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Jigsaw Group Reading #6 ((Divvy Group: Fuller (History of American Schools…

- - - - “The Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the First Amendment to mean that these two areas should not intersect” (Fuller,1994, pg 87)
        
        “Unfortunately, yet understandably, the Supreme Court has complicated this process by failing to give an exact definition of religion.” (Fuller,1994, pg 87)
      - “The Supreme Court, in 1947, declared that the First Amendment Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses were applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” (Fuller,1994, pg 93)
      - religious rights we have
        
        supreme court battle
        
        church VS. state
        
        state handles certain situations
        
        numerous court cases
    - - Classroom Curriculum
        
        The purpose of teaching is to obtain knowledge.
      - “One of the most important goals of the public school system is to provide societal cohesion.” (Fuller, 2005, p. 88)
      - Public schools were for continuing and advancing democratic society.
    - - Education stemmed from children learning to read the Bible.
      - "Promoting democratic principles did not mean that religion needed to be absolutely excluded. Instead, religion was viewed as a necessary component of 'good government'" (Fuller, 1994, p. 90)
      - "During the Colonial period of American history, there existed a common assumption that the purpose of life was to promote Christian faith. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the first form of public schools in America originated in Massachusetts for the purpose of assisting children in learning to read the Bible” (Fuller, 1994, p.88).
      - "After the Revolutionary War, however, the sense of common destiny and the purpose of public schooling began to change. The public educational system was seen as a way to instill and develop those characteristics necessary to perpetuate and advance a democratic society." (Fuller, 1994, p. 90)
- - - - Pierce illustrates the pattern of constitutional challenge to policies framed in universal terms but having the effect or underlying purpose of excluding or subordinating members of minority groups. ( Minow 2011, pg. 820)
      - “White Southerners did, in fact, use school choice practices as a form of resistance to court-ordered desegregation” (Minow, 2011, p. 822).
        
        “They also created organizations across the South to fight the implementation of Brown and effectively threatened retaliation against anyone who advocated integration” (Minow, 2011, p. 822).
      - “But the decision also produced a system in which only public schools received public funding, leaving parental choice of private schooling to private philanthropy and families with economic resources” (Minow, 2011, pp. 819)
      - “Operators of two private schools, the Catholic Society of Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus and Mary and the Hill Military Academy, persuaded the Supreme Court in 1935 to strike down Oregon’s compulsory school law” (819).
    - - This brings us to the current moment. School choice now accompanies expanding public options, styled not only as "magnet" schools but also as charter schools-new schools with potentially greater autonomy than that of typical public schools. As public school systems increasingly offer parents and students a range of educational choices, individuals may be able to enroll in more appealing schools. Nevertheless, three serious problems persist with contemporary school choice.” (Minow, 833, 2010)
        
        “First, not all families are informed and equipped to navigate the increasingly complex process of selecting among educational options, and some of the most disadvantaged students will lose out as a result.” (Minow, 833, 2010)
        
        “Second, the ideal of integration-across racial differences, religious differences, and other kinds of demographic differences — grows more elusive as school choice enables new forms of student separation based on identities and aspirations.” (Minow, 834, 2010)
        
