Search

Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women's unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields' histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students' participation and teachers' work in the contested labor of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores 'decolonial love' as a pedagogy of care among 16 first generation Black immigrants enrolled in predominantly White four- year colleges in the United States and Canada. The term 'decolonial love' and extensions of this original conceptualization focus on radical self-love and resistance to colonial oppression. Scholars have also connected decolonial love with Black liberation movements. Through a narrative analysis of the Black immigrant student experiences in university, this article uses a decolonial and intersectional approach to explore how higher educational institutions can embrace a radical decolonial praxis. This approach affirms and supports Black identities in a climate of anti-Black racism. The paper will discuss implications for institutions and educators whose aim it is to decolonize their teaching practices.

This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and 'scapes'. The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a 'chart' that defines academic time in terms of units of before-after relationships. The paper shows how students 'reuse' these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the ongoing debate between critical race theory (CRT) and Marxism, I begin in this paper by examining the origins of CRT in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) in the United States. I go on to describe CRT’s entry into education, first in that country, and then in the United Kingdom. I move on to a discussion of current debates between critical race theorists and Marxists, focusing on an analysis of arguments for the existence of abstract racial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling,, and it is argued that on both counts of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farzana Shain reviews two books: (1) Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang and George Lipsitz, 2019; and Education and Race: From Empire to Brexit, by Sally Tomlinson, 2019, Bristol, Policy. Shain begins this review by saying that we are now entering a new period for race relations in the US and UK. What Gramsci (1971) described as the 'morbid symptoms of the interregnum', can be seen in the revival of populist politics and renewed enthusiasm for nationalist policies across a number of countries as they respond to the impact of the global crash in 2008. Immigrants, those seeking asylum and minorities were the first to be blamed for the failures of flawed neoliberal financialisation policies and the wild speculation that went with it, which most economists now agree caused the crash (Bresser-Pereira 2010; Pettifor 2017). From the UK's Brexit referendum in 2016, the Trump election in 2016, to the nationalist policies pursued by Prime Ministers' Narendra Modi in India, Shinzo Abe in Japan, Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the minority groups within each nation-state are being blamed for declining living standards. Similar trends have been identified in the Philippines, China and India and in South Africa. Across European countries, recent elections have seen a rise in support for parties that promote xenophobic nationalism, economic protectionism and anti-immigration rhetoric. There has been a shift to right populism by existing parties in order to win votes (Inglehart and Norris 2016; Dennison and Geddes 2019) in the particularly volatile and uncertain economic and political context following the global crisis of 2008, the effects of which are still continuing -- this is the 'new interregnum'. Political analyses of events such as the Brexit referendum and Trump's victory in the US election in 2016, and a number of right populist parties' performances in the European elections in 2019, have noted that a significant proportion of the electorate was motivated to vote for anti-immigration parties not only because of economic insecurity but for long standing reasons of cultural insecurity, racial resentment and a marked hostility to 'others', most notably, Muslims and asylum seekers. These sentiments are captured within the cultural backlash theory of voting behaviour. Slogans such as 'Take Our Country Back' (Brexit, UK, 2016), 'Make America Great Again' (Trump election campaign 2016), and 'Get Brexit Done' (UK General Election 2019), do not explicitly mention race but speak to the cultural insecurities of many whites through plugging into a nostalgia for the 'good old days'. In this review, Shain asks the following questions: (1) What is the cultural nostalgia for? and what role does education play in feeding it? Shain identifies these questions as at the heart of the two books under review and she discusses those questions in detail in the sections of this review that follow. She notes that the books contain many rich examples of the methods that sustain white supremacy including the operation of apparently race and power-blind discourses such as merit and opportunity. Both books speak to these decolonising movements which are still in the process of agreeing what decolonise means and how it must be achieved. Shain closes the review by saying that while neither book offers a substantive conclusion chapter, both books make an invaluable contribution to current debates at a time when the right populism is on the rise again. She states that there are, inevitably, some gaps in the books however she found them extremely timely and will no doubt be referenced widely in interdisciplinary conversations focussed on challenging new racisms in education.

