“Thank God for Mississippi!” How Disparagement of the South Has Destroyed Public Schooling in New Orleans—and Beyond

Reasons for neglect of homeschooling in educational research literature are explored. The ideological hostility that occasionally surfaces in policy debates is unlikely to have a major influence on mainstream researchers. An alternative explanation based on Kuhn's concept of normal science is proposed. The dominant paradigm of educational research emphasizes quantitative analyses, standardized settings, and large randomized samples. Unlike homeschooling, public schools, with their state-mandated curricula, age-graded classrooms, and tight regulation of facilities and personnel, provide an ideal setting for this paradigm. The congruence between setting and method is reinforced by universities. The training of licensed public school teachers generates most of the revenue that supports faculty positions in colleges of education. Consequently there is little incentive to study homeschooling. The article concludes that a scientific revolution in educational research is not in prospect. Moving beyond the current neglect will require a change in approach in investigating homeschooling. Rather than focusing on holistic comparisons, aimed at demonstrating the superiority of one educational mode over another, homeschool researchers can gain mainstream attention by investigating factors that affect motivation and learning across educational contexts, thereby generating results that would be useful to both public school teachers and home educators.     

“No Excuses” Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement

Many most well-known charter schools in the United States use a “No Excuses” approach. We conduct the first meta-analysis of the achievement impacts of No Excuses charter schools, focusing on experimental, lottery-based studies. We estimate that No Excuses charter schools increase student math and literacy achievement by 0.25 and 0.17, respectively, for approximately each year of attendance. These are large and meaningful gains. Moreover, these effects are substantially larger than those of attending other kinds of charter schools. We discuss policy implications and offer necessary caveats.     

‘Drenched in the past:’ the evolution of market-oriented reforms in New Orleans

As the city with the largest charter-school market share in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana exemplifies market-oriented models in education. For a city that is so ‘drenched in the past,’ the reform movement in New Orleans typically neglects historical context, often dismissing the education system pre-Katrina as simply corrupt and dysfunctional. This is an incomplete story. While national narratives and news media tend to downplay these features, there is no local consensus on the reforms. There is mistrust on both sides of the debate, and a growing opposition movement, which arises from decades of racial and political struggles, corrupt public officials, and previous experiences with the state exerting power over locally elected school boards, which disenfranchised African-Americans in New Orleans in particular. Although the new, post-Katrina educational system significantly altered political dynamics, it has not eradicated politics altogether. In this paper, I conduct a policy history of education reforms in New Orleans, connecting the historical and political context to current reform efforts. As researchers evaluate the effectiveness of the new reforms in terms of student achievement, it is important also to examine their impacts on communities and the democratic control of schools, as well as how they reproduce or break from historical patterns of political struggle and inequality.     

Understanding school attendance: The missing link in “Schooling for All”

India is close to its goal of achieving 100 % school enrolment for children in the age group of 5–16 years. However, this does not correspond with universal school attendance. Not all children who are enrolled attend school regularly. Enrolment is, at best only “nominal” for them. In this study, we examine the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ side factors behind low attendance by drawing upon a new dataset on adolescents in India- Understanding Adults and Young Adolescents (UDAYA) for Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Results indicate that girls and older students are more likely to be absent from school. Married girls were more likely to be absent than their unmarried peers. Engaging in unpaid work also deter children from attending school regularly, although surprisingly, there is no significant difference between children who are not working and children engaged in paid work in terms of absenteeism. Religion, affluence, and school type also have a significant influence on attendance. Surprisingly, absenteeism did not emerge to be significant when proficiency in math as a marker of academic performance is taken into consideration. Provisioning of infrastructure can be a particularly effective means towards increasing attendance, as can be the contribution of teachers when considered as positive role models.     

The Home Schooling “Market”: Results and Implications of Current Research

ABSTRACT

One of the biggest forces in primary and secondary education today is the home schooling movement–parents opting to forego sending their children to public or private schools in order to teach them themselves in their own home. As this movement grows, more and more students entering higher education will have been home schooled. This is becoming a market segment that many colleges and universities cannot afford to ignore. The current paper reviews the research which has been conducted on home schooling to answer four questions of importance to college or university officials as they contemplate targeting this group: (1) why do parents home school? (2) what are the characteristics of home schoolers? (3) would home schoolers make good college students? and (4) how could a college or university effectively reach out to home schoolers? By answering these four questions, college and university officials can better decide whether or not they should target home schooled students and, if they do, how to best reach these students.     

