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1.
Some parents and caregivers, frustrated by low academic performance of their local school, emphasis on testing, or the content of the curriculum, have worked independently or formed parent groups to speak out and demand improvements. Parents and families enact solutions such as opting out of tests, developing alternative curricula, invoking parent trigger laws, and withdrawing their children from public schools. When engaged well, these outcries of family dissent can be used to improve public schools and to keep them truly public. In this article, I define good dissent and show how it keeps schools healthy. I examine the actions, publications, and web sites of major parent organizations and individual parents to argue that some parents are demonstrating good and admirable dissent that can help improve school quality, parent satisfaction with schools, and student experiences in them; others not only fail to employ good dissent, but may actually be hurting the viability of our public schools and the type of graduate they produce.  相似文献   

2.
Schools are required to develop policies and practices in line with the principles of both partnership with parents and pupil participation. However, there is increasing recognition of the potential tensions that may exist between these two principles. This paper reports on a study that aimed to explore the question of how schools might develop their home–school relationships in ways that enhance rather than constrain pupil participation. It focuses on the perspectives of children aged 6 to 16 years (with and without special educational needs), parents and teachers concerning children's involvement in decision-making at home and at school, and their participation within the home–school relationship. The findings highlight the need for schools to develop a coherent view of what active participation means for children and a vocabulary to communicate about this not only with pupils and staff across the whole school, but also with parents. They demonstrate that there is scope for two-way support between parents and teachers in relation to the promotion of children's involvement in decision-making both at home and at school. Further, they illustrate the complex and evolving three-way partnership between parent–child–teacher that is central to the home–school relationship. While it is acknowledged that children may rightly wish to keep a distance between aspects of home and school life, it is argued that there is a need for schools to give explicit consideration to the place of pupil participation within the home–school relationship.  相似文献   

3.
This article investigates why school choice is exercised to a limited degree by parents despite major government initiatives to enhance diversity, competition and choice in the Danish education system. Denmark has had 20 years of centre‐right governments, promoting choice reforms perhaps even more vigorously than the other Nordic countries, yet school choice is seldom used – only 12% of parents choose a public school that differs from the one that is allocated to them. The literature on school choice in Denmark argues that this is primarily due to a general lack of parental interest because of the relatively high similarity across schools. In this article, we argue that the main reason is to be found in the politics of vested interests, namely municipalities’ persistent use of pupil assignment schemes supported by powerful teacher union branches at the local level.  相似文献   

4.
School choice survey data from the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, a large county‐wide school district, is analysed to examine the characteristics of parents who consider choosing private schools for their children and those who do not. We examine differences in background, including race, educational attainment and socioeconomic status, as well as differences in parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school, parent involvement in school, parents’ priorities in school choice, as well as parents’ social networks. After controlling for background characteristics, we find that parent satisfaction with their child’s previous school was not a predictor of considering a private school. Rather, parent involvement seems to be a more important indicator of whether or not a parent would consider sending their child to a private school. In this case, parents are not ‘pushed’ away from public schools, contrary to much public rhetoric that suggests private schools are somehow inherently ‘better’ than public schools and parents who are dissatisfied with their public schools will opt for private schools. Instead, these findings suggest a ‘pull’ towards private schools. Parents may perceive that parent involvement and parent communication are more easily facilitated and valued in private schools.  相似文献   

5.
《教育政策杂志》2012,27(1):68-94
ABSTRACT

Oslo introduced a combination of school choice, per capita funding, balanced management and accountability in their public schools. Recent studies point out that this has increased segregation. In this study, teachers have been interviewed about their experiences. Bernstein´s classification and framing tools have been used to analyse the consequences for schools and relations between schools and parents/students. ´Marginalised´ and ´privileged´ schools find themselves in negative and positive spirals when it comes to popularity. These spirals are classed, raced and, (in upper secondary school), also gendered. Since attracting the ´right´ students and avoiding getting the ´wrong´ ones is essential for both school categories, school choice creates a mutual interest between the school and privileged parents/students in fortifying the latter´s voice. Three findings are especially interesting: 1. Cream skimming occurs in undersubscribed schools in a strictly public-school context. 2. School choice affects internal priorities in marginalised schools so that segregation at the class level increases, thus the educational context may be more segregated than what is indicated by school level information. 3. School choice increases segregation in the local communities, as two schools near each other may have very different student compositions. Segregation is thus not only explained by segregated housing.  相似文献   