        “Finally, the rhetoric of private individual school choice cordons off from public debate the very character of the kinds of choices — and kinds of education—school systems are permitting.” (Minow, 834, 2010)
      - “If you excuse the expression, we have a choice about what kind of school choice to promote” (842).
    - - “The Supreme Court had permitted public aid to students enrolled in religious schools if public school personnel offered standardized tests and speech, hearing, and psychological services'* and provided services mandated by the state outside the campus of the religious school” (Minow, 2011, p. 829).
      - “Participating private schools also agreed neither to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic background, nor to teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity” (Minow, 2010, pp. 831).
      - “This view should be distinguished from the conception that religion should never be treated differently from other personal views or commitments. Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager argue that equality would forbid the government from treating religion differently from any other category even if that difference takes the form of a preference or accommodation” (830).
    - - By ‘school choice,’ I mean the explicit policies granting parents and guardians the opportunity to select from among more than one option for complying with state compulsory school laws” (816).
      - “School choice offered an exit strategy for whites seeking to avoid school desegregation, then a strategy to incentivize voluntary racial mixing, and then an arena for killing off any form of race consciousness.” (Minow 843)
      - “The first moment introduced the discourse of school choice with the fight over Americanization during the 1920s. In the second, the rise of private school options and ‘freedom of choice’ plans used by whites to bypass court- ordered racial desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s associated school choice with self-segregation by whites. In the third moment, federal courts and local school systems turned to magnet schools and other forms of public school choice in pursuit of voluntary dimensions of racial desegregation from the 1970s until the Supreme Court curbed such efforts. In the fourth moment, longstanding constitutional campaigns to enable publicly financed vouchers to pay for religious schooling reached fruition in 2002. And, finally, during the early decades of this new century, proliferating experiments with charter schools, magnet schools, and other forms of choice present occasions for local, state, and national debate over whether to renew commitments to integration within schools across lines of race, religion, class, and other student differences or to promote plural kinds of schools that enable variety and competition as well as permit increasing separation of different kinds of students into different schools” (818).
    - - “School choice initiatives took the forms of vouchers and magnet schools during the 1970s and 1980s and reflected designs to open up better educational options for students confined to failing inner-city public schools” (Minow, 2011, p. 825).
      - “Yet magnet schools have also created new difficulties. As a device to promote racial balance in previously segregated or racially isolated schools, magnet programs sometimes produce diverse enrollments while reducing diversity in the nonmagnet schools” (Minow, 2010, pp. 826).
      - “School system designers sought to harness the appeal of "choice" in a kind of "soft paternalism," enticing white parents to choose public urban schools by endowing them with special programs and drawing black, Hispanic, and immigrant students out of their neighborhoods to these special schools.” (Minow 824)
      - “Criteria such as mandatory parental involvement and inadequate transportation skew enrollments in specialized schools toward disproportionately white and wealthier families” (Minow 828)
    - - “The second moment deployed school choice as a way to avoid racial desegregation; private schooling became an avenue for circumventing court- ordered school desegregation in the wake o£ Brown. Plans ostensibly allowing students to transfer across "public schools" — introducing the phrase to educational policy—did the same, but produced essentially no movement between historically black and historically white schools.” (Minow 821)
      - “This choice-based strategy did nothing to alter entrenched resource inequality, prejudices, and ostracism, enforced through law and vigilante violence. In 1968, the Supreme Court rejected the "freedom of choice" plan as insufficient to meet the district's obligation to desegregate” (Minow, 2010, pp. 824).
- - - - Easier to know if students are missing school with age-graded schools than one-room schools.
      - As age-graded schools took over one-room schools, they required more education from these children.
        
        Their attendance was required at these age-graded schools and that didn't leave them much time or opportunities to work on the farm with their families.
        
        because of this evolution of schooling, lots of people from rural ares were moving to urban areas.
      - An ungraded system allowed for children who worked on a farm, to focus more on that than their schooling
      - As the population in schools rose (due to consolidation), so did the demand for a change in the current ungraded one-room school system. Age-grading was the answer. Students were divided into age groups that learned together. It took quite some time to develop a proper system, however, the idea is still present today. Age grading required schools to coordinate curriculum school to school, for once students graduated primary school, they had to be equally prepared for high school. High school was the opportunity that children needed in order to get properly trained for higher paying jobs.
        
        Eventually, ungraded schooling, present in one-room buildings, became obsolete because it was only ideal for the teacher to combine the wide range of age groups together to best educate them. For the students who wanted to go to high school, this was not ideal because they were underprepared and could not pass the entrance exam. This difficult and ridiculously difficult exam even deterred students from even attending high school. The exam was deemed necessary in order for the greater achieving students to thrive and not be held back by their lower-performing peers. High schools eventually put private academies out of business because of their ability to produce higher-paid workforce-ready students.
        
        It took some time to work out the kinks of age-graded schooling. Eventually, the process became more sensible. Students would learn information as young children that they would then build on as they moved up through the “ranks” of the school system. There were eight segregated years of schooling where students similar in age tended to move up together. Once a student mastered the topic a skill or topic, they then built on the information in the next higher grade level. This idea of mastery and therefore also ineptness of a particular skill is most likely how the grading system that students are familiar with today began it’s development. The creation of high schools probably also furthered this idea because schools then needed to equally prepare their students for career-development school. Standards were created to help create matching curriculums for schools. In order for schools to decide whether a student was as prepared for the step-up, the student would need to have a good understanding of everything they had ever been taught. This was measured by using standards that students would meet or not meet.
        
