School Crisis Research Articles

Expansion of New Vocationalism and Realities of Labour Market: View from the Spanish periphery

This article presents an analysis of the recent vocational education and training (VET) policy in Spain. The article will argue that new vocationalism has played an important role as a rhetorical strategy to support the modernisation discourse of the state in education and to hide deficiencies in the correspondence between education and the labour market. To show this, the article is structured in three sections. The first one briefly presents the particular characteristics of mass schooling in Spain. Some points of historical information are provided to highlight the simultaneous process of consolidation and crisis of mass schooling in Spain. It is argued that the State had to face the democratisation of the access to education in times of fiscal crisis and heterogeneous demands coming from different social sectors. This theoretical and historical framework is used to look at policy documents and academic materials that show the central role of 'new vocationalism' in official education discourses and its rhetorical function to legitimise education policy. The article argues that VET discourses and policies have played a significant role as a symbolic production resource for coping with shortcomings and contradictions. Finally, in the third section, qualitative and quantitative data are given to show both the real dynamics of the Spanish labour market and the specific logic of both the State's VET policy and the employers' discourses in shaping what they expect from the education system and the type of skills they ask for. It is argued that, although some of the discourses stress an accelerated change in the production process and in the work organisation forms, empirical evidence shows the inconsistency of these discourse when looking at labour market regulations and the rise of less qualified jobs in the Spanish economy.

Inequality and Education Reform: Formulating a macro-historical sociology perspective

The persistence of race, class, gender, and regional inequality in US education poses many challenges for policy-makers and scholars. Investigations of school crises, as presently constructed, tend to treat the problems and paradoxes of inequality as exceptions to the American democratic system, instead of seeing them as contradictions within the system. This research suggests an alternative theoretical framework to study inequality and education reform. It analyzes a century of education crises by combining 'the sociological imagination' with a world-system perspective. It focuses on North Carolina in its assessment of Southern education as American education.

Inequality and Education Reform: formulating a macro-historical sociology perspective

The persistence of race, class, gender, and regional inequality in US education poses many challenges for policy-makers and scholars. Investigations of school crises, as presently constructed, tend to treat the problems and paradoxes of inequality as exceptions to the American democratic system, instead of seeing them as contradictions within the system. This research suggests an alternative theoretical framework to study inequality and education reform. It analyzes a century of education crises by combining 'the sociological imagination' with a world-system perspective. It focuses on North Carolina in its assessment of Southern education as American education.

The School Crisis Intervention Team At Work

The School Crisis Intervention Team At Work

School Crisis Consultation

School crisis consultations are services necessary to assist school communities recover from disruptions that interfere with a learning environment. Child and adolescent psychiatrists are ideal participants in such consultations owing to their knowledge of child development, familiarity with school systems, family dynamics, stress reactions in children, and crisis intervention skills. The exciting challenge is to tailor a consultation based on a needs assessment, degree of impact of event, and other resources. Every consultation is a unique and stimulating learning experience. Those who develop expertise in this area will be poised to lead future consultation efforts. These consultations are now informed by an increasing body of research on children's stress reactions and various types of interventions.

Swedish Teacher Education at the Crossroads

This paper discusses recent moves to modernise teacher education in Sweden. It first considers reasons why teacher education has received increased attention in different countries in recent years, and then goes on to explore what implications this has had for Sweden The approach taken in Sweden to the so-called crisis of schooling in Beck's risk society has been to attempt to raise the status of teacher educators by proposing increased research possibilities and a new discipline utbildningsvetenskap . The paper discusses the likely response of teacher educators to these new conditions and their overall implications for the Swedish state.

A Survey of LEA Guidance and Support for the Management of Crises in Schools

This study examines and discusses the guidance and support offered to schools by 17 local education authorities in respect of crisis management. After outlining some of the main features of the documents studied, it concludes that there is a considerable variation in the amount of guidance given to schools. The study suggests that every school should have a member of the Senior Management Team who has critical incident management planning as part of their job description. It is noted that the guidance given by all the local education authorities surveyed focuses on accidents on school trips and it is suggested that more attention needs to be paid to planning for dealing with floods, fires, structural damage and incidents such as those which occurred at Dunblane. More attention too, it suggests, needs to be paid to preventive and precautionary measures: all but one of the local education authorities surveyed restricted most of their guidance to coping with a crisis after it had occurred.

