Sociologists have a predilection for the collective. We are centrally concerned with social facts, characteristics of collectivities that give shape and motivation to individual action. Sociological research on schooling shares this interest in the collective. School resources, composition, climate, leadership, and governance, all collective attributes of schools, are often looked to as sources of influence on the outcomes of schooling for individual students.Yet the study of school organization is marked more by failure than by success. It is especially significant that the most important contribution by sociologists to research on schooling-the famous Coleman Report of 1966-is also the most spectacular failure to connect the collective with the individual in an educational setting. Variation in school conditions was largely unrelated to differences in student outcomes, as school-level effects were dwarfed by the powerful influence of the home environment for student learning. Though policymakers drew implications from the positive impact on learning of the proportion of White students in a school, the effect of racial composition was small compared to the great importance of individual family background factors. This pattern of results, emphasizing the individual over

This study is part of a 5-year professional development intervention aimed at improving science and literacy achievement of English language learners (or ELL students) in urban elementary schools within an environment increasingly driven by high-stakes testing and accountability. Specifically, the study examined science achievement at the end of the first-year implementation of the professional development intervention that consisted of curriculum units and teacher workshops. The study involved 1,134 third-grade students at seven treatment schools and 966 third-grade students at eight comparison schools. The results led to three main findings. First, treatment students displayed a statistically significant increase in science achievement. Second, there was no statistically significant difference in achievement gains between students at English to Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) levels 1 to 4 and students who had exited from ESOL or never been in ESOL. Similarly, there was no significant difference in achievement gains between students who had been retained on the basis of statewide reading test scores and students who had never been retained. Third, treatment students showed a higher score on a statewide mathematics test, particularly on the measurement strand emphasized in the intervention, than comparison students. The results indicate that through our professional development intervention, ELL students and others in the intervention learned to think and reason scientifically while also performing well on high-stakes testing. ß

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract