This book reviews the educational experience of the 1960s and 1970s and to suggest ways of approaching major contemporary themes such as equality, accountability and standards. The author underlines a nineteenth and twentieth-century sociological tradition in analysing education and covers a range of educational themes including aspects of schooling and higher education, education as social policy, knowledge as power, and teaching and adolescence. He draws on the social history of many of the processes, concepts and debates. Parts of the book derive from research into the history and contemporary forms of these problems in the USA. The volume therefore illuminates important contemporary issues in education and society by using historical, sociological and comparative insights.

Education forms a unique dimension of social status, with qualities that make it especially important to health. It influences health in ways that are varied, present at all stages of adult life, cumulative, self-amplifying, and uniformly positive. Educational attainment marks social status at the beginning of adulthood, functioning as the main bridge between the status of one generation and the next, and also as the main avenue of upward mobility. It precedes the other acquired social statuses and substantially influences them, including occupational status, earnings, and personal and household income and wealth. Education creates desirable outcomes because it trains individuals to acquire, evaluate, and use information. It teaches individuals to tap the power of knowledge. Education develops the learned effectiveness that enables self-direction toward any and all values sought, including health. For decades American health sciences has acted as if social status had little bearing on health. The ascendance of clinical medicine within a culture of individualism probably accounts for that omission. But research on chronic diseases over the last half of the twentieth century forced science to think differently about the causes of disease. Despite the institutional and cultural forces focusing medical research on distinctive proximate causes of specific diseases, researchers were forced to look over their shoulders, back toward more distant causes of many diseases. Some fully turned their orientation toward the social status of health, looking for the origins of that cascade of disease and disability flowing daily through clinics. Why is it that people with higher socioeconomic status have better health than lower status individuals? The authors, who are well recognized for their strength in survey research on a broad national scale, draw on findings and ideas from many sciences, including demography, economics, social psychology, and the health sciences. People who are well educated feel in control of their lives, which encourages and enables a healthy lifestyle. In addition, learned effectiveness, a practical end of that education, enables them to find work that is autonomous and creative, thereby promoting good health.

This book reviews the educational experience of the 1960s and 1970s and to suggest ways of approaching major contemporary themes such as equality, accountability and standards. The author underlines a nineteenth and twentieth-century sociological tradition in analysing education and covers a range of educational themes including aspects of schooling and higher education, education as social policy, knowledge as power, and teaching and adolescence. He draws on the social history of many of the processes, concepts and debates. Parts of the book derive from research into the history and contemporary forms of these problems in the USA. The volume therefore illuminates important contemporary issues in education and society by using historical, sociological and comparative insights.

In the first edition of this book published in 1988, Shirley Engle and I offered a broader and more democratic curriculum as an alternative to the persistent back-to-the-basics rhetoric of the ‘70s and ‘80s. This curriculum urged attention to democratic practices and curricula in the school if we wanted to improve the quality of citizen participation and strengthen this democracy. School practices during that period reflected a much lower priority for social studies. Fewer social studies offerings, fewer credits required for graduation and in many cases, the job descriptions of social studies curriculum coordinators were transformed by changing their roles to general curriculum consultants. The mentality that prevailed in the nation’s schools was “back to the basics” and the basics never included or even considered the importance of heightening the education of citizens. We certainly agree that citizens must be able to read, write and calculate but these abilities are not sufficient for effective citizenship in a democracy. This version of the original work appears at a time when young citizens, teachers and schools find themselves deluged by a proliferation of curriculum standards and concomitant mandatory testing. In the ‘90s, virtually all subject areas including United States history, geography, economic and civics developed curriculum standards, many funded by the federal government. Subsequently, the National Council for the Social Studies issued the Social Studies Curriculum Standards that received no federal support. Accountability, captured in the No Child Left Behind Act passed by Congress, has become a powerful, political imperative that has a substantial and disturbing influence on the curriculum, teaching and learning in the first decade of the 21st century.

Are socioeconomic inequalities in education declining? Is socioeconomic background becoming less important for people’s occupational class or status? How important is cognitive ability for education and later occupational outcomes? How do countries differ in the importance of socioeconomic background for education and work? Gary N. Marks argues that in western industrialized countries, pervasive views that socioeconomic background (or class background) has strong and unchanging relationships with education and later socioeconomic outcomes, resistant to policy and social change, are unfounded. Marks provides a large amount of evidence from many countries showing that the influence of socioeconomic background for education is moderate and most often declining, and socioeconomic background has only very weak impacts on adults’ occupation and earnings after taking into account education and cognitive ability. Furthermore, Marks shows that cognitive ability is a more powerful influence than socioeconomic background for educational outcomes, and that in addition to its indirect effects through education has a direct effect on occupation and earnings. Its effects cannot be dismissed as simply another aspect of socioeconomic background, nor do the usual criticisms of ‘cognitive ability’ apply. The declining effects for socioeconomic background and the importance of cognitive ability support several of the contentions of modernization theory. The book contributes to a variety of debates within sociology: quantitative and qualitative approaches, explanatory and non-explanatory theory, the relationship between theory and empirical research, the role of political ideology in research, sociology as a social science, and sociology’s contribution to knowledge about contemporary societies. It will appeal to professionals in the fields of education and sociology as well as postgraduate students and academics involved in the debate.

Teaching in Context provides new evidence from a range of leading scholars showing that teachers become more effective when they work in organizations that support them in comprehensive and coordinated ways. The studies featured in the book suggest an alternative approach to enhancing teacher quality: creating conditions and school structures that facilitate the transmission and sharing of knowledge among teachers, allowing teachers to work together effectively, and capitalizing on what we know about how educators learn and improve. The chapters in this book point to the need to reevaluate current policies for assessing and ensuring teacher effectiveness, and establish the foundation for a more thoughtful, research-informed approach. "What a wonderful collection of diverse voices in this book, all sounding a similar message. Successful schools encourage and support purposeful collaboration among adults and they focus on students. In these schools, teachers feel more rewarded for their efforts and students learn more. Practitioners and researchers understand these findings. Now, let's build education policies that enable them." --John Q. Easton, vice president of programs, Spencer Foundation "Teaching in Context is a call to action--one to which Esther Quintero and her colleagues invite us to imagine, build, nurture, and protect a profession and culture fueled by supportive networks that produce more trust and less churn." --Ralph R. Smith, managing director, Campaign for Grade-Level Reading Esther Quintero is a senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute. Andy Hargreaves is the Brennan Chair in Education at Boston College.