
contribute to further conflict involving religion and public schooling.
However, there are some handy tools public school educators can employ
when faced with a possible religious conflict. The first is the “heresy” test.

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Regarding a given curriculum (e.g., evolution or sexuality education), individuals may object because the curriculum violates tenets of a religious faith. These
objections cannot survive legal scrutiny because they serve a religious purpose.
Public schools are not permitted to screen materials against possible religious
heresy. Such screening would be an endorsement of religion. Another test is the
“Satan” test. If a public school educator is unclear whether a school-sponsored
activity, practice, or material endorses a religious viewpoint, substitute the word
“Satan” for the deity invoked. Returning to Newdow, the phrase, “one Nation
under Satan,” would probably make more than a few devout Christians squirm.
Such a reaction is similar to an atheist being required to say “one Nation under
God.” Consequently, these practices are suspect. Finally, there is the “do no harm
test,” when addressing the religious rights of individual students. If the practice involved does not disrupt the good order and discipline of the school, and
other similarly situated students are allowed to exercise their religious rights,
you should accede to the student’s request. For example, barring a Jewish student from wearing the Star of David to school (in one case, school administrators claimed it was a gang symbol), yet permitting Christian students to
wear crosses and crucifixes is inconsistent and favors one religious faith over
another. Such an uneven policy will not survive judicial scrutiny. Given the
increased religious diversity in public schools, school and district level educators must remember they represent a secular government—not a religious
tradition. And finally, public educators need to scrutinize their policies and
practices to avoid litigation and provide a safe and nurturing educational
environment for all students.
Further Reading: Counts, G. S., 1928, Education, The American Journal of Sociology,
31(1), 177–186; Justice, B., 2005, The war that wasn’t: Religious conflict and compromise in the common schools of New York State, 1865–1900, Albany: State University of
New York Press; Kelley, Tina, 2006, Talk in class turns to God, setting off public debate
on rights, New York Times, Monday, December 18, 2006, retrieved December 18, 2006,
from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/nyregion/18kearny.html?pagewanted=print;
Lugg, C. A., 2004, One nation under God? Religion and the politics of education in a
post-9/11 America, Educational Policy, 18(1), 169–187; Lugg, C. A., & Z. Tabbaa-Rida,
2006, Social justice, religion and public school leaders, in C. Marshall & M. Oliva (eds.),
Leadership for social justice: Making revolutions happen (pp. 130–144), Boston: Allyn &
Bacon; Pennock, R. T., 1999, Tower of Babel: The evidence against the new creationism,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Zimmerman, J., 2002, Whose America? Culture wars in the
public schools, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Catherine A. Lugg and Carol F. Karpinski
RETENTION IN GRADE
Grade retention refers to a child repeating his or her current grade level again
the following year. In the United States, the use of grade retention as an intervention for struggling students has been a topic of heated discussion and numerous
empirical research investigations since the early 1900s. The debates regarding
the use of grade retention as an intervention for early academic and behavior

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challenges have increased amidst the contemporary sociopolitical context emphasizing high standards and accountability. With initiatives such as the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, there has been an increased emphasis on implementing interventions based on research. Moreover, an assortment of reading,
writing, and other academic standards have emerged as indicators of whether
students are proficient and should be promoted to the next grade level. Simultaneously there has been a call for the end to social promotion (i.e., the practice of
promoting students with their same age-peers although they have not mastered
current grade level content). This has resulted in increased rates of retention
amidst an era emphasizing educational standards and accountability. Despite
a century of research that fails to support the effectiveness of grade retention,
its use has increased over the past 25 years. Retention rates vary by individual
factors (e.g., social and economic indicators and ethnicity), school type (e.g.,
suburban, metropolitan), and geographic region. By high school, the cumulative
risk of grade retention in metropolitan school systems often exceeds 50 percent.
The following provides a brief summary of: (a) who is retained, (b) research regarding the effectiveness of retention, and (c) alternative intervention strategies
to promote the social and cognitive competence of students.
WHO IS RETAINED?
In the United States, it is estimated that at least 2 million students are held
back each year. Some children are recommended for retention when their
academic performance is low or if they fail to meet grade level performance
standards established by a school district or state. Some children may be recommended for retention if they seem socially immature, display behavior problems,
or are just beginning to learn English. While factors vary considerably among
retained students, several individual, family, and demographic characteristics
are commonly associated with an increased risk of retention. Examples include:
(1) late birthdays, delayed development, and/or attention problems; (2) living
in poverty or in a single-parent household; (3) frequent school changes and/or
chronic absenteeism; (4) low parental educational attainment and/or low parental involvement in education; (5) behavior problems and/or aggressive behavior
or immaturity; (6) difficulties with peer relations and/or low self confidence or
self-esteem; (7) reading problems (including English Language Learners); and
(8) Hispanic and black male students.
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GRADE RENTENTION
Too often, anecdotal evidence, clinical experience, and folklore overshadow
the results of research when discussing the merits and limitations of grade retention. Research indicates that neither grade retention nor social promotion
alone is an effective strategy for improving educational success. Moreover, grade
retention is not effective for addressing academic or social and emotional concerns, is associated with negative long-term consequences, and is perceived
negatively by students.

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Initial academic improvements may occur during the year the student is
retained, however, achievement gains decline within two to three years of retention. This means that over time, children who were retained either do not show
higher achievement or sometimes show lower achievement than similar groups
of children who were not retained. Research has found that for most students,
grade retention has a negative impact on all areas of academic achievement (e.g.,
reading, math, and oral and written language) and social and emotional adjustment
(e.g., peer relationships, self-esteem, problem behaviors, and attendance).
There is evidence of negative effects of retention on long-term school achievement and adjustment. Research demonstrates that during adolescence, previously experiencing grade retention during elementary school is associated with
health-compromising behaviors (e.g., emotional distress, low self-esteem, poor
peer relations, cigarette use, alcohol and drug abuse, early onset of sexual activity, suicidal intentions, and violent behaviors). Furthermore, students who were
retained are much more likely to drop out of school. Grade retention is one of
the single most powerful predictors of high school dropout, with retained students being 5 to 11 times more likely to dropout. Finally, grade retention is negatively perceived by students. Sixth-grade students have rated grade retention as
one of the most stressful life events.
The following four seminal reviews provide historical perspective of the past
century (1900–1999).
Jackson 1975 Systematic Review
Jackson (1975) provided one of the first systematic reviews of research examining the efficacy of grade retention. This review included 30 studies published
between 1911 and 1973. “The purpose of this review was to determine, whether
students who are doing poor academic work or who manifest emotional or social maladjustment in school are generally likely to benefit more from being retained in a grade than from being promoted to the next one” (p. 615). Jackson
declared, “One general conclusion about the effects of grade retention relative to
grade promotion is clearly warranted by all the results taken as a whole: There is
no reliable body of evidence to indicate that grade retention is more beneficial
than grade promotion for students with serious academic or adjustment difficu
lties. . . . Thus, those educators who retain pupils in a grade do so without valid
research evidence to indicate that such treatment will provide greater benefits
to students with academic or adjustment difficulties than will promotion to the
next grade” (p. 627).
Holmes and Matthews 1984 Meta-Analysis
Holmes and Matthews (1984) completed a meta-analysis exploring the effects of retention on elementary and junior high school students, including both
achievement and socioemotional outcomes. This 1984 meta-analysis included
44 studies published between 1929 and 1981 (including 4,208 retained students and 6,924 regularly promoted students). Of these 44 studies, 18 included

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comparison samples matched on various combinations of intelligence (IQ),
achievement tests, socioeconomic status (SES), gender, grades, and other dimensions. The Holmes and Matthews meta-analysis indicated statistically significant differences favoring the promoted students in each area of comparison
(e.g., academic achievement, language arts, reading, mathematics, work study
skills, social studies, personal adjustment, social adjustment, emotional adjustment, behavior, self-concept, attitude toward school, and attendance). The results of the meta-analysis indicated that overall, the retained students had lower
academic achievement, poorer personal adjustment, lower self-concept, and
held school in less favor than promoted students. Based on the results of the
meta-analysis, Holmes and Matthews concluded, “Those who continue to retain
pupils at grade level do so despite cumulative evidence showing that the potential for negative effects consistently outweighs positive outcomes. Because this
cumulative research evidence consistently points to negative effects of nonpromotion, the burden of proof legitimately falls on proponents of retention plans
to show there is compelling logic indicating success of their plans when so many
other plans have failed” (p. 232).
Holmes 1989 Meta-Analysis
During the same decade, Holmes (1989) included 19 additional studies and
completed another meta-analysis (using a total of 63 studies published between
1925 and 1989 comparing retained students to promoted students). Of the 63
studies in this review, 25 studies included participants matched on areas such as
IQ, achievement, SES, gender, grades, and other variables. Holmes reported that
54 studies found overall negative effects associated with grade retention, including socioemotional maladjustment and lower academic achievement. Furthermore, of the nine studies that yielded positive results, the benefits of retention
appeared to diminish over time. For example, in these studies students often
demonstrated gains during the repeated year and sometimes the following year;
however, subsequent comparisons across the years usually demonstrated no significant differences and sometimes favored the comparison group. Based on the
results of the meta-analysis of 63 studies, Holmes (1989) concluded, “When only
well-matched studies were examined, a greater negative effect was found for retention than in the research literature as a whole. In studies where retained children and promoted controls matched on IQ and prior achievement, repeating a
grade had an average negative effect of –.30 standard deviations. The weight of
empirical evidence argues against grade retention” (p. 28).
Jimerson 2001 Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
The most recent systematic review and meta-analysis examining the efficacy
of grade retention, included 20 articles published between 1990 and 1999, totaling over 1,100 retained students and over 1,500 regularly promoted students.
The studies included samples from diverse geographic regions across the United
States. One of the key criteria for selection was that the study must have included

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an identifiable comparison group of promoted students. Comparison groups
ranged from those with only one matched variable to those with students who
were recommended for retention but were not retained and essentially matched
on all variables considered (i.e., IQ, academic achievement, socioemotional adjustment, SES, and gender). Most studies included only students retained during
kindergarten, first, second, and third grades; however, a few included students
retained kindergarten through eighth grade. Most of the studies examined outcomes through grade 7, whereas five included outcomes during eighth grade
and beyond. Of the 20 studies, 80 percent reported negative conclusions regarding the efficacy of grade retention intervention for academic achievement and
socioemotional adjustment.
Results of the meta-analysis indicated that overall, retained students had
lower academic outcomes and more maladjusted socioemotional and behavioral outcomes relative to the comparison group of promoted students. Jimerson
concluded, “Studies examining the efficacy of early grade retention on academic
achievement and socio-emotional adjustment that have been published during
the past decade report results that are consistent with the converging evidence
and conclusions of research from earlier in the century that fail to demonstrate
that grade retention provides greater benefits to students with academic or adjustment difficulties than does promotion to the next grade” (p. 27).
ALTERNATIVE INTERVENTION STRATEGIES
Neither grade retention nor social promotion is likely to enhance a child’s
learning. Research and common sense both reveal that simply having a child
repeat a grade is unlikely to address the problems a child is experiencing. Likewise, simply promoting a student who is experiencing academic or behavioral
problems to the next grade without additional support is not likely to be an effective solution. When faced with a recommendation to retain a child, a more
effective solution is to identify specific intervention strategies to enhance the
cognitive and social development of the child and promote his or her learning
and success at school. The combination of grade promotion and implementing
evidence-based interventions (promotion plus) is most likely to benefit children
with low achievement or behavior problems.
In contrast to the negative effects associated with grade retention, research
provides evidence supporting other educational interventions that promote the
cognitive and social competence of students. It is important to note that there is
no single silver bullet intervention that will effectively address the specific needs
of low-achieving students. Importantly, the literature indicates that effective
practices for students at risk tend not to be qualitatively different from the best
practices of general education.
The following are examples of alternatives to grade retention and social
promotion:
• Parent involvement with their children’s schools and education. Examples
include frequent contact with teachers, supervision of homework, and
ongoing communication about school activities to promote learning.

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• Early reading programs. Developmentally appropriate, intensive, direct instruction strategies have been effective in promoting the reading skills of
low-performing students.
• Early developmental programs and preschool programs to enhance language and social skills. Implementing prevention and early intervention
programs is more promising than waiting for learning difficulties to accumulate. Effective preschool and kindergarten programs develop language
and prereading skills using structured, well-organized, and comprehensive
approaches.
• Age-appropriate and culturally sensitive instructional strategies to accelerate
progress in the classroom.
• Systematic assessment strategies, including continuous progress monitoring
and formative evaluation, to enable ongoing modification of instructional efforts. Effective programs frequently assess student progress and
modify instructional strategies accordingly.
• School-based mental health programs. These programs are often valuable in
promoting the social and emotional adjustment of children. In addition,
addressing behavior problems has been found to be effective in facilitating
academic performance.
• Behavior management and cognitive-behavior modification strategies to reduce classroom behavior problems.
• Student support teams with appropriate professionals to assess and identify
specific learning or behavior problems, interventions designed to address
those problems, and evaluation designed to measure the efficacy of those interventions. Effective programs tend to accommodate instruction to individual needs and maximize direct instruction.
• Extended year, extended day, and summer school programs that focus on
facilitating the development of academic skills.
• Tutoring and mentoring programs with peer, cross-age, or adult tutors focusing on promoting specific academic or social skills.
• Comprehensive schoolwide programs to promote the psychosocial and academic skills of all students. Collaboration and consistency between regular,
remedial, and special education are essential.
CONCLUSIONS
Neither grade retention nor social promotion is an effective solution to address the needs of children experiencing academic, emotional, or behavioral
difficulties. Parents, teachers, and other professionals committed to helping all
children achieve academic success and reach their full potential must abandon
ineffective practices (such as grade retention and social promotion) in favor of
promotion plus specific interventions designed to address the factors that place
students at risk for school failure. Parents and teachers are encouraged to actively collaborate with each other and other educational professionals to develop
and implement effective alternatives to retention and social promotion. Furthermore, early identification of school problems can help students to develop

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skills before they begin to feel like failures and can improve students’ chances
for success. Incorporating evidence-based interventions and instructional strategies into school policies and practices will enhance academic and adjustment
outcomes for all students.
Further Reading: Holmes, C. T., 1989, Grade-level retention effects: A meta-analysis of
research studies, in L. A. Shepard & M. L. Smith (Eds.), Flunking grades: Research
and policies on retention (pp. 16–33), London: The Falmer Press; Holmes, C. T., &
K. M. Matthews, 1984, The effects of nonpromotion on elementary and junior high
school pupils: A meta-analysis, Reviews of Educational Research, 54, 225–236; Jimerson, S. R., 2001, Meta-analysis of grade retention research: Implications for practice in the 21st century, School Psychology Review, 30(3), 420–437; Jimerson, S. R.,
G. Anderson, & A. Whipple, 2002, Winning the battle and losing the war: Examining
the relation between grade retention and dropping out of high school, Psychology in the
Schools, 39(4), 441–457; Jimerson, S. R., & A. M. Kaufman, 2003, Reading, writing, and
retention: A primer on grade retention research, The Reading Teacher, 56(8), 622–635;
McCoy, A. R., & A. J. Reynolds, 1999, Grade retention and school performance: An extended investigation, Journal of School Psychology, 37(3), 273–298.

Shane R. Jimerson and Mary Skokut
RURAL SCHOOLS
For the largest part of our history as a nation one-room rural schools dominated the educational landscape and represented the typical school experience
for average Americans in all states. They remained so until 1918, when what we
today might call urban schools took over the top spot. By the 1980s, however,
the primary educational experience had shifted again to what we today call suburban schools. In the process, rural, one-room schools fell to the point where
they now are the least common school experience in the nation.
This dramatic turnabout reflects the widespread embrace of an educational
policy known as school consolidation. Few would argue with the proposition
that school consolidation—closing a small school or schools to make a bigger
one elsewhere—has nearly always been economically motivated. This is not to
say that it has nearly always been touted as a school finance measure; far from it.
Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century it became fashionable
to consider school consolidation as merely synonymous with school improvement. The popular cultural maxim, bigger is better, was often used to sell the
concept. The argument went like this: why support a handful of poorly supplied
and poorly taught one-room elementary schools when one well-supplied and
well-taught school would do?
Of course the school improvement argument was augmented with the economic one: “a consolidated school will cost less—you may pay lower taxes if
a school consolidation plan is allowed to take place.” It should be noted that
these arguments lacked much in the way of persuasive power until technological developments, most notably the internal combustion engine, made it possible for school children to get to and from school at distances well beyond what
they could reasonably walk. When the utility of the automobile and school bus

Rural Schools |

was made even more attractive by the lure of indoor plumbing, central heating,
electric lights, and so on, school consolidation became overwhelmingly popular. Well-educated sophisticates were convinced that rural school consolidation
could not proceed fast enough. Colleges and schools of education all across the
country were filled with professors who possessed an unquestioning faith in consolidation as a policy option that would always and everywhere (1) improve the
education of youth, and, (2) save taxpayers money. It has only been in recent
years that the wisdom of this policy has received serious scholarly scrutiny.
In practical terms, the story of school consolidation in America’s schools
meant first that farm children, instead of walking to a neighborhood one-room
school, boarded a bus and went to school in town. The next wave of consolidation meant that children in and around very small towns no longer walked or
were bused to the town’s school but were bussed to yet another larger town some
distance away. The third wave of consolidation was primarily confined to the
high school level and involved closing consolidated schools and combining senior high-aged youth of four and five towns into one or two county high schools.
A fourth wave has been identified as well, this one moving back over towns that
maintained K–8 “attendance centers” and closing them down in the interest of
implementing the “middle school concept” via a consolidated middle school.
Each successive wave has simultaneously (1) generated more vigorous local
opposition, and (2) further stretched the plausibility of the standard rationale
supporting consolidation, namely that it will improve the educational program
for children while it saves taxpayers money. In fact, as late as 2007, it is impossible to point to any substantive research that suggests that school consolidation
may do these things. The reason, of course has to do with a mix of factors, some
economic (e.g., matters of scale) and some tied to the nature of teaching and
learning (e.g., the significance of teacher-student ratios).
It was hardly the cost and rarely even the quality question that concerned the
parents and children affected by proposed consolidations, however. Opposition
to school consolidation was rampant because rural Americans psychologically
connected the school with the well-being of their community. Community allegiance and affection were affronted at the very suggestion of closing down the
local school—a circumstance that resulted in court challenges in every state.
Again, as late as 2007, the courts have allowed state and local educational authorities free reign with respect to determining the number of school buildings
a district will support, and for choosing which students will attend them. In
other words, with some exceptions—victories in lower courts that were thereafter lost upon appeal—the courts have continued to defend consolidation as a
viable school policy, the lack of evidence to support it notwithstanding.
Some educational researchers have tried to use “optimal school size” research to
defend efforts at consolidation. The concept rests on the assumption that a certain
number of students will maximize a school’s revenue while keeping the studentteacher ratio fairly low, thus maximizing student achievement. This assumption
has some merit but is very easily confounded by contextual variables. What if it
takes a two-hour bus ride one way to reach the total number of students deemed
desirable by optimal school size research? Such a circumstance would almost

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certainly jeopardize the academic performance of the students forced to spend
four hours a day on a bus, in addition to a regular school day, just as it would skew
economies of scale by increasing transportation costs. It turns out that optimal
school size research lends little support for rural school consolidation.
It seems that each new governor, and each new group of state legislators,
when faced with their first budget-cutting exercise, almost immediately jumps
to school consolidation as a cost-saving measure. It is an easy, convenient solution. It affects only rural dwellers from the smallest communities—a distinct
minority among state voters. For their part, residents of small communities are
left to their own devices in terms of fighting back. They might create partnerships with similarly targeted communities and schools, but, by and large, the
nation’s colleges and universities have ignored the plight of the victims of school
consolidation.
Without question, in terms of sheer numbers, more pitched battles between
local schools and state departments of education have been waged over the issue
of consolidation than any other school issue. These battles, however, have been
nonviolent and civil when compared to the battles waged by majority populations fearing the inclusion of racial and ethnic minority children within their
schools. While we tend to think of this as an urban or suburban phenomenon,
this was not always the case. In fact, two of the five cases decided under the
umbrella of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas were rural schools.
In some places in Texas and California, school consolidation as a policy option
was used as a way to segregate racial minorities in one school while preserving
another as a “white” school.
Without question, however, school consolidation does not exhaust the list of
contested issues surrounding the nation’s rural schools. While most of the following issues have long since been resolved, they nevertheless reveal a significant connection between the provision of public education and the well-being
of democratic processes in the nation as a whole and are therefore worthy of
inclusion here.
RURAL EDUCATION AND THE DRIVE
FOR DEMOCRATIC REFORMS
As the nineteenth century progressed, any obstacle to free schools for all was
increasingly seen as undemocratic. In fact, by the time Nebraska became a territory under the terms of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, certain key school issues
had surfaced as litmus tests, as it were, regarding the quality of a state’s commitment to democratic principles. Did a state make provision for a totally free education? Or was it permissible for local school officials to charge tuition? Did the
state direct local school authorities to provide free textbooks to all students? Or
did they countenance the requirement that parents must provide required texts?
Was the state careful to be sure that all children meant all, and that persons of
color were not excluded? Were women allowed to serve on school boards or to
hold the office of county or state superintendent? What about tenant farmers
living and working within a given school district? Could they vote at school

Rural Schools |

board meetings, or were they prohibited from voting as nontaxpayers? Did the
state leave loopholes that would allow for egregious discrepancies in funding
the state’s common schools? What about private religious, or in the parlance of the
late nineteenth century, sectarian, schools? Did the state permit the dispersal of
school funds to such schools? Where did the state stand on the issue of compulsory education? Was it enough to provide a system of common schools, or was
the state ready to be sure that every child in the state attended one?
From the vantage point of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is difficult to appreciate what a challenge it was to develop a free school system. Any
school expenses that could be paid via a tuition charge saved local taxpayers
money. Charging tuition was especially popular if a district contained tenant
families who were not taxpayers. What is more, tenant farmers were typically
denied a voice at school meetings and were therefore unable to protest the use of
tuition for school funding. Many states failed to end tuition as a part of common
school funding long after common schools were established. New York continued the practice until the late 1860s, for example.
Eligible voters in all states since the Jacksonian suffrage reforms of the 1830s
included white males over age 21. The 14th Amendment to the United States
Constitution added black males to the list of voters. In the matter of voting for
school board officers or voting at school board meetings, however, the vote
was reserved for “freeholders,” or to those “eligible to pay property taxes in the
district.” Since all decisions surrounding the provision of schools were a direct
expense to local taxpayers, it was assumed that they alone should make the necessary decisions. Generally, women were allowed to vote if they were widows or
by other means became property owners, but this was by no means a given, and
there was considerable confusion over the issue. Consequently, extending the
right of women to vote in school elections and at school meetings became a kind
of political issue and one of the litmus tests to gauge the measure of democracy
within a given state. Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota were among the first to
officially sanction the right of women to be “qualified” to voice their views in the
affairs of the school. For example, an 1881 Nebraska school law amended earlier
language by inserting a mere three words concerning who was eligible to vote
at school board meetings, “Every voter and every woman who has resided in the
district forty days, and is over twenty-one years of age, and who owns real property in the district, shall be entitled to vote at any district meeting.”
A similar litmus test had to do with whether or not tenant farmers who
merely rented land in the district ought to be allowed to exercise a voice in the
affairs of the schools their children attended. Once again, Nebraska was among
the leaders in establishing this democratic provision. Just two years after expressly allowing women this right, the school law related to who could vote in
school elections and at school meetings was again amended, this time reading,
“Every person, male or female, who has resided in the district forty days and is
twenty-one years old, and who owns real property in the district, or personal
property that was assessed in his or her name at the last annual assessment; or
has children of school age residing in the district, shall be entitled to vote at any
district meeting.”

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States in the trans-Mississippi west were also leaders in promoting the cause
of free textbooks for all schoolchildren, an issue that became a part of the Farmers Alliance and Populist Party platforms during the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Most states ignored the popular demand for this provision until well into the
twentieth century. But as early as 1877, the state superintendent of public instruction reported that 66 Nebraska school districts had voluntarily purchased
textbooks for all students in their schools. By 1880, that number rose to 246;
by 1886, 422. In 1891, Nebraska became one of the first states in the union to
pass legislation requiring all districts to provide free textbooks. Six years later,
this act was tested through litigation to see if various sorts of school supplies
must also be provided freely. The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that, “We do
not think the term ‘text-books’ should be given a technical meaning, but that it
is comprehensive enough to and does include globes, maps, charts, pens, ink,
paper, etc., and all other apparatus and appliances which are proper to be used
in the schools in instructing the youth.”
LOCAL “HOT BUTTON” ISSUES IN RURAL SCHOOLS
The small, one-room school districts that dotted the entire nation were almost always governed by a three-person Board of Education (the former slave
states of the American South represent a notable exception). Some districts were
relatively homogenous in terms of their demographics and some were not. In either case, however, serious battles often ensued over issues that in hindsight can
only be called trivial. In one North Dakota district, for example, board members
severely reprimanded their teacher for bringing her own pencil sharpener into
the school. Apparently, the students were using the sharpener too often and, in
the process, using up their pencils too fast. Parents complained to the board
members, who in turn, complained to the teacher.
In one Minnesota district, the Board of Education decided to purchase a new
set of encyclopedias for the school—leaving themselves with a problem. Who
would get the old set? Board members fought over this question until it was finally decided that one board member would get volumes A through H, another
I through P, and the last, Q through Z.
Sometimes different ethnic and religious groups were fairly evenly distributed
in a particular district, a circumstance that could create other kinds of battles. In
one Minnesota district, for example, the composition of the three-person board
fluctuated between Norwegian Lutherans and German Catholics. When Lutherans controlled two of three seats, it was frequently “moved and seconded that
the Women’s Christian Temperance Union be allowed to use the [school]house
for their meetings.” When Catholics controlled two seats, it was moved and seconded that the group “not be allowed to use the house.”
Sometimes the location of the schoolhouse itself became a battleground issue.
Naturally, it was an advantage to live near the school, and wealthy farmers frequently donated land to the district so that the old school might be moved, or
a new one might be built, very near to the wealthy farmer. This dynamic was so

Rural Schools |

prevalent that it is quite likely that battles of this sort occurred in every state of
the Union.
The end result of those battles sometimes created a phenomenon known
only to those familiar with America’s rural educational history—a phenomenon
called “outside scholars.” Because schoolhouses were rarely situated equitably
in rural districts, it was frequently the case that some students had a shorter
walk to a school in a neighboring district than the walk to their own school. The
parents of such students frequently appealed to the board of the neighboring
district asking to allow their children to attend as “outside scholars.” Every rural
district had to have a policy dealing with outside scholars. This policy often created a good deal of acrimony and a trail of complaints leading all the way to the
office of the state superintendent of schools.
Sometimes, of course, small rural districts became divided over more serious issues, like the practice of corporal punishment in the local school. Keeping
order in rural schools was quite often synonymous with brandishing what came
to be known as the “switch,” a long, slender tree limb that caused a sharp sting
when wielded by a teacher. Sometimes, teachers were hired who took too many
liberties with the switch, particularly in the eyes of parents. Board meetings were
sometimes overrun with parents who demanded that the teacher in question,
like the rural Illinois teacher who kept 10 switches attached to his desk, each of
a slightly greater thickness to be used for light to serious student infractions, be
summarily dismissed from his position.
America’s rural schools were remarkably successful, despite the fights that
occurred within and around them over the years. They became a source for local
political engagement that reinvigorated American democracy. For example, at
the height of rural schooling in America, roughly one out of every 500 citizens
served as a school board member. Today, that number is roughly one out of
every 25,000. The history of American one-room schools demonstrates that
while democracy may not always be pretty, it can nevertheless be effective.
Further Reading: Fuller, W. E., 1982, The old country school: The story of rural education
in the middle west, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Reynolds, D. R., 1999, There
goes the neighborhood: Rural school consolidation at the grass roots in early twentiethcentury Iowa, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press; Theobald, P., 1995, Call school: Rural
education in the midwest to 1918, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; Tyack,
D. B., 1972, The tribe and the common school: Community control in rural education,
American Quarterly 24, 3–19.

Paul Theobald and Linda Tolbert

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SAFETY AND SECURITY IN SCHOOLS
Most parents send their children off to school each morning with confidence
that schools are safe places; and statistics support that their confidence is justified. What events are likely to disrupt the safety and security that students have
a right to expect in their environments? The list is relatively short in number of
items, but vast in the potential impact on the lives of children and youth. The list
includes: natural disasters, terrorism, pandemic illnesses, violence, and unintentional injuries. Despite the history of shootings in schools and the recent tornado in Enterprise, Alabama, these events are extremely rare. Overall, children
are safer at school than in almost any other setting in which they congregate.
That said, to lose even one child to a preventable death or injury is one child
too many, and it is the goal of protecting children that impels us to seek solutions to provide safe, secure school experiences for all children. While we recognize that such things as fights, bullying behavior, disruptive behaviors, class
cutting, and truancy are likely to occur on a daily basis at most schools, the
possibility that a major, catastrophic event will occur dramatically diminishes as
we focus on those common events. However, the fact that schools are generally
safe should not lull us into complacency and prevent us from being prepared to
prevent or reduce the impact of potential cataclysmic events.
THE CONTROVERSY
No one disagrees that schools should be safe places where children can learn
without worrying about threats to their personal safety. In general, parents and
students favor the planning and preparation associated with specific strategies

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to enhance their safety when natural disasters, such as tornados or pandemic illnesses, threaten. However, the strategies and resources dedicated to preventing
school violence are a source of disagreement among parents, school administrators, taxpayers, and students themselves. For example, because of the risk to
children at school from handguns and other weapons, many schools have instituted metal detector screening, video cameras, security guards, and uniforms
along with educational interventions including conflict resolution and gang
prevention programs. Some parents may feel that the excessive focus on these
intense screening measures creates a climate of fear and diminishes the educational focus of the school. And further, parents and others believe that those
students who are intent on bringing weapons to school will find a way around
the screening process, thus punishing those who follow the rules by requiring
them to submit to these excessive processes.
In 2006, a survey of school superintendents in the United States asked them
about their preparedness for school-based mass-casualty events. Although most
(86%) reported having a response plan in place, only 57 percent reported having
a prevention plan. Furthermore, although 96 percent had an evacuation plan,
30 percent reported never having conducted a drill and almost half had never
consulted with local ambulance officials to talk about emergency response and
transport of casualties.
Recognizing that schools do have a community role to play in preventing,
preparing, and responding to safety issues, schools also help in recovery. When
the school session is discontinued following a disaster, the return to school
marks the return to normalcy for the whole community. However, the need to be
prepared for all contingencies must be balanced against the need for academic
performance, and currently, schools are judged more on their test performance
than they are for their plans to address disasters. Unfortunately, it often takes a
disaster to make everyone aware of the need for prevention and preparation.
NATURAL DISASTERS AND/OR TERRORISM
Most schools have a plan for natural disasters including fire, tornado, and
flooding, depending on their local geographic risks. However, untested plans
and untrained students make such plans moot. Community collaboration about
early warning systems and evacuation plans is crucial to the overall success of
the process. No event occurs in isolation, and whatever peril challenges a school
(or for that matter the community) will have widespread impact. Because the
impact on the school is likely to be very similar, natural disasters as well as the
“unnatural” impact of terrorism are considered together.
When the Oklahoma City bombing occurred on April 19, 1995, one of the
unanticipated responsibilities of the school was determining whether or not
children could be sent home, given that many of their parents worked in the area
of the bombing or were part of the first response teams responding to the disaster. While this disaster was of the terrorist variety, the planning and response
principles still apply. Teachers and counselors began calling and receiving calls
from parents known to work for those agencies in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal

Safety and Security in Schools |

building. When parents and next of kin could not be located, children remained
at school with teachers and counselors until family members could be located.
Another unanticipated event was that many parents who were not personally
involved in the bombing came to the schools to pick up their children because
the tragedy made them want to hold their children close. However, parents arriving to pick up children prior to the close of school and the general awareness
of children of the abnormal atmosphere after they had experienced the bombing
shock wave created a heightened sense of chaos and foreboding that required
teachers and counselors to provide comfort and reassurance in a time when they
had little information on which to base their responses.
The need for accurate, timely information and a plan for insuring that children and their parents could be reunited were paramount in this disaster, and
for most other disasters when the child’s safety is not immediately threatened.
Every plan should consider the possibility that in a community disaster (whether
weather-related or caused by a terrorist) some parents may be injured or killed
and unable to assume responsibility for their children. In that event, appropriate
provisions must be made for the immediate care of the child until appropriate
caretakers can be located.
Having a parental “crisis response team” that is trained and ready to come to
the school should a disaster strike is critical to providing good response to the disaster as well as mitigating the aftereffects of trauma for the children involved. The
sense of vulnerability after a disaster is acute for everyone involved, especially
children and youth. To the degree that schools can provide an orderly, reasoned
approach, children will be less likely to experience post-traumatic stress.
PANDEMIC ILLNESSES
The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in 2003 was a
wake-up call for the potential of a worldwide pandemic. From the first deaths in
China from a mystery flu-like illness in November of 2002, until the declaration
by the World Health Organization in June of 2003 that the world-wide health
threat from SARS was coming to an end, a cumulative total of 8,450 probable
SARS cases had been identified and 810 deaths occurred. Schools in China were
closed for weeks. This particular epidemic affected 29 countries including Canada. The reality is that it can happen anywhere and schools must be prepared.
Planning and preparation for pandemic illness is usually a community process
and one that must include the schools. Deciding when to close and when to reopen are the big decisions once a pandemic is imminent. However, schools can
play a major role in disseminating information to the community about pandemics and also about appropriate preventive measures. Good hygiene is the first line
of defense, and schools should be mindful of opportunities and facilities for hand
washing. If students and staff are aware of the likelihood of disease transmission through contaminated hands, and if they have facilities and opportunities
to wash their hands frequently, even ordinary illnesses such as the common cold
can be reduced. Unfortunately, having sufficiently available hand-washing facilities might require structural modification as well as a change in scheduling.

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SCHOOL VIOLENCE
In 2003, the National Center for Educational Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics compiled the sixth annual report tracking violence at school. In
2001, violent victimizations at schools occurred at the rate of 28 per 1,000 students compared to 48 per 1,000 students in 1992. For the 1999–2000 school year,
there were 24 homicides at schools, two-thirds of which involved school-aged
children. However, statistics also confirmed that in regard to murders, youth
ages 5–19 were about 70 times more likely to be killed away from school.
The factors that may predispose youth to violence include exposure to violence in the media; the availability and accessibility of handguns; exposure to
violence in the home or community, whether as a victim or witness; living in
socially and economically impoverished communities; or living in a household
with poverty and no positive family support.
Research has defined qualitatively different patterns of delinquency and antisocial behaviors such as shoplifting, using drugs, or general rule-breaking from
the more defined pattern of persistent antisocial behavior that begins in early
childhood and persists into adulthood. Clearly, for those youth who may participate in a sentinel, antisocial event, the response and redirection provided to
the youth can make the difference in the trajectory of youth outcomes.
For example, for a youth who is caught with a pocket knife at school, one alternative trajectory would place the youth within the custody of juvenile justice
authorities and eventual placement with other troubled, antisocial youth who
reinforce/justify their antisocial actions. Another alternative trajectory could
provide parental and school/community redirection to make available those
experiences (relationships, resources, commitment) that would help the child
develop the skills essential for successful transition into responsible adulthood.
How schools respond to this event could make all the difference in the future of
the child.
If school violence were limited only to murder, perhaps little additional intervention would be required, given its infrequency. However, the National Youth
Violence Prevention Resource Center defines violence as including assaults with
or without weapons, physical fights, threats or destructive acts other than physical fights, bullying, hostile or threatening remarks between groups of students,
and gang violence. The cost of youth violence has been estimated to exceed $158
billion (including medical costs, lost productivity, and quality of life), so it is not
an insignificant sum. Additionally, the cost in school attendance is significant
in that about six percent of high school students reported not attending school
because they felt unsafe either at school or on their way to and from school.
The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control spearheaded a project
to discover “best practices” to prevent youth violence. They found good evidence
supporting four interventions. These included: (a) parent- and family-based
strategies that focused on parenting skills and other educational and therapy
components, (b) home visiting strategies involving nurse visits to homes of highrisk families to provide health care, health or referral information, and other
support services; (c) social cognitive strategies training to address emotional,

Safety and Security in Schools |

social, and cognitive development; and (d) mentoring that involves matching a
youth with an adult who will provide guidance and serve as a role model. Conspicuously absent from this list is the concept of “zero tolerance” that is often
used as a symbol of the “get tough” approach to youth violence. However, this
strategy has not been shown to be effective and is likely to contribute to the
negative outcomes described previously.
UNINTENTIONAL INJURIES
The leading cause of death for school-age children is unintentional injury
(accidents), which accounts for 38 percent of deaths for children ages 5–14 and
about 50 percent of youth ages 15–19. For high school aged youth, unintentional
injuries, homicide, and suicide combined accounted for 75 percent of deaths in
2003. The largest subgroup within the unintentional injury category is motor
vehicle crash, and if it were ranked by itself, it would rank ninth among the leading causes of death. For younger children, this means passenger death, but high
school youth are often the drivers of these vehicles.
In fact, the leading cause of death and injury among teenagers is motor vehicle crash, and the risk is highest for the most inexperienced teens. The risk
of crashing for drivers who are aged 16 is almost three times as high as more
experienced drivers who are 18 to 19 years of age. Two conditions, night-driving
and driving with teenage passengers, significantly increase the likelihood of a
crash. One proposed solution has suggested a graduated driver’s license (GDL)
that would allow younger drivers to acquire the skills and experience they need
under low-risk conditions before they are allowed to drive in higher-risk conditions, including night driving and driving with peer passengers. Most schools no
longer offer driver’s education and are little involved in the process, other than
providing proof of grade point average for those states that have imposed proof
of passing in order to apply for a license or for lower insurance premiums.
However, schools do govern parking permits on school property and have an
opportunity to educate youth about driving safety. Because youth are known to be
higher risk takers, this characteristic combined with driving inexperience can be
deadly or at the very least expensive in terms of injury, lost productivity, and property damage. Through prompts and praise, school personnel could reinforce those
safe driving skills that could reduce accidents and their concomitant damage.
SAFETY PLAN RECOMMENDATION
The function of a safety plan is to guide the planning and preparation required to insure the safety and security of both students and staff in the event of
threats from anticipated or likely sources. While the plan should cover responses
to natural disasters, terrorism, pandemic illnesses, violence, and unintentional
injuries, it should also provide plans to prevent these events if possible and to
attenuate their effects.
Prevention interventions must be tailored for the threat they target. For violence, programs that teach problem solving and communication have been

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shown to be effective. Children and youth often express their volatile emotions
without thinking of the consequences. Learning to feel anger without expressing
it in a negative way is an important component of these programs and will help
youth learn to avoid situations that can escalate into violence.
The concept of school disconnectedness has been associated with negative
outcomes and schools can include in their violence prevention plans opportunities for all students to be a part of school organizations that help build self-esteem
and provide an alternative to gang membership and participation in other risky
behaviors. The legacy of such a plan will go far beyond preventing violence and
is likely to promote prosocial behaviors among youth.
Another area for planning should include school redesign. School buildings that
have removed administrative offices from central locations and located restrooms
in remote hallways are providing a hothouse for violence and other disruptive behavior. In order to appropriately monitor student behavior, administrative offices
should be in a central area, as should restrooms, so that students are less likely to
hang out there and staff can monitor traffic flow. Improving both staff and student
access to hand washing facilities will also help with prevention of illnesses.
If schools want to create a welcoming environment and forgo metal detector screening, monitoring of visitors and restriction of access is essential. Most
schools can make most exterior doors exit only; however, education is required
of students to insure that these doors are not propped open to facilitate their
ease of entry. Careful monitoring of visitors is an essential part of a safety plan,
and both parents and children should know and be supportive of the plan in
order for it to be successful.
Finally, even the best of plans is useless if it has not been tested through rehearsal. Every school should provide a drill for building evacuation to places of
safety designated for students and staff in case of weather-related threats. Good
hygiene should also be encouraged regularly as accepted practice rather than
waiting for the threat of a pandemic. Every staff member, student, and parent
should know how the school plans to protect children from harm. Schools face
a long list of demands on their time and attention, and in the face of academic
pressure to improve test scores, preparation for that which may never happen
may fall down on the list. However, learning is enhanced in a safe environment,
and schools should make safety and security a first priority.
Further Reading: Aspy, C. B., R. F. Oman, S. K. Vesely, K. McLeroy, S. Rodine, & I.
Marshall, 2004, Adolescent violence: The protective effects of youth assets, Journal of
Counseling & Development, 82(3), 268–276; DeVoe, J. F., K. Peter, P. Kaufman, S. A.
Ruddy, A. K. Miller, M. Planty, et al., 2003, Indicators of school crime and safety (No.
NCES 2004–004/NCJ 201257), Washington, DC: U.S. Departments of Education and
Justice; Graham, J., S. Shirm, R. Liggin, M. E. Aitken, & R. Dick, 2006, Mass-casualty
events at schools: A national preparedness survey, Pediatrics, 117(1), 8–15; Heron, M., &
B. Smith, 2007, Deaths: Leading causes for 2003, National vital statistics reports, 55(10),
Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics; Sandhu, D. S., & C. B. Aspy, 2000,
Violence in American schools: A practical guide for counselors, Alexandria, VA: American
Counseling Association [BBB30126]; Thornton, T., C. Craft, L. Dahlberg, B. Lynch, &
K. Baer, 2002, Best practices of youth violence prevention: A sourcebook for community

School Choice
action (rev. ed.), Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National
Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

Cheryl Blalock Aspy and Daya Singh Sandhu
SCHOOL CHOICE
The term, school choice, means that parents can select the school their child
attends. The school choice movement endeavors to expand their options. Currently, a number of alternatives are available both within and outside school districts. Districts provide open enrollment plans, specialized magnet and vocational
schools, small schools-within-schools, and locally managed public schools. Of
these alternatives open enrollment, arguably has been the most controversial.
OPEN ENROLLMENT PROGRAMS
Open enrollment programs allow students to attend any public school in
their district or often throughout a state. First enacted in Minnesota in 1988,
these programs currently are available in 29 states. However, only 14 percent of
children in grades 1–12 participate. The low participation can be attributed to
the fact that transfer programs threaten the ability of neighborhoods to control
who attends their schools. Districts take advantage of loopholes allowing them
to refuse students or to set quotas based on space availability and other reasons,
and most states do not provide funds for transportation.
Although open enrollment programs may benefit individual students, the
schools themselves are left unchanged or in worse condition. In particular, if
a small school loses some students, it may need to cut staff and programs and
increase class size. These cuts can prompt still more students to transfer, introducing still another round of cuts.
INDEPENDENT, PUBLICLY FINANCED SCHOOLS
Notwithstanding a wide range of choice options available within public
school districts, during the past two decades the school choice movement has
dramatically evolved into a restless push for publicly financed schools that operate outside districts. The quest of parents to be free of district control explains the
popularity of education vouchers and charter schools. In both cases, parents use
public tax monies to send their children to self-governing, independent schools
that operate without close oversight from local school boards. Most local taxpayers have no say in what happens in such schools. Charter and voucher schools
are both being rationalized with free market ideologies premised on claims that
market-driven organizations outperform traditional public school monopolies.
Voucher Schools Compared to Charter Schools
Education vouchers set aside a specified amount of public money that parents
may use to pay their child’s tuition to a receptive private (or a few cases, public)

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school. Receiving schools are known as voucher schools. The private sector is
diverse. The Catholic Church enrolls almost half of all private school students.
But one in three is in a school affiliated with a wide array of religious organizations and sects, and others are in nonsectarian schools. Most private schools are
for elementary students, but some of them are high schools, and many more are
combined K–12. Also, private schools are widely dispersed throughout central
cities, the urban fringe, and large towns, but one in five is located in a rural area.
Few Catholic schools are small (under 50), and over one third are large (300
or more); this pattern is reversed for nonsectarian schools. One in four private
schools serve wealthy, elite families, and the percentage of private schools with
poverty students is half that of public schools. Three-fourths of all private school
students are white, but in one out of five Catholic schools over half the students
come from minority backgrounds. Most Catholic schools have some students
who qualify for subsidized meals, but other private schools are much less likely
to have such students. Private schools are far less likely than public schools to
enroll students with limited English proficiency.
Charter schools are publicly funded, tuition-free, nonsectarian public schools
that have been released from many of the laws and rules that govern school districts, including, for example, rules pertaining to teacher qualifications, curriculum, and calendar. Funds allocated to the school district follow the student to the
charter school. Like private schools, they are also very diverse. About three quarters of charters nationwide are new start ups; most of the others are existing public
schools that have converted to charter status. In practice, many charter schools are
indistinguishable from other public schools. However, they are expected to take
innovative approaches likely to improve student achievement. And some do. In
fact, some charters are runaway mavericks, while others feature distinctive and
sometimes controversial Waldorf, Montessori, or “back-to-basics” approaches.
Still others are not schools in the usual sense. Nearly one third of them are not
classroom based. Eight percent operate as home schools, still others are classified
as independent-study schools, and there are several dozen “online” cyber-charters
having no visible physical boundaries or school buildings. There are even some
charter districts that have converted all of their schools to charters.
Control of Charter Schools
Depending on the state, charters can be launched by parents, educators, community members, state universities, private firms, or any entity designated by the
state. Charter schools are managed by their own governing boards, and most are
legally independent. Eleven states grant them independence outright and eight
others permit them to be independent. The 20 states that require their charters
to operate as part of a school district account for only about one fifth of the
nation’s 3,600 charter schools. Their legal status notwithstanding, as conceived
charter schools are supposed to operate autonomously, although their actual
freedom varies widely in practice.
Authorized by state statutes, charter schools operate under a contract with an
overseeing chartering agency. Over three fourths of all charters are sponsored by

School Choice

local school boards. In addition, intermediate, county and state boards of education, as well as state education agencies, universities, and colleges sometimes act
as sponsors. Sponsors approve long-term contracts. Theoretically, they can also
revoke or refuse to renew contracts, but in practice a sponsor’s actual control
over schools varies enormously. Adding to the ambiguity, several states require
each school to negotiate with the sponsor over which decisions it is permitted
to control, and the outcomes of these negotiations are not always clear. It does
seem clear, though, that many charter schools are precariously straddling a bewildering paradox as autonomous, often legally independent schools, physically
located within school districts that are responsible for them but not permitted or
inclined to interfere with them.
Selectivity in Charter Schools
Unlike private schools, which select students, charter schools are legally required to accept students who apply, provided there is space and provided the
child meets criteria that may be mandated by the states or set by the school.
However, in practice, charter schools are not available to most students because
of mandates and because of official and informal policies. Often charter schools
give priority to local neighborhood children, either by mandate or by policy.
Some states limit enrollment to low-income or low-achieving students. Most
charter schools say they are oversubscribed, in which case they are allowed to
select students randomly or from first-served waiting lists.
Some charters target recruiting practices to preferred types of families, some
have formal or informal admission criteria (including recommendations, academic records, tests, or aptitudes), others counsel out the less preferred individuals, and many expel difficult students. Just how frequently charters use
these informal practices is difficult to document. Most schools deny having
any special admission requirements, but one in four charters admit to them.
Many others require applications and interviews. Moreover, a large percentage
of charters require or expect parents to work on behalf of the school as a condition for admission. While that may seem like a good idea, parent contracts
exclude families that are unable to participate or choose not to participate.
Given this arsenal of available exclusionary techniques, the admission practices of charters and voucher schools are not as divergent as appears on the
surface.

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT
The school choice movement has been explained and justified in at least three
ways:
1. White-flight parents, seeking to escape desegregation programs mandated
under the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, enrolled their children in private schools, which in turn created a demand for publicly financed vouchers.

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2. Reformers advocated government-financed schools that would provide
options for low-income minority parents dissatisfied with their children’s
assigned public school. Some voucher programs and charter schools have
been reserved for minorities, while some others are required to maintain
some form of racial and/or income balance. However, the aggregate national data showing that charters enroll a high percentage of minorities
are misleading. State-by-state data show that a few charters have an abundance of minorities, while most others enroll only a handful of minority
students.
3. Some reformers have succeeded in convincing politicians to support
vouchers and charter schools under the implausible promise that competition from independent publicly financed schools will force public schools
to reform in order to retain students.
Just one year after the Brown decision, the Nobel Prize winning economist
Milton Friedman introduced a plan to give parents public money they could
use to enroll their children in any receptive private or public school of their
choice. But it was not until 1990 that Milwaukee, Wisconsin used vouchers and
tax credits to create the nation’s first publicly financed urban school choice program. The school choice ideology got a substantial boost in the early 1990s as
frustrated parents realized that school districts were incapable of meeting their
needs. Critics were quick to cite low test scores, high dropout rates, overcrowding, and other negative statistics as evidence that traditional schools were failing to prepare the literate, skilled workers needed in a specialized, technological
world marketplace. Frustrated parents, the critics argued, started looking for options, and independent choice schools emerged to do the job.

Criticisms of Bureaucracy
The problems often have been blamed on intractable bureaucracy and uncaring officials. But bureaucracy is not primarily responsible for the shortcomings
of school districts. There were awesome societal forces beyond their control,
including immigration, higher retention rates, and urbanization, all of which
produced mammoth schools unable to meet personal circumstances. This society did not—or maybe could not—provide the resources and leadership that
districts needed to cope with the drastic social changes that swept over them.
In any case, frustration with bureaucracy does not account for why choice
advocates pushed to make choice schools independent from public school districts. They said public educators were incapable of changing and too often were
uninterested in doing so. Yet, in the early 1990s, even as vouchers and charters
were being vigorously promoted, social conditions were already forcing school
districts to adapt. They were ripe for sweeping internal reforms and were in fact
experimenting with a host of reforms.
It was not necessary to force parents to leave school districts to give them
viable choices. Choice advocates could have chosen to use their clout to push
for choices within school districts. Instead, they chose to press for independent

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schools operating outside districts. Why? The short answer is that a nationwide
ideological movement, which took hold starting in the 1950s, had gained momentum. This so-called laissez faire movement called for the privatization of almost every commodity and service in the public sector. School choice advocates
hitched their ideological wagon to a questionable free-market dream.
The Impetus for Charter Schools
Charter schools entered the picture in the early 1990s as a derivative of the
voucher concept, and just as important, as a competitive alternative to school
vouchers. For example, in 1993, California voucher activists placed a public initiative on the ballot to assess the voters’ interest in school vouchers. Their opponents
felt compelled to give the public another way to regain control over the way their
children were taught. The compromise was legislation authorizing charter schools
to form. There seems little doubt that the promise of charter schools helped defeat
the 1994 California voucher initiative. However, the charter school concept had
itself become tainted by close association with private school vouchers, which in
turn caused the school establishment to turn its back on charter schools. To meet
the objections of educators, the California legislature imposed compromises, including caps on the number of charter schools that could be created.
ARE CHOICE SCHOOLS BETTER THAN REGULAR SCHOOLS?
In exchange for being released from most rules, charter schools are supposed
to be more accountable than other schools, a provision that supposedly includes
closing schools that fail to perform adequately. There are two types of accountability criteria: market and contractual. Market accountability means that a
choice school must sustain adequate levels of enrollment. Voucher schools are
subject to this type of accountability. Contractual accountability means that the
school must fulfill a contract with sponsors under terms set by state legislation,
which can include stipulations about meeting student achievement goals. Charter schools are subject to both forms of accountability.
In practice, both are problematic. Market accountability provides no assurance that a school is providing a sound education and operating legally. Contractual obligations, especially those pertaining to student achievement, are
difficult for under-staffed agencies to monitor or measure. Consequently, few
charter schools have been closed for failure to produce good results. At the same
time, more than 400 have been closed for fraud and mismanagement, and there
are probably many others that have not been caught or sanctioned. Corruption
and negligence are the unspoken downside of independence.
Charter schools, and even private schools that accept vouchers, were presented to the public as a way to improve student achievement. The bargain was
better outcomes in exchange for deregulation and independence. In particular, it
was understood that if charter schools could not demonstrate improved student
achievement they would be shut down. In addition, some advocates convinced
legislatures that competition from charter schools would force public schools to

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improve. The preponderance of evidence has not supported either claim. Yet,
both programs remain strongly entrenched in state and federal budgets, sometimes because they are promoted by passionate advocates making claims based
on trivial differences and wildly inconsistent data.
The Vast Gap between the Claims and the Evidence
Advocates say that:
• Choice schools lead to higher levels of learning.
• No study points to substantially poorer performance of choice schools.
• There is a “surprising consensus” among studies showing students enrolled
in choice programs benefit academically.
• Data showing charter school students do worse on national tests than other
students are “baseless.”
• Fourth-grade school students across the nation are more proficient in
reading and math than students in nearby public schools.
• Competition from a few independent schools produces improved test
scores among students in regular schools.
• Competition from charter schools is the best way to motivate the ossified
bureaucracies governing education.
• Charters are “re-inventing” public education.
In contrast, however, various researchers have concluded that:
• Student achievement in general has not been positively enhanced by charter schools.
• Some studies comparing charter schools and regular schools suggest a
positive impact and others a neutral or negative impact.
• The majority of charter schools have failed to raise, and sometimes have
lowered, student achievement compared to regular public schools in the
same area.
• With some notable exceptions charter schools are remarkably similar to
regular schools.
• Charter schools are not doing anything regular schools wish to emulate.
• There is little going on in charter schools that merits the attention of anyone seeking powerful ways to engage children and youth in learning.
• Innovation in curriculum and instruction is virtually nonexistent in charter schools.
• Charter schools have produced no convincing data to illustrate that, on the
whole, they are prudent or productive investments.
Further confounding the picture, some researchers overstate the implications
from the data and, in some cases, distort the data themselves. For example, comparing a sample of charters with nearby regular schools, one researcher claims
to have found a three percent difference in math proficiency and a five percent
difference in reading, which she believes is significant (Hoxby, 2004). Not only
are the differences relatively small, but they were inflated because the author

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excluded the lowest performing charter-school students because they attended
schools serving “at-risk” students, who the author supposes are not comparable
to students in nearby public schools—even though a large portion of most public schools enroll the same type of student. Moreover, the study was represented
as a national study when in fact the schools included represented only one third
of existing charter schools and the students included account for fewer than
12 percent of charter school students.
Diversity of Outcomes
So, are choice schools superior? It is obvious that advocates on both sides
of the question are arguing over inconsistent and often trivial differences. The
rancorous ongoing debate only confirms that studies have not substantiated
the overblown claim that choice schools are out-performing regular schools in
meaningful ways. At best, the picture is mixed. It could not be otherwise given
the diversity of choice schools. They take too many different forms to be treated
as a meaningful unit that can be sensibly compared to conventional public
schools—which of course also differ widely among themselves. Choice schools
are not comparable either in programs or in students’ qualifications and therefore cannot be held accountable to common measures. The only thing charter
schools have in common is their legal form—which is to say, the charter that
authorizes someone to start a school. And the only salient feature the more than
7,000 private schools share is their nonpublic standing.
Is Competition Reforming Regular Public Schools?
What about the claim that competition from choice schools is causing school
districts to improve? The short answer is that it probably is not happening. Reason suggests that schools will sometimes take notice when they start losing
enough students and money. However, the research has not identified where
that might happen, how big the loss must be, how much competition it takes, or
what actions schools will take to improve student outcomes. This research has
been plagued by defective analyses, including: inflating the significance of small
differences, incorrectly aggregating individual scores to meaningless levels of
abstraction, preoccupation with averages that obscure variation, and failure to
identify where competition does and does not have an effect.
A few schools in a district are probably not going to provide real competition,
and they certainly are not going to assure that regular schools will miraculously
improve. Improvement takes leadership, skills, and resources—none of which
is guaranteed by competition. On the contrary, competition can have a corrosive effect by draining off resources. Ultimately, competition might only cause
schools to flail blindly without direction.
Problems with the Research on School Achievement
Using classroom tests to compare samples of schools is inappropriate, for the
following reasons.

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Hazards of Aggregating Test Scores of Individuals to Schools
The idea that the success of a national program can be assessed with standardized tests comes from an obsolete industrial model that treats schools as
factories processing students as raw materials—with average test scores reflecting the quality of the product. However, in the first place, a school does not
control most of the so-called production process. The way students perform on
tests depends on many extraneous forces, such as language proficiency, family
structure, parental guidance, peer group influences, job and travel experiences,
and the like. More important, standardized tests are constructed to maximize
differences among individuals and so are inappropriate measures of higher-level
organizational units like schools, school districts, and programs. The greater the
variance among individuals at the classroom level, the smaller the differences
become when their scores are used to represent schools, districts, or states.
Fallacies of Statistical Averages
Reporting averages that compare schools, programs, or states can mislead
parents who are trying to find a suitable school for their children. Studies typically pool all included charter schools, across all classrooms, districts, and states
represented, and then report the mean for that pool, without breaking out important differences among various types of schools and without taking into account the range of scores. Within a school, many students could be doing poorly
even if the mean score reflects well on the school. For example, a school can
increase its average score even when the students who improve are the ones in
the upper part of the distribution. And among diverse schools, districts, and programs, mean scores only obscure the critical differences among them. Statistical
means do not, for example, reveal the fact that many public schools are as good
as private schools, and that students who attend the best public schools outperform most private school students.
Given the enormous differences among both choice schools and regular
schools, averages and other measures of central tendency are not only meaningless, but also deceptive. Suppose that charter schools within a state or within
a school district have higher average scores than regular public schools. That
signifies only that some are better; but some may be worse. The question is how
many are better? It is always possible that a few schools are pulling up the average, masking the poor performance of most other schools. What is most critical
is the percentage of schools in the top, middle, and bottom of the distribution
of charter schools, and how those percentages compare with the distribution
of public schools. Those distributions are seldom reported, and consequently,
parents have no way to assess the risk they are taking in sending their child to a
charter school, even when average scores in the area are relatively favorable.
Implications of the Research
Putting aside inflated claims on both sides of the question, the only reasonable conclusion that can be justified by the evidence so far is this: even if some

School Choice

students are marginally better off in choice schools, the differences appear small
and inconsistent enough that it does not make much difference, causing some
to question why massive federal and state programs in favor of choice schools
are in place. The fact that some choice schools may be good, even exceptional,
is little comfort for parents who must make decisions about whether to risk
sending their children to a particular school. Given the wide differences among
schools, the risk is high. For parents, average scores are not helpful. They need
better information. However, rather than sorting it out, researchers report only
averages and then incorrectly aggregate data collected from individuals in classrooms to the levels of districts, states, and programs. Standardized test scores
were not constructed for the purpose of comparing diverse types of schools or
other macro units like school districts and states.
CONCLUSION
While independence from school districts has been vaunted as a solution
to the problems confronting public schools, as things stand, independence appears to be a counter-productive dead end. Autonomous schools are products
of random market forces. There is no guarantee that they will locate where
the need is greatest, or be well-designed and able to meet the most challenging problems. Further, there appears to be no perceptible difference between
many charters and regular public schools. And many charter schools seem to
abuse their freedom, while many others are struggling to survive. In the name
of independence, some students are being shortchanged with watered-down
versions of comprehensive school programs, sitting in substandard buildings
and facilities, being taught by inexperienced and sometimes poorly trained
teachers.
This does not mean that there are no excellent choice schools. On the contrary, there are many exceptionally good ones. But there is no compelling evidence for the proposition that schools that operate independently are better
than regular schools. And even if it could be shown that independent schools
are marginally better, the difference could be explained by the small size of most
choice schools, or by good teachers, strong parental support, and a host of other
reasons unrelated to independence.
The promise that it would be possible to demonstrate across-the-board
achievement gains in favor of independent choice schools was impossible from
the start, not necessarily because choice schools are inadequate, but because proponents promised too much and certainly more than can be demonstrated with
test scores. However, charter schools, and even voucher schools, can be useful,
provided they are linked more closely with school districts. For it is known that
while some choice schools are floundering, others are performing at least as well
as regular schools or in some cases even as well as blue-ribbon public schools.
These charter schools could be helpful to school districts if only they were made
part of districts rather than being independent of them. The school choice debate artificially sets schools against one another when competition is not the
solution. School districts need help.

