Age versus schooling effects on intelligence development

The effect of formal education, as opposed to chronological age, on intelligence development has suffered from inadequate empirical investigation. Most studies of this issue have relied on natural variation in exposure to school among children of the same age, thus confounding differences in schooling with differences in other intelligence-related variables. This difficulty can be overcome by a quasi-experimental paradigm involving comparison between children who differ in both chronological age and schooling. The present study applies this paradigm to the estimation of the independent effects of age and schooling in grades 5 and 6 on raw scores obtained on a variety of general ability tests. The sample included all students in Jerusalem's Hebrew-language, state-controlled elementary schools. The results unambiguously point to schooling as the major factor underlying the increase of intelligence test scores as a function of age and to the larger effect schooling has on verbal than nonverbal tests. These results contribute to our understanding of the causal model underlying intelligence development and call for reconsideration of the conceptual basis underlying the definition of deviation-IQ scores. Some implications of these results concerning the distinction between intelligence and scholastic achievement, the causal model underlying the development of "crystallized" and "fluid" abilities, and the notion of "culture-fair" tests are discussed.     

‘Catholic schooling with a twist?’: a study of faith schooling in the Republic of Ireland during a period of detraditionalisation

The role of faith-based schools is increasingly debated within a context of school reform, rights and plurality in multi-ethnic societies. The Catholic schooling system in the Irish Republic (always referred to as Ireland in the text) represents an interesting case internationally because of the extent to which Catholic education is structurally embedded as normative across the education system. Yet, Ireland is in a process of detraditionalisation and wider societal change. Drawing on Bourdieu and Bernstein, and a mixed methodological study of Catholic secondary schools, the article presents a typology of Catholic schooling in transition. This identifies a continuum of Catholicity among the study schools that is mediated by dynamics of social class in an increasingly competitive and diverse system. It is argued this has implications for considering the role of a recontextualised model of Catholic faith schooling, underpinned by principles of social justice in a multicultural and more secularly oriented society.     

学校变革的三种影响力量

教育行政推动、社会需求驱动和学校自主选择是影响学校变革的三种主要力量,它们对学校变革的影响各不相同。为使学校变革能顺利推进,一方面要尽力改进教育行政管理和引导社会对教育的需求,为学校变革创造支持环境;另一方面要从学校自主选择切入,培育推动学校变革的力量。为此,要重点提升校长的教育责任感、事业心、办学理念、开拓精神、改革意志等办学品质。     

Evolution in Freedom? The Meanings of ‘Free School’ in Chile

This article examines the background in which enterprises called free schools, as well as complementary educational activities, have taken root in Chile. Two kinds of recently burgeoning free schools are identified; one supplementing regular schooling with a social justice focus, and another that is a fully fledged alternative to other schooling. The history of freedom itself in Chile is explored from a historical perspective, contrasting somewhat with freedom as it is understood in more developed countries. Parallels to Anglophone free schools such as AS Neill’s Summerhill are also discussed, as well as the sociopolitical context in which Chilean free schools continue to develop.     

Education and disadvantage: the role of community‐oriented schools

The proposed development of extended schools in England is part of an international movement towards community‐oriented schooling, particularly in areas of disadvantage. Although on the face of it this movement seems like a common‐sense approach to self‐evident needs, the evaluation evidence on such schools is inconclusive. In order to assess the likelihood that community‐oriented schooling will have a significant impact on disadvantage, therefore, this paper analyses the rationale on which this approach to schooling appears to be based. It argues that community‐oriented schools as currently conceptualised have a focus on ‘proximal’ rather than ‘distal’ factors in disadvantage, underpinned by a model of social in/exclusion which draws attention away from underlying causes. They are, therefore, likely to have only small‐scale, local impacts. The paper suggests that a more wide‐ranging strategy is needed in which educational reform is linked to other forms of social and economic reform and considers the conditions which would be necessary for the emergence of such a strategy.     

