The Spencer Foundation supporting advancement in education through research

Conference Sociology and Education report

 

Report on the Conference Sociology and Education

Michael Hout and Pamela Barnhouse Walters

 

On March 1-3, 2000, the Spencer Foundation and the American Sociological Association, with the assistance of Michael Hout (University of California-Berkeley) and Pamela Barnhouse Walters (Indiana University), convened a group of scholars for a working meeting to explore the current state of sociological research on education and to chart future directions for that research. The goals for this meeting were (1) to encourage scholars already engaged in the study of education to make stronger connections with the latest work in related specialties within sociology, (2) to encourage scholars who have been outside the sociology of education to incorporate education into their agenda for the future, and (3) to develop a research agenda that includes innovative ways of thinking about and increased opportunities for the next generation of sociological research related to education.

 

The Spencer Foundation and the American Sociological Association invited to the conference some sociologists who are already engaged in the study of education and others whose work has been largely outside of the sociology of education. The goal for the former group was to encourage them to make stronger connections with broad sociological issues as well as with the latest work in related specialties within sociology; the goal for the latter group was to encourage them to incorporate education in their agenda for future research.

 

More specifically, the conference was organized around six panel discussions on: social stratification and education, families and schools, the social organization of education, the politics of education, learning and achievement, and labor markets and occupations. Participants were asked also to consider four broad questions that cut across all the sessions: (1) What do we know at present, (2) What central theoretical and empirical issues have we not yet addressed, (3) What kinds of research will move the field forward, and (4) How does each line of questioning link to core questions in the discipline of sociology, and how can these connections be strengthened? Before the conference, each scholar was asked to prepare a short (five to seven pages) and somewhat informal working memorandum which acted as a springboard from which to begin the discussion during the meeting. Moreover, each conference participant was a panelist for one of the six sessions. Panelists were provided specific questions which were intended to guide both the writing of their memoranda and the discussion for each panel. (Short excerpts from the panelists' memoranda are provided for their respective sessions.)

 

In her opening remarks, Spencer Foundation President Patricia Albjerg Graham reflected on the Foundation's history of funding the best scholars doing research related to education and its commitment to identifying and supporting those scholars. She talked further about the Foundation's recent attempts to bring together leading scholars in individual disciplines to discuss the intersection of education and specific disciplines. This conference examining the intersection of education and sociology is part of that larger effort. American Sociological Association Executive Director Felice Levine commented on the forward-looking nature of the conference: thinking ahead about future directions for sociological research on education as well as thinking about the data and training needs that might have to be addressed to further that agenda. Conference organizers Pamela Barnhouse Walters and Michael Hout remarked that one of the purposes of the conference was to explore the seeming insularity of sociology of education as a subdiscipline within sociology and to think of ways to better connect the subdiscipline with the discipline. They encouraged participants not to be limited by the orienting questions they had received and acknowledged that the end result of the conference was likely to be more questions.

 

In a post-dinner panel the first evening, a number of overarching points were raised. Some were primarily theoretical and included comments suggesting that work in the sociology of education more closely resembles a set of discrete and unconnected studies than a coherent subdiscipline. There was also a call to sociologists working on education to develop more powerful theories to explain educational processes. Further commentary arose from observations about education in the contemporary United States. For example, the student population is changing rapidly: immigrants now comprise one in five children under the age of 18, and they are the fastest-growing population of school-age youth. Yet, the field knows too little about their educational experiences, and some of what we know runs counter to theoretical expectations (e.g., first-generation immigrants are often more successful in school than second- or third-generation immigrants). We were also reminded that schools are one of the last legitimate public institutions (along with health care) today, which should provide another incentive to turn our best sociological minds and imaginations to questions and issues about contemporary education.

 

Social Stratification and Education Panel

 

The first session was designed to address a number of questions in the area of stratification and education. The panelists for this session were David Grusky (Cornell University), Lingxin Hao (Johns Hopkins University), and Guillermina Jasso (New York University). The focal questions were: Why has the association between family background and schooling outcomes proven so resistant to attempts to weaken it? Have we settled the credentialism debates? Are the returns to education payoffs for human capital or symbolic? What are the key mechanisms of educational stratification and how have they changed over time in response to attempts to make education less stratified? What are the relative roles of secondary and higher education in the process of stratification?

 

In his memorandum, David Grusky stressed "the simple, but typically overlooked point that detailed occupations (e.g., lawyer) are deeply institutionalized in the class structure, while aggregate class categories are academic constructs that are mainly meaningful to sociologists." His primary question of interest was whether scholars of education also stand to benefit from taking such local class boundaries more explicitly into account. Grusky asserted that it would be useful to revisit classical sociological debates about the reproductive effects of education. He raised two research questions of special relevance: (1) Are the finely grained educational decisions of children (e.g., type of major, professional school, vocational training) much affected by the occupations of their parents? and (2) Are finely grained educational investments reliably converted into the associated careers?

 

Lingxin Hao's memorandum focused on ways in which family background can be examined more accurately and precisely. She stated that "family inheritance remains powerful in predicting children's academic achievement and educational attainment." Her concern was whether the way family background is measured will change findings about the resistance of the family background effect. She asserted that research has focused on the parent and/or child expectations and assumed them to be exogenous. This view needs to be further refined in two ways. First, it is the expectation gap, not the level of parents' or the child's expectation per se, that determines the child's success. Second, the expectation gap is a result of parent-child interactions.

 

Guillermina Jasso's memorandum focused on several findings from recent research on advance directives for medical care, immigration, and the justice of grades, as well as a set of theoretical results based on justice and comparison theory. The categories of findings discussed were as follows: (1) schooling as an attenuating factor on the effects of gender socialization; (2) the schooling level of recent legal immigrants to the United States; (3) immigrant Ph.D.s, Ph.D. origin, and their visa category; (4) schooling and assortative mating among new legal immigrants; (5) the effect of worker schooling on just earnings; (6) junior high school students' judgments of the justice of grades; and (7) the implications of justice theory for dimensions of evaluation in schools.

