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1.
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   

2.
In this essay, Michele Moses and Terri Wilson explore the recent movement to opt out of state tests. They situate this activism within a diverse line of efforts to refuse aspects of public education, asking how to evaluate the democratic legitimacy of different kinds of refusal in public education. Drawing on specific examples of opting out, they point to different ethical principles at stake in conflicts over public education. They pose three sets of questions — emphasizing reasons, positionality, and consequences — to help guide local educational leaders, policymakers, and citizens in negotiating difficult cases of refusal in public education. Moses and Wilson conclude that opting out of tests may, under certain conditions, serve the public purposes of education in a democratic society. Although many opt-out activists justify their actions in terms of individual rights, others are concerned with public goals and ideals, including concerns about the narrowing of curriculum, the erosion of teacher authority, and the widening privatization of public education. Yet communicating across and between different interests in this movement remains a challenge, one that points to the need for spaces of democratic deliberation about the aims of education policy.  相似文献   

3.
In this essay, Sarah Stitzlein addresses a key current crisis in public education: accountability. Rather than centrally being about poor performance of teachers or inefficiency of schools, as we most often hear in media outlets and in education reform speeches, Stitzlein argues the crisis is at heart one about citizen responsibility and political legitimacy. She claims that the recent accountability movement has shifted the onus of curing society's problems almost exclusively onto schools, but contends that these burdens should not just be unidirectional. There is, Stitzlein maintains, a corresponding obligation on the part of citizens to public schools. This includes all citizens, not just those closely tied to schools through their children or employment. Moreover, this obligation entails a robust commitment that extends beyond merely supporting public schools through taxes, voting for levies, and choosing to send one's children to them. The responsibility of citizens includes upholding a commitment to schools as a central institution of democracy — something that sustains democracy but also, in its best forms, is democracy in action.  相似文献   

4.
We formulate a distinctly 'political liberal' conception of mutual respect, which we call 'civic respect', appropriate for governing the public political relations of citizens in pluralist democratic societies. A political liberal account of education should aim at ensuring that students, as future citizens, learn to interact with other citizens on the basis of civic respect. While children should be required to attend educational institutions that will inculcate in them the skills and concepts necessary for them to be free and equal citizens, parents should be granted as much freedom as is compatible with the requirements of civic respect to raise their children in accordance with their respective 'comprehensive doctrines' (systems of beliefs and values, including religious doctrines). We consider an objection to our position drawn from the account of upbringing recently advanced by Matthew Clayton, namely, that the conception of civic respect that we advance rests on an implausible view about the limited scope of the requirements of political justice. We develop an account of the 'basic structure of society' as the appropriate subject of political justice that can overcome this objection.  相似文献   

5.
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   

6.
The idea of collective decision making in schools has been a popular democratic educational reform model. One of its claims is that participation in school decision making empowers teachers and improves teaching. This research investigates this claim by exploring seven teachers’ experiences with a unique democratic school reform in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the election of principals by teachers, students, parents, and staff. Results showed that the elections reshaped the school authority relations, resulting in greater freedom for teachers to introduce democratic teaching methods, while articulating the school as a democratic institution and teachers as citizens.  相似文献   

7.
This paper focuses on the issue of separate schooling. Diverse societies use schools to develop shared value systems, strengthen democratic engagements and provide better educational outcomes. However, in Europe, the United States, Australia and elsewhere groups of parents and communities have been invoking human rights claims to challenge the state, often successfully, to demand separate schools for their children or the right to send their children to a school of their choosing, irrespective of the consequences for society at large. Yet do such separate schools reflect an increased respect for the rights of minorities and a commitment to help them reach their full potential? Do they help remove marginalization and can they ever lead to the establishment of stable and peaceable communities? Or do they undermine societal commitments to intergroup harmony and perpetuate stereotypes, racism and ethnocentric thinking? Do they keep existing inequalities in place and deny young people the opportunities they need to become full-fledged members of society? It is argued here that regardless of location, separate schools are part of the problem, not the solution.  相似文献   

8.
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   

9.
Abstract

Data from the National Household Education Survey (1993) were used to examine parents' conceptions of kindergarten readiness and home-learning activities. Parents reported reading to their children an average of several days each week; a majority of children watched educational television programs such as Sesame Street. African American and Hispanic parents, and other parents of color, were significantly more likely than Caucasian parents to express concerns about their childís readiness for kindergarten. However, Caucasian parents were significantly more likely than other parents to comment that they would delay sending their child to kindergarten until he or she was older. Parent concerns about their child's kindergarten readiness were unrelated to learning activities and educational television viewing at home.  相似文献   

10.