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field's flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing social inequalities: 'political arithmetic'; and the more recent 'cultural turn'. We find that in the UK, the cultural turn dominates; whilst in the US, it is political arithmetic which does so. In accounting for these contrasting national profiles, we argue that they are underpinned by divergent social infrastructure and organisation. We also discuss some of the implications of the dominance of the cultural turn in the UK, specifically in terms of the relationship between the fields of academic research and policy and the development of a cumulative evidence base to address social inequalities in education.

This paper examines the long-term association of family socioeconomic status (SES), educational, and labor force outcomes in a regional US longitudinal sample (N = 2264). The results offer insights into the mechanisms underlying the role of family SES in transitions from secondary schooling to early work experiences. It was found that the academic achievement gap associated with SES widens during secondary schooling due in part to course-level tracking. Family SES relates to college enrollment mainly via its association with academic gains in school, but also through family income and father’s occupational status. Family SES is weakly but significantly related to adult offspring’s earnings but more strongly related to occupational status. Educational qualifications and cognitive skills make independent contributions to the explanation of labor force outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with "problem-based" curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential consequences of such a shift in higher education policy for the identities of university teachers, researchers and students, and suggests that these calls for reform are premised especially on the problematic assumption that, in Bernsteinian terms, "regionalised" curricular inputs can be expected to produce "generic" knowledge outcomes within the university. (Contains 10 notes.)

This paper reviews the existing literature to discuss how critical race theory has been applied as a theoretical framework to higher educational research in the United States and what its contributions are. To provide necessary context, I will discuss race and racism in the United States, the background of US higher education in relation to race, the emergence of critical race theory and its application in US higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present paper applies Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device to explain how high-stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social relations in education. This analysis finds that high-stakes tests, through the structuring of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the selection and regulation of students' educational success.

This paper explores Indian women's views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger's social theory of learning to explore how Indian women's participation in communities of practice in higher education contributes to their participation in arranged marriages. The concept of 'social capital' is used to discuss how women are able to negotiate their participation in arranged marriages, It is used to examine the knowledge and identity resources that women develop through their participation in higher education, which provides them with the means from which to develop the necessary 'bridging ties' leading to their active participation in the wider South Asian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand Korean students' motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research-centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push-pull model of transnational higher education choice-making, this study situates Korean students' aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge-degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students' qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students' aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I begin by taking a brief glimpse at the current state of global capitalism. I then look at attempts in Britain and the US to argue the case, within educational theory, that postmodernism and poststructuralism can be forces for social change and social justice. Concentrating on some of the work of Elizabeth Atkinson, Patti Lather and Judith Baxter, I argue that such claims are illusory. I make the case that Marxism remains the only viable option in the pursuit of social change and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretically informed by the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, this analysis represents an initial attempt to examine what it would mean to analyse educational policy as a social field. By employing such a frame, two main claims are addressed: (1) that the sociological perspective of Bourdieu offers valuable potential for understanding both educational policy, per se, and what it means to analyse educational policy; and (2) that there is good reason to question claims about shifts in power relations in US educational policy. Where other contemporary analyses of educational policy draw on some of Bourdieu's conceptual framework, in this paper I hope to more systematically elaborate methodological concerns raised when applying a Bourdieuian framework to educational policy. Further, I argue the perspective developed here suggests that in the 1980s US educational policy reforms reveal the historical maturation of a social field which has developed its own autonomy and its own rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative critiques of education and proposals for reform show striking similarities in Canada, Britain and the US. All seem to reflect what Haberrnas referred to as "the affirmative stance towards social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity". The paper uses this distinction to describe and analyse New Right criticisms of educational progressivism and conservative efforts to promote a new sympathy for business values, market discipline and market relations in schools and colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of mental testing, it discusses the tests themselves, the men who developed them, and the social and historical context in which they worked. Attention is drawn to the interpersonal connections among the early testers and the social background which they shared. It is argued that the tests were produced in an intellectual and social climate heavily influenced by eugenicist theory. Acceptance of the vocabulary of psychometry into educational debate institutionalised this theory as scientific 'fact'. Finally, some reference is made to research which first cast doubts on such 'facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the construct of 'externalisation', this article examines how and why national policy experts use international knowledge in education policymaking. To understand how national policy experts deal with external source of information and expertise, I analysed the bibliographic references in policy documents prepared for an education reform and conducted network-cued interviews with local policy experts in the United States, South Korea, and Norway. The results revealed that national policy actors' utilisation of international knowledge varies across countries in terms of frequency, function, and level of engagement. The national differences suggest that each country has internalised the act of externalisation in the national policy process, reflecting its own policymaking and reform contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the unresolved tensions in higher education systems and the contradiction between widening participation and the consolidation of social position. It shows how concepts of capital derived from Bourdieu, Coleman and Putnam provide a powerful basis for critique, but risk a deficit view of students from less privileged backgrounds. These students are more likely to attend lower-status institutions and engage with an externally focused curriculum. The paper argues for greater attention to agency, and community and familial capital, in conceptualising the resilience of those from less privileged backgrounds. While the recognition of "voice" is important, a curriculum that acknowledges the context independence of knowledge is essential if these students are not to be further disadvantaged.