 

The three panelists for this session had two major recommendations for the study of social stratification and education. First, we should consider focusing more attention on detailed occupations as opposed to large, aggregate classes when we consider the role of education in occupational mobility and reproduction. Second, we should consider a broader array of family background effects on education.

 

Previous research has used large aggregate classes to study inequality, particularly inequality as mediated through the school system. This research was based on a model that assumed that the intergenerational association between detailed occupations could be wholly represented and explained by such highly aggregated classes. Another model has suggested that occupations track individuals into educational outcomes that are occupation-specific, but that there are no effects of one's occupation of origin beyond the effects of education. However, this model is inadequate in explaining all effects of social origins. Scholars know very little about the adequacy of a third model: the direct intergenerational transmission of occupations. That is, how much of such transmission is not mediated by education, but rather the effect of networks and other factors? In addition to more specific social origins measures-such as detailed occupations-scholars need to investigate further the prospect of measuring investments in education and education attainment in a more detailed way. This might account for the high levels of unexplained variation we see when we look only at years of schooling in educational stratification research.

 

Related to this suggestion of looking at detailed occupations to capture more about the processes of intergenerational transmission, another suggestion made during this session was to look at family background using a life course perspective. Families go through many transitions, they move, and their communities change over time. When looking at the effects of "family background" on educational outcomes, researchers must consider such factors. Family background is not static, though most analyses make the simplifying assumption that it is. In particular, scholars should look at three groups of factors. First, transitions such as divorce and geographical moves have the potential to affect outcomes greatly, and these should be considered when studying "family background." Second, we must investigate further how young people's relationships with their parents and siblings affect learning. And third, scholars should consider further community dimensions such as the accumulated wealth and poverty of neighborhoods and changes at the community level that affect everyone who lives there, including factors such as White flight and families' embeddedness in communities.

 

In the conversation that followed the panelists' remarks, several other related issues arose. There was support among participants for the hypothesis that detailed occupations are more important for explaining some social processes, particularly patterns of consumption and lifestyle. Several scholars agreed that, rather than always looking at one measure such as occupations, in some cases more indigenous categories should be used. The overwhelming salience of firm size in Japan was one example of this. Also, there was some discussion of relating educational and occupational origins to life course outcomes such as marriage and childbearing, with a particular emphasis on gender differences in the processes of attaining these outcomes. Participants also questioned whether occupations are nominal and actually based on other, more core characteristics.

 

Another set of questions focused on the micro-foundations of stratification research. We have much to learn about how social intentions at the family and individual levels actually result in social inequality. In other words, through what mechanisms does "class" (or alternatively, occupation) actually get into schools? It was argued that through "institutionally truer" measures (i.e., occupations in great detail), scholars in the field will find out more about how advantage, disadvantage, and other forms of intergenerational persistence get into the schools.

Part of this session also focused on the distinction between direct or applied research and basic research. Some scholars argued that basic research can help to discover more about fundamental human nature and ultimately more about processes such as how social inequality is mediated by education. Others argued that such a "medical model" of doing research is less useful in the social sciences. However, this broad topic was set aside and discussed in other sessions.

 

Families and Schools Panel

 

The second session was designed to focus on research issues around families and schools. The panelists for this session were Karl Alexander (Johns Hopkins University), Annette Lareau (Temple University), and Suet-ling Pong (Stanford University). Central questions guiding this session included: In what ways are schools as institutions linked to families as institutions? What implications do demographic changes in the family have for public schools? What is the variety of ways in which parents control or influence their children's educational careers, and with what consequences for equality? How does the degree of control or influence vary by class, race, and ethnicity? How do the transitional stages in childhood and adolescence affect children's school performance and how do families mediate the links between childhood developmental stages and school success?

 

In his memorandum, Karl Alexander asserted that differences in children's school success are critical to the role schools play in society's system of stratification, and the link to stratification is what makes such an agenda sociological. He stated that we know that disadvantaged children often come up short in terms of school-based "opportunity to learn" criteria, yet the pattern of school-year gains reveals that the schools they attend, and the experiences they have in them, play an important compensatory role, helping offset the drag of out-of-school resource shortfall. How can we reconcile these two observations? How can we exploit the insight that time in school is especially important to the cognitive development of disadvantaged children? Alexander asserted that scholars need a deeper understanding of what it is that privileges privileged children outside school and what it is that holds back disadvantaged children. They also need to understand what schools do to (partially) override adverse effects of home and community disadvantage.

 

Annette Lareau's memorandum indicated that many authors have conceptualized family life as a "background." Others, however, have challenged the logic of this approach and have noted that intertwined with these "background" factors is a difference in the ways in which mothers and fathers oversee the process of their children's schooling. Lareau maintained that while there is widespread agreement on the importance of "context" in shaping school experiences, the emerging picture of context remains fragmented. She asserted that "it is a mistake to think there can be one best way for parents to be involved in schooling and promote children's success. Instead, there are multiple pathways. However, some pathways are more trodden than others, accorded more legitimacy than others, and easier to comply with for some groups than others. Researchers need to be more critical of the demands made by schools, looking at them in a broader context."

 

Suet-ling Pong's memorandum addressed research related to family composition (siblings), family structure (single-parenthood), family economic resources (dual-earner family), and parental involvement and social capital. She asserted the need to refine the theory of social capital, to link the theory with empirical investigation, and to collect more data. "We also need a good operational definition of social capital, particularly the notion of intergenerational or social closure. What measure best captures the collective nature of the concept?" She suggested that scholars integrate social capital into "our earlier intellectual tradition," which emphasizes the school compositional effects. Pong noted that, in her opinion, "school compositional effects consist of two major components: peer effect and social capital effect. Understanding the independent and interactive influence of peer groups and social capital should help us to move the field of sociology of education forward."

 

In their remarks, the panelists reminded us of the importance of families to children's learning and highlighted the family as an important site of learning, especially regarding language. There are two traditions in sociology with respect to addressing issues of the link between family and schools: The first looks at families as sites of learning and facilitators of learning, and the other looks at family characteristics such as class or parental occupation as background factors related to educational outcomes. However, scholars still do not understand fully the processes that produce family socioeconomic status (SES) effects on children's learning, nor do they understand how families and schools together produce learning (and other education-related) outcomes. Further, research on families and schools has suffered from a lack of attention to the embeddedness of families and schools in their larger economic, political, and cultural environments and from the field's lack of attention to the state's role in mediating the family-school relationship. We also need to better understand the cross-cultural differences in family-school links. Outside the United States, for example, this link is generally weaker, and there is less stratification of learning opportunities and educational outcomes.

 

While much research acknowledges that family, school, and neighborhood exert strong influences on children's educational careers and schooling outcomes, researchers typically investigate the influence of one sphere while controlling for the effects of the others. Such research should pay greater attention to the simultaneous and combined influence of family, school, and neighborhood on student outcomes. Another promising line of inquiry for future scholarship on family effects on schooling is exploring the degree to which seasonal patterns of learning vary by family background. Research has established, for example, that children from high-SES families learn more over the summer than children from low-SES families. However, the learning gap between children from high- and low-SES families does not increase nearly as much during the school year. Scholars need to better understand the dynamic of summer learning, which will tell us more about families as sites of learning, and the process that allows low-SES children to keep up during the school year, which will tell us more about the family-school link and the independent effects of schools.

 

Panelists asserted that we know that families are important shapers of children's schooling experiences. In particular, families transmit cultural and social capital to their children and they shape their children's educational careers, but in both cases, family effects vary strongly by social class. Working-class parents are more likely to defer responsibility for their children's educations to the schools; "professional" standards of child rearing tend to be modeled after middle-class parents. Analyses of the effects of social and cultural capital need to be more critical of the middle-class standard used by school professionals, which disadvantages working-class families, as well as the middle-class standard implicit in a great deal of the research on social and cultural capital.

 

Parental involvement is a prevalent topic in the sociology of education. Research has shown that parental involvement in school activities and home-based support of the school's expectations and demands facilitates student success. However, less is known about why and how this happens. Cross-national research can help a great deal in this regard. Little attention has been given to parental involvement in other countries, and the fact that there are fewer family effects on schooling outcomes outside the United States provides a rich (and as yet relatively unexplored) set of opportunities for understanding these effects better and the institutional arrangements that affect the family-school link.

 

Through research, scholars also know that changes in the demographic composition of families have affected the school, but there is too little information about how changes in parental and family characteristics have influenced the organization of the school. Changes in family demographic composition have also resulted in changes in school composition. Hence, it may be time to revisit the effects of school-level student body composition on educational outcomes. This presents particular challenges to urban schools, which face the question of how to make schools work in the absence of a middle-class, two-parent core implicit in "models" of families around which schools as institutions are organized.

 

The Social Organization of Education Panel

 

The third session focused on the social organization of education. The panelists for this session included Jomills Braddock (University of Miami), Elisabeth Clemens (University of Arizona), Francisco Ramirez (Stanford University), and Ricardo Stanton-Salazar (University of California, San Diego). The primary questions for this session were: What are the main organizational dimensions along which school systems vary? What are the consequences of organizational structure for the educational and social goals of school systems? What kinds of within-school organizational structures are most effective for learning and for equity? How do the organization of peer groups and the structure of students' networks affect students' learning, social outcomes, and the probability of success in school? How does the organization of children's and adolescents; culture interact with official school culture, and with what consequences?

 

In his memorandum, Jomills Braddock asserted that "the pursuit of equality of educational opportunity has been a long and continuing struggle in American education." Contemporary educational reform initiatives generally aim to improve the overall academic performance of American students and eliminate the persistent problems of academic underachievement rooted in differential access to educational opportunity by insuring that all students have the opportunity to learn what they need to know in order to meet high performance standards. He stated that sociologists have developed several alternative approaches to defining and assessing equality of educational opportunity, and that each has advantages and disadvantages for particular scientific, policy, and practical purposes. However, he suggested that sociological research on schools become more focused on schools as "social systems," broadly defined to "meaningfully incorporate important elements of student culture and co- and extracurricular school programs in addition to the more traditional or formal aspects of school and classroom organization."

 

Elisabeth Clemens' memorandum indicated that education provides exemplars for only two major theoretical perspectives: "the neo-institutionalism of John Meyer and colleagues as well as the model of garbage-can decision-making developed by James March and John Olsen to make sense of the search for a university dean." She stated that in an important sense, these two theories grounded in educational exemplars mark the boundaries of both prediction and practical implications for organization theory. The result has been a largely one-way conversation in which organization theory is applied to schools by education researchers while organizational scholars more generally pay little attention to education. She had four suggestions for research topics on education that speak directly and powerfully to basic theoretical questions in organizational sociology: institutional change, auspice, competition, and information or accountability.

 

Francisco Ramirez's memorandum asserted that much of the sociology of education revolves around issues of equality and achievement. The focus on equality almost invariably emphasizes class-, race-, and gender-based inequalities of access to valued educational resources as the underlying explanation of inequalities in educational, occupational, and wage outcomes. He noted, however, that there are a number of interesting organizational issues that fall outside the scope of the dominant tradition. Moreover, the organizational reform literature does not offer a strong reflection on the deep culture of American schooling. Ramirez discussed three ideas from the literature: (1) organizational age and liability of newness, (2) organizational environments and Institutional Isomorphism, and (3) organizational and institutional change. He asked whether these ideas help explain change and stability in the organizational character of universities and whether they help explain similarities and differences between universities within and across national educational systems. The main question is whether and when a set of organizational changes results in institutional transformation. That is, at what point do the organizational changes universities are undergoing add up to institutional transformation?