In the United States and a number of nations, one of the most powerful dynamics of educational 'reform' involves the movement toward home schooling. The national media have spoken glowingly about it and the number of children being schooled at home is growing rapidly. In large part, this is stimulated by the circulation of anti-statist discourses and by the continuation and expansion of claims about school failure. In these accounts, the sources of educational problems are multiple: teacher education institutions produce teachers who are unprepared academically and unskilled in teaching the 'basics'; state funded (public, in the US sense of the word) schools have been taken over by 'progressive' models of teaching that are unworkable; these same schools do not teach 'traditional' cultural and religious knowledge, beliefs, and values; and public schools do not listen to conservative parents and are much too bureaucratic. Supporters of home schooling are usually religious fundamentalists who have increasing power in the USA and elsewhere. They have formed a national coalition and have joined in a tense rightist hegemonic alliance with neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, an alliance that seeks to reconstruct our common-sense about education and about all things social. The article shows how the movement toward home schooling has become more extensive and more dangerous than has usually been thought. In the process, home schooling is situated within the larger conservative and authoritarian populist ideological, religious, and social movements that provide much of its impetus. Connections are suggested with other protectionist impulses and connections are made to the history of and concerns about the growth of activist government. Finally, the article points to how it may actually hurt many other students who are not home schooled.  相似文献   

11.
Educational theorists frequently invoke rights claims to express their views about educational justice and authority. But the unyielding nature of rights claims presents a significant quandary in democratic contexts, given the tension between rights claims and majoritarian democracy. Educational theorists have given limited attention to this tension, while political theorists tend to sideline education in their analyses. In this essay Anne Newman addresses this gap by advancing a democratic rationale for educational rights. Newman's purpose is to provide a framework for advancing educational rights that protects these rights from the whims of majoritarian politics. Her central argument is that the importance of educational rights warrants giving democratic bodies far less deference than they are typically accorded. Yet the assertion of a right to a quality education, Newman emphasizes, should not be viewed as an undue constraint on democratic authority but rather is consistent with and required by the values that underlie democracy.  相似文献   

12.
This paper discusses the role of religious speech in the public square and the common school. It argues for more openness to political theology than many liberals are willing to grant and for an educational strategy of engagement over one of avoidance. The paper argues that the exclusion of religious debate from the public square has dysfunctional consequences. It discusses Rawls's more recent views on public reason and claims that, while they are not altogether adequate, they are consistent with engagement. The outcome of these arguments is applied to three 'hot button' issues in US education: creationism, an issue of gay rights, and teaching the Bible in schools.  相似文献   

13.
What becomes of the political orientation of American education when children are educated in the home rather than in public schools? Homeschooling critics raise concerns over the larger consequences: political exit and even indoctrination. Drawing on a recent study of 62 interviews with 35 homeschooling families in 11 states in the USA, we offer a theoretical argument grounded in empirical observations and perceptions of homeschoolers themselves. Using the work of political theorist Hannah Arendt as a guide, we suggest that, contrary to critics’ claims of political exit over voice, homeschooling may provide the opportunity for some families to respond with a “private voice” that is politically robust because it is intentionally subversive to a (perceived) homogenous dominant culture. We thus argue that some homeschoolers offer an understanding of private life that is political without being “public,” and that they reconcile this irony by attempting to cultivate reflexive “thinking” in their children regarding questions of conformity, materialism, and plurality.  相似文献   

14.
Rational choice theory suggests that parents are utility maximizers who make decisions from clear value preferences, that they are able to demand effective action from local schools and teachers, and that they can be relied upon to pursue the best interests of their children. This paper presents a different perspective and argues that parents invest a mixture of rationalities when selecting schools. Based on the results of a survey of 1,500 parents of students in 11 private, eight public and 10 alternative elementary schools in Alberta, Canada, this paper explores the logic, values, and concerns that inform parental decision making in the selection of an elementary school for their children and discusses implication for policy and educational reform.  相似文献   