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In many conventional schools, unions may control teacher assignments,
and as a consequence the best teachers are able to avoid the most challenging
schools. However, if a district operated its own charters, it could use them strategically to entice good teachers into hard-to-staff schools, and to address other
district-wide problems, including those associated with at-risk students, English
learners, special education students, and others.
Further Reading: Bracey, G. W., 2002, The war against America’s schools: Privatizing schools,
commercializing education, New York: Allyn & Bacon; Cookson, P. W., & K. Berger, 2002,
Expect miracles: Charter schools and the politics of hope and despair, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; Corwin, R. G., & E. J. Schneider, 2005, The school choice hoax: Fixing America’s schools, Westport, CT: Praeger; Heise, M., & J. E. Ryan, 2003, The political economy
of school choice, Yale Law Journal, 111(8), retrieved August 20, 2007, from http://www.
questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5000773591; Hoxby, Caroline M., 2004, Achievement in
charter schools and regular public schools in the United States: Understanding the differences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research;
Lockwood, A. T., 2004, The charter school decade, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Ronald G. Corwin
SCHOOL COUNSELING
The profession of school counseling has had its share of conflict and controversy since its beginning almost a century ago. The development of the
profession has been characterized by times of rapid growth and times of stagnation. This history manifests itself into a number of conflicts witnessed today.
School counselors typically experience conflict in various areas. Because school
counselors work in almost every area related to school functioning and student
development, their daily activities involve many of the controversies addressed
in other chapters of these volumes. These include, but are not limited to, areas
such as standardized and high-stakes testing, accountability, achievement gaps,
bullying, poverty, violence, and discipline. For the purposes of this chapter, the
focus will be on conflicts unique to school counseling. These conflicts involve
issues of professional identity and confidentiality.
PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY
A counselor’s professional identity aids in shaping the roles performed in
schools, decisions that are made, and the views they express as professionals.
Historically, school counselors have had difficulty in consistently performing
the tasks associated with a strong professional identity. Remley and Herlihy
(2005) state:
Individuals with a strong professional identity can easily explain the
philosophy that underlies the activities of their professional group, describe the services their profession renders to the public, describe the
training programs that prepare them to practice their profession, explain their qualifications and the credentials they possess, and articulate

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the similarities and differences between members of their own profession and other similar groups. (p. 22)
School counselors struggle with basic tasks such as using a consistent name to
describe the profession, performing appropriate counseling tasks, and avoiding
being externally defined and controlled. The National Model released in 2003
by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) may aid in increasing
the number of counselors who use consistent terms in describing their titles
and roles in schools as well as providing consistency in preparation, certification
standards, and practices.
Title Confusion
Since school counselors’ introduction into schools, they have struggled to
find a consistent identity or even use a consistent term to describe themselves.
Whether to use the term guidance or counseling continues to be a major debate. While ASCA suggests school counselor as the appropriate title, often school
counselors are referred to by others or refer to themselves as guidance counselors. Additionally many school counseling offices are still called guidance offices.
The term guidance was used when school counseling was first implemented
into schools. School counseling has its roots in vocational guidance. Jessie Davis
is credited with introducing guidance to the schools in 1907 when, as a principal, he encouraged English teachers to assign essays and provide lessons that
had a career and personal/social nature. Also during this time, Frank Parsons,
the “Father of Vocational Guidance,” is credited with aiding young people with
transitions from school to work. His projects in Boston led to the first school
counseling certificate, which emphasized study in education and vocational
guidance. His work propagated the growth of counselors working in schools.
The profession’s focus on vocational guidance, in which school counselors
focused on students’ transitions into careers that matched their characteristics
and aptitudes, is very different than what is advocated by ASCA today. Paisley
suggests:
While guidance defines one part of the set of activities that might be a
part of a comprehensive program, the term guidance counselor is considered somewhat dated and limited in describing the current role and
function of a school counselor. It has been associated with more directive and stereotypical notions of services usually focused on educational
and career planning. (ASCA, 2005b, p. 20)
This contemporary view, espoused by ASCA, involves school counselors
working within comprehensive school counseling programs that address three
domain areas: academic, career, and personal/social. The programs, led by school
counselors working collaboratively with school staff, parents or guardians, and
community members, serve the needs of all students through a preventative and
developmental model. While the provisions of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 and the mandate of the Individuals with Disabilities Education

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Improvement Act (IDEA) of 2004 that a transition program be part of students’
Individualized Education Plans (IEP) have reinforced the ideas of career guidance for school counselors, the focus is more mature in that contemporary career concepts such as citizenship, total person development, and activities of
daily living have been introduced.
The debate in relation to a clear terminology appeared to be put to rest when
a unanimous vote by the ASCA Governing Board in 1990 declared that the acceptable terms would be school counseling and school counseling program. Later
documents published by ASCA and ASCA’s current vision and mission statements have supported this terminology, but one needs only to call or visit a local
school to see that the terms guidance counselor or guidance office are still very
popular.
Role Confusion
What does a typical school counselor do? One should not be discouraged
if unable to answer this question because many practicing school counselors
struggle with it. The inability of school counselors to use a consistent title and
to form a unique identity manifests itself in role confusion. There is great variance in the activities performed by school counselors. Often school or administrative policies dictate their roles and activities within a school. One can travel
from one school to another within the same district and find school counselors
performing stunningly different roles and functions. One may find school counselors who spend the majority of their days counseling students individually or
in small groups. One may find school counselors who spend a large amount of
their time performing classroom lessons on academic, career, or personal/social
topics such as test anxiety, friendship skills, or bullying. Conversely, one may
find school counselors who spend the majority of their time in clerical tasks
such as filing, completing class schedules, registering new students, computing
grade-point averages, and/or coordinating the administration of standardized
tests. One may also find school counselors who spend large portions of their
days in administrative tasks such as providing discipline to students. Finally, one
may also come across school counselors who perform all or none of the actions
described above.
In the 1920s and 1930s, school counselors embraced the system of group administration developed and used by the United States Government during World
Wars I and II. Group tests were administered to assess students’ aptitudes and later
explore students’ characteristics and traits. In the 1940s the country became fascinated with the intelligence quotient (IQ), and at the urging of parents IQ testing
entered the academic realm. Finally, the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, in response to the launch of Soviet Sputnik I, established training programs and school counseling positions across the United States.
School counselors were trained and hired in record numbers with the purpose
of identifying, guiding, and supporting students with an aptitude for math and
science. These events spawned government support in the form of resources, leadership, and training. These movements added assessment as a major function of

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school counselors. While ASCA supports the analysis and interpretation of test
data, many school counselors serve as test coordinators and perform clerical functions such as scheduling rooms for test administration, counting test booklets, and
proctoring make-up exams. These activities diminish school counselors’ capacities to serve students and underutilize their advanced training.
As a result of the budget crisis of the 1970s, school counselors, fearful of losing their jobs, began to take on additional roles in order to assist administrators
and give them greater visibility. Previously they had typically performed individual counseling and planning behind closed doors. These added duties were often
administrative in nature and are related to many of the noncounseling roles school
counselors are currently performing, such as scheduling, testing, bus duty, and discipline. The budgetary constraints that hamper many of our schools today and the
pressures of accountability require school counselors to be more visible and prove
their worth. However, unlike the 1970s, school counselors maintain visibility and
exhibit accountability by performing tasks that aid in closing the achievement gaps
between majority and minority students and ensuring the academic, career, and
personal/social success of all students. Although not as common as in the past,
many still continue to take on noncounseling responsibilities.
Tasks deemed inappropriate by ASCA, such as registering and scheduling
students, entering data, and administering tests, often pull counselors away
from more appropriate tasks. School counselors may spend as little as 50 percent
of their time in direct contact with students, which is 30 percent less time than
is recommended by ASCA. Burnham and Jackson (2000) found similar results
suggesting that school counselors are often overly involved in noncounseling
activities. Often these activities, suggested by ASCA to be inappropriate, are the
very activities by which we define school counselors.
The large number of personal and social concerns presented to school counselors by students, as well as the overwhelming demands placed on school counselors by others, limit their abilities to advocate for students and serve as leaders
in enhancing student achievement. Compounding the difficulties placed on
school counselors by the overwhelming number of noncounseling tasks they
must complete is the tremendous counselor-to-student ratio. Currently ASCA
suggests that one school counselor should serve a maximum of 250 students in
order to maintain effectiveness. This is problematic in that the current U.S. average is 479 students per counselor. This number is far too large for school counselors to meet the academic, career, and personal/social needs of all students.
In order for progress to be made, Burnham and Jackson (2000) suggest that
school counselors collaborate with school administration and other individuals in defining their roles. In doing so, nonguidance duties may be reassigned
to staff members who can best perform the tasks in question. This may aid in
eliminating an area of tremendous controversy in school counseling.
Authors agree there is a disconnect between school counselor education and
the actual activities of school counselors. Inconsistent preparation of school
counselors may result in notable variance in certification requirements and
licensure laws between states. Variance may lead to ambiguity in the roles of
school counselors, resulting in counselors who are ineffective and inefficient.

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The explosion of school counseling and school counselor preparation and
training programs, resulting from the passage of the NDEA of 1958, prompted
the American School Counselor Association and the Association for Counselor
Education and Supervision (ACES) to create training standards that emphasized
individual counseling for students and stressed the importance of documenting
and providing information as well as practice related to placement, follow-up,
and evaluation. Interestingly, many of these roles are identified as inappropriate by ASCA. Many school counselor educators cling to preparation standards
similar to those in the 1950s and 1960s that place importance on a nondirective
client-centered approach. These types of approaches do not adequately address
the needs of today’s students or schools. A dialogue should be developed to decrease the divide between counselor education programs and school counselors
and to develop a mutual language on how the practice and training of all counselors needs to change.

Identity Confusion
There are a number of dichotomies inherent in the school counseling profession, two of which are school counselor versus mental health counselor and
teaching experience versus no teaching experience. These dichotomies often
force school counselors to choose sides and result in identity confusion.
School counseling became more closely aligned with mental health counseling in the 1940s and 1950s. Title V of NDEA provided resources not only to
increase the number of school counselors, but to increase the number of school
counselor preparation programs. These preparation programs were highly influenced by Carl Rogers, who focused on a more nondirective approach to
counseling. This approach focused less on providing information and helping
students to solve problems and more on developing the counseling relationship.
The training of many school counselors in a nondirective, client-centered approach to counseling moved school counselors away from the typical directive
approaches that characterized the educational environment and more closely
aligned school counselors with the counseling profession. This realignment
caused confusion among school administrators, teachers, and student caretakers and among school counselors themselves as to the role of the counselor in
schools (ASCA, 2005a). Wittmer (2000) argued that the more nondirective approach “took us off track in school counselor preparation and may have contributed to the inappropriate training of many school counselors” (p. 2).
Many school counselors still struggle with whether they should or should not
provide full-time therapeutic counseling services for students. While the title
counselor may denote that a person in that job can provide therapy or consistent
service to a select number of students, often school counselors lack the time to
diagnose or treat the mental disorders and/or severe mental health issues of students, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, severe depression, Bipolar Disorder, and/or eating disorders. They may also lack the required preparation
to perform these tasks. They are prepared to develop prevention strategies and

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can be used to identify students who have needs associated with these mental
disorders or health issues and aid them in finding external resources.
Similar to psychotherapists, school counselors seek to develop relationships with
students based on trust, acceptance, and understanding and provide services to
students that are therapeutic, such as working with students individually, in small
groups, and/or by providing classroom guidance. These services help students to
become better learners and to discuss their beliefs or plans for future events in
the academic, career, or personal/social realms. However, the goal of therapy in
school counseling is to help students become effective and efficient learners and
not seriously adjust personality, which is the purpose of psychotherapy.
Identity confusion has also resulted in the debate pertaining to whether or not
school counselors should have teaching experience before entering the school
counseling profession. While the majority of states do not require teaching experience as a prerequisite for school counseling certification, many practicing
school counselors and teachers believe that it is necessary for effective practice.
Baker (2001) suggests that a lack of educational experience may discourage
school counselors from implementing counseling programs that are proactive
and developmental in nature. However, others find little support and no empirical link between teaching experience and success as a school counselor.
External influences also contribute to the debate about whether school counselors identify more with educators or counselors. Movements to revise counselor education programs by the Education Trust and the creation of a national
certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS)
have encouraged school counselors to align more with educators. This view is
diametrically opposed to that of the National Board of Certified Counselors,
which also provides a national certification for school counselors. Their stance
is that school counselors make up a specialty area of counseling that is unique
but still conforms to the basic philosophies of the counseling profession, such
as working from a preventative and developmental model that opposes viewing
students as mentally ill and works to empower them.
With the release of the National Model, ASCA has aided school counselors in
finding a balance between their role as educators and their role as counselors.
School counselors are challenged to incorporate the best that both viewpoints
(education and mental health) have to offer. On a daily basis school counselors
position themselves as leaders in helping to remove barriers to educational success of students. These barriers may be the result of issues aligned with mental
health, such as anxiety, depression, and/or community or family dysfunction.
They are encouraged to build relationships with students that are based on trust
and will aid in ensuring students’ academic success. By finding a balance between education and mental health, school counselors may be able to find one
vision and one voice for their profession.
CONFIDENTIALITY
Although much less ambiguous than professional identity, a major conflict
for school counselors surrounds balancing the privacy rights of students with

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the rights of parents or guardians, principals, and teachers to know students’
information. School counselors have access to tremendous amounts of information, including students’ grades and assessment scores. They are also privy to
information provided by students and parents in individual counseling sessions,
as well as by court systems, medical doctors, and mental health professionals
working in the community. School counselors wrestle daily with the issue of
what information they should keep private versus what information they should
provide to parents, school faculty, and principals. At times, information about
students would be helpful to individuals such as teachers. Additionally, providing student information to teachers or principals would occasionally be in the
best interest of the student or possibly the school, such as in the case of school
safety. However, students’ privacy (confidentiality) is the sole basis for establishing trust in the counseling relationship.
The progressive education movement, by highlighting personal, social, and
moral development, prompted schools to increase the amount of counseling
and guidance provided to students. However, this movement, primarily in the
1920s and 1930s, quickly ended due to the belief by parents and some education systems that the priority of a school should be to educate students solely in
terms of academic information. Even today it is not uncommon to find parents
who feel that classroom instruction is diminished by students’ involvement in
school counseling that addresses a variety of topics, including what some would
feel are private family-oriented issues.
Bodenhorn (2006) found that the two most frequently reported ethical dilemmas by school counselors in the state of Virginia included maintaining the
confidentiality of students’ personal disclosures and the confidentiality of student records. For many school counselors, the issue of disclosing information
is not black and white. Many take into account the age and maturity of students
when deciding to disclose to parents information gained during students’ counseling sessions. Often elementary school counselors are more willing to provide
confidential student information to parents than middle or high school counselors. When parents request more information about their children than school
counselors feel comfortable providing, school counselors are then faced with
struggling to resolve the conflict involving minors’ rights of confidentiality. One
approach to possibly reducing such struggles, provided by Bodenhorn, involves
school counselors educating parents and school personnel about the responsibilities of school counselors to maintaining students’ confidentiality. Confounding
this struggle even more is the fact that parents and guardians maintain the privacy rights of their children. Two federal statutes, the Family Education Rights
and Privacy Act (FERPA, 1974) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA, 1996), provide structure for this principle. Because of
these federal statutes, parents, not students, have the right to disclose any or all
of their child’s personal and medical information, including school counseling
records.
Defining the legal status of minors can prove to be complicated. In most instances minors are defined by their age, someone younger than 18 years. Legally
it is understood that minors generally cannot make decisions without guidance,

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that they are “a group of individuals with few responsibilities, many restrictions,
and a complex legal status that maintains a dependency on adults for privilege
and access to resources” (Sanger & Willemsen, 1992). Even after students turn
18 they are not fully emancipated if still enrolled in a secondary school setting.
Parents still have a right to access their children’s records if the children continue to be defined as dependents under the federal income tax code.
For school counselors who face these struggles it is important to understand
that they have an ethical obligation to protect the privacy of their students as
well as a legal obligation to the parents and guardians of those students to keep
their children safe. Stone explains that if school counselors do not provide a safe
environment for students where trust can be developed, many would not seek
their services due to potential threats to confidentiality. Stone argues that school
counselors should keep information related to counseling confidential unless
disclosure of student information is required by law and in the best interest of
the students. Counselors should maintain confidentiality of students’ information, with the only exceptions being if child abuse is suspected, a student is a
danger to self or others, the student or a parent requests the information, or the
information is requested via court order.
CONCLUSION
School counselors grapple with many issues related to professional identity and confidentiality. The past and present controversies make it difficult for
school counselors to find a common identity and balance regarding the sharing of information. Their roles and functions have been expanded through the
years and with each added activity confusion has resulted. With the release of
the ASCA National Model and statutes and ethical codes that reflect a more
contemporary view of professional identity and privacy, it is likely that school
counselors will be able to internally control their duty and functions within a
school and lessen the ambiguity that has characterized the profession.
Further Reading: American School Counselor Association, 2005a, ASCA national model
for school counseling programs (2nd ed.), Alexandria, VA: Author; American School
Counselor Association, 2005b, School counseling principles: Foundations and basics,
Alexandria, VA: Author; American School Counselor Association, 2006, Vision and
mission, retrieved November 21, 2006, from http://www.schoolcounselor.org/content.
asp?pl=325&sl=127&contentid=171; Baker, S. B., 2001, Reflections on forty years in
the school counseling profession: Is the glass half full or half empty, Professional School
Counseling, 5(2), 75–83; Bodenhorn, N., 2006, Exploratory study of common and challenging ethical dilemmas experienced by professional school counselors, Professional
School Counseling, 10(2), 195–202; Burnham, J. J., & C. M. Jackson, 2000, School counselor roles: Discrepancies between actual practice and existing models, Professional
School Counseling, 4(1), 41–49; Remley, T. P., Jr., & B. Herlihy, 2005, Ethical, legal, and
professional issues in counseling (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education;
Sanger, C., & E. Wellemsen, 1992, Minor changes: Emancipating children in modern
times, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 25(2), retrieved August 20, 2007,
from http://ssrn.com/abstract=952315; Stone, C. B., & C. A. Dahir, 2006, The transformed school counselor, Boston: Lahaska Press; Ward, C., 2005, July, Social advocacy

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and professional identity: An interview with Reese M. House, Counseling Today, 34–35;
Wittmer, J., 2000, Developmental school guidance and counseling: Its history and reconceptualization, in J. Wittmer (ed.), Managing your school counseling program: K-12
developmental strategies (2nd ed.) (pp. 2–13), Minneapolis, MN: Education Media
Corporation.

Lynne Guillot Miller
SCIENCE EDUCATION
For over a hundred years traditional and progressive ideals have competed
with each other in science education. To traditionalists, education is a process of
transmitting knowledge. Traditionalists value discipline, hard work, and intellectual rigor. Progressives value student interest and opportunities for students to
construct meaning out of their own experiences and the experiences of others. In
a progressive classroom there is a greater reliance on active participation in which
students are engaged physically and intellectually in a learning task. Progressive
educators often criticize what they see as passivity on the part of students in traditional classrooms. Progressive teachers are more likely to share decision making
with students so that students develop responsibility for their behavior and for
their learning. Progressive educators find the testing that dominates traditional
education inadequate for measuring the complexity of learning that they value
in progressive classrooms. In science education, these differences are played out
in debates over child-centered vs. teacher-centered teaching; disciplinary knowledge vs. societal applications; and discovery vs. receptivereception learning.
SCIENCE TEACHING IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
During the first half of the twentieth century, science education was often justified explicitly in terms of its societal value. Education in general sought to address pressing problems that the rapidly growing country faced—issues related
to immigration, urbanization, public health, and other socially based problems.
The trend in all of education was toward practical work for students, both because it would be more interesting to them and because practical studies could
address issues having importance in society.
John Dewey, who is generally regarded as the father of progressive education,
argued that citizens in a democratic society should be inquirers regarding the
nature of their physical and social environments and active participants in the
construction of society. They should ask questions and have the resources to find
answers to those questions, independent of external authority. To prepare them
for life in a democratic society, formal education should give students the skills
and dispositions to formulate questions that were significant and meaningful to
them. And because there is a shared, collaborative aspect to life in a democratic
society, students also should develop a capacity for cooperative group inquiry.
In one of the first formal statements on the importance of engaging students in the solution of real world problems, the science committee of the National Education Association’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary

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Education (CRSE) said that “the unit of instruction, instead of consisting of
certain sections or pages from the textbook, or of a formal laboratory exercise,
should consist of a definite question, proposition, problem, or project, set up by
the class or by the teacher (National Education Association, 1920, p. 52). In the
same report, the CRSE’s physics committee said the laboratory should be a place
for genuine inquiry rather than as a place to “verify laws.” Many science educators during the early years of the twentieth century thought that the laboratory
should be used as a place where students could work on problems of interest to
them that had social, as well as scientific, relevance and importance. Numerous
studies were conducted to determine if students learned more from laboratory
experiences than from teacher-led demonstrations and if laboratory instruction
could be cost effective. Researchers also investigated whether the laboratory
could precede or must follow classroom instruction because, when following a
truly inductive approach, laboratory work should be exploratory and therefore
should come first. But this often created scheduling problems that could not be
easily overcome.
THE AGE OF REFORM
By the 1950s, a growing number of scientists, science educators, and industry
leaders were becoming concerned about the practical orientation of many science courses and what they saw as an over-emphasis on social relevance and
student interest. To them, the appropriate role of schools was the training of
disciplined intelligence and the transmission of the cultural heritage, not teaching the practical applications of science. Science also had become important for
national security and economic development and, in such an environment, the
appropriate goals of science teaching should include preparing students to become scientists and developing a public that was sympathetic to science.
In the mid 1950s, the National Research Council (NRC) and the National
Science Foundation (NSF), as well as various professional organizations in science and mathematics, developed plans to revise the science and mathematics
curriculum to accomplish these new goals. The interest in reform was stimulated
by questions about the adequacy of the country’s technical expertise, especially
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the years immediately following World War II. It
was also asked if progressive education, which had enjoyed the support of the
education community for most of the first half of the twentieth century, was
adequate to meet the new challenges involved in preparing individuals for work
in technical fields. Many argued that progressive education was anti-intellectual
and was failing to transmit the cultural heritage to the youth of this country.
Largely because of U.S. postwar tensions with the Soviet Union, President
Truman in 1946 established the President’s Scientific Research Board to study
and report on the country’s research and development activities and on science
training programs in the country. The board said: “The security and prosperity
of the United States depend today, as never before, upon the rapid extension of
scientific knowledge. So important, in fact, has this extension become to our
country that it may reasonably be said to be a major factor in national survival”

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(President’s Scientific Research Board, 1947, Vol. 1, p. 3). In a 1953 report published by the U.S. Office of Education, a committee of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) said: “The present struggle for the very
existence of our freedoms causes the need for the improvement of the instruction in science and mathematics to become increasingly important” (U.S. Office
of Education, 1953, p. 1).
By the time the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first Earth orbiting satellite, in
1957, the country was prepared for the reforms that many scientists and mathematicians had been recommending. In this high-stakes environment, mastery of
the disciplines was seen as the way to achieve the intellectual rigor that critics said
was missing. This was to be accomplished in part by deliberately excluding most
of the existing social and technological applications from the science courses and
focusing instead on the organized disciplines themselves. This emphasis on the
structure of the disciplines was in direct opposition to the conventional wisdom
of science educators in the first half of the twentieth century, who said that subject matter should always be taught in connection with its social and cultural
meanings, especially its relevance to the lives of the students themselves.
Leaders of the movement instead thought that science should be taught as
it was practiced by scientists to give it the most authenticity possible. Students
should learn the fundamental ideas of the disciplines and they should learn
those ideas through investigations that mirrored the way scientists themselves
generated new knowledge. Although most often referred to as inquiry teaching,
the various approaches to teaching and learning that were modeled after scientific inquiry were also described as discovery learning and inductive teaching.
The individual most often associated with the reform movement’s ideas about
scientific inquiry was Joseph Schwab. To Schwab, scientific content and process
were intimately connected and inseparable. An accurate representation of science required that the principles of science be taught in relation to the methods that generated that knowledge. Content should not stand alone and neither
should method. The key difference between this kind of science teaching and
earlier approaches was that it was linked even more closely to actual scientific
inquiry as performed by scientists. Learning the structure of the disciplines
meant learning the disciplines in the way that scientists understood them, including both the content and the modes of inquiry that were used. Whether
learned through the laboratory or through a textbook, the conclusions of science
and the evidence that supported those conclusions would go hand-in-hand. For
future scientists this would give them the advantage of an early introduction to
the logic and methods of their chosen field of work, and for those who would
choose other careers, it would give them a truthful and accurate picture of the
nature of science and an appreciation for the methods of science. Public understanding and appreciation were of critical importance in a political environment
where scientific research had come to depend so much on public funding. The
scientific community realized that it needed the support of the public to continue its work.
Reformers wanted students to understand the interconnectedness of the content and methods of the science disciplines. In general, most reformers thought

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that it was more effective for students to conduct their own investigations than
to study what scientists themselves had done, because it would promote deeper
intellectual engagement with the content and more meaningful understanding
of the nature of scientific inquiry. It was also thought that students would be
more likely to understand and retain science concepts learned in this way and
that the approach would be more motivating because they would be asking genuine questions about the world.
Although probably unintended, linking scientific method so closely with disciplinary content had the effect of making it less accessible to the general public.
Whereas early twentieth-century educators promoted scientific method as a
systematic approach that could be applied to a wide range of scientific and social
problems that were within the range of the general population to investigate,
mid-century reformers saw scientific inquiry as discipline-specific. Thus the science courses that were developed during this period were inaccessible to many
students because of their conceptual difficulty and theoretical sophistication,
and because they failed to address the social world of students, their personal
interests, or practical concerns. In a major shift from the approach taken during
the first half of the twentieth century, student investigations became much more
closely tied to the logically organized science content and much less to phenomena in their everyday social experience.
SCIENCE LITERACY
By the early 1970s, the educational focus began to shift away from disciplinary study and toward preparing an enlightened citizenry that would have
the skills to function effectively in a scientific world. Although not without its
critics, science education for social relevance and democratic participation regained much of the popularity it had held during the first half of the twentieth
century. The idea of science education for a broad and functional understanding of science came to be referred to as science literacy. This neoprogressive
attitude could be seen in newly developed programs in environmental education, values education, humanistic education, and in a science, technology,
and society (STS) movement, which focused on the societal applications of
science.
In this new intellectual environment, science knowledge and the processes
of science were aimed at questions that people encountered in their everyday
lives. Science was to be practical and useful to people. Science teaching was
to focus on science as a social and cultural force, on the relationship between
science and technology, and on preparing citizens who could use scientific
knowledge and processes to solve problems they encountered in everyday
living. A position statement on scientific literacy from the National Science
Teachers Association (1971) said: “The major goal of science education is to
develop scientifically literate and personally concerned individuals with a
high competence for rational thought and action” (p. 47). Issues that students
would investigate might include endangered species, genetic engineering,
global warming, nuclear waste disposal, or air and water pollution.

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Of less interest was the study of science as a structured discipline. The discipline-based approaches of the 1960s treated scientific inquiry as fundamentally linked to the disciplines and not as a general method that could be applied
to a wide range of scientific and societal-based problems. In those reformbased curricula of the 1960s, students practiced scientific inquiry to acquire an
understanding of the disciplines. In the more socially oriented period that followed, student activities were not aimed so much at the basic principles and
concepts of science as they were toward science-related issues that had social
relevance. The inquiries they engaged in were often more appropriately called
problem-solving, or personal and social decision-making activities. In this new
intellectual environment, the logic of science and the scientific way of thinking
were important for solving practical problems that citizens faced in their everyday lives. Science teaching was no longer to take place just in the classroom and
the laboratory but also in the communities where students lived. Students were
to learn skills of data collection, interpretation, and communication of results by
investigating science-related social issues directly.
Critics of an issues-oriented approach to science teaching said that such an
approach lacked substance and did not convey a sense of the structural integrity of science. They also questioned whether it was appropriate for the methods of science to be taught and learned in the context of science-related social
problems. Reformers of the 1960s had insisted that scientific inquiry should be
intimately connected to the content of the science disciplines. The question was
not whether the methods of science could be generalized to the study of social
problems but whether this is the kind of activity students in our science classes
should engage in. Dewey and other early twentieth-century educators spoke of
general method that had broad application to a wide range of problems that
could be studied in the science classroom. Neoprogressives of the 1970s and
1980s agreed with that position, whereas discipline-based reformers of the 1950s
and 1960s did not.
THE PAST TWO DECADES
By the late 1980s, goal statements in science education included an understanding of science content and process for their cultural, disciplinary, and intellectual value, and for their application to everyday decision making and problem
solving. Rather than settling on a single approach to science teaching, the tendency was to combine these goals under the general heading of science literacy.
Published in 1989, Project 2061’s Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1989) was
an attempt to reach consensus on what students should know to be scientifically
literate in the broadest possible sense. The common core of learning was selected on the basis of five criteria: (1) Does the content enhance one’s long-term
employment prospects and the ability to make personal decisions? (2) Does
the content help one to “participate intelligently in making political decisions
involving science and technology?” (3) Does the content “present aspects of
science, mathematics, and technology that are so important in human history
or so pervasive in our culture that a general education would be incomplete

Science Education |

without them?” (4) Does the content help people ponder the enduring questions
of human existence? (5) Does the content enrich children’s lives at the present
time regardless of what it may lead to in later life (pp. xix–xx)? Both the goals of
personal intellectual development and responsible citizenship were included in
these statements.
The authors of Science for All Americans also recommended that science teaching be consistent with the nature of scientific inquiry. Accordingly: “Students
need to get acquainted with the things around them—including devices, organisms, materials, shapes, and numbers—and to observe them, collect them, handle
them, describe them, become puzzled by them, ask questions about them, argue
about them, and then try to find answers to their questions. . . . Students should
be given problems . . . that require them to decide what evidence is relevant and
to offer their own interpretation of what the evidence means” (p. 201). Furthermore: “Scientific habits of mind can help people in every walk of life to deal
sensibly with problems that often involve evidence, quantitative considerations,
logical arguments, and uncertainty” (p. xiv).
Following soon after the publication of Science for All Americans, the National
Research Council (NRC) published the National Science Education Standards
(NRC, 1996). The goals for school science identified by the National Standards
were to prepare students who would be able to:
• experience the richness and excitement of knowing about and understanding the natural world
• use appropriate scientific processes and principles in making personal decisions
• engage intelligently in public discourse and debate about matters of scientific and technological concern
• increase their economic productivity through the use of the knowledge,
understanding, and skills of the scientifically literate person in their careers (p. 13)
As is Science for All Americans, the National Science Education Standards is an
all-encompassing document that includes goals of personal intellectual development as well as responsible citizenship. In the Standards, inquiry teaching is
presented as a pedagogical approach that is consistent with the nature of science
and that provides useful skills for investigating problems of personal interest or
social concern. In both Science for All Americans and the National Science Education Standards, there is recognition of the importance of science teaching for
portraying scientific investigation accurately, for contributing to one’s personal
intellectual development, and for offering a way of thinking that could be used
in the solution of everyday problems.
SUMMARY
In the early twentieth century, students were encouraged to apply general
methods of scientific inquiry to problems of social concern. By the 1950s and
1960s the focus had shifted away from practical and applied problem solving

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to a rigorous intellectual treatment of the individual scientific disciplines. This
was in part for purposes of personal intellectual development but mainly so that
personnel needs could be met in technical and scientific fields and so that lay
people would have sufficient understanding of science to offer their support for
scientific research. Within a relatively short period of time, however, science educators revisited the idea that it was important for students to acquire skills in
scientific problem solving so that they could investigate issues of personal and social concern and be active, contributing citizens in a democratic society. Finally,
by century’s end, goal statements in science education recognized the validity
of a wide range of approaches to science teaching that had been made over the
years—those that recognized the value of the scientific disciplines and the applications of scientific knowledge to issues of concern to the broader society.
Further Reading: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989, Science for
all Americans, New York: Oxford University Press; Dewey, J., 1916, Democracy and education, New York: McMillan; National Education Association, 1920, Reorganization of
science in secondary schools: A report of the commission on the reorganization of secondary education (U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin No. 20), Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office; National Research Council, 1996, National science education
standards, Washington, DC: National Academy Press; National Science Teachers Association, 1971, NSTA position statement on school science education for the 70’s, The
Science Teacher, 38, 46–51; National Society for the Study of Education, 1932, A program
for teaching science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; President’s Scientific Research
Board, 1947, Science and public policy, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office; Schwab, J., P. F. Brandwein, 1962, The teaching of science as enquiry, in The
teaching of science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; U.S. Office of Education,
1953, Education for the talented in mathematics and science, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

George E. DeBoer
SEXUALITY EDUCATION
As early as the 1890s, the National Education Association and the National
Congress of Parents and Teachers discussed sexuality education in schools. It
was not until the early twentieth century, however, that the topic started to appear somewhat regularly in educational literature. In more recent years, a wealth
of information has been learned about sexuality education. Even though we
know a lot about sexuality education, controversies related to it continue to
exist. Among them are whether or not sexuality education should be taught in
schools, what should be taught at various levels, what the qualifications should
be for sexuality educators, whether parental permission should be needed for
student participation in educational activities, and many others.
WHAT IS SEXUALITY?
When people hear the word “sex” or “sexuality” many thoughts are likely
to come to mind, commonly related to sexual intercourse, reproduction, fun,

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moral feelings, and even taboo subjects. Some people associate sexuality with
something “dirty”; some think the subject should not be discussed at all. Others
feel there is a real need for sexuality education. The thoughts, feelings, images,
and impressions people have about sexuality are the result of many different
kinds of experiences they have had throughout their lives. They have learned
from parents, relatives, friends, the entertainment media and advertisements,
religious organizations, and schools.
In this entry a broad view of human sexuality is promoted. Human sexuality
is part of total personality and thus basic to human health and well-being. Many
factors in the human makeup interact to create an individual’s sexuality. The
Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS)
includes the following points when explaining human sexuality:
• Sexuality is not only about taking part in sexual behaviors.
• Sexuality is about self-concept, feelings about being a male or female, feelings about other people, the way we move and speak, and the way we relate
to others.
• Sexuality is a natural and healthy part of who we are throughout our
lives—from birth until we die.
• Sexuality is not about what we do, it is about who we are and how we live.
Sexuality consists of at least cultural, psychological, ethical, and biological
dimensions. The cultural dimension is the sum of cultural influences that affect
our thoughts and actions, both historical and contemporary. The psychological dimension is probably the clearest example of learned aspects of sexuality.
Regardless of whether our experiences are positive or negative, our learned
responses to them become integral to our sexuality.
The ethical dimension includes questions of right or wrong, should-I-or
shouldn’t-I, yes-or-no. Whatever the source of ethical attitudes, each person
faces daily decisions related to the ethical dimension of sexuality. The biological
dimension is probably the one most people think of first. It includes all of the expected topics such as development of physical sexual characteristics, responses
to sexual stimulation, reproduction, fertility control, and growth and development in general.
It can sometimes be a little tricky to define “human sexuality,” but it is important to remember that all the dimensions of sexuality combine to make up our
sexuality. Sexuality, in turn, is one part of our total personality. Having a healthy
concept of human sexuality makes important contributions to personal wellbeing and positive interpersonal relationships.
REASONS FOR SEXUALITY EDUCATION
Most sexuality education programs are justified for the wrong reasons. It is
still common to hear people clamoring that a sexuality education program is
needed to reduce sexually transmitted infection (STI), to stop premarital pregnancies, and to control “unwanted” sexual behavior. Later, we will take a look
at research about the effects of sexuality education, but for now it is important

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to realize that it is extremely difficult, at best, to show that a sexuality education
program is going to quickly or easily do any of these things. It is difficult in any
education program to show a direct result on behavior, and this is particularly
true with behavior as complicated as sexual behavior.
So, what are sound reasons for sexuality education? Here are a few:
• Since sexuality is part of total personality, sexuality education can treat sexuality in its proper perspective. For example, it is necessary to understand
one’s sexual nature and needs as well as historically changing sex roles.
• People receive a distorted view of life (and sexuality) through the mass
media. Sexuality education can help place many aspects of life in their true
perspective.
• It is well documented that learners receive much false sexuality information from many sources. Sexuality education can give factual information
that will help reduce many misconceptions.
• Many parents are unwilling or unable to provide the needed sexuality education.
• All young people will be reached through school sexuality education programs.
• Sexuality education can help people learn the sexual decision-making process and hopefully make wise decisions.
As indicated earlier, it is difficult to show that good sexuality education
programs reduce negative statistics related to premarital pregnancy, STI, and so
on. However, if people have sound knowledge, positive attitudes about sexuality,
and good decision-making skills it is logical that there can be a positive impact
on these negative statistics as well.
THE CONTROVERSY
In spite of the many positive reasons for sexuality education, and in spite of
the fact that many research studies show that the vast majority of parents and
educators support sexuality education, strong opposition to sexuality education
may be encountered. Opposition can take many forms. Sometimes opponents
may simply be community members who are not well-informed about reasons
for sexuality education, how it is conducted, and the positive results that are
likely to occur. Many times these types of opponents can become strong sexuality education supporters after they better understand the total program. At
other times, however, opponents may be citizens’ groups that typically have not
been involved in education decision making. They range from local conservative groups to national organizations with formal opposition platforms. Their
goal is often to curtail freedom of expression and academic freedom as well as
one’s right to sexual information and a healthy sexual life.
A good example of groups opposed to comprehensive sexuality education is
the Coalition for Adolescent Sexual Health. Its members include the Christian
Coalition of America, Concerned Women for America, Eagle Forum, the Family
Research Council, Focus on the Family, the National Abstinence Clearinghouse,

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and the Traditional Values Coalition. Other such organizations can be found
at http://www.siecus.org/pubs/fact/fact0016.html. Typical tactics of such groups
include blacklisting and labeling, intimidation, disruption of meetings, trying
to divide and conquer, giving half-truths and dubious documentation, causing
hysteria and fear, putting pressure on public officials, and infiltrating respectable
educational groups.
It can be hard to objectively counter arguments against sexuality education
because they often involve strong emotions and incorrect information. There
are many typical opposition arguments, but here are a few of them with some
suggestions for countering them:
• Opposition argument. Sexual education will cause sexual experimentation.
Suggested response. Some sexual experimentation is natural. No amount of
education is likely to affect that one way or the other. Research indicates
that sexuality education does not cause more sexual experimentation.
• Opposition argument. Sexuality educators are not trained to handle sexuality education. Suggested response. This can be a legitimate complaint, but
it is one that is easily overcome. There should be concern about qualifications of the educator, but there are many excellent opportunities for sexuality educators to become well-informed and skillful.
• Opposition argument. Parents should handle sexuality education for their
children. Suggested response. Parents do play a major role in sexuality education, and no organization should try to replace them. However, we don’t
expect parents to be able to teach their children other school subjects. It
makes no more sense to expect them to be able to teach sexuality education. There needs to be appropriate cooperation between sexuality educators and parents for best results.
• Opposition argument. Sexuality education is too controversial for schools.
Suggested response. If properly planned and the community is well informed, sexuality education should be no more controversial than history
or social studies. The controversy seems to arise concerning moral values.
It is not the job or the right of the school to make value judgments concerning human sexuality. This is the job of the home, religious leaders, and
the individual.
• Opposition argument. Sexuality education is just a plot to promote homosexuality and other “sick” behaviors. Suggested response. Education is helpful in
learning about differences. It is not the intent to promote any specific sexual
behaviors, but to help learners better understand themselves and others.

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE SEXUALITY EDUCATOR
Everyone is a sexuality educator—particularly parents and teachers. They cannot choose whether or not they will be sexuality educators. Their actions and words
are a form of sexuality education for those around them, particularly younger
people. Those who are the educators in sexuality education programs obviously
must have sound sexual knowledge. This includes knowledge about reproduction

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and human anatomy, STI, contraception, masturbation, abortion, the role of
marriage in family life, sex differences and roles, sexual orientation, interpersonal
relationships, psychology of adolescence, growth and development, social influences on sexuality, moral issues, and even more topics.
As important as knowledge is, the sexuality educator also needs to be comfortable with his or her own sexuality, be comfortable with the language of sexuality,
and be good at relating to learners of various ages. The American Association
of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) has set forth requirements to certify a person as a sexuality educator. These can be found at
WHAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT AT DIFFERENT LEVELS?
The words “comprehensive” and “sequential” are fundamental to what should
be taught in sexuality education. Too often sexuality education programs have
been narrow. Some educators believed they were implementing adequate sexuality education programs because they talked about reproduction, discussed
dating, or presented information on STI. All of these topics are important, but
a comprehensive program deals with the dimensions of sexuality explained earlier. It is not enough to have a one-sided view of sexuality. To help learners develop a broad-based concept of sexuality, a comprehensive program is essential.
At the same time, the program should be sequential. This simply means that
there should be a logical order to the curriculum. Sequence should be carefully
planned—it will not happen by chance. No one knows for certain what is right
to teach at any given grade level. Any curriculum may need to be adapted to
meet particular needs, but here are some suggestions for what should be taught
at different levels.
Early Elementary Grades
Good elementary teachers have been providing sexuality education for years,
but often there has been no label attached to this education. The kind of foundation that will prepare learners for the rest of the program includes:
1. the basics of plant and animal (including human) reproduction
2. the similarities and differences between males and females
3. growth and development (physical changes and emotional feelings)
4. family roles and responsibilities
5. discussions of individual feelings about oneself and others
6. an introduction to HIV/AIDS
7. an exploration of basic social skills as well as public and private behavior
Upper Elementary Grades
Assuming that the solid foundation has been laid in the early elementary
grades, the emphasis in the upper elementary grades should be:

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1. biological information in greater depth (endocrine system, menstruation;
pregnancy and birth; nocturnal emissions; masturbation; body-size differences; response to sexual stimulation [contact, pictures, and reading];
birth control and abortion; and physical abnormalities). This last subject
may seem peculiar, but at this age children are often interested in the unusual rather than the usual.
2. interpersonal relations (heterosexual feelings; homosexual feelings; how
emotions affect body functions; changing family responsibilities and privileges; the need to use different approaches with different people; different
male and female feelings; and why people sometimes fight)
3. self-concept (How do people react to me?; What kind of person am I?;
How do I feel about myself?; Why do people like me sometimes and not
other times?; and, Why do I hate people sometimes?)
Lower Secondary Grades
Once young learners have the basics, here is what should be considered at the
next level.
1. overview/review of biological material
2. more detail on birth control (how various methods work, research about
contraception)
3. more about intimate sexual behavior (how far to go, why individuals feel
the way they do, why people behave sexually as they do, and being responsible for personal behavior)
4. dating, hanging out, and interpersonal relationships (what to expect from
others and the experiences of being with them, why some people date and
some do not)
5. variations in sexual behavior (homosexuality, voyeurism, transvestism,
transsexualism, exhibitionism)
6. HIV/AIDS (facts and statistics, behavioral issues, prevention and control/
treatment, legal and ethical issues)
Upper Secondary Grades
Issues to be covered include:
1. birth control research and details (population dynamics, abortion, contraceptive research, infertility causes and treatment)
2. relationship decisions (dating, hanging out and hooking up, pros and cons
of sexual behavior, communication)
3. contemporary living arrangements (cohabitation, contract marriages,
communes and group marriages, single-parent families, blended families,
traditional marriages)
4. sexual myths
5. ethical decision making
6. control of sex drives; responsible behavior

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7. parenthood (childbirth options, childrearing, and sexuality education of
children)
8. gender issues
9. sexuality research (human sexual response, sexual dysfunction, infertility,
erotica and pornography, HIV/AIDS research)
10. sexuality and legality (personal behavior, control and censorship, treatment and information, and sexuality education)
11. historical and social factors affecting sexuality (historical events related to
sexuality, cultural aspects of sexuality)
12. sexuality and the mass media
With the foundation learners would have with this program, it would be possible to deal effectively with almost any issue. Sexual myths and hang-ups would
be virtually eliminated, and sophisticated discussion about sexual issues would
be possible on a mature level. Teachers, students, administrators, and parents can
handle this content if the program is properly planned, if appropriate public relations activities are utilized, and if skillful teaching is employed. To do this may
sometimes be difficult, but an effective sexuality program should be the result.
CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE SEXUALITY
EDUCATION PROGRAMS
There have been many studies related to the effects of sexuality education
programs. Staff at Advocates for Youth (www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/
factsheet/fssexcur.htm) summarized the studies and indicate that effective sexuality education programs
1. offer age-and culturally appropriate sexual health information in a safe environment for participants
2. are developed in cooperation with members of the target community, especially young people
3. assist youth to clarify their individual, family, and community values
4. assist youth to develop skills in communication, refusal, and negotiation
5. provide medically accurate information about both abstinence and also
contraception, including condoms
6. have clear goals for preventing HIV, other STIs, and/or teen pregnancy
7. focus on specific health behaviors related to the goals, with clear messages
about these behaviors
8. address psychosocial risk and protective factors with activities to change
each targeted risk and to promote each protective factor
9. respect community values and respond to community needs
10. rely on participatory teaching methods, implemented by trained educators
and using all the activities as designed
It is important to pay attention to all of the criteria within each of the above
statements. This is because we also know that, to be effective, programs must
meet as many of the criteria as possible.

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WHAT DOES RESEARCH INDICATE ABOUT THE EFFECTS
OF GOOD SEXUALITY EDUCATION PROGRAMS?
It is difficult to establish cause and effect relationships among some educational
programs, particularly those related to complicated human behavior. However, in
recent years a number of researchers have examined the results of sexuality education programs. As implied, a “good” sexuality education program must meet as
many of the 10 criteria listed above as possible. When that happens, many positive results are found. For example, evaluations of comprehensive sexuality education programs show they do not increase rates of starting sexual behaviors, do
not lower the age at which youth initiate sexual behaviors, and do not increase
the frequency of sexual activity or the number of partners among sexually active
youth. In fact, effective sexuality education programs seem to delay the initiation
of sexual activity, reduce the frequency of sexual activity, reduce the incidence of
unprotected sexual activity, and increase the use of condoms and other forms of
contraception. Long-term impacts include lower STI and/or pregnancy rates.
All of the statistical relationships just mentioned are very important. However, we also need to remember that sexuality education is needed because of the
broad-based concept of human sexuality and its relationship to total personality.
Related to this, we know that good sexuality education programs also increase
knowledge about sexuality, increase parent-child communication, improve selfconcept, and help students to be more accepting of others.
SUMMARY
In practice, there are a number of controversies related to sexuality education. If cool-headed, logical, and informed people look at the subject carefully,
they will see that comprehensive sexuality education programs have many
benefits—just like other educational programs. Keeping the focus on a concept
of total human sexuality, being sure that the community is involved in program
planning, using only well-qualified educators, insuring that the characteristics
of effective programs are present, and conducting programs in sound ways will
result in a number of important education benefits for learners.
Further Reading: Bruess, C. E., & J. S. Greenberg, 2004, Sexuality education: Theory and practice, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers; Greenberg, J. S., C. E. Bruess, & S. C. Conklin,
2007, Exploring the dimensions of human sexuality, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers;
McKeon, B., 2006, Effective sex education, retrieved October 2, 2006, from http://www.
advocatesforyouth.org/publications/factsheet/fssexcur.htm; School Health Education
Clearinghouse, 2006, Sexuality education, Sexuality Information and Education Council
of the United States, retrieved August 20, 2007, from http://www.siecus.org.

Clint E. Bruess
SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLS
Single-sex schooling has increasingly become a controversial topic of public debate over the past decade. For the educational mainstream in the United

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States, separating boys and girls poses a direct threat to the canon of coeducation. That is not to suggest that educating girls and boys together originally
rested on any grand educational philosophy or social theory. Early common
school reformers of the nineteenth century embraced mixed-sex schools largely
for reasons of efficiency. In fact, while separation was common nationwide in
gender-specific vocational and technical classes, for example, home economics for girls and drafting for boys, through the mid-twentieth century, totally
separate schools were rare except in large eastern school districts like New York,
Baltimore, and Philadelphia. According to the U.S. Commissioner of Education
Report for 1900–1901, only 12 out of 628 cities reported that they operated any
single-sex high schools.
Nevertheless, pragmatism turned to politics with the coming of the civil rights
and women’s movements in the 1960s when coeducation gained significance as
a symbol of the equality ideal itself. As women fought for their place on an equal
social and economic playing field with men, they pushed open the doors of
prestigious academic institutions that traditionally had excluded them solely on
the basis of their sex. At the same time, they rejected both the less academically
challenging finishing school aura of elite girls’ schools and the gendered curriculum of separate public schools, both vocational and academic, that trained
girls for less lucrative careers than boys. As a result, single-sex education came
to represent a system of male privilege and female subordination that would no
longer be tolerated in an enlightened society.
As it has become increasingly apparent that coeducation is not a certain remedy for gender inequality in schooling, single-sex schooling in its contemporary
incarnation is slowly gaining popular support, especially in urban communities,
despite continued political resistance and legal ambiguities. While it will never
replace coeducation as the norm, nor should it, it presents an alternative strategy for addressing educational gaps in interest, performance, and achievement
that appear to fall along gender lines. It remains to be seen if the approach can
achieve its promised results. Findings to date have been encouraging but nonetheless inconclusive. Yet the growing number of programs nationwide is now
creating the field necessary for gathering critical comparative data. The final
proof rests with both the educational and research communities as they work
together, through trial and error, to set aside ideological disagreements and objectively identify what works best for different populations of girls and boys at
different stages in their schooling. Meanwhile, it rests with the federal Department of Education to vigilantly enforce newly revised standards and guide these
programs as they navigate the turbulent waters of sameness and difference.
THE LEGAL CONTEXT FOR PUBLIC SINGLESEX SCHOOLING
The discussion of single-sex schooling in its modern incarnation becomes especially heated in the context of public schooling. This fact is not surprising since
the federal government effectively banned single-sex programs in the 1970s following the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the
subsequent adoption of its implementing regulations. A series of significant legal

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events has intermittently fueled the debate since the mid-1990s. In 1996, the
United States Supreme Court, using sweeping language with potentially broad
implications, struck down the all-male admissions policy at the state-supported
Virginia Military Institute, popularly known as VMI. That decision, addressing
a unique institution with a unique mission, has yet to be tested on elementary
and secondary programs. Nevertheless, it casts an uncertain cloud over current
initiatives despite vast differences in their intent, practices, and effect as compared with VMI.
To complicate the matter even further, in January 2002, as part of the No
Child Left Behind Act, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, authorized the
use of federal funds for innovative educational programs, including single-sex
schools and classes. In order to remove any conflicts between that authorization and Title IX, in October 2006, the federal Department of Education finally
issued revised Title IX regulations. The revisions offer school districts considerable flexibility in establishing schools and classes that separate students on
the basis of sex. The new rules are a striking turnaround from previous federal
policy, under which the Office for Civil Rights had aggressively threatened or
initiated enforcement action against local efforts to establish single-sex schools
or classes.
The four years of foot-dragging speak volumes to the complexity and political
sensitivity of the issues presented and the sharp disagreements over a possible
resolution. Women’s and civil rights groups have been the primary opponents
of any changes in Title IX interpretation. Support, on the other hand, has come
mainly from school districts and charter school organizers.
This is clearly one of those situations in which practice has outstripped both
policy and the law. Despite continued political resistance and legal ambiguity,
single-sex schooling has been experiencing a revival nationwide for more than
a decade, opening to question coeducation’s longstanding veneer of gender neutrality. And it is not confined to the public sector. In fact, interest in single-sex
education especially among private independent girls’ schools began to escalate
in the early 1990s. Between 1998 and 1999 alone, enrollment in all-girls’ schools
increased by 4.4 percent. By the start of the new millennium, 32 new girls’
schools had opened in the previous five years while applications nationwide had
increased by 37 percent and enrollments by 29 percent over the course of a decade. By 2002, enrollments had risen by another 8 percent. Girls’ schools were
also outstripping boys’ and coed schools in enrolling and retaining students of
color (see Choosing a Girls School, 2001; NCGS Member Survey, 2001).
The extent of this unexpected phenomenon, and the underlying reasons,
vary somewhat by gender, race, and social class. First, even as the admission
of women into prestigious all-male schools and colleges moved forward in the
1970s, it soon became apparent that coeducation itself could not remedy deeply
institutionalized attitudes and practices. Discrimination in counseling, hostile
classroom environments, and a curriculum devoid of women’s experiences and
accomplishments soon surfaced as serious obstacles to women’s full participation in education and ultimately in society. The inequalities were pervasively
evident from elementary school through higher education. Then there was the

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well-publicized research, dating from the 1980s and early 1990s, on how coeducation was more specifically shortchanging girls. Girls were lagging behind
boys in math and science and were losing self-esteem as they approached adolescence. Add to that the more recent studies sounding an equally troubling
alarm regarding boys and their academic alienation. And finally and perhaps
most critically, among school officials and policymakers there is the growing
awareness of and frustration with the severe academic and social problems of
African American and Latino students, especially males.
It is not surprising that urban educators and parents in particular are increasingly turning to single-sex programs. Between 2000 and 2003, 15 single-sex
public schools opened their doors. Some were new start-ups including charter
schools. Others were reconstituted from formerly coeducational schools. In all
but three of them, 85 percent of the students were nonwhite (Project on Single
Sex Schools, 2004). In the 2004 school year, an additional 11 schools opened,
bringing the number to 34. By the 2007 school year, the number had grown
to 86, with an additional 277 public schools offering some single-sex classes.
Many of these schools are targeted toward underprivileged minority students.
The landscape of single-sex schooling, therefore, is changing dramatically. And
it may change even more, depending on whether these new initiatives can demonstrate positive academic results and whether they can survive continued legal
opposition.
DECONSTRUCTING THE DEBATE ABOUT SINGLESEX SCHOOLS
Although widely considered to reflect traditional values, single-sex schooling
in its current form defies conventional political labels. On the question of public schooling in particular, it has generated an unusual alliance among an odd
grouping of individuals and organizations: social conservatives touting “hardwired” differences between boys and girls; political conservatives for its appeal
to a free market of parental choice; feminists seeking to close the gender gap
favoring boys especially in math, science, and technology; and urban educators
and activists concerned with the plight of minority students and especially African American males.
Supporters offer a number of rationales for separating girls and boys and particularly underprivileged minority students. They argue that single-sex programs
remove the social distraction of the other sex, placing the intellectual above the
social, which is above all important in communities where students do not necessarily identify with academic achievement. They provide minority boys with
positive role models in socially secure settings and thereby enable them to establish a constructive sense of self and more academically oriented goals. Some
maintain that single-sex programs serve as a counterweight to the negative influence of popular culture and the mass media. It is well known that today’s
preteens and teenagers are exposed to a hip-hop culture with a heavy sexual
element. Given that reality, separate programs provide a “safe haven” from the
social pressures to engage in early sexual activity along with the opportunity to
channel energies into academic pursuits.

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It is also believed that single-sex schooling more effectively accommodates
the different maturational pace, learning styles, and emotional needs of many
girls and boys. Girls as a group come to school with better verbal and fine-motor
skills and have longer attention spans and greater impulse control, all of which
put young boys at a disadvantage in the lower grades. Most boys eventually
do catch up, but many boys, and especially minority boys who lack basic prereading skills when they enter school, simply give up or are misidentified as
learning disabled, a labeling that sets them on a path of low self-esteem and
academic failure. Young boys in general have tremendous energy. Boys’ schools
pride themselves on channeling that energy into positive directions rather than
trying to control it by making boys conform to the more sedentary learning
style of most girls.
Meanwhile, proponents maintain that single-sex programs afford girls an
emotional space in which they can develop leadership skills and intellectual
abilities free from the social pressure of boys. More specifically, they believe
that single-sex schooling can effectively increase math and science achievement,
performance, and interest among girls and ultimately increase the numbers of
women pursuing careers related to those subjects. And finally, for a growing
number of inner-city parents and school officials, single-sex education is an antidote to failing schools. It is widely known that four decades of compensatory
programs and school reform have failed to stop the downward spiral that continues to capture many urban students.
Yet, despite these compelling arguments, single-sex schooling continues to
evoke fear, vitriolic criticism, and threats of legal action. Opponents argue that
these programs smack of benevolent sexism and deny young men and women
the social skills and familiarity they need to relate to each other now and in the
future. They maintain that separation does not breed the mutual understanding
and respect that place women on an equal footing with men, that it diverts attention from the more pervasive gender inequities in coeducation especially for
girls, that it reinforces archaic gender stereotypes, and that it inevitably results in
lesser resources for female students. Finally, there are the legal claims, even despite the revised Title IX regulations, that publicly supported programs violate
both the intent of the Title IX law and the U.S. Constitution. Separating students
on the basis of any personal attribute induces outrage from civil liberties groups
and others who invoke the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of
Education and the principle that “separate is inherently unequal.” It also raises
the specter of the Court’s 1996 decision striking down the all-male admissions
policy at the Virginia Military Institute.
As stated, the most vocal and visible critics have been organized women’s
groups (although chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union have played a
key role in bringing litigation and filing Title IX complaints challenging singlesex programs). The 5,800 letters and e-mails, many of them identically worded,
that the Department of Education received opposing any revisions in the Title
IX regulations were the result of efforts orchestrated by some of the most established feminist groups, including the National Organization for Women, the
Feminist Majority Foundation, the American Association of University Women,

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and the National Women’s Law Center. And so, at first glance, “feminism” appears to be the primary enemy.
That is the way many observers see it. Yet that view is overly simplistic and
misleading. It mistakenly implies that feminism is both monolithic and static.
It also implies a negativity that many individuals, including women, now attach
both to the feminist label, and to the more radical oppositionist streams within
feminism as a movement. Yet many of those committed to advancing full political and social equality for women ardently endorse single-sex schools. In fact,
numerous individuals, including dissenters within the same organizations that
have voiced strong legal and political opposition to the concept, have supported
it, mainly outside the public eye. A considerable number of these proponents
themselves attended an academically rigorous girls’ high school or elite women’s
college, which proved for them a positive and even a defining experience. For
those who have lived single-sex schooling on the inside, opposing arguments
simply defy reason especially when viewed against the modern-day backdrop
of poverty and academic disengagement that characterize many urban minority
students.
SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE
Within the larger and looser network of gender equity advocates and within
the formal ranks of “feminists” per se, the controversy turns primarily on fundamental disagreements over sameness and difference. For the most vocal critics
of single-sex schooling, much of their view dates back to the 1960s and 1970s
when women pushed to assimilate into a male world based on “sameness.” For
them, any concession to differences between the sexes signals a retreat to a world
where women were foreclosed from a full range of life opportunities that men
enjoyed. Proponents, on the other hand, pragmatically wind through a maze of
sex differences and inequalities on race and social class.
We are now coming to understand that boys and girls are essentially the same
at the core in abilities and performance but differ at the margins at various stages
in their development. As already noted, girls enter school with more advanced
fine-motor and verbal skills while boys tend to develop visual-spatial skills at a
younger age, which gives them an advantage in math and science through much
of schooling. But the very fact that three decades of special programs for girls in
these subjects has narrowed the gender gap demonstrates that performance is
changeable and not carved in biological stone.
Meanwhile, the achievement gap favoring boys in math and science pales
in comparison to the one favoring girls in reading and writing. Within public
schooling, it progressively widens as students move up the grades. The average 11th grade public school boy writes with the proficiency of the average 8th
grade girl. According to a 2004 Gallup poll (see Mason, 2004), although virtually the same proportions of adolescent girls and boys consider math or science
their favorite subjects, only 5 percent of boys as compared with 22 percent of
girls favor English. Boys, moreover, represent 73 percent of secondary school
students identified with learning disabilities. It is therefore not surprising that

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the disproportionate number of female college students has become a matter
of national concern. The female-male ratio has reached a stunning 60–40 at the
University of North Carolina and 61.5–38.5 at American University. Even at
Harvard, the incoming class for 2006 was 52 percent female.
In recent years, advanced technology and research techniques have afforded
gender differences greater attention and credibility. Scientists can now view
how females and males process information and how their brains develop from
childhood to adolescence and into adulthood. As a result, researchers report a
range of structural, chemical, and functional brain differences linked to gender.
Some of these differences appear to arise from the moment of birth. Studies have
documented the more rapid maturation of the female brain. Others have found
sex differences in the specific regions of the brain activated for sound recognition (related to language and reading skills favoring girls) and spatial performance (related to mathematical skills favoring boys).
Nevertheless, these seemingly innate variations need to be looked at critically and cautiously. While they provide a compelling justification for single-sex
schooling, at least at first glance, it must be kept in mind that findings from
brain research are tentative and understandably lend themselves to potentially
dangerous misuse and misleading implications. A significant link between these
findings on the one hand and cognitive abilities, learning styles, and teaching
strategies on the other has yet to be established. Moreover, these differences are
not fixed over time, nor do they exist in a cultural vacuum. There is general
agreement that innate abilities respond to outside influences that either reinforce their strength or counteract their weakness. Whereas one sex may be biologically disposed to perform certain tasks, this difference in ability influences
popular beliefs and expectations about the sexes. And so children adapt to a
normative view grounded in biological reality that home, school, and the media
further underscore.
Proponents of single-sex programs maintain that separation permits the use
of strategies and materials that appeal to different learning styles and interests.
While that approach is not harmful in itself and may in fact prove effective for
some students, educators must apply it with thought and careful attention when
ascribing differences to sex. If not, it merely serves to reinforce and even imbed
differences where they may not exist in the first instance. Constructing definitions of femininity and masculinity, and assessing how those constructions
reflect the values of the immediate community and the larger society, are issues
that go to the heart of all education and especially single-sex schooling.
Meanwhile, any discussion of educational programming for girls or boys would
be incomplete without taking race and social class into account. As single-sex
schooling migrates beyond the elite private schools and into the inner-city, these
differences are critical. The test-score gap between white and African American
students has been widening since the mid-1980s in nearly every age group and
in every subject, reversing gains made in the previous decade and a half. Nearly
two-thirds of African American and nonwhite Latino fourth graders are functionally illiterate. Nearly two-thirds of eighth graders among them lack basic
math skills. The deficits are especially striking at the top levels of achievement,

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as Advanced Placement and SAT scores reveal. When compared with white students, the dropout rate for African Americans is almost double while for Latinos
it is quadruple. The problem is most acute among boys. The failure of disadvantaged minority boys, in particular, to identify with academic success has been
well documented. Minority girls, in fact, fare almost universally better academically than minority boys, but again far worse than majority girls.
THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE FAVORING
SINGLESEX SCHOOLING
Threaded throughout the debate and the surrounding legal maneuverings,
the obvious and perhaps most vexing question is whether single-sex schooling
“works.” Is there any evidence that separating students on the basis of sex makes
a positive difference in academic performance and achievement or social adjustment, at least for some populations of students? That question is especially
important for public schools, which are not only accountable to their constituents, but also answerable to legal norms that remain open to wide interpretation. It is especially important for new schools as they try to articulate their
mission and respond to demands that they produce research findings, initially
to support their fundamental purposes and ultimately to prove that they have
achieved what they originally set out to do.
Critics now invoke the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its provision
calling for “scientifically-based research” to guide educational practice. From
that vantage point, qualitative studies as commonly carried out in educational
circles do not provide hard evidence, but at most hypotheses for further studies.
As a remedy to those shortcomings, randomized trials have gained new currency in Washington policy circles. Such studies ideally assign subjects at random to either experimental or comparison groups. Commonly used in medicine
and the biological sciences, they have been rare and somewhat controversial in
education. The apparent disinclination to use the methodology has stemmed in
part from the expense involved and in part from the impractical logistics of designing and monitoring identical learning environments that isolate the particular approach under study. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, assigning
students at random to yet unproven educational programs raises serious ethical
concerns. It is, therefore, understandable why randomized studies on single-sex
schooling cannot be found.
Critics also raise the Supreme Court’s decision in the Virginia Military Institute case, where the Court made clear that state actors must present an “exceedingly persuasive justification” when drawing distinctions on the basis
of sex. Exactly what specific pedagogical and social rationales would prove
constitutionally acceptable, and for what population of students, remains to be
tested. The Court, nevertheless, did note that programs must develop the “talents and capacities” of the particular students that they serve. In other words,
they must have academic merit and produce positive educational outcomes.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the facts surrounding VMI differed
dramatically from public school programs now sweeping the country. In the

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case of VMI, the State of Virginia was offering a unique and highly valuable education to men while denying it to women. This was the only publicly supported
military college in the state. And it did not merely prepare students for military
service. In fact, it was a primary entryway into high-level corporate and governmental careers. Although in the course of the lawsuit, the state opened a parallel
program for women at a nearby private women’s college, this was, as the Court
said, a “pale shadow” of VMI in terms of “curricular choices, faculty stature,
funding, prestige, alumni support and influence.” In contrast, the new wave of
initiatives attempts to level the playing field by sex, race, and social class. Their
aim is to empower students and help them realize their full potential. Analogies
drawn to racial segregation are similarly flawed for obvious differences in intent,
practice, and effect. Unlike the forced segregation of students struck down by the
Court in early race desegregation cases, publicly supported single-sex programs
are voluntary as a matter of law. (The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of
1974, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1721 (2003) prohibits the involuntary “assignment” of
students to public schools on the basis of sex.) They also are enthusiastically
embraced by the families that they serve.
That being said, federal research requirements and the VMI standard, taken
together, have sent educators and policymakers in frantic search of evidence to
justify programs that, critics argue, rest solely on anecdotal reports and scattered
studies from other English-speaking countries and from private and particularly
Catholic schools in the United States. Much of this research admittedly lacks the
methodological rigor and the statistical controls of conventional scientific research. Nor can we deny the obvious organizational, cultural, and demographic
differences between the programs studied and newly established public school
programs in this country. These distinct features obviously limit the predictability of the findings. The limitations in themselves, however, should not derail the
discussion as they so often do. To demand scientifically based evidence before
moving forward would foreclose any innovation.
Rather than reject existing findings, therefore, policymakers should accept what they reveal in suggesting specific reasons for considering single-sex
schooling. Some of this research unquestionably is now dated and begs for replication. Yet several more recent large-scale and controlled studies (reviewed in
Salomone, 2003) have generated especially promising results. Added to these
findings is a growing body of case studies and anecdotal reports from public
schools in the United States, pointing to certain benefits to be gained from various forms of separate classes or schools. While the findings are not definitive,
they are nonetheless instructive.
Researchers report that single-sex classes may develop greater self-confidence
and broader interests, especially among adolescents. Girls note that single-sex
math and science classes afford them a greater comfort level, allow them to interact more with their teachers, and enable them to develop more favorable attitudes toward these subjects. They state that they are less self-conscious about
asking questions and participating in cooperative learning groups, and that they
have greater self-confidence when they advance to upper-level coed classes, even
in subjects unrelated to science or math. It is reasonable to speculate that these

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changed attitudes, examined over time, may lead to more advanced coursetaking and ultimately a broader range of career options. And while conventional
wisdom holds that boys prefer competition and independent work, there is
some evidence that both girls and boys derive academic benefits from working
collaboratively in same-sex groupings.
There is further evidence from other English-speaking countries (also reviewed in Salomone, 2003) that single-sex schools increase both interest and
course-taking in math, science, and technology among girls, and likewise in
language arts and foreign languages among boys, academic subjects that boys
traditionally tend to disfavor. A study by James and Richards (2003) of boys’
school graduates in the United States confirms these findings. They found that
single-sex schooling promoted interest in the humanities (English, reading, and
history), which further carried over into college majors and career choices. In
contrast, male graduates of coed schools were more likely to major in business
than their counterparts from boys’ schools. Beyond these attitudinal and more
long-range effects, findings further suggest that single-sex schooling more immediately improves academic performance and achievement. Several small experimental programs for disadvantaged minority boys, with male teachers as
role models, have reported increased attendance and improved performance in
reading and math. More recent large-scale studies from other English-speaking
countries have yielded similarly positive academic results. (See Salomone, 2003,
for more details.)
Educators report that single-sex schools afford students the possibility to engage in the full range of extracurricular activities beyond those conventionally
identified with one sex or the other. Girls assume more leadership roles in political and debate clubs while boys are more likely to join the drama club, the choir,
the literary magazine, and community service clubs—activities that girls often
dominate in coed settings. It could be the case, however, that these findings are
at least partially a function of social class. There may be a distinct difference in
comparing elite private to public coeducational schools where male students are
apt to be high achievers and drawn to traditionally male activities, and to the
more general student population where, according to press reports, secondary
school girls now dominate student government positions and receive the lion’s
share of academic awards.
Nevertheless, whether rich, poor, or middle-class, boys in coeducational
schools do not appear to enjoy a full assortment of extracurricular activities. At
the high socioeconomic end, socially determined interests reinforced by male
role models lock boys into conventionally male-gendered activities, while at the
low end, equally powerful but different social pressures completely lock them
out. If that is the case, then perhaps boys across the socioeconomic/academic
spectrum, as well as girls at the high end, can benefit from the expanded leadership and extracurricular opportunities that single-sex schools seem to provide.
Meanwhile, although girls at the low end of the spectrum theoretically enjoy
these benefits by male default, they cannot realistically fill that void without
the necessary academic identification and motivation that results in early pregnancy for many low-income minority girls. In view of these troubling realities,

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the intense academic focus of single-sex schools has much to offer beyond the
academic and social benefits found in earlier studies.
It cannot be denied, however, that the overall findings on single-sex education
are inconclusive and merely suggestive. Yet, considered in the aggregate, along
with other developmental and social evidence, they provide useful direction to
educators as they initially consider justifications and define goals. This combined
body of data and observations is at least equally informative for researchers to
explore and selectively follow in charting a broad and varied research agenda
specifically to measure outcomes. Following that route, a full assessment of
single-sex schooling’s benefits should cover a range of short- and long-term effects beyond the bottom line of school performance and achievement, including
changed attitudes toward certain subjects as well as course selection patterns;
immediate effects on disciplinary problems, pregnancy, suspension, and dropout rates; and even long-range effects on college enrollment and career choices.
A further useful consideration would be the impact of single-sex versus coeducation on socialization factors including attitudes toward the other sex. It is
crucial to consider whether single-sex programs reinforce or dissipate gender
stereotypes among students.
Further Reading: Choosing a girls’ school: Directory 2001, 2001, Concord, MA: National
Coalition of Girls’ Schools; James, A. N., & H. C. Richards, 2003, Escaping stereotypes:
Educational attitudes of male alumni of single-sex and coed schools, Psychology of Men
and Masculinity, 4(2), 136–148; Mason, H., 2004, Math = Teens’ favorite subject, The
Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing, June 15, 2004, retrieved August 22, 2007, from http://
www.gallup.com; NCGS member survey, 2001, Concord, MA: National Coalition of
Girls’ Schools; National Association for Single-Sex Public Education, Single-sex public schools in the United States, retrieved August 22, 2007, from http://www.singlesex
schools.org/schools-schools.htm; Project on Single Sex Schools: Their Characteristics
and Effects, 2004, Single sex schools, Portland, OR: RMC Corporation; Salomone, R.,
2004, Feminist voices in the debate over single-sex schooling: Finding common ground,
Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, 11(1), 63–95; Salomone, R., 2003, Same, different,
equal: Rethinking single-sex schooling, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Salomone,
R., 2006, Single-sex programs: Resolving the research conundrum, Teacher’s College Record, 108(4), 778–802.