 

In his memorandum, Ricardo Stanton-Salazar declared that only recently has the field seen scholarly work on social capital that begins to inform the scholarly debate on inequality and social reproduction. "Overall, this work is extremely important for the development of a theory of social capital that deepens our understanding of how class, race, and gender operate in the lives of low-status minority youth and their families." In his view, the literature on social networks and social support (across different disciplines) offers a body of metaphors, conceptual tools, and theoretical ideas that carry the potential for accounting for urban social inequality in a new and very powerful way. He noted the need for more research devoted to bringing to light the complexities surrounding network development and social capital accumulation among working-class and minority groups and to interpreting this problem as a key mechanism for the social reproduction of inequality in society. He suggested that research projects driven by sociological perspectives (1) analyze and critique features of interventions that are of greatest sociological import and (2) identify a sample of successful interventions targeted at low-status minority adolescents living in urban/metropolitan areas, incorporating both school-based and (nonschool) community-based programs.

 

The panelists for this session highlighted bodies of theory and research that have been or could be especially important in understanding schools from an organizational perspective. Participants discussed the breakdown of clear distinctions between public and private as a fundamental transformation in process in American education. Given current trends toward "privatization," even in public schooling (vouchers and charter schools), now is a critical time to draw connections to research on other types of organizations. The growing body of research on auspices in the nursing home, day care, and health care industries could be informative. Comparing and contrasting educational institutions and other private and non-profit organizations at the post-secondary level could be particularly informative and could lead to exploring the possibilities of the "entrepreneurial university" model.

 

Schools must be viewed as organizations with both formal and informal characteristics. Informal characteristics have become especially salient as some formal characteristics (e.g., de jure racial segregation) have disappeared. However, compositional characteristics of student bodies (race, SES), whether formal or informal, have remained extremely important in understanding features of schools as organizations, and, in turn, in explaining variation in student learning outcomes. Research should focus more on the impact of each of these compositional characteristics individually on school organization and on their intersection at the school and community levels.

 

The panelists raised several issues related to the way in which education as an institution involves not only formal schooling in the classroom, but other social institutions as well. Extracurricular components of schools are especially understudied. In particular, research must begin to link informal youth culture (such as that of extracurricular activities) with official school culture. For example, research could focus on the different ways in which students' involvement and experiences in extracurricular activities are shaped by gender and social class, particularly from a historical perspective. Panelists called for a research agenda that integrates the study of families, schools, and peer groups. Moreover, networks through which social and cultural resources flow transcend the boundaries of home and school and they, too, must be included in research on schools as organizations. Cross-disciplinary research, cross-methodological research, and integration of sub-fields within sociology were identified as several strategies to develop such an agenda.

 

In developing a research program that integrates the sociology of education into organizational sociology more broadly, panelists paid particular attention to new institutionalist theories. Unlike "garbage can" theories of organizations, which suggest that the processes that occur inside educational institutions cannot be explained, new institutionalist theories have been useful in explaining characteristics of schools as organizations. This is especially true when looking at the broad context of schools in society (e.g., links between school characteristics and the labor market). Unfortunately, these theories have not been adequately linked to what actually goes on inside schools and to learning outcomes in particular. Furthermore, new institutionalist theories are in some cases, poor predictors of the diversity and innovation we find in examinations of school practices.

 

Thus, scholars in the field must concentrate future efforts on understanding the link between school practices, organizational features, and institutional identities, and the benefits and limitations of new institutionalist theories. In particular, research should examine the conditions under which there is loose coupling between organizational structures and practices. Scholars should also explore, in historical perspective, conditions under which schools and universities experience fundamental transformations. What do such transformations, compared to less fundamental organizational reforms, mean for student learning? How are reforms on one level (e.g., secondary school) affected or limited by the organizational features of other levels (e.g., higher education)?

 

The discussion around issues of social capital was continued during this session. Participants agreed that scholars can explore educational institutions as opportunity structures that actors negotiate using various social and cultural resources. As the formation of social capital occurs in the family, in the school, and in peer groups, understanding actors' varying abilities to draw on these resources provides a way for sociologists to study the interconnections between these spheres. Perhaps most importantly, social capital is linked to the valuation processes of the larger society and can assist in developing a research agenda that connects research in the sociology of education to other sociological research.

 

The Politics of Education Panel

 

The fourth session focused on issues involving the politics of education. The panelists for this session were Steven Brint (University of California, Riverside), Anthony Bryk (University of Chicago), Scott Davies (McMaster University), and Charles Payne (Duke University). The central questions guiding the discussion for this session were: How is the structure of the state related to the structure of the educational system, and how does that relationship affect the balance of power in educational decision-making between state officials and groups in civil society? In what ways is a society's educational system and control over that educational system related to the citizenship rights of its members? Furthermore, what are the major sources of change in educational systems, and how have various constituent groups succeeded in achieving their educational objectives?

 

Steven Brint's memorandum focused on issues related to political sociology, which is "concerned with issues of power, authority and influence, and the contestation of groups in society for power, authority, and influence." The distribution of scarce values, such as safety, health, opportunity, status, and amenities of life, is an important focus of political studies. He suggested five studies that would help to advance the political sociology of schooling:

 

  1. Comparative macro-structural influences-analyzing the causes of different macro-structural arrangements and defining the consequences of these different arrangements for the life chances, priorities, and outlooks of students.

    2.  

  2. The rise and fall of epistemic regimes-first is to agree upon the meaning of the concept of "epistemic regimes" and to identify major regimes.

    3.  