This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorization of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and "scapes." The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This article contrasts the use of ethnographic research procedures in the study of schools in Great Britain and the U.S. It also reflects on differences between the anthropology and the sociology of education. In the course of this exploration the authors also hope to draw together much of the literature from the respective countries and disciplinary fields. There is an obvious and striking difference between British and U.S. school ethnography. Whereas the U.S. research on schools and classrooms has been conducted primarily by applied anthropologists, that in Great Britain has been done overwhelmingly by researchers who see themselves as sociologists. It is noticeable that several researchers working as sociologists were trained as anthropologists or began work in anthropology departments. Where British research has looked to North America it has been to U.S. sociology in genera--especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The article also attempts to establish that the Atlantic really does divide school ethnographers into differing traditions. It establishes the truth of the authors' claim that school and classroom ethnography in the U.S. and Canada is predominantly anthropological in orientation, while that in Great Britain is more sociological.

Reviews new American research on the sociology of curriculum characterized by intellectual and methodological pluralism, theory that is integrated with empirical research, and a view that educational interventions can contribute to social change. Research on school texts, the hidden curriculum, and the curriculum-in-use can stimulate British research. (AM)

Building from the classic Wisconsin model of status attainment, this study examines whether a specific style of parenting, concerted cultivation, and a close friend’s school-related attitudes and behaviors mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement in the United States. Using a recursive path model on nationally representative panel data of high school students (N= 10,350), the results confirm a direct association between socioeconomic status and concerted cultivation. In addition, concerted cultivation and close friends are shown to mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing body of literature has begun to explore the individual identities, motivations, and school choices of middle-class, typically white, parents who choose to reside in socioeconomically and racially mixed central city neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative research in three US cities, we argue that a focus on middle-class parents’ collective engagement in schooling is particularly important in under-resourced urban contexts. In these environments, we show, middle-class parents’ use of social networks often extends beyond basic information-sharing about school quality to encompass a range of activities undertaken with other families ‘like them’ who have also chosen to enroll their children in an urban public school. We find that, in some instances, middle-class parents’ collective actions can benefit an entire class or school. Yet in other instances, their activation of social capital can contribute to processes of social reproduction in urban schooling by excluding or marginalizing low-income students and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

