Jeannie Oakes

• University of California, Los Angeles

The community school strategy calls on teachers, families, and school staff to take on new and more challenging roles to collaboratively address existing educational inequities. For example, deepened family and community engagement in the schools can help incorporate the rich funds of community knowledge and experience, both in the classroom and in...

AERA’s centennial provides an opportunity to reinvigorate the aspirations that gave rise to our research community in the United States: hope and determination that research can strengthen public education, society’s most democratic institution. The first AERAers sought to produce scientific knowledge to improve large, increasingly diverse urban sc...

In the first edition of this handbook, we recommended significant shifts in the way education change is understood and pursued. Specifically, we argued that reforms seeking to disrupt historic connections among race, social class, educational opportunities, and schooling outcomes are likely distorted or abandoned altogether during the implementatio...

Structuring curriculum: Technical, normative, and political considerations Students learn in a remarkable variety of organizational arrangements. They learned in one-room schoolhouses in 19th century Kansas and do today in 21st century Egypt. They learn in formally structured, inner city United States classrooms using the scripted reading lessons o...

The history of US schooling is a remarkable tale of expanding educational opportunities in the midst of educational inequality. Despite cultural commitments to equality and justice, the US educational system continues to provide clear and consistent advantages for white and wealthier Americans and disadvantages for low-income, students of color. T...

This article explores how a revitalized public life promises to be far more effective than conventional school reform in bringing more equitable education policy. Participatory social inquiry stands in contrasts to the limited and mostly technical focus of equity reforms that began with Great Society policies in the 1960s and 1970s and that continu...

This chapter applies literature on the politics of education to data from a recent study of ten racially mixed secondary schools that were attempting to alter their grouping practices to illuminate how macro social, political and economic forces shaped the struggles these schools faced. The study found that unless reforms seek to achieve parity in...

Values, beliefs, and human interests are embedded in evaluation theory and practice. For organizations such as public schools to engage seriously in improvement and change efforts, this normative content must be explicitly addressed. Critical inquiry provides an evaluative paradigm for doing so.

This article addresses critical issues regarding students' access to textbooks, curriculum materials, equipment, and technology. Using California as a case, it reviews the importance of these instructional materials to education, generally, and in the context of current standards-based education policies. Based on data from a variety of sources, we...

This special double issue (Volume 106, No. 10 and 11) includes articles by a group of scholars who are interested in the educational and legal parameters that shape students' rights to receive adequate and equal support for their schooling. Over the past two years the scholars have conducted empirical and analytic studies focused on issues emerging...

This article addresses critical issues regarding students’ access to textbooks, curriculum materials, equipment, and technology. Using California as a case, it reviews the importance of these instructional materials to education, generally, and in the context of current standards-based education policies. Based on data from a variety of sources, we...

This paper argues that those seekingequity-focused educational reform have much tolearn from social movements and grassrootspolitical organizing. We explore how theknowledge, skills, strategies, and passionatenarratives emanating from suchnon-institutional change efforts can shed light onthe difficulty of equity-focused educationreform and provide...

Schools' course structures and policies allow some families to garner the best educational resources. To treat all students fairly, schools must recognize privileged parents' racial/class motivations, infuse academic talk into informal networks, acknowledge "invisible" parents' aspirations, demolish communication barriers, and encourage advocacy fo...

It is with a sense of great urgency that I forward to you the final report of the Hispanic Dropout Project, No More Excuses. With this report, we have fulfilled the charge that you gave to us in our letters of appointment to the project and at our meeting on September 18, 1995. Since we first met with you, thousands of this nation’s Hispanic studen...

Structural changes necessary in detracking efforts challenge not only the technical dimensions of schooling, but also the normative and political dimensions. We argue that detracking reform confronts fundamental issues of power, control, and legitimacy that are played out in ideological struggles over the meaning of knowledge, intelligence, ability...

In this article, Kevin Welner and Jeannie Oakes assert that educators and education advocates have developed a greater awareness of the harmful effects and pedagogical indefensibility of tracking. They also note that detracking advocates are increasingly giving litigation serious consideration in their search for policy tools to promote reform. The...

Using findings and emerging themes from their three-year study of 10 racially mixed schools, the authors discuss the potential pitfalls of systemic reform in education. They argue that the goal of creating centralized standards, curricular frameworks, and tests while encouraging decentralized decision making and local control is likely to backfire...

Focusing on the equity aspect of proposals for making opportunity-to-learn standards integral to an accountability system, this article discusses conceptual issues surrounding determination of equal educational opportunity and explores ways that these issues manifest themselves in empirical formulations of opportunity to learn (OTL). Using two data...

This article presents the story of our research team's efforts to conduct a multisite case study of 10 racially mixed schools engaged in effort to reduce ability grouping or tracking. Although the politics of education research and our own theoretical frame work told us that detracking reform is strongly influenced by the politics and norms in the...

Over the past 20 years, research has expanded educators' knowledge of the impact of high school tracking on students' curriculum opportunities and outcomes. Researchers also know that students are unevenly distributed among tracks, with low-income and minority students more likely to be in low ability classes for the non-college-bound. At the same...

The work reported on in this yearbook collection represent the work of educators committed to the concept that genuine reform takes place in settings where students and teachers work together to create new educational communities. Reports on ongoing projects in several parts of the United States are included in the following chapters: (1) "Normativ...

A new generation of state and local middle school reformers is attempting to reconceptualize their mission to avoid past failures. Against the background of earlier thinking and failed reforms, we explore in this article the content of the new reforms, paying particular attention to how they diverge from conventional school practices, school norms,...

