Instead they believed that marketisation will produce schools to run more efficiently like a business therefore schools will have to compete against each other to attract the consumers, by showing them what they want to see- such as outstanding success in exams. There have been many polices introduced to promote marketisation such as: league tables, open enrolment, formula funding and educational vouchers. On the other hand despite the benefits of marketisation, critics argued that it has increased inequalities within social class, gender and ethnicity. Ways in which marketisation reproduced and legitimises inequality is through league tables and funding. Publishing schools exams results in league tables ensure that the school has to achieve phenomenal results if they want to attract likes of the consumers.
The New Right also believes that a successful school will gather sufficient momentum to build on its successes. They also see the major role of education is the development of skills and knowledge required to compete in the outside market. They believe that schools should be managed in the same way as businesses However, some theorists such as Chubb and Moe would argue that American state education has failed and they make the case for opening it up to new marker forces of supply and demand. They claim that disadvantaged groups (lower classes, ethnic minorities ect) have been badly served by state education due to the failure to create equal opportunity. Theyâd argue that state education is inefficient because it fails to produce pupils with the skills needed by the economy and
Murray and Ungar Synthesis In the many recent debates about how to approach higher education, one issue that has constantly appears is the question of students benefiting from a liberal arts based education. Some argue that a liberal arts education is helpful in teaching students the basic life skills, others claim that a more specific field of study is necessary in order to b successful in life. In Ungar’s essay “the New Liberal Arts”, he claims that with a liberal arts education, students can benefit tremendously when they receive their jobs. In Murray’s essay “Are Too Many People Going to College”, he proclaims that a liberal arts degree is not highly recommended because the more difficult careers want students to take classes that are more specific to a job. Sanford J. Ungar and Charles Murray both conduct and display their own opinion towards the facts they learned through their own strenuous research.
He argues that college pressures take away from the experience as a whole; that students are, then, more focused on attaining a secure future rather than truly appreciating the college atmosphere. He argues that college pressures cause “violence [to be] done to the undergraduate experience” (Zinsser 471). His opinion, though, is fairly biased in that it excludes the benefits of such pressure in the long run. Although college pressures may inflict short-term distress, in the long run, these pressures are not only necessary, but also valuable. Pressure such as this is beneficial as it plays a very significant role in the motivation for greater achievement.
Responsive Essay Draft Dual Credit in the Community College By Dr. David Lydic “ Dual Credit in the Community College” is a commentary by Dr. David Lydic stating his doubts about the current dual credit programs in high schools across the country. Dr. Lydic expresses his concern that dual credit classes in high school are not sufficiently rigorous compared to traditional college courses, and that these students are not experiencing a true college level course. However, Dr. Lydic references evidence from numerous studies supporting the benefits of dual credit programs, such as financial benefits, early college graduation, and significantly better performance in college from dual credit students. The problem is the controversy over what Dr. David Lydic believes and the evidence to the contrary presented in numerous studies. Dr. Lydic argues that high school students are not experiencing a real college education.
The difficulty with this approach, as it later became clear, was that the problems identified by liberal sociologists set many educators to work in opposition to working class cultural practices. What happened with the liberal view of education is that culture is seen as a cause of inequality rather than as one of the effects. However, an advantage that liberal sociology did had was governmental confidence, as is often the case with quantitative research, and as a result, it enjoyed the freedom to engage in empirical research and had a chance to influence educational reform. The origins of the sociology of education in England grew directly out of the research interests of a number of sociologists who were primarily interested in social mobility, and in particular, with the way that arrangement of inequality persisted in education. Many studies where carried out that concentrated on the relationship between class and educational opportunity.
The first part states, “…purely liberal and republican conceptions of civic identity are seen as frequently unsatisfying to many Americans, because they contain elements that threaten, rather than affirm, sincere, reputable beliefs in the propriety of the privileged positions that whites, Christianity, Anglo-Saxon traditions, and patriarchy have had in the United States (Smith 558).” To me, this says that true liberal ideas such as equality to its fullest extent threaten some groups within American culture. For example, many Christian groups in the United States do not support gay marriage rights because this act is contradictory to their beliefs. Rogers Smith would argue
In the United Kingdom, a group of teachers hope to ban the word fail and replace it with “deferred access” (Smerconish 65). Teachers believe that using more politically correct words is better for students. They also believe they can ease pressures on students by changing their grading tactics. Grading papers in red ink has been commonly accepted since the 1700s. However, society has come to believe that the color red is harsh and can be demoralizing to students.
Individually these elements would not be as effective because a state could earn high test scores because of unequal spending per student, and vice versa. This is where the argument is the strongest, but there are, however, weaker parts of the argument. For example, the arguer does not touch on issues which also have implications on why the schools are preforming the way they are. In the paper he states as part of his argument, “think tanks rate sates on things like class size and teacher pay among other things.” He does not, however, touch on these differences which might be the reason why Utah is doing seemingly better than Florida. There are no statistics provided in the argument comparing class size, teacher pay, or socioeconomic conditions which may leave a reader wondering if other factors are to blame for Florida’s poor performance.
Personally I agree with both authors but only up to a certain point. I agree with how Gatto describes the United States is falling further behind in education while he provides us with the contradictory thought that education may not be paramount to a person’s success (Gatto). With many of our greatest minds, having gone no further than secondary education, the key is to give our adolescents more chances to “let them manage themselves” (Gatto, 28) while trying to increase the achievements of people who are not born into the upper class. Like many social constructs, the elitist succeed, while others are left behind. Gatto contends that “schools really are laboratories of experimentation on young minds” (Gatto, 28).