Week 12

What were your most memorable events in elementary and high school?

Schools are a key social institution, bridging other areas – peer groups, family, communities.

How do we create a social environment in schools to offer more opportunities and meaning – sense of belonging?

• School interventions seem to take an agency/removal approach – with low success (Lundman, 1993).
• Increase in demand for ecological perspective – developing sense of community (Shared emotional connection, membership, reinforcement, influence)

What is the purpose of schools? What role(s) do they play in our society? What role(s) should they play?

What is it about schools that result in desired (or undesired) outcomes?

• Academic? (achievement, drop-out)
• Social? (school involvement/pro-social behavior, antisocial behavior/violence)

What outcomes make a school successful or unsuccessful?

How can we evaluate the impact of a school on an individual or group of individuals? (In other words, what outcomes indicate how schools influence individuals?)

How do you think impact is evaluated most often?

• Industrial revolution
• Roosevelt’s reform
• The above resulted in "factory model" (Villani, 1997)

• Early schools as true developmental models
• Emergence of public system
• The first "organizational" school models
• Educational administrators as managers

• 1950s "wake up call" – Soviet technology and the race for space
• The 1980s - backlash on teachers
• Federal report, A Nation at Risk, results in outrage and teacher blame
• Standardized testing became primary marker of efficiency
• Disconnect of school, home, and community not taken into account
• School at classroom level seen as primary influence on student development and success

• Renewed interest in school structure and its influence on student development
• Acknowledgement of multi-level influences
• Focus on creating settings inclusive of the needs of multiple individuals, groups, ideological perspectives

Factories, offices, prisons, churches, and schools are all examples of community organizations, as the term is used in everyday life. Community psychology in the context of schools often uses frameworks from literature about other social organizations (e.g., sociology, organizational psychology) as well as in disciplines such as social, developmental, and cognitive psychology.

We first will focus on an organizational perspective. The literature of organizations is extensive, and is of two kinds: studies in the sociology of organizations, and "organizational theory." The former is concerned with researching and explaining organizations – theories of the "way things are". The latter is more concerned with improving organizational performance – "the way things ought to be".

Sociological Approach

1. The relation of school to society – What is the role of the school?

1. Key theme – we expect schools and societies to reflect each other, not just in terms of subjects taught, but also in terms of school organization and functioning. The two examples show that in different situations, society is reflected in different ways to different degrees
2. However, though the settings may seem entirely different they do reflect some common modes of organization – mass production, bureaucratic organization, unionization, hierarchical decision making that can examined across contexts
3. Schools of thought about the function of schools– functionalism, conflict theory, interpretivist approaches

1. Functionalist perspective

1. socialize students to adapt to economic, political, social institutions – manifest function
2. also a latent function – producing people who share basics
3. integral part of society, vital to its continuation
4. molding individuals to fit existing social practices and requirements
5. discuss in terms of factory prep model

1. Conflict theorists - Cultural reproduction

1. schooling as social practice supported and utilized by those in power to maintain dominance in social order; factory prep link
2. Marxist theory and Education

1. many conflict theorists are Marxists
2. see social institutions functioning to preserve class relations

1. Differences between functionalism and conflict theory

1. one sees school as an organ of society (heart/lung)
2. other sees school as instrument of class domination
3. each offers different ways of explaining social forces operating in schools

1. Interpretivist perspective

1. sees social world as world made up of actors who acquire, share, and interpret a set of meanings, rules, norms that make social interaction possible

1. social forces are shared meanings and interpreting individuals who interact in particular social contexts
2. link to school/agricultural society
3. in order to understand why a particular student or teacher did a particular thing, need to understand the way of life in society and ways of doing things in that school
4. also important to know purposes of individuals and social meanings they share with others; factory prep link

1. Meaning and Messages

1. Overlap of three approaches

Consider these case examples from educational research studies:

1. A suburban high school has seen its community and student population change over the past twenty years from white and middle-class to extremely diverse ethnically and economically. The teaching and organizational strategies that seemed successful two decades ago don’t work nearly as well now, but nobody is sure what to do about it.
2. An urban school district is trying to respond to a growing and increasingly well-organized Greek-American community demanding to know why its children have been so unsuccessful in the schools. How does the district reconcile its commitment to education for all with the particular needs and aspirations of various communities within the larger community?

Educators often have a surplus of advice about what's best for schools and children