6.
7.
Parents in the United States have had the legal right to choose the school their child attends for a long time. Traditionally, parental school choice took the form of families moving to a neighborhood with good public schools or self-financing private schooling. Contemporary education policies allow parents in many areas to choose from among public schools in neighboring districts, public magnet schools, public charter schools, private schools through the use of a voucher or tax-credit scholarship, virtual schools, or even homeschooling. The newest form of school choice is education savings accounts (ESAs), which make a portion of the funds that a state spends on children in public schools available to their parents in spending accounts that they can use to customize their children's education. Opponents claim that expanding private school choice yields no additional benefits to participants and generates significant harms to the students “left behind” in traditional public schools. A review of the empirical research on private school choice finds evidence that private school choice delivers some benefits to participating students—particularly in the area of educational attainment—and tends to help, albeit to a limited degree, the achievement of students who remain in public schools.  相似文献   

8.
There has been relatively little empirical research on the impact of stage of fluency in English of bilingual pupils. However, this issue is increasingly important given growth in the bilingual school population in England of over one‐third between 1997 and 2004 to around 10% of the school population. This study evaluates the relationship between stage of English fluency and performance in public examinations at age 16 for all pupils within an inner London local education authority. Two methodological approaches are used to study the associations. The first looks at the context and the trend data for the case‐study local authority (LEA) in terms of languages spoken and the performance of bilingual pupils in schools. This is followed by a detailed statistical regression analysis to isolate the unique association between level of fluency in English and pupils' performance at age 16, after controlling for the effect of a range of other pupil and school background factors. The results confirm a strong relationship between stage of fluency in English and educational attainment, with the performance of bilingual pupils increasing as measured stage of fluency in English increases. Pupils in the early stages of fluency perform at very low levels, while bilingual pupils who are fully fluent in English perform better, on average, than English‐only speakers. However, the latter results are not due to bilingualism per se since the difference is no longer statistically significant after controlling for other measured pupil background variables. All EAL (English as an Additional Language) pupils make better than expected progress over the two years between age 14 and age 16. The final section questions the appropriateness of the Qualification and Curriculum Authority's (QCA) approach to the assessment of bilingual pupils, which contrasts with the local authority's good practice. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that there is a need to develop a national assessment strategy that better meets the needs of bilingual learners. The policy implications for national and local government and for school improvement practitioners are reviewed.  相似文献   

9.
This article provides a “thick” understanding of how public school parents understand their decision to opt their children out of standardized tests. In it, Amy Shuffelton draws from qualitative research interviews with Chicago parents to explore how three mothers connected opting out of standardized testing to their broader commitments to public schools. In probing the democratic potential of their logic, Shuffelton points to avenues of hope for democratic and equitable public schooling. As scholars have argued on multiple grounds, public schools have generally preserved inequitable power relations and resource allocations rather than changed them, and this happens in part because of parental resistance to reforms they believe to be detrimental to the interests of their children. Precisely because privileged parents have and implement the power to use schooling to pass advantages to their own children, however, it is important to consider when and why some of these parents instead see reason to build a public school system that shares those advantages widely. Putting these parents' explanations for opting out of testing into conversation with ideas about the democratic public in texts by John Dewey and Bonnie Honig, Shuffelton finds potential pathways, as well as hurdles, to reviving commitment to public schooling.  相似文献   

10.
This paper examines the causes of pupil mobility and good practice in schools to address mobility issues. Pupil mobility is defined as ‘a child joining or leaving school at a point other than the normal age at which children start or finish their education at that school’. The first part draws upon evidence of a survey, which explores the views of headteachers on the nature and causes of pupil mobility in schools and the priority they give to addressing pupil mobility issues in their schools. It examines the cause of mobility in schools in the context of mobile groups. This is followed by the challenges for managing mobility and strategies to address pupil mobility in schools. The second part of the paper outlines successful strategies that minimize the effects of mobility in schools. Evidence is drawn from case‐study research and focuses on the school systems, pastoral care and access to learning which combine to support the induction, assessment and monitoring of newly arrived pupils in school and effective use of data for self‐evaluation. Examples of flexible curriculum organization, innovative approaches to additional support and effective administrative procedures are drawn upon. Evidence reflects the views of a range of school staff, parents/carers and pupils in the case‐study school, as well as the judgements of senior researchers. Policy implications for government and for all concerned with school performance are highlighted, as well as many practical suggestions for raising achievement of mobile pupils  相似文献   

