Sociology Quiz 7

What are Manifest functions?

Socialization Transmission of culture Social control Social placement Cultural innovation

What are Latent functions?

Courtship Social networks Group work Creation of generation gap Political and social integration

How is education defined?

Education is a social institution through which a society's children are taught basic academic knowledge, learning skills, and cultural norms.

How do functionalists view education?

Functionalists view education as one of the more important social institutions in a society.

Feminists?

Like many other institutions of society, educational systems are characterized by unequal treatment and opportunity for women. Feminist theory seeks to promote women's rights to equal education (and its resultant benefits) across the world.

What is No Child Left Behind?

No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to test students in designated grades. The results of those tests determine eligibility to receive federal funding. Schools that do not meet the standards set by the Act run the risk of having their funding cut.

How do social factors influence education in the US?

Researchers noted that educational resources, including money and quality teachers, are not distributed equitably in the United States. In the top-ranking countries, limited access to resources did not necessarily predict low performance.

What is the current US ranking on science and math?

Students in the United States had fallen from fifteenth to twenty-fifth in the rankings for science and math

What was the Brown v Board case?

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.

Conflict theorists?

Conflict theorists do not believe that public schools reduce social inequality. They believe that the educational system reinforces and perpetuates social inequalities that arise from differences in class, gender, race, and ethnicity. To them, educational systems preserve the status quo and push people of lower status into obedience.

Tracking?

Conflict theorists point to tracking, a formalized sorting system that places students on "tracks" that perpetuate inequalities. While educators may believe that students do better in tracked classes because they are with students of similar ability and may have access to more individual attention from teachers, conflict theorists feel that tracking leads to self-fulfilling prophecies in which students live up (or down) to teacher and societal expectations.

What is credentialism?

Credentialism embodies the emphasis on certificates or degrees to show that a person has a certain skill, has attained a certain level of education, or has met certain job qualifications. These certificates or degrees serve as a symbol of what a person has achieved, and allows the labeling of that individual.

What is cultural capital?

Cultural capital, or cultural knowledge that serves as currency that helps us navigate a culture, alters the experiences and opportunities available to French students from different social classes. Members of the upper and middle classes have more cultural capital than do families of lower-class status.

What is formal education? Informal education? What is cultural transmission?

Formal education describes the learning of academic facts and concepts through a formal curriculum. Informal education describes learning about cultural values, norms, and expected behaviors by participating in a society. Cultural transmission refers to the way people come to learn the values, beliefs, and social norms of their culture.

What is the issue with charter schools? Pros? Cons?

Money as Motivation Public school teachers typically find stability, comprehensive benefits packages, and long-term job security. The school faces the challenge faced by schools all over the United States: getting poor, disadvantaged students to perform at the same level as their more affluent counterparts. Of course, with the high salary comes high risk. Most public schools offer contracts to teachers. Those contracts guarantee job security.

Hidden curriculum?

Refers to the type of nonacademic knowledge that students learn through informal learning and cultural transmission

Symbolic interactionists?

Symbolic interactionism sees education as one way that labeling theory is seen in action. One might say that this labeling has a direct correlation to those who are in power and those who are labeled. For example, low standardized test scores or poor performance in a particular class often lead to a student who is labeled as a low achiever.

What is the head start program?

The federal Head Start program, which is still active and successful today, was developed to give lowincome students an opportunity to make up the preschool deficit discussed in Coleman's findings.

What was the Mills v Board case?

This case was brought on the behalf of seven school-age children with special needs who argued that the school board was denying their access to free public education. The board argued that the cost of educating these children would be too expensive and that the children would therefore have to remain at home without access to education.

What does universal access refer to?

This term refers to people's equal ability to participate in an education system. On a world level, access might be more difficult for certain groups based on class or gender.

Please be familiar with the education system in Finland.

Yet over the past decade Finland has consistently performed among the top nations on the PISA. Finland's school children didn't always excel. Finland built its excellent, efficient, and equitable educational system in a few decades from scratch, and the concept guiding almost every educational reform has been equity.