Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-1994

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Sociology

Major Professor

Thomas C. Hood

Committee Members

Michael Betz, John Gaventa, Karl Jost

Abstract

The move to improve education through choice provides the most recent impetus for debate about the structure and function of education, and about the feasibility of the current direction in educational reform. On the one hand, the debate is centered around the failure of education as an outcome of the monopolistic structure that has historically characterized this society's educational system--failure due to a lack of competition and market forces in education. On the other hand, the problems confronting education are said to stem from the inadequate resources and the unequal distribution of those resources that are available--infusing choice will only exacerbate existing socio-economic inequities.

Before society can resolve its decade-long struggle to reform education, before it can transcend the current educational crisis, before it can successfully move, educationally, into the next century, key policy makers must address substantive issues about the structure and purpose of education. They must examine what choice promotes and who is being served by choice.

The time has come to step back and examine the process by which those involved in educational policy make sense of an educational system guided by choice. This research creates a paradigmatic synthesis of the works that comprise the theory and substance of education as a sociological phenomenon. Supported by this synthesis, and recognizing that as one this of society's principal institutions, education is critical to the maintenance of the social order, this treatise explores the socio-political and economic dynamics inherent to the emergence of choice, inherent to the understanding of what choice promotes. It explores a single occurrence of choice to determine who is being served by choice.

This preliminary exploration concludes that choice is about school improvement, about how to produce results that will satisfy stakeholders, and about how to gather and maintain the commitments and resources needed to sustain the educational system in the pursuit of its purpose. Choice is also about values, identity, and freedom, about who will control the educational agenda, about what that agenda promotes, about who, as participants in that agenda, will lead this nation into the next century.

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