15.
We offer a theoretical and ecological argument for the preparation of citizens in U.S. public schools. This democratic education draws legitimacy from the concern of the nations founders for a populace educated to govern itself. We also emphasize the need for new democratic skills and knowledge in the face of today’s challenges, and our responsibility to prepare the young for the 21st century. A critique of the current school reform movement is provided because of its undemocratic nature. We issue a call for the transformation to democratic schools. We specifically argue that current efforts at reform are maintaining historical inequities, while also depriving those that enjoy social and economic advantages of the education needed to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. The democratic education proposed is based on three goals: citizenship preparation, inclusion, and an optimum learning environment. Seven well established principles of democracy and their relationship to schooling are presented. These include; the nature of authority, inclusiveness, equal availability of the understanding required for deliberating the most serious challenges to democracy and livability, equal access to centers of political decision-making, guaranteed inalienable rights, equality, and universal access to an optimum learning environment. We offer a fundamentally different approach to educational reform: calling for a reassessment of the role of public schools in a democracy that recognizes the importance of citizenship preparation, and a “bottom up” reform model that starts in the classroom and can be implemented by individual teachers.  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.
In this essay, Leonard Waks reconsiders the issue of the public character of charter schools, that is, schools funded through public taxation but operated by non‐state organizations such as nonprofit and for‐profit educational corporations and nongovernmental public interest organizations. Using John Dewey's conception of a democratic public as a framework, Waks examines the following questions: (1) Are schools chartered and funded by government, but operated by nonprofit nongovernmental organizations, ever appropriate instruments of a democratic public? (2) If so, what criteria might distinguish those that are appropriate from those that are not? (3) How might public education be re‐institutionalized so as to include the charter schools that are appropriate? Waks concludes that Dewey's theory of democratic publics can play a useful role in thinking about how to balance the democratic benefits of charter schools for the various subcommunities of our society with the democratic requirement of broad public discourse and intergroup education.  相似文献   

18.
One major concern with public school open enrollment programs is the potential for parents’ school selection errors to adversely affect their children's academic achievement. In this study of the Beijing middle school open enrollment program, we estimate the degree to which children's school outcomes were negatively affected by the poor choices their parents made during the school selection process. We do this by examining parents’ responses to a survey on school choices combined with actual school applications, school admission records, and High School Entrance Examination test scores for 4717 students entering middle schools in Beijing via randomized lotteries. We find that the children of parents who made judgment errors in school selection were admitted to lower quality schools and achieved lower test scores on the High School Entrance Examination. Parents who had less education, whose children performed at lower levels in primary school, and who were less attentive to teachers’ opinions about schools were more prone to make these errors. Providing assistance to parents, especially those less prepared to make informed choices about school selection, is consequently important for supporting more efficient and equitable open enrollment programs.  相似文献   

19.
This article concerns gendered dimensions of parental involvement in two US charter schools. Drawing on the narratives of parents who have founded charter schools, and on conversations with school administrators and parents in the main public school district, it presents an analysis of the way parent-teacher interactions are being reframed in the context of school choice. The author argues that in a context in which parents are being asked both to produce and consume new educational programs, parents-practically speaking, mothers-who involve themselves in organizing charter schools run the risk of being seen as stepping out of their roles as consumers and caregivers. The implications of mothers' involvement in charter schools for parent-teacher interactions and for the trajectory of school reform are explored.  相似文献   

20.
In the authors' research with Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage parents, some teachers, head teachers and other educational professionals referred to the South Asian parents as ‘hard to reach’. Whilst it was clear from the parents that they were not very, and in some cases not at all, involved in their children's schools and knew little about the education system or what their children were doing in school, it was also very apparent that the parents were not ‘difficult’, ‘obstructive’, or ‘indifferent’—the kind of behaviour ‘hard to reach’ implies. The article therefore considers that rather than parents being ‘hard to reach’, it is frequently the schools themselves that inhibit accessibility for certain parents. The authors challenge the cultural interference model, arguing that it is incorrect and pathologises parents. The article arises out of a two‐year, Economic and Social Research Council funded, qualitative study of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage families and schools, in the north‐east of England.  相似文献   

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