The Social Organization Of Schooling

Schools are complex social settings where students, teachers, administrators, and parents interact to shape a child’s educational experience. Any effort to improve educational outcomes for America’s children requires a dynamic understanding of the environments in which children learn. In The Social Organization of Schooling, editors Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider assemble researchers from the fields of education, organizational theory, and sociology to provide a new framework for understanding and analyzing America’s schools and the many challenges they face. The Social Organization of Schooling closely examines the varied components that make up a school’s social environment. Contributors Adam Gamoran, Ramona Gunter, and Tona Williams focus on the social organization of teaching. Using intensive case studies, they show how positive professional relations among teachers contribute to greater collaboration, the dissemination of effective teaching practices, and ultimately, a better learning environment for children. Children learn more from better teachers, but those best equipped to teach often opt for professions with higher social stature, such as law or medicine. In his chapter, Robert Dreeben calls for the establishment of universal principles and practices to define good teaching, arguing that such standards are necessary to legitimize teaching as a high status profession. The Social Organization of Schooling also looks at how social norms in schools are shaped and reinforced by interactions among teachers and students. Sociologist Maureen Hallinan shows that students who are challenged intellectually and accepted socially are more likely to embrace school norms and accept responsibility for their own actions. Using classroom observations, surveys, and school records, Daniel McFarland finds that group-based classroom activities are effective tools in promoting both social and scholastic development in adolescents. The Social Organization of Schooling also addresses educational reforms and the way they affect a school’s social structures. Examining how testing policies affect children’s opportunities to learn, Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller find that policies which increased school accountability boosted student enrollment in math courses, reflecting a shift in the school culture towards higher standards. Employing a variety of analytical methods, The Social Organization of Schooling provides a sound understanding of the social mechanisms at work in our educational system. This important volume brings a fresh perspective to the many ongoing debates in education policy and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of America’s children.

Social organization varies greatly from school to school, and this variation fosters different, though equally valid, conceptions of teaching. In this book, the author presents problems and successes that recur in 78 diverse elementary schools.

This volume addresses key issues in the sociology of education concerning how schools are organized for instruction and what processes link school organization and instruction to educa tional achievement. The content of the chapters represents a shift in focus from traditional and even recent themes in soci ology of education, including the study of school effects and of classroom processes, to a concern with the social organization of schools and its consequences for student outcomes. Rather than reviewing or evaluating existing research, the chapters present new and developing conceptualizations of the school ing process and provide theoretical models to guide future empirical work on schools. A unique feature of this book is its heavy emphasis on theory. Each chapter presents a theoretical model or argument concerning an issue of central importance in sociology of edu cation. The empirical analyses and simulations that are included are often more for illustrative purposes than for rigorous hypothesis testing, and some chapters have no data analysis at all. The major strength of the volume, therefore, lies in the new conceptualizations and reconceptualizations it provides of fundamental processes relating school organization to student learning. Theoretical work such as this is exactly what is needed in an area that has traditionally been, for the most part, empir ical and atheoretical. Another important feature of this volume is the various approaches it presents to the study of school organization.

Based upon a year of videotaped observations of one inner-city elementary school class, a sociologist analyzes the tacit rules that organize the social interaction of a classroom and provides a new understanding of its social fabric.

Series: a href="http://www.oupcanada.com/tcs/"Themes in Canadian Sociology/aExploring how education plays a significant role in both modern society and our development as social beings, this text applies classical and contemporary theoretical approaches to study the relationship between school and society. Featuring a Canadian focus and up-to-date statistics and research,The Schooled Society offers a comprehensive examination of schooling at all levels from a sociological perspective.