  3. The state's influence on the educational opportunities of disadvantaged groups' additional cross-national studies of the conditions under which class and other group differences in educational opportunities narrow.

    4.  

  4. The origins and fates of educational policy proposals' move from the macro-level of comparative and historical studies to the meso-level of institutional studies.

    5.  

  5. Authority and responsiveness in effective and less effective schools'a comprehensive study of the quantity and character of communications between the major adult groups connected to schools.

 

Anthony Bryk's memorandum mentioned two broad, contrasting approaches to improvement in various reform efforts: (1) a focus on structural change as witnessed in efforts to promote governance reform and restructuring of school work conditions and (2) a more direct focus on instruction. He concluded that a third, distinctly sociological perspective also needs to be brought to these problems. Within any formal arrangements for schooling, teachers must not only engage subject matter and ideas about how to teach it, but also students, their parents, and their professional colleagues. "Designing good schools requires us to think about how best to organize the work of adults so that they are more likely to operate more productively together and fashion a more coherent environment for the development of children." He noted that there is relatively sparse acknowledgment of these relational concerns in the sociology of education literature. "A diverse body of case studies and narrative accounts about school change direct our attention to the social dynamics of schooling. Systematic conceptualization and rigorous empirical study of these topics, however, is limited and a vast array of important questions remains unconsidered."

 

In his memorandum, Scott Davies asked, "How do school systems change?" On one side, many view school reform as frustratingly slow. They see schools as highly resistant, even hostile to change. On the other side, schools are seen as faddish, ever-changing institutions. He suggested that an essential starting point to understanding change and politics in education is the sociology of school organizations. In particular, two key concepts from "The New Institutionalism" are useful. New Institutionalists (1) contend that schools have strong ritual structures (i.e., credentialing procedures), but weak technical controls (i.e., they do little to monitor, coordinate, and control instruction and learning); and (2) see schools as judged more by their conformity to institutional rules rather than by their technical effectiveness or performance. While these two concepts provide an essential starting point, additional research is needed in two areas. First is a better understanding of the particular sources of political change in school systems. Second, the New Institutionalist notion of "legitimacy" begs the questions of what becomes legitimate in education and how so? Davies suggested three areas of research on educational change and politics: (1) framing and social movements in education, (2) examining how sociology of education translates into policy, and (3) competition and change in education.

 

In various ways, all of the panelists highlighted the importance of understanding schools as political institutions or perhaps more accurately, the school as a political institution. In general, they asserted that this approach has received too little attention in education research, including sociological research. There is a weak tradition of political sociology of education, for example. This has impaired scholars' ability to understand processes of social and organizational change in schools, cycles of school reform and their effects, the current impression that public schools are beset with problems, or political actors' attempts to deal with perceived educational problems.

 

Political sociology, at its core, involves the study of power and authority, two processes that are central to understanding why schools are the way they are and how schooling has changed. Research needs to further explore how societal interests mobilize to gain power in education. This also points to the usefulness of social movements analyses that pay attention to the process by which political issues and demands are framed and differences in political power based on race, ethnicity, and class. Scholars also need to explore further the processes by which elites, including state officials, shape schooling.

 

Participants asserted that schools are similar to other political institutions regarding their exercise of power and authority. For example, constituents have more influence when they share broad similarities with officials; the broad underlying values about schooling are subject to social movements and electoral influence. Hence, the ideology of political elites matters. However, unlike other political institutions, the school's clientele is children and young adults (who do not vote), and the school's mission is the transmission of knowledge and offering of equal educational opportunity. These differences must be taken into account in sociological analyses as well.

 

When scholars seek to understand long-term processes of political change in education, they need to take into account significant changes in the aims of education. Achievement for all is a relatively new political goal for American schooling, for example. Researchers also need to understand how rapid technological change interacts with political change to affect the ability of schools to meet their goals. Above all, scholars in the field need to turn their political and organizational lenses on the problems of contemporary education. Participants agreed that school funding, particularly the distribution of school funding, is a key contemporary political issue that would benefit from good political sociology analysis.

 

One unique political challenge for schools today is that they are very open to external forces-perhaps more so than any other institution. Further, the country is in the midst of an era in which schools are politically defined as being in crisis. Sociologists need to better understand who the different stakeholders are and explain their stakes in education. Some educational changes originate inside the schools (e.g., from teachers and bureaucrats) and others originate outside (from parents, elected officials, or the voting public).

 

The educational reform literature brings to light a central paradox about educational change. On the one hand, schools are resistant to change and organizational inertia is a powerful force. On the other hand, reform movements are abundant and can be extremely faddish, showing that schools are lightening rods for social anxieties and seen as institutions that should respond quickly to changes in external demands and expectations. Understanding the conditions under which schools resist and are open to change is a central challenge for future research. Understanding the success and failure of school reform movements requires sociologists to pay attention to the rhetoric and language of reform as well as the strategies used to push reform. Symbolic politics may be as important as material politics for understanding schools; scholars also need to think carefully about the ways in which symbolic school politics fit (or do not fit) with the larger political culture.

 

Finally, it is vitally important to understand the political obstacles to change in schools. Research on equity movements shows, for example, that we cannot "scale up" in schools serving poor children without more privileged groups fearing they will suffer; this worry, in turn, leads privileged groups to act politically to minimize the losses they expect to suffer.

Learning and Achievement Panel

 

The fifth session focused on research issues around student learning and academic achievement. The panelists for this session were Aaron Pallas (Michigan State University), Meredith Phillips (University of California, Los Angeles), and Min Zhou (University of California, Los Angeles). The questions driving discussion for this panel were: What are the contributions to learning of individual ability, home life, and school? Can one compensate for deficiencies in the other? Do individual differences in achievement at some point in the educational career predict life-long differences, or does the rank order of individuals shift over time-as some develop late and others plateau? How can we separate the answers to these questions from the content of the tests we use to answer them? Where are we today in the field of sociology of teaching?