HIV/AIDS Among Children and Adolescents: Implications for the Changing Role of School Psychologists

Because epidemiological estimates indicate that young adult females experience the greatest annual increase in HIV infection rates, public schools must prepare for a corresponding increment in pediatric HIV resulting from transmission during pregnancy, birth, or the neonatal period. In addition, data reveal that adolescents continue to engage in alarmingly high rates of risk taking in the context of sexual activity and drug use. These findings have important implications for the changing role of school psychologists. A three-tiered consultation model, first proposed by Meyers (1975), is described in which school psychologists can engage in child-centered, teacher-centered, and system-centered consultation practice in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in school.

Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform.

In this personal account, Jean Anyon provides evidence that the economic and political devastation of America's inner cities has robbed schools and teachers of the capacity to successfully implement current strategies of educational reform. She argues that without fundamental change in government and business policies and the redirection of major resources back into the schools and the communities they serve, urban schools are consigned to failure, and no effort at raising standards, improving teaching, or boosting achievement can occur. Based on her participation in an intensive four-year school reform project in the Newark, New Jersey public schools, the author vividly captures the anguish and anger of students and teachers caught in the tangle of a failing school system. Ghetto Schooling offers a penetrating historical analysis of more than a century of government and business policies that have drained the economic, political and human resources of urban populations. This book reveals the historical roots of the current crisis in ghetto schools and what must be done to reverse the downward spiral.

The reconstruction of home/school relations: Portuguese conceptions of the 'responsible parent'

This article looks at the way the home/school relationship has been restructured by the Portuguese state over the past 25 years. It is argued that, through education policy, this state has attempted to construct the 'responsible parent' on the basis of two forms: the collaborative parent and, more recently, the 'parent as partner'. In the context of what we have characterised as the 'simultaneous crisis and consolidation of mass schooling' in Portugal, and on the basis of an analysis of official legislation on the home/school relationship and empirical work carried out in two Portuguese schools, we argue that a main objective of education policy has been to make parents accountable by bringing them into the education system and we produce a typology of parent forms on the basis of representations which policy-makers and schools have of parents.

Preparing for a crisis: crisis team development.

Emergency preparedness in the school setting necessitates the formation and development of a Crisis Team that will be prepared to assume critical roles in the event of a crisis. This paper discusses the school Crisis Team, including member identification and responsibilities, and the relationship of the Crisis Team to the school crisis plan and policies.

Common errors in school crisis response: Learning from our mistakes

This article describes five school crises involving alcohol-related fatality, self-injurious behavior, school homicide, racial/ethnic conflict, and community violence. In each case example, errors in crisis management by school staff exacerbated the crisis and resulted in deleterious consequences for the school, its students, and the surrounding community. We identify common themes of leadership, teamwork, and responsibility that are critical to successful crisis management. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Common errors in school crisis response: Learning from our mistakes