11.
This study examines whether rising enrollments of foreign-born students in US public schools caused a movement among native children from public schools to private schools, something the literature has labeled native flight to private school. Using data from the National Center of Educational Statistics School District Demographic System, estimates of native flight are constructed using enrollment data on native and foreign-born, school-age children from 1990, 2000, and 2010. Concern regarding omitted variables bias necessitates the use of an instrumental variables technique. An instrument for the foreign-born enrollment is created using information about the ethnic composition of school districts in 1980 to predict the enrollment patterns of foreign-born students in later years. Two-stage least squares estimates confirm the presence of native flight. Flight to private school among white native students is occurring in smaller school districts in non-traditional immigrant receiving states, while flight among native minorities and Hispanics is located in school districts that reside in traditional immigrant receiving states.  相似文献   

12.
This study aimed to investigate internet usage among post-primary pupils in years 9, 11 and 13 in two contrasting post-primary schools in Northern Ireland, the nature and incidence of cyberbullying among these pupils, and the ways in which their schools are currently addressing the problem. A mixed methodological approach was adopted: a paper questionnaire was completed by pupils in Years 9, 11 and 13 (n = 425) in the two post-primary schools; focus group interviews were conducted with pupils from each year group (n = 18); and individual semi-structured interviews were carried out with the pastoral care coordinators (deputy heads with responsibility for pupil wellbeing) of each school (n = 2). The findings confirm that the post-primary pupils in these two schools own a range of internet-capable media devices and spend considerable time online. The incidence of cyberbullying among these pupils was relatively low, and most often consisted of hurtful or nasty comments sent via texts or posted on social networking sites. The study reveals inconsistencies between the approaches taken by the two schools, but also generally low levels of staff training, little engagement with parents, a lack of pupil confidence in the school’s ability to discuss cyberbullying openly, and a worrying absence of any systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of the schools’ current strategies for tackling this complex issue.  相似文献   

13.
Background Educational reform is a major challenge facing schools in Taiwan. The new educational reform requires that every primary school must have parental involvement programmes in their school schedules, and to support these new programmes, there is a need for research to examine the extent and nature of parental involvement in primary schools in Taiwan, and to investigate the impact of parental involvement on pupil outcomes.

Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the extent to which parents' involvement in schooling is related to primary pupil outcomes, after taking into account differences in family social status and family structure, and the children's perceptions of their school learning environments.

Sample For the analyses data were collected in 2001 from 261 6th-grade Taiwanese students, 128 boys and 133 girls, from four primary schools in the Taichung City school district. The average age of the children was approximately 11 years.

Design and methods In the analysis of the research model, a quantitative approach was adopted, in which each student completed two questionnaires and two academic achievement tests. The first questionnaire included questions to assess family social status, family structure and parents' involvement in their children's education. In the second questionnaire there were questions to measure pupils' self-concept and perceptions of their schools' learning environments. The data were analysed using multiple-regression techniques to examine relationships among family social status, family structure, parental involvement, the school learning environment and pupils' school-related outcomes.

Results The findings suggested that: (a) children's academic achievement is related to their family social status and perceptions of immediate family learning environments, and (b) children's self-concept is associated with their perceptions of classroom learning environments, parents' aspirations and parents' involvement at home. These propositions indicate the differential nature of the relationships among family and school environments and measures of children's school outcomes.

Conclusions In the Taiwanese context, by showing the particularly important association between Taiwanese family environments and children's school outcomes, the present investigation supports the educational reform movement that encourages schools to involve parents more intimately in shared responsibilities.  相似文献   

14.
The prevalence of ‘pre-service’ or ‘trainee’ teachers in schools is rising in England, driven by the expansion of school-led routes to qualified teacher status and increasing demand for newly qualified teachers. This may have important implications for schools, which have historically been concerned with the impact of trainee teachers on their pupils’ attainment. There are, however, confounding factors which affect both the decision to host a trainee teacher and pupil attainment. We empirically model the impact of trainee teachers on contemporaneous pupil attainment in ‘high-stakes’ exams, exploiting unique data combining national administrative data on pupil test scores with a survey of schools’ involvement with initial teacher training over multiple academic years. We use school fixed effects to account for time-invariant school factors which may determine both schools’ teacher training decisions and pupil attainment. Counter to schools’ concerns, we find that pupil attainment in high-stakes assessments, on average, is not significantly affected by the number of trainee teachers. This is an important empirical finding, as it suggests that the rapid expansion of school-led teacher training is not likely to have a detrimental effect on pupil attainment in England, conditional on the set of schools that choose to engage with initial teacher training remaining similar: trainee teachers may still affect pupil attainment in schools that do not currently participate in initial teacher training, as these schools are typically more constrained.  相似文献   