Schools that Make a Difference: a sociological perspective on effective schooling

A recent review essay of three books on effective schooling stated that the literature on school effectiveness largely adopts a functionalist view of society and schooling and the field of inquiry is dominated by a positivist paradigm. The review argued for a sociological analysis of effective schooling. This paper examines from a sociological perspective the nature of effective schooling. The paper draws on case studies of four high schools to analyse their relationship with the social, cultural and policy dimensions of their context. A major focus of the paper is on the dilemmas, tensions and issues arising from the interrelationship between each school and its context, and the implications of these for an understanding of effective practices in schools.     

“Straw bonnets” to superior schooling: The “failure” of the charity school movement in the context of nineteenth-century Ireland – a reappraisal

The spectacular growth and equally spectacular decline of the eighteenth-century charity school movement prompts this examination of the contribution made by the movement to nineteenth-century schooling – particularly superior or secondary schooling. Educational historians have argued that the movement was a failure. This paper argues that only in the case of one charity school-type – the charity day school – may failure be safely attributed to the charity school movement. The charity boarding schools, hospitals and asylums were far from being a failure. Indeed, in nineteenth-century Ireland, these schools, in response to social change, advanced from “straw bonnets” to superior schooling. Historians have also noted that the real difficulty surrounding the charity school is that of defining it. For Jones, it was an omnibus term that embraced all schools of a like nature. And indeed charity schools constitute a broad genre of schooling. In order to qualify the received assessment of the charity school movement in terms of “failure”, it has been found necessary to classify the charity school types within the broad genre they constitute. The paper assembles a number of charity school types and identifies the charity boarding school as that institution that successfully made the transition to superior status. The characteristics of the superiorisation process are outlined, as are the unique circumstances of nineteenth-century Ireland that facilitated, indeed required, it.     

Selecting Teaching Practice schools across social contexts: conceptual and policy challenges from South Africa

In a country like South Africa, as in many other countries around the world, there is an imperative to prepare student teachers for a wide variety of social contexts, as part of breaking the cycle of disadvantage for poor learners. This article explores the challenge of placing student teachers for their field experience in schools that differ greatly in terms of their social and educational conditions. Drawing on interviews with teacher educators at one university, the article argues that criteria for identifying suitable schools for Teaching Practice do not easily support placements in schools in difficult conditions. Conceptual models of teacher education are explored, with a view to developing a model that supports teacher preparation for diversity. Policy recommendations are offered to support the preparation of excellent teachers for all schooling contexts.     

Schooling effects on intelligence development: evidence based on national samples from urban and rural China

The current research investigated the variability of school effects on intelligence development in considering two economically and socially distinct groups of children. The data came from a nationally representative sample of primary school children from urban and rural areas of China. Two standardised reasoning tests were used to assess fluid intelligence. The between-grade regression discontinuity approach was applied to disentangle the schooling effect from the age effect. Results showed that the combined effects of schooling and age were 5.09 intelligence points per year, in which the schooling effect (4.37 points) was larger than the age effect (.72 points). The patterns of schooling and age effects were different in urban and rural subsamples. For the urban subsample, the schooling effect was smaller than the age effect for children from grade 1 to 3, but the schooling effect became larger than the age effect from grade 4 to 6. For the rural subsample, however, the schooling effect was always larger than the age effect. The effect of one year of schooling for rural children (5.59 points) was larger than that for urban children (3.15 points). These results suggest that schooling effects are closely related to the context where children are growing up.     

School choice: neoliberal education policy and imagined futures

The launch in Australia of a government website that compares all schools on the basis of student performance in standardized tests illustrates the extent to which neoliberal policies have been entrenched. This paper examines the problematic nature of choosing schools within the powerful political context of neoliberalism. It illustrates how key elements of the neoliberal worldview are normalized in the day-to-day practices of schooling and how certain norms and values that characterize neoliberalism are shaped and reinforced in the education system and also in personal, family and social imaginaries. The task for educational sociology, therefore, is to problematize and ‘re-imagine’ the prevailing neoliberal imaginary.     