 

Aaron Pallas' memorandum began with the premise that schooling is the social institution that society charges with the task of socializing the young to become competent adults-that is, to perform adult social roles competently. The socialization process involves assisting students in developing a set of cognitive skills and inculcating in them a set of behaviors, values, norms, and dispositions. He stated that sociologists of education rarely study this kind of learning. "Rather, we rely on proxies for school learning, such as standardized test performance and the grades that teachers assign to students." However, "test scores and grades, though great friends to sociologists of education, do not tell us what students know." He declared that sociologists need to consider test taking as itself a context and to account for the multiplicity of social contexts that matter and that need to be taken into sociological account in the framing of school learning. He proposed several ideas that may have some bearing on future sociological thought about the learning that goes on in schools, especially with regard to the nature of school knowledge (differentiating between "knowing that, knowing how, and knowing with") and knowledge transfer. He suggested that future research focus more directly on the production of knowledge in the classrooms and that sociologists of education focus more on the social context of school learning and less on the individual student learning.

 

In her memorandum, Meredith Phillips indicated that there is a "decent," but incomplete, descriptive sense of what children's achievement trajectories look like and how children's rank order in the achievement distribution changes with age. "We have not thought hard enough, however, about whether these patterns would change if we changed our assumptions about how to measure achievement growth." There are still inadequate descriptive data on the academic trajectories of children from Latino and Asian American backgrounds. Moreover, scholars need to worry more about the extent to which their descriptive conclusions depend on the types of skills that standardized tests measure. Little is known about the processes by which social contexts influence children's academic trajectories. In addition, there is far too little sociological research on children's academic development during elementary school. She concluded with four points: (1) "If we want to understand how schools do and can make a difference, we need to focus more on within-school effects"; (2) "We need to collect observational data to link to survey and assessment data"; (3) Quantitative sociologists need to realize when to turn to ethnographic research, and (4) "Our most popular explanations for group differences in achievement too often ignore the fact that the relative influences of social contexts change as children age."

 

Min Zhou's memorandum suggested that existing literature on the adaptation of immigrant children has highlighted the significance of various levels of immigrant receiving contexts - the family, the neighborhood, and the school - in shaping the adaptational experiences of the children of immigrants. She then discussed some of the preliminary findings in her study of three immigrant neighborhoods in downtown Los Angeles to highlight the importance of the neighborhood context for scholars' understanding of the education of immigrant children. A summary of her findings follows:

 

 

The panelists agreed that sociologists have paid less attention to learning and achievement than to some of the issues and questions covered during the other sessions. Indeed, two of the panelists questioned whether there is a sociology of learning and whether the field really needs one. One noted that psychologists have paid much more attention to learning and achievement than sociologists have, particularly the "micro-issues" of how they are produced and the methodological problem of how to measure them.

 

Over the past couple of decades of research, sociology has offered two basic "stories" about what is learned in schools: a stratification story and a socialization story. The stratification story, which focuses on inequality in learning outcomes, and to some degree inequality in learning opportunities, has dominated sociology since the publication of the Coleman report in the 1960s. Little attention has been paid to learning as socialization, to the socializing influence of schools, or to the transferability of learning. Even more fundamentally, sociologists have given scant thought to the question of what students learn in school, particularly since the publication of Dreeben's On What is Learned in School (1968). Instead, they rely primarily on standardized tests to define what aspects of learning will be the focus of sociological inquiries.

 

Scholars know that learning is produced in the classroom, but that it is also produced in various other sites. Much sociological research on education assumes that learning is easily transferable to other settings, for example, from home to school and vice versa. However, participants maintained that scholars doing research in this area need to think of learning as situated, especially with respect to its sociocultural context, and to investigate how and when it transfers from one site to another.

 

The importance of understanding the context of learning was underscored by participants in a number of other ways. The family, the school, and the neighborhood are all sites of learning, and research shows that learning is optimized when the goals, values, and norms to which children are exposed in all three contexts are consistent. Sociologists have paid attention to the family and school as contexts for learning; yet, there is still a need to pay more attention to the "fit" among all three contexts and to better understand the influence of neighborhoods.

 

Panelists agreed that studies of immigrants and immigrant children's educational achievement shed a good deal of light on the relationships among family, school, and neighborhood as contexts of learning because in various ways the fit among these contexts differs from what is typically observed for native-born White children. In immigrant families, the family-school link differs from the common model because many parents do not speak English and thus do not "parent" their children through the educational system in the same way as middle-class White non-immigrants do. Yet, many immigrant groups have high academic achievement. This anomaly points to the importance of the neighborhood, and strong neighborhood institutions, as sources of social capital for immigrant students.

 

Standardized tests and the use of test scores were the focus of much discussion among participants during this session. One panelist reminded the group that despite the institutionalization of test scores as accounts of school learning, scholars do not have to rely on them as measures of the production of classroom knowledge. Another panelist warned that an anti-test score stance is not warranted: standardized tests measure aspects of learning and achievement that researchers should care about and that have important stratification implications. If our question is about disadvantaged groups and their chances of mobility, grades and test scores are very important foci because of their clear relevance to getting ahead in the educational system.

 

We need a better understanding of the nature of learning that includes, but is not limited to cognitive ability. We need to know more about what it is that standardized tests measure, and we need to develop better measures of learning. Among other things, these measures need to solve the metric problem (our assessment of when peak learning occurs and how much learning occurs during various school intervals is entirely metric-dependent). Further, our future attempts to develop a better understanding of learning need to pay much greater attention to the elementary years. These attempts will be hampered by a lack of large-scale data sets for the elementary years. In general, getting inside the black box of learning processes in schools and homes will require different kinds of data than what we currently have readily available.