Rosemary C. Salomone
SMALL SCHOOLS
It comes as a surprise to many current school reformers in the United States
that most schools were, a mere generation or so ago, small. The idea of big
schools has a history in a few large urban centers (like New York and Chicago)
that goes back to the earlier part of the twentieth century, in part because they
served large masses of low-income children who lived in densely populated
areas in which land was scarce, but they were the exception.
In the 1950s the guru of American schooling, James Conant, advocated large
schools in the interest of better serving the more elite, college bound collegebound youth. By and large, he explained, he meant that a school should have

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at least 100 students per grade so that the top 20 percent would constitute a
sufficient number to justify honors and college prep classes.
A mere 50 years later, a high school of only 400 students was on the low end
of what is now called “the small school movement.” Between 1950 and 2000,
schools of three to five thousand students became commonplace as districts
consolidated and as suburban development escalated. The “shopping mall” high
school—a school intended to serve all youngsters in a particular geographic region who had been pressed into remaining in school for a diploma long after
they had lost interest in so-called academics—became a target of criticism, although it had just been invented. Between the new pressure for a high school
diploma, the GI Bill of Rights, which raised the aspirations for a college education for vast numbers of people who had not imagined such, and the 1960s
and 1970s drive for equity, a new idea entered the public domain. All children
should be well educated; not merely literate and numerate in the common sense
definition of those words, but fit for a college education—if they chose to go that
route. Thus the shopping mall schools intended originally to house many ability and aspiration-tracked “small” schools became more diffuse, incoherent and
anonymous. A small group at the top, the “jocks,” and theater crowd were visible
to their teachers and the larger school. The rest belonged to small peer-cliques
purposely seeking to be anonymous to the faculty and hoping to slide by as unnoticed as possible.
COMMON FEATURES OF SMALL SCHOOLS
• 250–300 students in a heterogeneous mix
• Non-exclusive admissions policy
• Consistent educational experience for students over an extended period of time
(more than one year)
• Coherent focus and philosophy of education, and a curriculum that is integrated
around that focus
• Cohesive group of teachers that collaborate and discuss the needs of their students
• Shared leadership and investment among those in the small school
• Involvement of families in the school community

EXAMPLES OF THE SMALL SCHOOL ALTERNATIVE
In New York City two unusual educational administrators decided that the
quality of education in their particular domains was sufficiently appalling to require novel thinking. Anthony Alvarado, the new young superintendent of East
Harlem’s District 4, and Steven Phillips, the newly appointed superintendent of
a collection of alternative schools for the students being kicked out of or wooed
back into high schools, took advantage of a fairly short laissez-faire period in
New York City’s history to reinvent schooling under their jurisdiction. Alvarado
developed, between 1974 and 1984, 52 different small elementary and middle

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schools of choice occupying the same 20 buildings that had once housed 20
schools. In addition, he reopened the one high school located within his district
as a semi-choice school with a new mission and collaborated with Phillips to
start a Grade 7–12 Coalition of Essential Schools program at Central Park East
Secondary School. During the same time span, Phillips pulled together the existing dozen or so dropout prevention schools, as well as a group of new schools
designed with coalition principles for “regular” high school students interested
in a different form of schooling. The common principle behind their work was
creating institutions where it was possible to “get to know each other well”—
particularly each other’s work.
All the schools designed in the “alternative” high school division, for example,
were small, often as small as a hundred; all had specific missions and styles, and
Phillips prodded them to consider the development of young people’s intellectual, moral, and social capacities central to their work. They explored new ways
to assess student progress and new forms of graduation requirements—based on
a set of academic performances rather than credit-counting or multiple-choice
testing. Within a short period there were over 50 small high schools, many with
the city’s presumably most difficult pupils, and attendance improved, and more
students graduated and went on to college; they even outperformed other cities’
schools on school safety!
In 1989 I wrote an op ed piece in the New York Times about the virtues of
small schools. The idea was striking and new, and readers were fascinated at
its novelty. The article reminded readers that small schools were a means to an
end, not an end in themselves—a way to create a learning culture for faculty and
students, and for building useful relationships between adults (including families) and our young, across generations. This was perhaps the first generation
in which the closer our youth came to adulthood the fewer adults they knew
well, and the more alien their life experience was to the life experience of adults.
What an odd way to introduce novice adults to the world of adulthood.
The idea was not that students get lost in big schools—most are found by
someone (generally of the same age and background). What they are lost to are
adults. But equally troubling, the adults also get lost, and again not to their selfchosen friends and lunch partners, but to the school at large and the students
they work alongside. In a school with a faculty of over a hundred, no long-term
sustained and coherent conversation can take place about the purposes of education, about curriculum or pedagogy, scheduling or requirements, much less how
to engage students in serious and thoughtful work. Meetings are places where
announcements get made, occasionally one-session working groups can meet,
and everyone can keep an eye on the clock for the instant they can get out of
there. At best departmental meetings serve more important purposes, but they
work within very narrow ranges of options. They cannot change the schedules
that require them to “get to know” as many as 150 or more young people each
semester, in groups of 30 or more for 45 minutes 4–5 times a week. The sequence
of courses during the day that students take makes no particular sense (math
follows English follows . . .) for reasons related only to the demands of the master schedule. The curriculum and pacing is set by external examinations, such

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as the New York State Board of Regents exams. This structure leaves nothing to
discuss except “managing” and “discipline.”
If the students did a single serious homework assignment a week, the faculty
would be spending almost as much time reviewing and responding to homework as the hours they were paid to teach. (Do the math: 150 students × 10
minutes for marking = 1,500 minutes or nearly 20 hours a week.) Most students
(and families) can spend four years in high school and have no one who knows
them or their work well enough to write a decent letter of reference, much less
help guide them or confer with them about matters big or small.
WHAT SMALL SCHOOLS OFFER AND HOW
If we want the young to take academic ideas seriously, to “play the game of
academia,” they need to witness it done by experts. Where might that happen?
We know that about any other activity we take seriously. That we do not take it
seriously about academics is either because we ourselves do not take academics seriously and/or that society has traditionally had very little reason to need
more than a small number of “academic” successes. Until we clear this misunderstanding up, we may not use small schools much better than big ones. But the
small schools give us a chance. Our founding fathers (white, property-owning
males) thought education was essential as a tool for democracy—a democracy
that gradually was expanding to include more and more of its members into the
so-called “ruling” (decision-making) class. A few minor skills (like signing one’s
name to documents, and reading the local town newspaper) would be useful to
everyone, but probably not essential. There was a core of civic understandings
that the common school was presumed to pass on to its future voters. But the
time has long passed when such an understanding of what a democracy requires
of its citizens—and who is included in that citizenry—was valid.
In a modern complex global society, in which at age 18 everyone can both
vote and serve on a jury, a quite different intellectual base of knowledge and
skill, new kinds of habits of heart, mind, and work are required of one and all.
We can, if we choose, call all this academia—meaning that we call upon generations of understanding in a variety of disciplines to best build the habits needed
for future generations. One can define the goal of academia as a state of mind
in which one is excited to engage in discovering and arguing over ideas, propositions, and preferences. The intellectual habits needed for such discourse are
learned in context—both the context of authentic, real-life struggles as well as
staged discoveries, through the authors of books and dramas and organized
school-based experiences around the conventional disciplines. But these are just
tools; how we use them is not learned by magic. As Gerald Graff reminds us in
Clueless in Academe, we barely give them a hint about what it all amounts to.
Young people learn by observing adult life, and by being invited into the
“clubs” that adults take seriously: the historian’s club, the scientific club, and
so on. Schools will be places in which the paradoxes of real life—which young
people need to be confronted with—are reflected upon within school, openly
and fearlessly in the presence of as well as with young people. We must learn

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to not merely tolerate, but relish, differences of opinion—demanding always
both a tone of civility and well-backed evidence. Passion for ideas is too often
shushed in school, as leading to arguments, and arguments spell “trouble.” But
if there were no reasons to argue, democracy would be entirely unnecessary;
as, incidentally, would science and math and history. All disciplines have their
own rules of discourse, but where a discipline is alive and healthy good evidence
trumps status when it comes to arguing a point.
Small schools are ideal instruments for the creation of our idealized New
England small town meeting. But even in the past—in the good old days—
the kind of empathy and healthy informed skepticism that defines democratic
life wasn’t easily imbibed. There were plenty of people who were not invited to
those town meetings. We are aiming for a society in which everyone is invited
in and everyone is heard, a heady task, and one that smallness alone makes possible, if not inevitable. A democratic culture may turn out to be the exception,
not the rule. But we could use those required 12 years of schooling to give it a
better chance.
Between about 1998 and today, with the assistance of several foundations—
particularly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—in New York City alone
several hundred new small schools have been created, many by carving up
existing large high schools into smaller schools, and some by stand-alone new
schools. Almost all of these schools are grades 7–12. These, when added to the
approximately 100 K–12 small schools begun topsy-turvy in the two decades
before, could constitute a substantial new way of thinking about schools.
Similar developments have been occurring in every major urban center,
many of which had not experienced the earlier waves of highly individualistic small schools. Overnight new schools are designated to open, often at short
notice, leaders are appointed, faculties chosen, themes often designated (arts,
math, communications, transportation), and students assigned (sometimes with
choices). They range in size from 400–800, and mostly with relatively little input
from faculty, parents, or students. The new principals are strictly “accountable”
to those that appoint them, with an eye largely focused on standardized test
score results. Their “missions” are mostly not sufficiently different from each
other to make choice of great importance. Even the career academies often don’t
differ a lot from each other except for a few course offerings. Some are better and
some worse, not because they define their tasks differently but because some
have stronger leaders, more experienced staff, or are able for one reason or another to attract a more academically skilled student body. Demographics helps
or hurts. The faculties are often young and inexperienced, and as of now most
do not stay more than three to five years. Whether their principals last much
longer only time will tell, and perhaps the kind of salaries offered will help induce stability.
THE FUTURE OF SMALL SCHOOLS
Is the promise of the early small school movement likely to survive its current popularity? Can it take on the task of shifting the culture of our schools,

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and as a result, our society? It may or may not, depending on how one defines
that promise. The small schools can, as they were in some of the early intentionally designed small schools in the 1970s and 1980s, be seen as places where
ornery grownups struggle with ornery kids to create strong and enduring
communities—and were thus often “hard to fit” into a traditional system. But
they also can be seen as management tools to increase “productivity” and “compliance,” a means for closer monitoring of teacher and student behaviors, just
another way for those on top to control those below them. These latter purposes
seem far more in keeping with what the “small school movement” has turned
into since its early heady years. In becoming a fad (adopted by many large foundations and business roundtables) it has attracted the interest of those who want
fast, efficient reform—an end to incrementalism, in the words of New York City
Commissioner Joel Klein.
In the misused name of accountability (which is, after all, precisely what democracy was invented for) these new small schools have virtually no say on the
issues of most importance to a school. They can move the chairs on the deck,
and they can do it faster, but they cannot give new direction to the ship as a
whole. It may be easier for the entire faculty to meet together, but the only topic
worth discussing is too often only how best to improve test scores or suffer the
consequences. Curriculum, broad pedagogical issues, the choice of leadership
of the school, and its ways of holding itself accountable are all taken out of their
hands—and generally placed in the hands of those with little or no prior school
experience. There are few important things left to argue about that might provide the excitement that good discussion engenders. The opportunities to take
advantage of the moment, to engage in the unexpected, to take a leisurely look
at one child, one classroom are at the heart of great schools; and they require a
self-governing culture, not a regimen.
However, there are trade-offs that need to be acknowledged up front. For example, there is no way that a school with fewer than 20 faculty members—probably
a good maximum to keep in mind for the purpose of strong collegiality—can
provide expertise in all the subjects that our big high schools are accustomed to
offering. Teachers need to be generalists, often teaching in disciplines that are
not their foremost strength. World languages are harder to offer the smaller the
school gets, and certainly a choice of several languages often seems impossible.
One might argue that only in small schools can the kind of experimentation
in the teaching of foreign languages take place—maybe a month-long immersion experience for all the members of the community would be more effective
than several hours a week spread out over 40 weeks. Teams and bands might
be a problem, although schools sharing a site might find ways to collaborate on
these.
Departmental life, which is for many teachers at the heart of what keeps them
in the profession, may be a serious loss, and one that would require a more interdisciplinary form of discourse. Other ways to provide access to the academic
disciplines of the adults’ choice might need to be invented—maybe including
local universities. Smallness also increases opportunities for people to get on
each other nerves—and not just faculty, but particular parents, not to mention

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kids. My own grandchildren who went to rural schools from Kindergarten
through 12th grade often longed for a big school and new potential friends—a
larger subgroup of film buffs, for example, or students of the same ethnicity or
religion, and fresh young teachers.
And above all, if the school is not a place where people can openly be oddballs
or have deviant ideas or styles, smallness can become suffocating. The culture
of the big anonymous schools offers havens for many people—the anonymity
being very welcomed. Strong principals and involved parents can stifle precisely
the intellectual climate that smallness is best designed to make possible. There
are good reasons for faculties—aside from the fact that change is always hard—
to be wary about such new fads and wonder whether they are intended to liberate or control them. These are all good reasons to move with caution—learning
as we go.
One essential that needs to be addressed is whether small schools are sustainable, over time. Does each change of leadership mean an upheaval, as new
leaders try to impose their culture on their predecessors? What sustains the best
schools is that they have the time to build upon the past, to change slowly and
carefully, to bring all their constituents along as they learn from their mistakes.
No two cultures are the same, just because they call themselves democratic.
Each is set by its own history, its shared stories, its oddball characters however
long departed.
To sustain these unique identities requires leadership shifts that grow from
the inside, that acknowledge that the job of a new leader is not to create a new
school. Private schools accomplish this, where they do, by the strength of their
boards—who know their school well and insure that a mistake (and hiring decisions are fraught with mistakes) is temporary. It is one factor that helps sustain
the loyalty of a school’s faculty and families—that they know that the school’s
uniqueness will be sustainable over time. Small public schools with their own
character and culture need democratic processes for the development and selection of leadership at all levels. There may be more than one way to do it, but if
we avoid this dilemma we lose part of the power of smallness to impact on kids
learning.
Finally, if too much is expected of any reform it is bound to turn into a fad,
and the first people who will be blamed are the practitioners who, in turn, may
turn on the kids—“we got the wrong students” or “wrong families,” some may
lament. So it’s well to remember that such reforms will make only a small blip
in reducing test score gaps between the haves and have-nots. Probably they
will have no effect since the haves will be working at least as hard at improving
their scores as the have-nots, and as usual are better at it. Standardized tests
are peculiarly sensitive to social and economic class differentials, as every study
demonstrates. By reducing the definition of being “well-educated” to what can
be captured in the forms of examination imposed by the new reform wave we
will move further away from a truly well-educated citizenry—top and bottom—
prepared to tackle twenty-first-century problems. We may even stand to
lose the ingenuity that American success has always depended on, wherever at
the workplace or the meeting place. Thus the success of small schools needs to

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be measured by better tools, including longitudinal studies on the impact of
such schooling in later life habits.
At a time when the gaps between rich and poor are growing at a speed not
seen before in our history—with all the related gaps in health, housing, and
incarceration—small schools will be another vain effort to make this a fairer
world. But they have the potential to be something else, to offer our least engaged young an opportunity to experience a cross-generational environment
rich in artistic, intellectual, and social experiences. If we choose to use them for
the purposes we proposed way back when—in the 1970s and 1980s, they can be
transformative. I’m not optimistic in the short-run, but I do not believe the time
has come to give up on the idea that democracy, even in a single schoolhouse, is
both possible, desirable, and, dare I say it, enjoyable.
Further Reading: Feldman, J., M. L. López, & K. G. Simon, 2005, Choosing small: The essential guide to successful high school conversion, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Graff, G., Clueless in academe: How schooling obscures the life of the mind, New Haven: Yale University
Press; Meier, D. W., T. Sizer, & N. F. Sizer, 2004, Keeping school: Letters to families from
principals of two small schools, Boston: Beacon Press; Meier, D. W., 1995, The power of
their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem, Boston: Beacon Press.

Deborah Meier

SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION
THE ORIGINS AND PURPOSES OF SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION
Social studies education has had a relatively brief and contentious history as
a school subject. The fundamental content of the social studies curriculum—the
study of human enterprise across time and space—has always been at the core
of education; however, there continues to be a lack of an agreed-upon definition
of social studies.
One of the earliest uses of the term “social studies” to refer to school subjects
is attributed to Thomas Jesse Jones in an article that appeared in the Southern
Workman in 1905 in which he expressed his concern that young African Americans and Native Americans “would never be able to become integral members
of the broader society unless they learned to understand that society, the social forces that operated within it, and ways to recognize and respond to social
power.”
The roots of the contemporary social studies curriculum are found in the
1916 report of the Committee on Social Studies of the National Education Association’s (NEA) Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Schools,
which Jones chaired. The final report of the committee, The Social Studies in
Secondary Education, illustrates the influence of previous NEA and American
Historical Association committees regarding history in schools, but it also emphasized the development of citizenship values in students and established the
pattern of course offerings in social studies that has been consistent for most of
the past century.

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Few social studies educators disagree that the purpose of social studies is to
prepare youth so that they possess the knowledge, values, and skills needed for
active participation in society. Arguments have been made that students can develop “good citizenship” through the study of history; through the examination
of contemporary social problems, public policy, social roles, and social taboos;
or by becoming astute critics of society. The key question at the heart of the controversy in the field is whether social studies should promote a brand of citizenship that is adaptive to the status quo and interests of the socially powerful or
whether it should promote citizenship aimed at transforming and reconstructing
society—a question that has fueled debates since Jones first employed the term
“social studies.”
SOCIAL STUDIES, CULTURAL TRANSMISSION,
AND SPECTATOR DEMOCRACY
The tensions between an emphasis on transmission of the cultural heritage
of the dominant society and the development of critical thought have produced
a mixed history for social studies education—predominately conservative in
its purposes, but also at times incorporating progressive and even radical purposes. Various schemes have been used to make sense of the wide-ranging and
conflicting purposes offered for social studies. Social studies education serves
three primary purposes: (1) socialization into society’s norms; (2) transmission
of facts, concepts, and generalizations from the academic disciplines; and (3) the
promotion of informed social criticism. Citizenship transmission, or conservative cultural continuity, is the dominant approach practiced in schools.
The dominant pattern of social studies instruction is characterized by textoriented, whole group, teacher-centered approaches aimed toward the transmission of “factual” information. While many social studies educators have long
advocated instructional approaches that include active learning and higher-order
thinking within a curriculum that emphasizes gender equity, multiculturalism,
environmentalism, and informed social critique, the dominant pattern has persisted. In practice, social studies education is characterized, at least in part, by
pedagogy that produces students who are either unable or afraid to think critically. This pedagogy is primarily the result of socioeconomic and political realties that produce conditions such as large class size, a lack of planning time for
teachers, a culture of teacher isolation, the expectation that the curriculum present the celebratory history (and myths) of Western civilization and the United
States, and a strong emphasis on standardized test scores as the only legitimate
measure of educational achievement. The traditional pattern of social studies
instruction is, however, also sustained by the fact that it is easier for teachers to
plan and teach in accordance with a direct instruction approach that focuses on
information transmission and coverage of content and that encourages teachers’
low expectations of students.
Reinforcing these tendencies is the conservative restoration of the past two
decades that has produced the “educational excellence” and “standards” movements, which have placed an emphasis on high-stakes testing and student

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recall and identification of social studies facts, persons, and events, diverting attention away from the ways in which the conditions of teaching and
learning might be transformed to encourage critical, active, and democratic
citizenship.
EXEMPLARS OF CURRICULUM CONTROVERSY
IN SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION
There are many persistent dilemmas and controversies in social studies that
will likely never be resolved, for example, breadth versus depth of curricular
scope, chronology versus issues-based teaching, a focus on the dominant culture versus multiculturalism, and advocacy versus neutrality of teachers. While
we have to be careful not to frame these issues in purely dualistic terms, each
of these cases described in the following sections illustrate clashes between social studies for indoctrination (also called “citizenship transmission”) and social
studies aimed at fostering critical social thought.
The Rugg Textbook Controversy (1930s–1940s)
Textbooks have always played a key role in shaping the content and pedagogy in social studies classrooms. As preeminent American historian Arthur
Schlesinger Sr. put in the early part of the twentieth century, “whether we like it
or not, the textbook not the teacher teaches the course.” And while Schlesinger’s
point of view vastly underestimates the role of the teacher, textbooks are one of
the most dominant forces in determining what gets taught and how.
In 1929, Harold O. Rugg, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, published the first commercial volume in a series of social science textbooks
entitled Man and His Changing World. Between 1937 and 1942 Rugg experienced what has been called the greatest censorship campaign ever to be waged
against a textbook author. Rugg was affiliated with the social reconstructionist
movement, which questioned the prevailing notions of social Darwinism and
laissez-faire capitalism. Social reconstructionists did not call for the overthrow
of the government or the economic system; rather they argued that the social
and economic systems required careful planning and execution to ensure that
social justice would prevail. Rugg and the social reconstructionists believed that
schools were a key factor in the pursuit of social change and that the individualistic self-interest promoted by the traditional curriculum and its emphasis on
rote learning of conventional subjects needed to be replaced by an innovative,
interdisciplinary curriculum emphasizing the interrelations of citizens and a social action component encouraging individuals to work cooperatively in order
to have a positive influence on society.
Rugg said, “To keep issues out of the school program is to keep thought out
of it,” and insisted that schools should prepare students for active participation
in democratic decision making. The aim of his textbooks was to teach students
to be aware and critical of injustices in American society, and to become active
participants in bringing about needed social change.

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Rugg insisted that “pupils must learn to think critically about modern problems.” In a review of the textbooks, historian Carl Wittke wrote that Rugg “emphasizes the need for tolerance, which he defines as ‘open-mindedness’ and
‘critical mindedness.’ ” Rugg’s Teacher’s Guide advised teachers to make constant
use of phrases such as: “Why do you think so?” “Are you open-minded about the
matter?” “What is your authority?” “Have you considered all sides of the case?”
as part of their pursuit of “tolerant understanding.”
The Rugg textbooks intended to foster critical thinking rather than conveying received knowledge. For example, end-of-the-chapter questions in A History
of American Government and Culture including the following: “In considering
each period of history we shall ask: How democratic was the government? Who
had the privilege and responsibility of voting? Who were excluded from voting
or holding office?”
The textbooks also emphasized “social action inquiry.” In An Introduction to
the Problems of American Culture, Rugg encouraged students to explore their
local communities with the hope that they would identify and take action to
ameliorate social ills, “organize a survey of life in your village, town, or city.
Study the history of your town, gathering together copies of old records. Try to
understand the people who founded and developed it into what it is today. Try
to understand the neighborhoods, the family life, social organizations, the real
government. Study the needs and try to learn how to improve the community in
which you live.”
Some of the themes addressed in the Rugg textbooks included the fragile nature of the economy, a critique of laissez-faire capitalism, the unfair distribution of wealth and income, the causes and consequences of high unemployment
levels, class conflict, immigration, rapid cultural change, and imperialism. In
his junior high school textbook Citizenship and Civic Affairs, he indicated that
in 1929, 36 American families had more than $5 million to spend, while more
than five million families had less than $1,000 on which to live. He illustrated
the contrasted lifestyles and opportunities of a prototype “Mr. Very Poor Man,”
“Mr. Average White-Collar Man,” and “Mr. Prosperous Business Man,” the latter
“able to afford beauty as well as comfort” in his home.
Man and His Changing Society was a highly successful textbook series. According to Rugg, 5.5 million copies of the textbooks, and student and teaching
guides were sold to nearly 5,000 schools. Peak annual sales approached 300,000
copies. The success of the textbooks has been credited to their innovative form,
style, and extensive content—the same characteristics that created the controversy and ultimately lead to the demise of the books in the 1940s.
The Hearst newspaper corporation, the advertising and manufacturing industries, the American Legion, and other powerful interests and patriotic societies
such as the Daughters of the American Revolution attacked the Rugg textbooks
for, according to Time magazine, “picturing the U.S. as a land of unequal opportunity, and giving a class-conscious account of the framing of the U.S. Constitution.”
In 1937, B. C. Forbes attempted to have the books removed from the Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey schools, calling the books “un-American, socialistic,

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and subversive.” While Forbes was initially unsuccessful, he used his column in
the Hearst newspapers and his position as founder of Forbes magazine to spark
a grassroots, public campaign against the Rugg textbooks. Forbes and the Hearst
papers felt threatened by, among other things, the textbooks’ portrayal of the
newspaper industry as a powerful force in society. For example, one Rugg text
states, “The largest newspaper chain is that controlled by William Randolph
Hearst. . . . So great is the combined circulation of these newspapers that it is
estimated that they enter daily one home out of four in the United States. . . .
Newspaper publishing is a business, and newspapers are printed for profit. What
they contain is essentially what the publishers think the American people want.”
Forbes called the books “viciously un-American” and claimed that Rugg “distorts facts to convince the oncoming generation that America’s private-enterprise
system is wholly inferior and nefarious.”
The National Manufacturers Association produced the so-called Robey Report (written by Ralph W. Robey, an assistant professor of banking at Columbia
University), which reviewed 600 social studies textbooks and labeled a substantial portion of them as “suspicious” because they were critical of the “free enterprise” system and the current form of American government. Robey said, “the
whole emphasis (of Rugg’s materials) is placed on the one-third of the population who are underfed rather than the two-thirds who are well-fed. . . . Yet in
most instances you don’t get a leftist point of view; if you had an out-and-out
leftist slant it would be much simpler to handle. What you get is a critical attitude that is destructive in its influence.”
In 1939, the Advertising Federation of America and its affiliates—offended
that the Rugg textbooks contained lessons about why consumers should look
out for false advertising claims—launched an anti-Rugg propaganda campaign
with a pamphlet entitled “Facts You Should Know about Anti-Advertising Propaganda in School Textbooks.” One of the final blows for Rugg’s textbooks came
in 1940, when the American Legion demanded that his textbooks should be
banished from the schools in an American Legion Magazine article titled “Treason in the Textbooks,” which was accompanied by a cartoon depicting Rugg as a
slant-eyed devil and innocent schoolchildren wearing pink-shaded glasses.
These national organizations fomented grassroots protests, which resulted in
the removal of the textbooks from schools across the country (and book burnings in Ohio). In defense of their profitable series, Rugg’s publisher, Ginn and
Company, financed his travel to communities where the textbooks were under
attack. Rugg was met by many protesters who admitted to never reading the
books, but caught up in anticommunist hysteria of the times nevertheless made
false and ludicrous claims about the books and their author. Ironically, Rugg was
considered a moderate among the social reconstructionist thinkers and was antipathetic to the class-conflict approach of some of his Marxist colleagues.
Despite the continued acclaim for the textbooks by many educators and the
supportive efforts by organizations such as the School Book Publishers, The National Council for the Social Studies, and the American Civil Liberties Union,
by the early 1940s school boards across the country were ordering the removal
of the Rugg series. Sales declined to 21,000 in 1945. A small number of the texts,

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however, remained in use and, in 1951, an article in Reader’s Digest branded
Rugg and fellow social reconstructionist George S. Counts as “evil geniuses.”
Rugg’s books were condemned for “tricky statistics,” for being “heavily charged
with socialist propaganda.” In the late 1950s, when the Rugg textbooks were no
longer in use, the American Legion was complaining that the seeds they had
planted remained “like hardy germs” of the new “golden staphylococcus—they’re
highly resistant to all known antibodies.”
While other social studies textbooks suffered similar attacks as Rugg’s, most
notably the Building America series, which was published by the Association
for Supervision and Curriculum Development in the 1940s, the Rugg episode
remains the most notable because of its lasting impact on the textbook industry,
which has since adopted a highly conservative stance toward design and content
of their products.
“The New Social Studies” (1960s–1970s)
In 1963, a major federally funded, multipronged curriculum effort known
as Project Social Studies was born. The New Social Studies (as the project is
commonly known) aimed to transform social studies curriculum and teaching
by: (1) stressing concepts and generalizations from all social sciences; and (2) encouraging active learning through discovery, inquiry, and inductive approaches
to teaching.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Man: A Course of Study
(MACOS), which is perhaps the most well known and controversial of the two
dozen New Social Studies Projects. First made available to schools in 1969,
MACOS was a cultural anthropology course designed for fifth and sixth grade
students and included films, booklets, records, maps, games, and other materials,
such as field notes, journals, poems, songs, and stories, construction exercises,
and observation projects that allowed children to learn in varied ways. Within
five years MACOS was in use in 1,700 schools in 47 states. MACOS examined
the nature of humans as a species and the forces that molded and continued
to shape humanity. MACOS exposed students to the way others lived, introduced them to the concept of culture, and attempted to enable students to think
about human behavior in a more general way and to appreciate cultural diversity by comprehending the common humanity of all people. Recurrent themes
included the concepts of life cycle, learning, parental care, adaptation and selection, aggression, affection and love, social organization, language, technology,
and values and beliefs. These themes are repeatedly examined from different
perspectives throughout the course.
Three questions recurred throughout the curriculum: What is human about
human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?
Students explored these questions first by examining life cycles of salmon, herring gulls, and baboons. The second part of the course focused on the Netsilik
Eskimos (Netsilik Inuit or Netsilingmiut) in the Pelly Bay region of Canada.
The Netsilik material emphasized the uniqueness of human beings and the basic
similarities that unite all races, ethnic groups, and cultures.

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MACOS came under widespread criticism, which began with attacks by
right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society and creationists who opposed
the teaching of evolution. School districts and teachers using MACOS were harassed and a media campaign against MACOS was mounted. Critics claimed
that because MACOS was a secular curriculum—that is it claimed that human
values and behavior are determined by specific environmental forces—it was
disrespectfully antireligious; that the curriculum dehumanized people and humanized animals; that by introducing students to the values of another culture
the course undermined the moral foundations of American society; and that
teachers were instructed to concentrate on examples of cannibalism, infanticide,
and senilicide until these acts are understandable and acceptable to American
children.
In the mid-1970s, NSF requested funds from Congress for preparation of
teachers to use the curriculum. During what was to be a routine hearing before a
subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, Congressmen
John B. Conlan (R-AZ) and Robert E. Bauman (R-MD) complained that some
parents were protesting MACOS, complaining that it conveyed what they saw as
disturbing and un-American values. Conlan said that the program “brainwashes
children with a dishonest view of man,” and Congress subsequently canceled
MACOS funding.
Jerome Bruner, the cognitive psychologist who was the primary developer of
MACOS, attributed the demise of the program to a “storm of anti-intellectualism, primitive patriotism, and [the] ‘back-to-basics’ [movement].” He concluded
that the study of the nature of humans cannot be address in schools without reconsidering how schools reflect society. Bruner stated that “If I had it all to do
over again, and if I knew how, I would put my energies into reexamining how
schools express the agenda of the society and how that agenda is formulated and
translated by schools. That it seems to me would be the properly subversive way
to proceed.”
The National History Standards Controversy (1990s)
Over a half-century after the height of the Rugg textbook controversy, a similar
ideological clash occurred over the federally funded national history standards
project. In the 1990s, standards-based educational reform began sweeping the nation, with the backing of political liberals and conservatives as well the national
leadership of corporate America and the teachers’ unions. The National History
Standards developed by Gary B. Nash, a renowned social historian, and his team
at the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA became a lightning rod
for criticism from cultural conservatives as well as progressive leftists.
The initial draft of the standards for teaching U. S. and world history were
viciously attacked by right-wing ideologues (including Rush Limbaugh, Pat
Buchanan, George Will, Lynne Cheney, G. Gordon Liddy, and Newt Gingrich),
rejected by the U.S. Senate 99–1, and denounced by the Clinton administration, because they judged the standards were too compensatory of traditionally
marginalized groups.

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Before a gathering of the American Legion, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob
Dole said that “The purpose of the National History Standards seems not to be
to teach our children certain essential facts about our history, but to denigrate
America’s story while sanitizing and glorifying other cultures.” Dole declared
that the work of the Standards’ authors “threatens us as surely as any foreign
power ever has.” Clinton’s secretary of education, Richard Riley, said “The President does not believe and I do not believe that these Standards should form the
basis for a history curriculum in our schools.”
The attacks on the National History Standards were, essentially, opposition to teaching and research of social history, a history that challenged the
traditional grand narrative of “great white men.” The National History Standards (and social history in general) were subject to attack because they were
considered as not celebratory enough. Nash described critics of the standards
as wanting “a stainless steel version of history, a consensual past.” In contrast,
the social history that informed the Standards covered episodes of the American experience that could not be absorbed into what some called “happy-face
history.” Key critics, like Lynne Cheney (who was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities when it funded the National History Standards
project), described them as a “grim and gloomy” monument to political correctness. She pronounced the standards project a disaster for giving insufficient
attention to Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers and far too much to obscure
figures (such as Harriet Tubman) or patriotically embarrassing episodes (such
as the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism) and described the standards as “the
most egregious example to date of encouraging students to take a benign view
of—or totally overlook—the failings of other cultures while being hypercritical
of the one in which they live.”
While cultural conservatives led the charge, they were not the only critics of
the standards project. Representing the views of many progressive social studies educators, historian Michael Whelan argued that the U.S. Senate rejection of
the National History Standards was “right, but for the wrong reasons.” Whelan
argued that the most pressing problem for history education is that the subject
matter is essentially limitless, but instructional time is not. Whelan posed key
curricular questions, such as: What topics will be included in or excluded from
study? On what basis should such decisions be made? Who is in the best position to make these decisions?
Whelan argued that the “broad-based national consensus building process”
used by Nash and colleagues gave the impression of thoroughness and fairness, but consensus building is not the best way to determine the historical
understandings most worth knowing and teaching. Instead, decentralized curricular decision making is much more consistent with the fundamentally interpretative nature of historical study. “History,” Whelan points out, “is not a
matter of facts, but a matter of deciding what the facts mean.” In addition, the
notion of national standards is based on the misleading assumption that the
study of history is simply about the past, rather than properly understood as
about the relationship between the past and the present. Leftist critics of the
National History Standards (and the myriad of standards projects that emerged

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in the 1990s) also highlighted how, when coupled with the mandated highstakes tests, the curriculum standards quickly morphed into “official knowledge,” which narrowed the range of content taught in schools and deskilled
teachers by making it nearly impossible for individual teachers to make specific
curricular decisions.
Has Social Studies Gone Wrong? (2000s)
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, whose publications include Where Did
Social Studies Go Wrong? (WDSSGW) and Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy:
What Our Children Need to Know, has sponsored one of the most visible recent
efforts at social studies reform. These publications have sparked an aggressive
and vigorous debate regarding the nature of social studies education. The authors of WDSSGW believe, among other things, that the current social studies
curriculum “eschews substantive content and subordinates a focus on effective
practice to educational and political correctness.”
In his foreword to WDSSGW, Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham
Foundation and former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, states that an essential tenet of any decent social studies curriculum
for young Americans is that “democracy’s survival depends upon transmitting
to each new generation the political vision of liberty and equality before the
law that unites us as Americans.” It is on this crucial point of transmission, and
its primary role in education for democracy, that WDSSGW contrasts with the
cases described above.
Even before the concept of social studies was invented, schools in the United
States had been indoctrinating their youth; no other single factor has so characterized textbooks, curriculum materials, or classroom instruction. Teaching
as “transmission of content” is alive and well in the contemporary social studies
classrooms. However, indoctrination and transmission that results in an emphasis on artificial separate subjects, rote memorization of facts, and uncritical
transmission of cultural values are not, in fact, essential tenets of teaching for
democracy, rather just the opposite.
The current debate about social studies curriculum, and its incumbent tensions, indicates the need for social studies educators to begin a serious conversation that can help the field chart a deliberative, divergent, and flexible course
for its curriculum. If social studies is to continue to evolve, it must involve those
interested in social studies in communicating areas of agreement as well as articulating philosophical differences.
The position of the self-described social studies “contrarians,” as presented
in WDSSGW, rejects the pluralism of the field of social studies and deliberation as the means to democracy. An examination of the table of contents of
WDSSGW is illustrative of the desire of its authors to close off and limit the
discussion: chapters with titles such as “The Training of Idiots,” “Garbage In,
Garbage Out,” and “Ignorant Activists,” reflect a perspective that implies an inherent correctness and allows little room for scholarly discussion or reasoned
disagreement.

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CONCLUSION
As we debate the reform of social studies, we should not move rashly to adopt
a singular curricular perspective that is driven by ideology and special interests. Rather, we need to take the time to consider conscientiously a pluralism of
viewpoints on social studies reform that could help to reinvent the social studies
curriculum and make it relevant and flexible to meet the unknown demands of
the future. A way to assure that a pluralism of views on the nature and purposes
of social studies education remains beneficial, and not factionalizing or destructive, is to embrace deliberation as the core idea of creating, maintaining, and
teaching for democracy.
Further Reading: Evans, R. W., 2007, This happened in American: Harold Rugg and the censure of social studies, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing; Evans, R. W., 2004,
The social studies wars: What should we teach the children? New York: Teachers College
Press; Hursh, D. W., & E. W. Ross, eds., 2000, Democratic social education: Social studies
for social change, New York: Falmer; E. W. Ross, ed, 2006, The social studies curriculum:
Purposes, problems and possibilities, Albany: State University of New York Press; Ross,
E. W., & P. M. Marker, eds., 2005, Social studies: Wrong, right, or left? (Special issues),
The Social Studies, 96(4/5); Vinson, K. D., & E. Wayne Ross, 2001, In search of the social
studies curriculum: Standardization, diversity, and a conflict of appearances, in W. B.
Stanley (ed.)., Critical issues for social studies research in the 21st century: Research, problems, and prospects (pp. 39–71), Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishers.

E. Wayne Ross
SPORTS IN SCHOOLS
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM OF EDUCATION REFORM
As has been well documented, the United States is in danger of losing its status
as the world’s most robust, creative economy. This is largely because from most
measurements, we are losing the global battle as it relates to the educational
preparedness of our populace. This global competition will only become more
intense. Americans have always competed against each other for the top jobs in
math, science, technology, and health care that fueled the global economy. But
with the opening of countries such as China, India, and Russia, coupled with the
advancement of technology and the Internet, our children will be competing for
the best jobs with young people all over the globe.
In today’s global, creative economy the implications of our declining educational competitiveness are serious. At a time when the economic health and
prosperity of our nation depends more heavily on the educational preparedness of our children, we are falling further behind. The only way the United
States will be able to maintain its place as the world’s premier economic, scientific, and technological power is to fully develop the potential of its greatest
resource—people. To do so will require an education system where the primacy
of academic achievement and excellence is absolutely clear. In short, a country
cannot accomplish extraordinary things with a population that has received an
average education.

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Given this backdrop, it is no wonder the debate regarding school reform has
become so heated. There is no shortage of reasons, strategies, and proposals for
how to reform the system: school vouchers, increased funding, more stringent
teacher standards, the No Child Left Behind Act, increased pay for teachers,
more parental involvement. The list goes on.
While all of these ideas and potential solutions deserve consideration, there
is one aspect of the education reform debate that we refuse to consider seriously.
Specifically, that is the role that sports should play in our schools. Consider it the
elephant in the room of education reform.
Our reluctance to acknowledge, let alone confront, the elephant results from
a fear of challenging an American institution with supposed values that are as
wholesome as motherhood and apple pie. This is why high school and college
sports are an American institution whose growth and influence has progressed
virtually unchecked for more than a century. We have blindly accepted the justifications for elite athletics—that participation is educational, character building,
and healthy for the participants, that they bring communities together, serve a
large percentage of the student population, and generate resources to pay for
themselves.
But given the rising stakes in the education debate, coupled with the increasingly professionalized nature of the current athletic culture and system, the time
has come to evaluate whether athletics is meeting these justifications and to
thoughtfully, rather than emotionally, examine the role that elite sports play in
our high schools. As America struggles to prepare its citizens to compete in the
global, creative economy of the future, each and every aspect of our educational
system must be evaluated to determine its effectiveness in meeting this goal.
Everything must be on the table for review, including the elephant.
Such evaluation is critical. If athletics contributes to a school’s educational
mission to a greater extent than currently believed, perhaps we should invest
even more time, energy, and resources in them. But what if it were proved, using
solid empirical data, that elite athletics is not meeting these justifications, that
these long-held assumptions regarding athletics’ positive impact on the health
and educational development of the students as well as the educational mission
of schools are not true? What if they are myths perpetuated by the athletic establishment and its adoring public and corporate community? What, as responsible, tax-paying citizens, should we do?
For example, there is a growing body of research suggesting that participation in elite athletics, rather than developing athletes’ character, honesty, and
sportsmanship traits, actually inhibits the development of young adults’ moral
reasoning skills. And while it has never been easy to determine the actual cost of
such programs, it is becoming increasingly clear that they cost far more than we
have been led to believe. This is because many direct sports-related costs such
as physical plant maintenance, coaches’ salaries, and insurance are hidden in
the general budget. And figures for high school sports participation, including
those published by the National Federation of State High School Associations,
include the total of athletes by sport, without taking into account multisport
participants. Often, what is counted as 300 participants is actually 125 students

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enrolled in two or three sports each. In short, not only is the cost of athletic
teams much higher than we have long believed, but the number of students involved in those programs is likely to be far fewer than we have been told. Thus, it
is critical that parents and school boards develop a more accurate accounting of
the true cost of their interscholastic athletic programs. With our schools facing
an increasingly difficult funding and economic climate, the implications of this
cost/benefit analysis are significant.
The claim that athletic programs unify educational institutions can also be
disputed. There are just as many students, faculty, parents, and taxpayers who
would rather see institutional resources and energy devoted to improving their
school’s art, music, science, theater, or English departments than to buying new
uniforms for the football team. Further, there are risks in relying on athletic
teams to unify educational communities. Schools that use athletics to solve the
problems of a fragmented community run the risk of making athletics, rather
than educational and academic excellence, the primary purpose of the institution. Although a football or basketball team can unite a high school in a way an
English department may not, the primary purpose of the institution remains, as
it always has been, educational. In short, a winning football team does not make
a quality educational institution.
The impact of our increasingly professionalized interscholastic sports culture
on the teaching function of high schools is also very significant. For example,
athletic department needs greatly influence how school days are structured. Typically, the school day starts at 7:30, is fragmented into many periods with many
interruptions throughout, and ends as early as 1:30. This allows long afternoons
for sports practices. There are several problems with this structure. Research
indicates that adolescents don’t truly “wake up” until 9:00 a.m. or so. Further,
50 minute class sessions are far too short for effective teaching and learning.
Finally, the school day ends too early. Ironically, the “subject” that occurs in the
best learning environment (a long period of time with no interruptions that occurs in the afternoon with a low “teacher” to student ratio) is sports practice.
Further, it is ironic that as the athletic department has gained in influence,
coaches have actually moved further away from the academic model. The link
between the athletic fields and the educational mission of the institution has,
over the past two decades, become increasingly tenuous. Specifically, a growing number of coaches do not teach at the schools at which they coach, if they
teach at all. This is problematic because there is little opportunity to integrate
the coach into the academic community. As a result, many coaches have little
appreciation for, or understanding of, the educational culture and academic expectations, practices, philosophies, and mores. For whatever reasons (low pay,
less willingness to deal with overzealous parents, etc.) the number of high school
coaches who are professional teachers has declined dramatically, by some estimates to below half.
Finally, and perhaps most significant, growing evidence suggests that there
are other extracurricular activities and programs that offer a far better return on
educational dollars invested. For example, not only does involvement in music
programs teach the values of teamwork, discipline, and communication, but

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research tells us that the link between involvement in such programs and the
improvement in students’ math, reading, logic, and creative skills—precisely the
skills that our children will need to compete in the creative, information-based,
global economy of the future—are very direct.
This is not to say that athletics has no value. Rather it is to raise the question
as to whether we are spending what are considered extracurricular resources—
all of them precious—in the most educationally beneficial way.
But the development of the mind is only one facet of a well-balanced education. The Greek ideal of a sound mind and sound body is, in fact, sound. And
it is in the area of public health that our educational system’s sponsorship of
elite athletics may be most damaging. In short, we must own up to the painful
fact that, with our schools leading the way, our system of sport is badly out of
step with our nation’s health needs. Specifically, our nation’s system of organized
sport has failed to promote the idea that sport for pure exercise is positive, fun,
and healthy. Rather, athletics must be about winning and developing future allstars and pros. Meanwhile, childhood obesity in America has reached epidemic
proportions.
Lifelong health and fitness habits are not developed by accident. They must be
taught, nurtured, and practiced regularly from an early age. Our schools must
play a role in this educational process by aggressively teaching and promoting
the concept of fitness for life. Currently, the vast majority of health, physical
education, and athletic extracurricular school spending funds interscholastic
sports. A large percentage of that total funds football, a sport in which the final
high school contest will be the last time that 99 percent of the participants ever
play the game. Yet, football flourishes while high school physical education requirements are reduced.
If we believe sport to be a character-building activity that prepares youth
for adulthood and instills in them important values and discipline, why is our
system of organized athletics not structured to encourage maximum participation? Rather than maximizing opportunities to become involved in and reap the
positive personal and health benefits of organized athletics, our current system
weeds out, at earlier and earlier ages, all but the most talented athletes and, in
the process, discourages participation by all but those who display extraordinary
potential. There is nothing in this model that encourages children to become
physically fit, or to learn about and enjoy the process of fitness. In short, from
the pee-wee leagues to our nation’s campuses, encouraging a healthy lifestyle
through sport is simply not a priority.
If the desired outcome of school athletics is for participants to have fun, develop character, gain confidence, and improve health, they must be organized
and conducted with those purposes in mind. This will require a fundamental,
structural shift in the role of sports in our schools from the current “elite” model
to one that would have as its fundamental purposes to use athletics as a tool to
supplement the educational development of participants and to promote broadbased participation in activities that can be practiced for a lifetime for purposes
of personal and public health. In short, physical education requirements, intramural sports, and wellness programs must be expanded and improved and the

Standardized Testing

responsibility for the development of elite athletes and teams must shift from
our educational institutions to private sports clubs and professional teams.
In such a model, once a youngster is identified as having the potential to compete at an advanced athletic level, he or she would simply pursue that endeavor
with a local club or professional team. This model works well throughout the
entire world. In fact, the United States is the only country in the world in which
elite athletes and teams are sponsored by high schools and colleges rather than
local clubs and pro teams.
In some sports, such a shift is well on its way. Many elite athletes in the sports
of soccer, basketball, and swimming have come to consider their participation
on elite local clubs or traveling AAU or all-star teams more important than participation on their high school teams. To these athletes, this is simply a logical
progression of their involvement in youth sports clubs and elite travel teams.
And, as mentioned, the direct link between high school athletics and the educational institution has become increasingly tenuous, as a growing number of high
school coaches are not professional teachers. These trends are simply the first
signs that the decoupling of elite athletics and high schools is under way.
Once again, the issue is not whether elite sports are good or bad, but whether
the current system is best suited for making the most of athletics’ potential to
meet our nation’s education and public health needs. There is a place for elite
athletics in America. The question is simply whether that place should be in our
schools.
The benefits of shifting the responsibility for conducting elite sports programs
from our nation’s schools to outside sports clubs would be enormous. After what
will surely be an initial, very loud uproar, eventually parents and community
leaders will recognize the advantages of this change and respond accordingly. Intramural, physical education, and wellness programs will be expanded, resulting
in far more students being able to avail themselves of health- and exercise-related
resources and benefits. And the credibility of our educational system will increase dramatically, because such a change would signify that our communities
and schools have strong educational values and public health priorities. In the
final analysis, confronting the elephant in the room will result in schools that are
better positioned to serve the broad, long-term, education, health, and fitness
needs of America.
Further Reading: Gerdy, John R., 2006, Air ball: American education’s failed experiment
with elite athletics, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Gerdy, John R., 2002, Sports:
The all-American addiction, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

John R. Gerdy
STANDARDIZED TESTING
Standardized tests are administered under standard conditions, scored in a
standard way, and result in quantifiable results; they can include multiple choice
or performance-based questions (like essays), and while usually administered to
groups they may also be individually administered. Standardized tests are used

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in schools for a variety of reasons (to determine the achievement or aptitude
of individual students; to evaluate programs and curricula for improvement; to
hold schools accountable), and they may be either low stakes (that is, having no
or low-level rewards and consequences) or high stakes (that is, having serious
consequences attached to the scores).
Standardized testing in schools has always been controversial. The controversy centers on the uses and misuses of the tests; cultural, class, and gender biases in the tests; whether they are benign or have a negative effect on those who
take them; and whether they are a good indicator of the quality of learning or
schools. Standardized tests have both the promise to reward merit and the reality of advantaging the already advantaged; the means to overcome racism and a
source or racism; and the means of establishing accountability in schools and a
constraint on what a good education is.
Beginning in kindergarten, standardized test results are used to sort, track,
and monitor the abilities, achievements, and potentials of students. A concern
is that standardized test results may be weighed more heavily than they ought
TIMELINE OF STANDARDIZED TESTING EVENTS
1845: Administration of the Boston Survey, the first known written examination of student
achievement.
1895: Joseph Rice developed common written tests to assess spelling achievement in
Boston schools.
1900–1920: Major test publishers are created: The College Board, Houghton-Mifflin,
Psychological Corporation, California Testing Bureau (what is now CTBS), and World
Book open for business.
1901: The first common college entrance examinations are administered.
1905: Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon develop the Binet-Simon Scale, an individually
administered test of intelligence.
1914: Frederick Kelly invents the multiple choice question.
1916: Louis Terman develops an American version of the Binet-Simon Scale, which becomes a widely used individual intelligence test, and he develops the common concept of the intelligence quotient (or IQ).
1917: Army Alpha and Beta tests are developed by Robert Yerkes, then president of the
American Psychological Association, to efficiently separate potential officers from soldiers as the United States entered World War I.
1926: The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), adapted directly from the Army Alpha Test, is
first administered.
1955: The high speed optical scanner is invented.
1970: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is created.
1980s: Computer-based testing is developed.
2001: No Child Left Behind is signed into law, reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and using student achievement test scores to hold schools
accountable.

Standardized Testing

to be, that decisions once made cannot or will not be reversed, and that other
compelling information may be ignored. The uses of standardized testing are
far-ranging. While there is considerable variation from one school district to
the next, children will be administered at least one but typically many more
standardized tests each year. Except for Iowa and Nebraska, every other state
administers English and mathematics state-mandated tests from grades 3 to 8,
and of those 48 states, 31 administer state-mandated tests in at least two of
grades 9 through 12.

MENTAL MEASUREMENT GOES TO SCHOOL
The use of standardized student achievement testing in American schools
dates back to 1845 with the administration of the Boston Survey. Horace
Mann, then secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, oversaw
the development of a written examination covering topics such as arithmetic,
geography, history, grammar, and science. The test battery, 154 questions in all,
was given to 530 students sampled from the more than 7,000 children attending
Boston schools. Mann was moved to create these tests because of what he perceived to be a lack of consistency and quality in the Boston schools.
This was followed not long after by Joseph Rice’s work, also in Boston. In
the decade beginning in 1895, Rice organized assessment programs in spelling
and mathematics in a number of large school systems. Much as Horace Mann
wanted to see more consistency in what was taught in schools, Rice was motivated by a perceived need to standardize curriculum.
About this same time, in 1904, E. L. Thorndike, known as the father of educational testing, published the first book on educational measurement, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurement. He and his students
developed many of the first achievement tests emphasizing controlled and uniform test administration and scoring.
But the real impetus for the growth of testing in schools grew out of the then
developing emphasis on intelligence tests, particularly those that could be administered to groups rather than individuals, work that built on the basics of
Thorndike’s achievement tests. In 1917, the Army Alpha (for literate test takers) and the Army Beta (for illiterates) intelligence tests were developed. Robert
Yerkes, Louis Terman, and others took up the challenge during World War I
of helping the military to distinguish between those recruits who were officer
material and those who were better suited to the trenches. Within a year and
a half, Terman and his student Arthur S. Otis had tested more than 1.5 million
recruits.
Terman also created the Stanford Achievement Test, which he used in his
longitudinal study of gifted children and from whence came the term “intelligence quotient,” or IQ. So taken with Terman’s work, the Rockefeller Foundation
supported his recommendation that every child be administered a “mental test”
and in 1919 gave Terman a grant to develop a national intelligence test. Within
the year, tests were made available to public elementary schools.

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Test publishers quickly recognized the potential of testing in schools and
began developing and selling intelligence tests. Houghton-Mifflin published the
Stanford-Binet Intelligence test in 1916. The commercial publication of tests is
critical since many of the efficiencies of the testing industry, such as machine
scanning, resulted from efforts to gain market share. In turn, the ability to process large quantities of data permitted ever more sophisticated statistical analyses of test scores, certainly with the intention of making the data more useful to
schools, teachers, and counselors.
Until the onset of the current high-stakes testing movement, achievement
and ability tests served a number of purposes, but in his 1966 book The Search
for Ability: Standardized Testing in Social Perspective, David Goslin summarized
what were at the time the typical uses of standardized tests in schools:
• to promote better adjustment, motivation, and progress of the individual
student through a better understanding of his abilities and weaknesses,
both on his own part and on the part of his teachers and parents
• to aid in decisions about the readiness of the pupil for exposure to new
subject matter
• to measure the progress of pupils
• to aid in the grade placement of individuals and the special grouping of
children for instructional purposes within classes or grades
• to aid in the identification of children with special problem or abilities
• to provide objective measures of the relative effectiveness of alternative
teaching techniques, curriculum content, and the like
• to aid in the identification of special needs from the standpoint of the efficiency of the school relative to other schools
While Goslin’s list represents the emphasis on local uses of testing, at this
same time, during the administration of John F. Kennedy there was a growing
interest in national assessment. During this period, Ralph Tyler was called
upon to oversee the development of a national testing system, which would
become the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), first administered in 1969 by the Education Commission of the States. The creation
of NAEP allowed for state-by-state comparisons and a common metric for
all American students, and all states are now required to participate in NAEP
testing.
THE TECHNICAL AND SOCIOPOLITICAL NATURE
OF MEASUREMENT
The development of standardized means for measuring intelligence, ability,
and achievement coincided with a remarkable explosion of scientific knowledge and technological advance across a wide range of domains. The industrial
growth of most of the twentieth century and the information technology growth
of the late twentieth century are the context for the use and development of
assessments that differentiate individuals for the allocation of scarce resources
such as jobs, postsecondary education, and scholarships.

