American Secondary Education Research Articles

Progressive Pioneer: Alexander James Inglis (1879–1924) and American Secondary Education

Alexander James Inglis's transformation from an academic traditionalist devoted to Latin pedagogy to an influential progressive-experimentalist and advocate of the comprehensive high school during the early twentieth century has received insufficient attention from educational and curriculum historians. A reconstruction of Inglis's career leads to an exploration of the explanatory power of four accepted historical interpretations when applied to his work. Recognizing the limitations of these interpretations for explaining anomalous aspects of Inglis's career, the possibility of educational biography for revealing nuances obscured by high-level generalizations is broached.

Progressive Pioneer: Alexander James Inglis (1879–1924) and American Secondary Education

Alexander James Inglis's transformation from an academic traditionalist devoted to Latin pedagogy to an influential progressive-experimentalist and advocate of the comprehensive high school during the early twentieth century has received insufficient attention from educational and curriculum historians. A reconstruction of Inglis's career leads to an exploration of the explanatory power of four accepted historical interpretations when applied to his work. Recognizing the limitations of these interpretations for explaining anomalous aspects of Inglis's career, the possibility of educational biography for revealing nuances obscured by high-level generalizations is broached.

The Implementation and Effectiveness of Geographic Information Systems Technology and Methods in Secondary Education

Geographic information systems (GIS) technology and methods have transformed decision-making in society by bringing geographic analysis to the desktop computer. Although some educators consider GIS to be a promising means for implementing reform, it has been adopted by less than 2 percent of American high schools. The reasons behind the interest in GIS, its slow implementation, and its effectiveness in teaching and learning are unclear. To address these concerns, this research describes the extent to which GIS is being implemented in American secondary education and assesses the effectiveness of lessons that use GIS. A survey of 1,520 high schools that own GIS software, along with experiments and case studies in three high schools, provided primary data for assessing the implementation and effectiveness of GIS.

Democracy’s High School? Social Change and American Secondary Education in the Post-Conant Era

In this article I discuss James Conant’s ideas about the democratic role of the comprehensive high school and address just how those ideas have been treated by history. I consider the historical context of the post–World War II United States, focusing on several issues: (a) race and the growth of school segregation, (b) the rise of a youth culture and the movement for students’ rights, and (c) the changing national economy, especially with respect to rising educational expectations. Drawing on the work of Amy Gutmann and other treatments of democratic education, I assess how these factors changed the prospects for democracy in American high schools. I also examine major policy statements and commission reports concerning secondary education from the 1970s and 1980s. Altogether, it appears that these major historical events converged in the postwar period to make Conant’s vision of the democratic high school problematic, at least in the nation’s large metropolitan areas. Thus the future of democratic education is an open question for the great variety of U.S. youth to be educated in the coming century.

The Quiet Reform in American Education: Policy Issues and Conceptual Challenges in the School-to-Work Transition

A quiet reform has gone almost unnoticed in the many policy debates about improving America's schools. Labeled "The School-to-Work Revolution" by Lynn Olson and others, this little-noticed movement offers, at last, a solution to the constraining historical dualism between academic and vocational training. There is a new enthusiasm for and focus on the preparation-for employment side of American secondary education. However, although reinvigorated, the school-to-work revolution remains heavily threatened by our nation's reputation for low-quality vocational education and by some long-unresolved tensions with regard to social mobility and political control. This article discusses the need for additional theorizing about and policy-minded attention to the revolution and observes that valuable opportunities for improvement in job preparation are at hand in an increased national interest in economic development.

Silent Voices: Secondary Education in the United Kingdom and The United States

Barbara Pollard recently spent a sabbatical in London updating her 1974 study of British secondary education, which was published in the November 1974 NASSP Bulletin. What has changed in education in the United Kingdom? What has remained the same? Barbara Pollard's thoughtful comments illuminate both British and American secondary education.

The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education. Jurgen Herbst

<i>The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education</i>. Jurgen Herbst

The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education

The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education

The Once and Future Schools: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education.

The Once and Future Schools: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education.

The once and future school: three hundred and fifty years of American secondary education

The once and future school: three hundred and fifty years of American secondary education