        High school was where students got properly trained for higher-paying jobs in the workforce. It was an opportunity for social mobility. Age-graded schools better-prepared students for the high school entrance exam and high school itself because they were separated into close age-groups and learned information and could build on that knowledge each year they were in school. One-room schools struggled to prepare students for high school because they had one teacher to teach lessons to a group of students with grades ranging from what we now consider elementary school students to eighth graders. The teacher could not properly build on to her student's knowledge, which was necessary for even being accepted into high school. The entrance exam was quite difficult and it’s stigma even deterred students (rural students especially) from taking it. Rural voters saw the benefits of age-graded schooling and demanded the change in the remaining one-room schools.
        
        “Almost all accounts of the transition from ungraded to age-graded schools imply that the local districts had to be dragged into consolidation against the will of the locals. I argue the contrary. Consolidation was locally desired by a majority of voters because it plugged them into what was developing as a national system of age-graded schools that led to high school” (Fischel 178).
        
        Both rural and urban voters supported these consolidated age-graded schools. Urban voters did this because of the possibility of well-paying jobs and the economic benefits that came from lower taxes. Rural voters supported them primarily because of the threat of declining property values and because their children had a more difficult time getting into high school.
        
        “It was this systemic disadvantage of one-room schools -the children could not get into high school as easily-that I believe eventually offset the location and governance advantages of the one-room district and made rural voters agree to consolidate schools” (Fischel 189).
        
        Originally, rural voters were hesitant to make the switch from one-room schooling to age-graded schooling. For starters, age-graded schools were more expensive to the community because of the increase in the number of teachers and the development of multi-room buildings. Also, transportation costs increased and there was less community control. Finally, students had to attend school without taking long absences. Therefore, farms lost their farmhands during the school season and families lost extra income that comes from the child-workers. Rural voters also believed that the removal of the old district would reduce their property values, rather than improve them. They saw the advantage in one-room schooling because the system allowed for a variable school year, a curriculum that matched their preferences, teaching staff that they felt were good-enough, and students could take as much or as little of what the school had to offer. Eventually, though, rural voters saw the advantages in the conversion to age-graded schooling. This was primarily because their children were at a disadvantage to those in the consolidated schools because they were less prepared for high school (which was necessary for acquiring a high-paying job). The curriculum of one-room schools had to be fitted to that of the graded curriculum, but it was almost always an imperfect match. Graduates of one-room schools would struggle in high school compared to those who attended consolidated, age-graded schools. They became a distraction and eventually urban high schools required rural students to pass a difficult entrance exam in order attend their school. One-room students were unequipped for this exam and it’s stigma even deterred students from attending high school. In order to better prepare their children, rural voters decided that age-graded schooling should replace the old school system, in order to improve their chance for social mobility. Other less-influential reasons that rural voters saw to the change were the threat of declining property values, especially because they would affect not only their residential wealth but also their business of farming and if their family needed to move from a rural to an urban school, their child would not struggle or be found disruptive. Rather, they could pick up, essentially, right where they left off, just at a different school.
        
        The influence of schools on these property values is because of both proximity and systemic effects. Homes closer to schools had greater property values because children would not have to walk as far. Schools that performed better (had higher-quality teachers) attracted buyers to the area, therefore increasing property values for everyone. Therefore, when an area lacked a consolidated age-graded school, the property values there were lower.
        For these reasons, the consolidated schools or districts were not CREATURES OF THE STATE, rather the product of voted upon and agreed benefit for both rural and urban voters.
        
        “The size of the rural school district was governed by the distance a child could reasonably be expected to walk. A homestead located close to the school had an advantage over others for prospective buyers” (Fischel 187).
        “The systemic effect of having a desirable school is different from the proximity effect. The systemic value of a better-than-average school accrues to everyone in the district. Having a school that attracted buyers to the district as a whole would be capitalized into the value of all properties in the district, not just those close to the school” (Fischel 187).
        
