Schools and Education Relate to Broader Social Structures Term Paper

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Schools and Education Relate to Broader Social Structures

This paper provides a critical evaluation of three texts, Education and Social Change by John Rury, Tearing Down the Gates by Peter Sacks and Learning the Hard Way by Edward W. Morris to identify the authors' purpose for writing these texts, the major arguments presented by the authors, the degree to which the views are supported or refuted by the arguments, and the degree to which the text supports their own objectives to understand how schools and education relate to broader social structures, including economic forces, social capital, and changes in the American family and workplace over the past several decades. Finally, a summary of the research concerning these social structures and their respective influence on education and the nation's schools together with important findings concerning these issues are presented in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

In the United States, the existing arrangement of elite private secondary and postsecondary education has been cited as being responsible for some of these inequities and critics argue that current institutional arrangements ensure that the children of elite parents receive the lion's share of educational opportunities (Sacks, 2007). These disparities in educational access are all the more significant because they exist in a nation where education is widely recognized as the path to economic and personal success. In this regard, in his text, Education and Social Change, Rury (2002) argues for a reevaluation of the priorities in American education and a careful scrutiny of the social structures that sustain existing disparities. Rury reports that national surveys in the U.S. confirm that most Americans consider a free and universal public education as a fundamental right, and that education should serve as a path towards better citizenship (Durkheim, 2012). According to Rury (2000), "Most American continue to believe in the principle of free and universal public education, both as an instrument of assimilation and away of promoting national unity, and as a means of economic advancement, personal and collective" (p. 219). Nevertheless, Rury also emphasizes that there are a number of barriers to securing a high quality education in the United States that involve race, gender and social class. In this regard, Rury emphasizes that, "Race, gender, and social class still produce invidious distinctions within the schools, and across the larger society that sustains them" (2009, p. 219).

Notwithstanding the increasing part being played by the federal government in the delivery and content of educational services in the United States, education continues to be largely localized (Rury). Across the country, there remains a wide disparity between the manner in which educational services are provided as well as in the quality of what curricular offerings are available, even between two places that may be in close geographic proximity (Rury). Besides serving as a means of developing better citizens, the public schools have also been routinely tasked with providing the business community with the types of education that is needed in an increasingly competitive and globalized marketplace. In this regard, Rury emphasizes that, "Education has been linked in various ways to economic activity since the very first schools, but in the past several decades the influence of the labor market has been especially striking" (p. 220). Clearly, America society and a number of economic factors have had a major impact on the public schools, so it is important to take these discrete factors into account when considering their collective impact. In this regard, Rury notes that, "To understand American schools today, one must consider the collective impact of all these elements and decide which of them are most significant at this particular time" (p. 220).

Therefore, an understanding concerning how schools and education relate to broader social structures involves a critical analysis of the prevailing zeitgeist. As Rury points out, "The interrelationship of education and social change is quite complex. Clearly, the schools and educational practices observed throughout history have been shaped by larger social forces, just as have other social institutions and practices" (p. 220). Although there have been other social forces at work in shaping the public schools over the years, most of these forces were economic in nature. In the past, the public schools were the vehicle by which the business community could secure the educated and trained workers it needed during times of technological innovation, and these same forces continue to operate today (Rury). In this regard, Rury advises that, "Many of the major processes of social transformation were economic: the search for labor in the New World, the rise of the factory system, the onset of full-scale industrialization, and the human capital revolution" (p. 220).

These were indeed "major processes of social transformation" for the nation's schools, and each of these waves of social change had important implications for education and resulted in substantive changes in the schools (Rury).

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In this regard, Rury points out that, "The factory system provided models for creating more orderly and uniform schools; industrialization helped inspire the social efficiency movement, the celebration of differentiation, and the rise of testing during the Progressive Era" (p. 220).

Social capital, then, represents yet another social structure that has been highly influential in shaping what is taught in the nation's public schools as well as what types of academic outcomes are achieved with scare taxpayer resources. For instance, Rury emphasizes that, "Historically, differences in social and cultural capital appear to have accounted for great disparities in the school performance of children from different backgrounds, and this has continued to be true into the 21st century" (2002, p. 222). In fact, it would seem that every educational initiative in recent years has somehow unjustly benefited by elite at the expense of the country's lower-income families as a concomitant of the human capital revolution. From Rury's perspective, as manifested by high-stakes testing regimens, the human capital revolution has had an enormous influence of the nation's public schools:

High-stakes testing became an increasingly popular feature of American schooling as the 20th century drew to a close. In many respects it is possible to see the rush to institute new regimes of standard assessments in American education as a corollary of the human capital revolution, and a correspondingly narrow way of viewing the function of schools. (2002, p. 222)

While the proponents of high-stakes testing cite the need for uniform measures of academic progress irrespective of the localized educational content being delivered, Rury argues that these initiatives have only served to further reinforce and even exacerbate the inherent inequities that pervade the nation's school system. These initiatives, though, have been the result of a growing demand for an educated workforce that the elite need to make the system work. The influence of this social structure on education and the public schools is abundantly apparent. In this regard, Rury notes that, "The point of systemic reform, after all, was to make schooling more productive in terms of specific curricula, and most of the attention of the testers was focused on mathematics, science, and reading" (p. 222). Although this shift in focus to core curricular offerings can be traced to the post-Sputnik era, the emphasis has become increasingly pronounced in recent years as innovations in technology have fueled the need for an educated workforce. According to Rury, mathematics, science and reading "of course, were the subject areas most frequently linked to the new service and professional sectors of the economy and to the higher demand for advanced educational credentials" (2002, p. 222).

Rather than being an evil tool of the elite to favor their own, though, Rury qualifies the actual nature of standardized testing as simply being the most efficient way of identifying which of the lower-income cohorts might be suitable for further education. In this regard, Rury reports that, "Standardized tests simply were a form of technology well suited to the task of identifying individuals who had developed these abilities, and schools that successfully imparted them" (p. 222). It is difficult to argue with the need for accountability and evidence-based practices in the nation's public schools, and Rury suggests that standardized testing was yet another way in which social structures influence education and the public schools. As Rury points out, "Standardized tests, then, were a pragmatic approach to making schools accountable for producing more such skilled individuals was thus a strategy for strengthening the national capacity for economic growth and at the same time improving the productivity and earning power of individual Americans" (p. 222).

Standardized tests, though, have been cited time and again as being unfairly designed in ways that adversely affect less privileged members of American society. In the business world, it is axiomatic that in order to improve something, it must first be measured and this same philosophy has been applied to the nation's schools in ways that make them resemble so many factories churning out so many widgets. As Rury puts it, "In other words, education is seen as just another factor of production, subject to measurement and improvement like sources of energy,….....

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