Rethinking accountability in a knowledge society

Competition between schools combined with test-based accountability to hold schools accountable for predetermined knowledge standards have become a common solution in educational change efforts to improve the performance of educational systems around the world. This is happening as family and community social capital declines in most parts of developed world. Increased competition and individualism are not necessarily beneficial to creating social capital in schools and their communities. This article argues that: (1) the evidence remains controversial that test-based accountability policies improve the quality and efficiency of public education; (2) the current practice of determining educational performance by using primarily standardized knowledge tests as the main means of accountability is not a necessary condition for much needed educational improvement; and (3) there is growing evidence that increased high-stakes testing is restricting students’ conceptual learning, engaging in creative action and understanding innovation, all of which are essential elements of contemporary schooling in a knowledge society. Finland is used as an example to suggest that educational change should rather contribute to increasing networking and social capital in schools and in their communities through building trust and strengthening collective responsibilities within and between schools. This would create better prospects of worthwhile lifelong learning in and out of schools. Based on this analysis, the article concludes that education policies should be directed at promoting more intelligent forms of accountability to meet external accountability demands and to encourage cooperation rather than competition among students, teachers and schools.     

Seeing classes: toward a broadened research agenda for critical qualitative researchers

This paper proposes a research agenda that foregrounds social class in US public schooling. The author suggests that the relative invisibility of social class in academic discourse on schooling limits the value of research in at least three ways: (1) middle‐class academics’ propensity to speak on behalf of the poor and working class limits analysis of class and schooling; (2) the class and gender constraints on the work of teachers has been inadequately theorized, while simultaneously the work of teachers ha been invoked as proxy for deeper social and structural inequalities; and (3) researchers have declined to ‘study up’ power structures within which the work of schools is embedded, limiting our understanding of relationships between schooling and the economy. It is suggested that researchers’ work will make deeper contributions to the reform of schools to the extent that they acknowledge how norms of scholarship sustain their own middle‐class privilege.     

Family,Classroom, and School Effects on Childrens Educational Outcomes in Latin America

This study, which is based on a longer report by Willms and Somers (2000), employs hierarchical linear regression models to examine the relationships between 3 schooling outcomes (language and mathematics achievement, and time to complete primary schooling) and family background, as well as various school policies and practices. The analyses employ data from the Primer Estudio Internacional Comparativo (PEIC ; UNESCO, 1998), which includes data for 13 Latin American countries, with samples of approximately 100 schools in each country, and 40 grades 3 and 4 pupils sampled in each school. The study finds that the relationship between schooling outcomes and family background varies among countries. The most successful country, Cuba, has uniformly effective schools, and relatively small inequities along social class lines and between the sexes. Across all countries, the most effective schools tend to be those with: high levels of school resources; classrooms which are not multigrade, and where students are not grouped by ability; classrooms where children are tested frequently; classrooms and schools with a high level of parental involvement; and classrooms that have a positive classroom climate, especially with respect to classroom discipline. The article concludes with a discussion about how we might improve capability to monitor school performance in low-income countries.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

Comparing public and private high schools using three SAT data sets

Proponents of private schooling claim that private high schools, on the average, more effectively promote measured academic achievement than public high schools. They have also argued that private high schools increase high school completion rates and improve college enrollment rates among high school graduates. Their antagonists, typically, hold that there is little or no difference between public and private high schools with respect to any of these outcomes. We address two of these school effectivenes issues by applying multiple-regression analysis to two SAT data sets for Florida and a national SAT data set. We ask whether there are differences between public and private high schools in promoting achievement as measured by the high-profile SAT verbal and math tests. At the same time, we are asking, at least implicity, if either public or private high schools provide an SAT soore advantage in promoting college enrollments. Our analysis finds a consistent advantage for public high schools with respect to SAT math attainment. For high schools generally, however, it seems clear that school effects outweigh the impact of socially ascribed traits, such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class.     