Control as Care: How Teachers in “No Excuses” Charter Schools Position Their Students and Themselves

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on how early career charter school teachers (n?=?20) in schools utilizing a “no excuses” discipline approach describe their interactions with students. Using positioning theory as an analytic tool, we explore how teachers engage the language of no excuses discipline and associated behaviors to position their students as passive beings unaware of “what is best for them” and potential deviants needing oversight. In this way, relationships were largely described as focused on control and compliance. The findings raise questions about how no excuses systems shape teachers’ understandings of care for their students as well as how teacher-student relationships develop.     

Selling Schools: Marketing and Recruitment Strategies in New Orleans

Under new school-choice policies, schools feel increasing pressure to market their schools to parents and students. I examine how school leaders in New Orleans used different marketing strategies based on their positions in the market hierarchy and the ways in which they used formal and informal processes to recruit students. This study relied on qualitative interviews, observations of board meetings, and board-meeting minutes from a random sample of 30 schools in New Orleans. Findings indicate that marketing was a very common strategy. Yet even though choice policies were meant to give parents, not schools, power in selecting where their children attend school, some schools found ways to avoid enrolling disadvantaged students, often by not marketing. Faced with the pressure of accountability and charter renewal, these schools traded greater funding for potentially greater averages in student achievement. At the same time, some schools that were oversubscribed invested in marketing and recruitment anyway to draw less affluent parents to the school, who might not be aware of the open application and enrollment process. I discuss the implications of these marketing strategies.     

THE “New Adam” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

There were many new images with some special social meanings in the 19 th American literary works, among which"New Adam"was a typical one. This paper extracts a"New Adam"from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Through analyzing the protagonist Huckleberry Finn's different characteristics, we can find that Mark Twain's"New Adam"enjoys adventures,yearns for freedom and equality. It is these outstanding features that enhance the paper to probe into the social reality of that time and the characters of new Americans.     

“Useless Schooling” or “Hopeless Schooling”: An Ethnographic Study of Lower-Class Rural Parents’ Perceptions on the Value of Schooling

Abstract

Based on the data collected in a one-year long fieldwork in Zhong, a county located in middle part of China, this article reconsiders the concept of “useless schooling,” which was proposed in recent studies on the perceptions of value of education among lower-class rural residents in China. It calls for a understanding of those changes in the macro social structure, which becomes increasingly stratified, and the emerging patterns of educational opportunity structure in the era of social transformation, and argues that this is the base for the understanding lower-class rural parents’ perceptions on the value of schooling. This article employs Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and conceptualizes the process of how lower-class rural residents form their value on school education as a process of structural factors being internalized into individual dispositions. Based on the data collected, this article proposes to use the concept of “hopeless schooling” to capture their perceptions on the value of school education. It emphasizes that the emerging education opportunity structure and differentiated chances of social mobility by different social groups have gradually been transformed into a stratified pattern of “expectations” for education and social mobility, and proposes the need to examine the ongoing solidification of social structure in this period of transformation.     

Schooling of immigrant children in West-Germany — Sweden — England: The educationally disadvantaged

The focus of this article is on children of migrant workers and immigrants in the schools of West-Germany, Sweden and England. One central problem, that of language, is considered both as it is dealt with in policy, i.e., in curricula, and as it is actually implemented in some programmes, which are typical for the actions in these countries. The three countries that are compared have similar proportions of immigrant children but these children differ in nationality. The analysis is based on the concept that children of immigrants belong to the disadvantaged people in our societies, which include not only immigrants but people with whatever kind of deprivation. Some demographical data are given as background information and underline the urgency of action.