Thinking about Classics

E.B. Holtsmark: Thinking about Classics Thinking about Classics Erling B. Holtsmark In thirty-five years of teaching and writing about Classics I have never yet been invited to "write whatever you want" for any publication. It is therefore with great delight that I submit the following thoughts with my accompanying thanks to the editors of this volume for dieir kind solicitation. I begin with Miss [sic] Shade. She was the teacher I had in 1949 in the ninth grade at La Jolla High School, and in her elementary Latin course she was the first to illustrate that there was a life of deep and abiding interest beyond the endless summers of California surfing: she actually taught a subject and expected the students to learn it by doing homework every night—an exciting novelty in what even then was the academic wasteland of American secondary education. Both her seriousness about learning and the nature of Latin itself held enormous appeal for me, and indirectly I owe it to her that I ended up doing what I have done with my life. In the company of the many fine teachers I had in college and graduate school, Miss Shade still stands out in my mind as truly inspiring and exceptional. My enduring interest in Classics has always been the ancient languages themselves, and it wasn't until I started teaching that I branched out, so to speak, into the literatures and cultures. As a student I was both entranced by the detailed rigor of doing Classics and also troubled by its close-endedness. A friend of mine (who switched to English) once said the whole business struck him as an exclusive club oblivious to the outside world and with an impossibly high membership fee. Perhaps there still is a solipsistic unwholesomeness to some quarters of the discipline, a kind of academic narcissism; but surely the great change that has taken place in the study of Classics is its opening up to the larger community. This phenomenon we are all familiar with through the proliferation of sub-disciplines widiin the field and the kinds of courses that are now routinely offered. Classics has democratized itself to an extent unthinkable in the fifties, and in so doing helped to put the lie to that dreadful 2 Syllecta Classica 7 (1996) canard about its essential irrelevance (to the modem world?). Needless to say, however, there is much room for more progress in this direction.1 Desultory reading during just the past few months as of this writing offers perhaps some index to the way in which Classics has worked itself into the public consciousness. For example, in a recent issue of The New York Review ofBooks2 Gore Vidal attempts to place Mark Twain in context as a story-teller and opines that the "Western Storyteller . . . could have evolved from Homer or, later, from the Greek Milesian tales ofrun-on anecdote," and two weeks later the same organ3 has a review of the mushrooming O.J. Simpson meta-literature in which die football star's many honors and honorific medals are compared to "the odes and statues of the ancients." Commentary4 carries a full and laudatory review of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out ofAfrica: How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History. An essay by Jamie James in The New Yorker,5 coming to grips with the linguistic fecundity of Indonesia's national language used by Pramoedya Ananta Toer in his national epic, The Bum Quartet, contains the following observation: Just as the Homeric dialect helped formalize the concept ofGreekness by welding together the various idioms of the Aegean, Bahasa Indonesia was one of the principal forces that brought about the unity (such as it is) of Indonesia, where more than six hundred languages are still spoken. Currently the number one best-seller on the nonfiction list in America is Bad As I Wanna Be, the 'autobiography' of the theatrical and self-exoticizing Bull's player, Dennis Rodman. A recent reviewer begins his take on the book in the following way:6 If the doings of Achilles had been televised when I was growing up, I might have memorized the Iliad and pursued...

On the Limited Presence of African American Teachers: An Assessment of Research, Synthesis, and Policy Implications

This article responds to a recent review essay by King (1993) on the limited presence of African American teachers in American elementary and secondary education. The purpose of this response is twofold. First, it is suggested that the original work leaves some of the issues surrounding attracting and retaining elementary and secondary school teachers unaddressed, leaves some conflicting empirical work unsynthesized, and provides interpretations and policy suggestions that do not necessarily directly follow from the empirical evidence. Second, this response highlights an emerging problem in educational research. It suggests that a productive and worthwhile area of inquiry would be one in which educational researchers examine how “crises” in education emerge, how they are defined and constructed both within and outside the field of education; and how educational researchers respond to educational crises. It is hoped that these substantive and policy concerns will begin to receive additional attention from educational researchers and policymakers.

School Size Effects on Achievement in Secondary Education Evidence from the Netherlands, Sweden and the USA1

ABSTRACT In this article the results of an investigation into the relation between school size and achievement are reported. The findings relate to mathematics achievement in Dutch, Swedish and American secondary education and to science achievement in the Netherlands. The analyses sought to provide an answer to the following questions: (1) Is school size related to achievement independently of student background characteristics such as sex, achievement motivation, socio‐economic status and cognitive aptitude? (2) Is the effect of school size related to any of the aforementioned background characteristics? (3) Does the effect of school size on achievement differ between the educational systems of the Netherlands, Sweden and the USA? (4) Is the effect of school size the same for different measures of student achievement (mathematics versus science)? It was hypothesized that school size would be most strongly related to achievement in the USA. The analyses, however, revealed little empirical evidence for the existence of school size effects on achievement in any of the three countries, possibly because school size and curriculum comprehensiveness are not strongly related in these countries. Because the investigations involved the analysis of five separate datasets, the research outcomes revealed some useful additional information with respect to the robustness of the detected relations between the five covariates and student achievement.

Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History

To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum, explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding of public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.

