role of social foundations in education school prestige, The

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bredo, Eric

The present study extends some of these considerations in a study of the bases of status among organizations rather than individuals. It considers how information at different levels of generality is combined to reach judgments about education school prestige. How does one evaluate the overall "quality" of a particular school? Should one infer it on the basis of the perceived quality of specific departments or programs within the school? Should one make an inference based on the overall quality or rank of the college or university of which the school is a part? Or should one combine this information in some way? This study will describe how US News' evaluators have done the job, leaving the normative issue of how one should do it unanswered.

Data from USNews' web-site were used to investigate the sources ofeducation school prestige (USNews, 2000a). The data include the overall rank of the college or university in which an education school is located, the rank of its education school itself, and the rank of different programs within the education school. Since US News reports only the ranks of the top twenty to forty schools and programs across the country, the "sample" size is small, although one should recall that these schools constitute the entire universe of tope schools in the country. Some data are also missing since some schools do not have a program in a given area or some programs in a given school have a level of prestige that was too low to receive a numerical rank. Nevertheless, there are an adequate number of cases to perform an elementary analysis.

Other ambiguities concern the way US News has labeled or categorized programs. In order to compare programs a standardized set of terms for various program areas has been used, such as "Social/Philosophical Foundations," "Administration/Supervision," or "Vocational/Technical Education." The programs in a given education school may not directly correspond to these categories, such as programs in "policy studies," which are at times virtually indistinguishable from "social foundations" programs and in other cases quite different, or programs in "adult education" that may be quite different from the run of those in "vocational/technical education." Given the lack of standardization, apples and oranges are clearly being compared in some cases. Yet one can argue that there is enough similarity to make some rough judgments. At the very least, as will shortly become evident, the data show some interesting and apparently robust patterns.

Program Prestige and Education School Prestige

Consider, first, the contribution of the status ofa particular program or task area to overall education school status. To what degree do the evaluators of education schools generalize from the perceived quality of specific programs to the perceived quality of the education school as a whole? If they do so, which programs contribute the most to the evaluation of the education school? One can begin to investigate this issue by looking at zero-order correlations between education school prestige and the prestige of different program areas within them (Table 1).