Discuss alternatives to traditional public schools
Examine teacher training, affirmative action, and the cost of education as contemporary issues in education
As schools strive to fill a variety of roles in the lives of students, there are many issues and challenges beyond simply educating students, disseminating knowledge, and issuing credentials. Many students face myriad challenges including bullying, violence, the effects of declining funding, and other impediments to their education. In this section, you’ll examine some of these modern issues and concerns.
Hot Topics in Education
When Americans are asked about their opinion of public education on the Gallup poll each year, reviews are mixed at best (Saad, 2008). Schools are no longer merely a place for learning and socializing. With the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling in 1954, schools became a repository of politicized legal action that is at the heart of several issues in education.
Equal Education
Until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, schools had operated under the precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which allowed racial segregation in schools and private businesses (the case dealt specifically with railroads) and introduced the troubling phrase “separate but equal” into the U.S. lexicon. Brown overruled this, declaring that state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students were, in fact, unequal and therefore unconstitutional in light of the 14th Amendment (which guarantees equality before the law).
While the ruling paved the way toward civil rights, it was also met with opposition in many communities. In Arkansas in 1957, the governor mobilized the state National Guard to prevent black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower, in response, sent members of the 101st Airborne Division from Kentucky to uphold the students’ right to enter the school. In 1963, almost ten years after the ruling, Governor George Wallace of Alabama used his own body to block two black students from entering the auditorium at the University of Alabama to enroll in the school. Wallace’s desperate attempt to uphold his policy of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” stated during his 1963 inauguration (PBS, 2000), became known as the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door.” He refused to grant entry to the students until a general from the Alabama National Guard arrived on President Kennedy’s order.
Watch this video, an interview with one of the Little Rock 9 students discussing her experience:
Figure 1. President Eisenhower sent members of the 101st Airborne Division from Kentucky to escort black students into Little Rock Central High School after the governor of Arkansas tried to deny them entry. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army)
Presently, students of all races and ethnicities are permitted in America’s schools, but there remains a troubling gap in the relative quality of education they receive. The long-term socially embedded effects of racism—and other forms of discrimination and disadvantage—have produced a range of challenges for many students. Those from wealthy families and those of lower socioeconomic status do not receive the same opportunities. This the result of many factors, including the policy wherein economic resources are dependent on local property taxes, which results in wealthier neighborhoods having higher quality schools. In demographic and sociological literature, this is often referred to as cumulative advantage or disadvantage.
Today’s public schools, at least in theory, are positioned to help remedy those gaps. To help ensure universal access, this system was legally mandated ed to accept and retain all students regardless of race, religion, social class, and the like. Moreover, public schools are held accountable to equitable per-student spending (Resnick, 2004). Private schools, usually only accessible to students from high-income families, and schools in more affluent areas generally enjoy access to greater resources and better opportunities. In fact, the strongest predictors for student performance include socioeconomic status and family background. Children from families of lower socioeconomic status often enter school with already acquired learning deficits, and must overcome these obstacles alongside their institutionally assigned responsibilities. These patterns, uncovered in the landmark Coleman Report of 1966, are still relevant today, as sociologists generally agree that there is a great divide in the performance of white students from affluent backgrounds and their nonwhite, less affluent counterparts. The Coleman Report, commissioned in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, found that the racial and social demographics of schools, along with the student’s home and family life, had a greater effect on student learning than the quality of the school institution itself.
Despite these shortcomings in equal access to education, which have been well-established by academic research, it is important to note that schools do narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. Research shows that it is often the non-school environment that presents the greatest inequality, and that schools, despite being unequal in quality and opportunity, present a smaller inequality than what is seen in students’ homes. This conclusion is drawn from the evidence that the gap in cognitive skills grows mostly during the summer months, when students are not attending school and when their progress is exclusively dependent on the home environment and the resources there.[1]
Head Start
The findings in the Coleman Report were so powerful that they brought about two major changes to education in the United States. The federal Head Start program, which is still active and successful today, was developed to give low-income students an opportunity to make up the preschool deficit discussed in James S. Coleman’s findings. The program provides academic-centered preschool to students of low socioeconomic status.