Common errors in school crisis response: Learning from our mistakes

The Little Rock Crisis and Postwar Black Activism in Arkansas

HISTORY IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS when the White Folks show up, writes civil rights scholar Charles M. Payne in a critical assessment of written accounts of the past.1 Certainly this analysis rings true when one looks at the work on the 1957 Little Rock school crisis over the past forty years. Numerous firsthand accounts have provided us with a variety of white perspectives, including that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Congressman Brooks Hays, Gov. Orval Faubus, Superintendent of Schools Virgil T. Blossom, Little Rock's mayor Woodrow Mann, Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore, segregationist politician Dale Alford, school administrator Elizabeth Huckaby, and Women's Emergency Committee To Open Our Schools (WEC) member Sara Murphy.2 Secondary works have focused on Governor Faubus, massive resistance and the White Citizens' Councils, local white clergymen, local white women, the local white business elite, white judges, and the interaction of (largely white-dominated) national and local political and legal issues.3 Useful though these memoirs and studies are, by focusing almost exclusively on the events of September 1957 and Little Rock's emergence in the national spotlight, they offer little insight into how the school crisis fit into a much larger struggle over race relations in the city and state. Even more important, these works, mostly written by and about whites, fail to present a thoroughgoing analysis of the black community and its contribution to the story of race relations in Arkansas. For over thirty years, the only black perspective on the school crisis was the memoir of Daisy Bates, head of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People State Conference of Branches (ASC). Significantly, the second work to emerge from the black community, written by Melba Pattillo Beals in 1994 from the perspective of one of the nine students who integrated Central High, adds little to Bates's account. Like the works by whites, Bates's and Beals' books provide only snapshots of events, lacking a broader context to locate the drama of September 1957.4 For the white people, we do, at least, have a variety of perspectives. For blacks, we simply do not-and no secondary works have focused on the black community to address this gap in the existing literature. The Little Rock school crisis was, after all, about black rights-specifically, about the rights of blacks to have the same access to educational opportunities as whites. Yet where is the black population in the historiography of the school crisis? We know little of what the events of 1957 meant to black Arkansans or how they fit into their collective hopes and aspirations for racial change. The 1957 Little Rock school crisis had its roots in the growing militancy of black activism in Arkansas after World War II. Prior to the 1940s, the guiding philosophy for most black leaders in the state had been Booker T. Washington's stance of accommodation, which stressed economic advancement within the boundaries of segregation, instead of head-on racial protest to challenge Jim Crow and disfranchisement. Yet, although accommodation remained the mainstay of the black elite in Arkansas, there had been several black activists who looked to extend the scope of black advancement beyond the world of business. In the vanguard of black political struggle from the turn of the century was Scipio Africanus Jones, a lawyer based in Little Rock. In 1928, after a long, bitter, and hard-fought battle against lily-white forces in the Arkansas Republican party, who attempted to deny black participation in the party, Jones was elected as a state delegate to the Republican National Convention, forcing whites to acknowledge the legitimacy of black participation in the state organization.5 In the same year, Dr. John Marshall Robinson, a black physician from Little Rock, founded the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association (ANDA) and launched the first legal attack on the Democratic party of Arkansas's (DPA) exclusive white primary system. …

Will My Name Be Shouted Out?: Reaching Inner-City Students Through the Power of Writing.

My Name Be Shouted Out?: Reaching Inner-City Students Through the Power of Writing, by Stephen O'Connor. New York: Touchstone Books, 1996. 382 pp. $14.00, paper. Reviewed by Deloris M. Saunders, University of Maryland-Baltimore County. My Name Be Shouted Out? presents a journalistic account of author Stephen O'Connor's experiences teaching creative writing in a New York City junior high school under the auspices of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. The Collaborative has sponsored residencies by visiting writers and other artists in New York City schools since 1967. O'Connor produced this work to provide insights into the crisis in urban public schools that serve predominantly low-income children from racial/ethnic minority groups. He wanted to illustrate the plight of these students and the cynical, unabashed destruction of federal programs that benefit the poor and working classes. The book is divided into three major sections comprising 16 chapters. Part one, Innocence and Guilt, describes O'Connor's engagement as a writer in residence through the Collaborative. Part two, On This Day a Poor Boy Died, discusses his pedagogy and methods of engaging his students in writing. Part three, Will My Name Be Shouted Out?, describes his second year of teaching writing. Part three closes with an analysis of his feelings about his students and the draconian shift in . . . social spending policies in America (p. 377), along with a narrative on the ills of American policy affecting the poor. Working without the benefit of pedagogical acumen, O'Connor attempted to engage junior high school students in expressing themselves through creative writing. Because his position was funded outside of the regular curriculum, he was able to use unconventional pedagogy, curriculum content, and standards. His interest soon shifted to creating a play that the students would present. He chose as the topic of this play the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a young Black man who was killed in a racially motivated attack by more than a dozen White youths upon visiting New York City's Bensonhurst neighborhood to look at a used car. The incident became the center of racial crisis in a city already filled with racial tension caused by previous acts of violence. O'Connor states that he believed that the violence of the incident and the attendant publicity would motivate his students to write freely of their feelings about the event. He wanted his students to understand the feelings of both perpetrators and victims, hoping this would inspire them to be more compassionate. He also believed that their writings would lead to a deeper understanding about the effects of violence. Thus, he encouraged his students to write monologues, dialogues, and poetry about Bensonhurst or other violence they had witnessed. …

Class: The Central Issue in the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis

Class: The Central Issue in the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis

What Are the Attributes and Duties of the School Crisis Intervention Team?

What Are the Attributes and Duties of the School Crisis Intervention Team?