Standardized Testing

Without the power of more and more advanced and complex technology,
both in terms of data management and statistical analysis, it is doubtful that
student assessment would be the driving force of the accountability demanded
in the current standards-based reform movement. The development of testing
technology is a series of changes, each responding to a contemporary constraint
on testing, and each of which enhanced the efficiency of testing—that is, the
ability to test more people at less cost and in less time. Charles Pearson’s invention of factor analysis in 1904, Lindquist’s invention of the optical scanner in
1955, the development of item response theory in the early 1950s by Fred Lord
and Darrell Bock, as well as the variant developed by Georg Rasch in 1960, and
the development of matrix sampling by Darrell Bock and Robert Mislevy in the
1960s and 1970s are examples of these technological enhancements. A number
of areas in student assessment remain astonishingly unsophisticated, such as,
for example, strategies for standard setting. In many ways, the educational measurement community has operated on the assumption that appropriate uses of
assessment in schools is a matter of making good tests and being able to manipulate the scores in sophisticated ways. However, testing is also a sociopolitical
activity and even technically sound measures and procedures are transformed
when they are thrown into the educational policy and practice arena.
There is and has been great optimism about what testing and measurement in
schools can accomplish. Robert Linn, contemporary father of educational measurement, suggests in his 2000 Educational Researcher article that we are overly
optimistic about the promises of what can be delivered:
I am led to conclude that in most cases the instruments and technology
have not been up to the demands that have been placed on them by highstakes accountability. Assessment systems that are useful monitors lose
much of their dependability and credibility for that purpose when high
stakes are attached to them. The unintended negative effects of high-stakes
accountability uses often outweigh the intended positive effects. (p. 19)
EUGENICS AND TESTING
Early American work on mental measurement was deeply informed by a
presumed genetic basis for intelligence and differences. In 1905, the French
psychologist Alfred Binet developed a scale for measuring intelligence that
was translated into English by the American psychologist Henry H. Goddard,
who was keenly interested in the inheritability of intelligence. Although Binet
did not hold the view that intelligence was inherited and thought tests were
a means for identifying ways to help children having difficulty, Goddard and
other American hereditarians disregarded his principles. Goddard believed that
“feeble-mindedness” was the result of a single recessive gene. He would become
a pioneer in the American eugenicist movement.
“Morons” were Goddard’s primary interest, and he defined morons as “high
grade defectives” who possess low intelligence but appear normal to casual
observers. In addition to their learning difficulties, Goddard characterized

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morons as lacking self-control, susceptible to sexual immorality, and vulnerable
to other individuals who might exploit them for use in criminal activity.
Lewis Terman was also a eugenicist and popularized Binet’s work (that is,
Goddard’s translation of it) with the creation of the Stanford-Binet Test. A critical
development, and one that still sets the parameters for standardized testing, was
Terman’s standardizing the scale of test scores—100 was the average score and
the standard deviation was set at 15. Terman (along with others, including E. L.
Thorndike and R. M. Yerkes) promoted group testing for the purpose of classifying children in grades three through eight, tests that were published by the
World Book Company (the current-day Harcourt Brace). The intent of these
tests was clear: to identify the feeble-minded and curtail their opportunity to
reproduce, thus saving America from “crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency.” Although lively discussion (most especially with Walter Lippman) about
the value of and justifiability of Terman’s claims was waged in the popular press,
this eugenicist perspective persisted.
In addition, Terman’s classifying of student ability coincided with ideas emerging among progressive educators in the 1910s. Progressives believed curriculum
and instructional methods should be scientifically determined, and Terman’s
tests and interpretations fit the bill. Few seriously questioned his assumptions
about the hereditary nature of intelligence or that IQ was indeed a valid measurement of intelligence. By “scientifically” proving that recent immigrants and
blacks scored lower than whites due to an inferior mental endowment, he catered strongly to the nativism and prejudice of many Americans.
Although most contemporary experts in mental measurement eschew these
eugenicist beginnings, the debate lives on, manifest more recently in the work of
Herrnstein and Murray in the much-debated book The Bell Curve. The authors
of this treatise have used intelligence testing to claim African Americans are genetically intellectually inferior. But their arguments are connected to class as well,
and herein may lie the most obvious connections to the advocacy of testing by
powerful politicians and corporate CEOs. Questions and answers they pose are:
How much good would it do to encourage education for the people
earning low wages? If somehow government can cajole or entice youths
to stay in school for a few extra years, will their economic disadvantage
in the new labor market go away? We doubt it. Their disadvantage might
be diminished, but only modestly. There is reason to think that the job
market has been rewarding not just education but intelligence. (p. 96)
Race and class, which are inextricably linked in contemporary society, remain
important considerations in measurement and assessment. There is ample evidence that suggests achievement tests are better predicators of parental income
than anything else.
BIASES IN STANDARDIZED TESTS
Standardized tests used in schools have always been criticized for their potential
biases, especially since the test developers may be different from many students

Standardized Testing

taking the tests and these authors may take for granted their cultural, class, racial
upbringing, and education. Although test developers strive to develop fair tests, it
is difficult to make a single test that accurately and fairly captures the achievement
of a student, rather than their life experiences. For example, a test item that asks
about the motion of two trains moving on parallel tracks may be obvious to adults
but quite confusing to a child who has never had occasion to ride on a train. Or
the obvious class bias in the oft-cited analogy question on the SAT—runner is to
marathon, as oarsman is to regatta. The bias in standardized test questions may be
based on cultural, class, ethnic, gender, or linguistic differences.
The increased use of standardized tests called high-stakes tests, those where
the results are used to make important decisions resulting in rewards or punishments, has, however, reinforced the disadvantages standardized tests present for
students of color and those living in poverty. High-stakes testing is disproportionately found in states with higher percentages of people of color and living
in poverty. A recent analysis of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey
(NELS) shows that 35 percent of African American and 27 percent of Hispanic
eighth-graders will take a high-stakes test, compared to 16 percent of whites.
Looked at along class lines, 25 percent of low socioeconomic status (SES) eighth
graders will take a high stakes test compared to 14 percent of high SES eighth
graders. Students of color are more likely to take high-stakes tests and they also
score lower than white students. With the advent of high-stakes testing, dropout
rates for students of color have increased, either because they do not do well on
the tests required for graduation or because they are pushed out by school districts that are judged by their overall test scores.
EFFECTS OF STANDARDIZED TESTS ON TEST TAKERS
Although standardized tests are meant to facilitate educational decision making at many levels, it is important to consider the experience of the test taker.
Generally, policymakers, test developers, and educational bureaucrats assume
the taking of standardized tests will be benign, with relatively modest positive
or negative effects on children. Research, however, suggests standardized testing
contributes to unhealthy levels of student stress, resulting sometimes in serious
mental health problems and even suicide.
Although less dramatic, there is also concern that emphasizing performance
on standardized tests (and even grades) diminishes students’ motivation to learn.
Rather than focusing on the value of learning, educational contexts that emphasize outcomes focus students on getting the grade or test score—emphasizing
what is required to do well on the test, rather than focusing on genuine learning.
Life-long learning and critical thinking are not key educational outcomes when
the focus is on tests scores.
STANDARDIZED TESTS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Despite cautions about the value of standardized testing, test scores are now
the common language used by education bureaucrats, politicians, and the media

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Table S.1

An Illustration of Standardized Testing across the Life of a Student

Grade

Test

Kindergarten

Boehm Test of Basic Concepts

1st

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test*

2nd

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test*
Stanford Diagnostic Math Test*
Terra Nova (reading and math)

3rd

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Testing*
Stanford Diagnostic Math Test*
Terra Nova (reading & math)
School and College Ability Test (SCAT)**
Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT)

4th

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test*
Stanford Diagnostic Math Test*
School and College Ability Test (SCAT)**
State English Language Arts Test
State Math Test
State Science Test

5th

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test*
Stanford Diagnostic Math Test*
Terra Nova (reading and math)
School and College Ability Test (SCAT)**
State Social Studies Test

6th

Terra Nova (reading and math)
School and College Ability Test (SCAT)**

7th

Terra Nova (reading and math)
Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT)

8th

State English Language Arts Test
State Math Test
State Science Test
State Social Studies Test
State Foreign Language Test
State Technology Test

9th –12th

State Graduation Exams:
English Language Arts
Mathematics
Global History and Geography
U.S. History and Government
Science
Language other than English
PSAT
SAT

* for remedial students only; ** Johns Hopkins Talent Search test for gifted program.

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to summarize the quality, or lack of quality, of schools. This is a recent use of
standardized tests though, and the last decade has seen a turn to high-stakes
testing. While test scores have been used within the education bureaucracy for
many decades, not until the late 1970s when the College Board reported declines
in SAT scores did these scores become the means for describing the quality of
schools. And the debate about the meaning and value of those scores for such
purposes began immediately.
Culturally, Americans are drawn to statistical and numerical indicators,
which are perceived to be factual and objective. Perhaps this is a result of public
policy debate in a complex democracy where there is a tendency to gravitate to
simple means for resolving differences in deeply held value positions. Perhaps
it is a romance with technology and science. In a few decades, standardized test
scores have infiltrated the popular culture as the obvious, inevitable indicator
of the quality of education and schooling. In such a short time, we have forgotten there are many other sorts of evidence that have been and can be used to
describe the quality of schools and schooling.
The reporting of test scores in the media, primarily in newspapers, is now
expected and often uncritically examined. Typically, the test scores on statemandated standardized tests are published annually in local newspapers. Little,
if any, information is provided about the meaning of the scores. Topics like measurement error (which, for example, would tell one that on the SAT, a difference of
at least 125 points between two scores is necessary to be confident there is any real
difference between the two test takers) and test validity (whether the standardized
test being used is one that was developed for that particular use) are usually not
included, either because they are not understood by education reporters, or are
perceived as too complex for the average reader. Similarly, schools and districts
are often ranked—an absolute folly given the error in the scores and the conceptual problem of truly being able to justifiably rank order hundreds of things.
While test developers have always cautioned that tests should be used for the
purposes for which they were developed, this desire for a simple common metric
to judge a student’s learning, the quality of a school, a teacher’s performance, or
a state or country’s educational attainment has led to more misuses of test. More
and more standardized tests are required and too often tests are being used in
ways they were not intended to be used. The most common example of this
is when general achievement tests developed specifically to create a spread of
scores from very low to very high with most scores in the middle (like the Iowa
Test of Basic Skills) are used to determine what students have actually learned.
James Popham, notable measurement expert, likens this misuse to taking “the
temperature with a tablespoon.”
CONCLUSION
Standardized tests have been a part of education and schools for many decades and will continue to be a part of the educational landscape. Controversy
will surely continue to surround their uses, and the psychological, social, and
political aspects of their use.

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Further Reading: Baker, J., 2005, Achievement testing in U.S. elementary and secondary
schools, New York: Peter Lang Publishers; Clarke, M. M., G. F. Madaus, C. L. Horn,
& M. A. Ramos, 2000, Retrospective on educational testing and assessment in the
20th century, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32(2), 159–181; Gould, S. J., 1996, The
mismeasure of man, New York: W. W. Norton & Company; Mathison, S., & E. W. Ross,
2004, Defending public schools: The meaning and limits of standards based reform and
high stakes testing, Westport, CT: Praeger; Nichols, S. L., & D. C. Berliner, 2007, Collateral
damage: How high stakes testing corrupts American schools, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.

Sandra Mathison

TEACHER EDUCATION
Teacher education has always occupied an uneasy chair in the cluttered
corridor between K–12 schools and institutions of higher education, surrounded with bystanders grumbling about the failure of teachers to live up to
conflicting standards and expectations and buffeted by shifting demographics and undulating economies. As a professional program, teacher education
struggles for academic respectability and does not enjoy the prestige or wealth
of medicine, law, and engineering. And each new wave of reformers confidently promises to solve once and for all teacher education’s obstinate if not
endemic problems.
The widely held popular belief that anyone can teach well if he or she is smart
enough and really wants to has put teacher education in the position of fighting to justify itself within universities, school systems, and public policy arenas.
Teaching is at heart often considered to be women’s work—a semi-profession—
at least until you get to high school science, math, and athletics. As a result,
activities to prepare teachers are not highly prized and are often seen to add little
value to the quality of teaching in schools. Indeed, teacher education requirements are sometimes viewed as impediments to the attraction of talented people
into the classroom. Such a climate has affected funding for teacher education,
the status of the enterprise itself, and the ability to attract talented students
and faculty.
Yet, teacher education persists and the conversation about the preservice and
inservice education of teachers continues. The core of this conversation revolves
around five major questions:

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1. What should teacher education consist of?
2. How should it be done?
3. Who should do it?
4. How long should it take?
5. Who should be educated to be a teacher?
As will be seen, these five questions intertwine: decisions about the substance of teacher education, for example, have implications for how it should
be done and how long it should take. Yet each question represents a distinct
perspective on the issues that surround teacher education policy and practice. The range of questions also suggests that teacher education is contested in
nearly all of its aspects.
WHAT SHOULD TEACHER EDUCATION CONSIST OF?
Teacher education has apprenticeship roots. It grew out of “normal” schooling
in which high school students received practical instruction, usually in the form
of demonstrations, on how to teach elementary school pupils. Such instruction
was not devoid of theory: rationales for lessons were an essential part of training and in the great pedagogical centers—Pestalozzi’s institutes in Switzerland
and Oswego Normal School in the United States, for example—rich theoretical
discourse was fundamental. But preparation was grounded in observing the everyday activity of master teachers conducting lessons and managing groups of
children.
As teacher education took on institutional form in the budding state college
systems of the early twentieth century, more formal content in philosophy, psychology, history, and method was added to the curriculum. Especially significant was the then emerging field of educational psychology, which promised to
give a scientific foundation to teaching practice. In addition, curriculum thinking for teacher education expanded to include both general studies prerequisites
and specific courses in the contents that prospective teachers were to teach, and
state departments codified this curriculum expansion into certification requirements.
Part of this curriculum enlargement was probably driven by efforts to enhance the status of schools of education, but it necessarily gives rise to questions
of the putative value of the knowledge requirements for teacher education and
to treatises on the “knowledge base” for teaching, an especially vigorous enterprise at the moment (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2006). In broad strokes,
discussions about the knowledge base for teaching practice revolve around
three major themes. The first is the traditional tension between (a) foundational
knowledge in such disciplines as psychology, philosophy, history, and the like;
and (b) practical demonstration, modeling, and practice in procedures for managing lessons and children. One version of this difference is the contrast between a view of teaching as complex decision making in uncertain conditions
and an emphasis on skill training to enable novice teachers to enact known and
verified practices with proficiency. The former perspective emphasizes interpretation, understanding, and design grounded in rich knowledge about children,

Teacher Education

learning, and pedagogy, while the latter underscores the value of performance
based on clear models of what to do and how to do it skillfully.
A second theme exists around the poles of content vs. method, i.e., knowledge of the subject or subjects one is to teach vs. preparation in learning and
development, general teaching methods, and classroom management. This issue
is especially robust in discussions of elementary school teaching, in which the
typical teacher’s preparation in the various contents of the curriculum, especially math and science, is quite broad and, perhaps, thin.
Finally, there is a tension, which has gained considerable energy recently,
around the contrast between scientifically tested and verified knowledge about
effective practice and clinical knowledge grounded in the experiences of seasoned practitioners. The former attitude, of course, fosters rules about what
constitutes scientific verification of effectiveness and an emphasis on preparing
teachers to follow the scripts that enact these effective practices in classrooms.
The latter is based on a valuing of the everyday wisdom of practitioners regarding the realities of the classroom and promotes teacher reflection and inquiry
into their own practice.
There is an additional shadow theme that lurks behind much of the discourse
about the content of teacher education, namely, the tension between ideal vs.
real, between improving schools by preparing teachers to enact “best” practice
vs. helping prospective teachers learn to survive in “real” classrooms, with the
complex and conflicting motivations of students, the crowded conditions of
schools, the lack of adequate resources, and the supposed impracticality of much
of what the research community thinks ought to happen. In practical terms, this
issue has a profound impact on the enduring effects of teacher education on its
graduates.
The contemporary view of best practice in teacher preparation can probably
be summarized as emphasizing (a) a strong foundation in the content one is to
teach; (b) a solid grounding in the modern learning sciences; (c) scientific justification for the methods and practices taught to teachers; (d) a concern for the
dispositions and practical arts needed to enact best practices in complex classroom settings; and (e) an emphasis on mentored practice with master teachers
in diverse classroom settings (see, e.g., Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).
HOW SHOULD TEACHER EDUCATION BE DONE?
Propositions about how teacher education should be carried out obviously depend upon what one believes about the substance of the endeavor itself. If, for
example, one thinks that teaching is complex, intellectually demanding work, the
effectiveness of which depends upon local invention by practicing teachers, then
one would prize teacher education experiences that foster understanding, interpretation, design, and reflection. If, on the other hand, one believes that teaching
is largely a process of skillfully carrying out predetermined scripts that guarantee
success, then one would advocate modeling and directed practice.
Direct clinical instruction in the craft of teaching through skill training and
apprenticeship is probably the most persistent and robust approach to teacher

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preparation and the one most widely perceived, even by program graduates, as
effective. Certainly student teaching is widely seen as the most important part
of beginning teacher preparation, and early field experiences and field-based
methods courses have become a regular and valued part of teacher education
programs. In addition, a family of techniques has evolved over the years for modeling teaching skills and providing directed practice in using them. Developers of
highly structured instructional programs have also devised inservice programs
to train experienced teachers in the faithful enactment of lesson scripts.
Among teacher educators, however, there is an enduring allegiance to principlebased teacher education, in which emphasis is placed on understanding, insight,
decision making, and reflection. Such an approach does not disregard teaching
skills, but insists that imitation is not, in the long run, the most effective preparation. Rather, skills need to be developed in an intellectual context that enables
teachers to comprehend their significance in achieving educational outcomes
and, thus, be able to adapt them to emerging circumstances. The principles for
this type of teacher education are variously derived from the study of children’s
learning, development, and motivation (e.g., developmentally appropriate practice), knowledge of classroom events and processes, or, especially in math and
science, reform pedagogies grounded in subject matter knowledge and studies
of how that subject matter is learned. A branch of the teacher education community also places considerable weight on critical pedagogy, that is, on understanding the social assumptions and consequences of educational structures and
practices and on learning emancipatory pedagogies that achieve social justice
and equality.
Case-based pedagogies enjoy a prominent place among teacher education
scholar/practitioners. Here the focus is the teacher’s task of enacting complex
events in classrooms and, thus, the story or narrative structure of teachers’ practical knowledge (Carter, 1993). In this context, cases become the preferred representation of teaching, both in trying to understand what experienced teachers
know, as well as in conveying the essential features of teaching practice to novices. Indeed, teaching experience itself is seen as an accumulation of personally experienced cases that, upon reflection, become a wellspring of professional
knowledge, insight, and growth.
An assessment of the contemporary scene suggests a fairly solid leaning toward
performance-based teacher preparation, reflecting a dominant perception that
teaching is a relatively straightforward matter of a few essential skills that can be
learned directly by apprenticing with a master. This stance is certainly reflected
in a variety of government policies and in the support for short-term, alternative
models of teacher education. At the same time, teacher education professionals
continue to argue for the long-term benefits of extensive preparation in the foundations and principles of schooling, teaching practice, and subject matter.
WHO SHOULD DO TEACHER EDUCATION?
The question of who, in fact, are the teacher educators is difficult to answer, in part because the enterprise itself extends across so many institutional

Teacher Education

boundaries within universities, public agencies, and school systems. In recent
years, the issue of where teacher education should be housed has received a
wide range of proposals. In the mid-1980s, the Holmes Group proposed that
teacher education should be done only at the post-baccalaureate level and only
at a select group of around 100 or so research universities. This proposal was
consistent with a larger effort to raise serious questions about the utility of
most undergraduate teacher education programs. Underlying this movement
was a distrust of the competence and intellectual viability of the courses and
faculty in schools of education. Professional courses for teachers were often
depicted as vacuous credits, except perhaps for those in psychology and student teaching, which added little to the quality of the teaching force and served
as impediments to strong preparation in subject matter and to the attraction
of high quality high-quality university students into teaching. This movement
led to revisions of state certification requirements to reduce the amount of
time prospective teachers spent in initial preparation coursework, deregulation of teacher education in many states, and the development of many shortcourse alternative programs for getting prospective teachers quickly into the
classroom.
The question of who is qualified to educate teachers reflects tensions at the
very core of college and university-based teacher preparation programs. Is the
best teacher educator the academic who knows the intellectual and scientific
foundations of teaching (but whose experience in K–12 classrooms occurred
several years ago, if at all), or is it the clinical practitioner who understands and
is currently familiar with the realities of schools and classrooms? This tension
is exacerbated in research universities in which tenure-line faculty face acute
demands both to publish in prestigious journals and to participate in the laborintensive activities of preparing teachers.
The overall effect of the policy landscape that surrounds teacher education
is pressure to move the site and substance of teacher education closer to classrooms and, in some cases, to have school districts become the primary providers of teacher education, especially in the professional development of employed
teachers. Teacher education, in other words, is increasingly seen to be a key part
of school districts’ efforts to implement district decisions concerning curriculum and instructional practice.
HOW LONG SHOULD TEACHER EDUCATION TAKE?
The beginning and ending points of teacher education are inherently indeterminate. As Lortie (1975) observed some three decades ago, learning what it
means to be a teacher begins with the extensive “apprenticeship of observation”
that comes from being a student in K–12 classrooms. Thus, ideas of the teacher’s
role and how to teach are well fashioned before students entered formal teacher
preparation. Moreover, what prospective teachers know about subject matter—
math, history, literature, science, and so on—comes from whatever exposure
they have had during their general education prior to and during their collegebased professional preparation program.

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During the twentieth century, teacher educators succeeded in formalizing
and lengthening the preparation needed to become certified as a teacher. Implicit in this effort was the notion that teacher preparation needed to be frontloaded, that is, the content of teacher education courses needed to anticipate all
that teachers might encounter in their careers and inoculate them from “wrong”
ideas that they might be exposed to in schools. In modern parlance, novices
were to come out of preservice preparation as experts.
This expectation of expertise as a minimally acceptable outcome of preservice
teacher preparation would seem to have little validity. Studies of teacher development, for example, suggest that in most cases achieving a sense of mastery in
teaching takes some four years of teaching experience. Such findings indicate
that learning to teach takes repeated practice in clinical settings to develop the
understandings and pattern recognition necessary to interpret teaching dilemmas and invent workable, if tentative, solutions. Without this experiential foundation novices appear to have substantial difficulty incorporating knowledge into
everyday interpretations and decisions. One implication is that induction, mentoring, and inservice early career support systems need to be in place to help
beginning teachers travel the demanding journey toward expertise in teaching.
Teacher education, in other words, becomes a continuum beginning with preservice preparation and extending well into if not throughout a teaching career.
The implications for preservice preparation of seeing learning to teach as a
protracted process are somewhat ambiguous. Should preservice teacher education include extensive internships prior to certification to provide the necessary
experiential base under intensive supervision (medical education parallels are
easily invoked here)? Or should preservice activities be abridged so that teacher
candidates can move quickly into full-time responsibilities as employed teachers
and, thus, gain real-world experience? The former alternative—extensive internships—lacks utility on at least two grounds: (1) teacher salaries hardly justify
investments in long-term preparation programs; and (2) preservice experiences
lack authenticity for participants—they are not “real” teaching in one’s own
classroom. The latter alternative—shortened initial preparation—would seem to
have considerable power in the current policy climate in teacher education and
is shifting attention in teacher preparation to induction programs and the inservice professional development of teachers.
WHO SHOULD BE EDUCATED TO TEACH?
Two major themes dominate conversation regarding the pool of candidates
for teaching: (1) the ability and life experience of prospective students; and
(2) the gender and ethnicity of those who seek to be teachers.
It is often argued that teacher education draws disproportionally from the
lower ranges of the achievement distribution of college students, and anecdotal
stories abound that academics—chemists, mathematicians, economists—often
encourage their lower-achieving students to consider teaching as a career. Policy
initiatives to increase the level of ability among teachers have tended to focus
on bypassing the traditional undergraduate teacher education major to increase

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access to teaching by persons who already have bachelor’s degrees and, perhaps,
bring to the classroom important life experiences through previous nonteaching
careers. Programmatic alternatives include short-term commitment programs
such as Teach for America, Master’s degree and other post-bachelor’s certification programs, alternative certification summer institutes, school district
training programs, and the like. Evidence concerning the effectiveness of these
alternative efforts in terms of the success of participants and their retention in
teaching generally indicates that these programs have limited impact, but this
conclusion is deeply contested among partisans.
Observers also note that teacher education students are typically white,
middle-class females, a demographic that has a number of consequences. At
one level, drawing from this population affects the career trajectories of teachers: many times teachers’ salaries represent a second income for families and
teachers interrupt their careers for child-raising duties. In addition, occupations
populated largely by women have traditionally not enjoyed the same status as
male-dominated occupations. Finally, the demographic profile of teachers differs substantially from the ethnic, cultural, and class characteristics of K–12
students, especially those in urban schools. This last issue has generated considerable energy around efforts to infuse an emphasis on cultural diversity into
teacher education programs to increase teachers’ understandings of and sensitivities toward other people’s children. In addition, efforts have been make to define culturally appropriate pedagogies to accommodate, take advantage of, and
celebrate the multiple diversities that exist in modern classrooms.
CONCLUSION
On several levels—technical, intellectual, organizational, political—teacher
education is a rich and exciting domain for analysis, invention, and design. The
enterprise has certainly attracted considerable attention, both as the source of
the supposed failures of modern schooling and perhaps society itself and as the
ultimate solution to problems of individual and social achievement. The controversies surrounding teacher education also point to fundamental tensions at the
core of our social discourses and struggles. It is possible, one suspects, that answers to the major questions in teacher education will emerge only as the larger
society comes to terms with its predicaments.
Further Reading: Carter, K., 1993, The place of story in research on teaching and teacher
education, Educational Researcher, 22(1), 5–12; Cochran-Smith, M., & K. M. Zeichner,
eds., 2006, Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and
teacher education, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Darling-Hammond,
L., 2006, Powerful teacher education: Lessons from exemplary programs, San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass; Darling-Hammond, L., & J. Bransford, eds., 2005, Preparing teachers for a
changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do, sponsored by the National
Academy of Education, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Lortie, D. C., 1975, Schoolteacher: A
sociological study, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Sikula, J., ed., 1996, Handbook
of research on teacher education (2nd ed.), New York: Macmillan.

Kathy J. Carter

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TEACHER KNOWLEDGE
THE ROLES OF PEDAGOGICAL SKILL AND TEACHER
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE IN THE AMERICAN VISION
OF TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS
Is pedagogical skill sufficient to be a good teacher? Many elements of teacher
training, placement, and evaluation in the United States suggest that many think
the answer is yes. Was the answer always in the affirmative? Should it be? This
chapter examines the question in a historical context and discusses recent investigations suggesting that we should reconsider and evaluate the ways in which
our answer plays out in practice.
To better understand current conceptions of effective teaching, it is helpful
to recognize that conceptions are not static. They evolve not only as research
accumulates, but also as social contexts change. We thus begin our look at the
opening question by going back a century to John Dewey and his philosophy
regarding the role of content knowledge in teaching. We then continue with an
examination of the era that followed, an era marked by the work of Charles Judd
and by theories of Edward L. Thorndike—theories that, we argue, until very recently have laid beneath responses to our basic question.
DEWEY, JUDD, THORNDIKE, AND THE PLACE
OF CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
In Democracy and Education, John Dewey stated categorically that pedagogy and content are inseparable. “Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something
outside of the material” (p. 194). “The teacher should be occupied not with
subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupil’s present needs and
capacities”(p. 215). Dewey also believed that highly developed subject matter
understanding is a prerequisite for effective teaching. Foreshadowing presentday theories, he noted that “The more the educator knows of music, the more
he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child”
(p. 215).
The view that content knowledge must be closely connected to teaching was
reflected not only in Dewey’s words, but also in the organization of his work.
He came to the University of Chicago as chair of the department of philosophy.
At that time, the department included also the university’s work in psychology
and, at Dewey’s request, pedagogy. Dewey’s closest colleagues represented these
(what we think of now as) disparate fields. Additionally, through his work at
the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, Dewey sought the advice of
prominent professors of botany, zoology, physiology, sociology, anthropology,
physics, and chemistry. Those advisors offered material help and the chance to
share ideas about the organization of subject matter with those who were studying and, indeed, defining the fields or subjects to be taught.
Consistent with the idea that the study of education should cross content
fields, Dewey believed that educational researchers should participate in the

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classroom and that teachers should conduct research. Further, he believed that
educational administrators should be teachers who leave their posts only temporarily to fulfill these duties.
Compare Dewey’s conceptualization of the field of education with that
which followed it. Dewey was replaced at the University of Chicago by Charles
Judd, who sought to professionalize the field of education and did so successfully with work on several fronts. In 1909, the year of Judd’s appointment, the
department of education became a field unto itself with distinct departmental
faculty leading a new series of courses. At the time, fields at institutions of
higher education multiplied in number and narrowed in scope. Boundaries
between fields became less permeable. Mirroring this tendency toward specialization, in the department of education, researchers, teachers, and administrators were seen as having separate goals and needs, with each role served
by a distinct set of individuals. With Judd at the helm, recommendations for
graduates seeking positions in education were to come only from professors
within the department of education. All of those efforts speak to a shift in the
value not only of the opinion of content knowledge experts, but also of content
knowledge itself.
Edward L. Thorndike, a contemporary of Judd’s who worked at Teachers
College, Columbia University, shared with Judd an interest in laboratory experimentation. Both preferred this form of investigation to the kind of naturalistic participant-observer form of inquiry for which Dewey became known.
Thorndike’s early work involved the study of animals, the findings from which
he later generalized to experiments with humans. With the rise of Thorndike’s
work, gone were the days in which content played a role in pedagogy. The days
of stimuli/response connections had arrived.
A “connectionist,” Thorndike defined learning as making connections between stimuli and responses. Connections were made, according to his theory,
following three laws: the law of readiness, the law of exercise, and the law of
effect. These laws suggested, respectively, that making connections is pleasurable, that connections, once made, are more likely to be made again in a similar
situation, and that connections that are rewarded are strengthened. This theory
relegates the teacher to little more than the provider of information and rewards.
There’s little need for a teacher to have a deep understanding of content, the
relations among subtopics, and associations between one content area and another. As for the role of educational researchers, the identification of those universal laws suggested that learning was independent of context. It followed there
was little need for researchers to make observations within naturalistic settings,
and there were many advantages to searching for laws of learning in more controlled laboratory contexts.
The views of Judd and Thorndike, rather than those of Dewey, shaped the face
of American education and educational research. Content became something to
be “controlled out” of studies so that the fundamental laws of method could be
isolated, even to the point that nonsense syllables and words were commonly
used as learning tasks in educational psychology experiments. Educational
historian Ellen Lagemann argues “that one cannot understand the history of

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education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes
that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost” (1989, p. 185).
For his work, Thorndike became known as the Father of Educational Psychology. The question might be asked whether current researchers who represent the re-emergence of interest in content knowledge are simply wayward
offspring, rebelling against the elder generation and its triumphs. Before the
content pendulum swings fully back to the position in which it found itself
when Dewey led work at the University of Chicago, it is useful to examine what
contemporary investigations are revealing about the contributions of content
knowledge and pedagogical knowledge to teaching effectiveness.
THE REEMERGENCE OF INTEREST IN CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
Many elements of our system of teacher training, placement, and evaluation
in the United States suggest that we have a continuing belief that content knowledge plays, at best, a minor role in effective instruction. Acquisition of content
knowledge plays a relatively small role in teacher education programs, especially
in elementary education. This is in stark contrast to many programs in other
countries. What happens when American teachers are assigned to real classrooms? In a recent examination of out-of-field teaching in U.S. high schools, it
was found that (1) about a third of all math teachers do not have either a major or
a minor in math, math education, or related disciplines, (2) about a quarter of all
English teachers have neither a major nor minor in English or related subjects,
and (3) about a fifth of all science teachers do not have at least a minor in one
of the sciences or in science education. The same study found that in any given
year, out-of-field teaching takes place in well over half of all secondary schools
in the United States and that levels changed little from the late 1980s to the mid1990s. Once placed, teachers can be expected to take part in professional development programs that are, to a very large degree, focused on information not
related to the content they teach (e.g., classroom management, student motivation, grading systems). When they are evaluated, the same is usually true. Rarely
is teachers’ content knowledge (in any form) directly evaluated.
Thus in many respects our actions seem to suggest that we place a low value
on teachers’ content knowledge, and that we think sound pedagogical skill is sufficient for good teaching. However, there seems also to be a recent re-emergence
of interest in the levels of content knowledge held by teachers. As an example of
this, Lee Shulman in his 1985 presidential address to the American Educational
Research Association advocated for a return to questions that had recently gone
unasked—questions related to the content involved in classroom teaching. He
proceeded then to go one step beyond, and to propose a theoretical framework
that further distinguishes the types of content knowledge involved in teaching
(i.e., subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and
curricular knowledge). The article based on Shulman’s address has been cited
wildly (1,320 times according to Google Scholar) since then and has spurred a
large body of research designed particularly to measure, improve, and determine the impact of pedagogical content knowledge on student learning.

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UNDERSTANDING SHULMAN’S NOTION OF PEDAGOGICAL
CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
The term pedagogical content knowledge has become very popular in educational discourse (a Google search yields 1,090,000 citations). Such wide usage
increases the risk of the concept losing its original meaning. Shulman (1989)
defined pedagogical content knowledge as follows:
A second kind of content knowledge is pedagogical knowledge, which
goes beyond knowledge of the subject matter per se to the dimension of
subject matter knowledge for teaching [emphasis in the original]. I still
speak of content knowledge here, but of the particular form of content
knowledge that embodies the aspects of content most germane to its
teachability. Within the category of pedagogical content I include, for
the most regularly taught topics in one’s subject area, the most useful
forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies,
illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in a word,
the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. . . . Pedagogical content knowledge also includes
an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or
difficult: the conceptions and preconceptions that students of different
ages and backgrounds bring with them to the learning of those most
frequently taught topics and lessons. (p. 9)
One of the researchers who has made Shulman’s theoretical framework the
center of her research agenda for almost two decades now is Deborah Ball.
Through her notion of mathematical knowledge for teaching, Ball has not only
contributed to the operationalization of Shulman’s definition of pedagogical
content knowledge for the field of mathematics; she has also gone a step further
and offered a more elaborated conceptualization of the knowledge that mathematics teachers need. Ball and colleagues argue that to the knowledge of best
representations of materials for learners and of errors that students make (i.e.,
pedagogical content knowledge) a third component should be added: common
and specialized content knowledge. The notion of specialized content knowledge (SCK) has received particular attention, specifically through the development and testing of items for its measurement (see the Learning Mathematics
for Teaching Project). SCK includes the ability to represent mathematical ideas
and operations, provide mathematical explanations, and interpret nonstandard
computation methods.
In addition, the work that Ball and colleagues have conducted around this
notion has addressed in another important way Shulman’s call for the reintroduction of subject matter content knowledge in the discussion of what
teachers need to know. It has provided a new way of thinking about processproduct studies, in which the central question is about how teachers’ mathematical behavior—as opposed to purely pedagogical behavior—might impact
student learning. In a study involving 115 elementary schools engaged in instructional improvement, Hill and her colleagues have reported a significant

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relation between teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and student
achievement gains in first and third grades.
Similar links between teacher pedagogical content knowledge and student
learning were found in a study that compared teachers who obtained National
Board Professional Teaching Standards certification and teachers who applied
for the certification, but did not obtain it. Certified teachers outperformed their
counterparts on a measure of deep representation of the subject matter, and
skillfulness in monitoring and providing feedback to students. Students of those
teachers in turn exhibited a more integrated, coherent, and abstract understanding of mathematical concepts.
Converging evidence on the impact of teacher knowledge that blends content and pedagogy together can be drawn from studies of the effects of teacher
professional development (PD) on student learning. In a review of those studies in the fields of mathematics and science, Kennedy reported that teacher PD
programs that focused on specific content and ways in which students learn that
particular content had larger effects on student learning than programs that
focused mainly on teachers’ pedagogical behaviors.
CONCLUSION
How closely has the pendulum swung back to the position it was when
Dewey worked at the University of Chicago? It is too early to say. Conceptualizing teacher content knowledge conducive to student learning needs more
unpacking and investigation of the kind that Ball and colleagues have done. It is
sobering that Kennedy’s review turned up only about a dozen studies of mathematics and science PD programs that examined both the role of teacher content
knowledge and student outcomes. Certainly, many more rigorous studies that
link teacher knowledge to student achievement are needed.
However, some have argued that a better balance of pedagogy and content
in conceptions of teaching effectiveness is necessary but not sufficient. Some
read the evidence that has accumulated since Dewey lost and Thorndike won
to indicate a more complicated view of teaching is required when the goal
is its improvement. Those voices are arguing that the many existing types of
knowledge—research, content, pedagogy, and pedagogical content—are most
useful to teachers when they are seamlessly integrated into a professional knowledge base for teaching.
Hiebert and his colleagues argued that professional teaching knowledge is
more particular, concrete, and linked to practice than what either content experts or researchers typically produce; and that professional teaching knowledge
is organized not according to type but rather the specific problem it is intended
to address. Knowledge types now separated by investigative or logical analysis
must be tightly integrated in order to teach a particular lesson more effectively.
Teachers need to know how to teach this classroom of children to understand
conceptually why they cannot add the denominators of unlike fractions, and
thousands of other particular problems. Knowing general principles of effective
instruction is helpful, but each school day teachers design lessons and prepare

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instruction that addresses particular student needs and common misconceptions and misunderstandings. In this kind of knowledge all the constituent
forms—including content and pedagogy—are so tightly woven that it appears as
a cloth of a single thread.
Every day, practitioners use and develop this kind of particular, problemfocused professional knowledge. Such professional teaching knowledge might
be sometimes haphazardly shared, but seldom beyond the building, and almost
never stored for future use. Late in his career, Dewey noted that one of the saddest things about American education is that “the successes of [excellent teachers] tend to be born and die with them: beneficial consequences extend only
to those pupils who have personal contact with the gifted teachers. No one can
measure the waste and loss that have come from the fact that the contributions
of such men and women in the past have been thus confined” (Dewey, 1929).
Some have proposed remedying this loss of knowledge with regional or national systems—perhaps organized by content areas—that capitalize on multimedia Internet technologies to build accessible libraries of professional teaching
knowledge illustrated with classroom videos. In this vision, researchers play a
vital role in testing and verifying practitioner-developed professional knowledge
that is entered into the base. The potential of this idea was noted by a national
commission chaired by former senator and astronaut John Glenn: To improve
the quality of mathematics and science teaching in grades K–12, the commission urged that a “dedicated Internet Portal must be available to teachers so they
can make use of and contribute to an ever-expanding knowledge base.”
There are many challenges, not the least of which is drawing the research and
practitioner communities into a new and productive collaboration—one that
echoes both the Dewey and Thorndike legacies. Educational science and professional practice needed nearly a century to see a different way forward. Content
and method unified in theory, research, and practice. Perhaps Dewey will not
lose after all, and Thorndike’s descendants will find value in researching teaching in its natural settings.
Further Reading: Bond, L., T. Smith, W. K. Baker, & J. A. Hattie, 2000, The certification system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: A construct and
consequential validity study, Greensboro, NC: Center for Educational Research and
Evaluation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Dewey, J., 1916, Democracy
and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education, New York: MacMillan;
Dewey, John, 1929, The sources of a science of education, New York: Horace Liveright
(many thanks to James Hiebert for this quotation); Hiebert, J., R. Gallimore, & J. W.
Stigler, 2002, A knowledge base for the teaching profession: What would it look like
and how can we get one? Educational Researcher, 31(5), 3–15; Hill, H. C., D. L. Ball,
& S. G. Schilling, in press, Unpacking “pedagogical content knowledge”: Conceptualizing and measuring teachers’ topic-specific knowledge of students, Journal for Research
in Mathematics Education; Hill, H., B. Rowan, and D. Ball, 2005, Effects of teachers’
mathematical knowledge for teaching on student achievement, American Educational
Research Journal, 42(2), 371–406; Kennedy, M. M., 1999, Form and substance in mathematics and science professional development, National Institute for Science Education
Brief, 3(2), Madison: University of Wisconsin; Lagemann, E. C., 1989, The plural worlds
of educational research, History of Education Quarterly, 29(2), 185–214; Lagemann,

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E. C., 2000, An elusive science: The troubling history of education research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) Project, retrieved
February 1, 2007, from http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lmt/home; National Commission
on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century, 2000, Before it’s too late: A
report to the nation, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education; Shulman, L., 1986,
Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching, Educational Researcher, 15(2),
4–14; Shulman, L. S., 2004, The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and
learning to teach, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Karen Bogard Givvin, Rossella Santagata, and Ronald Gallimore
TEACHER LICENSURE
WHO SHOULD BE ENTITLED TO TEACH, OR HOW MANY
WRONGS DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A RIGHT?
Since 1951 all states must give their permission (a license) for a person to
teach in a public school, and a few also require the license for private school
teaching. Historically and continuing to current time, three factors have been
relied on in granting this permission: (1) an assessment of the prospective
teacher’s character, (2) the prospective teacher’s tested knowledge (particularly of the teaching subject), and/or (3) the prospective teacher’s teaching
skill as attested to by the completion of a higher education program of study
in pedagogy.
The state’s granting of formal permission to teach is meant to be based on
indicators that permit an overall prediction that a particular candidate will perform safely and satisfactorily in the complex situation of teaching. Upon which
of the three factors the various states elect to award their license depends on
whether they see teaching as a profession based exclusively upon specialized
university-level study, or whether they see teaching as little more than a civil
servant’s line of work that can be taken up by nearly any well-meaning person
who has mastered a subject matter. The battleground, both historically and at
present, centers on these competing views of teaching—how a person learns to
teach, who should be entitled to teach, and more importantly who should be
prohibited from teaching, whether teaching is inherently moral or technical,
an art or a science, and so forth. Recently, policymakers have wanted also to
know whether any of these factors influence the performance of the prospective
teacher’s students on the standards-based assessments the state makes of pupil
and student achievement. No matter the basis of the license award, the students
of licensed teachers generally perform marginally better than the students of
nonlicensed teachers.
The battleground also centers on who has the authority and expertise to grant
the license. While it is essentially a settled matter today that the states have this
authority, it was not always a settled matter because local communities, the profession, individuals, and the colleges have battled for the right to make the determination, and today some argue that licensure should be granted only at the
national level in accordance with national standards.

Teacher Licensure

To comprehend the complexity of the problem of the basis of the license,
consider for a moment a hypothetical, but related, question in the social sciences of what factor, out of all the factors researched in the scholarly literature,
would yield the best predictor of behavior in a complex situation like teaching—the candidate’s gender, age, IQ, socioeconomic status, religion, political
affiliation, nationality, grade point index, years of schooling, cultural identification, motivation, race, personality profile, SAT scores, values and dispositions,
personality, or some other indicator? Some of these factors, given their relationships to general behavior, are reasonably helpful, but none is close to being a
sure guide to very much by itself, and any one, taken by itself, would be a very
weak predictor of behavior in general or teaching behavior in particular. Taken
in combination, however, some sets of indicators do yield fairly accurate predictions of some complex tasks. To take a simple example, the combination of high
school grade index on selected courses and SAT scores is a more precise predictor of an individual student’s first year college grades than either factor alone or
any other factor. In most instances, however, one would know next to nothing if
measures, even good measures, of some of these factors were relied upon singly
to predict teaching behavior, although a very good case in fact can be made for
the verbal component of intelligence.
To push the point a bit further of how a collection of flawed and incomplete
indicators can be useful, consider that some of the most powerful measures in the
field, like IQ, are themselves little more than systematic combinations of other
limited measures, like memory span, word meaning and fluency, spatial relations, manual dexterity, classification, numerical reasoning, reaction time, and
common knowledge, which by themselves have little predictive validity. Each
is weak and flawed in its power to account for very much of human behavior,
although the compilation of these separate component measures is significantly
related to nearly all aspects of human intellectual accomplishment.
From colonial time onward, parents, school boards, personnel directors, state
superintendents, policymakers, and their counterparts have sought an answer
to the question of what will predict who, among all the available candidates for
a teaching position, is likely to succeed and perhaps more urgently who is likely
to fail in the position.
Regrettably, all that is really available to them in their quest for a way to determine who should be permitted to teach are answers to slightly different questions
about the prospective teacher—how well they scored on various tests, what kind
of schools they attended, what they studied in school, how they responded to an
interviewer’s questions, how they handled a circumscribed practice teaching assignment, what they value and believe, what motivates them, and so forth. Out
of the answers to these questions a consistent and mutually reinforcing picture
of the prospective teacher’s potential can be had sometimes.
Unfortunately, the historical and current desire for a simple, single, and inexpensive measure of teaching potential yields risky answers that would be as silly
as using spatial relations skill as the sole indicator of intelligence. To support this
desire for a single and simple basis for the license, the acknowledged weakness
and bias in any available indicator has been replaced from time to time with

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another flawed indicator. Historically, the prevailing eighteenth-century tests of
good character (basically interviews with local clergy) were supplanted by local
tests of subject matter and pedagogy in the nineteenth century, and when these
proved to be biased, invalid, and easily corrupted, they in turn were replaced by
diplomas and degrees from programs of study in the newly emerging normal
schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1980s saw a
resurgence of tests of basic skills and subject matter coupled with the academic
degree, but some, like the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), promote a stand-alone subject matter test as a sufficient basis
for gauging teacher competence and potential.
The recurring dissatisfaction with the nation’s schools prompts nonreflective
policymakers to simply reject the indicator of the moment—the education degree on one occasion is replaced or supplemented with a standardized test because schools of education, even accredited ones, give degrees to academically
weak students. Tests of uncertain psychometric merit are then relied upon, and
historically were relied on exclusively until the 1920s, when it was clear then
as now that the tests’ validity coefficients are so low that nontrivial numbers of
poor teachers do reasonably well on them. Direct classroom observation of a
sample of the candidate’s teaching, while closer to the predictive task at hand,
proves unduly burdensome when properly done. Because the number of observations needed to reach acceptable reliability levels is nearly identical with
the entire first year first-year teaching assignment itself, predictive observational
measures of teaching are essentially redundant with the very behavior they were
put in place to predict in the first place.
Currently, there are about eight potential ingredients in the nation’s system
of quality assurance, all admittedly insufficient by themselves, but that collectively permit tolerable levels of accurate prediction of teacher success, each one
speaking to a different aspect of teacher quality. Each ingredient is evaluated by
a distinct agency or organization that has its own agenda that may be only marginally related in some cases to the prediction of who should teach. These eight
interrelated ingredients are:
1. The Degree in Teacher Education. The faculty seeks only to answer the question of whether the prospective teacher understands the liberal arts, the
subject matters that will be taught, and pedagogy and its attendant skills
and dispositions. The question, actually, is at the lower level of how well
has the student conformed to the faculty’s expectations. The faculty’s claim
about the prospective teacher, however, is warranted by the student’s performance on about 100 hours of examinations over four to five years by
about 40 separate evaluators. The grade-point index also meets fairly demanding psychometric criteria for stability and reliability and is generally positively associated with license test results and other indicators, and
some subject matter majors are occasionally found to be associated with
subsequent student achievement in the subject by the teacher’s students.
In 1863 only one state accepted the diploma from the normal school as a
basis for the license to teach, but by 1921 all but one state had given up its

Teacher Licensure

reliance on teacher testing as the sole basis for the license. Even as late as
1950, however, less than half the states required even a bachelor’s degree
for beginning elementary teachers. Now the majority of teachers have a
master’s degree.
2. Accreditation. Historically, the accreditation question was whether a new
institution was sufficiently like other institutions that its students should
be permitted to transfer to them. Over time, the question evolved into one
of whether the institution had the capacity to deliver a teacher education
program. To some extent accreditation was independent of whether the
program accomplished its goals, as accreditation was primarily about the
capacity of the institution, quite apart from its willingness to act on that
capacity. In the 1998 a newly established accreditor, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), shifted the basis of accreditation
to the evidence that the graduates were competent beginning teachers,
and the older accreditor, the National Council for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE), followed suit so that accreditation is now
centered on evidence of the prospective teacher’s understanding and skill.
Even here there is the tension between whether the purpose of the evidence is to persuade an external public of the program’s value or whether
its purpose is to stimulate program improvement by uncovering program
flaws and problems for subsequent inquiry and repair by the faculty.
Only half the nation’s teacher education programs are accredited because,
unlike other professions, only a handful of states require graduation from
an accredited program for their teaching license. The evidence of whether
graduates from accredited programs are better teachers, however, is weak
and inconsistent.
3. State Program Approval. The separate states have approved some 1,384 of
the nation’s college teacher programs against their own standards or ones
they have borrowed from the accreditors or other national organizations.
Any graduate of a state-approved program, and recommended by the program’s faculty, is entitled to a license to teach through a set of reciprocity
agreements among the certification directors in each state. In the past,
state certification officers examined the individual student’s transcript and
qualifications to see if the college courses the state required were taken
and passed. Now program approval is often coordinated with accreditation
and is sometimes supplanted by it.
4. License. Unlike accreditation and program approval, which evaluate a program, the license question is directed at the individual and whether the
person is minimally qualified as a teacher. Individual states award licenses
in as many as 90 categories and often have as many as three staged levels of
licenses, depending on the teacher’s experience and qualifications. In most
cases, the license is given automatically to graduates of approved programs
who also have passed a test in subject matter and pedagogy and have no
criminal record. As there are some 353 different courses taught in the public schools, there is a potential for that many separate licenses to teach.
Currently there is an effort by the Interstate New Teachers Assessment

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and Support Consortium (INTASC) to develop national standards for
the license that would set out the knowledge, skills, and dispositions the
beginning teacher should have, and program approval is often based on
these standards or their state adaptations. In addition, all the states permit
some 124 alternative routes to their licenses, and these are provided by
485 agencies, half of which are traditional colleges and universities while
the rest are school districts, corporations, teacher unions, and professional
associations.
5. Certificates. In 1987 a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
(NBPTS) was created by a consortium of professional education associations, principally the teacher’s unions, for the purpose of defining and
recognizing superior or masterly teaching at levels beyond the minimums
signified by the state license. The distinction between licenses, given by the
state, and certificates, given by the profession, is only recently made, the
latter being given to master teachers, or at least very good teachers. Virtually all the states and 25 percent of the school districts acknowledge the
Board’s certificates in some fashion, usually with a salary bonus. There are
now 55,000 teachers with National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification. The research on whether board-certified teachers are
more effective than the uncertified, or those denied certification, is promising, suggestive, but inconclusive.
6. Tenure. The question is whether the district, based upon its own assessment of three years or more of the teacher’s work, wishes to retain the
teacher’s services for the duration of the teacher’s contract. Rarely is an
independent evaluation made, however, as tenure, or automatic contract
renewal, is routinely given based on a few relatively problem-free years
of service. There is evidence that years of service (at least up to the midrange) positively affect student achievement.
7. Standardized tests. The question is whether the prospective teacher can respond correctly to a sufficient number of questions of interest to the state
to earn a passing score set by the state, not the test-maker (the Educational
Testing Service or the National Evaluation Systems). The tests, some 600
of them, cover basic skills and pedagogical and subject matter knowledge,
and the passing scores, even on the same test, differ significantly among
the states. These tests, unlike almost every other form of assessment, have
been subjected to several court-tested challenges for psychometric validity
and fairness. These legal standards, however, are quite low psychometrically, and researchers generally have found thin or no evidence of predictive validity for any of the available license tests.
8. Student achievement. Until recently, the question was rarely posed publicly, but now it is routinely raised and seeks evidence that the students
profited from the teacher’s efforts and acquired information, knowledge,
skill, and dispositions they did not have prior to the instructional program. The recently developed work sample methodology shed light on the
issue during practice teaching and the new value-added statistical models
are now available for exploring the question among the state’s teaching

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force. Value-added modeling, while only a topic of prior speculation, is
enabled now by computers and the state assessment systems of the last
two decades. It is encouraged also by its acceptability for the annual yearly
progress (AYP) provisions of No Child Left Behind (at least in the 10 states
authorized to use it). The models help identify teachers whose pupils
make greater than expected (or less than expected) gains over the school
year.
While some of these eight indicators or measures may by themselves lead to a
correct prediction of effective teaching, each is subject to known distortions that
may lead to an inaccurate prediction; that is, they may indicate that a person can
teach well or at an acceptable level, when in fact the person will prove to be inept
with some pupils in some challenging circumstances.
In matters of importance, where mistakes have significant societal costs, prudence and common sense lead to systems of checks and balances supported by
multiple measures. In biological systems, vital functions are over-determined
through multiple fail-safe mechanisms (birds, for example, have several independent navigational systems upon which to draw; similarly, humans have multiple
modes of communication should any single mode fail). Thus, a sound prediction
that a prospective teacher will succeed might rest on the person’s completion of
a state-approved degree program from an accredited institution coupled with
performance on standardized tests of subject matter and pedagogy coupled with
demonstrations of teaching that incorporated measures of pupil performance.
The prediction is enhanced through interview techniques that seek to establish
that the prospective teacher possesses attitudinal characteristics, values, beliefs,
and expectations that align with those possessed by veteran successful teachers.
WEAKENING OF CONVERGENCE
The logic of convergence as a strategy for building a credible prediction out of
individually weak and flawed measures requires that the measures contributing
to the prediction be multiple and independent. Efforts that conflate measures or
have one substitute for the other introduce unwarranted risk. The initial driver’s
license, for example, requires a road test in which the candidate demonstrates
proficiency in the task itself. There would be considerable risk if the road test
were waived solely on the basis of good grades in accredited or approved driver’s
education courses, or high marks on a written test of knowledge about driving. Rather, the state seeks to reduce the risk of granting a license to substandard drivers by requiring independent and multiple sources of evidence about
the candidate’s driving (a sample of driving behavior, a written test of driving
knowledge, and driver’s education or experience).
Very nearly the opposite approach has evolved for teaching. First, the license is often not required for certain teaching assignments—for private school
teachers, or tutors, or others who work outside the public schools. It is waived
now for about 5 percent of the public school workforce. It would be unthinkable to waive the driver’s licenses or require them only for those who drive
publicly owned vehicles or require medical licenses only for those physicians

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who work in public hospitals and clinics. Program approval and accreditation
are frequently collapsed into one assessment, and in some scenarios the license
test may substitute for all other indicators together, thereby losing all the power
of convergence.
THE BATTLEGROUND OF PERMISSION: WHO HAS THE RIGHT?
While it seems natural that the state should set the standards for the teaching
license, most professions set and enforce their own standards, and the authority
and expertise is thought by some to properly reside among the teachers themselves, and by others to reside in the academy. Still others see teaching as a matter of individual prerogative and expertise that is independent of the state,
the academy, or the other professionals. Most problematic, however, is the lack
of consensus, noted by the courts in malpractice or teacher incompetence litigation, about the validity of the criteria for teacher competence that would
legitimize any licensure requirements, degree requirements, accreditation and
program approval standards, cut scores on tests, and so forth.
Thus, the final (or beginning) step in building a convergent set of measures
to predict teacher quality must be to insure that each measure is trustworthy
and that each is empirically established as a valid requirement for employment. As none can bear the burden as the sole indicator of teacher potential,
the entitlement to teach requires several convergent and independent strands
of evidence and deeper inquiry into each with regard to the future teacher’s
promise.
Further Reading: Angus, D., & J. Mirel, 2002, Professionalism and the public good, Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation; Cochran-Smith, M., & K. M. Zeichner,
eds., 2005, Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA panel on research and
teacher education, American Educational Research Association: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.

Frank B. Murray

TEACHER UNIONS
TEACHER UNIONS IN THE MIDDLE
In a White House meeting with governors in 2004, then United States Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National Education Association (NEA),
the 3.2 million member teachers union, “a terrorist organization.” As the former
chief of Houston, Texas public schools, Paige has long harbored antipathy toward teacher unions. His labeling of the largest labor union in the United States
as a terrorist organization was prompted by the NEA’s relatively mild criticism
that the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law had not been
adequately funded and that the law unfairly penalized schools if students’ test
scores do not improve from year to year. Paige’s remark predictably prompted
a firestorm of criticism. But his “apology” for the remark continued the attack,

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claiming the NEA fights against school improvement and implied that the primarily white membership of the NEA does not really care about educating all
students regardless of their race or ethnicity.
As the title of Paige’s new book illustrates—The War against Hope: How Teacher
Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education—he
has not tempered his views since joining the private sector. Paige calls teacher
unions “arrogant” and “destructive,” says that they defend incompetent teachers and oppose merit pay for teachers who excel. “No special interest is more
destructive than the teachers’ unions, as they oppose nearly every meaningful
reform,” he writes.
Paige’s views constitute a thumbnail sketch of the right-wing anti-union rhetoric used by various politicians, school managers, and corporate leaders for years.
So at first blush it might seem surprising to find Paige praising the president of
New York City’s teacher union, Randi Weingarten, in his book. Paige says she is
a rare union leader who has “exhibited the unique ability to achieve, or at least to
strive to achieve, the proper balance between the interests of the public education system and the well-being of the union’s members.” But in reality, the leadership of the two largest teacher unions—the NEA and American Federation
of Teachers (AFT)—in the United States has been working collaboratively for
years with the corporate interests that shaped current federal education policy,
including the NCLB.
An excellent example of this collaboration is the sophisticated and well-financed
public relations organization known as the Education Excellence Partnership—a
collaboration of the national teacher unions, the Business Roundtable, U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, National Alliance of Business, Achieve Inc., National
Governor’s Association, and U.S. Department of Education—that has promoted
the high-stakes testing and curriculum standardization agenda as means to “motivate achievement” and retain children in grade, both of which are proven educational malpractices. The Educational Excellence Partnership was a key force
in the promotion of the NCLB and the epitome of what has been described as
“professional unionism.”
Professional unionism is an extension of the dominant outlook of organized
labor in the United States (i.e., the union as a business that sells labor) and can
be traced to the formation of the American Federation of Labor, which from
its beginnings struck a bargain in which the welfare of the working class was
abandoned, as were challenges to the rights of owners under capitalism. Instead,
AFL unions explicitly emphasized improvements in wages, hours, and working
conditions; left business decisions to employers; did not attempt to influence
managerial behavior; and took a pragmatic (or what some might call opportunistic) approach to politics by supporting particular politicians over the creation
of a party focused on workers’ interests. Professional unionism (sometimes
called “new unionism”) moves beyond the AFL’s defensive bargain with capitalist interests and into a partnership with them, as illustrated by the Educational
Excellence Partnership and the strong backing of teacher union leadership for
NCLB, which emerged from a series of corporate-led education summits in the
1980s and 1990s.

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While Paige and others attack unions from the right, the rise of professional
unionism has produced criticism from the left, which asks “Which side are
you on?” The choice is between a “new unionism,” which offers collaboration
in the interests of the political elite (e.g., union executives, politicians, policymakers, and corporations); the rejection of adversarial tactics (e.g., strikes); the
standardization of education; or loss of internal union democracy—that allows
independent action of locals—and the opportunity to build principled alliances
around issues of common interest to educators, parents and students in local
communities.
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF TEACHERS’ UNIONS
IN THE UNITED STATES
Teachers are the most heavily unionized of all professions in the United States.
The two major national unions—American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and
National Education Association (NEA)—have a combined membership of 4.5
million. While a proposed merger of the two unions was rejected by the NEA
membership in 1998, the unions cooperate through the “NEAFT Partnership,”
and unified NEA-AFT locals include Florida, Minnesota, Montana, and New
York. The unions, however, have dramatically different roots.
National Education Association
The NEA was founded in 1857. Ironically, while the NEA is now the largest
labor union in the United States it did not officially become a labor union until
the 1960s. The NEA began as the National Teachers Association (NTA), whose
membership was open to minority educators from the beginning but barred
women. In 1866, the NTA allowed “persons” (rather than “gentlemen”) to join
and soon after, Emily Rice was elected vice president. By 1870, the NTA had
changed its name to the National Education Association and merged with the
National Association of School Superintendents, the American Normal School
Association, and the Central College Association; thus the NEA included and
was led by school managers for many years.
In the post-Civil War years, the NEA began to address important educational
and social issues, establishing a Department of Indian Education, which researched the systematic attack on native culture in government-run reservation
schools. NEA also lobbied for child labor laws at the state and federal levels to
better protect the health, safety, and education of children. In 1903, a Chicago
teacher, Margaret Haley, led a demonstration at the NEA convention that brought
the economic and working conditions of teachers (e.g., low salaries, gender inequities in salaries, tenure, pensions) to the forefront of the NEA agenda.
By the time the NEA was 50, classroom teachers were dominating its membership, and Ella Flagg Young, who would become the NEA’s first female president,
said: “If the public school system is to meet the demands which 20th century
civilization must lay upon it, the isolation . . . of teachers from the administration
of the school must be overcome . . . can it be true that teachers are stronger in

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their work when they have no voice in planning the great issues committed to
their hands?”
With its membership growing, in 1920 the NEA reorganized as a Representative Assembly (RA) composed of delegates from affiliated states and locals.
Its decentralized and democratic approach to governance is a hallmark of the
NEA—the union calls the RA the largest democratic decision-making body in
the world—and it is an important point of contrast with the top-down approach
of the AFT.
Throughout the twentieth century, the NEA took politically progressive
stands on many major social issues, including women’s rights and civil rights.
For example, the NEA endorsed women’s suffrage years before the passage of the
19th Amendment; passed an “equal pay for equal work” resolution in 1934; and
in the 1970s supported the Equal Rights Amendment and worked to end forced
maternity leave and the firing of pregnant teachers. In 1966, after four decades
of collaboration on issues affecting African American students and teachers, the
NEA merged with the American Teachers Association and in 1968 the NEA
elected its first African American president, Elizabeth Duncan Koontz.
In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to pass a collective bargaining law
for public employees. This law ushered in an era of teacher bargaining that
transformed the NEA from a professional association into a labor union. The

Figure T.1 Ella Flagg Young, first woman president of National Education Association.
Source: Courtesy Library of Congress.

