role of social foundations in education school prestige, The

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bredo, Eric

Based on the fact that that all but one of these correlations are positive, it seems that there is a tendency to evaluate an education school positively if one views at least some of its specific programs as relatively good.

A more surprising finding is that the best predictor of an education school's overall rank is the rank of its Social/Philosophical Foundations program. This is closely followed by the rank of its Educational Psychology program, which is perhaps less surprising. Other programs, such as Curriculum and Instruction, Administration and Supervision, Higher Education, and Elementary Education round out the list of those that are quite strongly related (predictively) to education school rank. Secondary Education and Vocational Technical Education are more weakly related to overall education school prestige, the Vocational Technical score being based on a very small number of schools (7), while Counselor Education and Special Education programs are even more weakly related (positively or negatively), indicating that "good" programs in these areas may appear in education schools of virtually any rank in this group of top schools.

Why should Social Foundations and Educational Psychology be more strongly related to education school prestige than other subject areas? Here one might begin to speculate that this is because they are relatively high prestige fields that are closely aligned with the arts and science disciplines. Appearing to do well in these high status fields may serve to convey some of the luster of scholarly status on an education school.

An alternative hypothesis, however, is that Social Foundations and Educational Psychology are related to education school prestige simply because high status programs and high status education schools occur on high status college campuses. The positive relationship between status in these program areas and overall education school status may be spurious, in other words, being due to the fact that high status campuses have both high status programs in these areas and high status education schools. Clearly, it is important to investigate the independent influence of these variables, putting them all into one equation. But before moving to this more complex analysis it may be useful to first consider the simple (zero order) relationship between college prestige and education school prestige to see if there is in fact any relationship between the two. In doing so we will in effect be asking whether the more generalized status (overall college prestige) affects (or, more accurately, predicts) the status of one of its components, the education school.

College Prestige and Education School Prestige

Is education school prestige due to a "halo" effect of being part of a high prestige college or university?2

Inspecting the schools for which a rank was reported, college prestige does indeed turn out to be a fairly good predictor of education school prestige. The zeroorder correlation between college prestige and education school prestige is r=.57, indicating a fairly strong linear relationship between the two. Without taking other factors into account, college prestige allows one to predict 33 percent of the variance in education school prestige (r). There is some evidence, therefore, that education school prestige may be based on a "hasty generalization" or halo effect deriving from the overall prestige of the college in which the education school or department is placed. If an education school is part of a "good" college, perhaps respondents assume the education school must be good as well.