Education and inequality: historical and sociological approaches to schooling and social stratification

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Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Tara Davidson, the conference administrator, who handled all of the administrative duties related to the conference and to the selection of articles for this special issue; and Diane Hill, the Director of Campus and Community Relations at Rutgers‐Newark, who ensured that all campus‐related issues were handled effectively. We also want to thank Frank Simon and Ian Grosvenor, whose input into this issue and comments on the articles were invaluable. Finally, we would like to thank all of the contributors to this issue for their excellent articles and for their clear and concise abstracts for the ISCHE abstract book, which we have relied on and paraphrased liberally for this introduction.

Notes

¹A.R. Sadovnik, Equity and Excellence in Higher Education: The Decline of a Liberal Educational Reform (New York: Peter Lang, 1994).

²S.F. Semel, The Dalton School: The Transformation of a Progressive School (New York: Peter Lang, 1992).

³S.F. Semel and A.R. Sadovnik, “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 2006; A.R. Sadovnik and S.F. Semel, Founding Mothers and Others: Women Leaders During the Progressive Era (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

⁴Although the following discussions of the sociology and history of education focuses primarily on the fields in the US, they reflect larger disciplinary trends internationally. One of the strengths of ISCHE and Paedogogica Historica is their inclusion of a comparative and international perspective, one that is reflected in the set of articles in this special issue.

⁵See Education Trust: http://www.edtrust.org for detailed data on achievement gaps.

⁶J.S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966).

⁷S. Bowles and H. Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

⁸C. Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Role of Families and Schools (New York, Basic Books, 1972).

⁹J. Anyon, Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education and a New Social Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005).

¹⁰R. Edmonds, “Effective schools for the urban poor,” Educational Leadership 37, no. 1 (1979): 5–24.

¹¹A. Thernstrom and S. Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).

¹²P. Tractenberg and others, Don’t Forget the Schools: Legal Considerations for School Finance Reform (New Bruswick, NJ: Institute on Education Law and Policy, Rutgers University, 2006).

¹³R. Ingersoll, Who Control’s Teachers’ Work; Power and Accountability in America’s Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

¹⁴J. Oakes, Keeping Track (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; 2005).

¹⁵R. Rist, “Student social class and teacher expectations: The self fulfilling prophecy in ghetto education,” Harvard Education Review 40 (1970): 411–51. R. Rist, “On understanding the processes of schooling: The contributions of labeling theory,” in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. J. Karabel and A.H. Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 292–305.

¹⁶B. Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control: Vol. 1; Class, Codes, and Control: Vol. 2; Class, Codes, and Control: Vol. 3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, 1973, 1975).

¹⁷P. Bourdieu, “Cultural reproduction and social reproduction,” in Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change, ed. R. Brown (London: Tavistock, 1973), 71–112; P. Bourdieu and J.C. Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977).

¹⁸See A.R. Sadovnik, Sociology of Education: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 2008).

¹⁹L.A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); American Education: The National Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); American Education: The Metropolitan Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

²⁰L.A. Cremin, Popular Education and Its Discontents (New York: Harper & Row, 1990).

²¹M.B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); J. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972); C. Karier, ed., Shaping the American Educational State (New York: Free Press, 1976).

²²Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America.

²³C. Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

²⁴T. Skocpol, States and Social Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

²⁵J. Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York: Houghton, 2005).

²⁶K. Neckerman, Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner‐City Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

²⁷J. Rury, “The variable school year: Measuring differences in the length of American school terms in 1900,” Journal of Research and Development in Education Spring (1988): 29–36; Education and Women’s Work: Female Schooling and the Division of Labor in Urban America, 1870–1930 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).

²⁸J. Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish. Italians, Jews and Blacks in an American City, 1880–1935 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

²⁹J. Meyer, “The effects of education as an institution,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 1 (1977): 55–77; F.O. Ramirez and J. Boli, “The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization,” Sociology of Education 60, no. 15 (1987): 2–17.

³⁰R. Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage, 2004).

³¹M. Arnot, M. David and G. Weiner, Closing the Gender Gap: Postwar Education and Social Change (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999).

³²Frances Maher, “Progressive Education and Feminist Pedagogies: Issues in Gender, Power and Authority,” Teachers College Record 101, no. 1 (1999): 35–59.

³³S. Aronowitz and H. Giroux, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); H. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1983).

³⁴H.J. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in Education (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995).