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AFL-CIO/NEA Labor Solidarity Partnership agreement of 2006 allows local
affiliates of the NEA to join the federation at the local and state levels through
affiliation with the national AFL-CIO.
American Federation of Teachers
Unlike the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was founded as
a craft union (as opposed to an industrial union) to represent the economic, social, and professional interests of classroom teachers and was from its inception
in 1916 a member of the American Federation of Labor. In recent years, the AFT
has expanded its membership to include not only teachers, paraprofessionals,
and school-related personnel, but also local, state, and federal employees; higher
education faculty and staff; and nurses and other health-care professionals.
Teachers’ groups that founded the AFT were from urban schools (Chicago
and Gary, Indiana) and AFT locals continue to be concentrated in large cities
and on the east coast, with the NEA strongest in suburban and rural areas and
in the west. The AFT grew slowly at the beginning, because many teachers rejected the idea of joining a union, and laws did not support collective bargaining for teachers. As a result, AFT membership by 1930 (less than 5,000) was
only half of what it had been in 1920.
The AFT fought against “yellow-dog” contracts, which required teachers to
promise not to join a union, and in 1932, after these contracts were outlawed by
the Norris-LaGuardia Act, the union fought for teacher tenure rights with significant success. The AFT’s first collective bargaining agreement was negotiated
in Butte, Montana in 1936.
The AFT record on civil rights has generally been strong but is marked by controversy. The union called for equal pay for African American teachers in 1918,
and the AFT was the only education organization to file an amicus brief in Brown
v. Board of Education. In 1957, AFT ejected locals that would not integrate (resulting in the loss of over 7,000 members). It was also one of the few unions to support
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
On the other hand, in the early 1940s the AFT expelled three locals in New
York City and Philadelphia—representing nearly a third of the union’s membership—following allegations that they were “communist-dominated.” (In contrast, the NEA, while no supporter of the radical left, did help reverse the “The
Little Red Rider”—a 1937 Congressional act requiring Washington, D.C. public
school employees to swear an oath disavowing communism or forfeit their salary.) Following the purge of pro-communist locals, the Teachers Guild, which
had been founded by philosopher John Dewey, was the only AFT affiliate in
New York City.
Albert Shanker
It is impossible to understand the history and direction of the AFT separate
from Albert Shanker. Shanker not only dominated the union from the time of his
installation as president in 1974 until his death in 1997, but his legacy continues

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via the union’s organizational structure and political ideology. Shanker left his
position as a social studies teacher in New York City in 1959 to work full time
as a union organizer for the Teachers Guild. At that time there were numerous
teacher unions in New York City.
Early in 1960, the Teachers Guild merged with the New York City’s High
School Teachers’ Association, forming the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
Shanker and Teachers Guild president Charles Cogen led New York City teachers out on strike. Over 5,000 teachers picketed and another 2,000 engaged in

Figure T.2 Albert Shanker, president of United Federation of Teachers (UFT), holds
report issued by mediators to Mayor Robert Wagner that helped to stop strike threat of
teachers.
Source: World Telegram and Sun photo by Walter Albertin. Courtesy Library of Congress.

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a “sick-out” over issues of wages, grievance processes, workloads, and public
school funding. A fact-finding commission appointed by New York City Mayor
Robert Wagner recommended a collective bargaining law as a solution to the
labor strife. Subsequently, and with financial help from the AFT and the AFLCIO, the UFT won an election battle with the NEA, to represent the city’s teachers, thus increasing the AFT’s membership by nearly a third overnight. The New
York City teachers strike was followed by hundreds of teacher strikes across the
country over the next decade, and AFT’s membership ballooned from 60,000 to
more than 200,000 by 1970.
Shanker was elected president of UFT in 1964 and four years later led New
York Teachers into the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike, which polarized race
relations in the city and established Shanker’s national reputation. The Ocean
Hill-Brownsville school district was a poor African American neighborhood in
Brooklyn chosen as one of three city districts to experiment with decentralized
governance or community control over schooling. The district operated under
a separate, community-elected governing board with the power to hire. The
UFT supported the experiment early on, but when the governing board fired
13 teachers and 6 administrators for what was described as efforts to sabotage
the decentralization experiment, a crisis developed. The fired teachers were returned to the control of the New York City public school system, but Shanker
demanded due process for the teachers.
The bitter strike was marked by racism and anti-Semitism and created a
schism among progressives who supported community control of schools and
unions who supported contract rights of their members. Shanker was jailed for
sanctioning the strikes, but UFT ultimately won the battle against community
control of schools, as the teachers were reinstated and an agreement affirming
due process rights of teachers was crafted. The strike had lasting affects on the
union, and AFT militancy steadily decreased in its aftermath.
In 1974, Shanker defeated David Selden in a bitter election campaign for the
presidency of AFT. The next year, Shanker persuaded the New York State Teachers Retirement Fund to loan $150 million to New York City to prevent the city
from falling into bankruptcy.
Shanker instituted organizational changes within AFT to insulate his authority and create obstacles for rank-and-file democracy within the union. For example, he instituted biennial as opposed to annual conventions and eliminated
the distribution of verbatim transcripts of convention proceedings. Shanker
wielded power within the union through political caucuses (the “Unity Caucus”
in the UFT and the “Progressive Caucus” in the AFT), which were tools to control debate and decision-making processes. Pro-Shanker caucus members were
not allowed to publicly express disagreement with positions of the group for fear
of expulsion from the caucus and exclusion from jobs the union leadership controlled. And, unlike most other American labor unions, the AFT does not allow
rank-and-file members to directly vote for national officers.
The most important of Shanker’s legacies, however, is his political ideology,
which not only shaped the educational and political stances of the AFT but influenced AFL-CIO and trade unionism world-wide as well as the policies and

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actions of the U.S. government. Shanker has been described as “an aggressive
opponent of social change.” He was a staunch supporter of the U.S. war in Vietnam. And on educational issues he was opposed to bilingual education, and inclusion of disabled children in the classroom, as well as efforts to make school
curriculum multicultural.
There is a long history of “labor imperialism” among American Federation of
Labor affiliated unions. As Kim Scipes has recently stated, “It has been unequivocally established that the AFL-CIO has worked to overthrow democraticallyelected governments, collaborated with dictators against progressive labor
movements, and supported reactionary labor movements against progressive
governments.” Through organizations such as the American Institute for Free
Labor Development, Shanker and the AFT supported reactionary labor programs throughout the world, sometimes working in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency.
TEACHER UNIONS TIMELINE
1857: National Teachers Association (NTA) formed.
1870: NTA changes its name to National Education Association (NEA) and merges with
National Association of School Superintendents and two other organizations.
1903: At NEA’s national convention, Margaret Haley leads demonstration about economic
conditions for teachers, including tenure and pensions.
1906: NEA chartered by U.S. Congress.
1910: Ella Flagg Young elected as president of NEA.
1916: American Federation of Teachers (AFT) formed.
1933: John Dewey presents report on communist control of AFT Local 5.
1941: Charters revoked from three AFT locals due to communist views of leaders.
1946: First organized teachers strike in the United States (St. Paul, Minnesota Federation
of Teachers).
1948: AFT stops chartering segregated locals.
1960: NEA begins organizing higher education faculty.
1957: AFT expels all locals that refuse to integrate.
1959: Wisconsin becomes first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public employees.
1966: NEA and American Teachers Association merge.
1968: Elizabeth Duncan Koontz becomes first African American President of NEA Ocean
Hill-Brownsville Strike in New York City.
1972: NEA votes to support the Equal Rights Amendment.
1974: Albert Shanker becomes AFT president (holds position until his death in 1997).
1995: AFT starts campaign to accomplish goals of A Nation at Risk.
1998: NEA members reject merger with AFT.
2001: NEAFT Partnership formed (allows locals to affiliate with both NEA and AFT).
2006: AFL-CIO/NEA Labor Solidarity Partnership.

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Since Shanker’s death, as well as under the watch of his successor, Sandra
Feldman, the political relevance of the union has been called into question, but
Shanker’s legacies continue to influence the union, public education, and public
policy.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF TEACHER UNIONISM?
Professional, or “new unionism,” is an effort to move beyond what are perceived by current union leaders to be the limitations of a narrow trade unionist
(or industrial unionism) perspective, including: an adversarial view of labormanagement relations; a focus on winning better wages, benefits, and pensions
for teachers; and using militant tactics such as strikes to accomplish union goals.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s both the AFT and the NEA operated, for the
most part, on industrial unionism principles, and the unions grew in size and
strength. But in making the rights of (and benefits for) teachers their number
one priority the unions subordinated what might be in the best interests of the
school children and local school communities.
Industrial unionism makes teachers and their unions vulnerable to criticism
for allegedly putting their interests ahead of students and school communities
(e.g., supporting across-the-board pay increases and class-size reductions,
changes that increase the number and compensation of teachers) and opposing reforms that might help students but harm union interests (e.g., measures
that distinguish between good and bad teachers or make bad teachers easier to
fire). Critics on the right, like Rod Paige, argue that teacher union opposition to
school vouchers, tenure reform, some curriculum reforms, and accountability
reforms like the No Child Left Behind Act are based on union self-interest as
opposed to the interests of children and the public.
In the past decade the wave of professional unionism has been engulfing
teacher unions. Professional unionism is a model of labor-management relations
similar to the co-management approach taken by the United Auto Workers and
General Motors in the latter’s Saturn division in which workers “partner” with
management in working toward goals established by corporate elites. This approach eschews long-held beliefs about the separate and competing interests of
labor and management and, in the language of new unionism, adopts a shared
commitment to work on areas of mutual concern. This is evident in the teacher
unions’ complicity with corporate interests in educational reform (e.g., Educational Excellence Partnership).
Teacher union leaders have resurrected old company union stances as a “new
unionism.” Union leaders promoted the AFT/NEA merger, mimicking their
corporate counterparts, rather than creating real value by organizing around
the common interests of teachers, students, and parents. The teacher unions
have been complicit with corporate interests in educational reform, promoting, though legislation such NCLB, a common curriculum driven by standardized exams, peer discipline programs, grade retention, and high barriers
around the profession to make sure only the most credentialed enter. What
new unionism obscures is that there is a conflict of interest between those who

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gain from democracy and equality and those who benefit from low wages and
authoritarianism.
Inequitable societies do not want injustice investigated, and one traditional
method of disguising inequality is nationalism, which is the crux of new unionism
and the standardized curriculum movement. A standardized national curriculum,
which is promoted by the unions and corporations, is the regulation of knowledge:
certain content and methods of learning assigned to groups of children arranged
by social class. Classroom teachers know standardized curricula explode the foundation of learning, that is, the meeting of a particular student with unique interests, a special teacher with certain passions and expertise, and the resources of a
distinctive community in a loving classroom where risk is nurtured. Standardized
curriculum and the mandated high-stakes tests that assure it is followed are instruments of coercion that segregate children, enforce the standpoint of political
elites, and rob teachers and students of one of their most precious commodities:
time spent in fervent study. More regulated exams locate the thinking mind and
source of truth in a test. The teacher becomes an imperial clerk.
New unionism promises power through solidarity. The solidarity offered,
however, is not with the source of real educator power—unity with poor and
working-class parents and students who have everything to gain from school.
Some early teacher unionists, such as Margaret Haley (who worked in both the
NEA and AFT in the early 1900s), led campaigns that drew on the powerful
unity of interests among students, teachers, and parents around issues such as
class size, freedom to control the local curriculum, and a more just tax system.
She often won.
Unfortunately both the NEA and the AFT have abandoned the vision that
links the activities of school workers with students and parents. The most obvious example of this estrangement of interests is the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville
teacher strike, which established a labor-management model that mirrors private industry, one in which educational policy is determined in bilateral negotiations between a highly centralized school administration and highly centralized
union.
This legacy continues. Neither the NEA nor AFT, anywhere, has attained attractive and enforceable rules about class size. Neither union has fought hard
against the shift of the tax burden onto poor and working people. Neither the
NEA nor AFT has defended academic freedom from the onslaught of standardized test regulations; indeed they commonly support a mandated curriculum.
And the craft union strategy of increased certification requirements to limit
entry to the job has served to deepen the color moat in education—in a few
years more than 95 percent of teachers will be white, while the school population will be more than one-half students of color. Creating a larger teacher union
tied to the interests of corporations, the elite, or a false sense of national interest
will not serve the interests of teachers, and most students and their parents.
An alternative would be organized, principled caucuses of parents, students,
and educators, inside and outside the unions, directed at common interests,
unifying issues: class size, academic freedom, a more equitable way to fund
schools. This is real solidarity, established around the idea that circumstances

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require a really new form of teacher unionism, one that embraces schools for a
democratic society.
There are signs of this kind of solidarity emerging in North America. For
example, members of the NEA shocked their leaders in 1998 when they overwhelmingly voted to reject a merger with the AFT, which their leaders had secretly planned for more than a decade. Canadian teachers, in 1998, led the largest
strike in the 1990s in North America, a massive outpouring against standardization of schooling and for improved conditions of work. The following year,
12,000 Detroit teachers, led only by rank-and-file activists, wildcatted against
their AFT union leaders and the state of Michigan in an illegal strike demanding
“Book! Supplies! Lower Class Size!” The two most recent examples are the illegal strike of British Columbia teachers in 2005, which focused on funding to
improving classroom teaching and learning conditions and which enjoyed wide
popular support. And the popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, led by teachers,
has produced the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca and sustained itself
against fierce and violent state repression.
It remains to be seen what the future holds for teachers and their unions, and
whether those who believe schools should operate in the interests of children
rather than business or administrators—who would centralize educational decision making and see increased economic production as the most appropriate
measure of teaching and learning—are willing to take actions that negate the
leaders’ command of the structures that keep them in power.
Further Reading: Buhle, P., 1997, Albert Shanker: No flowers, New Politics, 6(3): 51–58,
retrieved May 23, 2007, from http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue23/buhle23.htm;
Gibson, R., 2006, The most important thing in the history of the labor movement: Since
the merger of the AFL-CIO? Substance, April, retrieved May 23, 2007, from http://
www.substancenews.com/content/view/352/81/; Holcomb, S., 2006, Answering the call:
The history of the National Education Association, NEA Today, January, retrieved May
23, 2007, from http://www.nea.org/neatoday/0601/neahistory.html; Kerchner, C. T., and
J. Koppich, 1993, A union of professionals: Labor relations and educational reform, New
York: Teachers College Press; Kerchner, C. T., J. E. Koppich, & J. G. Weeres, 1997, United
mind workers: Unions and teaching in the knowledge society, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass;
Lieberman, M., 1997, The teacher unions: How the NEA and AFT sabotage reform and
hold students, parents, teachers, and taxpayers hostage to bureaucracy, New York: The
Free Press; Murphy, M., 1990, Blackboard unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Perlstein, D., 2004, Justice, justice: School politics
and the eclipse of liberalism, New York: Peter Lang; Podair, J. E., 2003, The strike that
changed New York: Blacks, whites and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press; Rousmaniere, K., 2005, Citizen teacher: The life and leadership
of Margaret Haley, Albany: State University of New York Press; Schmidt, G. N., 1978,
The American Federation of Teachers and the CIA, Chicago: Substitutes United for Better Schools; Weiner, L., 1998, Albert Shanker’s legacy: A critical perspective, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San
Diego, CA, April 13–17, ERIC Document ED419805; Scipes, K., 2005, Labor imperialism redux?: The AFL-CIO’s foreign policy since 1995, Monthly Review, 57(1), retrieved
May 23, 2007, from http://www.monthlyreview.org/0505scipes.htm#1.

E. Wayne Ross

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TEACHING
The idea that teaching is controversial, that its practice represents a battleground rife with disagreement and conflict, is not a new one. In fact, debates
over how best to teach young people are a time-honored, longstanding, and constructive tradition. Among those people for whom education and the institution of schooling matter, getting things right is of primary importance. And, of
course, this is how it should be. For underlying this concern with teaching, this
interest in how best to teach, is the fundamental understanding that we expect
parents to entrust their children to nonfamiliar adults for the better part of their
lives, and that we demand of teachers the implementation of all that is worthwhile and good with respect to pedagogy. We, quite naturally, insist upon excellence, and take the growth, experiences, and possibilities offered (or imposed
upon) our youth as serious and vital business.
The problem, of course, is defining what is best. What teaching constitutes
good teaching? What education reflects excellence? As much as we love our
children and care about their schooling, how can we know how we should
teach them, what they should learn, and whether they have learned it?
A universally satisfying answer to these questions is most likely an impossibility, for as with so much else, the devil is in the details. And, in the end,
it is the details that matter most. While we all might agree with the broad
principle of wanting the very best teaching for everyone, we disagree, perhaps
inevitably, on what this ultimately means. Conceptions of good teaching vary;
they are multiple, diverse, and frequently incompatible. They rest upon competing moralities, epistemologies, ideologies, needs, and interpretations of
critical awareness. Each conception of good teaching, that is, expresses both a
theory of education and an essential engagement with the absolute well-being
of children.

THE TRADITIONAL VS. THE PROGRESSIVE
This section explores the historical and contemporary conflicts surrounding
classroom instruction. Focusing on twentieth and twenty-first century schooling
in the United States, it examines the contexts, concepts, frameworks, groundings,
and implications of various contentions and disagreements encompassing the
theory and practice of teaching. Moreover, for simplicity and clarity, the chapter
concentrates as much as possible on the practice of teaching as detached from
other related schooling issues, even though this approach clearly risks proffering
an inadequate and incomplete picture of teaching and its associated conflicts.
Recognizing that the act of teaching rests on competing if not incommensurable
perceptions of culture, psychology, politics, economics, science, society, technology, diversity, and philosophy (among other considerations), this section examines some of the principal arguments, themes, and antagonisms characterizing
teaching’s current and dynamic situation.
Undoubtedly there are many ways to characterize existing and historical
controversies over the practice of teaching. Perhaps the most basic, and the

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best known, is that between so-called progressive approaches and so-called
traditional (or conservative) ones. As with much else in educational work, this
broad disagreement reflects even broader conflicts over educational purpose,
the proper organization of society (and the relationships between society and
public schools), and how best to prepare young people for their contemporary
and future roles as democratic and productive citizens.
Historically this progressive-traditional distinction is perhaps best represented by several critical, groundbreaking works, including those by progressives William Heard Kilpatrick (for example, his 1918 publication The Project
Method) and John Dewey (for example, his 1916 publication Democracy and
Education and his 1938 publication Experience and Education) and traditionalists such as Arthur Bestor (for example, his 1953 publication Educational Wastelands) and William C. Bagley (for example, his 1934 publication Education and
the Emergent Man). At heart this dichotomy exemplifies key and central divisions surrounding such critical understandings as those related to (1) the purpose of education; (2) correct teaching methods; (3) appropriate content; (4) the
role of teachers; and (5) the role of students.
All in all, within any given period, either some progressive or some traditional
perspective prevails or is on the ascendancy, although never does the other completely disappear. It is more a contest, a back-and-forth cycle or a constructive
melding in which one side or the other temporarily takes the lead (traditionalism today, for example), similar, in fact, to the case of the American curriculum made by educational historian Herbert M. Kliebard in The Struggle for the
American Curriculum: 1893–1958.
At the most elementary level this opposition is between the progressives’
emphasis on the wants, needs, and experiences of the child (or “learner”) and
the traditionalists’ focus on the transmission of “basic” and “authoritative”
knowledge. The progressive view is, while multiple and complex, generally one
that stresses difference, equality and social justice, democracy, student activity
and engagement, and child/learner-“centeredness.” The traditional view, while
similarly multifaceted and difficult, presents the act of teaching-learning as
one in which teachers are content area and behavioral experts and students are
“empty vessels” with respect to knowledge, values, and necessary skills. It is
teacher- or content-centered. Traditional teaching perceives education as onedirectional and top-down, with the overall role of schooling being preserving
if not strengthening the existing and dominant political, economic, and sociocultural status quo.
Although there are, of course, many unique and useful ways of portraying
this opposition (or, rather, set of oppositions), the issues can be illustrated by
reviewing and concentrating upon just four, namely those offered by Gary Fenstermacher and Jonas Soltis in Approaches to Teaching; Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton in Teaching to Change the World; Bruce R. Joyce, Marsha Weil, and
Emily Calhoun in Models of Teaching; and Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels,
and Arthur Hyde in Best Practice. Each of these examples illustrates not only the
progressive-traditional distinction, but also specific teaching and pedagogical
practices affiliated with each.

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FENSTERMACHER AND SOLTIS: APPROACHES TO TEACHING
In their 2004 work Approaches to Teaching (4th ed.) Fenstermacher and Soltis
provide a format for distinguishing among various individual and archetypal
modes of instruction. In their view, one’s teaching approach is determined by
one’s perceptions of one’s goals and roles as a teacher. Differences—or conflicts—
among various approaches result from disagreements regarding the meaning of
teacher, the definition of (good) teaching, the nature of student, the selection of
content, and the purpose of teaching. Competing approaches arise to the extent
that (1) individual teachers (and their critics) differ according to their personal
conceptions of role and goal; (2) distinct understandings of role and goal lead
to distinct understandings of the teacher, good teaching, the student, content
selection, and purpose (i.e., distinct approaches to teaching); and (3) specific
approaches to teaching are contextually and differentially valued relative to
prevailing and specific political and policy-bound circumstances. Although for
Fenstermacher and Soltis all approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages, each also, at least to some degree, represents a position incompatible
with any other. Antagonisms, then, occur as some approaches become privileged
at the expense of others, especially insofar as perceptions of role and goal and
orientations toward the teacher, teaching, the student, purpose, and content selection are inseparable from and ensconced within particular, power-construed,
and rival ideologies.
Fenstermacher and Soltis distinguish four ideal-type approaches, each encompassing particular elements of progressive and traditional pedagogy; each,
that is, presenting a more or less progressive and a more or less traditional set of
positions rooted in a more or less progressive and a more or less traditional set
of conceptions of role and goal.
The first such approach, the “Executive,” sees teaching as a process in which
the teacher utilizes scientific and research-based methods in order to instill
in students specific and determined facts, concepts, and understandings in a
teacher-centered and right-and-wrong way. It is, in actualization, closely connected to such recent developments as “teacher effectiveness,” “scripted lessons,”
and “Direct Instruction.” Essentially traditional, the Executive approach aims at
preserving and strengthening the societal status quo—as opposed, say, to stressing self-actualization or personal or social change—through the competitive
dissemination of the “best” of Western cultural knowledge and the acquisition
among students of proper and appropriate behaviors, primarily by means of lecture, memorization, and practice. Here the underlying role of the teacher is that
of manager of learning, discipline, comprehension, character, and action.
The second approach, the “Therapist,” positions the teacher as “empathetic
person,” as a compassionate guide “charged with helping individuals [i.e., students] grow personally” and to become “self-actualized.” The Therapist teacher
is someone chiefly and essentially concerned with assisting students in “developing their own selves as authentic persons through personally meaningful educational experiences.” The most thoroughly progressive of Fenstermacher and

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Soltis’s approaches, the Therapist stance highlights the teacher’s absolute role as
contributor to the child/learner’s psychological and affective well-being and to
his or her singular intellectual evolution. The elemental goal of this approach,
therefore, is the holistic welfare of the particular and especial child.
The “Liberationist” approach, the third identified by Fenstermacher and
Soltis, “views the teacher as a liberator, a freer of the individual’s mind and a
developer of well-rounded, knowledgeable, rational, and moral human beings.”
It is, perhaps, the approach most closely resembling “[t]he classical idea[l] of
a liberal [humanistic] education.” Potentially either progressive, traditional, or
some combination of both, the Liberationist approach most nearly corresponds
to the so-called perennialist programs suggested by such educational theorists
as Mortimer J. Adler in The Paideia Proposal and to the range of contemporary
calls for the increased Socratic study among teachers and students of the socalled “Great Books” of Western civilization.
Fenstermacher and Soltis’s fourth approach, the “Emancipationist,” views
teaching as a complex assortment of processes designed to help students (and,
by extension, the rest of society) become free from “the economic and political forces . . . that hold them back and keep them from full equality.” Generally
a progressive view, one based within neo-Marxist, feminist, multicultural, and
related anti-oppressive ways of thinking, Emancipationism promotes the role
of teacher as that of social activist, as one who with his or her students works
to move society further toward social justice, equality, political and economic
fairness, and genuinely democratic social change. Altogether, in terms of its dynamic and sophisticated commitment to authenticity and anti-oppressiveness,
the Emancipationist approach parallels those standpoints commonly classified
as Critical Pedagogy, specifically with respect to its treatment of educational
purpose, instructional method, the curriculum, and assessment/evaluation.
With respect to the various conflicts and controversies surrounding the contemporary act of teaching, the framework advanced by Fenstermacher and Soltis
focuses most directly upon the fundamental significance of differing interpretations of role and goal. As such, arguments and disagreements over teaching
and teacher effectiveness can be viewed as constitutive differences relative to
what a teacher is, how he or she should behave, the nature and rightness of his
or her unique educational purposes, and the legitimacy of his or her particularly conceived pedagogical and professional identities. It is, from this perspective, these factors that define and characterize the current contextual battlefield
within which teaching and its denoted elements are necessarily encompassed,
executed, and sanctioned.
OAKES AND LIPTON: TEACHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD
Oakes and Lipton, in Teaching to Change the World, relate divergent perspectives on teaching to specific differences in educational and political philosophies. Broadly, they identify three traditional philosophies and three progressive
ones, each defined according to its intellectual roots, its take on education’s purpose, its preferred curriculum, and its view of the role of the teacher and of the

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role of the student. The traditional philosophies they indicate are essentialism,
perennialism, and behaviorism; the progressive ones are child- and communitycentered schooling, social reconstructionism, and multiculturalism/socio-culturalism.
Overall, the traditional philosophies of education depict the teacher as an
authority figure, one who instills or transmits knowledge, virtue, and wisdom as
well as one who effectively trains students (using suitable stimuli and reinforcers)
in “good” and “proper” behavior. The progressive views emphasize the teacher’s
role in assisting or guiding students, facilitating student-directed problem solving, raising social awareness, and promoting and encouraging the significance
of multiple forms of knowledge and myriad student/learning diversities.
For Oakes and Lipton, conflicts and controversies over teaching arise not
merely from deep-seated philosophical differences, but also from the political
aims and oppositions that are intrinsic to them. From this perspective, philosophies and their inherent politics inevitably (at least in part) structure and define
the nature, meanings, and outcomes of the teaching debate. They constitute and
bound the ideological and power-laden struggles over teaching’s purposes and
actualizations. Simply, teaching is political, and its politics unquestionably matter. For as Oakes and Lipton argue:
Proponents of all the philosophies try to instill their values and beliefs in
the education system [via prescriptions for teaching, for example], and
by extension, they exclude the values and beliefs of others. In that sense,
they [philosophies of education and their interpretations of teaching]
are all political. (p. 156)
And, in the end, such political viewpoints foment what oppositions exist with
respect to the contingencies of teaching and to its various and high-stakes formulations.
JOYCE, WEIL, AND CALHOUN: MODELS OF TEACHING
Models of Teaching, by Joyce, Weil, and Calhoun, organizes instructional work
into four teaching “families,” each a broad category or configuration consisting
of several explicit classroom strategies. Each family originates in distinctive philosophies and social and psychological understandings of how students learn
and develop and thus how teachers should correspondingly teach them.
The first model, “The Information-Processing Family,” draws principally
upon recent developments in cognitive psychology. It focuses, therefore, on
how children/learners acquire, use, comprehend, and organize classroom and
experiential knowledge as well as more formalized curricular information.
The second, “The Personal Family,” derives its emphases from both humanistic
psychology and existentialist philosophy. It parallels, in part, Fenstermacher
and Soltis’s “Therapist Approach” and certain key aspects of the progressive
philosophies described by Oakes and Lipton and the “Best Practice Consensus” identified by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde (next section). “The Social
Family,” Joyce, Weil, and Calhoun’s third delineation, sees teaching and learning as essentially a set of cooperative, interpersonal interactions in which

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individuals and groups come together in order to produce and/or construct
specific understandings as well as specific and meaningful interpretive senses
of knowledge. The fourth classification, “The Behavioral Family,” stems most
plainly from the behaviorist philosophy/psychology of B. F. Skinner. Here,
teaching and learning involve the direct transmission from teacher to student
of certain prescribed, factual content and certain conformative modalities of
behavior. Its stimulus-response-reinforcement basis somewhat follows the
“Executive Approach” of Fenstermacher and Soltis. It is the most adamantly
traditional of the four families.
Overall, the models framework advanced by Joyce and his colleagues situates
differences in teaching according to differences in philosophy and psychology.
Pedagogical controversies reflect such specific disagreements as they are manifested within the prevailing and powerful contexts of political policy, ideology,
and dominant educational trends.
ZEMELMAN, DANIELS, AND HYDE: BEST PRACTICE
In Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools,
Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde situate conflicts over how teachers should teach
according to (1) growing public interest in school reform; (2) the perplexing
neglect of teaching and learning in contemporary discussions of educational
policy; (3) political disagreements; and (4) the preponderance of ostensibly reasonable reform movements that offer no more than merely “more of the same.”
They contend that many recommended reforms, especially those touted by
the national government, simply suggest minor alterations in the “logistics” of
schooling rather than tackling the many real difficulties entailing the enactment
of “teaching processes—the nature of the interactions between kids and teachers in school.” Such reforms ignore significant research as their advocates stress
accountability and achievement assumptions that, unfortunately, “never really
question the basic day-to-day process and content of American education.” For
Zemelman and his colleagues, this wrongheaded acceptance of “traditional reform,” this oxymoron of stay-the-course-change, should be abandoned in favor
of what they call the “unrecognized consensus” of best practice, one built upon
decades of empirical research findings as well as the enduring and still relevant
goals of educational progressivism.
Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde envision a new era of teaching that is properly
“experiential,” “affective,” “cooperative,” “diverse,” and “deep,” one opposed to
the traditional, ideology-bound pedagogies of “teacher-directedness,” “student
passivity,” “competition,” “rote memorization,” and “standardized test[ing].” As
they define it, this new consensus, one combining the democratic promises of
progressivism with the data supporting holistic teaching-learning unearthed
by contemporary empiricism, provides for Zemelman and his co-authors the
sort of support necessary to at last implement meaningful and constructive best
practice, a mode of instruction that is “backed by educational research, draws
on sound learning theory, and, under other names, has been tested and refined
over many years.”

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From this standpoint, then, conflicts and controversies related to teaching
stem from the relative balance of power between ideology/political agenda and
dedication to rigorous scholarship. In Zemelman, Daniel, and Hyde’s accounting such disagreements and their resolutions involve the degree to which one is
or is not willing to suspend one’s possibly blind devotion to politics in the face of
convincing evidence and/or the degree to which one is willing to discount convincing evidence in favor of politics and political expediency. The battleground
that is teaching thus involves no less than confronting the issues circumscribed
on the one hand by reason and the circumstances of teaching-learning and on
the other by the profitability of received and dominant doctrines and purposefully divisive cultural warfare.
NCLB/SBER: THE CURRENT SCENE
What these various frameworks represent, of course, are the many inherent and contingent differences individuals and groups hold with respect to the
theory and practice of teaching. They provide an intricate array of schema from
within which to pursue teaching’s manifold conflicts and controversies. As such,
they offer a valuable and effective service. And yet, a more persistent and perhaps more important issue remains, one concerning their substantive and critical
meaning. Here, what they mean and the degree to which they might be interpretively useful depends upon their quintessential relevance to how teaching is carried out vis-à-vis today’s dynamic pedagogical and sociopolitical circumstances.
Most distinctly, that is, they must be understood interactively within the settings
of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law and other types of standards-based
educational reform (SBER). By interactively I mean that the various frameworks
might help us to make sense of NCLB and SBER even as NCLB and SBER might
help us to make sense of the frameworks.
The contemporary move toward SBER, one culminating in NCLB, while
contentious, has established the primary governing “reform” environment for
implementing U.S. educational policy, including that affecting the theory and
practice of teaching. It calls for classroom teachers to deliver predetermined,
standardized content to learners. It holds them (as well as local schools, districts,
and states) accountable for the “learning” of this content via students’ measurable
“objective” performance on standardized tests (at this point, still, most significantly math and reading tests). SBER/NCLB encourages direct methods of
instruction, those methods most consistent with increased levels of student
memorization, factual recall, and successful skill reproduction.
Three educational theorists have each dedicated their efforts toward the
practical aspects of teaching in this age of SBER. The first, E. D. Hirsch Jr.,
argues in favor of a significant degree of traditional, standardized curriculum
and instruction. The second, Alfie Kohn, argues against such standardization,
instead making the contemporary case for progressive education as an antidote
to the burdens imposed upon teachers and students by current conservative
approaches. The third, Robert Marzano, presents, for good or bad, one serious, practical, and thoughtful attempt at “making the best of the situation” by

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building, in effect, a research-based structure within which effective instruction
and contemporary SBER can fruitfully coexist.
E. D. Hirsch, in both Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, elucidates the modern,
traditional (“essentialist”) interpretation of classroom teaching. He argues first
and foremost for the primacy of factual knowledge, namely that indicative of
typical “Western Civilization” courses. He views this as necessary for cultural
literacy, that is the background knowledge essential in order to communicate
effectively within the demands of public discourse. Blaming predominantly progressive orientations (e.g., naturalism, developmentalism, romanticism, etc.) for
the “decline” of American schooling, he offers in their place a mode of teachinglearning that is teacher/content-centered, direct, fact-based, “objective,” and
standardized-tested, believing that too often we expect students to think before
they have acquired any information to think about and that we see schools as
failing if learning is perceived as too dull or boring. For Hirsch, important learning is definitely not always fun.
Alfie Kohn, in The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving beyond Traditional
Classrooms and “Tougher Standards,” makes a compelling case for the contemporary progressive perspective. Fundamentally against the various reforms advocated via SBER, Kohn lays out his criticism in a chapter titled “Getting Teaching
and Learning Wrong: Traditional Education and Its Victims.” Kohn argues, in
effect, that recent, traditional moves toward standardization get teaching and
learning “wrong” by (1) overemphasizing the “basics” (especially to the extent
that “memorizing facts and practicing skills . . . [are or] should be treated as ends
in themselves”); (2) promoting education as a phenomenon in which “thinking”
can occur only after the memorization of decontextualized facts; (3) approaching the learning of facts merely as a rote, necessarily “by heart,” mechanistic
process; (4) perceiving the learning of skills as demanding repetitive, disconnected drill; (5) focusing on “correct answers” at the expense of deep and critical thinking; (6) valuing curricular breadth over curricular depth; (7) viewing
instruction as a top-down, didactic act rather than as a constructive, cooperative
one; (8) regarding learning as properly passive rather than effectively active; and
(9) breaking content down into bite-sized bits and divorcing it from other content instead of viewing subject matter more holistically and as interconnected.
What Kohn wants instead is a mode of classroom instruction that is studentcentered, localized, experiential, creative, active, thought-provoking, problemposing, and non-standardized.
Marzano, in What Works in Schools, considers “school-level factors,” “teacherlevel factors,” and “student-level factors.” With respect to teacher-level factors, beginning with instructional strategies, Marzano advocates nine “general
instructional categories,” each of which he divides into “specific [instructional]
behaviors.” Out of 34 specific behaviors he discusses, nine broad categories
including:
• identifying similarities and differences
• summarizing and note taking

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• reinforcing effort and providing recognition
• homework and practice
• nonlinguistic representations
• cooperative learning
• setting objectives and providing feedback
• generating and testing hypotheses
• questions, cues, and advance organizers
In setting up this list, Marzano demonstrates his debt to both traditional
and progressive perspectives as he recognizes the contemporary pressures on
teaching and learning. He equally submits to, for example, both the traditional
emphasis upon homework and practice and the somewhat more progressive
emphasis upon hypothesis testing.
In terms of classroom management, Marzano specifies four interrelated and
integrated aspects, namely:
Establishing and enforcing a comprehensive list of rules and procedures,
using disciplinary interventions that strike a balance between positive
reinforcement for appropriate behavior and negative consequences for
inappropriate behavior, establishing relationships with students that involve appropriate levels of dominance and cooperation, and developing
the mental dispositions of withitness and an emotional objectivity toward students. (p. 105)
Again, as with instructional strategies, Marzano attempts to strike a balance,
whether successfully or not, between progressive and traditional notions, one
compatible not only with current research, but also with the wants, needs, and
interests of the child and the demands of NCLB/SBER.
Likewise with respect to Marzano’s outlook on classroom curriculum design.
Here he posits three principles consistent with his reading of what works in
schools. They are:
1. Learning is enhanced when a teacher identifies specific types of knowledge
that are the focus of a unit or lesson.
2. Learning requires engagement in tasks that are structured or are sufficiently similar to allow for effective transfer of knowledge.
3. Learning requires multiple exposure to and complex interactions with
knowledge.
As he notes, relative to these principles, Marzano derives his understandings mainly from the work of contemporary cognitive psychologists. Although
his overall focus is student learning per se, his approach also clearly acknowledges an indebtedness to both progressive and traditional philosophies/pedagogies and to the exigencies of NCLB/SBER.
Taken together, what the works of Hirsch, Kohn, and Marzano do is to help
explicate the range of current conflicts and controversies over the theory and
practice of teaching. First, especially in the cases of Hirsch and Kohn, they illustrate the broad categories of progressive and traditional educational thought.

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Second, they demonstrate the interactive effectiveness and utility of the teaching
frameworks constructed by Fenstermacher and Soltis; Oakes and Lipton; Joyce,
Weil, and Calhoun; and Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde. That is, we can better
understand, at least arguably, the positions and recommendations of Hirsch,
Kohn, and Marzano as a result of these four instructional designs, and we can
better understand these four instructional designs because of the works of
Hirsch, Kohn, and Marzano. Third, Hirsch, Kohn, and Marzano imply specific
mechanisms for making sense of NCLB/SBER (Hirsch, advocate; Kohn, criticize; Marzano, accommodate), while NCLB/SBER suggests a straightforward
basis for making sense of Hirsch (advocate), Kohn (critic), and Marzano (accommodationist). Simply, these efforts indicate how fundamental political and
philosophical (among other) differences situate disagreements with respect to
teaching.
CONCLUSIONS
In the end, teaching is controversial. At least that much is certain. Its variously construed differences regarding theory and practice ultimately stem from
complex, struggled over, and dynamic disagreements regarding philosophy and
power politics. They grow also, however, out of considerable disparities related
to perceptions of, and stances toward, culture, social structure, economics, technology, science, and so on. The expansive progressive-traditional distinction;
the frameworks provided by Fenstermacher and Soltis, Oakes and Lipton, Joyce
and his colleagues, and Zemelman and his colleagues; the prevalent viewpoints
of Hirsch, Kohn, and Marzano; and the currently dominant context of NCLB/
SBER all assist in the fundamental interpretation of teaching’s essential, conflicting circumstances and implementations, even as, simultaneously, each of these
movements/perspectives/implications mutually mediates the others and as the
performance of teaching itself makes clear its many interpretive and critical
frameworks.
The progressive-traditional mapping posited here, of course, is not the only
possible or even advantageous way of conceptualizing the scope and magnitude
of teaching’s controversies. They may, for instance, be usefully seen according to
whether one accepts teaching more as an “art” or more as a “science” (or some
combination of both; see, for example, Nathaniel L. Gage’s The Scientific Basis of
the Art of Teaching), and/or, perhaps, even within the discussions of “paradigm”
as such discussions address the divergent processes of research on teaching and
teachers (see here Lee S. Shulman’s “Paradigms and Research Programs in the
Study of Teaching: A Contemporary Perspective” and Robert Donmoyer’s “Paradigm Talk Reconsidered”).
What matters most, finally, is that we persist in trying to make sense of
teaching—its influences, its effects, its meanings, its conditions and situations,
and so forth. For, clearly, what is at stake here is nothing less than the absolute
health, well-being, happiness, and uniquely positioned identities of our children. And, therefore, we have no choice but to engage the inevitably crucial,
contentious, perpetual, and necessarily grand pedagogical conversation.

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Further Reading: Adler, M. J., 1982, The Paideia proposal: An educational manifesto, New
York: Scribner; Bagley, W. C., 1934, Education and the emergent man: A theory of education with particular application to public education in the United States, New York:
Nelson; Bestor, A. E., 1953, Educational wastelands: The retreat from learning in our public schools, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press; Dewey, J., 1966, Democracy
and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education, New York: Macmillan
(original work published 1916); Dewey, J., 1963, Experience and education, New York:
Collier (original work published 1938); Donmoyer, R., 2001, Paradigm talk reconsidered, in V. Richardson, ed., Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed., pp. 174–197), New
York: American Educational Research Association; Fenstermacher, G. D., & J. F. Soltis,
2004, Approaches to teaching (4th ed.), New York: Teachers College Press; Gage, N. L.,
1978, The scientific basis of the art of teaching, New York: Teachers College Press; Hirsch,
E. D., Jr., 1987, Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 1996, The schools we need and why we don’t have them,
New York: Doubleday; Joyce, B. R., M. Weil, & E. Calhoun, 2004, Models of teaching
(7th ed.), Boston: Allyn and Bacon; Kliebard, H. M., 2004, The struggle for the American
curriculum: 1893–1958 (3rd ed.), New York: Routledge; Kohn, A., 1999, The schools our
children deserve: Moving beyond traditional classrooms and “tougher standards,” Boston:
Houghton Mifflin; Marzano, R. J., 2003, What works in schools: Translating research into
practice, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development;
Oakes, J., & M. Lipton, 2007, Teaching to change the world (3rd ed.), Boston: McGrawHill; Shulman, L. S., 1986, Paradigms and research programs in the study of teaching:
A contemporary perspective, in M. C. Wittrock, ed., Handbook of research on teaching
(3rd ed., pp. 3–36), New York: Macmillan; Zemelman, S., H. Daniels, & A. Hyde, 1999,
Best practice: New standards for teaching and learning in America’s schools (2nd ed.),
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Kevin D. Vinson
TECHNOLOGY AND SCHOOLING
In 1922, Thomas Edison wrote, “I believe that the motion picture is destined
to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant
largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” Of course, motion picture technology has done no such thing; nor has radio, television, computers, or the Internet, technologies for which similar claims have been made. Indeed, the history
of technological innovations in education can be seen as a recurring cycle that
begins with exuberant claims that emerging technologies will revolutionize education, includes major implementations and studies demonstrating positive effects on teaching and learning, and ends with schools little changed. And yet, all
of these technologies are not only integral parts of modern life, they have each, in
their time, profoundly changed how we live and work. In fact, some would argue
that technologies have so profoundly changed the ways in which we make sense
in the world that education must change accordingly or become irrelevant.
The latest cycle in the technology and schooling saga, is the one involving
digital technologies. This cycle began in the early 1970s with educational applications running on mainframe computers and continues today with innovations
involving the Internet and a variety of mobile and wireless technologies. In many

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ways, computer technologies differ from their twentieth-century predecessors:
they are intrinsically interactive (as opposed to passive); they integrate a variety
of media forms (and consequent ways of knowing); they are not confined to
linear presentations (rather they link information and users across space and
time); they are malleable (and so can be employed by both teachers and students to a variety of pedagogical ends); and they continue not only to evolve
but evolve in whole new directions. This has led many proponents of computers
in schools to argue that digital technologies have the potential to revolutionize
education on a scale comparable to that achieved by the invention of printing.
And yet, schooling remains the only knowledge-intensive arena in today’s society in which digital technologies do not play an integral part.
The first part of this section considers why this is the case, and explores
whether computer technologies (should) have any important role to play in
schooling. Then, debates around what sorts of significant roles digital technologies might play in schools and schooling are considered. These first two parts
explore major and ongoing issues that have been debated since computers were
first introduced in classrooms. The remaining part addresses some of the major
debates around technology and schooling today.
TECHNOLOGY AND SCHOOLING
The core question on which all discussion of technology and schooling is premised is whether technology belongs in classrooms at all. There are at least three
aspects to this question.
The first involves technology’s effects on thinking and learning and derives
from work that explores relationships between the technologies we use and
the ways in which we make sense of the world. Briefly, the common idea here
is that because differing technologies support and constrain differing ways of
knowing, their use privileges particular thinking practices while marginalizing
others. Among scholars who accept this notion, there are those who contend
that our use of modern technologies is destroying our capacity to think deeply
(Oppenheimer, 2003), reason critically (Postman, 1994), or care about our fellow
humans (Weizenbaum, 1976). Such scholars maintain that schools are our last
defense against this trend and that digital technologies have no place in them.
At the other extreme are those who maintain that digital technologies enhance
our thinking, expand our ways of knowing, and link us to a much larger world
of ideas. They argue that digital technologies have the potential to radically improve schooling and should be enthusiastically embraced (McClintock, 1999;
Papert, 1993). A slightly different version of the positive side of this debate holds
that our ubiquitous use of digital technologies everywhere except for schools
has already changed the ways in which we act and think, and so education must
embrace their use or become irrelevant (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005).
A second aspect of the debate about the place of technology in schools involves
its relationship to teachers’ work and speaks to the question of why teachers have
historically resisted technology integration. It revolves around the notion that
teaching is more art than science and is centered on evolved practices that are

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essentially interpersonal and social. Thus, some scholars argue that teachers have
developed an organic sense of what works in classrooms and that the imposition
of digital technologies on student/teacher relationships gets in the way of those
relationships and devalues teachers’ work (Bromley & Apple, 1998; Cuban, 2001).
Others maintain that it does not have to be that way. They argue that digital technologies free teachers from more mundane and mechanical tasks and allow them
to focus more deeply on social and interpersonal activity (van ‘t Hooft & Swan,
2007).
A third aspect of the issue of technology’s place in schooling concerns its
cost effectiveness. Central to this discussion is the reality that schools have
limited resources, and that allocation of these resources to one facet of their
operations necessarily takes them away from others. Indeed, a prime argument
made by opponents of technology in schools is that money spent on technology integration, which after years of expensive purchases has had little impact
on student performance, would be much better spent on proven educational
innovations such as smaller class sizes. Proponents counter that computing
technologies have yet to be meaningfully integrated into schools in general,
but that small-scale experiments have demonstrated their potential effectiveness; that current systems of measurement do not capture their more significant and long-lasting effects on learning; and that the woeful under-financing
of education should be challenged rather than used as an argument against
technology integration.
TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS
Whatever one believes about the place of technology in schooling, the fact is
that there are huge numbers of computers and other digital devices in American
schools. In 2004, for example, there was one computer with Internet access for
every 4.4 students in K–12 schools across this country, and that ratio continues
to decline. How can we make good use of this enormous investment?
One of the oldest answers to this question is that technology can be used to
deliver high quality, standardized instruction to a large number of students at
low cost. Proponents of educational film, radio, and television emphasized how
they could be used to bring the very best instruction to all students. Proponents
of digital technologies make similar claims. Indeed, Interactive Learning Systems (ILS) have been shown capable of simultaneously delivering individualized
instruction and instantaneous feedback to large numbers of students at multiple
achievement levels with well-documented, positive effects on learning. A major
objection to this approach is that it does not reflect what we currently know
about how people learn, namely that knowledge is socially constructed. In addition, the delivery-of-instruction approach rejects the possibility of technological
effects on thinking and learning and devalues teachers’ work.
A second approach to appropriate uses of technologies in schools, which neither rejects technological effects nor devalues teachers’ work, is grounded in the
very McLuhanesque (and constructivist) concept of digital technologies as cognitive tools that support and extend our thinking. Jonassen (2000), for example,

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identified six categories of digital tools—semantic organizing, dynamic modeling, information interpretation, visualization, conversation, and knowledge
construction tools—that, when used by learners to represent what they know,
necessarily engage them in critical thinking about the content they are studying. The cognitive tools approach views digital technologies as tools that scaffold
teaching and learning in much the same way that textbooks or paper and pencils
do and argues that they should be similarly ready at hand and integrated across
the curriculum to support the needs of students and teachers. A major objection
to this approach is that it takes a substantial amount of teachers’ and students’
already limited time to learn how to use particular technologies before they can
be productively used to support thinking and learning. In addition, there is little
research support for the efficacy of a cognitive tools approach.
A third approach to the appropriate uses issue is to treat the use of digital
technologies as a subject. Proponents of this approach range from those who
view “digital literacy” as a set of mechanical skills to be learned in keyboarding
or technology classes (which most schools now offer) to those who argue for an
expanded notion of literacy that includes being able to think critically about and
with a variety of media and technologies across the curriculum (which most
schools don’t offer). Although the technology as subject approach encompasses
a wide variety of epistemological and pedagogical beliefs, it is clearly grounded
in the idea of preparing students for participation in a technological society. And
although this approach can be seen as the reverse of the cognitive tools tack, it
similarly suffers from objections related to the time, in this case time taken from
other subjects, and teaching resources it requires. In addition, some writers have
argued that there is little or no relationship between technology skills learned in
schools and the skills requirements of corporations and businesses.
Clearly, the above approaches are not mutually exclusive; indeed many schools
incorporate parts of all three in their technology plans. This is most obviously
the case with the approach that views technology as a catalyst for school reform.
Central to this approach is the idea that the introduction of technologies into
schools can serve as a vehicle around which major school reform can be organized. Applications of this approach range from the current U.S. Department of
Education’s call to use technologies to support the testing, data collection, and
instruction delivery requirements of its No Child Left Behind program of reform,
to appeals for developing new post-industrial models of schooling that more
accurately reflect today’s society. We consider the latter in more depth in the
next section of this chapter.
TECHNOLOGY AND TWENTYFIRST CENTURY SCHOOLS
Outside of schools, today’s K–12 students learn, think, and communicate in
ways that are very different from the average adult. In large part this is due to
the explosion of wireless, mobile technologies, and the (almost) free on-line
technologies that allow users to produce, share, and communicate. Students are
not afraid to use and repurpose the virtual plethora of communication and networking tools, and these are quickly becoming the preferred ways of hanging

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out, forming social groups, and sharing information for teenagers. The lack of
adult understanding of what younger generations are doing with new technologies often leads to fear, and restrictions on or an outright ban of digital tools
in schools and libraries. Debates are raging over the vices and virtues of social
sharing and networking sites, and whether students should be allowed to carry
cell phones while at school. The federal government even stepped in last year,
proposing the Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA), legislation that would have
banned schools and libraries from providing students access to commercial social networking Web sites and chat rooms.
Proponents of these types of restrictions argue that they are justified in
doing so because digital communication and sharing tools can potentially expose K–12 students to on-line predators and cyber-bullying, are a distraction
to teaching and learning, and use up resources such as bandwidth that should
be used for educational purposes. On the flip side, those who do not oppose
student access to new technologies argue that because new tools blur the boundaries between school and world, schools are starting to regulate the lives of students outside of school, raising questions about freedom of speech and invasion
of privacy in the process. In addition, many feel that schools are blaming technology for deeper-rooted social problems related to puberty. These problems
existed before students turned to cell phones and the Internet; they just were
not as visible. Also, many are of the opinion that educators who do not use new
digital technologies to teach with and about are failing to prepare their students
for the world outside of school.
Traditional curricula have been and still are heavily based on textbooks and
learning that is compartmentalized by grade level and subject area. Relatively little
has changed at the K–12 level, even after the advent of the Internet and substantial
investments in connecting classrooms to this virtual network of information. For
the most part, the Internet has been used for distance learning and as an electronic reference, with publishers and instructors suggesting selected Web sites on
an often heavily filtered Internet. Many educators are of the opinion that this is
the most appropriate (and safest) way of using the Internet in classrooms, places
of learning that are still highly hierarchical, siloed by subject, and sequential.
Others argue that the Internet provides opportunities far beyond accessing
selected content. The Internet is not only the place where the most recent and
complete knowledge can be accessed; its connectivity within and between subject areas creates a seamless, nonsequential learning experience. Everything is
connected and ideas are no longer limited by grade levels or rigid standards.
What makes these interconnected ideas even more powerful is that they can
be accessed anywhere and anytime, using a wireless, mobile device such as a
handheld computer or smartphone. As a result, learning becomes situated and
meaningful instead of isolated and disconnected.
Where do students fit in all of this? According to recent reports (e.g., Education
Evolving, 2005), kids value technology in their lives and for learning. They want
more and diverse access to digital technology in school, with challenging and
meaningful instructional activities that go beyond using the Internet as a glorified
encyclopedia. Increasing numbers of students at high school and college levels

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are becoming less satisfied with teachers’ uses of technology, because educators
are not using the tools that students are most familiar with; this dissatisfaction is
coupled with higher expectations of technology use on the part of students.
CONCLUSION
In many ways, digital technologies have radically changed our everyday lives.
We use tools like ATM machines, check-out scanners, microwaves, cell phones,
cable TV, and the Internet routinely. Most of us cannot imagine doing our work
without access to computers, digital networks, and a wide array of digital devices. However, today’s classrooms are not fundamentally different from classrooms that existed 50 years ago, and many educators argue that schools need to
change or they will become increasingly irrelevant.
These same educators argue that we need to use digital tools across the curriculum, just as we do in our lives. We must also rethink what knowledge and
skills are important, and what it means to be literate in a digital world. A unique
consortium of leaders from government, industry, and education, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2003, p. 6), argues that students need to learn
how to “appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate and evaluate information, to construct new knowledge,
and to communicate with others.” They maintain that the emphasis of No Child
Left Behind on core subjects is not enough. Rather, they contend that these core
subjects should include twenty-first-century content, that they should be taught
and learned using twenty-first-century tools in a twenty-first-century context,
and that learning should be measured using twenty-first-century assessments.
Others argue that we need to go even further and reimagine schooling altogether. Digital technologies diminish boundaries imposed by brick and mortar
and the school day. Mobile computing devices, wireless networks, and on-line
spaces make it possible to extend teaching and learning beyond school walls and
the school day, and to bring the larger world into the classroom, making learning truly a lifelong experience. Many thus argue that educators at all levels need
to seriously reimagine teaching and learning in a way that reconnects schools to
an increasingly connected world.
Proponents of digital technologies available today maintain that these tools
change what is pedagogically possible. However, that potential cannot be realized unless teaching practice is radically reconceived. With ubiquitous access
to digital tools and the Internet, classrooms no longer need be thought of as
isolated places with limited resources. Rather, they can and should be reconceived as portals with access to abundant resources and rich connections to the
world. Teaching needs to be thought of less as instruction and more as conducting learning. Rather than walking all students through the same, limited set of
materials, teaching should be reimagined as scaffolding each and every student’s
learning with resources appropriate to his or her abilities and interests.
Opponents of these same technologies maintain that there is no need to invest
in hardware, software, or connectivity, because in their view the technology that
is in schools now has not made a difference and actually distracts students or puts

Textbooks

them in harm’s way. Instead, opponents say that limited resources are better spent
on other educational needs such as reducing class sizes and raising test scores.
Being for or against digital technologies for education depends on one’s views
about teaching and learning, and what constitutes progress or achievement. However, it seems that in this day and age we cannot afford our schools having to play
catch-up with the rest of the world when it comes to mobile, wireless tools and
on-line spaces. For our students to be prepared to function in a high-tech society,
they need to learn how to use technologies in meaningful, ethical, and safe ways.
Further Reading: Breck, J., 2006, 109 Ideas for virtual learning: How open content will help
close the digital divide, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education; Bromley, H.,
& M. W. Apple, 1998, Education/technology/power: Educational computing as a social
practice, Albany: State University of New York Press; Cuban, L., 2001, Oversold and
underused: Computers in the classroom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;
Education Evolving, 2005, Listening to student voices—on technology: Today’s tech-savvy
students are stuck in text-dominated schools, retrieved January 8, 2007, from http://www.
educationevolving.org/studentvoices/pdf/tech_savy_students.pdf; Gee, J. P., 2003, What
video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan;
Jonassen, D. H., 2000, Computers as mindtools in schools: Engaging critical thinking, Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall; Lehart, A., & M. Madden, 2007, Social networking websites
and teens, Pew Internet and American Life Project, retrieved January 15, 2007, from http://
www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_SNS_Data_Memo_Jan_2007.pdf; McClintock, R. O.,
1999, The educator’s manifesto: Renewing the progressive bond with posterity through the
social construction of digital learning communities, New York: Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College, Columbia University, retrieved January 8, 2007, from http://
www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/manifesto/contents.html; McLuhan, M., 1964, Understanding media: The extensions of man, New York: The New American Library; Oppenheimer, T., 2003, The flickering mind: Saving education from the false promise of technology,
New York: Random House; Papert, S., 1993, The children’s machine: Rethinking school in
the age of the computer, New York: Basic Books; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2003,
Learning for the 21st Century, retrieved June 28, 2005, from http://www.21stcenturyskills.
org/; Postman, N., 1994, Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology, New York:
Viking Press; Rogers, Y., & S. Price, 2007, Using ubiquitous computing to extend and enhance learning experiences, in M. van ‘t Hooft and K. Swan, eds., Ubiquitous computing
in education: Invisible technology, visible impact (pp. 329–347), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates; Salomon, G., 1981, The interaction of media, cognition and learning,
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Tyner, K., 1998, Literacy in a digital world: Teaching and learning in the age of information, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; van ‘t Hooft, M.,
& K. Swan, 2007, Ubiquitous computing in education: Invisible technology, visible impact,
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Weigel, V. B., 2002, Deep learning for a digital
age, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Weizenbaum, J., 1976, Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation, New York: W. H. Freeman.