15.
A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.  相似文献   

16.
Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children's educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.  相似文献   

17.
Throughout the 1990s there have been growing concerns from teacher unions, local education authorities (LEAs) and central government about the rising level of pupil exclusions from schools in England and the related issue of school discipline. School exclusion has also been given a high profile in the media, with attention often focusing on cases where the original decision to exclude has been overturned on appeal. Although certain ethnic groups are over‐represented among those excluded from school, issues of race and ethnicity have largely been ignored in the public debate on exclusions and the question of possible racial discrimination overlooked. This article reports on a study to identify good practice in reducing the number of exclusions from school, particularly the disproportionate number amongst African‐Caribbean boys. The study draws on statistical data from Birmingham, the largest metropolitan LEA, and on interviews with teachers and headteachers in six West Midlands case study schools. This data was supplemented by interviews with key personnel from a variety of West Midlands authorities and by questionnaires to pupils in the case study schools. We examine recent government proposals to cut exclusions in the light of this study's findings and the context of racial equality  相似文献   

18.
In these times of tight budgets and political intoleance for taxation, public schools, particularly urban public schools, will continually have to look for ways in which to spend less while dealing with ever-increasing societal problems. While the ability of schools to improve the overal “product” with less resources is highly suspect, this article addresses one way in which spending less might actually improve school perfomance. The best planners in the best schools should be the administration, techers, students, parents, and the comminitu at large, and not outside esxperts hired to improve a school's “comprehensive” or “strategic” plan. By forcing the segments of the public that have the largest stake in the educational outcomes of schools to work together to plan for the future, schools will improve the efficacy of their staffs, their students, and allow parents the self-satisfaction of playing an important role in their children's education. An improtant side effect of such a method may be an increasing awareness by the public of the difficulties that schools face, and perhaps a better understanding of the important need for higher expenditures. His research interests include professionalism, collective bargaining, and educational reform. His articles have appeared inPeople and Education, and a recent article has been aceepted for publication in theJournal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector.  相似文献   

19.
The literature shows that a good collaboration between the school and parents of students with special educational needs (SEN) is not always present. However, school counsellors must collaborate with SEN students’ parents to organise guidance trajectories for their child. This article examines school counsellors’ experiences when collaborating with parents of SEN students and the factors they perceive as contributing to good or difficult collaboration. Four focus groups in mainstream education (= 50) and one focus group in special education (= 14) were conducted in Flanders. A thematic analysis indicated that school counsellors generally find it difficult to collaborate with parents of SEN students and that an expert attitude can emerge. The role of these parents is described as limited, which is even preferred by some school counsellors. A deficit view is recognised and the reasons for poor collaboration are mainly situated on the parents’ side, such as parents that need more processing time to accept the SEN of their child and that show distrust towards the school. School counsellors spontaneously referred to parents’ low socioeconomic and ethnic minority status as complicating factors for collaboration. They seem to feel incompetent to overcome these collaboration difficulties. Various recommendations for schools are formulated.  相似文献   

20.
School quality, child wellbeing and parents’ satisfaction   总被引:1,自引:0,他引:1  
Child wellbeing at school and enjoyment of the learning environment are important economic outcomes, in particular because a growing body of research shows they are strongly linked to later educational attainments and labour market success. However, the standard working assumption in the economics of education is that parents choose schools on the basis of test-score performance, and concerns about child happiness are largely ignored. In this paper, we address this omission and investigate to what extent parents’ and children's views of their school are linked to test-score based performance, and to what extent parents’ judgements of school quality are linked to their child's happiness. To do so, we use information on stated attitudes from the Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England (LSYPE) matched to administrative records on pupil achievements in England. Our results suggest that test-score based measures of school quality tend to dominate parental satisfaction with the learning environment. However, school quality along this dimension is not strongly associated with pupil happiness and wellbeing at school.  相似文献   

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