 

Labor Markets and Occupations Panel

 

The sixth session focused on sociological issues involving labor markets and occupations. Central questions guiding this session were: How do individuals turn human capital (potential) into jobs and careers (realized potential)? What institutions mediate the process? Does the American reliance on "market mechanisms" promote more or less inequality than the institutionalized systems in Japan and Germany, for example? Are community colleges better suited than high schools for linking young people and employers? Are universities or four-year colleges better or worse in bridging the school-to-work transitions? Are the better aspects of one type of institution transferable to other types? Does a close articulation between school and the labor market promote or ameliorate social inequality? What are the consequences of the increasing professionalization of higher education for higher education and for the social opportunity it provides? The panelists for this session were Richard Arum (New York University), Mary Brinton (Cornell University), and Robert Nelson (Northwestern University).

In his memorandum, Richard Arum indicated that the association between educational attainment and labor market inequalities has increased in recent years. He advanced five arguments related to research in this area to stimulate sociological dialog and suggest new directions for research on this topic:

 

  1. The emphasis on measurement of cognitive skills in research on schooling has been atheoretical, empirically unjustified, and generative of inappropriate educational policy. Educational research since the mid-1960s, including research within the sociology of education, has focused too heavily on investigation of variation in test scores.

    2.  

  2. Schools affect individual labor market outcomes by both sorting students and socializing youth for adult roles; the latter function, however, has been relatively neglected in educational research.

    3.  

  3. Sociological research on schooling and employment must focus greater attention on the bottom quintile of economically disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals by reconceptualizing the definition of "labor markets."

    4.  

  4. Institutional and network dimensions of school-to-work transitions require greater investigation and elaboration.

    5.  

  5. Educational experience must be conceptualized more broadly (e.g., in terms of resources, curriculum, and peer climates) in order to identify more accurately the associations between education and labor market outcomes.

 

Mary Brinton's memorandum asserted that the question of how individuals convert their human capital into "successful" jobs and careers is central to social stratification research and to sociology more generally. She argued that sociologists of education are particularly well-positioned to initiate research in several of the understudied theoretical and empirical areas. The links between educational attainment and occupational achievement/status have been well-established by a very large body of literature in American sociology. Further, research that sees cultural capital as a mediating link between education and labor market outcomes has been the domain of sociologists. She asserted that sociologists need to turn concerted attention to the relationship between schools and the labor market rather than the relationship between individual education and labor market outcomes. One overarching question for a research agenda is: In order to ameliorate social inequality and to facilitate the school-work transition in an efficient way, where is the training for specific entry-level jobs and the competition for jobs best located-inside or outside schools? She stated that there is "a great need for cross-fertilization between theoretical work on the one hand, and empirical studies of school-work systems in other countries and school-work experiments in local areas in the U.S. on the other hand."

 

Robert Nelson's memorandum provided "an outsider's perspective on directions for sociological research on education." He limited his discussion to gender inequality, but indicated that many of his questions could also be posed about race and class. He discussed his book Legalizing Gender Inequality: Courts, Markets, and Unequal Pay for Women in America (with Bill Bridges) in which they found that the most significant source of male-female pay differentials for full time workers is between-job pay differentials. The book argues that organizational pay systems, especially in large organizations, are important mediating institutions in the generation of gender inequality in pay. He maintained that there are relatively few sociological studies of specific labor markets or organizational personnel systems, so that the field knows relatively little about the role of education in markets or organizational hierarchies. He declared that it will be important to examine these relationships in future research from any of the following three research strategies: (1) to study the education-gender-job link in more theoretically-informed case studies of organizations, industries, or labor markets (a kind of bottom-up approach); (2) to examine explicitly the interface between occupations and labor markets and organizational personnel systems (a top down approach); and (3) to work at the level of individual occupations.

 

Socialization and allocation were the main functions of education in classical sociological theory, especially in Durkheim and Weber; only later did cognitive learning become a major concern of sociologists of education. The panelists, during this session, integrated these three dimensions of education as they relate to the connections between school and work.

Panelists and participants presented several arguments about the connections between socialization, learning, and the labor market. The schools that are often perceived as failing most are not necessarily those with the lowest aggregate test scores (e.g., in rural areas), but rather those with the highest rates of delinquency (e.g., in the inner city). Schools, it was argued, have lost the "moral authority" to socialize students effectively and, as a result, there may be too much "noise" to implement successfully reforms of any kind-reforms that would improve learning or strengthen ties to the labor market. Others argued that delinquent subcultures arise in such schools precisely because they are so loosely connected to students' occupational futures. A third argument was that students act out frustrations in school that grow out of frustrations with the larger society. These arguments present several important empirical questions and clearly have vastly different policy implications.

 

A comparative research agenda provides the opportunity to examine alternatives to the U.S.'s fairly loose connections between schools and the labor market. In particular, the example of Japan shows that, indeed, closer school-employer ties seem to be related to a higher instrumental authority of schools. However, even there, as these ties have weakened in some cases, the authority of the school has disintegrated. In addition to cross-national studies, we can investigate further these processes of school-job transitions by turning to a growing set of local case studies in the U.S. that have not been integrated into the academic literature. In looking at what kinds of relationships between schools and employers could or should be developed, panelists stressed that it is important to keep in mind the roles that various actors and the configuration of schools play, as well as the efficiency and fairness of the process.

This session also focused on the institutionalized allocation processes that lead to quite different labor market and earnings outcomes for men and women. Research has shown that gender earnings gaps vary across generations and different levels of education, but little of it has addressed the mechanisms that lead to these variations. Relevant to this session, scholars have much to learn about the role schools play in channeling men and women into different jobs, which is a very important issue since much of the gender earnings gap is due to inequality between occupations. In addition, research should focus more attention on the relationship between education, gender, and earnings in internal labor markets (e.g., within organizations).