Karen Swan and Mark van ‘t Hooft

TEXTBOOKS
Textbooks have long occupied a cherished—and vilified—role in American
schooling. Since the beginning of the republic, textbooks have been at the core

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of formal instruction. In addition to being the most frequently utilized instructional resource in the classroom, many educators also consider the class text to
be the major purveyor of the school curriculum. By some estimates, students
spend approximately two-thirds of their classroom time using textbooks. Both
parents and many educators alike welcome their reassuring presence. Critics,
however, alternately charge that they can be biased, outdated, watered down,
boring, and irrelevant to students’ lives.
HISTORY
In colonial America, schooling’s primary purpose was religious and moral
instruction. As such, the earliest textbooks were hornbooks and the Bible. Primers, with their emphasis on teaching the alphabet, the numerals, and spelling,
were also very popular. Historians estimate that three million copies of the New
England Primer were printed and sold between 1690 and 1850.
By the early part of the nineteenth century, educational reformers began
to advocate for a common curriculum organized around standardized textbooks. Using primarily rote instruction and memorization, academic subjects
were seen as a body of knowledge to be sequentially mastered. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, McGuffey’s Readers became the school books of
choice. It is estimated that during this time 80 percent of all school children used
them at some point in their education. Up to 150 million copies may have been
sold. Originally developed by William McGuffey and then later by his brother,
Alexander McGuffey, these instructional books not only taught reading skills
but also conveyed morals and virtues such as the importance of hard work, honesty, and thrift. Despite their popularity, they were not without criticism; detractors charged that the behavior extolled by the lessons also supported those
qualities needed in a developing capitalist society.
By the turn of the century, textbooks were ubiquitous in U.S. classrooms.
American educator A. E. Winship maintained that even ineffective teachers
“cannot prevent a child’s learning a subject if he has a good book” (p. 339). Even
still, grumblings could be heard from Progressive Era reformers that textbooks
had begun to define the curriculum and determine instructional practice.
With increased immigration, the transmission of national identity, patriotism, and American civic values was considered central to the school curriculum. Not surprisingly, textbooks began to reflect this emphasis and, to ensure
that school books would not disparage U.S. principles and institutions, several
states passed legislation to this effect. In the period between the World Wars,
these efforts only intensified.
The Cold War’s impact could be felt in educational circles in a myriad of ways,
including battles over textbooks. Using Red Scare tactics, political conservatives
alleged that school books were being infiltrated with communist beliefs. Even
widely respected and used texts, such as Magruder’s American Government,
were held up as exemplars of Marxist ideas seeping into American thinking and
society. During this time, a small but vocal group of educational scholars began
to question the role and politics of the classroom text. This group of critics also

Textbooks

began to critique the role of publishers and revealed the exorbitant profits that
the companies were making.
Since that time, some scholars have charged that the situation has not improved; others maintain that today’s textbooks much better reflect our diverse
society than those of previous generations.
CONTROVERSY OVER CONTENT
One of the central controversies about textbooks is content. This is especially
true at the secondary level, with the emphasis on subject matter specialization.
Social studies and science textbooks have especially been at the center of this
controversy. Criticisms include outdated or incorrect information, lack of relevance to students’ lives, content that is lifeless and bland, and perspectives that
are biased and skewed to favor one political viewpoint or another.
From time to time watchdog groups publish reports of textbooks’ inaccuracies. They point out that because the entire process of publishing a textbook
often takes four or five years, textbooks can become outdated quickly. In some
cases, however, critics point out that the errors and omissions are the result of
poor scholarship, sloppy editing, and an already too-crammed text. Panels of
scholars have found math texts riddled with computational errors, grammar
books replete with misspellings, and history books filled with incorrect chronologies. Some incidences have been revealed of well-known authors’ names
being used on the cover of the text, while the actual manuscript was written by
in-house, “ghost” writers. Critics also complain about “dumbed-down” texts
that may be aesthetically attractive but offer little substance.
Critics also rail against homogenized content that can result in insipid textbooks. Students consistently complain of how boring their classroom texts are,
especially when compared to the colorful, interactive media that many of them
utilize routinely. Because textbooks are usually written for a national audience,
the “one size fits all” approach does not encourage specialized, highly relevant
texts for students. As a result, students often do not see their local communities
featured in their school texts and may not be able to make connections between
national/international issues and events and those in their immediate environs.
Parents and students complain about the size of the texts, each often weighing
four or five pounds and scarcely fitting into lockers and book bags. Published
studies point to the health dangers that overloaded backpacks can represent for
school children. More than 10,000 emergency room visits by school-aged children are made each year related to backpacks; further, children’s posture and
gait can be significantly altered by the physical stresses associated with carrying
heavy book bags.
But perhaps the most serious allegation levied against textbooks is that
they present information and perspectives that are biased and presented to
serve a particular political aim. In 1991, an influential analysis of school texts
by Christine Sleeter and Carl Grant argued that the realities of socioeconomic
class, gender, ethnicity, and disability in U.S. society were either misrepresented
or omitted altogether. Since then, a number of studies have reaffirmed those

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allegations. On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives like Diane
Ravitch have also been vocal about how political correctness has led to self-censoring and dilution of school texts. They point out that, in an effort to provide
students with a more just perspective, the “language police” have taken matters
to the extreme and sanitized school books to such an extent that the content is
skewed at best and unrecognizable at worst.
TEXTBOOK SELECTION AND ADOPTION
The process of textbook selection has led to contentious and controversial
debates about educational policy decision making and control over the curriculum. About half the states (mostly in the South and West) have a textbook adoption committee that makes recommendations or mandates about which books
will be used in schools. These committees review and recommend books that are
in turn selected by school districts and individual schools. The state subsidizes
all or part of the cost of the books if the districts/schools choose from the state’s
list. Even if schools are allowed to choose books that are not on the list, they are
often not subsidized at the same funding level, and/or considerable additional
paperwork must be submitted to get the request approved. Textbook adoption
typically runs in five- to seven-year cycles (one of the reasons why critics charge
that many books are outdated).
Typically, textbook adoption committees comprise a varied group of individuals including teachers, school administrators, academics, parents, and community representatives. While many applaud having such a diverse panel involved
in the selection process, critics allege that the reason educators and parents are
asked to participate is so that they cannot later complain about the materials
ultimately selected. Others protest that the reviewers’ names remain anonymous
and that final reports are not published and accessible by the public. State administrators respond by asserting that secrecy is warranted because portions of
the reports have been used (without permission) by publishers for marketing
purposes.
Some states provide training to the committee members so that they may
make better, more informed decisions as they review the texts under consideration. Especially important is how closely the texts align with the mandated
curricula. The committee members often must submit written reports of their
findings. The evaluation forms usually address the supporting resources as well
as the textbook itself.
Even for those states that do not have an adoption committee, they often use
the same books as are used in big states like California, Florida, and Texas—all
of which have textbook adoption committees—because those lucrative markets
determine to a great extent what is produced commercially.
TEXTBOOK PUBLISHERS
Textbook publishing is a $6 billion a year industry in the United States. While
publishers maintain that they hire reputable scholars and writers, it cannot be

Textbooks

refuted that they are a for-profit business. Critics assert that teachers who utilize
the textbook as the core of their instruction are, in effect, publishers’ agents.
In an effort to keep production costs down and increase profits, the big
publishing houses—Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Pearson/Prentice-Hall,
Harcourt, and a few others—tend to produce uniform books that, with few
modifications, can be used by a number of states. According to the American
Textbook Council (2006), in a subject such as social studies, a handful of books
wind up holding an estimated 80 percent of the national market.
The large publishing firms are also able to develop ancillary materials—
teachers’ editions, workbooks, study guides, technology supplements—that are
often what convinces a state or school district to adopt the corresponding text.
Smaller publishers do not have the large development budgets or staff to offer
such incentives and are usually passed over in favor of the more visually enticing
materials provided by the big companies with their promises of educational effectiveness and teacher support.
It is not unusual for the big publishing houses to have lobbying offices in the
major cities with huge school populations (and thus huge textbook budgets).
Sales representatives develop relationships with school districts and often host
or sponsor meal functions or other events at professional conferences and meetings. At the national level, the powerful Association of American Publishers also
exerts influence by lobbying state governments.
Because many textbooks now come “bundled,” that is, accompanied by CDROMs, workbooks, and ancillary materials such as maps and tests, textbook
costs are at an all-time high. While these teacher-enticing supplements are
pitched as being “free,” they inevitably increase the costs of the texts. As the
average price of a textbook continues to rise steadily, publishers counter that
these escalating costs are necessary to produce quality products and claim that
their profit margin is much smaller than is widely claimed. A small but growing
group of school systems are turning to e-books or CDs in an effort to cut down
on spiraling costs.
There is, however, a small but vocal group of scholars who maintain that publishers have been responsive to market demands and that textbooks are better
today than they have ever been before. In particular, the supporters point to
diversity initiatives that have led to school books more accurately reflecting the
ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States in both text and pictorials.
COURT CASES
Textbooks are considered to be such a central component of a student’s education that charging a fee for school books has been ruled unlawful. In Bond v.
Public Schools of Ann Arbor School District (1970), the Michigan Supreme Court
ruled that books are an essential element of elementary and secondary education
and pupils thus cannot be required to purchase them. Similar cases in other states
have upheld this mandate (e.g., Norton v. Board of Education of School District
No. 16, 1976, New Mexico; Cardiff V. Bismarck Public School District, 1978, North
Dakota; Randolph County Board of Education v. Adams, 1995, West Virginia).

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Since textbooks can be used as a means of controlling curricular content, it is
no surprise that they have been at the center of several noteworthy court battles,
especially those dealing with political views, religious teachings, or language
deemed inappropriate due to sexual explicitness or vulgarity. Generally speaking, school boards have the authority to decide on textbooks’ inclusion or exclusion in their districts.
In Board of Education v. Pico (1981) the Supreme Court ruled that, despite
freedom of speech liberties, the Constitution allows some limits on local school
boards’ authority to remove books from school libraries (although not necessarily on materials used in the classroom). When removing or excluding class
texts, legal rulings have made it clear that school boards must use pre-established guidelines and arrive at their decision in a constitutional manner. In
particular, textbook selections cannot be based on the desire to teach specific
religious or political viewpoints. School boards do have the right, however, to
exercise their discretion to deliver pedagogically sound instruction and curricula.
The 1989 case, Virgil v. School Board of Columbia County, Florida called
into question a humanities anthology that was used in a high school course.
The school district’s review committee deemed that some of the book’s classic
literature pieces (e.g., Aristophane’s Lysistrata and Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale)
included inappropriate sexual content and vulgar language and ordered the removal of the text. While the justices of the Eighth Circuit Court did not necessarily agree with the school board’s action, the court judged that the district had
acted within its authority based on “legitimate pedagogical concerns.”
Despite these cases, the law does limit the amount of authority that school
boards and state education commissions can exert in excluding books from the
extant curriculum. Of primary concern are First Amendment rights and access
to a free, public education.
CONCLUSION
Some educators argue that while textbooks include a great deal of information and possibly bias, there is no way to know for sure how much of that content
students actually internalize. While textbook analysis can reveal what is often
taught or intended, it does not necessarily confirm what was learned. What is
presented in a book, some researchers argue, is often mediated by the teacher
and student and is not ingested in toto.
Ultimately, most educators conclude that while textbooks can provide a large
amount of useful information, they should be selected wisely, used carefully, and
should be only one source of information among many.
Further Reading: American Textbook Council, 2006, Widely Adopted History Textbooks,
retrieved September 28, 2006, from http://www.historytextbooks.org/adoptions.htm;
Apple, M. W., & L. K. Christian-Smith, eds., 1991, The politics of the textbook, New York:
Routledge; Giordano, G., 2003, Twentieth-century textbook wars: A history of advocacy
and opposition, New York: Peter Lang Publishing; Ravitch, D., 2003, The language police:
How pressure groups restrict what students learn, New York: Knopf; Reese, William J.,

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1995, The origins of the American high school, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
Sewall, G. T., 2005, Textbook publishing, Phi Delta Kappan, 86, 498–502; TysonBernstein, H., 1988, A conspiracy of good intentions: America’s textbook fiasco, Washington, DC: Council for Basic Education; Winship, A. E., 1908, State uniformity in
text-books, Journal of Education, 67, 339–342.

Bárbara C. Cruz

TIME IN SCHOOL
DOING TIME
From the mid-1800s debates have raged over the adequate or appropriate
allocation of time in schooling, and many books and studies (such as Prisoners of Time or It’s about Time) have centered on the use of time. Indeed, doing
time in schools is the one common element in our increasingly fragmented and
diverse society: participation in some form of schooling is mandatory for all
children for approximately least 10 years. Because there is ongoing and genuine disagreement over the best ways to distribute time in schools, the allocation of time may rightly be termed a battleground issue. Further, despite mixed
research and genuine differences of opinion, arguments over time tend to be
at least as ideological and emotional as they are rational or research-based and
stem, at least in part, from some of ongoing tensions about education in a democratic society. Such questions as whether schools should be locally controlled
or standardized, whether educators or parents should have the stronger voice,
or about the primary purpose of education continue to underlie decisions and
discussions about the allocation of time in schools. In this chapter, we first provide a historical overview of the origins of some of these disputes, then turn to
examine the two ways in which they persist into this century: debates over time
allocations within the school day and debates over the configuration of time in
the school year.
Standardizing Time in Schools
During the last half of the nineteenth century, schooling was not standardized in North America. The length of the school day, the timing of the school
year, the curriculum—even the assumed purposes of education—all differed depending on one’s location.
In the rural United States, the local school belonged in a real sense to
the community, where it was often the center of most social interactions. In
one-room schools “all over the nation, ministers met their flocks, politicians
caucused with the faithful, families gathered for Christmas parties and hoedowns . . . and neighbors gathered to hear spelling bees and declamations”
(Tyack, 1974, p. 16). Village schools, often run by local churches and parishes,
operated approximately five to six months of the year (from the last harvest to
the first planting), with children attending when they were not required to assist with work at home.

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During this same time period, urban schools were called upon to address
some of the pressing needs brought about by increased industrialization and
new patterns of immigration. Schools became the first line of socialization, expected to introduce immigrants to democratic principles and practices, to teach
them English, and to assimilate them into North American society. As the urban
areas grew in size and industrialization increased in importance, civil control
came to be perceived as a pressing issue. Along with a strong police force, public education was seen a means of maintaining social order, and jurisdictions
passed “stringent legislation to force truants to go to school” and remove them
from the decadent influence of “the streets” (p. 68). As some schools were established for immigrant children and other schools were established for educating wealthier American-born children, educational institutions quickly became
mechanisms of both segregating and sorting social groups. In the cities, schools
tended to operate year-round, but without any compulsory school day or school
year attendance. Here many urban children also attended school if they were not
working or required at home.
In the 1880s, the state superintendent in California wrote that “citizens should
support compulsory education to save themselves from the rapidly increasing
herd of non-producers, . . . to save themselves from the wretches who prey upon
society like wild beasts” (p. 69). Similar pressures for compulsory education also
developed in agrarian North American society as the Homestead Acts of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought new waves of immigrants, enticed by the offer of free land. Although most of the immigrants were of European extraction, many were not English speaking, and so education was seen as
the means of assimilating them into the wider society.
By the end of the nineteenth century, rural and urban life became increasingly
interrelated as farming and industry became more mechanized. Disparities in
the educational experiences and opportunities of rural and urban students became evident. The “bookish curriculum, haphazard selection and supervision
of teachers, and voluntary character of school attendance” (Tyack, 1974, p. 21),
combined with generally substandard school buildings and woefully inadequate
instruction, were seen to be symptoms of an inability of rural folk to administer education that was appropriate for their place in an increasingly complex
society. Pressure for a more uniform approach to schooling, with a common
curriculum, and mandated compulsory attendance with a more standardized
school day and school year increased.
As with many other aspects of educational innovation in the United States,
Massachusetts was pivotal in the development of the school calendar. It was the
only state in the United States to have compulsory education prior to the American Civil War. An 1852 statute required that children between the ages of 8 and
14 attend 12 weeks of schooling annually, with a minimum of six weeks needing to be consecutive. Over the next 40 years, the requirements in Massachusetts
changed frequently, with modifications relating to children of different ages and
varying situations. For example, in 1860, a bill stipulated that children under 12
could not be employed in manufacturing unless they had attended school for
18 weeks in the preceding year. By 1902, all grammar school children were re-

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quired to attend school for 32 weeks—a period roughly equivalent to the current
180 days mandate. By 1874 in New York, another leader in education, children
between the ages of 8 and 14 were required to attend school for 14 weeks, 8 of
which had to be consecutive. However, here as elsewhere, discrepancies persisted between the rural and urban school days and school years.
It took almost 150 years of meandering, even tortuous negotiation for educators to arrive at the compromise that is dominant in American education in
the twenty-first century. Rapprochement between the two calendars occurred
largely as a result of curriculum standardization and a movement toward more
uniform assessment procedures. In 1847, modifications to address the newly
implemented grade-level organization of schools were introduced. In order to
offer the standard curriculum, urban schools reduced the length of their year
and rural areas increased the number of school days to what we have come to
know as the traditional or “agrarian” calendar, a year with approximately nine
months of schooling and a three-month summer break.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the shorter urban school year had
brought a number of critiques. When the U.S. commissioner of education compared the school years in several major cities for 1891–1892 with those of 50
years earlier, he found that in New York, the school year had gone down from
between 245 and 251 to between 190 and 200 days and he bemoaned the reduction, complaining that children had to attend school several additional years to
receive the same amount of education they previously received in eight years.
Nevertheless, the compromise had been reached and has remained in place,
with slight modifications, for almost 200 years. A school day of approximately
five hours and a school year of roughly 185 days remains the norm, although not
without significant wrangling and debate, ongoing tinkering, and a few more
significant changes related to how best to organize the day and the year.
Current Controversies
Some current controversies rage over the organization of the school day itself,
with debates over such topics as the ringing of bells, the length of the day, how
best to organize the day for instruction, the optimal length of recess time, and
so forth. Other debates center primarily around two issues related to the school
year itself: whether to extend the mandated number of days to more closely approximate schooling in many European and Asian countries; and whether to reallocate vacation time to shorten the long summer vacation and introduce more
regular breaks and vacation periods during the school year.
School Day Debates about Time
For the most part, this first set of controversies, how to organize time within
the school day itself, has primarily concerned educators, with little of the debate
spilling over into the family or the community. When such changes are
introduced at the school level, the impact on home life is relatively negligible.
It is not that parents are not concerned about their children’s education; they

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are; nevertheless, a decision to change the schedule so that subjects are taken
on alternate days over the course of a school year instead of daily for a single
semester surely has little impact on family routines and, hence, does not seem
of tremendous importance. Similarly, whether (as is currently in vogue in
some areas) elementary schools choose to have two “nutrition breaks” rather
than the traditional morning and afternoon recess and one lunch break may
require some rethinking of how food is packed and sent to school, but again,
has little impact on family life and schedules. Here we will examine some of
the most controversial topics: Carnegie units, semestering or block scheduling, extending the school day, and reducing the amount of recess time
available.
Carnegie Units
Carnegie units are the basic measure of instructional or contact hours a student has with a teacher or a given subject. In the early 1900s, high schools themselves were relatively new and universities wanted a way to determine whether
students were adequately prepared for advanced study in a particular subject.
Hence, requirements for a certain amount of time, such as five hours a week
of language arts instruction, or 60 semester hours of algebra, were intended to
ensure some degree of uniformity. At the same time, the concept of a time-based
reference for measuring student attainment became the norm, not only in secondary schools, but in elementary schools and universities as well, with a certain number of minutes or hours mandated by day, week, semester, or even year
for each specific subject. At the university level, the Carnegie unit is still the
basic measure that determines such things as faculty workload, efficiency, and
evaluation.

Figure T.3 Traditional school calendar.

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To Semester or Not to Semester
Another argument related to thinking about time allocated to specific subjects
relates to what is commonly called block scheduling (in the United States) or semestering (in Canada). This debate, that began in the 1970s, focuses primarily
on whether it is better to require students to take all subjects on a regular basis
(daily or sometimes on alternate days), for a whole school year, or to teach fewer
subjects at a time in longer daily blocks of time for only one semester. The debate
centers on the conditions under which students learn better—a concentrated period or a schedule in which learning is spread out over a longer period of time.
A secondary debate centers on whether one schedule offers a more cost-efficient
and flexible use of resources—whether human, facility, or instructional—than
the other. Early studies suggested that despite general satisfaction with block
scheduling, the way the innovation was implemented had more effect on staff
and student satisfaction than the nature of the organizational change. There was
no conclusive evidence that students in fully semestered schools achieved better or dropped out less than other students. However, in some cases, attendance
in block-scheduled schools improved; in other instances, some students took
advantage of opportunities to complete their secondary education more quickly.
A comprehensive study of mathematics instruction and achievement in approximately 600 secondary schools found, however, that teachers and students
in year-long classes achieved higher scores. The study therefore concluded that
although there might be other reasons for choosing a block schedule, it did not
appear that improved academic achievement (at least for mathematics) was one
of them.
Extending the School Day
In addition to debates over how to schedule specific subjects is the discussion
of when best to schedule them and whether to extend the school day beyond the
typical five hours of class time. Educators are well aware that sometimes such
noneducational pressures as lunch room space or bus schedules strongly influence the timing of activities during the school day. Nevertheless, educational deliberations about extending the school day are usually prompted by one of two
concerns: a need to alleviate overcrowding and facilitate scheduling or a desire
to provide additional benefits primarily for disadvantaged students.
In some extended-day models, classes are placed on overlapping schedules to
permit students to attend in shifts, either in the morning or the afternoon, with
some classes scheduled around the noon hour to accommodate all children at
once. At the elementary level, the noon-hour classes tend to offer subjects seen
as “less important”—art, music—to larger groups of students at the same time.
In secondary schools, the noon-hour classes may be the less popular options,
permitting courses (such as French or calculus) to be offered once for students
in both morning and afternoon sessions. This model does not provide additional instructional time, but simply extends the time when schools are open.
Although shifts have not been found to be productive for elementary school
children, the evidence is more mixed at the secondary level. There is some

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recent research that suggests that elementary school students are more “morning people” and adolescents (as they progress through high school) become
more “evening-type” students; hence, some argue that extending the school day
into the late afternoon is detrimental to younger children but changing the starting or ending time of high school classes might be of value to older high school
students.
The second reason for extending the school day is to provide additional
learning opportunities for those who need more time or extra tutoring in order to
demonstrate academic success. Sometimes this occurs by actually adding minutes
to the school day; at other times, it is the result of after-school tutoring programs
funded by outside agencies. Aside from the debate about time preferences related
to learning, the evidence from some after-school programs funded throughout the
United States by state and federal grants shows that, for some children, providing
additional focused, instructional support enhances achievement as measured by
standardized tests. Extended day programs may also bring noninstructional benefits, decrease the time spent under less supervised or safe conditions, and offer
increased awareness of and involvement with community groups.
Recess: Frivolity or Necessity
A more recent debate related to extending the amount of teaching and learning time has been prompted by the accountability demands of No Child Left
Behind and the need for schools to meet designated targets for Annual Yearly
Progress. Some school-based educators emphasize the urgency of using every
minute of the school day for instructional purposes: to cover the curriculum
and prepare students for tests. Others, including parents, academics, and medical practitioners, urge the continuation of free playtime, citing the advantages of
play and rapidly increasing rates of childhood obesity. They urge, not a reduction of recess, but a guarantee, not only of less structured playtime, but mandated regular time for physical education for all students.
In addition to the need for instructional time, educators’ concerns about
the legal ramifications of accidents on the playground, possible bullying, and
new safety regulations requiring expensive equipment and extensive monitoring
have also contributed to the reduction of recess. Regardless of the reason, the
American Academy of Pediatrics has critiqued the reduction of playtime, stating
that children need unstructured playtime to promote creativity and social skills.
Recess, they found, can help “kids to become resourceful in figuring out conflict
resolution, negotiation, and even leadership.” Other groups such as the National
PTA and the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play (a group affiliated with the United Nations) have joined the vocal and increasingly intense
debate.
Summary
Similar to many other topics on education, the polarization of debates over
time in the school day can be described in several ways. Sometimes the debate is

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over inputs (standard units and curriculum) vs. outputs (what students actually
learn); at other times it is over control—standardization (all students covering
the same topics in the same length of time) vs. flexibility (the need to take into
account students’ prior knowledge or different rates of learning). At all times,
the debates are influenced by ideology, with the current emphasis on accountability and high-stakes testing tipping the scales heavily toward some form of
standardization. The perceived (and highly political) need to demonstrate student achievement on high-stakes tests in some subjects has, in some cases, led
to the elimination of what are seen as less important subjects. Here, recognizing
the impact of such elements as Carnegie units—the need to allocate to each subject an equal amount of time—may facilitate a differentiated schedule and the
retention of a richer and more comprehensive curriculum. Hence, the impact of
time considerations cannot be underestimated.
School Year Debates about Time
Although emotion and ideology inform the previous debates, they come to
the forefront in debates about the allocation of time for the school year, where
arguments are often couched in language about family and community values
and grounded in both myth and tradition. Indeed, when choices about educational time have a more direct impact on family life, influencing such things
as when families might take vacations or engage in sporting activities together,
they always generate intense controversy among parents, politicians, and the
general public.
Compacting the School Year
Laws regulating the amount of time children spend in schools vary, with
some jurisdictions mandating a specific number of school days and others requiring only a certain number of minutes of in-school time. Although this has
generally resulted in relatively standard school years, regulations specifying the
number of minutes are more flexible and seem to permit some room for altering
the schedule.
In the most common and least controversial cases, this has resulted in the
addition of a few minutes to each school day, in order to permit several additional days for teacher professional development or a few extra vacation days.
A more recent innovation, one intended to save money for districts with particular fiscal constraints such as high costs of fuel or transportation, is to extend each school day by approximately one hour, but then only to offer classes
for four days a week. Because this innovation has a significant impact on families who require child care or who enjoy after-school lessons or activities, it is
quite controversial. At the same time, the jury is still out on its effectiveness.
There is little doubt that districts can economize if they hire secretaries, custodians, or bus drivers four days instead of five, but communities must ask
themselves if the savings to the district warrant the reduction in the salaries
of these support workers. Moreover, there are no comprehensive research

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data concerning the long-term impact of a four-day week on student learning. Some proponents argue that it encourages better attendance and hence
more learning occurs; opponents claim that the efficiencies are counteracted
by increased student fatigue on the longer class days and by a lower number of
days and periods engaged in subject-specific activities. In both cases, the data
are largely anecdotal.
Extending the School Year
Interestingly, the alternative debate also rages, focusing on the fact that
schools in North America generally operate for fewer days than their counterparts in Europe or Asia. The argument, often raised if students do not perform
in top positions on tests used for international comparisons, is that we should
extend our school year to more closely approximate the 220–240 days of Japan
or China. Here, as with the Carnegie units previously discussed, the argument
is based on an equation of additional time with more learning. The suggestion
to increase the number of days in a school year is often criticized because it
would be a costly innovation. Moreover, opponents argue, most American children perform extremely well under current conditions, so there is little need to
extend the school year for everyone. Nevertheless, because not all children are
equally successful, the argument is frequently advanced that adding days to the
school year would help more children to be achieve success.
Balancing the School Year
Another generally controversial way of thinking about the allocation of time
over a school year is to maintain approximately the same number of instructional days, but to redistribute the in-class and vacation period over the calendar year so that the summer vacation is substantially reduced and longer, more
regular vacation breaks are inserted during the year. This modified calendar,
often called a year-round school calendar and more recently also known as a
modified or balanced calendar, is one of the longest standing innovations (and
controversies) related to time, yet perhaps one of the most widely implemented.
At present, in North America, there are over two million children enrolled in
a school with some form of balanced calendar. A balanced four-term calendar
was instituted nationally in New Zealand in 1996; it is the norm in some states
in Australia and was recommended in England, in 2001, by the National Commission on the School Year.
The balanced school year is sometimes seen as more advantageous to students and teachers than the traditional school year. Proponents argue that it
reduces stress, tensions, misbehavior, and violence in schools; that it increases
the attendance, motivation, and enthusiasm of teachers and students; and that
it is a cost-effective way of increasing academic achievement. One common argument is that it decreases summer learning loss (which affects disadvantaged
children more extensively than children from more advantaged backgrounds),
that it reduces the amount of time spent on review, and therefore, that it

Time in School | 669

facilitates more and more effective learning on the part of all children. Opponents often argue that the traditional calendar was good enough for parents
and grandparents. They believe that the balanced calendar destroys family values, detracts from the ability of families to vacation together, and makes child
care and student employment more difficult. They also claim that it can be
disruptive to families if there are a number of children in schools with different schedules.
Intersession
Another way of extending the school year is through the voluntary use of
additional instructional time. This is most commonly, although not uniquely,
associated with the introduction of a balanced calendar year, even though the
balanced calendar does not necessarily extend the number of days or time in
school. The introduction of intersession activities may serve that purpose. Schools
that offer intersession generally do so as a way of affording additional educational opportunities, remediation, or enrichment to students who voluntarily
opt to attend programs offered during one or more of the school break periods.
Similar, voluntary additional instruction may also be offered during day five of a
four-day week or during the summer in traditional calendar schools. Although
there is sometimes a cost for these programs, many schools offer them as part of
the activities funded through Title I allocations or by redistributions of summer
school funding.
The addition of voluntary time for some students addresses some of the
previous critiques of the extreme costs of extending the school year for everyone. Indeed, because intersession is often offered as a way of providing targeted
support for students with particular needs—socioeconomic, English language
support, and so on—it may be seen as an equitable way of increasing learning
time for those who need it without increasing the costs and time in class for
those who are already achieving to high standards.

Figure T.4

Balanced school calendar.

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Debates about Time: Some Final Reflections
The foregoing overview suggests that there are many different approaches to
configuring time in the school day or throughout a school year. Some debates oppose a desire for decentralization and flexibility to standardization and control;
others weigh the relative merits of more instructional time compared to time
for physical activities or socializing; still others arise from the need to balance
fiscal resources with educational benefit. In general, disputes about time and
schooling oppose the forces of habit and tradition with the forces of innovation
and change. Often, such arguments reveal a clear preference for the familiar over

Figure T.5

Number of public, charter, and private schools with year-round programs, 2005–2006.

Tracking

the unfamiliar, for the 150-year-old compromise over the possibility of new approaches for the twenty-first century.
In every instance one can find conflicting research, and hence research to
support almost any opinion or preference. There is therefore a need for those
who turn to research for supporting arguments to do so judiciously, to carefully consider the nature of the questions asked, the quality of the data and the
analysis, and the underlying ideological position. Time for learning is a precious
commodity. Allocated foolishly, it can foster antiquated and inequitable learning situations. Allocated wisely and judiciously, it has the potential to increase
the learning and the enjoyment of children in our schools and hence to make a
positive contribution to the development of our democratic society.
Further Reading: Kneese, Carolyn C., 1996, Review of research on student learning in
year-round education, Journal of Research and Development in Education, 29(2), 61–72;
Pisapia, J., & A. L. Westfall, 1997, Alternative high schools: Scheduling, student achievement and behavior, Research report, ED411337, Metropolitan Educational Research
Consortium, Richmond, VA; Raphael, D., M. W. Wahlstrom, and L. D. McLean, 1986,
Debunking the semestering myth, Canadian Journal of Education, 11(1), 36–52; Shields,
C. M., & S. L. Oberg, 1999, What can we learn from the data? A study of the effects
of different school calendars on student outcomes, Urban Education, 34(2), 125–154;
Shields, C. M., & Steven L. Oberg, 2000, Year-round schooling: Promises and pitfalls,
Lanham, MD: Technomic; Tyack, D. B., 1974, The one best system: A history of American
urban education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carolyn M. Shields and Steven L. Oberg
TRACKING
Tracking, or the sorting of students by perceived ability, is a widespread
practice in American schools. While tracking has changed since the early twentieth century, when students were sorted into overarching sets of classes that
were exclusively college-preparatory or vocational, tracking today takes the
form of different levels of classes by subject area. Tracking is a highly controversial educational issue. The controversy centers on whether tracking affords
access to quality instruction for all learners, whether assignment practices are
fair, and whether achievement effects warrant continuation or elimination of its
practice.
HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF TRACKING
Tracking first developed in the early twentieth century, when increased
immigration and urban industrialization contributed to a student population
explosion. The population of American schools surged from 200,000 in 1880
to more than 1.5 million in 1918. The passage of child-labor laws and enforcement of compulsory education also radically altered the demographic composition of public schools, which until this point had largely served middle- and
upper-class white families who could forego extra income from their nonworking children.

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Differing conceptions of the purpose of public schools undergirded the debate about how best to meet the challenges of this new landscape. In 1893, Harvard University President Charles Eliot and the National Education Association’s
Committee of Ten on Secondary Studies advocated rigorous academic coursework, acceptable for college admission, for all students to create an intelligent
American populace capable of reasoning and critical thinking. Progressive educators strove to make “every working man a scholar and every scholar a working
man” by offering a full range of academic, vocational, and life skills preparation
for all students. In contrast, educational administrators who believed that schools
should prepare students for their future work roles deemed that not all students
needed to learn a common core of rigorous, academic coursework. Instead, they
believed that students who would later become welders and secretaries would
best be served with vocational training, while the “brightest” students would
engage in curricula that would prepare them for college and leadership roles.
Thus, the intent of tracking was to tailor curricula and instruction to particular
ability levels and future occupational roles, leading to a skilled labor force. Some
progressive reformers also believed that tracking would lead to more equal educational opportunities as schools addressed the different needs of all students
through differentiated, relevant curricula.
Other tracking advocates had less pure educational goals in mind. Tracking,
they believed, would serve to separate newly arrived, poor, and “undesirable” immigrants from eastern and southern Europe from their wealthier Anglo-Saxon
peers, leading students to assume their “rightful” places in the stratified society.
Tracking thus began to take hold in a climate where a fear of immigrants, Social
Darwinism (a belief that the elite were innately more “fit” to take on leadership roles than their disadvantaged peers) and a belief in industrial efficiency
through specialization converged.
The advent of the IQ test cemented the practice of tracking by introducing a
supposedly objective measure of intelligence into the schooling system. Despite
many problems with using IQ tests to sort students—such as questions biased in
favor of the elite—millions of children were placed into differential tracks (e.g.,
vocational, general, or college-bound) for their education. Tracking by such
overarching courses of study continued through the 1960s, although administrators did not strictly adhere to results of IQ tests. They also began to consider
other factors, such as school counselor and teacher recommendations, student
input, and standardized reading and math test scores in placement decisions.
During the 1960s and 1970s, however, these tracked formal programs (vocational or college) began to be dismantled. Samuel R. Lucas’s 1999 book, Tracking
Inequality, attributes this change to concerns for equity brought up by the civil
rights movement, as well as the challenge to the idea that intelligence was a single entity that IQ tests could measure easily. Since then, tracking began to take
a different form. By 1980, few secondary schools separated students into overarching programs. Instead, tracking took the form of course levels, with students
enrolled in high- or low-track classes by subject. At the secondary level, tracking
manifests itself in the form of honors, regular, or remedial classes by subject. At
the elementary level, tracking is evident in self-contained gifted and “regular”

Tracking

classes, or in high or low reading groups within one classroom. Despite the fact
that current assignment practices appear less biased than in the early twentieth
century, research suggests that track placement in one subject is highly associated
with assignment in another subject area; that is, students in high-track classes in
English are likely to also be in high-track classes in mathematics.
CRITICS ARGUE TRACKING HAS FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS
IN ITS DESIGN AND PRACTICE
Critics of tracking argue that tracking does not afford equal access to quality
instruction for all students and relies on unjust assignment practices.
Unequal Access to Quality Instruction
Research consistently demonstrates that tracking offers inadequate instructional opportunities to students in the lower tracks, thereby hurting their academic attainment. Specifically, students in the low tracks receive less challenging
curricular content that does not emphasize critical thinking or problem-solving
skills. Drawing on classroom observations, interviews, and surveys at a sample of
twenty-five secondary schools in different regions of the country in the 1970s,
Jeannie Oakes, in the most widely cited book on tracking, Keeping Track, documents how teachers teach different content (e.g., works of literature vs. short
adolescent fiction), skills (writing essays or reports of library research vs. completing grammar assignments), and intellectual processes (understanding concepts,
ideas, and mathematical models vs. basic computation and memorization) to
students in high- and low-track classes. She also reports that students in lowtrack classes have fewer student-teacher interactions on learning and less time
on-task in a punitive and less trusting classroom climate compared to students
in high tracks. In addition, students in the low tracks have less qualified teachers,
measured by years of experience and number of professional degrees. The gaps
in skills and content knowledge across tracks grow over time, making movement from low- to high-tracked classes virtually impossible without additional
support.
Through the educational opportunities each track level affords, tracking
has a profound influence on students’ educational and career trajectories. A
student’s track position in high school (regardless of background, test scores,
or grades) independently affects her or his grade point average, participation in extracurricular activities, dropout rate, misbehavior in school, and
delinquency.
Unjust Assignment Practices
Assignment practices have also been a strong source of controversy surrounding tracking. While there has been some controversy regarding the
evidence of racially discriminatory placement practices disadvantaging students of color (e.g., the limitations of large, aggregated data sets that mask

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Tracking

racial discrimination), there is wide consensus among researchers that there
is socioeconomic bias in placement practices, leading to the disproportionate
under-representation of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds in
higher academic tracks.
Some researchers have found that tracking plays a central role in perpetuating race- and class-based inequality in American society as students of color
from low socioeconomic backgrounds are disproportionately assigned to the
lower academic tracks, irrespective of academic achievement. Roslyn Mickelson, in her 1999 expert testimony in the U.S. District Court case of Capacchione
v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools reports that “White children are more likely
to be in higher tracks than African-American students with comparable prior
achievement” (p. 8). One explanation for this phenomenon is research that illustrates how privileged parents use their power to place their children in higher
tracks even when these students did not qualify, undermining the pedagogical
rationale of tracking.
The disproportionate assignment of students of color from low socioeconomic backgrounds to lower tracks in a system where students supposedly
have input into their track levels appears to stem from a complex interplay
between institutional barriers and student desires to “belong.” Hidden institutional prerequisites such as teacher and counselor recommendations or prior
coursework and screening tests prevent students from moving up in the tracking hierarchy. School personnel may be more responsive to white or Asian
students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds who request to move up
than to poor, Latino, or black students who desire the same upward mobility.
At the same time, students’ self-conceptions of their likely fit with and success in higher-tracked courses and the availability of information about the
implications of course taking contribute to the artificiality of student choice
in course taking.
Moreover, critics of tracking question traditional notions of ability and intelligence, which underlie tracking assignments. Researchers have raised questions
about how educators can assign students to tracks when ability is not fixed, innate, unidimensional, or easily assessed. When should the assignment practice
start, and should “late bloomers” be relegated to inadequate educational opportunities in the low track? Research reporting that it is extremely rare for students
to move up in tracks once they are assigned to the lower tracks compounds the
impact of placement decisions.
These and other concerns about tracking led politicians and state education
agencies (National Governors Association, California and Massachusetts state
departments of education), educator groups (the National Education Association, National Council for the Social Studies, the National Council of Teachers
of English, the National Council of Mathematics Educators), as well as organizations working with youth (the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), the Children’s Defense Fund, the Carnegie Corporation Council
for Adolescent Development, and the College Board, among others) to publicly
condemn tracking in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Tracking

DEFENDERS OF TRACKING SAY PROBLEMS LIE
IN INEFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION
All researchers well versed in the tracking literature acknowledge that there
are serious problems with the current practice of tracking. Even one of the
most prominent defenders of tracking, Tom Loveless, author of the Tracking
Wars, acknowledges “one criticism . . . appears valid: low tracks often emphasize good behavior and menial skills, while high tracks offer preparation for
college. These differences in learning environments particularly depress the
academic achievement of poor and minority students, who are assigned disproportionately to low tracks” (p. 3). However, defenders of tracking argue that
these unintended effects are not inherently a problem with tracking. Instead,
they insist that they are a result of human error in its implementation. Defenders of tracking suggest that educators need to improve the quality of instruction
across tracks and implement fair placement practices to make tracking more
effective.
The idea of mending, not ending tracking was hotly debated in the late 1980s
and 1990s. Defenders argued that teachers need to deliver high-quality instruction to their low-tracked classes, and that they need to have high expectations
of all students. In addition, to make placement practices more equitable, some
suggested adhering to strict entrance requirements based on objective measures so that teachers can actually tailor instruction to particular ability levels. Finally, defenders of tracking argue that tracking placements need to be
revisited frequently and be made more flexible, allowing students to transfer
from low- to high-track classes. Schools should also offer support to students,
formerly in the lower tracks, in the form of remediation classes so that lack
of exposure to high-track content and skills does not preclude students from
successfully moving up in the tracking hierarchy. A primary argument from
this perspective is that the promise of tracking has not been realized because of
flaws in its implementation.
Critics of tracking argue that although strategies to improve tracking may
certainly improve the troubling effects of tracking, the hierarchical nature of
grouping practices always privileges one group of students over another, and
students internalize and meet teacher and peer expectations for student performance. In addition, these efforts to improve tracking practices have been tried
and, more often than not, have failed in typical public schools.
Researchers such as Loveless counter that intellectually stimulating lowtracked classrooms serve as an example of the possibilities of well-tracked
classes. Qualified teachers at Catholic schools targeted instruction to the ability
level of students in the lowest track, resulting in the elimination of the lowest
track by senior year as students moved up a level each year.
IS DETRACKING AN EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE?
Detracking, a movement to reduce ability grouping, attempts to address
these problems with tracking in a fundamentally different way than proposals
by defenders of tracking. Detracking organizes students heterogeneously, or in

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mixed-ability classes, so that all students have access to a high-level, collegebound curriculum with more equitable resources. For example, at Summit Prep
High School in Redwood City, California, all students enroll in a single, collegebound, rigorous course of study regardless of prior educational preparation
and skill level. In science, the four-year course of study translates to chemistry,
biology, physics and advance placement (AP) Earth Science for all students.
In the past 20 years, since educators have explored some of the possibilities
of detracking reform across the country, detracking has met with strong resistance, often from concerned parents of students who were previously in the
higher tracks, who fear that mixed-ability groups will hurt their child’s education. At the heart of opposition or skepticism about detracking are the following questions: What is the effect of detracking on student achievement? Are low
and high achievers hurt when they learn in detracked settings?
Research consistently demonstrates that low- and middle-achieving students
gain more in detracked environments compared to learning in homogeneous,
tracked classrooms. Why do these students gain more in heterogeneous classroom environments? Researchers speculate that when students formerly in the
low track are placed in an enriching classroom environment with higher expectations, more resources, and challenging curricula, student achievement improves.
What about high-achieving students? The research results here are less
conclusive. Some researchers, such as Robert Slavin, report that there is no
significant difference in achievement between high achievers learning in homogeneous or heterogeneous classes. Slavin conducted a meta-analysis of studies
that compared the achievement gains made by students in each ability group
(low, average, and high) in both ability-grouped and mixed-ability settings to
reach this conclusion. Since arguments in favor of ability grouping depend
on the assumption that ability grouping helps students learn, Slavin questions
the efficacy of homogeneous learning environments, in light of these findings.
On the other hand, some researchers, such as James A. Kulik, report that the
highest-achieving students enrolled in accelerated programs with a great deal of
curricular enrichment lose out when they learn in mixed-ability settings. Kulik
concluded that these students outperformed students of similar age and IQ enrolled in nonaccelerated programs by four to five months on a grade-equivalent
scale of a standardized achievement test. Thus, he cautions against eliminating
all ability grouping. In response to this argument, tracking critics countered that
high performance of students in accelerated classes is due to challenging curriculum, and not the homogeneous make-up of classes; students assigned to the
low track would similarly benefit from enriched classes.
Other research suggests that high-achieving students do not lose out, and
in fact also gain from learning in a detracked classroom. In 2006, researchers Carol C. Burris, Jay P. Heubert, and Henry M. Levin offered compelling
research evidence that detracking helps all students. In a six-year longitudinal
study of students in the Rockville Centre School District in New York, these
researchers compared the math achievement of three sixth grade cohorts who
learned math in a tracked setting with three sixth grade cohorts who learned

Tracking

in a detracked setting. They report a statistically significant increase in the percentages of students who took math courses beyond Algebra 2 in high school
for every subgroup: students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (32 to 67%),
black and Latino students (46 to 67%), initial low achievers (38 to 53%), average
achievers (81 to 91%), and high achievers (89 to 99%). The mean standardized
test scores of high-achieving students who learned in the detracked setting were
statistically indistinguishable from comparable students learning in the tracked
environment. In addition, more high-achieving students who learned in the detracked environment took the AP Calculus exam and scored higher than their
counterparts in the tracked environment. These results led these researchers to
conclude that high-achieving students are not only performing better in mathematics, but that more students have become high achievers.
Other research has documented that previously high-tracked students selfreported the benefit of learning with peers who were demographically different
from themselves in the detracked setting, as students from diverse backgrounds
shared critical interpretations of literature. The opportunities to debate different perspectives had been much more limited in their tracked and segregated
classes.
While the weight of the research literature, considered as a whole, suggests
that detracking does not hurt the academic achievement of high-achieving students, there are several factors that contribute to the divergent empirical findings
on the effect of detracking on academic achievement. Schools practice detracking differently, making it difficult to assess the effects of detracking on student
achievement across schools without specific attention to how detracking is defined across contexts. Some schools detrack only certain subject areas or grade
levels. Some allow students to choose the levels they want to take, some move
low-achieving students with potential into higher-ability tracks with support
classes, and other schools eliminate different levels entirely. Meta-analyses fail to
uncover the actual classroom practices that lead to success or failure, while case
studies are not generalizable to other settings by themselves. The lack of uniform
results involves a combination of issues related to definition and methodology.
Detracking, however, is not an easy undertaking and does not automatically
disrupt institutional patterns of inequality at the classroom level. Beth C. Rubin’s
work has illuminated the complex interactions between students’ perceptions
of their own and others’ academic competence (reflecting students’ racial and
class-based biases) and access to outside resources that reproduce inequality
even in detracked classroom settings with well-intentioned teachers who support detracking.
In evaluating the most compelling examples of detracking in the research literature, it is clear that successful detracking requires much more than just reducing ability grouping. Detracking involves educators who sincerely believe
that all students are capable of engaging in complex problem solving, not just
giving lip service to this notion. It means rethinking curricula to offer multiple
entry points to demanding high-level concepts so that all students have access to
college-bound curricula. It means spending long hours creating lesson plans that
do not just “teach to the middle,” as is erroneously thought of as characteristic of

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detracked classrooms, and that instead challenges all students, including formerly high-tracked students. For example, in Designing Groupwork, Elizabeth
Cohen describes a comprehensive approach to teaching heterogeneous classrooms, Complex Instruction, which involves drawing on students’ multiple intelligences, assigning competence to low-status students, and teaching students how
to work effectively in small groups. Instead of moving sequentially from basic
ideas to higher-order thinking skills in a set of hierarchically organized units,
Complex Instruction begins with an open-ended, complex, and “groupworthy”
problem, where students can practice skills through a meaningful context.
Successful detracking also often involves district- and school-level supports
such as back-up classes, class size reduction, and time for teachers to plan innovative curricula. In Constructing School Success, Hugh Mehan and his colleagues
describe an approach called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID),
an in-school program that provides college guidance and academic and social
support and teaches study skills such as note taking to previously low-tracked
students who have been placed in high-track classes.
Herein lies another point of controversy. Tracking proponents argue that the
resources needed to effectively implement detracking are unavailable and that
it would prove disastrous for students of all achievement levels to implement
detracking without appropriate resources. They argue that the lowest-achieving
students would become lost and that high-achieving students would become
bored in hastily detracked classroom settings, placing educational excellence
at risk. They state that scarce resources would be better spent fixing problems
of tracked settings. Detracking proponents counter that when detracking is
practiced well in a supportive context, it appears to hold the most promise to
help all students, including formerly high-tracked students, achieve. In addition, they argue that as the country could not wait to desegregate its schools in
1954, school reformers cannot wait for all of the stars to align perfectly, when
low-tracked classrooms are failing children so miserably, and efforts to fix tracking have been unsuccessful in typical public schools.
CONCLUSION
While much of the debate about tracking and detracking captured national
attention both in research and in popular media during the late 1980s and 1990s,
tracking remains a controversial, heated topic, especially as educators across the
country continue to pursue detracking school reform. The topic often strikes a
personal chord for those who engage in discussions about this topic, since they
remember their own or loved ones’ experiences in tracked settings and those unfamiliar with research on successfully detracked classrooms have difficulty imagining an alternative. Tracking is also an issue that has high stakes for students, as
track placement has far-reaching consequences beyond students’ K–12 schooling
experiences toward students’ future career and educational trajectories. The critique of tracking—that there is unequal access to quality education across tracks,
especially for students of color from low socioeconomic backgrounds—is also
difficult to swallow in a country founded on principles of equal opportunity.

Tracking

While the controversy over continued use of tracking in American schools remains, no one would argue that tracking students low, as currently practiced, is
problematic and must be addressed.
Further Reading: Cohen, E., 1994, Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous
classroom, New York: Teachers College Press; Loveless, T., 1998, The tracking and ability grouping debate, retrieved January 15, 2007, from http://www.edexcellence.net/
institute/publication/publication.cfm?id-127; Oakes, J., 2005, Keeping track: How schools
structure inequality (2nd ed.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Rubin, B. C., ed.,
2006, Special issue: Detracking and heterogeneous grouping, Theory into Practice, 45(1),
1–102; Wheelock, A., 1992, Crossing the tracks: How untracking can save America’s
schools, New York: New Press.

Maika Watanabe

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EDUCATION POLICY AND URBAN SCHOOL FAILURE:
AN HISTORICAL CRITIQUE
There is no large city in the United States that educates the majority of its students
to high levels. This has been the case since at least the middle of the twentieth
century and in some urban districts much longer. Tracing education policy at
federal, state, and local levels over the last century will help determine what this
history might reveal about why urban schools have performed so poorly. Why
have education policies targeted at urban education not been able to create highachieving schools?
Our historical investigation suggests that a narrow focus on schools and
schooling leaves education policy impotent in the face of deep structural economic and social forces that maintain urban poverty. Because education policy ignores these underlying causes of urban school failure it is not equipped
to combat them. We sketch a new paradigm for education policy that would
broaden its focus to include remediation of the policies responsible for poverty.
We intend that this larger purview would increase the capacity of policy to fundamentally improve urban schools.
FEDERAL AND STATE EDUCATION POLICY
Over the last century, federal policies have attempted various strategies to improve city education. The first federal policy aimed at working-class populations

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was the Smith Hughes Act of 1917, which provided funds to prepare students in
industrialized areas for working-class jobs through vocational programs. Variants
of this policy continued throughout the twentieth century, in the Vocational Education Acts of 1963, 1984, and 1998, in the School-to-Work Opportunity Act of
1994, and in later federal legislation in which it was subsumed.
Some federal education policies have attempted to improve urban education
by making funding available for increased curriculum materials and libraries,
early childhood classes, and various types of programmatic innovations in city
schools. Head Start in 1965, Follow Through in 1967, and, to a lesser extent, Title
IX banning sex discrimination in 1972, brought and instigated new curricula and
programs into city districts. These policies were intended to increase student access and/or achievement by upgrading curricular resources and experiences.
Other federal K–12 policies have aimed specifically at increasing educational
equity. The 1954 Brown decision, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
of 1965 (ESEA), the Bilingual Act in 1968, Title IX in 1972, and the Education
for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 opened doors to academic experiences for previously underserved K–12 students. These policies are generally
thought to have expanded urban students’ educational opportunities.
More recent federal education policies to improve schooling—with urban
students and teachers often a target—have called for increased academic standards and requirements, standardized testing, and professional development
of teachers. These policies were recommended by the influential report, A Nation at Risk, commissioned by President Ronald Reagan and published in 1983.
The emphasis on increased academic standards was part of an effort to support
business needs for well-prepared workers and employees. The report’s recommendations for higher standards and increased testing were introduced as policy in 1994 and 1996 as part of the Goals 2000 legislation. In 2001 these goals
were instantiated as federal mandates in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Privatization of education via nonpublic providers when K–12 schools fail is a
subtextual education policy in NCLB.
We note that federal education policies intended to improve urban schools did
not take aim at the economic arrangements and practices that themselves produced
the poverty in which city schools were embedded. Despite increases in educational opportunity, the effects of almost a century of educational policies on urban
school and student achievement have, by most accounts, been disappointing.
The first state policies regarding the education of America’s urban (and rural)
poor emerged earlier than federal ones. What has counted as state education
policy regarding poor students can be said to have begun with mid- to latenineteenth-century insertions into state constitutions of the right for all students
to a free, thorough, efficient, or useful education.
Following these insertions, and until the 1970s, however, most state education
policies did not focus specifically on urban education. State mandates typically
set regulations and requirements for school systems, teacher and administrator
preparation, and school funding (through property tax). During the 1970s and
1980s, lawsuits challenging state education funding systems brought increased
attention to city schools and districts. State urban education policy in these

Urban Education

decades involved various kinds of efforts, including school-based management
and basic skills mandates. In the 1990s, state policies attempted to align education standards and regulations with federal ones, mandated curriculum and
teacher licensure reform, and closely monitored urban districts. As the legal challenges to state systems have led to increased funding of city schools, states have
imposed stricter academic and graduation requirements, as well as multi-grade
and multi-subject standardized testing. Quasi-privatization policies supporting
charters and vouchers have also been a state strategy to attempt to improve the
education of urban children by offering them a choice of schools to attend.
LOCAL EDUCATION POLICY
Over the decades, federal and state policies codified an increasing number
of requirements that urban schools and districts must meet. Local governments
and educational bureaucracies have undertaken a plethora of programs to attempt to meet those guidelines. Local districts have also mounted school reform
projects in response to local social conditions and political pressure from parents and communities. Most local initiatives have been curricular, pedagogical,
and administrative.
During the Progressive Era, cities consolidated and professionalized their
school systems and personnel, introduced programs like the Gary Plan to
prepare students for the industrial experience, increased access to high school,
organized educational opportunities for immigrant parents, and sometimes
fed, bathed, and clothed poor children. During the decade of the Great Depression, most large cities retrenched and severely cut educational social service
and academic programs, as local tax receipts plummeted and banks that offered
loans demanded broad cuts in education. During the 1960s, many urban districts were weakened further as most remaining businesses and jobs moved to
the suburbs, decimating the urban property tax base.
Since the 1970s, in response to federal, judicial, and state mandates, urban
districts have bused students to meet racial integration guidelines, decentralized
authority to increase community participation, and created magnet schools to
attempt to attract middle-class parents. Other local policies that have been attempted to improve achievement are a multitude of reform programs or “school
improvement projects,” student retention services, privatization of educational
offerings, vouchers and magnets, mayoral control, small schools, and curriculum standardization and evaluation through testing. The social context of these
policies has included pressure to be accountable in the wake of increased funding, as well as community and corporate demands for better schools. None of
the local policies has focused on the poverty of families or neighborhoods.
CRITIQUE OF EDUCATION POLICY
One way to evaluate education policy over the last 100 years is to compare the
achievement of urban students at the beginning of the twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries. Although achievement is higher now, in that larger percentages

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of students remain in school past the elementary years than in 1900, the improvement is relative and illusory. That is, while in the early twentieth century
relatively few urban poor students went beyond fifth grade, the vast majority did
not require further education to find employment in industries that could lead
to middle-class income. Currently, relatively few urban poor students go past
ninth grade; the graduation rates in large comprehensive inner-city high schools
are abysmally low. In 14 such New York City schools, for example, only 10 to
20 percent of ninth graders in 1996 graduated four years later.
Indeed, despite the fact that low-income individuals desperately need a college degree to find decent employment, only seven percent obtain a bachelors
degree by age 26. So, in relation to the needs of low-income students, urban
districts fail their students with more egregious consequences now than in the
early twentieth century.
Why is this the case? As in any attempt to resolve complex issues, workable
solutions can only be generated by an understanding of underlying causes. In
Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and a New Social Movement,
Anyon examines underlying causes of the failure of urban schools. She finds that
despite stated intentions, federal and metropolitan policies and arrangements
generally restrict opportunities available to city residents and neighborhoods.
She shows how job, wage, housing, and transportation policies maintain minority poverty in urban neighborhoods and thereby create environments that
overwhelm the potential of educational policy to create systemic, sustained improvements in the schools. For example, policies such as minimum wage statutes that yield full-time pay below the poverty level, and affordable housing and
transportation policies that segregate low-income workers of color in urban
areas but industrial and other job development in far-flung suburbs where public transit routes do not reach all maintain urban joblessness, low wages, and
poverty populations.
In order to solve the systemic problems of urban education, then, Anyon argues in the book that we need not only better schools, but the reform of these
public policies. Rules and regulations regarding teaching, curriculum, and assessment certainly are important; but policies to eliminate poverty-wage work
and housing segregation (for example) should be part of the educational policy
panoply as well—for these have consequences for urban education at least as
profound as curriculum, pedagogy, and testing.
POLICIES THAT URBAN STUDENTS NEED
As education policymakers and practitioners, we can acknowledge and act on
this power of urban poverty, low-wage work, and housing segregation to dwarf
most curricular, pedagogical, and other educational reforms. The effects of macroeconomic policies continually trump the effects of education policies.
In a new paradigm of education policy that would address these issues,
education policies should take on the larger problems: Education funding reform would include the companion need for financing of neighborhood jobs
and decent wages. New small schools would be created as an important part

Urban Education

of coordinated efforts at neighborhood revitalization for low-income residents.
Vocational offerings in high school would link to living-wage campaigns and
employers who support them. College graduation would be understood as a
continuation of government’s financial responsibility for public education. And
lawsuits to racially integrate districts would acknowledge housing segregation as
fundamental and target legal challenges appropriately.
Policies that set the standards schools must meet would identify the money,
materials, teachers, courses, and neighborhood needs that must be filled in
order to provide opportunities to learn at high levels. Educational accountability
would be conceived as a public undertaking, centrally involving families, communities, and students, in consultation with district and government officials.
In this approach to urban school reform, “policy alignment” would not refer
to the fit between education mandates issued by various levels of government and
bureaucracy. The fit would be between neighborhood, family, and student needs,
and the potential of education policies to contribute to their fulfillment.
Education policy can acknowledge the underlying causes of poor schooling
in urban areas, and educators can join forces with those working to change the
conditions that prevent urban school reform from taking root and having positive economic consequences for students’ life trajectories. We can begin by enlarging our vision of what we intend by “education policy. ”
Further Reading: Anyon, J., 1997, Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational
reform, New York: Teachers College Press; Anyon, J., 2005, Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement, New York: Routledge; Anyon, J., 2005,
What counts as educational policy? Notes toward a new paradigm, Harvard Educational
Review, 75(1), Spring, 65–88; Ayres, L., 1909, Laggards in our schools: A study of retardation and elimination in city school systems, New York: Russell Sage; Education Trust,
2001, The funding gap: Low-income and minority students receive fewer dollars, Washington, DC: Author; Greene, J., November 2001, High school graduation rates in the
United States, Washington, DC: Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Manhattan Institute; Mishel, L., J. Bernstein, & J. Schmitt, 2001, The state of working America:
2000/2001, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Jean Anyon and Liza Pappas

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YOUTH ACTIVISM
Responding to the many ways in which elite private powers have been successful
in using the state to protect corporate interests and dismantle many of the rights
and protections achieved internationally by grassroots activists, organized labor,
and social democracies, vast multi-interest coalitions have sprung up around
the world that include human rights, environmental, faith, indigenous, and consumer groups, trade unionists, feminists, anti-sweatshop activists, and anti-war
protestors.
Of the 6.3 billion people that currently live on this planet, almost half of them
are under the age of 25. Half the world’s 1 billion poor are children. Victims of
the residue of a brutal history of colonial rule, sustained racism and patriarchy,
and now the imperial grasp and draconian mandates of deregulation and structural adjustment, 11 million of these children die before the age of 5 annually
because of malnutrition, dirty water—or a lack thereof, disease, and poor housing. Hundreds of millions of youth around the world are not getting a formal
education and millions are trapped in the sex trade and sweatshops or caught
up in military conflicts where they are often forced into fighting someone else’s
economic and ideological wars.
In every country on every continent, young people have always played a critical role in struggles for social justice. In the last 500 years alone—certainly since
the advent of the university in the Middle Ages, societies have witnessed social transformation on a grand scale mobilized, or at least in part energized, by
young people.
With the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child on November 20, 1989, the United Nations took the first steps to institutionally realize the
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active participation of youth in global affairs. Article 12 of the Convention states
that “Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own
views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the
views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.” Article 15 states, “Parties recognize the rights of the child to
freedom of association and to freedom of peaceful assembly.”
In order to embrace youth activism, it is essential to move beyond the simplistic notion that children inhabit a land of innocence. From birth on, as children
are being initiated into values and beliefs—what it means to be an integrated
member of a particular group—they come to occupy an inherently ideological
and thus political space, whether or not they are aware of it. It is important to
ask: What kinds of cultural practices are they being apprenticed into, what notions of youth are they subjected to, and what effects can young people have on
such processes?
In order to approach these questions it is essential to look at society’s main
socializing agencies, such as the family, houses of faith, community and business
organizations, government, the media, and schools, and how they can encourage youth to have an impact on these institutions and consequently on the rest
of society.
Given that public schools in any democracy are always intended to be agencies of civic mindedness and responsibility, and that the well-being of young
people is the pretext for almost every political movement on the planet, these
institutions should be used to encourage youth to recognize their power to act
upon the world via critical awareness. Unfortunately, contemporary practices
are much to the contrary. Youth, especially the poor and racially subordinated,
are far too often left out of drafting history, describing social realities, and debating social policies and practices. In fact, conservatives in the United States have
worked relentlessly to dismantle participatory democratic spaces that nurture
their potential to come to voice. Pertaining to public schools, Noam Chomsky
(1999) elaborates:
It starts in kindergarten: The school system tries to repress independence; it tries to teach obedience. Kids and other people are not induced
to challenge and question, but the contrary. If you start questioning,
you’re a behavior problem or something like that; you’ve got to be disciplined. You’re supposed to repeat, obey, follow orders. (p. 117)
Even in the well-intentioned calls to “empower” and “give voice” to students,
young people are mostly heard about and rarely from. What many educators fail
to realize is that even the most progressive and concerned pedagogue cannot
empower kids. On the contrary, it is both objectifying and patronizing to assume that teachers can simply tap any given child on the shoulder with a magical
epistemological wand, abstracted from the critical process of active engagement
and meaning making. This critique also applies to the notion of “giving voice.” It
is presumptuous to claim to possess the ability to bequeath the power of expression. Since all people already have voices—often critical ones at that, the real
challenge is for educators to be willing to create dialogical spaces where all lived

Youth Activism |

experiences and world views can be heard. In other words, will teachers be able
and willing to create the necessary self-empowering conditions that allow youth
of all walks of life to explore, theorize, reveal, and act upon the truths behind the
worlds that they inhabit?
There are certainly plenty of reasons for young people to work for social
change in the United States, a country that continues to have the highest child
poverty rate among major industrialized nations. Nationally, one in five children
grows up poor; 9.2 million children currently lack health insurance; 3.9 million
people are homeless (a number projected to increase 5% each year) and 1.3 million (or 39%) of them are children. The nation ranks 17th of all industrialized
countries in efforts to eradicate poverty among the young, and 23rd in infant
mortality. In addition to these economic hardships, young people are experiencing a great deal of discrimination along the lines of race, language, disability,
religion, gender, and sexuality.
The government’s response to the growing problems that youth in this country face is the implementation of a standardized curriculum, high-stakes testing,
accountability schemes, English-only mandates, strict zero-tolerance policies,
and draconian budget cuts. In this era of “No Child Left Behind”—conversely
referred to as “the war against the young”—6 million children have thus far been
left in the wake. More than six million students are being drugged into conformity and complacency in schools in the name of Attention Deficit Disorder,
and public schools are now largely controlled by private interests such as pharmaceutical, publishing, and food companies, for-profit education management
organizations, and corporate lobbyists.
In order to combat this long list of abuses of power, and continue to work
toward youth liberation as part of the formal curriculum, educators should
help mobilize students into organized political bodies (critical communities
of struggle) so that they are able to voice their concerns and realize their own
goals. Such political participation requires praxis—the ongoing relationship between theory and practice and reflection and action. Educators need to work to
mentor students into critical inquiry and theory. Not to be confused with what
is traditionally thought of as the “higher order thinking skills,” critical in this
sense implies being able to understand, analyze, pose questions, and affect the
sociopolitical and economic realities that shape people’s lives. Developing critical consciousness is not an exercise to get people to think in a certain way, but
rather it is intended to get them to think more deeply about the issues and relations of power that affect them.
In this sense, theory embodies how people interpret, analyze, and make generalizations about why the world works the way that it does. It is the why and how
of what has been happening around us, and not simply a focus on what is occurring and how to effectively respond. In other words, in order to fight injustice,
one needs to theorize why such social formations exist rather than be uncritically or even blindly mobilized by someone else’s reading of the world. Within
any participatory mode of activism, it is crucial to formulate more inclusive and
effective political subjects and democratizing networks that are able to analyze
political moments and consequently develop critical responses. Theorizing is

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thus also the ability to actively engage bodies of knowledge and human practices
for the logics and sociohistorical conditions that inform them, so that they can
be reworked. It encourages individuals to evaluate, based on their own experiences, expertise, and insight, the strengths and weaknesses of any conceptual
and practical movement and recontextualize and reinvent its possibilities for
one’s own predicaments. As an integral part of any political project, theorizing presents a constant challenge to imagine and materialize alternative political
spaces and identities and more just and equitable economic, social, and cultural
relations. It makes possible consciousness raising, coalition building, resistance,
activism, and structural change.
As part of their apprenticeship into theorizing, students could gain a great
deal of insight from the study and implementation of social movement and action research. Social movement research documents the power of movements
and their impact on people, public discourse, policy, institutions, and governments. It looks at the ways in which activists understand and make use of the
cracks of agency made possible by shifting economic, political, and cultural relations, and how organizations and networks develop, mobilize, and change.
Action research has always had a political and transformative agenda explicitly woven into its theoretical and empirical fabric. Advocates of this exploratory
model embrace the idea of doing research with others rather than on them in an
effort to understand and consequently change any given situation.
In such undemocratic times, it is not surprising that such theoretical and empirical practices are often discouraged.
The youth of the world can certainly be looked to as a democratizing force
capable of dismantling the structured inequalities in societies. It is for this very
reason that conservatives and capitalists fear them so and vigilantly work to
contain and control them. Conservative educators in the United States—like
Diane Ravitch, Lynne Cheney, and William Bennett—omnipresent spokespersons for the Republican Party—have argued and continue to argue that attempts
to reveal the underlying values, interests, and power relationships that structure
educational and other social policies and practices have corrupted the academic
environment. Such efforts to depoliticize the public’s understanding of social
institutions, especially schools, in the name of neutrality are obviously a reactionary ploy to maintain the status quo.
In other words, this assault on theorizing is in part connected to ways in
which public schools and the university have been used as an indoctrinating
force to deskill students by working to mold them into uncritical receivers and
consumers of existing theory, but rarely viewing them as active and creative participants in the generative process of understanding. This is especially evident as
globally public schools and the academy are falling prey to the kinds of corporate logic that package thought as a commodity for exchange in the marketplace
rather than inspiring the kinds of inquiry that probe that very logic and use
of public energy and space. Within these corporate models of public education
the production of technicians in all disciplines (areas of study that are artificially disconnected from one another) comes at the expense of transdisciplinary
thinkers and producers of social knowledge about the world. As students of all

Youth Activism |

levels are distracted or lured away from critically reading historical and existing
social formations, especially those that maintain abuses of power, they often become the newest wave of exploited labor power and reproducers—whether they
are conscious of it or not—of oppressive social practices. It is precisely this lack
of inquiry, analysis, and agency that a critical and activist-based philosophy of
learning and teaching should work to reverse.
In this spirit, as part of their formal educational experience, students should
be exposed to examples of activist efforts, intercultural and intergenerational
cooperation, and international solidarity. The curriculum could include the exploration and analysis of the labor movement in the United States, and youth
participation therein, investigating important events like the Newsboy Strike
in 1899, the 1903 “Children’s Crusade,” and the development of the American
Youth Congress in the 1930s. Students could also examine efforts to desegregate schools in the 1950s and the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee. They could find a great deal of inspiration in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the college campus activism that was mobilized by groups
such as Students for a Democratic Society. There are also lessons to be learned
from government efforts to mobilize youth in public policy such as the National
Commission on Resources for Youth in the 1970s.
Students should be apprenticed into conducting archival research so as to be
able to tap into this vast history. It is important to note that such research needs
to go beyond an introduction to the primary personalities that led many of these
movements, and move into the world of everyday people struggling for change.
The intent of exploring the history of activism is not to generate nostalgia
in these conservative times, nor does it offer up a recipe book to be followed to
the last grain of salt; rather, it is a way to inspire the critical appropriation and
reinvention of revolution as these struggles offer a theoretical, empirical, and
practical springboard for contemporary efforts.
Not only do students readily express an interest in their own lives and what
they are deeply connected to, but they also generate a great deal of interest in
education and the state of society if allowed to connect in substantive and politically influential ways to the very world around them. When given the opportunity to speak, youth are more than willing and able—as they have always
been—to analyze social injustice and come up with solutions to such problems.
Youth movements in the past two decades provide a great deal of evidence of
this. Students of all ages and grade levels have taken up such causes as education
reform, immigrant rights, AIDS awareness, environmental protection, animal
rights, antiwar activism, civil liberties, and gay, disability, and women’s rights.
They have battled against sweatshop labor, racism, police brutality, poverty, and
the rise in incarceration. There have been a plethora of recent protests against
discriminatory and abusive social and educational policies such as in California against the passage of Propositions 187, 209, and 21 led by organizations
like the Critical Resistance Youth Force and Youth Organizing Communities. In
fact, there is a vast array of organizations that merit investigation, such as Youth
on Board, the Youth Activism Project, the Freechild Project, and the National
Youth Rights Association.

