School Politics Research Articles

Can Virtue be Taught—Especially These Days?

The politics and pedagogy of schooling are becoming more authoritarian, coercive and utilitarian. Reactionary ideologies dressed and patched up with new managerialism (already moribund in the market place) are supplanting progessivist ideas. Even in its own cramped terms the new model will not work. But educationalists should not be content to oppose it with nostalgic stories. Progressivism was always at a loss to cram its ideals within the geography, architecture and timetable of a school day. It is the very structure and context of schooling that needs overhaul.

Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark. By Wilbur C. Rich. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. 240p. $35.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark. By Wilbur C. Rich. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. 240p. $35.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark

Black Mayors and School Politics: The Failure of Reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark

Black mayors and school politics: the failure of reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark

Black mayors and school politics: the failure of reform in Detroit, Gary, and Newark

Education and identity in rural France: the politics of schooling

l. Introduction: journey to Lavialle 2. Theoretical orientations: schooling, families, and power 3. Cultural identity and social practice 4.Les notres: families and farms 5. From child to adult 6. Schooling the Laviallois: historical perspectives 7. Families and schooling 8. The politics of schooling 9. Everyday life at school l0. Conclusions: persistence, resistance, and co-existence

‘Homophobia Kills’: a disruptive moment in the educational politics of legitimation

This paper explores how students and, to a lesser extent teachers, have engaged with their school's politics of legitimation to participate in a disruptive moment in sex/sexual/gender relations within their school. Over a period of 3 years students have, with the support of some teachers, actively sought to make homophobia an issue of concern within their school. Their activities have served to disrupt the legitimacy of the heterosexist hegemony operating within the school's discursive arrangements. However, powerful normalising discourses worked through the school to contain this disruption. It is the interplay between discourses of legitimacy, disruption and containment which is referred to here as the politics of legitimation.

Welcome to Heights High: the crippling politics of restructuring America's public schools

Welcome to Heights High: the crippling politics of restructuring America's public schools

’n Reformatoriese perspektief op die verhouding skoolonderwys en die politiek1

A Reformational perspective on the relationship school education and politics. There is a generally-held conviction that school education and politics are linked to each other, and that they of necessity have a reciprocal influence. What is not, however, clear, is how the relationship between school education and politics can (should) precisely be defined in terms of principle. The Reformational tradition offers specific philosophico-educational guidelines within which school education and politics can be regarded. In the first place a distinction can be made between the two entities, school education and politics; in the second place, it is possible to indicate school educational and political interests; thirdly there are specific limitations on the competences of school education and politics; and in the fourth place a distinction can be made between what is regarded as school-typical tasks and politically typical tasks.

Boston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905

Boston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905

What's in it for us?

This paper examines the difficulties of negotiating and gaining access to a secondary school to carry out ethnographic research in Britain. Issues related to external and internal confidentiality arising from the offer of written feedback to the schools are examined. External confidentiality refers to problems connected with the schools’ need to be seen “in best performance” in the new era of competition. Internal confidentiality deals with issues of trust between the researcher and participants. Problems regarding the position of the researcher vis‐a‐vis internal school politics are identified. The influence of the research project on the participants and their setting is considered, as are the possible benefits and hazards related to the project. How the researcher dealt with ethical issues is also addressed. Oral feedback is offered as an alternative to written feedback because it reduces risks for participants and offers an opportunity to discuss problem issues within the school in a wider setting.

Truancy; The Politics of Compulsory Schooling

Truancy and compulsory schooling - a socio-historical account researching school attendance modes of regulation modes of resistance schooling, truancy and the new ERA. Appendices.

An Evaluation Of The University Of Idaho Beginning Agriculture Teacher Induction Program

No abstract available

Creating Middle Schools: Technical, Normative, and Political Considerations

A new generation of state and local middle school reformers is attempting to reconceptualize their mission to avoid past failures. Against the background of earlier thinking and failed reforms, we explore in this article the content of the new reforms, paying particular attention to how they diverge from conventional school practices, school norms, and school politics. We argue that to achieve fundamental change it will not be enough to reform existing technical practices; rather, norms of community and integration will need to replace many of the competitive, individualistic, and bureaucratic norms embedded in current practice, and existing political relations will need to be restructured to ensure that the reform process reflects a fair and democratic distribution of authority. These normative and political considerations fill out the usual technical reform picture-portraying the new middle school reforms as inherently complex, value laden, and politically loaded. We conclude with the implications of our analysis for the implementation of this ambitious and complex set of reforms.