Busing
The second major change brought about after the release of the Coleman Report was less successful than the Head Start program, and has generated a great deal of controversy. With the goal of further desegregating education, courts across the United States ordered some school districts to begin a program known as “busing.” This program involved transporting students to schools outside their neighborhoods (and therefore to schools they would not normally have the opportunity to attend) in an effort to balance racial diversity. This policy was met with substantial public resistance from people on both sides, whether dissatisfied with white students traveling to inner city schools, or minority students being transported to schools in the suburbs.
No Child Left Behind
In 2001, the George W. Bush administration passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to test students in designated grades. The results of those tests determine eligibility for schools to receive federal funding. Schools that do not meet the standards set by the act risk funding cuts. Sociologists and teachers alike have contended that the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act is far more negative than positive, arguing that a “one size fits all” concept cannot apply to education. The act’s rationale for funding also seemed backwards. If students at a school are not performing as well as they might, shouldn’t those very schools be the ones eligible for increased government funding?
Teaching to the Test
The funding implications of the No Child Left Behind Act have led to the phenomenon commonly called “teaching to the test,” wherein a curriculum narrowly focuses on preparing students to succeed on standardized tests, but fails to address broader educational goals and learning concepts. At issue are two approaches to classroom education: the notion that teachers impart knowledge that students are obligated to absorb, versus the concept of student-centered learning that seeks to teach children not facts, but problem solving abilities and learning skills. Both types of learning have been valued in the U.S. school system. The former, to critics of “teaching to the test,” only equips students to regurgitate facts, while the latter, to proponents of the other camp, fosters lifelong learning and transferable work skills.
Bilingual Education
New issues of inequality have entered the national conversation in recent years regarding bilingual education, which attempts to give equal opportunity to minority students through offering instruction in languages other than English. Though it is actually an old issue (bilingual education was federally mandated in 1968), it remains a controversial one. Supporters of bilingual education argue that all students deserve equal opportunities in education—opportunities some students cannot access without instruction in their first language. On the other side, those who oppose bilingual education often point to the need for English fluency in everyday life and in the professional world.
There are academic and professional benefits to being bilingual, which has also pushed for dual-language learning in the United States. This TED talk explains some of the benefits of multilingualism:
Common Core
“The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade.” Included in the list of standards is that they be evidence-based, clear, understandable, consistent, aligned with college and career expectations, include the application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills, and are informed by other top-performing countries (The Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2014).
The primary controversy over the Common Core State Standards, or simply the Common Core, from the standpoint of teachers, parents and students, and even administrators, is not so much the standards themselves, but the assessment process and the high stakes involved. Both the national teachers’ unions in the United States initially agreed to them, at least in principle. But both have since become strongly critical. Given a public education system that is primarily funded by local property taxes, rather than by state and federal funds distributed to all schools equally, we see a wide disparity in funding-per-student throughout the country, with the result that students in schools funded by affluent communities are clearly better off than those who are not–even when the schools being compared are located just a few miles apart. As such, broad standards for academic performance that do not account for inherent disadvantages in the education system hurt certain groups of students.
What gets measured?
Much has been said about the quality, usefulness, and even accuracy of many of the standardized tests. Math questions have been found to be misleading and poorly phrased; for instance, “Tyler made 36 total snowfalls with is a multiple of how triangular snowflakes he made. How many triangular snowflakes could he have made?”
Some of the essays had questions that made little sense to the students, or to adults, for that matter. One notable test question in 2014 that dominated the Internet for a time was about “The Hare and the Pineapple.” This was a parody of the well-known Aesop fable of the race between the hare and the tortoise that appeared on a standardized test for New York’s eighth-grade exam–though with the tortoise changed into a talking pineapple. With the pineapple clearly unable to participate in a race and the hare winning, “the animals ate the pineapple.” “Moral: Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”
At the end of the story, questions for the student included, “Which animal spoke the wisest words?” and “Why did the animals eat the talking fruit?” Evidently, this question is problematic and rather confusing, leading students to under-perform based on standard measures.