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Recognizing the media as a major pedagogical force that teaches much in
the way that public schools do, youth have also been deeply involved in the
media reform movement to educate the general population about the political
economy of the mass media—that is, ownership and regulation of this industry;
and to challenge the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress to democratize the airwaves and develop new technologies and to diversify
representations that reflect the diverse realities of people in the United States.
A key component of any activist effort should be to encourage the widespread
development of critical media literacy, that is, the ability to read the values and
beliefs embedded in the knowledge that is circulated throughout society so as to
be able to defend ourselves from propaganda and participate in its eradication.
Organizations like Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME), the Media
Education Foundation, and Free Speech have been working diligently to engage
youth in this fight.
If progressive educators and community activists wish to continue to do the
work of informing and mobilizing the public and creating civic-minded students who are prepared to actively participate in a vibrant public sphere, then
students should be exposed to how the art of organizing is undergoing radical
changes as a result of the ways that activists have been making effective use of
new interactive technologies. Helping individuals and organizations mobilize
is a wireless, multimedia palette that includes notebook computers, personal
digital assistant (PDA) devices, cell phones (with digital cameras built in), text
messaging, pagers, global positioning systems (GPS), and digital camcorders.
These technologies facilitate organizing and coordinating efforts. Along with
these tools, and often in connection to them, the Internet has ushered in a revolution in cultural activism. Unlike the activists of yesteryear who accomplished
so much with so little, the new hybrid “smart mobs” have access to e-mail, blogs,
podcasts, computer faxes, listservs, hyperlinks, chat rooms, and downloadable
street posters with tear-off instructions.
These and other cyber-tools are all used for educating the public on pertinent
issues, building and mobilizing communities, coordinating events locally, nationally, and internationally, and influencing policy initiatives both locally and
globally. They can also be used to transcend the language divide with software
that instantly translates messages. Making effective use of Webcasting, news
outlets offer access to Internet radio and video feeds, information and photo
archives, and frequently updated news reports. There is an abundance of hyperorganization Web sites that keep the public up to date on current events, that
support real-life mobilization, and that connect activists to other like-minded
organizations through hyperlinks. And there is an endless stream of electronic
information that is readily available through e-journals, online zines, and infopages. Perhaps the most revolutionary contribution that these technologies have
made is that they have radically advanced social networking. The Internet allows
people, with relative facility, to cross geographical, political, and professional
boundaries. As cyberculture helps groups transcend traditional borders, develop
cross-interest coalitions, and forge collaborative knowledge, it simultaneously
opens the door to more inclusive and effective political struggle.

Youth Activism |

In this era of globalization, in which no society is entirely isolated and untouched
by neoliberal economic policies and practices, and any local action has a global
impact and vice versa, any constructive cross-disciplinary, multidimensional
approach to youth activism has to have an international component. Students in
the United States need to be exposed to the global justice movement’s innovative
efforts to work simultaneously through a politics of location (i.e., area-specific
conditions, traditions, and economic interests) and a politics of global unity. The
goal has been and should continue to be to search out new forms of democratic
and revolutionary identification, to recognize differences and commonalities
within struggles for economic and social justice, and to work through dialogue
and action to sustain what has become a “movement of many movements.” In
this way, youth in the United States can more effectively walk on to the political
stage in solidarity with other young people from around the world.
Further Reading: Boren, M. E., 2001, Student resistance, New York: Routledge; Chomsky, N., 1999, Demystifying democracy: A dialogue with Noam Chomsky, in Pepi
Leistyna, ed., Presence of mind: Education and the politics of deception, Boulder, CO: Westview; Jenkins, H., ed., 1998, Children’s culture reader, New York: New York University
Press; Movement Strategy Center, 2005, Bringing it together: Uniting youth organizing,
development and services for long-term sustainability, Oakland, CA: Movement Strategy
Center; Noguera, P., J. Cammarota, & S. Ginwright, eds., 2006, Beyond resistance! Youth
activism and community change: New democratic possibilities for practice and policy for
America’s youth, New York: Routledge; Rhodes, R., 2000, Freedom’s web: Student activism in an age of cultural diversity, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Sherrod, L. R., C. A. Flanagan, R. Kassimir, & A. K. Syvertsen, eds., 2005, Youth activism:
An international encyclopedia (2 vols.), Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Yates, M., & J.
Youniss, eds., 1998, Roots of civic identity: International perspectives on community service and activism in youth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pepi Leistyna

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Editorial Advisory Board
David Berliner, Arizona State University
Gerald Bracey, independent education consultant
William Cala, Fairport Central School District, NY
Elizabeth Graue, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Perry Marker, Sonoma State University
Deborah Meier, New York University & Mission Hill School
H. Richard Milner, Vanderbilt University
Valerie Ooka Pang, San Diego State University
Kenneth Teitelbaum, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Mickey Vanderwerker, parent, Bedford, VA

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
Jean Anyon is author of Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and
a New Social Movement and Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Education. Her articles on cities, race, social class, and schools have been reprinted
in more than 40 edited collections and translated into several languages. She
teaches education policy in the doctoral program in urban education at the City
University of New York Graduate Center.
Cheryl Blalock Aspy received BS and MEd degrees from Texas Woman’s University and a PhD in Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation from the University of Maryland. She is a fourth-generation native of Quitman, Texas, and was
named a 1999 Distinguished Alumnae Award Recipient of Texas Woman’s University. Aspy is a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
at the University of Oklahoma where she teaches behavioral medicine to secondyear family medicine residents and studies the relationship between youth assets
and youth risk behaviors. She is the author or coauthor of six books, more than
65 peer-reviewed articles, numerous book chapters and monographs, more than
50 national and international presentations and workshops, and grants totaling more than $9 million. She has one child, Mary Christine, who is a first-year
medical student at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine.
James A. Beane is senior scholar at the Center for Powerful Education in Madison, Wisconsin. Previously he was a professor in interdisciplinary studies in
curriculum at National-Louis University. His most recent books include A Reason to Teach (Heinemann) and Democratic Schools (Heinemann, coedited with
Michael W. Apple).

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Michael L. Bentley retired from the faculty of teacher education of the University
of Tennessee, Knoxville. He earned degrees in biology and science education at
King’s College, Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University
of Virginia. His 37-year career included teaching science and education at all
levels as well as work in science museum education, school administration, and
curriculum supervision. He has also directed many funded projects and is the
author of numerous books and journal articles. Dr. Bentley has been instrumental in the founding of two schools and currently serves as board chair for Community High School, Roanoke, Virginia. He continues to teach part time and
write. His latest book is Teaching Constructivist Science, K–8: Nurturing Natural
Investigators in the Standards-Based Classroom.
Marvin J. Berlowitz is a professor in the College of Education at the University
of Cincinnati, where he is also the director of the Urban Center for Peace Education and Research.
Ilene R. Berson is an associate professor in the Department of Childhood Education at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the prevention
and intervention services for young children at risk for behavioral and mental health challenges associated with child maltreatment and other traumatic
events. She leads reform initiatives linking early childhood, child welfare, and
healthcare systems. She has presented her research worldwide and has authored
numerous published works. She has co-edited the Research in Global Child
Advocacy book series.
Michael J. Berson is a professor of social science education at the University
of South Florida. He conducts research on global child advocacy and technology in social studies education, and he is a cofounder of the American
Educational Research Association Special Interest Group Research in Global
Child Advocacy. He has extensively published books, chapters, and journal
articles and has presented worldwide on children’s rights and well-being in a
digital age.
Gerald W. Bracey is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and an associate of the High/
Scope Educational Research Foundation, Ypsilanti, Michigan. For the last 20
years, he has written a “Research” column for the educational monthly Phi Delta
Kappan, summarizing research that might be of interest to practitioners. His
most recent books are On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public
Schools: The Folly of Current Educational Policy, and Setting the Record Straight:
Responses to Misconceptions about American Public Education. He was chosen
“Educator of the Year” by the Horace Mann Association in 2002, awarded the
Interpretive Scholarship Award by the American Educational Research Association in 2003, and awarded the John Dewey Award from the Vermont Association for the Study of Education in 2003.
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the American Association for the

Contributor Biographies | 703

Advancement of Science, which defends the teaching of evolution in the public
schools. His articles on creationism and evolution have appeared in such publications as Academe, The American Biology Teacher, BioScience, Free Inquiry,
Geotimes, and USA Today. With Eugenie C. Scott, he is the editor of Not in Our
Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.
Christopher P. Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the intersection of education policy, curriculum, and instruction;
standards-based accountability reform; and early childhood/early elementary
education.
Clint E. Bruess is chair of the Department of Education at Birmingham-Southern
College in Birmingham, Alabama. He is also dean emeritus of the School of Education and professor emeritus of health education at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham. He has coauthored more than 15 textbooks in the areas of sexuality education, human sexuality, personal health, and school health programs.
In addition, he has published numerous articles in professional journals and
served in elected and appointed positions for the American School Health Association (also a fellow), the American Association for Health Education (also a
fellow), and the Society of Public Health Educators.
David L. Brunsma is associate professor of sociology at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on
school uniform policies. His research has provided the empirical antidote to the
anecdotes that have driven the school uniform movement in the United States,
logging in over 200 interviews with national and international media outlets.
Aside from school uniforms, his other research focuses on critical sociological
inquiries into race, racism, racial identities, epistemologies, and sociologies of
knowledge. He is the father of three public school students.
JoLynn V. Carney PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Counseling Education, Counseling Psychology, and Rehabilitation Services at the Pennsylvania State University. She is a licensed professional clinical counselor with
experience in community mental health agencies, private practice, and schools.
Her experience has included expanding educational, cultural, and personal opportunities for underserved youth with counselors-in-training, teachers, school
staff, and community members. The largest portion of her research and publishing has focused on intervention and prevention aspects of youth violence, peeron-peer abuse, and adolescent suicide. Her scholarly work has also included
wellness programming and counseling techniques. Her current research focus
is on the psychophysiological influence and impact of peer abuse. She currently
serves on the editorial board of two nationally recognized counseling journals,
publishes, and does local, regional, and national trainings and workshops in her
areas of expertise.
Kathy J. Carter is professor of education in the Department of Teaching and
Teacher Education at the University of Arizona. Her research centers around

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classroom processes and instruction, classroom management, teacher education
pedagogy, and learning to teach. Presently her research involves narrative understandings of teaching as they are acquired through well-remembered events
in classroom life, improvisational and dramatic theatre, and case methods in
teaching.
Deborah Ceglowski is an associate professor in child and family development
in the Department of Special Education and Child Development at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include early childhood policy and qualitative research methodology. She has recently completed a
federally funded study about children’s and parents’ perceptions of child care.
Janet Ceglowski is a professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College. Her area of
expertise is international economics.
Joanne Chesley is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina
Greensboro. Her undergraduate work in clothing and textiles was done at Virginia State University, with cooperative education experiences at the Department of Agriculture in Knoxville, Tennessee. She taught in the Richmond public
schools until 1980 when she moved to North Carolina. She has been an assistant principal, principal, and central office administrator. She has also produced
and hosted local television broadcasts for school systems. Her graduate work
includes degrees in curriculum and instruction from University of North Carolina Charlotte and the Ed.D. in educational leadership from University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill. Her research areas are culturally relevant leadership and
principals’ intentionality. She coordinates the Masters in School Administration
program at University of North Carolina Greensboro.
George W. Chilcoat taught for 14 years as a high school teacher and 22 years
as a university professor. He is currently professor emeritus at Brigham Young
University. Much of his research and writings have been about progressive ideas
in social studies education and topics in curriculum history, especially about
educational programs that came out of the Civil Rights movement.
Elisabeth S. Clemens is associate professor of sociology at the University of
Chicago. Building on organizational theory and political sociology, her research
has addressed the role of social movements and voluntary organizations in processes of institutional change. Her first book, The People’s Lobby: Organizational
Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925
received the Max Weber Award for organizational sociology and the award for
the best book in political sociology. She is also coeditor of Private Action and
the Public Good and Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology. Her
current research addresses the relations between formal state institutions and
private organizations in American political development.
Ann Cooper is the director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School
District and is the former executive chef and director of wellness and nutrition of
the Ross School in East Hampton, New York. At the Ross School, she cultivated
an innovative food service program serving over 1,300 regional, organic, seasonal,

Contributor Biographies | 705

and sustainable meals each day. She is the author of the recently released book
In Mother’s Kitchen: Celebrated Women Chefs Share Beloved Family Recipes, and
Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children, as well as Bitter Harvest: A Chef ’s Perspective on the Hidden Dangers in the Foods We Eat and What
You Can Do about It and A Woman’s Place Is in the Kitchen: The Evolution of
Women Chefs. The former executive chef of the Putney Inn in Vermont, she is a
graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and was one of the first 50 women
to be certified as an executive chef by the educational arm of the American Culinary Federation.
Harris Cooper is professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of
the Program in Education at Duke University. In addition to studying homework, he studies other topics involving how out-of-school time and school-time
configurations influence academic achievement. These include summer school,
modified school calendars, and after-school programs. He also contributes to
the literature on methods of research synthesis and meta-analysis. He is the author of Synthesizing Research: A Guide for Literature Reviews and coeditor of The
Handbook of Research Synthesis.
Ronald G. Corwin is a professor emeritus of sociology at Ohio State University, has also taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, and has served
as director of basic research in the U.S. Department of Education. He has been
a vice president of the American Educational Research Association and has
held elected positions in the American Sociological Research Association. Author or coauthor of a dozen books and two dozen contributed chapters, he also
edited a series of books on educational research. His widely cited work has appeared in the sociological journals, including Sociology of Education, for which
he served as an associate editor. He was voted one of five individuals who have
made the greatest contributions to the growth and development of the sociology of education and one of the top contributors to the field of educational
administration. For over a decade, he has been following the school choice
movement and previously has published a dozen monographs and articles on
the topic.
Bárbara C. Cruz is professor of secondary education at the University of South
Florida in Tampa. Her research and teaching interests include global and multicultural perspectives in education, the representation of ethnic minorities in
school curricula and textbooks, and the teaching of Latin America and the Caribbean. She has developed global and multicultural curricula and a number of
scholarly articles, and published a number of young adult biographies (e.g., on
Frida Kahlo, Raúl Juliá, and Alvin Ailey). She is also the author of Multiethnic
Teens and Cultural Identity and César Chávez: A Voice for Farmworkers, both
winners of the Carter G. Woodson Book Award. In addition to presentations at
numerous professional conferences, she is a frequent presenter at schools, community organizations, and Hispanic Heritage celebrations.
George E. DeBoer is deputy director for Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also served as a program director at

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Contributor Biographies

the National Science Foundation and professor of educational studies at Colgate
University. He is the author of A History of Ideas in Science Education: Implications for Practice as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. His
primary scholarly interests include clarifying the goals of the science curriculum, researching the history of science education, and investigating ways to effectively assess student understanding in science. He holds a PhD in science
education from Northwestern University, an MAT in biochemistry and science
education from the University of Iowa, and a BA in biology from Hope College.
He is a member and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science.
Pamela A. Fenning is the director of the school psychology specialist and doctoral training programs at Loyola University Chicago. She is a licensed clinical
psychologist as well as a certified school psychologist in Illinois. She has significant clinical experience with children and adolescents in therapeutic schools
and residential settings, many of whom are victims of trauma and abuse. She
regularly teaches courses in crisis prevention and intervention in schools. Currently, she is conducting research on the exclusionary impact of school discipline
policies, particularly for students who are victimized and the most disenfranchised. She also studies effective ways of implementing Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports, particularly at the high school level.
Stephen C. Fleury is a professor of education at Le Moyne College in Syracuse,
New York. He has a PhD in social studies education from Syracuse University,
and a career involving middle and alternative high school teaching, and college
teaching and administration. He is currently a school board member for a rural
district, and codirector of the Syracuse Center for Urban Education. Fleury has
authored or coauthored numerous articles and book chapters on education for
national and international venues.
Donna Y. Ford PhD is Professor of Education and Human Development at
Vanderbilt University. She teaches in the Department of Special Education and
conducts research primarily in gifted education and multicultural/urban education. Specifically, her work focuses on recruiting and retaining culturally diverse
students in gifted education, multicultural and urban education, minority student achievement and underachievement, and family involvement. She consults
with school districts and educational organizations in the areas of gifted education and multicultural/urban education. She is the author of Reversing Underachievement among Gifted Black Students and coauthor of Multicultural Gifted
Education and In Search of the Dream: Designing Schools and Classrooms That
Work for High Potential Students from Diverse Cultural Backgrounds, and Teaching Culturally Diverse Gifted Students.
Four Arrows, aka Don Trent Jacobs, has doctorates in health psychology
and in curriculum and instruction. He is former dean of education at Oglala
Lakota College, and currently a professor in the College of Educational Leadership and Change at Fielding Graduate University and a professor in the College
of Education at Northern Arizona University. He is the author of a number of

Contributor Biographies | 707

books, chapters, and articles that relate to the indigenous world view and critical
pedagogy, including his most recent edited volume from the University of Texas
Press, Unlearning the Language of Conquest. He can be reached via his Web site
at www.teachingvirtues.net.
Erica Frankenberg is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and is a research assistant at the Civil Rights Project at
Harvard University. She received her AB, cum laude, from Dartmouth College
and MEd in educational policy from Harvard. Recent publications include “The
Impact of School Segregation on Residential Housing Patterns: Mobile, AL and
Charlotte, NC,” in School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? She has authored a report on the racial segregation of public school teachers and is also coauthor of a series of reports on school desegregation trends. Recently, she helped
coordinate and write a social science statement filed with the Supreme Court
regarding the benefits of integrated schools. She is the coeditor of Lessons in Integration: Realizing the Promise of Racial Diversity in America’s Schools.
Melissa Freeman is an assistant professor in the Qualitative Research Program
in the College of Education at the University of Georgia. Her research interests
include transformational and relational theories and methodologies in qualitative research and evaluation, parental perceptions of public schooling, and philosophical hermeneutics.
David Gabbard grew up in a working-class family who had migrated to southwestern Ohio from rural Appalachia during the Great Depression. His politicization occurred while serving in the U.S. Army during the Reagan administration. It
was at this time that he began questioning the professed benevolence of governments and their allied institutions, particularly schools. He went on to complete
his doctoral studies in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Cincinnati. He later completed post-doctoral studies in the Science,
Society, and Technology Program at the Pennsylvania State University where he
met Ivan Illich, whose influence left an immeasurable impact on his thinking.
Ronald Gallimore is chief scientist at the LessonLab Research Institute and distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles. While
a research psychologist at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, he directed (with
Alan Howard) the Hawaiian Community Research Project (1966–1972), and
founded and directed (with Roland Tharp) the Kamehameha Elementary Education Project and lab school (1969–1980). He also directed a longitudinal study of
Latino/a students and families (1988–2005) with Leslie Reese and Claude Goldenberg. Since 1983, in collaboration with Claude Goldenberg and Bill Saunders,
he has conducted numerous instructional improvement studies. Publications
include Na Makamaha o Nanakuli; Culture, Behavior, and Education; Rousing
Minds to Life; and You Haven’t Taught until They Have Learned. Awards include
the Grawemeyer Award and a University of California Presidential Award. Currently, he teaches at the University of California Los Angeles and researches the
improvement of teaching at the LessonLab Research Institute. His Web page is
ronaldg.bol.ucla.edu/.

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Contributor Biographies

William Gaudelli is associate professor of social studies and education at
Teachers College Columbia University. His research areas include global education and teacher development. He received a doctorate from Rutgers University
in 2000 and has worked as a teacher educator for eight years following a decade
of high school teaching. He employs a range of qualitative research methodologies, including ethnography, focus group, and phenomenology. He is a frequent
presenter at professional development meetings, an invited speaker at various
national conferences, and has guest lectured in the Netherlands. He has published many scholarly articles and World Class: Teaching and Learning in Global
Times, a book on global education.
Denise Gelberg is a visiting fellow at Cornell University. Her current research
focuses on what role business could play in improving the lives, as well as the educational prospects, of children who live at or near the poverty level. She taught
for 30 years in elementary schools in central New York State. She interrupted
her teaching career to earn a doctorate in labor relations in education from Cornell University in 1993. She is on the board of directors of the Teacher Education
Accreditation Council (TEAC) and is the author of The “Business” of Reforming
American Schools.
John R. Gerdy, a former All-American and professional basketball player,
is author of Air Ball: American Education’s Failed Experiment with Elite Athletics. He teaches as a visiting professor in sports administration at Ohio
University. He is a legislative assistant for the National Collegiate Athletic Association and he served as an associate commissioner for the Southeastern
Conference.
Susan Gerofsky is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum
Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She brings
experience in a number of fields to bear in an innovative and interdisciplinary
approach to curriculum theory and mathematics education, including a background in mathematics and linguistics, teaching experience in alternative high
schools and adult education, and work in film and television production. Her
recent book, A Man Left Albuquerque Heading East: Word Problems As Genre in
Mathematics Education, was published as part of the eXtreme Teaching: Rigorous
Texts for Troubled Times series by Peter Lang in 2004.
Karen Bogard Givvin is a research scientist at the LessonLab Research Institute
(LLRI) in Santa Monica, California. She received her PhD from the University
of California Los Angeles School of Education in 1997. She is currently engaged
in three projects at LLRI. The ALFA project is a randomized field trial of a mathematics professional development program focused on the implementation of
conceptually rich mathematical problems. The ViSTA project, on which she
serves as Co-Principal Investigator, is funded by the National Science Foundation. Its goal is to develop and assess six on-line, video-based modules for use
in university science methods courses. She serves as Co-PI also on the TeKno
project, which is investigating the relation between teachers’ analysis of teaching, their practice, and their students’ learning. Recent publications appear in

Contributor Biographies | 709

Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Comparative Education Review,
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Phi Delta Kappan.
Sara Golomb is currently a doctoral candidate in school psychology at Loyola
University Chicago. Prior to returning to graduate school, she was a practicing attorney for five years. Currently, she is a lead member of a research group
studying discipline policies and practices in schools. She has presented at numerous national and international conferences. In addition, she has an interest in the implementation of school-wide academic screening methods, such as
curriculum-based measurement at the elementary school level.
Elizabeth Graue is a professor of early childhood education in the department
of Curriculum and Instruction at University of Wisconsin, Madison and a nationally recognized expert on kindergarten and readiness for school. A former
kindergarten teacher with a PhD in research methodology, she brings a unique
field-based perspective combined with technical expertise in research design
and analysis. She is the author of 2 books, 30 articles, and 17 book chapters and
has served a consulting editor or editor on several national journals. She has
worked as principal investigator in a number of studies related to kindergarten
readiness. She is currently principal investigator on a multimethod evaluation of
Wisconsin’s class size reduction program.
Lee Gunderson is a professor and former head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, where he
teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in second language reading, language acquisition, literacy acquisition, and teacher education. He has served as
a preschool teacher, a primary-level elementary teacher, a reading specialist, a
principal and vice-principal in a bilingual school, and a teacher of the learning
disabled. He received the David Russell Award for Research, the Killam Teaching Prize at the University of British Columbia, and the Kingston Prize for contributions to the National Reading Conference. He has served as chair of the
Publications Committee of the International Reading Association and is founding chair of the Pippin Teacher’s Professional Library. He is a past president of
the National Reading Conference. He has conducted long-term research that
explores the achievement of approximately 25,000 immigrant students.
Thomas R. Guskey is distinguished university professor and co-director of the
Center for Advanced Study of Assessment at Georgetown College. He has a
PhD in measurement, evaluation, and statistical analysis from the University
of Chicago, served as director of research and development for the Chicago
public schools, and was the first director of the Center for the Improvement of
Teaching and Learning, a national educational research center. He was a member of the policy research team for the National Commission on Teaching and
America’s Future, the task force that developed the National Standards for Staff
Development, and recently was honored by the American Educational Research
Association for his work relating research to practice. His most recent books
include Benjamin S. Bloom: Portraits of an Educator; How’s My Kid Doing? A
Parents’ Guide to Grades, Marks, and Report Cards; Developing Grading and

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Reporting Systems for Student Learning; Evaluating Professional Development;
and Implementing Mastery Learning (2nd ed.).
James W. Guthrie is professor of public policy and education, Peabody College,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He holds three degrees from Stanford University, has undertaken postdoctoral study in economics and education
at Harvard and Oxford Universities, and was professor of education at the University of California Berkeley from 1967 until 1994. He has been a classroom teacher,
high school principal, and state and federal government education executive. He
has undertaken education studies in numerous foreign nations, contributed to
the design of school finance arrangements in more than 20 states, and testified
as an expert witness in 36 education-related court cases. He is the founder and
presently serves as chairman of the Board of Management Analysis and Planning
(MAP), one of the nation’s premier finance management consulting companies.
He is a distinguished senior fellow for the Education Commission of the States
and president-elect of the American Education Finance Association.
Patricia Espiritu Halagao is an associate professor of multicultural education and social studies at University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her teaching and research concentrates on addressing the chasm between the theory, practice, and
research of social studies and multicultural education. She is particularly interested in designing and evaluating culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy for Asian/Pacific Islanders, specifically Filipino Americans, with the intent
to improve their academic achievement and educational experiences. She is cofounder of Pinoy Teach, a transformative Filipino American history and culture multicultural teacher education program, and is recipient of a Smithsonian
Institution grant that developed the nation’s only multimedia on-line Filipino
American history curriculum.
Tina Hall is an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Education at
the University of South Carolina. She has 18 years teaching experience at the
elementary and middle school level and three years in higher education. Her
research interests include teacher education and teacher effectiveness.
Gregory E. Hamot is professor of secondary social studies teacher education
in the University of Iowa College of Education, where he is also coordinator for
international students and programs. He holds appointments in the university’s
Center for Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies and in International Programs, as well as serving as an executive committee member of the
University of Iowa Center for Human Rights and International Programs Board.
He has worked extensively on citizenship education reform in post-communist
countries, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Armenia, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, and Latvia. His research in cross-cultural conceptions of democratic citizenship education appears in Theory and Research in Social Education, Journal of
International Education, and Educational Studies. He coedited the Civic Learning in Teacher Education book series for the Social Studies Development Center
and edited the Department of Labor Child Labor Module Series. Hamot received
his PhD from the Ohio State University.

Contributor Biographies | 711

Christina Hart is a PhD student in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and
Organizations at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Previously, she served
in the administrative position of student activities director at a large, comprehensive public high school in California after completing her MBA in management.
Richard J. Hazler is professor of counselor education at the Pennsylvania State
University. He is known for work in the areas of peer-on-peer abuse, youth violence, humanistic approaches to counseling, and counselor education. Interest
in youth and counseling began as an elementary school teacher and later work
as a school counselor, and counselor in a university, the army, a prison, and
private practice as well as being a counselor educator. Extensive research and
journal publications also include books on counseling youth: Breaking the Cycle
of Violence: Interventions for Bullying and Victimization, Helping in the Hallways;
and others like The Therapeutic Environment, The Emerging Professional Counselor: Student Dreams to Professional Realities, and Everything You Never Learned
in Graduate School: A Survival Guide for Therapists. Currently his research focus
is in the area of biosocial factors influencing and resulting from school-related
stress and trauma.
Matt Hern lives in East Vancouver, British Columbia with his partner and
daughters, where he runs the Purple Thistle Centre and is the founder of the
East Van Celebration Society. He holds a PhD in urban studies and writes and
lectures widely, including for both the University of British Columbia and Simon
Fraser University’s urban studies and education departments. His books include
the collection Deschooling Our Lives, Field Day and the new Watch Yourself: Why
Safer Isn’t Always Better.
Lisa M. Holmes graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in English
and began her career as a writer with a six-year stint as a travel journalist for
Frommer’s. She later shifted her focus, adding chef and chocolatier to her resume after receiving her professional culinary training at the Culinary Institute
of America in Hyde Park, New York. After the birth of her first child she returned to her roots as a writer. Her most recent work includes Bitter Harvest, In
Mother’s Kitchen, and Lunch Lessons. Her current focus is on school food and
nutrition and the development of curricula for school kitchen/garden/nutrition
programs. She is developing a culinary program for Highfield Hall in Falmouth,
Massachusetts, and is the mother of two children.
David Hursh is associate professor in the Margaret Warner Graduate School of
Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. His recent
research focuses on the rise of neoliberalism, markets, competition, and highstakes testing in education. Some of his recent articles have appeared in Educational Researcher, the British Educational Research Journal, and Policy Futures in
Education. His recent books include Twenty-First Century Schools: Knowledge,
Networks and New Economies (coauthored with G. Macdonald), Marxism and
Education (coedited with João Paraskeva and E. Wayne Ross and published in
Portuguese) and Democratic Social Education (coedited with Ross). He is active

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Contributor Biographies

in many local and international educational reform efforts, including Rochester’s
Coalition for Common Sense in Education, an organization committed to critiquing and organizing against the use of high-stakes testing in schools.
Michael Imber is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and
Policy Studies at the University of Kansas. He was the director of an alternative
school that based its program on the principles of progressive education. He has
published articles in the areas of educational history, philosophy, policy, leadership, and law. He is also the author of two textbooks on education law.
Robert T. Jiménez is professor of education in the Department of Teaching and
Learning in Peabody College. He received his BA from the University of the
Americas in Puebla, Mexico, and his MEd and PhD from the University of Illinois.
He is currently directing the Teaching English Language Learners program at Peabody. His research focuses on the cognitive, cultural, social, and linguistic capital
of Latino students, and his most recent research project examines the language
and literacy practices found within a central Mexican community. He received a
García Robles Fulbright Fellowship to Mexico. He also received the Albert J. Harris
Award for research on struggling readers. He has published in Reading Research
Quarterly, the American Educational Research Journal, the Journal of Adolescent
and Adult Literacy, The Reading Teacher, and other journals. He most recently edited Race, Ethnicity, and Education: Language and Literacy in Schools.
Shane R. Jimerson is an associate professor in the Counseling, Clinical, and
School Psychology Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
His scholarly publications and presentations have provided insights regarding: developmental pathways of school success and failure, the efficacy of early
prevention and intervention programs (grade retention among others), school
psychology internationally, and school crisis prevention and intervention. His
numerous publications include: The Handbook of School Violence and School
Safety: From Research to Practice; a five-book grief support group curriculum
series, The Mourning Child Grief Support Group Curriculum; Best Practices
in School Crisis Prevention and Intervention; Identifying, Assessing, and Treating
Autism at School; The Handbook of International School Psychology; and The
Handbook of Response to Intervention: The Science and Practice of Assessment
and Intervention.
Carol F. Karpinski is an assistant professor at the Peter Sammartino School of
Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University and director of the Master of Arts
in Teaching program. Her research deals with leadership, teacher unions, and
social justice. She has presented numerous papers at the yearly meetings of the
American Educational Research Association (AERA), the University Council
of Educational Administration (UCEA), and the History of Education Society
(HES). Her publications include articles in Urban Education, the Journal of Educational Administration, and the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership, and
a forthcoming book on the National Education Association, African Americans,
and the civil rights movement. She has an EdD from Rutgers University, New
Brunswick, New Jersey.

Contributor Biographies | 713

Kevin R. Kosar is the author of Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education
Standards. His writings have appeared in Public Administration Review, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Teachers College Record, History of Education Quarterly,
the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Press newspaper, History News Network, and
Choice magazine. He has lectured at the New York University’s Robert F. Wagner
Graduate School of Public Service and at Metropolitan College of New York’s
School for Public Affairs and Administration. He has worked for a New York
City not-for-profit corporation that helps children in some of New York City’s
lowest-performing schools and has served as a peer reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Grant Program and Presidential Academies for American History and Civics programs. He earned his
doctorate in politics at New York University.
Chinh Q. Le served as assistant counsel at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
Inc. (LDF) in New York for five years. During that time, he represented plaintiffs in school desegregation and educational equity cases, including several class
action cases, and counseled defendants in voluntary school integration litigation. He has also been involved in matters related to voting rights and higher
education affirmative action. Le received his JD from the University of Virginia
School of Law, where served on as notes editor of the Virginia Law Review, and
his MA and BA, with high distinction, from the University of Virginia. He is
presently an associate in the New York office of Jenner & Block LLP.
Linda C. Lee is currently a sociology doctoral student at the University of Chicago. She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 2000 and, before entering graduate school, worked as a business consultant and as a director
of an education center. Her academic areas of interest include the organizational
behavior of schools and how such behavior relates to social stratification and
inequality.
Pepi Leistyna is an associate professor of applied linguistics graduate studies
at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he coordinates the research
program and teaches courses in cultural studies, media literacy, and language
acquisition. Speaking internationally, his books include: Breaking Free: The
Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy; Presence of Mind: Education and
the Politics of Deception; Defining and Designing Multiculturalism; and Cultural
Studies: From Theory to Action. He is a research fellow for the Education Policy
Research Unit, and a board member of the Working-Class Studies Association,
the Association for Cultural Studies, and the Media Education Foundation.
Jerry A. Ligon is associate dean of National College of Education at NationalLouis University, Wheaton, Illinois. He taught for a number of years as a high
school social studies teacher in Wichita, Kansas and has 21 years in collegiate
teaching. His current areas of research are issues-centered approach to teaching
social studies and the historical experience of the Mississippi Freedom Schools.
Michael H. Long is professor of second language acquisition and director of the
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland,

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Contributor Biographies

College Park. He is the author of more than 100 articles and several books, and
in 1991 was corecipient of TESOL’s International Research Prize. His current
research includes work on theory change in SLA, negative feedback, sensitive
periods, needs analysis, Task-Based Language Teaching, and a longitudinal
study of stabilization/fossilization in the interlanguage of a Japanese immigrant
to Hawai’i. Recent publications include the Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, coedited with Catherine Doughty, Second Language Needs Analysis,
and Problems in SLA.
Nathan Andrew Long is the associate director of the Division of General Education in the Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Cincinnati.
Catherine A. Lugg is an associate professor of education at the Graduate School
of Education, Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey. Her research has focused on social movements, political ideologies, and their influence on educational politics and policies. Her recent work has been published in Educational
Policy, Educational Administration Quarterly, Journal of School Leadership,
Journal of Educational Administration, and the Journal of Cases in Educational
Leadership. She is also the author of numerous book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and short essays.
Linda Mabry is professor of education at Washington State University. Her research includes state and national assessment systems and teacher-developed
assessments. Current projects include a follow-along study of No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) in two states and development of a public statement on educational accountability for the American Evaluation Association. Her publications include Portfolios Plus: A Critical Guide to Alternative Assessment,
Evaluation and the Postmodern Condition, Real World Evaluation, and articles
on the implications and impacts of state assessment in Washington, Indiana,
Michigan, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. She is a member of the Board of Trustees
of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment and
of the Performance Assessment Review Board of the New York Performance
Standards Consortium.
Frances A. Maher is professor of education at Wheaton College. She is coauthor, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of the Feminist Classroom and most recently, also
with Ms. Tetreault, Privilege and Diversity in the Academy, a study of progress
over the past 35 years toward the diversification of faculties in three universities by race and gender. She has published widely on gender issues in education,
including articles on feminist pedagogy, feminism and John Dewey, and other
topics. She is also coauthor (with Janey Ward) of Gender and Teaching.
Perry M. Marker is professor and chair of the Department of Curriculum Studies and Secondary Education at Sonoma State University. His current research
interest is in the area of applying future studies to school curriculum reform
efforts and the standards movement in education. His work has appeared in
Teachers College Record, Teacher Education Quarterly, and Theory and Research
in Social Education. He resides with his wife Marty, in Bodega Bay, California.

Contributor Biographies | 715

Leslie B. Mashburn is an assistant professor of reading education at Georgia
Southwestern State University, and also the director of the Pre-K program
housed on the Georgia Southwestern State University campus. She is a doctoral
candidate at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and is working on her
dissertation, which is titled Learning through Living: Democracy, Freedom and
Reading in the Classroom. She has presented at numerous local and national
conferences including Georgia Educational Research Association (GERA), National Science Teacher’s Association (NSTA), and the International Bergamo
Conference.
Sandra Mathison is professor of education at the University of British Columbia. Her research is in educational evaluation and her work has focused especially on the potential and limits of evaluation to support democratic ideals and
promote justice. Her most recent research is on the effects of state-mandated
testing on teaching and learning. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Evaluation, coeditor (with E. Wayne Ross) of Defending Public Schools: The Nature and
Limits of Standards Based Reform and Assessment, and coauthor (with Melissa
Freeman) of the soon-to-be-published Understanding Children’s Experience. She
is editor-in-chief of the journal New Directions for Evaluation. She can be found
on-line at http://web.mac.com/sandra.mathison.
Deborah Meier has been a teacher and principal of urban public schools for
more than 40 years. She is the author of many articles and books on schooling,
including The Power of Their Ideas, and is currently senior scholar at New York
University’s Steinhardt School of Education.
Roslyn Arlin Mickelson is professor of sociology and adjunct professor of
public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After receiving
her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1984, she spent a
postdoctoral year at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Bush Program in
Child Development and Social Policy. With funding from the National Science
Foundation and the Ford Foundation, she has investigated school reform in the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools since 1988. She has published widely on minority achievement, the political economy of education, and the effects of school and
classroom composition on educational outcomes. Her book is Children on the
Streets of the Americas: Globalization, Homelessness, and Education in the United
States, Brazil, and Cuba.
Beth M. Miller PhD has been conducting research and policy analysis in
the after-school field for nearly two decades. She is the currently president of
Miller-Midzik Research Associates (MMRA) and senior research advisor at the
National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST), Center for Research on
Women, Wellesley College. Recent projects include: Coprincipal investigator of
the Massachusetts Afterschool Research Study (MARS), a research project examining the links between program characteristics, program quality, and youth
outcomes; evaluation of Mixing in Math initiative; evaluation of Boston’s Literacy Coaching Initiative; and development, in concert with her colleagues at
NIOST, of an evaluation system for the Massachusetts Department of Education

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Contributor Biographies

that includes both program assessment and youth outcome measurement. Her
report for the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, Critical Hours: Afterschool Programs and Educational Success, has been widely disseminated. Dr. Miller has
written many influential articles, papers, reports, and literature reviews. She
presents frequently at conferences and meetings and has been quoted in local
and national media.
Lynn Miller PhD, RPsych is an assistant professor in the Education and Counseling Psychology and Special Education Department at University of British
Columbia. She started her career as a classroom teacher, went on to be a school
counselor, and then earned her Ph. D. at the University of Colorado. She has
long been interested in helping children be more successful in school settings,
understanding that the social emotional health of students directly affects academic performance. She focuses her research on searching for ways to deliver
mental health programs to families in school settings. Currently she is evaluating the effects of an empirically supported approach to child anxiety prevention
in the public school system. Teachers are trained to identify struggling students
and to implement curriculum that enhances emotion management. Other areas
of interest are marriage and family counseling, school counseling, and translating positive benefits of efficacious interventions to minority populations.
Lynne Guillot Miller is an assistant professor in the Counseling and Human
Development Services Department at Kent State University. She has worked as
a school counselor in Louisiana and is seeking licensure as a school counselor
and professional counselor in Ohio. She is a member of the American School
Counselor Association and the Association for Counselor Educators and Supervisors as well as various regional and state associations. She currently serves on
the government relations committee for the Ohio Counseling Association. Her
professional and research interests include school counseling, counselor preparation, legal and ethical issues, and political advocacy.
H. Richard Milner is Betts Assistant Professor of Education and Human Development at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on
urban education, teachers’ learning in language arts classrooms, and race and
equity in education.
Gary Miron is chief of staff at the Evaluation Center and professor of education at Western Michigan University. He has extensive experience evaluating
education policies and school reforms. In recent years he has evaluated charter
schools reforms in six states and conducted a federally sponsored study of the
correlates of success in charter schools. He also conducted an evaluation of student achievement in schools operated by Edison Schools Inc. Besides his work
as an evaluator, he has a diverse background as a teacher and researcher. In the
early 1980s he work as a high school teacher and coach. He has also taught at
universities in China, Sweden, and the United States. As a researcher, he has
held positions in Sweden and the United States, where he has conducted both
large-scale and small-scale evaluations of educational policies and school reforms. He has researched and written on such topics as special needs education,

Contributor Biographies | 717

educational evaluation, educational planning and policy, the strengthening of
research capacity, multimethod research, restructuring of education, and school
reform. Aside from a long list of technical reports, he has authored or edited
eight books and has published more than 20 articles or chapters in books.
Taylor Morello is a graduate student in the School Psychology Educational Specialist Program at Loyola University in Chicago. She has previous experience as
a research associate at DePaul University, where she coordinated a project related to the tobacco use of adolescents and published in the area. Currently, she
is a lead member of a research team at Loyola University Chicago that is focused
on the study of discipline policies and practices in schools. She has presented at
regional and national conferences in education and psychology.
Frank B. Murray is H. Rodney Sharp Professor in the School of Education
and the Department of Psychology at the University of Delaware and served
as dean of the College of Education between 1979 and 1995. He received his
BA degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and his MAT and
PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins University. He has served in various
capacities on the editorial boards of several journals in developmental and
educational psychology and is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. Currently, he is president of
the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) in Washington, D.C.
He edited The Teacher Educator’s Handbook for the American Association of
Colleges of Teacher Education.
Steven L. Oberg received his doctorate in educational studies from the University of British Columbia in 2005. He has previously worked as a teacher and
administrator in schools with traditional, extended day, and balanced (or yearround) calendars. His research and publications relate to the impact of various
calendars on students from diverse backgrounds and in diverse settings and to
the leadership issues related to implementing successful structural and cultural
change in schools. He currently lives in Idaho where he works as an independent educational consultant.
Frank Pajares is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of educational psychology
and philosophy of education in the Division of Educational Studies and associated professor in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. His
research focuses on academic motivation and the role of self-efficacy beliefs
in academic settings. He is recipient of the National Academy of Education/
Spencer Foundation Fellowship Award, the Harold E. Mitzel Award for Meritorious Contribution to Educational Practice through Research from the Helen
Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, the Publication Award from the Teacher
Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, and the Richard E. Snow Award for Early Contributions to Educational Psychology from
the American Psychological Association, Division 15. In 1999 he was named
Winship Distinguished Research Professor at Emory University. He is a fellow of
the American Psychological Association, coeditor of the book series Adolescence
and Education, and associate editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology.

718

Contributor Biographies

Valerie Ooka Pang is a professor in the School of Teacher Education at San
Diego State University. Her work includes Multicultural Education: A Caringcentered, Reflective Approach (2nd ed., 2005), and she was series editor with E.
Wayne Ross of Race, Ethnicity, and Education. She has published in a variety
of journals including Harvard Educational Review, The Kappan, The Journal of
Teacher Education, Action in Teacher Education, Social Education, Theory and
Research in Social Education, and Multicultural Education. Pang has been a consultant for organizations such as Sesame Street, Fox Children’s Network, Family
Communications (producers of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood), and Scott Foresman. Pang was a senior fellow for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform
at Brown University and honored by organizations such as the American Educational Research Association’s Standing Committee on the Role and Status of
Minorities in Education, National Association for Multicultural Education, and
the University of Washington’s College of Education.
Liza Pappas is a doctoral student in the Urban Education Program at the City
University of New York Graduate Center. She continues to work with students,
families, and teachers organizing for real change in schools and communities.
Erika A. Patall is a graduate student in social psychology in the Department of
Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. She is also a fellow in the Spencer Foundation Interdisciplinary Program in Education Science. Her research
interests include the impact of parent involvement in homework on academic
achievement and the role of choice in motivation, performance, and learning.
Finally, she is interested in research synthesis and meta-analysis and the application of these methodologies to issues in social, developmental, and educational
psychology.
Michael Peterson is professor in the College of Education at Wayne State University where he teaches courses related to inclusive teaching and transition
from school to adult life. He graduated with his doctoral degree in vocational
education, special needs from the University of North Texas in 1980. He has
previously been a faculty member at Mississippi State University and director of
the Developmental Disabilities Institute at Wayne State University. He is director of the Whole Schooling Consortium, an international network of educators,
university faculty, parents, and schools. He has published some 80 articles and
monographs including and Inclusive Teaching: Creating Effective Schools for All
Learners. He is married to Georgie and has two adult children and two young
grandchildren, Rachel Ellen and Shannon Noel.
Stephen Petrina is an associate professor of curriculum studies in the Faculty
of Education at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on academic freedom and intellectual property rights in higher education, the medicalization of education, and the cultural constraints governing how we learn
(and teach) technology across the lifespan. He recently published a book titled
Advanced Teaching Methods for the Technology Classroom, and is currently publishing books titled The Critical Ontology of Technology and The Critical Theory
of Design and Technology Education. He is also coediting a book on Technology,

Contributor Biographies | 719

Religion, Spirituality and the Sacred. His recent articles appear in Interchange,
Workplace, Technology & Culture, History of Psychology, History of Education
Quarterly, and the International Journal of Technology and Design Education.
Olga Acosta Price PhD is deputy director of the Center for Health and Health
Care in Schools and associate research professor at the School of Public Health
and Health Services, at the George Washington University in the Department
of Prevention and Community Health. She received her undergraduate degree
from Vassar College, a Masters and PhD in clinical psychology from the State
University of New York at Buffalo, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in
school mental health at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. She became associate director of the Center for School Mental Health Assistance, a national
technical assistance center, and assistant professor at the University of Maryland,
School of Medicine. In the following six years she directed the School Mental
Health Program (SMHP) at the Department of Mental Health in Washington,
D.C., where she implemented and evaluated comprehensive school-based mental health programs in more than 30 D.C. public schools.
Mary Anne Raywid is professor emerita of educational administration and policy studies at Hofstra University, where she founded and for 20 years directed
the Center for the Study of Educational Alternatives. She has written extensively
about alternative schools and has also known them in the roles of researcher,
evaluator, consultant, and advocate. She has been active in educational organizations and has been president of the John Dewey Society for the Study of Education and Culture, the Society of Professors of Education, and the Philosophy
of Education Society. She has published widely and has been a member of the
advisory board of 13 educational journals.
Judith Rink is a professor in the Department of Physical Education at the University of South Carolina and program director for the South Carolina Physical Education Assessment Program. She was chairperson of the first national
standards committee in physical education, has published widely in the research
journals of the field, and has been editor of several. Her books include Teaching
Physical Education for Learning, and Designing Physical Education Curriculum
for a Physically Active Lifestyle.
Stacey B. Roberts is an associate professor of educational administration at the
University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her research interests are school choice, homeschooling, and the socialization of beginning teachers and administrators.
Brian C. Rose is a doctoral student in the Department of Teaching and Learning in Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. He received his BS from the
University of California at Irvine. His research focuses on issues of classroom
access and equity for elementary school-aged students who speak a language
other than English. His current research investigates the interactional opportunities afforded adult English language learners in and out of the classroom. His
teaching background includes English language instruction in South Korea and
France, and he was the director of a private language school in California prior
to entering graduate study.

720

Contributor Biographies

E. Wayne Ross is professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the
University of British Columbia. He is interested in the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers’ practices, and the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of
greed, individualism, and intolerance. A former day care worker and secondary
social studies teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, he taught at the State University of New York (Albany and Binghamton campuses) and the University of
Louisville, where he was Distinguished University Scholar. Ross is cofounder of
The Rouge Forum (www.rougeforum.org), and coeditor of the journals Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor (www.workplace-gsc.com) and Cultural
Logic (www.eserver.org/clogic) and the former editor of Theory and Research in
Social Education. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Race,
Ethnicity and Education (vols. 1–4); Defending Public Schools (vols. 1–4); Neoliberalism and Education Reform (with Rich Gibson); The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities; Image and Education (with Kevin D.
Vinson); and Democratic Social Education: Social Studies for Social Change (with
David Hursh). You can find him on the web at http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross.
Martha Rapp Ruddell is dean and professor emerita of the School of Education at Sonoma State University. She taught in the secondary teaching credential
program and the graduate Reading and Language MA program. Dr. Ruddell is
author of numerous articles, book chapters, and books, including the fifth edition of Teaching Content Reading and Writing (Wiley). She has published articles
in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Teacher Education Quarterly, The
NRC Yearbook, and California Reader. She is past president of the National Reading Conference, an international educational organization devoted to research
in language and literacy. In 1996 she was inducted into the California Reading
Association Reading Hall of Fame; in 2003 she was honored with the Albert J.
Kingston Service Award of the National Reading Conference; and in 2004 she was
designated Distinguished Alumna by the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Jessica Ruglis is a PhD/MPH candidate in urban education/community health
education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A former
teacher, Jessica’s work focuses on retheorizing school dropout, consequences of
miseducation, educational policy relationships between education and health,
the embodiment of schooling, and participatory action research.
John L. Rury is professor of education at the University of Kansas. His publications have dealt with such topics as the history of urban education, women’s
schooling, historical methods, and race and inequality. He is a past president of
the History of Education Society (1998) and vice president for Division F (History and Historiography) of AERA (1997–1999).
Rosemary C. Salomone is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John’s
University School of Law. She has written and lectured extensively on gender
and single-sex education and is the author of Same, Different, Equal: Rethinking
Single-Sex Schooling, which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for
2005 by Choice Magazine.

Contributor Biographies | 721

Kenneth J. Saltman is an associate professor in the Department of Educational
Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University where he teaches in the graduate program in Social and Cultural Studies in Education. His books include
Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools; The Edison Schools;
Strange Love, Or How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market; and Collateral Damage: Corporatizing Public Schools—a Threat to Democracy.
Daya Singh Sandhu, EdD, NCC, NCCC, NCSC, LPCC, is professor and former
chairperson (1996–2004) in the Department of Educational and Counseling
Psychology at the University of Louisville. Dr. Sandhu has an interest in school
counseling, multicultural counseling, mental health counseling, and the role of
spirituality in counseling and psychotherapy. In addition to more than 50 refereed journal articles and 60 book chapters, he has authored or edited 15 books.
His two edited books, Violence in American Schools: A Practical Guide for Counselors and Faces of Violence: Psychological Correlates, Concepts, and Intervention
Strategies are of special interest to our readership. He was also recognized as one
of the 12 pioneers in the field of multicultural counseling in the Handbook of
Multicultural Counseling.
Rossella Santagata is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the
University of California, Irvine and research scientist at the LessonLab Research
Institute. She received her PhD from the University of California Los Angeles Department of Psychology in 2002. She is currently coprincipal investigator of three
research studies. The ALFA project, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences
(IES), is an experimental study of a teacher professional development program
implemented in a high-poverty and low-performing school district. The ViSTA
project, funded by the National Science Foundation, consists of the development
and testing of video-based modules for pre-service science teachers. The TeKno
project, funded by IES, consists in the development and testing of a video-based
measure of teacher pedagogical content knowledge. Recent publications appear in
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, Linguistics and Education, Mathematics
Thinking and Learning, and Teaching and Teacher Education.
Dale Schunk is dean of the School of Education and professor of curriculum
and instruction at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He received
his PhD in educational psychology from Stanford University. Previously he was
a faculty member at the University of Houston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was head of the Department of Educational Studies at
Purdue University. His research interests include motivation, social cognitive
learning, and self-regulation. He has published more than 90 articles and chapters, is author of Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective and (with Paul
Pintrich and Judith Meece) Motivation in Education: Theories, Research, and Applications, and has edited several books on self-regulation and motivation. His
awards include the Distinguished Service Award from the Purdue University
School of Education, the Early Contributions Award in Educational Psychology
from the American Psychological Association, and the Albert J. Harris Research
Award from the International Reading Association.

722

Contributor Biographies

Paul Shaker is dean of the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in
Burnaby, British Columbia. In addition to a passionate interest in educational
policy, Shaker carries with him nearly 35 years experience in education in varying capacities.
Rajni Shankar-Brown is a curriculum and instruction doctoral student at the
University of North Carolina Charlotte. Her academic concentrations are urban
education and literacy. Her research interests include minority education, culturally relevant pedagogy, art education, qualitative research, conflict resolution
mechanisms, and social justice. After teaching in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg
and Cabarrus County School Systems, she earned her Masters of Art in Teaching at University of North Carolina Charlotte. A child of immigrant parents, she
has worked to increase the level of understanding on multicultural and minority
education. She currently is researching the effects of homelessness on the youth
of Charlotte and the support systems that the city has to offer. Her forthcoming
dissertation is a case study on the social and educational experiences of children at a local shelter in Charlotte. She most recently copublished the chapter
“Homelessness: A Continuing Concern” in the upcoming Chicago Companion
to the Child.
Lorrie Shepard is professor and dean of the College of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on psychometrics and the
use and misuse of tests in educational settings. Technical topics include validity theory, standard setting, and statistical models for detecting test bias. Her
studies evaluating test use include identification of learning disabilities, readiness screening for kindergarten, grade retention, teacher testing, effects of highstakes testing, and classroom assessment. She is a past president of the American
Educational Research Association and past president of the National Council on
Measurement in Education (NCME). She was elected to the National Academy
of Education in 1992 and is currently president of this organization.
Carolyn M. Shields is professor and head of the Department of Educational
Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Before completing her doctorate in educational administration from the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Shields worked in numerous cultural settings in the
K–12 school system across Canada. She has previously held faculty positions at
the University of Utah and, more recently, at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada. She has served on several ministerial advisory boards and
completed terms as president of the Canadian Association for Studies in Educational Administration and as a board member for the Commonwealth Council
for Educational Administration and Management. Her research and teaching
interests relate to leadership for academic excellence and social justice in diverse
settings, including schools with various calendars. She has published six books
and more than 90 articles in addition to giving hundreds of presentations to
academic and practitioner groups.
Mary Skokut is a doctoral student in the Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is preparing

Contributor Biographies | 723

for a career to help better understand effective interventions for children facing
social, emotional, behavioral, or academic challenges at school.
Michelle Stack is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her interests revolve around educational leadership, media education, collaborative media work with youth and
educators, and the role of media in the educational policy process. She is also
interested in the media’s appropriation of psychology in pathologizing children
and constructing them as products to be consumed by media audiences.
Karen Swan is research professor in the Research Center for Educational Technology at Kent State University. Her research is in the general area of media
and learning, on which she has published and presented nationally and internationally. Her current research focuses particularly on on-line learning and on
ubiquitous computing in education. She has coedited two books, Social Learning
from Broadcast Television and Ubiquitous Computing in Education, and a DVDROM on the latter topic. She is currently principle investigator for a National
Science Foundation grant focused on middle school data literacy, and she received the Sloan-C award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual in 2006. Dr. Swan is the special issues editor for the Journal
of Educational Computing Research, editor of the Journal of the Research Center
for Educational Technology, and she serves on the review boards and steering
committees for several education and educational technology journals and conferences.
Susan Talburt is director of the Women’s Studies Institute and associate professor of educational policy studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. She
teaches courses in curriculum theory, youth and sexualities, feminist and queer
theory, and feminist and qualitative research methodologies. She is the author of
Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education and coeditor of Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education and
Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination in and out of
Schools. She is presently working on the intersections of remasculinization and
neoliberalism in educational contexts.
Kenneth Teitelbaum is professor and dean of the College of Education and
Human Services at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and formerly was
professor and chair of the Department of Teaching, Leadership and Curriculum
Studies at Kent State University. He was a high school social studies teacher in
San Francisco and upstate New York, and a faculty member at several universities, including Syracuse University and Binghamton University. His primary
research and teaching interests focus on school knowledge within current and
historical contexts; schooling and issues of equity, diversity, and democracy;
and critical reflection in teacher education and teachers’ work. He is the author
of Schooling for “Good Rebels” (Temple University Press) and has published in
such journals as Curriculum Inquiry, History of Education Quarterly, Journal of
Curriculum Studies, Journal of Education for Teaching, and Theory and Research
in Social Education.