International graduate students’ occupational trajectories have rarely been studied, although many studies exist on their learning experiences in foreign universities. Based on 80 qualitative interviews, this article aims to understand how, where, and why these students obtain jobs in academe and corporations. I focus particularly on Korean professionals who received graduate degrees from US universities and who later obtained jobs in Korea or the United States. The theoretical component of this work is based on two important concepts – global cultural capital and global positional competition – both of which are seen to be based on a global hierarchy of academic degrees and professional knowledge. This study empirically tests and elaborates Phillip Brown’s three rules of inclusion and exclusion in global positional competition. By looking at international students’ transnational occupational trajectories, this study aims to understand how global education, transnational job opportunities, and social inclusion and exclusion interact in diverse ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses Chicago public school closings as a case study for the rise of mayoral control and the decline of democratic participation – two common responses to stiff competition from global markets – in urban public schools in the United States. In response to the 2013 Chicago decision to close 50 schools and move 30,000 students, this article presents an in-depth look into the history and theory behind the situation. By drawing upon the history of restrictive education and housing policies for African Americans in Chicago and using a ‘critical spatial perspective,’ the authors argue that school closings are highly counterproductive to the fight for the ‘right to the city.’ The authors argue for increased democratic participation for students, parents, and community leaders in urban school systems across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study makes two contributions to the literature. First, it bridges the sociological discussion of social class habitus with psychological notions of adolescents’ educational expectations, locus of control, and self-concepts. Second, it empirically examines the relationships between early employed parental practices and expectations and adolescents’ dispositions using a recently available wave of data from a nationally representative sample of US students. The findings reveal that students from higher socioeconomic status families had more positive general and area-specific self-concepts, higher educational expectations, higher internal locus of control, and higher academic achievement, and higher parental educational expectations were positively associated with all studied outcomes. The findings provide only partial support for the effects of early parental practices and highlight the role of gender and race/ethnicity in shaping adolescents’ habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing upon two ethnographic studies of affluent and elite co-educational secondary schools in the United States, Weis and Cipollone spotlight the explicit ‘class work’ of a now highly insecure middle/upper middle class, as they attempt to maintain advantage via entrance to particularly located post-secondary destinations. Affirming the notion that class position must now be ‘won’ at both the individual and collective level, rather than constituting the ‘manner to which one is born,’ the authors track and theorize intensified preparation for and application to particular kinds of post-secondary destinations in an increasingly segmented national and international marketplace for higher education. Although the US media have taken note of such ‘application frenzy,’ little scholarly work tracks and theorizes this ‘frenzy’ as a distinctly ‘class process,’ one that represents intensified ‘class work’ at one and the same time as class ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ become ever more apparent in the larger global arena. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By drawing on interviews with administrators, faculty and staff at one school in the northeastern United States, this qualitative work considers the ways in which school leaders negotiate, resist or draw upon discourses associated with health, weight, nutrition and fitness to understand and experience their own bodies and interpret their roles and responsibilities at the school. Analysis of the narratives suggest that school leaders saw themselves as public examples from which students might resist and/or mimic (ill-)health. Further, school leaders believed that it was only through their active engagement in and display of health that they were able to effectively evangelize their commitment to the social project of self. Thus, while schools could provide an important venue for young people to experience diverse notions of health and well-being, without a school leader's knowledge of or commit to exploring these alternatives, this outcome is unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black boys in the United Kingdom and the USA have almost become synonymous with the concept of 'underachievement'. However, many Black boys are achieving against the odds. Whilst the possession of a high degree of dominant cultural capital is widely recognised as a key contributory factor to academic achievement, the contributory role of other forms of non-dominant capital is often overlooked. This qualitative study of educationally successful Black males in the United Kingdom and the USA, involving 40 Black male students from both new and ancient universities, set out to establish whether religion was a contributory factor to the educational success of Black male students. The study found that most of these students were religious and that their church community engineered cultural and social capital and their belief in God engineered religious capital, all of which made significant contributions to these Black male students' academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although high-stakes tests play an increasing role in students' schooling experiences, scholars have not examined these tests as sites for socialisation. Drawing on qualitative data collected at an American urban primary school, this study explores what educators teach students about motivation and effort through high-stakes testing, how students interpret and internalise these messages, and how student hierarchies develop as a result. I found that teachers located boys' failure in their poor behavior and attitudes, while arguing that girls simply needed more self-esteem to pass the test. Most boys accepted their teachers' diagnosis of the problem. However, the boys who felt that they were already 'doing their best' and 'working hard' began to doubt that educational success is a function of merit and effort. I conclude that students learn about much more than the three Rs through their experiences with high-stakes testing, and argue that future research should attend to the social dimensions of these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post‐industrialization have re‐shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the ‘New American School,’ we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in schools. These two strategies of school social control facilitate the link between courts and schools, and expose students to both the salience of crime control in everyday life and to the demands of workers in a post‐industrial world. By incorporating police officers and technological surveillance into the school safety regime, schools shape the experiences of students in ways that reflect modern relationships of dependency, inequality, and instability vis‐à‐vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post‐industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand Korean students' motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research-centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push-pull model of transnational higher education choice-making, this study situates Korean students' aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge-degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students' qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students' aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously. (Contains 8 notes.)