Think It Over
Is busing a reasonable method of serving students from diverse backgrounds? If not, suggest and support an alternative.
Charter Schools and Homeschooling
Charter schools are self-governing public schools that have signed agreements with state governments to improve student outcomes when poor performance has been recorded on tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act. While such schools receive public money, they are not subject to the same rules that apply to regular, state-run public schools. In return, they make agreements to achieve specific results. Charter schools, as part of the public education system, are free to attend, and are accessible via lottery when there are more students seeking enrollment than there are spots available at the school. Some charter schools specialize in certain fields, such as the arts or science, while others are more generalized.
Figure 1. The debate over the performance of charter schools vs. public schools is a charged one. Dozens of studies have been made on the topic, and some, as reflected in Stanford’s CREDO study above, do not support the claim that charter schools always outperform public schools. (Source: Based on the CREDO study Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States)
President Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education at the start of his administration. DeVos had a history of supporting charter schools, which she argued were a significant part of the “school choice” movement. Mrs. DeVos’ support for charter schools is rooted in the capitalist idea that if parents have a choice to send their children to a charter school, and charter schools receive funding from the government based on number of children, this will incentivize public schools to improve their quality of teaching.[2] School choice, however, does not merely include public and charter schools; DeVos wants to expand vouchers, which would allow lower- and middle-income families access to private schooling.
WATCH IT
Betsy DeVos, the current Secretary of Education, is an advocate for vouchers and charter schools, which has resulted in a revival in the school choice debate. This video clip from PBS explains just some of the mixed opinions on charter schools, their varied success rates, and the impact of charters in some predominately black communities.
Money as Motivation in Charter Schools
Public school teachers typically find stability, comprehensive benefits packages, and long-term job security. In 2011, one charter school in New York City set out to learn if teachers would give up those protections if it meant an opportunity to make far more money than the typical teacher’s salary. The Equity Project is a privately run charter school that offered teachers positions paying $125,000 per year (more than twice the average salary for teachers). The school’s founder and principal, Zeke Vanderhoek, explained that this allows him to attract the best and brightest teachers to his school—to decide whom he hires and how much they are paid—and build a school where “every teacher is a great teacher” (CBS News, 2011). He sees attracting top teachers as a direct road to student achievement. A nationwide talent search resulted in the submission of thousands of applications. The final round of interviews consisted of a day-long trial run. The school looks for teachers who can show evidence of student growth and achievement. They also must be highly engaging.
The majority of students at the school are African American and Hispanic, from poor families, and reading below grade level. The school faces the challenge faced by schools all over the United States: getting poor, disadvantaged students to perform at the same level as their more affluent counterparts. Vanderhoek believes his team of dream teachers can help students close their learning gaps by several grade levels within one year.
This is not an affluent school. It is publicly funded and classes are held in trailers. Most of the school’s budget goes into the teachers’ salaries. There are no reading or math aides; those roles are filled by the regular classroom teachers.
The experiment may be working. Students who were asked how they feel about their education at The Equity Project said that their teachers care if they succeed and give them the attention they need to achieve at high levels. They cite the feeling that their teachers believe in them as a major reason for liking school for the first time.
Of course, with the high salary comes high risk. Most public schools offer contracts to teachers. Those contracts guarantee job security. But The Equity Project is an at-will employer. Those who don’t meet the standards set by the school will lose their jobs. Vanderhoek does not believe in teacher tenure, which he feels gives teachers “a job for life no matter how they perform” (CBS News, 2011). With a teaching staff of roughly fifteen, he terminated two teachers after the first year. In comparison, in New York City as a whole, only seven teachers out of 55,000 with tenure have been terminated for poor performance.