724

Contributor Biographies

Paul Theobald currently holds the Woods-Beals Endowed Chair in Urban and
Rural Education at Buffalo State College. He is an accomplished educational
historian whose work frequently crosses disciplinary boundaries and has appeared in such research journals as Educational Theory, American Journal of
Education, Journal of Educational Studies, Journal of Educational Thought,
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, American Historical Review,
Educational Foundations, History of Education Quarterly, and many others. His
first book, Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918 has remained
the definitive study on the history of rural education in this country for the
past 12 years. His second book, Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the
Renewal of Community, an intellectual history that weaves in philosophical
themes in an attempt to build a new vision for educational ends, has been a
bestseller in graduate education classes both here and abroad.
Amy Thompson earned her BS degree in community health from Central
Michigan University. After graduation, she felt a desire to learn as much as possible about health and developing effective programs to improve individual and
community health status. In this pursuit, she obtained her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Toledo in health education. In fall 2005,
she joined the faculty at Kent State University in the Adult Counseling, Health
and Vocational Education Department. Her research interests include violence,
nutrition, and alcohol, tobacco and other drug issues, particularly in youth.
Dr. Thompson is active in the American School Health Association and the
American Public Health Association. Her work has appeared in journals such
as the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Journal of School Health, and
Journal of Community Health.
Linda Tolbert is an assistant professor of education leadership at Buffalo State
College in New York State. She received her PhD in Educational Leadership and
Research from Louisiana State University and spent seven years teaching at the
elementary school level. She worked as a program manager for the Louisiana
State Department of Education in the School of Accountability, Standards, and
Assistance. She also served as a program director of the Teach Baton Rouge Program in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System.
Eve Tuck is a PhD candidate in urban education at the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York. Tuck is the cofounder of the Collective of
Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD), a New
York City based participatory action research collective for youth aged 16–
22. CREDD’s 2006 Gateways and Get-aways Project is a project that seeks
to understand the GED (General Educational Development) Test as a cover
for pushing out unwanted students in New York City public schools, and as
a lens through which to understand the desires of pushed-out youth for free,
accessible, quality, rigorous, and just schooling. Her other interests are in indigenous and decolonizing theories, and education policies and practices,
particularly those that unfairly exclude indigenous youth, poor youth, and
youth of color.

Contributor Biographies | 725

Elizabeth (Beau) Vallance received her PhD from Stanford University and is
now associate professor of art education at Indiana University. She has taught art
education and museum education, and managed undergraduate and graduate
programs in museum studies at Northern Illinois University, and for 15 years
was director of education at the Saint Louis Art Museum. She is active in the
American Educational Research Association, the National Art Education Association, the American Association of Museums, and related state and regional
organizations. Her publications address museums as places of learning, curriculum theory, qualitative inquiry, the hidden curriculum, and the museum-related
experiences of everyday life. She is a photographer.
Mark van ‘t Hooft is a researcher and technology specialist at the Research Center for Educational Technology (RCET) at Kent State University, His research
focuses on ubiquitous computing and the use of mobile technology in K–12
education, especially in the social studies. He has published and presented extensively on these subjects, and is a founding member and current chair of the
Special Interest Group for Handheld Computing (SIGHC) for the International
Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Prior to his work at RCET, Mark
taught middle and high school social studies and language arts. He holds a BA
in American studies from the Catholic University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands,
and an MA in history from Southwest Texas State. He received his doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction, and evaluation and measurement from Kent
State University.
Kevin D. Vinson is associate professor of teaching and teacher education at the
University of Arizona. Prior to that he served as assistant professor of education
at Loyola College (Baltimore) and as a high school social studies teacher in Baltimore County, Maryland. He holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction from
the University of Maryland. His scholarship focuses on social studies education
and critical educational theory, specifically in terms of the relevance of the work
of philosophers Guy Debord and Michel Foucault. He has published widely, including in such journals as Theory and Research in Social Education and Cultural Logic. He is the coauthor of Image and Education: Teaching in the Face of
the New Disciplinarity and Defending Public Schools: Curriculum Continuity and
Change in the 21st Century.
Maika Watanabe is an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses in social and
cultural foundations and instructional reform to preservice teachers. Recent
publications include: “Lessons from a Teacher Inquiry Group about Tracking:
Perceived Student Choice in Course-Taking and Its Implications for Detracking
Reform” in Teachers College Record, “Tracking in the Era of High-Stakes State
Accountability Reform: Case Studies of Classroom Instruction in North Carolina” in Teachers College Record, and “Displaced Teacher and State Priorities in
a High-Stakes Accountability Context” in Educational Policy. She is currently
serving as chairperson of the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group on Tracking and Detracking. She is currently working on a

726

Contributor Biographies

project to film, edit, and produce a one-hour video that documents successful
teaching strategies in detracked math and science classrooms, including how
teachers address challenges to implementation.
John A. Weaver is professor of curriculum studies at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of Rethinking Academic Politics and Popular Culture:
A Primer. He is the editor of four books including Popular Culture and Critical
Pedagogy and (Post) Modern Science (Education).
Collin Webster is an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Education at the University of South Carolina. He currently teaches methods courses
for physical education majors and a course for elementary education and early
childhood majors that is designed to provide the classroom teacher with the
knowledge, skills, and values necessary to promote the goals of physical education. The central focus of his research is on teacher expertise in physical education and sport.
Gilman W. Whiting PhD is an assistant professor of African American and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the director of undergraduate studies. He teaches on the African American diaspora, black masculinity, race, sport,
and American culture and qualitative research methods. His research includes
work with young black fathers, low-income minorities, welfare reform and fatherhood initiatives, special needs populations (gifted, at-risk learners, young
black men and scholar identities), and health in the black community. He is
currently working on a book project titled “Fathering from the Margins: Young
African American Fathers, Fatherhood Initiatives and the Welfare State.” He has
articles in The Willamette Journal: Special on African American Studies, Gifted
Education Press Quarterly, Journal for Secondary Gifted Education, Gifted Child
Today, and Midwestern Educational Research Journal. He is editor of the forthcoming volume, On Manliness: Black American Masculinities.
Tianlong Yu is an assistant professor at the Department of Educational Leadership, School of Education, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Born and
raised in China, and educated in both China and the United States, he received
his doctorate from the State University of New York at Binghamton. At Southern
Illinois University at Edwardsville he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophical and social foundations of education. His research
focuses on moral education, especially the social contexts of moral development
and school curriculum. He is also interested in issues of multicultural education
and Asian American education. He is the author of In the Name of Morality:
Character Education and Political Control (Peter Lang, 2004) as well as a number
of articles published in such journals as Equity and Excellence in Education, Multicultural Education, and Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies.

INDEX
Abington v. Schempp, 518. See also Bible
Academic freedom: Academic Freedom Bill
of Rights, 9–10; defined, 1–2; “Freedom of
the Teacher” resolution, 2; for K-12
teachers, 1–11; neoconservative revival of,
8–10
Accountability, 11–19; and charter schools
91; and liberal-conservative alliance,
16–18; meaning of, 11–14; in physical
education, 487–89; standards-based, 184;
and textbooks, 19–20
Accreditation, 237, 625. See also Teacher
licensure
Achieve, Inc., 629
Achievement: impact of poverty on,
354; research on school achievement,
545–47; student achievement and
teacher licensure, 626. See also
Assessment; High-stakes tests;
International comparisons of student
achievement; No Child Left Behind Act;
Standardized testing
Addams, Jane, 74
Adler, Mortimer, 170, 642
Advancement Via Individual Determination
(AVID), 678
Advance Placement (AP), 175, 250, 277, 278,
279, 296, 388, 576, 676
Advertising Federation of America,
590

AFL-CIO (American Federation of
Labor-Congress of Industrial
Organizations), 629–30, 634–35
Afterschool programs, 19–27; attributes of
effective programs, 24–26; effects of
participation in, 23–24
AIDS/HIV, 170, 349, 378, 566, 567,
568, 691
Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC), 214
Alliance for Childhood, 222, 224
Alternative Education Resource Organization
(AERO), 29
Alternative schools, 27–33; core principles
of, 32
Alternatives to schooling, 33–37
Alienation: and education, 330–31
Alien national pattern, 140– 42
American Board for the Certification of
Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), 624
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 5,
573, 590, 674; condemnation of tracking,
674
American Council on Education, 263
American Evaluation Association (AEA),
240; Public Statement on Educational
Accountability, 12–14
American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
3, 17, 377, 629–38; merger with NEA,
636–38; Shanker, Albert, 632–36. See also

727

728

Index
National Education Association; “New
Unionism;” No Child Left Behind Act
American Library Association, 5
American Historical Association, 586
American Teachers Association, 631, 635
American School Counselor Association
(ASCA), 549–52; national school model,
555
American Youth Congress, 691
Annenberg Challenge, 258–59
Annual yearly progress (AYP), 129, 238,
387–89, 453, 457, 627
Apple, Michael, 160, 174, 318
Approaches to Teaching, 641–42
Aristotle, 80–81
Art education, 37–43; discipline-based art
education, 38–39, 42
Association for Counselor Education and
Supervision (ACES), 552
Association for Curriculum and Supervision,
377
Assessment, 43–55; authentic, 46–50;
important events 44–45; research-based
formative assessment, 50–53
Attention Deficit Disorder, 689
“Back to basics” movement, 165, 176, 398,
540, 592
Bagley, William C., 169, 640
Banking concept of education, 158–59, 226.
See also Critical pedagogy; Freire, Paulo
Banks, James, 108, 165, 447
Barnard, Henry, 368
Barry, Marion, 125–26
Basic Principles of Curriculum and
Instruction. See also Tyler, Ralph
Be A Better Reader series, 384
Beard, Charles, 108
Bell, Terrel, 125, 237
The Bell Curve, 237, 604. See also Eugenics
Bennett, William, 133–34, 434, 494, 690
Bestor, Arthur, 480, 640
Best Practice: New Standards for
Teaching and Learning in America’s
Schools, 644 – 45
Bible, 80–82, 145, 148 – 49, 154, 176, 379, 477,
517–18, 656
Bilingual education, 57–64, research base,
61– 63. See also English as a Second
Language
Bilingual Education Act (Title VII),
60, 232, 292
Biological Sciences Curriculum Study
(BSCS), 14, 150, 154

Block scheduling. See Time in schools
Board of Education v. Pico, 660
Bobbitt, J. Franklin, 171, 173
Bode, Boyd, 281
Bond v. Public Schools of Ann Arbor
School District, 659
Boring v. Buncombe, 8
Bourdieu, Pierre, 230
Boy Scouts, 504; Boy Scouts of America Equal
Access Act, 378
Bracero Program, 232
Brown, Charlotte Hawkins, 369
Brown v. Board of Education, 105, 108,
179, 181, 185, 186, 187, 242, 292, 371,
447, 452, 541– 42, 573, 632, 682; and rural
schools, 528
Bruner, Jerome, 169, 592
Bullying, 64–71; legislation against,
69–70; problems with implementing
polices on, 70
Burroughs, Helen, 369
Bush, George H. W., 17
Bush, George W., 17, 238, 408, 454, 502
Business and corporate involvement,
71–77. See also Accountability;
Commercialization of schools; No Child
Left Behind Act; Standardized testing
Business Coalition for Education Reform, 239
Business Roundtable, 17, 75, 239, 629
Butler Act (Tennessee), 149
Cajete, Gregory, 83
Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Schools, 674
Cappa clausa, 123
Carnegie Foundation, 255
Carnegie Units, 664–65
Castañeda v. Pickard, 233
Catholic schools, 124, 127
Censorship, 1, 4, 5–8, 10, 80, 568, 588.
See also Academic freedom
Center for the Renewal of Science and
Culture, 152, 153
Central Committee of Conscientious
Objectors (CCCO), 426
Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS),
31–32, 581
Channel One, 131–32
Character education, 79–85; contemporary
movement, 434–35; decline of, 431–32;
indigenous approach to, 82–83; movement
in early twentieth century, 430–31. See also
Moral education
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1

Index | 729
Charter schools, 85–91; control of,
540–41; definition of, 85; evaluation of
90–91, 543–45; impetus for, 543;
selectivity of, 541
Cheney, Lynne, 592–93, 690
Cherry Hill Elementary School (Baltimore,
MD), 126
Child abuse. See Children’s and students’
rights
Child advocacy. See Children’s and students’
rights
Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF),
21–23
Child Development Association, 302
Child Medication Act, 414
Child Nutrition Act, 464
Children’s and students’ rights, 91–101
Chomsky, Noam, 688
Citizenship education, 101–10. See also
Social studies education
Civil Rights, 110–16; 482, 510; Act of 1964,
108, 182, 232, 233, 371, 447
Class size, 116–22, 637
Clinton, Bill, 17, 127, 465
Clothing and uniforms, 123–28
Coalition of Essential Schools, 338, 581
Cogen, Charles, 633
Cold War, 104, 109, 137, 282–84, 396, 432,
500, 656
Coleman, James, 313. See also Equality of
Educational Opportunity (The Coleman
Report)
Collective of Researchers on Educational
Disappointment and Desire (CREDD),
263–66
College Mindset List, 361
Colorblindness, 511–12
Comic books, 491–92
Commercialization of schools, 128–36;
critics of 132–33; and global politics,
135–36; and individual identity, 135–36
Commission on the Reorganization of
Secondary Education (CRSE), 104, 169,
556–57, 562, 586
Committee on Social Studies (1916), 104,
108, 586. See also Citizenship education;
Social studies education
Common school movement, 368. See also
Mann, Horace
Compulsory schooling, 33–34, 136–47; as
cultural genocide, 145–46
Computers, and children, 222–25
Conant, James, 579–80
Conference Board, 75

Confidentiality, 553–53
Convention on Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, 138
Convention on the Rights of the Child,
94–95, 687–88. See also Children’s and
students’ rights
Cooper, Anna Julia, 369
Corporal punishment, 192–93. See also
Discipline
Counseling. See School counseling
Counts, George S., 3, 174, 281
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution, 147–56; Web sites about, 148
Creation Research Society, 150
Critical pedagogy, 134, 156–61; and critical
theory, 157; and critical thinking 157–58;
critics of, 159–61; defined 152; and Paulo
Freire, 158–59
“Critical periods” hypothesis, 252
Critical Resistance Youth Force, 691
Cubberly, Ellwood, 72–73, 242, 504
Culturally relevant education, 161–68
Curriculum, 169–77; content standards; 48,
54, 110, 152, 154, 174, 290, 293, 348;
definitions of, 170–72; global education,
281–82; history of, 592–93; and
mathematics, 391, 394, 398–400, 406, 417;
in middle schools, 417–18; national, 637.
See also Textbooks
Darwin, Charles, 64
Day nurseries, 217–18
Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA), 653
Democracy: aggregate versus deliberative,
505–6; spectator democracy, 587–88
Deschooling. See Alternatives to schooling
Desegregation, 179–87; trends in
resegregation, 184–86
Detracking, 675–78
Development, genocidal nature of, 137–42
Dewey, John, 28, 71, 81 103– 4, 107, 134,
244, 281, 369, 391, 395–96, 431, 438, 505,
620–21, 632, 640; on content knowledge,
616–18; debate with Snedden, 503–4;
pedagogical progressivism, 478–79, 556;
and progressivism, 496–501
Digital Diploma Mills, 226–27
Discipline, 187–94: alternatives to
suspension, expulsion, and punitive
measures, 193; corporal punishment,
192–93; expulsion, 190–92;
suspension,190–92; zero tolerance
policies, 190–92
Distance learning. See E-learning

730

Index
Dover, Pennsylvania, 153
Draper, Andrew, 74
Dropouts, 194–203; causes of, 197–200;
controversy over data reporting, 200–202.
See also General Educational Development
Test
Drug and Alcohol Free Schools, 70
Drug use and prevention, 203–11;
definitions of drug use, 204; effects
of drug abuse in youth, 204–6;
prevention programs, 209–10
Du Bois, W.E.B., 106–7
Dutch National Mathematics Exam, 46;
sample questions, 48–49
Eagle Forum, 285
Early childhood education, 213–21
Ebonics, 166
Edison Project. See Edison Schools
Edison Schools, 18, 75–76, 128, 131–32
Educational management organizations
(EMO), 76, 88–89, 129, 132
Educational measurement, 452, 454, 458, 601;
sociopolitical nature of, 602–3. See also
Assessment; Evaluation; Grading, policies;
Standardized testing
Educational Testing Service (ETS), 19
Education Commission of the States, 602
Education Excellence Partnership, 17,
629, 636
Education for All Handicapped Act, 242,
292, 682
Education tax credits, 248
Edwards v. Aguillard, 152, 516. See also
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution; Religion in public schooling
E-learning, 221–28; on-line distance
learning, 225–28; virtual schools, 225–28
Elementary and Secondary Education Act,
15, 232, 235–37, 292, 293, 381, 416, 452,
453, 459, 682; and parental involvement,
471. See also No Child Left Behind Act
Eight-Year Study, 234 –35
Eliot, Charles, 73, 672
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the
Future of Religion, 82
English as a Second Language (ESL), 58,
63–64, 234. See also Bilingual education
English language learners, 228–34
English-only law, 57–58
Epperson v. Arkansas, 150, 515. See also
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution; Religion and public schooling
Epstein, Joyce, 468–67

Equal Access Act of 1984, 379
Equality of Educational Opportunity (The
Coleman Report), 11, 243, 467–68. See also
Coleman, James
Equal Rights Amendment, 267, 631, 635
Erickson, Erick, 328–29
Establishment clause (of the U. S.
Constitution), 152, 153, 514, 515, 518. See
also Religion and public schooling
Eugenics: and testing, 603–4. See also
Desegregation; Race, racism, and
colorblindness
Evaluation, 234 – 40
Evolution, 80, 515–17. See also Creationism,
intelligent design, and evolution
Expulsion from school. See Discipline
Families. See Children’s and students’ rights
Family Education Rights and Privacy Act
(FERPA), 413, 554
Ferguson, Ma, 63
Ferrer, Francisco, 35
Fiction, unpopular popular, 494–95
Freedom schools. See Mississippi Freedom
Schools
Freeman v. Pitts, 183
Free-market economics, 101, and compulsory
schooling, 142 – 45; and privatization, 508;
and social reform, 103–6
Film, 490 – 91. See also Popular culture and
schools
Finance, 241–49; independent and publicly
financed schools, 539– 41
Finn, Jr. Chester E., 17, 480, 594
First Amendment (of the U.S. Constitution),
1, 80, 150, 514, 517, 519
Foundations and schools, 254–60
Forbes, B. C., 589–90
Ford Foundation, 255
Foreign language education. 249–54;
immersion programs, 252. See also
Bilingual education; English language
learners
Fourteenth Amendment (of the U.S.
Constitution), 242
Freechild Project, 691
Free schools. See Alternatives to schooling
Freiler v. Tangipahoa, 154
Freire, Paulo, 37, 157, 226, 482; and critical
pedagogy, 158 – 59
Freud, Sigmund, 157
Frobel, Friederich, 477–78
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 282
Fusco, Liz, 114

Index | 731
Future: outlook for, 363–64; -oriented
perspective, 364–66
Gabler, Mel and Norma, 154
Gage, Nathaniel L., 648
Gary Plan, 244
Gates Foundation, Bill and Melinda, 255,
259– 60, 445, 583
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
(GLSEN), 377–78
Gay Straight Alliance, 375, 378–80
General Educational Development Test
(GED), 202, 261–67; business and
corporate influence on, 262–63
Gender, 267–74; centrality in educational
settings 272–74; in physical education,
486–87
General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS), 136
Gerstner, Lou, 17
GI Bill of Rights, 580
Gibson, Rich, 159
Gifted and talented education, 274–80;
diversity in 277; services and programs,
276–77; talented students in poverty, 277
Giroux, Henry, 134, 161, 482
Global education, 280–87
Goals 2000, 238, 250, 293, 387, 452, 682
Goddard, Henry H., 603–4
Goodman, Paul, 28, 81
Government role in schooling, 287–94;
shift from local to state and federal
control, 504
Grades: as form of punishment, 296–98
Grading: on the curve, 294–95; policies,
294–99; research-based grading practices,
53–54; selecting the class valedictorian,
295–96; using zeros in, 298–99. See also
Assessment; Evaluation; Educational
measurement
Great Depression, 104, 218, 290, 341,
462, 683
Green v. County School Board of New Kent
County, 182
Hall, G. Stanley, 478
Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier,
1, 7, 8
Head Start, 218–19, 682; 301– 6;
reauthorization act, 304–5
Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), 413, 554
High School Teachers’ Association
(New York City), 633

High-stakes tests, 43, 75, 246 – 47. See also
Accountability; No Child Left Behind Act;
Standardized tests
Hip-hop, 175, 494, 572
Hirsch, E. D., 17, 133–34, 645 – 46
Hoenig v. Doe, 189
Holt, John, 28, 36, 81
Home and school relations. See Parental
involvement in schools
Homeless children and schools, 306–13; and
poverty 307–8; Stewart B. McKinney Act,
210; successful approaches to educating
homeless children, 312
Homeschooling, 247–48, 313–19; academic
outcomes of, 318; critics of, 318–19;
motivations for, 317–17; socialization of
homeschooled children, 317–18
Home School Legal Defense Association
(HSLDA), 315–16
Homework, 319–26; attitudes toward,
320–21; effects of, 319–20; research on,
322–25
Hoover, Herbert, 291
Horowitz, David, 8–9
Howe, Florence, 114
Human development, 326–32; spiral of,
327–29
Hurricane Katrina, 129, 306
Hurricane Rita, 306
Ice T, 493–94
Illich, Ivan, 36, 81
Immigrants, 229–30, 231–33
Impact aid, 291
Inclusive education, 222–40; research on
efficacy of, 337–38. See also Individuals
with Disabilities Education Act
Independence (play), 7–9. See also
Censorship
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA), 189, 342, 408, 458, 501, 549–50.
See also Inclusive education
Institute for Creation Research, 150
Institute for Social Research at the
University of Frankfurt (“Frankfurt
School”), 157
Integrated mental health services in schools,
340– 46
Intelligence Quotient (IQ): testing, 44, 219,
274–75, 278, 523–24, 550, 600–601, 604,
623, 672, 676; and race, 237
Intelligent design. See Creationism,
intelligent design, and evolution; Religion
in public schooling

732

Index
International Alternative Learning
Association (IALA), 29
International comparisons of student
achievement, 346–56
Interstate New Teachers Assessment and
Support Consortium (INTASC), 625–26
Iraq War, 129
Jackson, Henry (Senator), 291
James, William, 438, 498
Jeanes, Anna T., 369
Jeanes Fund, 255
Jefferson, Thomas, 84, 356, 422
Jim Crow, 331, 510. See also Brown v. Board
of Education; Desegregation; Civil Rights
John Slater Fund, 255
Jones, Thomas Jesse, 106
Journalism, 496; future-focused, 405
Judd, Charles, on content knowledge, 616–18
Jung, Carl, 328–29
Junior ROTC, 421, 423–25, 488. See also
Military in schools
Kennedy, Edward, 17
Kennedy, John F., 66, 182, 356, 602
Kennedy, Robert, 236
Keppel, Francis, 236
Keys v. School District No. 1, 182
Kilpatrick, William Heard, 173, 497, 640
Kindergarten, 217. See also Early childhood
education
King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther, 4, 632
Kitzmiller v. Dover, 153, 154, 516–17. See
also Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution; Religion in public schooling
Knowledge, 357–66; and commercialization
of schools 135; pedagogical content
knowledge, 618–20; specialized content
knowledge, 619
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 433, 436
Kohn, Alfie, 80, 645, 647–48
Koontz, Elizabeth Duncan, 631
Ku Klux Klan, 491, 593
Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 163, 164
Language-Experience Approach (L-EA),
383–84
Language legislation, 231–33. See also
Bilingual education; English language
learners
Lauter, Paul, 114
Lau v. Nichols, 60, 232–33, 242, 447. See also
Bilingual education; English language
learners

Leadership, 367–74
Learning for the future, 357–58. See also
Motivation and learning
Lee v. Weisman, 518
Lemkin, Rafaël, 137–38
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and
queer youth (LGBTQ), 195, 207, 269,
374–81; defining, 374; and religious right
375–76. See also Sexuality education
Lickona, Thomas, 434–35
Literacy education, 381–90; in historical
perspective, 382–87
“Little Red Rider” law, 2–3, 632. See also
Academic freedom
Locke, John, 477
Long Beach Unified School District
(LBUSD), 126–27
Loyalty oaths. See Academic freedom
Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 490
Magnet schools, 247. See also Charter
schools
Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), 14, 284,
591– 92
Management by objectives, 481
Mann, Horace, 34, 71, 81, 314, 368, 429, 601
Marx, Karl, 157
Marzano, Robert, 645– 48
Mathematics education, 391– 400;
assumptions underlying, 392–93; NCTM
standards, 398–400; “new math,” 396–98;
reform movements, 394 – 400
The “Matthew Effect,” 275
McGuffey’s Readers, 81, 130, 429, 656
McLaren, Peter, 160, 482
McLean v. Arkansas, 152, 153, 516. See also
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution; Religion in public schooling
Media and schools, 400–406. See also
Journalism
Mental health, 406–15; children’s mental
health as a public health crisis, 407–8;
interventions in schools, 411–12; levels
of care, 409–10; privacy protections, 413;
screening for problems, 410–13; use of
psychotropic medications, 413–14. See also
Confidentiality; Integrated mental health
services in schools
Meyer v. Nebraska, 106
Middle schools, 415–21
Millennials, 360 – 61, 362
Milliken v. Bradley, 183
Military, 18; Junior ROTC and youth
violence, 426–27; myths of recruitment,

Index | 733
425–28; in schools, 421–28; schools are
recruiting grounds for, 424 –25
Mississippi Freedom Schools, 107, 110–16;
civic curriculum of, 113–14. See also Civic
education; Civil Rights
Missouri v. Jenkins, 183
Models of Teaching, 643– 44
Moral education, 428–37; history of, 429–35;
working definition of, 429. See also
Character education
Morrill Acts, 421, 422
Mort, Paul R., 242
Motivation and learning, 437–55;
contemporary theories about, 440– 42;
early views of, 438– 42
Multiculturalism, 445– 49; definition of,
445– 46; in higher education, 448; who is
included in, 446. See also Culturally
relevant education
Multiple intelligences, 482
Mumford, Lewis, 136
Murray v. Curlett, 518. See also Religion and
public schooling
Music, 493–494
Nash, Gary, 17, 592
National Academy of Engineering, 360
National Academy of Sciences, 147
National Alliance of Business, 74, 629
National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP), 11, 236–37, 452–53, 456, 602
National Association for Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), 107;
condemnation of tracking, 674
National Association for the Education of
Young Children, 213, 216, 219
National Association of Biology Teachers, 147
National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM), 72, 75, 103, 105, 109, 502, 590. See
also Business and corporate involvement
in schools; Citizenship education; Rugg,
Harold; Social studies education
National Association for Multicultural
Education (NAME), 447
National Board of Professional Teaching
Standards (NBPTS), 553, 620, 626
National Commission on Resources for
Youth, 691
National Congress of Parents and Teachers,
562
National Council for the Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE), 625
National Council for the Social Studies, 108,
590, 674

National Council of Churches, 110
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
(NCTM), 46, 391, 394, 397, 398; standards,
398– 400
National Council on Education Standards
and Testing, 239
National Defense Education Act, 291, 500,
550; Title V, 552
National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH), 593
National Education Association (NEA), 2, 3,
17, 103, 108, 126, 377, 586, 628, 630–32;
advocacy for military education, 423;
condemning of tracking, 674; merger with
AFT, 636–38; and sexuality education,
562. See also American Federation of
Teachers; “New Unionism;” No Child Left
Behind Act
National Education Goals Panel, 238–39
National Education Summits, 15–16, 238–39
National Governors Association, 629, 674
National History Standards, 592–93
National Inclusive Schools Week, 339
National Reading Panel (NRP), 62
National Research Council (NRC), 557, 561
National Rifle Association (NRA) and Junior
ROTC curriculum, 426
National Science Foundation (NSF), 150, 237,
284, 480, 500, 557, 591
National Science Teachers Association, 147,
155, 559
National School Board Association, 126
National School Lunch Program (NSLP),
462, 463– 66
National School Resource Network, 189
National Teachers Association (NTA), 630,
635
National Youth Rights Association, 691
A Nation at Risk, 14, 46, 72, 74, 126, 137, 142,
245, 255, 347, 502, 504, 506, 682
NEA. See National Education Association
Neil, A. S., 28, 35
Neoliberalism, 131; and evaluation, 237– 40;
and global education, 285– 87
Nevin, Alan, 109
Newdow v. U.S. Congress, 519
New Freedom Commission on Mental
Health, 408, 412
New Orleans public schools, 129
Newsboy Strike, 691
New York State Teachers Retirement Fund,
634
“New unionism,” 629–30, 636–37. See also
AFL-CIO; Teacher unions

734

Index
Noble, David, 226–27
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), 19, 66,
70, 75, 76, 129, 152, 200–201, 202, 237,
238, 239, 245, 251, 263, 273, 339, 372, 378,
381, 387– 89, 401, 406, 416, 451–59, 501,
506, 521, 571, 576, 596, 627, 652, 682, 689;
current scene, 645– 48; effects of, 454 –58;
federal assistance or incursion, 452–54;
legislation leading to, 453; and parental
involvement, 470–71; and physical
education, 487– 89; and privatization,
505; response to criticism of, 628–29; shift
from local to state and federal control of
schools, 504; and teacher unions, 629,
636–37. See also Elementary and
Secondary Education Act
Noddings, Nel, 436, 437
Notes on Teaching in Mississippi, 111, 113. See
also Mississippi Freedom Schools; Civil
Rights
Nursery schools, 218
Nutrition in schools, 459–66; history of
school lunch, 461– 46
Outcomes-based education (OBE), 481
Of Pandas and People, 152–53. See also
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution
Oklahoma City Board of Education v. Dowell,
183
The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647, 81
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), 346, 351, 353, 403
Otis, Arthur S., 601
Paige, Rod, 626, 636
Paine, Thomas, 82, 84
Parental Consent Act of 2005, 413
Parental involvement in schools, 467–73;
congruity and incongruity between home
and school, 469–70; involvement as
outreach, 468– 69; involvement as
partnership, 470–72
Parents. See Parental involvement in schools
Parent Teacher Association (PTA), 462, 467
Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 654
Patriotism, 101, 108–10. See also Citizenship
education
Peabody Education Fund, 255
Pedagogy, 473–83; didactic, 473–74;
evocative, 474–76; progressive, 478–79
Performance Assessment Consortium, 507
People for the American Way Foundation,
155

Peirce, Charles, 497–98
Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 214
Pestalozzi, Henrich, 395, 396, 474, 477, 478,
498, 620
Phelps-Stokes Fund, 255
Phonics, 176, 381– 88
Physical education, 483–89; in elementary
schools, 484–85; gender issues; 486–87;
purposes of, 483–84; specialists, 485–86
Pickering v. Board, 5
Pierce v. Society of Sisters of Holy Names of
Jesus and Mary, 289
Plato, 33–34, 474–76, 489, 493, 495
Pledge of Allegiance, 80, 519
Plessy v. Ferguson, 106, 181
Plyler v. Doe, 242, 293
Politics and schools, 502–7
Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca,
638
Popular culture and schools, 489–95
Positive Behavioral Interventions and
Support (PBIS), 188, 194
Powell, Colin, 427
Prayer. See Religion in public schooling
Principal: duties of, 369–70; public
conception of role, 370–72
Principle of Fiscal Neutrality, 243
The Principles of Scientific Management.
See Taylor, Frederick
Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA), 346, 349–53, 403
Progress in International Reading Literacy
Study (PIRLS), 351–54
Progressive schools, 479
Progressivism, 495–502; administrative,
479–80; in decline, 500–501; pedagogical
478–79; post-, 480–81
Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance
Education), 210
Project STAR, 118–19. See also Class size
Project 2061, 560–61
Proposition 187 (California), 691
Proposition 21 (California), 691
Proposition 209 (California), 691
Proposition 203 (Arizona), 233. See also
Bilingual education; English language
learners; Language legislation
Proposition 227 (California), 57, 233. See
also Bilingual education; English language
learners; Language legislation
Protagoras, 474–75
Protection of Pupils Amendment, 413
Public Agenda, 15 –16

Index | 735
Public Law 88– 647. See Junior ROTC
Public Law 94 –142, 189, 342
Pythagoras, 475– 476
Question 2 (Massachusetts), 233. See also
Bilingual education; English language
learners; Language legislation
Race, racism, and colorblindness in schools,
509–14; privilege and power of race,
512–13. See also Brown v. Board of
Education; Culturally relevant education;
Desegregation; Multiculturalism
Random clinical trials, 240
Ravitch, Diane, 17, 108, 480, 690
Reagan, Ronald, 60, 61, 125, 131, 150, 183,
219, 237, 342, 398, 495, 594, 682
Religion and public schooling, 514–20, 530;
key court cases, 517; prayer, 517–19;
religious practices, 517–19. See also
Creationism, intelligent design, and
evolution
Retention in grade, 520–26; alternative
strategies, 524–25; effectiveness, 521–24
Rice, Joseph, 14, 44, 601
Richards, Ellen H., 461– 66
Rickover, Hyman G., 108
Rivlin, Alice, 237
Robinson v. Cahill, 243
Rockefeller’s General Education Board, 255
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 356
Roosevelt, Theodore, 421, 423, 496
Root, E. Merrill, 108
Rose v. Council for Better Education,
Inc., 243
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 477–78, 498
Rugg, Harold O., 103; and textbooks, 104–5,
108–9, 281, 588–91
Rural schools, 526–31
Russell Sage Foundation, 255
Safety and security in schools, 533–39;
natural disasters, 534–35; pandemic
illnesses, 535–36; safety plans, 537–38;
terrorism, 534–35. See also School
violence; September 11, 2001
San Antonio Independent School District v.
Rodriguez, 183, 243
Santa Fe v. Doe, 518
SAT, 18, 261, 576, 600, 605,606, 607, 623. See
also Standardized testing
“Satan test,” 520. See also Religion in public
schooling
Schlesinger, Arthur, 588

Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 108, 445
School boards, conceptions of role of
principals, 372–73
School calendars. See Time in schools
School choice, 529–48; and bureaucracy,
542– 43; historical roots of movement,
541– 43. See also Charter schools
School counseling, 548–56; professional
identity of counselors, 548–53
School day. See Time in schools
School Lunch Act, 290. See also Nutrition in
schools
School shootings, 68, 127
School-to-Work Opportunity Act, 549
School violence, 404, 536 –37; and JROTC,
426–27. See also Safety and security in
schools
School year. See Time in schools
Schwab, Joseph, 558
Science, Technology, and Society
(STS), 559
Science education, 556–62; in progressive
era, 556–57; science literacy, 559–60. See
also Biological Sciences Curriculum Study
(BSCS); Creation, intelligent design, and
evolution
Scopes trial (Scopes v. Tennessee), 149–52,
515. See also Creationism, intelligent
design, and evolution; Religion in public
schooling
Segregation. See Desegregation
Selden, David, 634
Selman v. Cobb County, 154
September 11, 2001, 9, 110, 127, 286
Serrano v. Priest, 243
Sexuality education, 80, 562 – 69; curriculum
for elementary grades, 566– 67; curriculum
for secondary grades, 567– 68; effective
program characteristics, 568– 69;
opposition to, 564 – 65; qualifications of
sexuality educators, 565– 66; reasons for,
563–64; what is sexuality, 562– 63. See also
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and
queer youth
Sexually transmitted infection (STI), 563–64,
566, 569
Shanker, Albert, 632–636, 638; political
ideology of, 634–35
Shulman, Lee, 648; and pedagogical content
knowledge, 618–20
Silberman, Charles, 81
Single-sex schools, 569–79; debate over,
572–74; legal context for, 570–71
Skinner, B. F., 438

736

Index
Small schools, 579– 86; common features,
580
Smart schools, 482
Smith-Hughes Act, 290, 682
Snedden, David, 103, 502; debate with Dewey,
503– 4
Snyder Act of 1924, 106
Social Education, 283
Social promotion. See Retention in grade
Social justice, 93–94, 101
Social studies education, 586–95; and
cultural transmission, 587; “new social
studies,” 591–92; origins and purposes,
586– 87. See also Citizenship Education;
Rugg, Harold
Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,
95
Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children,
95– 96
Socrates, 474, 476, 489 – 90, 492
Stewart B. McKinney Act, 210
Special education. See Inclusive education
Sports in schools, 595–99; elite athletics and
moral reasoning, 596–97
Sputnik, 59, 149, 274, 291
SRA Reading Laboratory, 382
Standardized testing, 44 – 46, 133, 599– 608;
and accountability for, 605– 6; bias in,
604 –5; critics of, 45; definition of,
599 – 600; effects of, 605; and eugenics,
603– 4; history of, 601–2; sample
questions, 47; sociopolitical nature of,
602–3; and teacher licensure, 626; timeline
of events, 600; uses in schools, 602. See also
Accountability; Assessment;
Evaluation; Grading, policies;
High-stakes tests
Standards: of behavior, 188; for early
childhood education, 219–20; of effective
pedagogy, 167; for evaluating programs,
236; movement, 15 –18, 75 –76, 163,165
237– 40; national, 348, 398 452, 561,
592– 93, 622, 637; of performance, 76, 89,
97, 163, 193, 195,199, 245– 46, 251, 295–96,
298, 302, 305, 349, 387; of professional
responsibility, 4; social, 8; for teacher
licensure, 626. See also Annual yearly
progress; Curriculum; No Child Left
Behind Act; Standards-based reform
movement
Standards-based reform movement, 14–18,
75–76, 163,165, 294, 298–99, 321, 338–39,
400, 403–4, 437. See also Accountability;
Assessment; Business and corporate

involvement; Charter schools; Curriculum;
Evaluation; Grading, policies; Motivation
and learning; No Child Left Behind Act
Stanford Achievement Test, 601–2
The state: and schooling, 34–36; and
compulsory schooling 142–45
Sternberg, Robert, 275
Stewart, Jon, 361
Strayer, George D., 242
Student Achievement Guarantee in Education
(SAGE), 118. See also Class size
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), 110, 111
Student rights. See Children’s and students’
rights
Students for a Democratic Society, 691
Superintendents, conceptions of principal
role, 372–73
Supreme Court of the United States, 67, 80
Suspension from school. See Discipline
Sustained silent reading, 386
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of
Education, 182
Taylor, Frederick, 73, 244, 480. See also
Taylorism
Taylorism, 244 –245
Teacher education, 609–15; pedagogical content knowledge, 618–20. See also
Teacher knowledge
Teacher Education Accreditation Council
(TEAC), 625
Teacher knowledge, 616–22
Teacher licensure, 622–28
Teachers Guild, 632–33
Teacher unions, 628–38; professional
unionism, 629–30
Teach for America, 615
Teaching, 639– 49; students of different
abilities, 337. See also Inclusive education
Teaching to Change the World, 642– 43
Technology and schooling, 649–55; and
youth activism, 692. See also Alliance for
Childhood; Computers
Television, 492–93
Ten Commandments, 82. See also Bible
Terman, Lewis, 275, 601, 604
Terrorism. See Safety and security in schools
Textbooks, 655– 61; controversy over
content, 657–58; court cases, 659–60;
selection and adoption of, 658; publishers,
658–59; and testing, 19–20. See also
Curriculum
Theories of change, 257–58

Index | 737
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 285, 594
Thorndike, Edward, 44 – 45, 438, 480, 601,
621; on content knowledge, 616–18
Time in schools, 661–71; school day debates,
663 – 67; school year debates, 667–71
Tinker v. Des Moines, 4–5, 7, 109, 125, 128
Title IX, 267, 269, 378, 387, 486, 570, 571,
573, 682
Tolstoy, Leo, 34–35
Total Quality Management (TQM),
74 –75
Tracking, 334, 671–77; alternatives to,
675–78; flaws in design and practice,
673–75; historical origins, 671–73. See also
Inclusive education
Transitional bilingual education (TBE). See
Bilingual education
Trends in International Mathematics and
Science Study (TIMSS), 347– 48, 351–53,
400
Truman, Harry S, 137, 463
Tyler, Ralph, 174, 234 –35, 236, 602
Twenty-first Century Community Learning
Centers (21st CCLC), 21–23, 24
Uniforms. See Clothing and uniforms
United Federation of Teachers, 633–34
Universal pre-kindergarten. See Early
childhood education
Urban education, 681– 85; critique of
policies on, 683– 84; federal and state
policy, 681– 83; local education policy, 683;
policies students need, 684 – 85
U. S. Chamber of Commerce, 75, 76,
105, 629
U. S. Constitution, 289–90
U. S. House of Representatives, 80, 413

Values clarifications, 432–34
Video games, 457, 490, 492,
494 – 95
Vietnam War, 66 – 67, 105, 109, 342
Violence, in schools, 68 – 69
Virgil v. School Board of Columbia County,
Florida, 660
Virginia Military Institute: Supreme Court
ruling on single-sex education, 576–77
Virtual schools. See E-learning
Visual culture. See Art education
Vouchers, 247, 539–541. See also Charter
schools; School choice
Vygotsky, Leo, 52–53, 482
Walton foundations, 255
War on Poverty, 105, 234
Washington, Booker T., 106
Weingarten, Randi, 629
Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?, 594
Whittle, Christopher, 121. See also Edison
Schools
Whole language instruction, 170, 381, 385,
388, 472. See also Literacy education
Wilson, Woodrow, 290, 423, 491, 496
Wood, General Leonard, 421, 423
World Economic Forum, 347– 49
Yerkes, Robert, 601, 604
Young, Ella Flagg, 369, 497, 630 –31, 636. See
also National Education Association
Youth activism, 687–93; technology and; 692
Youth on Board, 691
Youth Organizing Committees, 691
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 247
Zero tolerance policies, 68– 69, 190– 92
References (259)
IMPORTANT EVENTS IN CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION 1889: Jane Adams opens Hull-House to help immigrants gain citizenship. 1903: W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk attacks Booker T. Washington's "accommo- dationist" approach to African American education. 1905: Thomas Jesse Jones establishes "The Social Studies in the Hampton Curriculum" for developing African American citizenship. 1916: Report of the Social Studies Committee of the National Education Association. 1921: David Snedden's Sociological Determination of Objectives in Education lays out differentiated instruction for producers and consumers. 1923: Supreme Court overturns teaching foreign language bans in Meyer v. Nebraska. 1929-1940: Harold Rugg textbooks capture social studies market. 1936: Attacks begin on popular Rugg textbooks for "anti-competition" content. 1940: National Association of Manufacturers "educational assignments" curricula dissem- inated to promote free market system and citizenship. 1942: Historian Alan Nevin characterizes the teaching of American history in schools as unpatriotic. 1958: E. Merrill Root's Brainwashing in the High Schools attacks textbooks in civics and social studies as divisive and unpatriotic. 1964: Establishment of over forty Mississippi Freedom Schools intended to promote and expand African Americans' citizenship education. 1969: Supreme Court rules in favor of "symbolic" free speech in schools in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. 1994: Controversial national history standards released and attacked. 2002: Florida enacts Celebrate Freedom Week in all public schools and requires portions of Declaration of Independence to be recited daily.
Assume charge of the school.
Decide on courses taught.
Assign children to teachers and rooms.
Check the building for maintenance and needed repairs. 5. Inform authorities of problems.
Assume charge of the school.
Decide on courses taught.
Assign children to teachers and rooms.
Check the building for maintenance and needed repairs.
Inform authorities of problems.
Direct the duties of their assistant principals.
Manage the budget.
Solve complex problems of practice.
Manage demands by parents and students.
Manage the demands of state and federal government.
Manage the demands of the business sector.
Be accountable to the media and general public.
Keep up with ever-changing trends via courses and workshops.
Serve as guardian of legal protections such as IDEA and Title I. 15. Proactively support the expansion of technological communication.
Interact with politicians in an eff ort to acquire necessary resources.
Attend community events that provide a link between home and school.
Handle crises and report incidents of violence to the state.
Hire, supervise, and mentor employees.
Establish parameters for fair and respectful human interaction.
Insure the safety of the children and employees in the building.
Assume major responsibility for eff ective instruction and learning. 1927 Scopes v. Tennessee 1962 Engel v. Vitale 1963 Abington v. Schempp 1963 Murray v. Curlett 1968 Epperson v. Arkansas 1982 McClean v. Arkansas 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard 1992 Lee v. Weisman 2000 Santa Fe v. Doe 2002 Newdow v. U.S. Congress 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education Religion and Public Schooling | 517
TIMELINE OF STANDARDIZED TESTING EVENTS 1845: Administration of the Boston Survey, the first known written examination of student achievement. 1895: Joseph Rice developed common written tests to assess spelling achievement in Boston schools. 1900-1920: Major test publishers are created: The College Board, Houghton-Mifflin, Psychological Corporation, California Testing Bureau (what is now CTBS), and World Book open for business. 1901: The first common college entrance examinations are administered. 1905: Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon develop the Binet-Simon Scale, an individually administered test of intelligence. 1914: Frederick Kelly invents the multiple choice question. 1916: Louis Terman develops an American version of the Binet-Simon Scale, which be- comes a widely used individual intelligence test, and he develops the common con- cept of the intelligence quotient (or IQ). 1917: Army Alpha and Beta tests are developed by Robert Yerkes, then president of the American Psychological Association, to efficiently separate potential officers from sol- diers as the United States entered World War I. 1926: The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), adapted directly from the Army Alpha Test, is first administered. 1955: The high speed optical scanner is invented. 1970: The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is created. 1980s: Computer-based testing is developed. 2001: No Child Left Behind is signed into law, reauthorizing the Elementary and Sec- ondary Education Act, and using student achievement test scores to hold schools accountable. TEACHER UNIONS TIMELINE 1857: National Teachers Association (NTA) formed. 1870: NTA changes its name to National Education Association (NEA) and merges with National Association of School Superintendents and two other organizations. 1903: At NEA's national convention, Margaret Haley leads demonstration about economic conditions for teachers, including tenure and pensions. 1906: NEA chartered by U.S. Congress. 1910: Ella Flagg Young elected as president of NEA. 1916: American Federation of Teachers (AFT) formed. 1933: John Dewey presents report on communist control of AFT Local 5. 1941: Charters revoked from three AFT locals due to communist views of leaders. 1946: First organized teachers strike in the United States (St. Paul, Minnesota Federation of Teachers). 1948: AFT stops chartering segregated locals. 1960: NEA begins organizing higher education faculty. 1957: AFT expels all locals that refuse to integrate. 1959: Wisconsin becomes first state to pass a collective bargaining law for public em- ployees. 1966: NEA and American Teachers Association merge. 1968: Elizabeth Duncan Koontz becomes first African American President of NEA Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike in New York City. 1972: NEA votes to support the Equal Rights Amendment. 1974: Albert Shanker becomes AFT president (holds position until his death in 1997). 1995: AFT starts campaign to accomplish goals of A Nation at Risk. 1998: NEA members reject merger with AFT. 2001: NEAFT Partnership formed (allows locals to affiliate with both NEA and AFT). 2006: AFL-CIO/NEA Labor Solidarity Partnership.
Further Reading: Boren, M. E., 2001, Student resistance, New York: Routledge; Chom- sky, N., 1999, Demystifying democracy: A dialogue with Noam Chomsky, in Pepi Leistyna, ed., Presence of mind: Education and the politics of deception, Boulder, CO: West- view;
Jenkins, H., ed., 1998, Children's culture reader, New York: New York University Press; Movement Strategy Center, 2005, Bringing it together: Uniting youth organizing, development and services for long-term sustainability, Oakland, CA: Movement Strategy Center;
Noguera, P., J. Cammarota, & S. Ginwright, eds., 2006, Beyond resistance! Youth activism and community change: New democratic possibilities for practice and policy for America's youth, New York: Routledge; Rhodes, R., 2000, Freedom's web: Student activ- ism in an age of cultural diversity, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Sher- rod, L. R., C. A. Flanagan, R. Kassimir, & A. K. Syvertsen, eds., 2005, Youth activism: An international encyclopedia (2 vols.), Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; Yates, M., & J. Youniss, eds., 1998, Roots of civic identity: International perspectives on community ser- vice and activism in youth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pepi Leistyna GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
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| General Bibliography Editorial Advisory Board David Berliner, Arizona State University Gerald Bracey, independent education consultant William Cala, Fairport Central School District, NY Elizabeth Graue, University of Wisconsin, Madison Perry Marker, Sonoma State University Deborah Meier, New York University & Mission Hill School H. Richard Milner, Vanderbilt University Valerie Ooka Pang, San Diego State University Kenneth Teitelbaum, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Mickey Vanderwerker, parent, Bedford, VA E. Wayne Ross is professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the infl uence of social and in- stitutional contexts on teachers' practices, and the role of curriculum and teach- ing in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. A former day care worker and secondary social studies teacher in North Carolina and Georgia, he taught at the State Uni- versity of New York (Albany and Binghamton campuses) and the University of Louisville, where he was Distinguished University Scholar. Ross is cofounder of Th e Rouge Forum (www.rougeforum.org), and coeditor of the journals Work- place: A Journal for Academic Labor (www.workplace-gsc.com) and Cultural Logic (www.eserver.org/clogic) and the former editor of Th eory and Research in Social Education. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Race, Ethnicity and Education (vols. 1-4);
Defending Public Schools (vols. 1-4); Neolib- eralism and Education Reform (with Rich Gibson); Th e Social Studies Curricu- lum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities; Image and Education (with Kevin D. Vinson);
and Democratic Social Education: Social Studies for Social Change (with David Hursh). You can fi nd him on the web at http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross. Martha Rapp Ruddell is dean and professor emerita of the School of Educa- tion at Sonoma State University. She taught in the secondary teaching credential program and the graduate Reading and Language MA program. Dr. Ruddell is author of numerous articles, book chapters, and books, including the fi ft h edi- tion of Teaching Content Reading and Writing (Wiley). She has published articles in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Teacher Education Quarterly, Th e NRC Yearbook, and California Reader. She is past president of the National Read- ing Conference, an international educational organization devoted to research in language and literacy. In 1996 she was inducted into the California Reading Association Reading Hall of Fame; in 2003 she was honored with the Albert J. Kingston Service Award of the National Reading Conference; and in 2004 she was designated Distinguished Alumna by the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Jessica Ruglis is a PhD/MPH candidate in urban education/community health education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A former teacher, Jessica's work focuses on retheorizing school dropout, consequences of miseducation, educational policy relationships between education and health, the embodiment of schooling, and participatory action research.
John L. Rury is professor of education at the University of Kansas. His publica- tions have dealt with such topics as the history of urban education, women's schooling, historical methods, and race and inequality. He is a past president of the History of Education Society (1998) and vice president for Division F (His- tory and Historiography) of AERA (1997-1999).
Rosemary C. Salomone is the Kenneth Wang Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law. She has written and lectured extensively on gender and single-sex education and is the author of Same, Diff erent, Equal: Rethinking Single-Sex Schooling, which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2005 by Choice Magazine. Block scheduling. See Time in schools Board of Education v. Pico, 660
Bobbitt, J. Franklin, 171, 173
Bode, Boyd, 281 Bond v. Public Schools of Ann Arbor School District, 659
Bourdieu, Pierre, 230
Boy Scouts, 504; Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act, 378
Bracero Program, 232
Brown, Charlotte Hawkins, 369
Bruner, Jerome, 169, 592
Bullying, 64-71; legislation against, 69-70; problems with implementing polices on, 70
Burroughs, Helen, 369
Bush, George H. W., 17
Bush, George W., 17, 238, 408, 454, 502 Business and corporate involvement, 71-77. See also Accountability; Commercialization of schools; No Child Left Behind Act; Standardized testing Business Coalition for Education Reform, 239
Business Roundtable, 17, 75, 239, 629
Butler Act (Tennessee), 149
Cajete, Gregory, 83
Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 674
Cappa clausa, 123
Carnegie Units, 664-65 Castañeda v. Pickard, 233 Catholic schools, 124, 127
Censorship, 1, 4, 5-8, 10, 80, 568, 588. See also Academic freedom Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, 152, 153
Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors (CCCO), 426
Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), 31-32, 581
Channel One, 131-32 Character education, 79-85; contemporary movement, 434-35; decline of, 431-32; indigenous approach to, 82-83; movement in early twentieth century, 430-31. See also Moral education Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1 National Education Association; "New Unionism;" No Child Left Behind Act American Library Association, 5
Annenberg Challenge, 258-59 Annual yearly progress (AYP), 129, 238, 387-89, 453, 457, 627
Apple, Michael, 160, 174, 318 Approaches to Teaching, 641-42
Aristotle, 80-81
Art education, 37-43; discipline-based art education, 38-39, 42
Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES), 552
Assessment, 43-55; authentic, 46-50; important events 44-45; research-based formative assessment, 50-53
Attention Deficit Disorder, 689 "Back to basics" movement, 165, 176, 398, 540, 592
Bagley, William C., 169, 640 Banking concept of education, 158-59, 226. See also Critical pedagogy; Freire, Paulo Banks, James, 108, 165, 447
Barnard, Henry, 368
Barry, Marion, 125-26 Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. See also Tyler, Ralph Be A Better Reader series, 384
Beard, Charles, 108
Bell, Terrel, 125, 237
The Bell Curve, 237, 604. See also Eugenics Bennett, William, 133-34, 434, 494, 690
Bestor, Arthur, 480, 640
Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools, 644 -45
Bible, 80-82, 145, 148 -49, 154, 176, 379, 477, 517-18, 656
Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), 14, 150, 154
Charter schools, 85-91; control of, 540-41; definition of, 85; evaluation of 90-91, 543-45; impetus for, 543; selectivity of, 541
Cheney, Lynne, 592-93, 690
Child abuse. See Children's and students' rights Child advocacy. See Children's and students' rights Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), 21-23 Child Development Association, 302
Children's and students' rights, 91-101
Chomsky, Noam, 688
Citizenship education, 101-10. See also Social studies education Civil Rights, 110-16; 482, 510; Act of 1964, 108, 182, 232, 233, 371, 447
Class size, 116-22, 637
Clinton, Bill, 17, 127, 465 Clothing and uniforms, 123-28 Coalition of Essential Schools, 338, 581
Cogen, Charles, 633
Cold War, 104, 109, 137, 282-84, 396, 432, 500, 656
Coleman, James, 313. See also Equality of Educational Opportunity (The Coleman Report) Collective of Researchers on Educational Disappointment and Desire (CREDD), 263-66 College Mindset List, 361
Colorblindness, 511-12 Comic books, 491-92 Commercialization of schools, 128-36; critics of 132-33; and global politics, 135-36; and individual identity, 135-36 Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE), 104, 169, 556-57, 562, 586
Committee on Social Studies (1916), 104, 108, 586. See also Citizenship education; Social studies education Common school movement, 368. See also Mann, Horace Compulsory schooling, 33-34, 136-47; as cultural genocide, 145-46
Computers, and children, 222-25
Conant, James, 579-80
Conference Board, 75
Confidentiality, 553-53 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 138
Convention on the Rights of the Child, 94-95, 687-88. See also Children's and students' rights Cooper, Anna Julia, 369 Corporal punishment, 192-93. See also Discipline Counseling. See School counseling Counts, George S., 3, 174, 281
Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution, 147-56; Web sites about, 148
Creation Research Society, 150 Critical pedagogy, 134, 156-61; and critical theory, 157; and critical thinking 157-58; critics of, 159-61; defined 152; and Paulo Freire, 158-59 "Critical periods" hypothesis, 252 Critical Resistance Youth Force, 691
Cubberly, Ellwood, 72-73, 242, 504 Culturally relevant education, 161-68
Darwin, Charles, 64
Day nurseries, 217-18
Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA), 653 Democracy: aggregate versus deliberative, 505-6; spectator democracy, 587-88
Deschooling. See Alternatives to schooling Desegregation, 179-87; trends in resegregation, 184-86
Detracking, 675-78
Development, genocidal nature of, 137-42
Dewey, John, 28, 71, 81 103-4, 107, 134, 244, 281, 369, 391, 395-96, 431, 438, 505, 620-21, 632, 640; on content knowledge, 616-18; debate with Snedden, 503-4; pedagogical progressivism, 478-79, 556; and progressivism, 496-501
Digital Diploma Mills, 226-27
Discipline, 187-94: alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and punitive measures, 193; corporal punishment, 192-93; expulsion, 190-92; suspension,190-92; zero tolerance policies, 190-92
Distance learning. See E-learning International Alternative Learning Association (IALA), 29
International comparisons of student achievement, 346-56
Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC), 625-26
Iraq War, 129
Jackson, Henry (Senator), 291
James, William, 438, 498
Jeanes, Anna T., 369
Jeanes Fund, 255
Jefferson, Thomas, 84, 356, 422
Jim Crow, 331, 510. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Desegregation; Civil Rights John Slater Fund, 255
Jones, Thomas Jesse, 106
Journalism, 496; future-focused, 405
Judd, Charles, on content knowledge, 616-18
Jung, Carl, 328-29
Junior ROTC, 421, 423-25, 488. See also Military in schools
Kennedy, Edward, 17
Kennedy, John F., 66, 182, 356, 602
Kennedy, Robert, 236
Keppel, Francis, 236
Kilpatrick, William Heard, 173, 497, 640
Kindergarten, 217. See also Early childhood education
King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther, 4, 632
Kitzmiller v. Dover, 153, 154, 516-17. See also Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution; Religion in public schooling Knowledge, 357-66; and commercialization of schools 135; pedagogical content knowledge, 618-20; specialized content knowledge, 619
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 433, 436
Kohn, Alfie, 80, 645, 647-48
Koontz, Elizabeth Duncan, 631
Ku Klux Klan, 491, 593
Ladson-Billings, Gloria, 163, 164
Language-Experience Approach (L-EA), 383-84 Language legislation, 231-33. See also Bilingual education; English language learners
Lauter, Paul, 114
Lau v. Nichols, 60, 232-33, 242, 447. See also Bilingual education; English language learners Leadership, 367-74 Learning for the future, 357-58. See also Motivation and learning Lee v. Weisman, 518
Lemkin, Rafaël, 137-38
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer youth (LGBTQ), 195, 207, 269, 374-81; defining, 374; and religious right 375-76. See also Sexuality education
Lickona, Thomas, 434-35 Literacy education, 381-90; in historical perspective, 382-87 "Little Red Rider" law, 2-3, 632. See also Academic freedom
Locke, John, 477
Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), 126-27
Loyalty oaths. See Academic freedom Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 490
Magnet schools, 247. See also Charter schools Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), 14, 284, 591-92 Management by objectives, 481
Mann, Horace, 34, 71, 81, 314, 368, 429, 601
Marx, Karl, 157
Marzano, Robert, 645-48 Mathematics education, 391-400; assumptions underlying, 392-93; NCTM standards, 398-400; "new math, " 396-98; reform movements, 394 -400
The "Matthew Effect, " 275
McGuffey's Readers, 81, 130, 429, 656
McLaren, Peter, 160, 482
McLean v. Arkansas, 152, 153, 516. See also Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution; Religion in public schooling Media and schools, 400-406. See also Journalism Mental health, 406-15; children's mental health as a public health crisis, 407-8; interventions in schools, 411-12; levels of care, 409-10; privacy protections, 413; screening for problems, 410-13; use of psychotropic medications, 413-14. See also Confidentiality; Integrated mental health services in schools Meyer v. Nebraska, 106
Middle schools, 415-21
Millennials, 360 -61, 362
Milliken v. Bradley, 183
Military, 18; Junior ROTC and youth violence, 426-27; myths of recruitment, Index | 735
Public Law 88-647. See Junior ROTC Public Law 94 -142, 189, 342
Pythagoras, 475-476 Question 2 (Massachusetts), 233. See also Bilingual education; English language learners; Language legislation
Race, racism, and colorblindness in schools, 509-14; privilege and power of race, 512-13. See also Brown v. Board of Education; Culturally relevant education; Desegregation; Multiculturalism Random clinical trials, 240
Ravitch, Diane, 17, 108, 480, 690
Reagan, Ronald, 60, 61, 125, 131, 150, 183, 219, 237, 342, 398, 495, 594, 682 Religion and public schooling, 514-20, 530; key court cases, 517; prayer, 517-19; religious practices, 517-19. See also Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution Retention in grade, 520-26; alternative strategies, 524-25; effectiveness, 521-24
Rice, Joseph, 14, 44, 601
Richards, Ellen H., 461-66
Rickover, Hyman G., 108
Rivlin, Alice, 237
Robinson v. Cahill, 243
Rockefeller's General Education Board, 255
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 356
Roosevelt, Theodore, 421, 423, 496
Root, E. Merrill, 108
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 477-78, 498
Rugg, Harold O., 103; and textbooks, 104-5, 108-9, 281, 588-91 Rural schools, 526-31
Russell Sage Foundation, 255 Safety and security in schools, 533-39; natural disasters, 534-35; pandemic illnesses, 535-36; safety plans, 537-38; terrorism, 534-35. See also School violence; September 11, 2001
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 183, 243
SAT, 18, 261, 576, 600, 605,606, 607, 623. See also Standardized testing "Satan test, " 520. See also Religion in public schooling
Schlesinger, Arthur, 588
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 108, 445 School boards, conceptions of role of principals, 372-73
School calendars. See Time in schools School choice, 529-48; and bureaucracy, 542-43; historical roots of movement, 541-43. See also Charter schools School counseling, 548-56; professional identity of counselors, 548-53
School day. See Time in schools School Lunch Act, 290. See also Nutrition in schools School shootings, 68, 127
School-to-Work Opportunity Act, 549
School violence, 404, 536 -37; and JROTC, 426-27. See also Safety and security in schools School year. See Time in schools Schwab, Joseph, 558
Science, Technology, and Society (STS), 559
Science education, 556-62; in progressive era, 556-57; science literacy, 559-60. See also Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS);
Creation, intelligent design, and evolution Scopes trial (Scopes v. Tennessee), 149-52, 515. See also Creationism, intelligent design, and evolution; Religion in public schooling Segregation. See Desegregation Selden, David, 634
Serrano v. Priest, 243
Sexuality education, 80, 562 -69; curriculum for elementary grades, 566-67; curriculum for secondary grades, 567-68; effective program characteristics, 568-69; opposition to, 564 -65; qualifications of sexuality educators, 565-66; reasons for, 563-64; what is sexuality, 562-63. See also Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer youth Sexually transmitted infection (STI), 563-64, 566, 569
Shanker, Albert, 632-636, 638; political ideology of, 634-35
Shulman, Lee, 648; and pedagogical content knowledge, 618-20
Silberman, Charles, 81
Single-sex schools, 569-79; debate over, 572-74; legal context for, 570-71
Skinner, B. F., 438
E. Wayne Ross
University of British Columbia, Faculty Member
Sandra Mathison
University of British Columbia, Faculty Member
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