Drawing from two large-scale ethnographic investigations in which we interview poor and working-class white girls and women living in post-industrial cities in the Northeastern US, we argue that violence of all sorts is deeply embedded inside poor and working-class white communities, domestic violence in particular. The date reveal that children experience, witness and learn the rhythms by which their mothers, siblings and, perhaps, they are beaten. While in the US we have produced an enormous legal infrastructure of mandatory reporting, in the event of suspicion of child abuse, we have--as educators--defaulted to the law and not engaged a fully developed educational project through which to respond to the problem. Although deeply contested, a public space that is accessible to poor and working-class youth and where abuse in the home may be discussed and analyzed may be schools, yet many educators do not deal with this issue at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of education in the US is extremely varied in its theoretical and methodological tendencies, its visions what research is for, and its political sensibilities. This article describes a number of the most interesting recent developments within critically-oriented sociology of education in the US It pays particular attention to work on the politics of meaning. It discusses representative examples within the sociology of curriculum It then takes up 'critical' and 'postmodern/poststructural' work on critical discourse analysis, identity politics, political economy and the labor process, and racial formation Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the continuing tensions between the critical and postmodern/poststructural communities methodologically, conceptually, and politically [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the correspondence thesis devised by Bowles and Gintis (1976) to the 1988 Education Reform Act. Theoretical shortcomings of the thesis are identified, and a reformulated version is suggested which incorporates resistances into the analysis of the education system. More limited claims for the thesis are posited. The Education Reform Act is then explored with reference to the revised correspondence principle. Building on the work of previous theorists, it is argued that we may be seeing shifts to post-Fordist education, although contradictions and tensions in this movement are identified. It is suggested that the quasi-market in education is to some extent a change in the legitimating processes of reproduction, rather than a change in what is being reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many high school drop-outs share a history of academic failure and truancy behaviour, their underlying reasons for leaving school are far more complex, and involve a web of both personal and school-related problems. Interviews with drop-outs from a working class high school in the USA revealed how the school's response, or lack of response, to their problems compounds their difficulties and creates a tension over the source of blame for their failure. On the one hand, these adolescents criticised the school for its failings, but on the other hand, they attributed much of their failure to themselves. In resolving this issue of blame, these suburban white drop-outs, in contrast to innercity minority youth, indicated that, ultimately, they themselves must be at fault for failing to conform to the expectations and demands of school. An explanation for this difference is offered by contrasting their lack of collective identity with the racial consciousness of African American drop-outs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'at-risk' child has become a topic of increasing concern to American educators. It has been estimated that fully one-third of all school-age children are currently at risk for academic failure, and a recent report on pre-school-age children suggests that all are at risk to some degree. This article explores contemporary, constructions and constructions over time in an effort to deconstruct the notion of the 'at-risk' child and to examine how meaning is produced and to what end. The theoretical and historical material provide a framework in which data from a statewide survey of school administrators, regarding their preferences for pre-kindergarten programs, are interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to enlarge on knowledge about tenured academic women derived from accounts of their experiences sought through a series of interviews. Eight women in one school in a large Southern state university in the United States were studied. The study uses the concept of gender scripts drawing out the issues of inequality, discrimination and the politics of gender as they pertain to a group of tenured academic women. Findings include the valuing of so-called male attributes in academe, the problem of the women's distrust of other academic women and the existence of subtle and not so subtle boundaries between men and women academics. The women's successful strategies for dealing with the problems encountered in a male-dominated university are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within recent years scholars in both sociology of education and curriculum studies have explored what it is about the school that reproduces class, race and gender relations that maintain an unequal social structure While it has long been recognized that school outcomes differ along these lines, the role that the school plays in creating differential outcomes and forms of consciousness that sustain fundamental inequalities and antagonisms has been largely ignored. This is as much true for scholars like Bowles and Gintis as it is for earlier functionalists. This article begins to fill this void by focusing on the relationship between the `hidden curriculum' and student culture Data presented here were gathered as part of a larger study on the `lived culture' of lower class black students in a community college (which I call Urban College) located in a large northeastern city in the United States I argue that, rather than `determine' student culture in any simple sense, the hidden curriculum and student culture emerge in relation to one another Each creates aspects of the other and neither can be discussed or analyzed separately The way in which elements of the hidden curriculum combine in a concrete culture to produce aspects of student consciousness is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines political support for brain dysfunction which is culminating in the Children With Learning Disabilities Act of 1969 in the U.S. The act among other things, added learning disability to the list of educational abnormalities recognized by the federal government and authorize federal expenditures for research and pilot school programmes. There were two broad interpretations of the basic brain dysfunction model. The first of these was learning disability, which de-emphasized neuropathology and provided a relatively optimistic prognosis. Special educators and some researches urging this orientation used it to press for a less physiological and more educational approach to educational abnormality, intended to give them more independent control over the operation of special education categories and programmes and through this strengthen the power of educators to define normality and abnormality, as well as increase the demand for learning disability specialists. The other interpretation of the model, sociogenic brain damage, pointed to social and especially family factors as significant causes and its attention to neurostructural damage and non-development carried a distinctly pessimistic prognosis.