Sustaining the adoption of gamified outdoor social enquiry learning in high schools through addressing teachers’ emerging concerns: A 3-year study

Gamified Authentic Mobile Enquiry in Society (GAMES) is a GPS-supported mobile application for gamifying social enquiry learning in outdoor environments. Teachers are always the “educational innovation gatekeepers” in schools. This paper reports on a 3-year study in which the Stages of Concern model was employed as a quantitative diagnostic instrument to continuously understand and address the emerging concerns of 91 social humanities teachers (from 91 high schools in Hong Kong) about adopting GAMES in their teaching practice. With adequate interventions for addressing the participants’ ongoing needs, their peak categorical concern shifted initially from “Management” (in Year 1) to “Consequence” (in Year 2), and finally to “Refocusing” (in Year 3). The results reveal that the participants largely intended to go on harnessing GAMES to facilitate outdoor social enquiry learning in their schools. This work provides the field with profound strategic insights into sustaining technological innovations in schooling from the perspective of teachers—an important stakeholder of education.     

Girls and Transition to Second-level Schooling in Ireland: 'Moving on' and 'moving out' Correspondence : Maeve O'Brien,Department of Human Development,St Patrick's College of Education,Drumcondra, Dublin, 9. E-mail: Obpm@eircom.net

This article explores how groups of Irish girls from different social class backgrounds negotiate the transition from first- to second-level schooling and seeks to understand how their classed and gendered identities are produced and reproduced at this time of change. We hope to argue that the school choice process, although highly significant, is only one step in a series of challenges that girls and their families must negotiate at this disjuncture in schooling. Having made a 'choice' and secured a place at second level, girls face a complex web of emotional, social and academic transitions that shape and are shaped by their social classed and gendered identities. While transition to second level is a highly significant move for all groups, it is especially challenging for groups of working-class girls who experience emotional pain and loss in leaving their familiar and familial primary schools. The experiences of female students suggest that they are included, excluded and differentiated on the basis of their adherence to and acceptance of dominant middle-class and gendered norms, particularly in convent, single-sex secondary schools. Girls' resistance to these controlling mechanisms within their schools leads to alienation and marginalisation even in this first year in the second-level system and signals a step towards moving out of the system while others move on.     

The privatization and marketization of US schooling

This paper describes the trend towards the privatization and marketization of US schooling across three domains. We begin by describing the trend in recent pro-market policy reforms — proposed or enacted — to US schooling. This reform trend can be explained in terms of the growing importance of economic theory and economic evidence in social and political discourse. Briefly, we review mainstream economic theory and evidence to see what general lessons can be drawn, with a focus on productive efficiency. In the main section of the paper, we look at the direct evidence for US schooling not only in terms of the productive efficiency of schools, but also equity in schools, freedom of choice for parents and students, and the social cohesion produced by schools. Our review reaches a number of conclusions which suggest that the trend toward privatization and marketization may generate greater productive efficiency. Although the economic analysis is deficient in several ways and may have limited pertinence for social goods such as education, it highlights the need for strong and effective systems of accountability. Regardless of whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, however, it may be difficult to prevent further steps toward marketization.     

Parental Motivation in School Choice

Abstract

Concerned that public schooling leads to mediocrity rather than meritocracy, many middle-class parents are seeking other options such as private schools, alternative public schools, and charter schools to develop their children's academic, creative, and athletic talents. Based on a mixed method investigation of school choice among parents (N = 1,871) in the two largest cities in the Province of Alberta, this paper examines the logic, values, and concerns that inform parental decision-making and the impact of social class differentiation in the process of selection of elementary schools. Issues surrounding the placement of gifted students in various school options are discussed.     

Beyond Decontextualisation and Cynicism

Some see schools primarily as places where students learn academic skills that are crucial to individual and social development. Others see them primarily as places where students are stigmatised and where social inequality is reproduced. Despite their differences, both views of schooling tend to assume the same unrealistic conception of schooled knowledge as being decontextualised, as being separate from the social identification, power relations, and interpersonal struggles that occur in all cognitive practices. In this article I argue for a more complex account of schooling, one that reimagines the intertwining of academic learning and social identification without privileging one over the other.