Inequality and Education Reform: formulating a macro-historical sociology perspective

Abstract

The persistence of race, class, gender, and regional inequality in US education poses many challenges for policy-makers and scholars. Investigations of school crises, as presently constructed, tend to treat the problems and paradoxes of inequality as exceptions to the American democratic system, instead of seeing them as contradictions within the system. This research suggests an alternative theoretical framework to study inequality and education reform. It analyzes a century of education crises by combining`the sociological imagination' with a world-system perspective. It focuses on North Carolina in its assessment of Southern education as American education.The topic of education reform in the USA periodically surfaces as a critique of inequality in public institutions, but often fosters individual and private solutions that exacerbate inequality. For example, court-ordered desegregation attempted to close the gap between separate and unequal schools, but prompted the proliferation of white academies and the abandonment of public schools in the 1960s and 1970s. The excellence movement of the 1980s purported to raise public school standards, but led many parents to seek private alternatives to public education, and spurred local and state governments to support vouchers and charter schools that improved choice' for some, but increased inequalities for others. These solutions to education crises in¯amed deeply rooted tensions and con¯icts about race, class, gender, and regional inequality in public education. These measures did not reduce inequality; instead, they abetted efforts to defend, justify, and perpetuate inequality.Scholarly investigations of education crises and reform strategies contribute to the perpetuation and legitimation of inequality, perhaps unintentionally, by framing research around certain taken-for-granted assumptions underlying education, rather than questioning the fundamental assumptions used to construct the education crisis. In the 1980s, for example, discussions of education reform paralleled discussions of economic restructuring and downsizing. Linking the US decline in the global economy to alleged educational shortcomings, scholars and policy-makers

Framing African American Students' Success and Failure in Urban Settings

“…Feagin (2006) and Lewis et al (in press) noted that the education system is functioning in harmony with all other systems and institutions (i.e., economic, legal, family, religious, media, and government) in American society, benefiting students who are members of privileged social groups at the expense of less privileged students (p. 22). Supportively, Rushing (2001) noted that the American schooling system "is not a neutral institution, but one that functions in the context of political, cultural and social inequalities and plays a role in maintaining and legitimating those inequalities" (p. 32). In this view, the persistent lack of true educational equity is evidence of a larger social process that can't be explained by blaming students or schools; rather, all aspects of American society (institutions, laws, policies, practices, norms, and values) play a role in creating and maintaining educational inequities.…”

‘Synonymization’ threat and the implications for the funding of school districts with relatively high populations of black students

“…This is not a new observation. Rushing (2001) offered a historical and sociological perspective of the decades spanning the beginning and end of the twentieth century that demonstrated that education reform in the United States often prompted seemingly innocuous policy solutions that exacerbated inequality. Further, while educational funding often does not explicitly account for race, it typically accounts for seemingly impartial factors such as diseconomies of scale tied to sparsely populated districts.…”