It is argued that underwriting much contemporary educational research is a parochial fascination with education, which cannot handle educational difference, indifference, or dissent except as in some sense pathological and aberrant. Detectable in the analogies, assumptions and arguments of the educational researcher, it is argued that this fascination with education reaches its acme in the so-called 'radical' definition of educational equality, where 'statistical parity' is taken, or rather mistaken, for 'educational equality'. The intractable problems raised by such a definition in assessing educational equality in a pluralistic society are examined by reference to the work of its foremost advocate-J S Coleman [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how and by how much the existence and performance of the Journal of Educational Sociology contributed to the different dimensions of the institutionalization of its branch of knowledge. According to E. George Payne, the periodical's founder, the Journal was originated for the purpose of representing the field of educational sociology in the U.S. By representing this field of study, the Journal also made an important contribution to the more comprehensive process of institutionalization. The possession of a journal is not only in itself a component of this process, but it furthers what appear to be its three other dimensions. First, the acceptance of the subject by higher education, in particular the universities, with the concomitant production of appointments, curricula, examinations, research facilities, and others, in this context it has been perceptively pointed out that university organizational practices and mechanisms may equally well hold up or speed up the process. Next, the rise of an attached group of professional workers, generally accepted as such, and enjoying the esteem and autonomy that the term implies. Lastly, the acceptance of the field as a legitimate area by public bodies, especially ones able to fund teaching and research activities, and thus more particularly, governmental agencies.