        Property values are influenced by both proximity and systemic effects. Proximity refers to how close a school is to a house in it’s district. The closer a home was to the school, the more the property value of that house increased. The farther away a home is from the local school, the less it’s property value will increase. The children didn’t have to walk as far to school which was a trait many prospective buyers looked for in homes. The systemic effects refer to how well the school is doing. If it is a good school that does a good job of preparing students for high school and the job-force, it is an advantage for the entire town. For prospective buyers will be more interested in homes in this town because their children will have a better chance of success. Therefore, the property values for everyone in the district increase. School districts that had made the change from ungraded one-room schooling to age-graded consolidated schooling further increased property values for the township.
        
        it is important to note that despite the fact that the government and rich did not force rural voters especially to accept consolidated schooling or school districts, they control the majority of other decisions involving schools. Even if they completely oppose what the schools propose. One reform that was actually successful was the “Carnegie unit”, which is the model schedule that most schools even today follow.
        Despite the power that the state legislators held, they hardly ever implemented reform without the consent of the local districts.
        
        Consolidation, if forced on anyone, would be the rural voters. It is plausible that capitalist, upper-classmen gave voters “take what we are offering, or nothing at all” (Hobson's choice) scenarios that they had to reluctantly agree to. It may also stem from the fact that schools are “creatures of the state”. Meaning, state’s have authority over their schools. School boards require approval from the state before action. Rarely does a district come out on top against the state in court, even if it involves the state’s manipulating of a it’s powers, borders, or existence. However, the state almost never does anything without the consent of a district being affected. Finally the belief that consolidation was forced upon voters is partly the product of the bias in historical reports. State superintendents who were not getting their way developed these reports. This theory is based on their constant complaints within their reports about local resistance and the fact that many of their proposed reforms were failures.
        
        This is because states elected the members of the legislature houses. However, before the one-person, one-vote rule was created, rural voters had more influence because they had more geographical advantage than those in highly populated, condensed cities.
        
        Legislators proposed consolidation to rural areas using commission reports that local voters approved district-to-district. They did this by proposing districts that consolidated schools along township and county lines.
        This was unfavorable because the areas had opposing interests and opinions and limited contact with others in the same town, but residing in a different district. This law was repealed quickly and state legislators instead set up county commissions to propose more favorable consolidation zones that have organic and natural community boundaries. These were then proposed to local voters. After the change, school districts then spilled over county lines. Therefore, they were not ACCIDENTS OF GEOGRAPHY rather territories created by those living within them.
        
        1 more item...
      - This article states that the decline of school quality can lead to bad home values.
      - Properties were being capitalized because of the school district they were in. It didn't matter how close they are to the school, but if they were in the district.
      - School districts are the product of the cost-cutting consolidation of one-room schools. The change was welcomed by both rural and urban voters because of property value increases for homes closer in proximity to schools and for the homes in townships who had good schools. The development of new transportation systems and the creation of new roads and the improvement of old ones further consolidated schools because these districts were based on how far a child could be expected to walk to school. Non-human transportation then allowed for larger districts. The change from many one-room schools to a few was not government mandated. Schools consolidated on their own.
        
        Farming populations declined because of an increase in urbanization (due to the Industrial Revolution). This change led to a fewer number of children per square mile in rural areas. School enrollment, therefore, declined. Because of this, one-room schools were forced to cut costs. They could only do this by consolidating with a school nearby. The development of new transformation systems further consolidated schools because children could now travel further to school by not being on foot.
    - - Parents want to be more involved with their children's school
        
        “The most closely examined example of these attempts at direct democratic participation of parents in their local school districts is the Chicago ‘Local School Council’ (LSC) program. Each LSC is composed of six parents, two community representatives, two teachers, the school’s principals, and an additional non-voting high school student – representatives who are elected every two years. These councils deliberate and enjoy substantial powers and responsibilities, such as hiring and firing of principals at their schools, spending discretionary funds, and developing and implementing strategic plans for school improvement involving such issues as curriculum, instruction, physical design and administrative operation.” (Murray, 2009, 61)
    - - Justice requires that all children are provided with an education that is autonomy- facilitating and also meets the standards of equality of opportunity.
        
        Autonomy: the right or condition of self-government.
        
        To incorporate this into education, it involves encountering the ideas, attitudes and theories of different cultures.