Daisy Bates and the Little Rock School Crisis

August23, 1963 March on Washington was a watershed event. For the first time in our nation's history, Black Americans collectively presented their grievances to a world that had been largely silent toward their battles for freedom. But there was something peculiar about this great moment in American history: Black women were virtually barred from participation, among them Rosa Parks, Diane Nash Revel, Gloria Richardson, and Daisy Bates. The committee scheduled no female speakers during the entire three-hour program (Branch, 1988, p. 880). Anna Arnold Hedgeman, author of TrumphetSounds, recalls that Mrs. Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words (quoted in Giddings, 1984, p. 314). Thus the rhetorical space accorded Bates-civil rights activist, journalist, and lecturer-clearly did not reflect the essence of her achievements in the civil rights movement, especially in the South. Having successfully led the integration of Arkansas' Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Bates should have been a premier performer at the March on Washington when Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated and crystallized the Black movement toward justice; instead, she was relegated to the background. Bates spoke out at a time when women were supposed to be seen and not heard. Indeed, she was a key factor in shaping our social and educational history at a moment of constitutional crisis: the

Looking beneath the Surface: Teacher Collaboration through the Lens of Grading Practices

Teacher teams at a new school were observed during their first year working together. Based on these observations plus interviews and document analysis, this article describes a “crisis” in teacher relations (a controversy about grading) and the practice of collaboration as it is revealed in this crisis. The discussion highlights the importance of teacher teams’ maintaining their planned focus despite impinging school crises, informing newcomers of the history of decisions and norms, articulating clear purposes for their work together, and addressing the power of traditions in attempts to innovate. The article concludes that this collaboration is an effective means for teachers to reexamine educational practices.

Power from the Pedestal: The Women's Emergency Committee and the Little Rock School Crisis

IN THE SPRING OF 1957, LITTLE ROCK was, by most accounts, a thriving and progressive southern city. In postwar decade, city's leaders vigorously pursued a plan of economic development, and race relations were considered good and improving.1 In voluntary compliance with Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, Little Rock School District officials developed a desegregation plan, and an NAACP representative referred to Little Rock as the bright spot of South in terms of school desegregation.2 Thus, as first day of school approached in 1957, no one anticipated that Little Rock would become an international symbol of racism and massive resistance. On September 2, 1957, just hours before start of new school year, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered National Guard to surround Central High School to prevent integration. For three weeks, Faubus defied a federal court order to proceed with integration, and President Eisenhower ultimately had to send troops from 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to ensure that nine black students would be allowed to attend school. The paratroopers occupied high school for several months, and federalized National Guardsmen remained in halls of Central High School for entire school year. The end of school year, however, provided little relief for city. While school officials worked to delay integration, Faubus traveled state, campaigning for reelection as an ardent segregationist. Emboldened by his Democratic primary victory in late July, Faubus called a special session of legislature, which granted him power to close schools that fall to prevent integration. On Friday, September 12, 1958, United States Supreme Court ordered Little Rock School District to proceed with integration. In response, Governor Faubus immediately closed all of city's public high schools. As governor signed this school closing legislation, three white women gathered in an antebellum mansion just a few blocks from state capitol. There, beneath portrait of her father in Confederate uniform, Adolphine Terry sat with Vivion Brewer and Velma Powell, laying groundwork for first effective opposition to city's segregationists. Four days later, they founded Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). In ensuing months, women of WEC publicly challenged segregationists at every turn, and their actions were instrumental in defeat of extremists and reopening of city schools. Although WEC was first organized white opposition to city's segregationists and was central to resolution of school crisis, no study of organization exists. Few accounts have even mentioned WEC, in part because much of secondary material on Little Rock experience is contained in larger works on school desegregation or civil rights.3 Within such broad surveys, Little Rock is treated as merely one episode in a continuing saga of resistance. Moreover, even in literature devoted specifically to Little Rock, most studies focus on first year of crisis (1957-1958), when federal troops occupied Central High and dramatic conflict between Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower tested power of federal government to enforce Supreme Court's decision.4 Only a few authors have studied second year of crisis, when power struggles were local and WEC occupied center stage. In The Little Rock Recall Election, Henry Alexander examined climactic event in city's school crisis and provided first scholarly reference to WEC in his discussion of organization's role in 1959 recall campaign.5 However, his study provides little information about membership of WEC or its development prior to election. In Taken By Surprise, Elizabeth Jacoway provides an important introduction to social origins of WEC, but her focus is on failure of Little Rock's civic leadership during crisis, and she therefore does not provide a full discussion of WEC's activities. …