Framing dropouts: notes on the politics of an urban public high school

Framing dropouts: notes on the politics of an urban public high school

School Politics and Conflict in Racially Isolated Schools

Schools have long been involved in political battles with local, state, and federal governments. They have also had disagreements with so-called scribblers (professors who write about schools). Two decades of research on school politics have proven only that school conflict is inevitable and that it has both positive and negative effects on the community. In 1957 Coleman summarized several studies in which disagreements over education caused conflict between school boards and communities. He further hypothesized that conflict over basic political issues (including school-related issues) has the potential to disrupt and fractionalize a community. In 1962 Bailey et al. asserted that there will always be conflict in the schools over the 3 R's: race, religion, and Reds (a slang term for world communism). More recently, Michel and Woodbury (1987) have shown that political tensions in a community emerged because school administrators, local parents, and state officials disagreed about the control of public education. Spring (1988, pp. 93-110) also describes instances in which bitter school politics in a community was caused by local economic issues and political fractionalism. One theory of political conflict in a school district is that it develops in the local environment, taking its shape from the economy, the characteristics of its constituent population, and the political tensions created by different groups who seek to control the schools (Wirt & Kirst, 1989). Wirt and Kirst maintain that all school issues involve political control and are the result of one group or another's attempts to control school policies and practices. They identify seven areas of political control that have the potential to create political conflict between the school and its community, namely, issues of (1) parent control (i.e., parents seek to exert some control over the schools and share that control with administrators); (2) student control (i.e., students seek broader guarantees of their civil rights from school administrators); (3) teacher control (i.e., teachers seek greater control of the schools through collective bargaining); (4) taxpayer control (i.e., taxpayers seek to reduce the fiscal load they pay for public schools); (5) minority control (i.e., racial/ethnic and political minority groups seek solutions to issues related to discrimination in the schools); (6) federal control (i.e., the federal government variously

Contrasting Patterns in Black School Politics: Atlanta and Memphis, 1865-1985

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the participation of African Americans in school politics in the urban South. Some notable incidents have been recounted, and patterns of inequality between Black and White schools have been documented, but the kinds of synthetic historical accounts of growth and change in the educational opportunities available to Black children that have recently been produced for several northern cities are still lacking for most southern cities (Homel, 1990). In an earlier article we presented such an account of Black school politics in Atlanta (GA), in which we identified a pattern of changes in the immediate goals and tactics adopted by African American leaders in their century-long effort to win better schools for their community (Plank & Turner, 1987). In the present article we contrast Black school politics in Atlanta with those in Memphis (TN) and show how the divergent political structures of the two cities produced very different sets of opportunities and constraints for African Americans in the two cities. As in Atlanta, Black leaders in Memphis adapted their goals and tactics to the changing political circumstances of their community; yet, because the political histories of the two cities are very different, the patterns of interaction between Black leaders and the public school system are proven to be dramatically different as well. The crucial difference between Black school politics in Atlanta and in Memphis involves the participation of African Americans in city politics. From the start, White politics in Atlanta were organized around Black exclusion. A Black Republican, William Finch, was elected to the Atlanta city council in 1871, but thereafter no Blacks held public office in that city until the 1960s. Divisions in the White electorate sometimes allowed Blacks to play a role in local elections in the years immediately following the Civil War, but the ensuing competition for Black votes was universally decried among Whites. The institution of a White primary in 1892 brought an effective end to Black political participation in Atlanta, and it was only on the rare occasions when meaningful citywide elections were held (e.g., mayoral recall, bond referenda) that Blacks enjoyed real power (Plank & Turner, 1987; Turner, 1990).

The Link between School Decentralization and School Politics

Forms of decentralization are shaped by schoolpolitics and "actors."

Local initiatives and national policies: The politics of private schooling in Tanzania 1

Government and public administration in Tanzania are formally highly centralized, hierarchical, and compartmentalized. Education is no exception. In practice, however, the public policy process in Tanzania is far less authoritarian than it appears. The privatization of secondary education is a clear case in point. Over the formal objections of central educational administrators, and against the resistance of national political leaders, local initiatives successfully created, and then nurtured and maintained, private secondary schools. Squeezed between limited resources and escalating demands, national political leaders acceded to those local initiatives. Privatizing, at least in part, what is perhaps the most significant public policy became the stated objective of a socialist leadership. Or had it? Education remains a contested terrain in Tanzania.

1 The politics of urban education as a field of study: an interpretive analysis

Researchers in the field of urban education politics have much in agreement ‐ they refute the notion of bureaucratic insulation in school policy making, connect the school to its broader political and economic community, and address the effects of school governance on race relations, governmental legitimacy and political representation. At the same time, approaching the field with different disciplinary backgrounds and substantive interests, researchers have offered competing frameworks in analysing school politics. In my view, disagreements and consensus within the field can be better appreciated if the diverse approaches and their substantive findings are understood in the proper context of the school policy organization ‐ the way power is allocated between the top of the system and the school site and the way clientele are involved in schooling decisions. In this partial review of the literature, I shall propose an integrative framework that specifies the circumstances under which different kinds of po...

4 Public choice perspectives on urban schools

Using public choice theory as a conceptual orientation, the authors argue that politics in urban school districts have differed from those in suburban school districts. Urban school politics have been characterized by relatively well‐organized interest groups and weak market controls, although politics in suburban school districts vary also, as a function of the strength of market controls. The strength of these interest groups in city school systems is reflected in school board politics, in the administrative structure and in district policies. Interest group liberalism in urban school districts may be lessening due to the changing educational needs of urban students and due to reformers’ efforts to give parents more educational choices. However, the success of market reforms depends on a number of conditions which will be a severe challenge to reformers.