 

Finally, the panelists discussed cognitive skills in relation to inequality in the labor market. The discussion touched on debates about how skill requirements have (or have not) changed with new technologies. First, they cited past studies that show that productivity and earnings are only weakly related to scores on cognitive tests. Further, in many cases, new technologies have required not more skilled workers, but less skilled workers, or fewer workers altogether. Enough has changed in recent decades, however, that new theories might be needed to explain relationships between cognitive skills, the labor market, and technological change. For example, research has shown that, while test scores are poor predictors of initial job placement once credentials are controlled, they do help predict earnings five years into one's career. It was suggested that, as more and more people attend college, factors such as test scores and grades might assume greater meaning. Test scores might also capture a person's ability to adapt to change, particularly technological change, and could for this reason be more important later in one's career. All of these issues present new empirical challenges for sociologists of education.

 

Concluding Discussion

 

During the final session of the conference, participants were asked to identify themes that had been adequately covered and, more importantly, to use the time to raise issues that had received insufficient (or no) attention. As conference conveners, Michael Hout, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, and Felice Levine integrated participants' ideas from the various panel discussions in a final wrap-up session. They organized their final comments around theoretical, empirical, and measurement issues.

Infrastructure

 

With respect to infrastructure, several ideas emerged. First, better communication among researchers was suggested (e.g., create an e-journal of working papers or use the Education Section of ASA to disseminate results). Along with this, the importance of communication with the media and general public was stressed. Finally, participants recognized the value of a more problem-centered approach, whereas research often begins with a specific problem and then moves back into the various academic disciplines. Related to this, more incentives should be given for quality syntheses of pre-existing research in order to raise awareness of gaps and advances in the field, and to counteract a tendency toward extreme specialization.

Theoretical Issues

 

The theoretical points raised focused on five broad themes: the institutional culture of schools, the context of learning and knowledge, education and the state, schooling and the life course, and educational change. First, participants suggested that school must continue to be broadly theorized as a work culture. How are teachers, principals, and students socialized into their school roles? How have schools' institutional cultures changed over time? Related to these ideas, the notion of education as a social field in Bourdieu's sense could be a useful point of departure.

 

Second, while research has made great advances in describing how the processes of learning and achievement exist in a variety of social contexts, more needs to be done. Sociologists need to continue to theorize achievement beyond the individual level. Scholars need more critical and contextual analysis of parental practices and their role in learning. Also, there is a need for more theoretical analysis of knowledge production to better understand who and what counts as knowledge, learning, achievement, and productivity.

 

Third, participants stressed the need for a better theory of the link between politics and schools. Researchers tend to take for granted the financial and regulatory relationship between the state and school, but have little to say about how schooling is politicized, the role of political elites in education, or the interplay among the federal, state, and local levels of politics in shaping education.

 

Fourth, it was suggested that research on schools must consider the entire life course as a context. How is school, and particularly the school-to-work transition, related to later life outcomes? What makes schools relevant to the non-college-bound student? Finally, in looking at historical changes in educational institutions, we should consider several issues. What is the distinction between educational reform and educational transformation? How can we theorize historical contingencies? Why have class-based differences in educational attainment been so resistant to change?

 

Empirical Issues

 

The empirical issues raised were broadly grouped around data needs, research on learning and attainment, and the changing context of schooling. Participants identified several gaps in the data currently available. First, more attempts should be made to develop and use cross-national data. Research could also profit greatly from looking at variation not only between countries, but between regions, localities, and school districts as well. In order to do this, data from local case studies need to be compiled into a more comprehensive database. To learn more about historical trends and education as an institution, scholars should develop longitudinal databases at the school and university levels. Finally, researchers must include younger children and children of different language backgrounds in databases on aptitude and achievement.

 

Beyond these data needs, several ideas for specific research agendas, especially on learning and achievement, were raised. Scholars do not understand adequately how children achieve grades. Moreover, while research has come a long way in explaining seasonal variations in learning, there is much left to examine. The process of language acquisition, especially second language acquisition and formal language acquisition (e.g., math, music), has yet to be thoroughly examined. Related to student learning are issues of assessment. How do teachers assign grades? What do employers look for, and how do they recognize it in students?

Lastly, several empirical issues focused on the current context of schooling. Demographic change has greatly influenced this context. The increase in White families moving from cities to the suburbs, private schools, and home schooling have also increased minority concentration in many public schools. Sociologists need to better understand this process and its effects. In addition, future research should focus on the relationship between individualism and the role of the family in schooling. In other words, how does heightened individualism affect students' interactions with the family and the school? How can understanding the context of schooling help scholars to transfer what they know about school reform from one setting to another? Specifically, what kinds of goal conflicts between actors in various contexts prevent or encourage reforms?

 

Measurement

 

In the last broad category, measurement, participants raised several issues. Related to many of the theoretical and empirical issues, the problem of how to measure learning was central. Learning in college is a particularly under-researched area. Also, once sociologists have begun to define theoretically what kinds of learning are important for later life outcomes, scholars must develop a method to measure such learning. In addition to learning as aptitude, scholars need more research on how to measure social learning and, in particular, how to measure school as a socializing agent. Two suggestions were made related to the intergenerational transmission of education and occupation. First, sociologists must focus more energy on finding useful measures of social and cultural capital. Second, they must develop more detailed measurements of educational attainment and occupations in order to better understand the processes of social reproduction.

 

A Note from The Spencer Foundation

 

The Spencer Foundation sponsors occasional conferences to stimulate research on important issues in education. We thank Michael Hout, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, and Felice Levine for helping organize this conference, Michael and Pam for their role in preparing this report, and the individuals who participated (see attached listing) for their good work and contributions. We hope that interested researchers will find the theoretical, methodological, and topical issues raised at the conference thought-provoking. The Spencer Foundation welcomes well-designed research proposals on the issues and ideas discussed in this report.