This study examined how high schools made decisions about which courses to offer and which courses were appropriate for various students. During year 1, researchers visited three senior high schools in a major West Coast urban center to observe, study school documents, and talk with educators and students about curriculum offerings and student assi...

Incl. bibl. p.121-132

This report reviews research on the relationship between educational practices and policies and the low rates of participation of women, minorities, and disabled persons in science related careers. The information presented is designed to contribute to the discussion of how schools might create conditions that will help underrepresented groups prep...

A number of current federal and state efforts are attempting to create education indicator systems in the hope that these systems will improve the monitoring of the condition of education, inform policy decisions, and provide better accountability mechanisms. This article argues that the valid and useful indicator systems will include assessments o...

Although tracking may benefit high ability students, it has an adverse effect on poor and minority students who tend to be placed in groups with less access to knowledge. Alternatives to ability grouping are offered that promote high quality learning for all students. (MT)

Notes the schools' sorry record at promoting the achievement and participation of Black, Hispanic, and poor children--the sector providing most of tomorrow's students. Explores misconceptions about learning and individual differences, condemns grouping and tracking processes for restricting students' access to knowledge, and suggests alternative pe...

Tracking is nearly ubiquitous in secondary schools despite evidence suggesting its general ineffectiveness and likely negative effects on students in low tracks. Here it is argued that consideration of two contexts in which tracking is embedded is required for understanding how tracking works and why it persists. The schooling context (tracking's c...

Increasing concern about the overall quality of America's schools has altered federal and state education policy priorities. This shift has resulted in a reduction of federal support, an increase in state-level initiatives, and development of new policies aimed more toward improving the education system generally than toward solving the problems of...

This article is the second part of a two‐part series called “Keeping Track“ published in the September and October 1986 Phi Delta Kappan The first part was titled “The Policy and Practice of Curricular Inequality”; this second part is reprinted by permission.

Reviews the historical, political, and economic context of differentiated schooling. It is argued that this context explains the failure to address inequality in the current agenda for educational reform. The present inattention is viewed as reflecting the politics of economic scarcity and social conservatism and deeply rooted assumptions about hum...

Reflects on gaps between assumptions about vocational education's contribution to students' intellectual, personal, social, and vocational development and evidence about actual vocational education processes and effects. Suggests an expanded inquiry approach that promises greater understanding of the problems and issues implied by these conceptual...

After spending at least a quarter of a century and billions of dollars on large-scale school improvement efforts, the gaps between what school professionals intend to do, what the public expects to have happen in schools, and what actually goes on in them seem to grow increasingly wider. Dissatisfaction with schools, of course, is a recurring publi...

1 Critical Inquiry for School Renewal: Liberating Theory and Practice.- 2 A Critical Perspective on Administration and Organization in Education.- 3 An Alternative and Critical Perspective for Clinical Supervision in Schools.- 4 Reformulating the Evaluation Process.- Reflections.- 5 On Critical Theory and Educational Practice.- 6 Teaching as Reflec...

Revisionist educational historians have suggested that vocational education in secondary schools has been used primarily to segregate poor and minority students into occupational training programs to preserve the academic curriculum for white middle- and upper-class students. Using data collected about 25 secondary schools in the Study of Schooling...

Dissatisfaction with schools results directly from the failure to explain, understand, and change educational practice within a critical theoretical perspective. School renewal and the potential for change must be based on critical inquiry--a technique which utilizes qualitative and quantitative empirical procedures as catalysts for formative, crit...

In Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), Bowles and Gintis assert that the relationships in schools reproduce the consciousness of workers by fragmenting students into groups where different capabilities, attitudes and behaviors are rewarded. These institutional relations reinforce "the self-concepts, aspirations and social class identifications...

Recommends that schools experiment with a comprehensive formative evaluation system suggested by "A Study of Schooling" by John Goodlad and his associates. The system includes periodic assessment of such things as student achievement, teaching practices, class climates, adult working environments, and parent attitudes. (Author/JM)

In this report, the 25 secondary and 13 elementary schools participating in "A Study of Schooling" are described in two ways. First, the emphasis given to academics and vocational subjects in the curriculum is estimated and compared with that of the other schools at the same level. Second, tracking policies and practices at each of the schools are...

The relationship between secondary school students' socioeconomic status and ethnicity and their participation in vocational education programs was examined. Analysis of data from 25 secondary schools focused on three questions concerning: (1) the emphasis on vocational programs in non-white, ethnically or racially mixed, and white secondary school...

Classroom variables and student track levels were studied to determine the impact of tracking and the resulting differences in student educational experiences. A secondary analysis of nationwide data collected for "A Study of Schooling" was used in an analysis of the classroom experiences of students in 297 secondary school English and mathematics...

After reviewing the importance of understanding tracking in terms of academic achievement and educational inequality, this paper describes a study that explored the day to day educational experiences of students in tracked classes and in heterogeneously grouped classes. The investigation focused on curricular content, instructional practices, and s...

why, in the light of all the research evidence that tracking is harmful to students in the lower tracks and that high achievers can function well in heterogeneous groups, is the practice so widespread and entrenched in our schools / some related questions concern the forces that hold tracking in place / is tracking in the way of certain school refo...

This report summarizes the plaintiffs' case and the responses offered by the State's experts. It identifies conceptual and empirical errors in the State's experts' framing of the case, and in their arguments and evidence. It considers five of the State's experts' most troubling errors, detailing how they distort the case and misrepresent the plaint...

5 th – July 8 th 2006 America's position in the world may once have been reasonably secure with only a few exceptionally well-trained men and women. It is no longer. Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle dru...

Incl. abstract, bibl.