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Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel behandelt die Kinder von Gastarbeitern und Einwanderern in den Schulen Westdeutschlands, Schwedens und Englands. Ein zentrales Problem, das der Sprache, wird einmal im politischen, d.h. Curriculums-Aspekt, betrachtet, zum anderen so, wie es in einigen Programmen verwirklicht wurde, die für die Aktionen in diesen Ländern typisch sind. Die drei verglichenen Länder haben ähnliche Anteile an Einwandererkindern; diese Kinder haben jedoch verschiedene Nationalitäten. Die Analyse beruht auf dem Konzept, dass Einwandererkinder zu den benachteiligten Gruppen unserer Gesellschaft gehören; diese schliessen nicht nur Einwanderer, sondern alle Arten von Benachteiligten ein. Demographische Angaben als Hintergrund unterstreichen die Notwendigkeit des sofortigen Handelns.

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Résumé Cet article se concentre sur les enfants des travailleurs migrants et des immigrants dans les écoles d'Allemagne occidentale, de Suède et d'Angleterre. Un problème essentiel, le problème linguistique, est considéré à la fois comme on l'aborde p.ex. dans la politique, dans les curricula, et aussi comme il est vétitablement appliqué dans certains programmes qui sont typiques pour les actions de ces pays. Les trois pays que l'on compare ici ont des proportions similaires d'enfants immigrants, mais ces enfants sont de nationalité différente. L'analyse se base sur le concept d'après lequel les enfants d'immigrants font partie des défavorisés de notre société, qui ne comprend pas seulement des immigrants, mais aussi les personnes affectées par toutes sortes de privations. Des données démographiques sont aussi mentionnées comme renseignements de base, et elles soulignent l'urgence d'une action à prendre.

     

The Myth of “Migrants as Problems”: Public School in Neoliberal Times and the Construction and Contestation of “Migrant” Identity

This article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school’s neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the case school’s pursuit of exam-performance-based academic excellence, its official documents discursively constructed migrant students as being of “low quality,” and a problem for and potential danger to the school. However, the daily positioning practices of school administrators, teachers, and these students did not just reproduce this uniformly negative discursive construction; rather, they contested it in a complex and contradictory manner. This article offers further evidence showing the complexity of identity constructions in late modern urban schools, wherein professionals and students are all involved in a marketized education context that brings crises and dilemmas to institutions.     

The Persistence of Educational Semantics: Patterns of Variation in Monitorial Schooling in Colombia (1821–1844)

This contribution deals with the adoption and interpretation of the monitorial system of education in Colombia between 1821 and 1844, a period during which this pedagogical method was almost mandatory for all the country’s elementary schools. The analysis focuses on the differences between “local necessities” and “local semantic resources” in the interpretation and adoption of the method. The author shows that whereas its implementation in Colombia was closely related to the construction of a new, independent and republican political order, many practices and interpretations reveal astonishing similarities to the history of the method in Spain. These similar features are illustrated at the level of curriculum, teaching practices and educational knowledge. The author discusses how these continuities marked the reception of the method even though the cultural relations between Spain and Colombia were strongly weakened during this time. This fact is interpreted in terms of the persistence of a Hispanic American cultural semantics, which pervaded the circulation and appropriation of purportedly universal educational models.     

New Understanding of Henchard’s Tragedy in “The Mayor of Casterbridge”

No masterpiece by great writers is single-sided.It is always polyhedron and is bound to show new sides if we read it in a different perspective.Traditionally,"the Mayor of Casterbridge",one of the important novels by Thomas Hardy,is an illustration of the inevitable doom of the patriarchal economy in the English countryside in the 19th century England due to the merciless squeeze by industrial expansion.However,considering the widespread accepted theory of Adam Smith’s economic man and moral man,we could find that man are always in conflict between the two.Someone who are very rational and perfectly informed to pursue their own profits and wealth regardless of others’ interests could always successfully gain their wealth with the cost of losing their own happiness,while others who always care about someone else,put themselves in someone else’s places,and regard someone else’s happiness as their concerns could eventually get their real happiness and sweet life with a sympathetic heart.Adam Smith thinks that the egoism(economic man) and the altruism(moral man) are both human’s natural instincts.Only a moderately prudent balance and union between the two could both develop the economy and gain the happiness.In "The Mayor of Casterbridge",Henchard’s tragedy just lies in the abundance of egoism but the shortage of altruism.That’s to say,he possesses too many characteristics of economic man but too little of moral man.Then Henchard inevitably begins his tragic way with no repentance.