One of those two teachers who was let go said she was relieved, citing eighty- to ninety-hour work weeks and a decline in the quality of her family life. Meanwhile, there is some question as to whether the model is working. On one hand, there are individual success stories, such as a student whose reading skills increased two grade levels in a single year. On the other, there is the fact that on the state math and reading exams taken by all fifth graders, the Equity Project students remained out-scored by other district schools (CBS News, 2011). Do charter schools actually work? A Stanford CREDO study in 2009 found “there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools” (CREDO, 2009).
Home Schooling
Homeschooling refers to children being educated in their own homes, typically by a parent, instead of in a traditional public or private school system. Proponents of this type of education argue that it provides an outstanding opportunity for student-centered learning while circumventing problems that plague today’s education system. Opponents counter that homeschooled children miss out on the opportunity for social development that occurs in standard classroom environments and school settings.
Proponents say that parents know their own children better than anyone else and are thus best equipped to teach them. Those on the other side of the debate assert that childhood education is a complex task and requires the degree (or several) that teachers spend years earning. After all, they argue, a parent may know their child’s body better than anyone, yet they seeks out a doctor for their child’s medical treatment. Just as a doctor is a trained medical expert, teachers are trained education experts.
The National Center for Education Statistics shows that the quality of the national education system is the major concern when choosing to homeschool their children, expressing particular concerns about school environments.[3] White families make up a significant majority of homeschooling environments (83 percent). To date, researchers have not found consensus in studies evaluating the success, or lack thereof, of homeschooling.
Contemporary Issues in Education
Teacher Training
Schools face the difficult issue of measuring teacher effectiveness. For example, most high school teachers perceive students as being prepared for college, while most college professors do not see those same students as prepared for the rigors of collegiate study. Some feel that this is due to primary and secondary-level (i.e., high school) teachers being unprepared to teach, as many teachers in the United States teach subjects that are outside their own field of study. This is not the case in many European and Asian countries. Only eight percent of United States fourth-grade math teachers majored or minored in math, compared with 48 percent of math teachers in Singapore. Further, students in disadvantaged American schools are 77 percent more likely to be educated by a teacher who didn’t specialize in the subject matter than students who attend schools in affluent neighborhoods (Holt, McGrath, and Seastrom, 2006). Consequently, there are two broad structural problems in regards to teacher training in the United States: first, teachers are, according to some, under-prepared to teach students due to a discrepancy between their academic preparation and their professional expectations; second, better-prepared teachers are more likely to be found in wealthier neighborhoods, further contributing to already existing educational inequality.
Social Promotion
Social promotion is another issue identified by sociologists. This is the concept of passing students to the next grade regardless of whether they’ve met the standards for that grade. Critics of this practice argue that students should never move to the next grade if they have not mastered the skills required to “graduate” from the previous grade. Proponents of the practice question what a school is to do with a student who is three to four years older than other students in his or her grade, saying this creates more pressing issues than the practice of social promotion. Others are more concerned about the social consequences of holding students back, and about the social development of older students who would be surrounded by younger students.
Affirmative Action
Affirmative action has been a subject of debate, primarily as it relates to the admittance of college students. Opponents suggest that, under affirmative action, minority students are given greater weighted priorities for admittance. Supporters of affirmative action point to the way in which it grants opportunities to students who are traditionally done a disservice in the college admission process.
Watch this video for a brief illustration of how affirmative action seeks to address racial/ethnic inequality in higher education:
Rising Student Loan Debt
In a growing concern, the amount of college loan debt that students are taking on is creating a new social challenge. As of 2018, the average debt of students with loans was $37,172[4] upon graduation, leaving students hard-pressed to repay their education while earning entry-level wages, even at the professional level (Lewin, 2011). With the inconsistent state of unemployment since the 2008 recession, jobs are often scarce, making student debt more burdensome, and in some cases, unserviceable. As recent graduates find themselves unable to meet their financial obligations, all of society is affected.