Introducing engineering into American secondary education

Media reports indicate the decline of the technological literacy of American youth, especially that students in other countries are better prepared in science and mathematics. Our active-learning program, which consists of numerous hands-on experiments, introduces engineering applications into science and math programs, that will demonstrate to students the usefulness of the theory that they currently do not see as useful. The program, when fully developed, will make optimum use of technology, especially computers and videotapes. The hands-on experiments allow students to discover fundamental principles through data analysis and then use the principles to synthesize a solution to a technological problem. This discovery-based education will help school systems better meet performance standards such as those in the Maryland School Performance Plan. The experimental approach to science education is especially important in a technology-oriented economy where children use the new technologies without understanding the principles on which they are based.

The American People's College: The Lost Promise of Democracy in Education

The people's college as a tax-supported public secondary school was America's distinctive educational institution of the nineteenth century. Intended as a school that prepared its graduates for leading positions in trade, business, and industry, it emphasized mental discipline and offered a curriculum of academic subjects. Open to all who could qualify, it attempted to join a quality education with an attempt to provide equality of opportunity. It lost its position as the defining institution of American secondary education when it was challenged to prepare its students for college as well as for employment. The result of that challenge was its replacement by the comprehensive high school in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Writing in the academic disciplines, 1870-1990: a curricular history

In this singular study, David R. Russell provides a history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding of public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s.Russell s task is to examine the ways writing was taught in the myriad curricula that composed the varied structure of secondary and higher education in modern America. He begins with the assertion that, before the 1870s, writing was taught as ancillary to speaking. As a result, formal writing instruction was essentially training in handwriting, the mechanical process of transcribing sound to visual form.From this point, Russell carefully examines academic writing, its origins and its teaching, from a broad institutional perspective. He looks at the history of little-studied genres of student writing such as the research paper, lab report, and essay examination. Tracing the effects of increasing specialization on writing instruction, he notes how two new ideals of academic life, research and utilitarian service, shaped writing instruction into its modern forms. Finally, he contributes the definitive history of the current writing-across-the-curriculum movement, providing a study of the long tradition of other WAC efforts with an analysis of why they have waned.

Social Paradoxes of American Education

Abstract This articles identifies four issues whose resolution will shape the future of American elementary and secondary education. These are as follows. (1) Will the principle of decentralised control prevail over the seemingly inexorable tendency to consolidate power at the centre? (2) Will continuing emphasis on mass education obscure increasing demands to improve quality and raise achievement levels? (3) Will schools advance equality of educational opportunity, or reproduce inequalities inherent in the society? (4) Will schools integrate culturally heterogeneous populations at the expense of legitimate expressions of ethnic cultures? This article shows how these issues mirror ambiguities underlying American democratic principles, and offers some comparisons to conditions of education in Europe.

アメリ力中等教育における活動主義教育の一系譜

アメリ力中等教育における活動主義教育の一系譜

A Case of Academic Schizophrenia

p zERHAPS it is inappropriate to discuss an academic career in terms of abnormal psychology, but my scholarly enterprises have developed in two separate directions, embracing, on the one hand, early American intellectual history and, on the other, comparative literature, particularly the European Enlightenment, the Hispanic world, and western relations with China and Japan. Although nearly all of my books have been concerned with colonial or federal America, specifically with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Jonathan Edwards, most of my university teaching has not touched early America at all. I do not complain of this apparent academic schizophrenia-indeed, I am grateful for it-but I do consider it paradoxical. I have already discussed my experiences as a comparatist in a special issue in I983 of the German periodical Arcadia honoring its editor, and so I shall limit myself here to early America. My grammar school training in the public school system of Buffalo, New York, was excellent, but my high school experience was a disaster. I am, nevertheless, grateful to Buffalo, where I was born in 1915, for its public library and Albright Art Gallery, both of which compensated for the dismal teaching and lackadaisical guidance of my high school and kept me from becoming a dropout during the Depression, the only period in the annals of American secondary education when students were being offered postgraduate courses in high school in order to keep them off the streets. Fortunately, during this difficult period I retained my love for books and respect for education as a cultural institution and harbored no doubts about the advantages of proceeding to college. As an undergraduate at Indiana University I intended to specialize in history, but because of the inspiring teaching method of one of my French professors, Bert Young, I decided to switch to literature. Since I realized that more jobs were available in English than in French, however, I expanded my areas of preparation, graduating with majors in history, English, French, and education. The teaching method of Professor Young that I greatly admired and have subsequently imitated as much as possible is that of assigning library research projects to be organized and delivered as class reports. With this method, the course content is open-ended except for chronological limits, and the object of instruction is the stimulation of individual mental development, not the transmission of a prescribed dosage of information. After Indiana, I moved to the University of Georgia for an M.A., motivated by a wanderlust which still lingers. During these years of economic stress, the Deep South was almost as exotic me for as Korea and