Research in the Sociology of Education – serie

One of the most seductive topics in recent years is the field of social capital - the webs of trust, mutual obligation, and cultural knowledge that flow through local information - that yield resources in human-scale associations of individuals. When we ask about the implications for children's learning and performance in the school institution, however, the construct quickly becomes slippery to hold. The 2001 volume provides five papers that offer empirical evidence on the nature and life of social capital across diverse ethnic groups and cultural settings. These fresh studies delve into the resources embedded in Latino and Asian-American peer groups, how immigrant parents' networks and norms variably push their children to achieve in school, and how teenagers' involvement in ethnic-rooted churches contribute social capital. The volume includes three commentaries, authored by David Baker, Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, and Raymond Wong, and a review chapter by the editors.

Most societies place great faith in the modern school's power to offer children a more prosperous future, from better jobs to wider social opportunities. In turn, political leaders around the world push to expand western forms of schooling, creating more slots for children, from preschool through university levels. Yet despite this remarkable institutional change, are societies becoming equitable, especially for those groups living on the margins of civil society? Why, in too many cases, has schooling failed to deliver on its promise of reducing economic and social disparities? This volume addresses these questions, taking the reader into a variety of nations and cultural settings. With studies from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, the volume illuminates how schools can reduce or reinforce the layered stratification of society, even in nations with non-western traditions. The contributors, diverse in their own origins and viewpoints, advance our understanding of stratification by highlighting how a nation's history, particular institutions, and cultural context shape the school's efficiency as an agent of equity. The chapters move beyond individual conceptions of attainment and distinguish near-universal versus country-specific mechanisms that characterize the interplay between school expansion and inequality. It shows how schools can reduce or reinforce the layered stratification of society, even in nations with non-western traditions.

In recent decades, sociological research has investigated the nature of the school institution and its uneven effects on the progress of families, societies, and the global community. Yet, relatively little comparative research on schooling has dealt in a serious way with links between schooling and the other major contexts of childhood: families and communities. This edition of "Research in the Sociology of Education" speaks to the diverse contexts in which children function around the world, and to how these contexts shape school experiences and outcomes. The edition's authors are international and interdisciplinary. They offer a pastiche of perspectives on a single topic: how the non-school contexts of childhood interact with the school institution to advance modern and not-so-modern forms of virtue, merit, and attainment, in cultural context. This book offers qualitative and statistical portraits of children living in Asian and African countries. It links educational opportunities to the child's socialization. It urges social scientists and policy makers to consider a child's surroundings when modeling the modern school system. This book series is available electronically online.

The book examines the effects of education in creating global citizens who share a world culture. This occurs within an international system that still remains decentralized, composed of independent nation-states as major actors. Prof. Kamens argues that as globalization intensifies, this system of nation-states becomes more saturated and dense with structure. Intensified globalization has produced a world society, thanks to the spread of global capitalism, education, democracy and bureaucracy. The upshot is that world culture travels quickly and produces 'recipes' for the development of an 'imagined community' that has increasing commonalities across societies. The book examines the role of education in diffusing such attitudes and models, as global citizens confront national institutions.

Contributions come from authors spread around the globe, illuminating how the efficacy and ideologies of schooling variably unfold in differing national and historical contexts. Written by sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and cultural critics, this journal offers lively and accessible empirical work to a broad audience.

Research in the Sociology of Education is an important and established series, highlighting how societal contexts shape the educational experiences and outcomes of individual children and youth. Including five single-country studies from settings as diverse as rural China, Germany and the United States, as well as two cross-national comparative studies, this insightful new volume continues the series tradition for publishing research from across a broad range of settings. It demonstrates that various educational issues (including student victimization at school, immigrant-native gaps in educational aspiration, and STEM outcomes) are not limited to specific societies but are relevant worldwide. By exploring national and regional situations and then placing them within this broader context, readers are able to see both the commonality and uniqueness of educational issues around the globe.

Civic leaders around the globe now press educators to raise the performance of students and schools. Backed by a colorful array of odd bedfellows - from corporate interests to advocates for the poor - politicians seek to narrow the aims of learning, advance routine curricular packages, and tightly align standardized tests. Why are governments pushing to centrally regulate teaching and learning at this historical moment? Do these accountability mechanisms succeed in boosting student achievement? How are teachers responding to top-down rules, incentives, and the recasting of what knowledge counts inside school? These are the hotly contested ideological and empirical questions asked by this volume's contributors, a rich mix of sociologists, applied anthropologists, and education researchers. As public schools struggle to regain public confidence, political actors eagerly try to look strong and forceful. But do centralized accountability policies lift the motivation of teachers and students? Or, is this reform strategy a brilliant political remedy - but one that makes little difference inside the classroom.