Is College Worth It?
Figure 1. Students who do graduate from college are likely to begin a career in debt. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Dooley/flickr)
“What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed). David Simon, in his book Social Problems and the Sociological Imagination: A Paradigm for Analysis (1995), points to the notion that social problems are, in essence, contradictions—that is, statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another. Consider then, that one of the greatest expectations in U.S. society is that to attain any form of success in life, a person needs an education. In fact, a college degree is rapidly becoming an expectation at nearly all levels of middle-class success, and not merely an enhancement to our occupational choices. As you might expect, the number of people graduating from college in the United States continues to rise dramatically.
The contradiction, however, lies in the fact that the more necessary a college degree has become, the harder it has become to acquire one. The cost of getting a college degree has risen sharply since the mid-1980s, while government support in the form of Pell Grants and distributed tax revenue has decreased. The net result is that those who do graduate from college are likely to begin a career in debt. In 2013, the average of amount of a typical student’s loans amounted to around $29,000. As of 2018, it was over $37,000.[5] Added to that is that employment opportunities have not met expectations. The Washington Post (Brad Plumer May 20, 2013) noted that in 2010, only 27 percent of college graduates had a job related to their major. The business publication Bloomberg News stated that among twenty-two-year-old degree holders who found jobs in the past three years, more than half were in roles not even requiring a college diploma (Janet Lorin and Jeanna Smialek, June 5, 2014), making people wonder if college really does pay off in the professional world (see Figure 2).[6]
Figure 2. As can be seen by the trend in the graph, while the Federal Pell Grant maximum has risen slightly between 1976 and 2018, it has not been able to keep pace with the total cost of college.
Is a college degree still worth it? All this is not to say that lifetime earnings among those with a college degree are not, on average, still much higher than for those without (higher educational attainment does, on average, translate into higher wages). But even with unemployment among degree-earners at a low of 3 percent, the increase in wages over the past decade has remained at a flat 1 percent. And the pay gap between those with a degree and those without has continued to increase because wages for the rest have fallen (David Leonhardt, New York Times, The Upshot, May 27, 2014).
But is college worth more than money?
Generally, the first two years of college are essentially a liberal arts experience. The student is exposed to a fairly broad range of topics, from mathematics and the physical sciences to history and literature, the social sciences, and music and art through introductory and survey-styled courses. It is in this period that the student’s world view is, presumably, expanded. Memorization of raw information still occurs, but if the system works, the student now looks at the larger world in broader, more knowledgeable contexts. Then, when he or she begins the process of specialization, it is with a much broader perspective than might otherwise be the case. This additional “cultural capital” can further enrich the life of the student, enhance his or her ability to work with experienced professionals, and build wisdom upon knowledge. Two thousand years ago, Socrates asserted, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The real value of an education, then, is to enhance our skill at self-examination, and not merely to develop tangible skills.
glossary
Head Start program:
a federal program that provides academically focused preschool to students of low socioeconomic status
No Child Left Behind Act:
an act that requires states to test students in prescribed grades, with the results of those tests determining eligibility to receive federal funding
Downey, D., Von Hippel, P., & Broh, B. (2004). Are Schools the Great Equalizer? Cognitive Inequality during the Summer Months and the School Year. American Sociological Review, 69(5), 613-635. ↵
Redford, J., Battle, D., and Bielick, S. (2017). Homeschooling in the United States: 2012 (NCES 2016-096REV). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91. ↵
The College Board, Trends in College Pricing 2018, Table 2 online; U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid Data Center. ↵
Licenses and Attributions
CC licensed content, Original
Introduction to Issues in Education. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
Modification, adaptation, and original content. Authored by: Florencia Silveira for Lumen Learning. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
In the black community, a division over charter schools. Authored by: PBS News Hour. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyBUlSrIOh4. License: Other. License Terms: Standard YouTube License
