role of social foundations in education school prestige, The

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bredo, Eric

Other data may bear on the question, however. Suppose that education schools "make a living" in different ways as one moves up the hierarchy of institutions. Lower ranked schools may specialize in different fields than higher ranked schools. The former may specialize in fields like counselor education, vocational education, or teacher education, producing professionals in these areas, while higher ranked schools may be in the business of producing academics who will teach in more discipline-based areas in education, such as Social/Philosophical Foundations or Educational Psychology. If we find that education schools tend to become specialized in this way as one works up their ranks, then producing scholars in Social/ Philosophical Foundations or Educational Psychology becomes the principal "business" of the higher status education schools, suggesting that Social/Philosophical foundations is not a mere "luxury" investment engaged in by wealthy schools but a central part of what they do for a living.

To investigate this hypothesis, the thirty top education schools were divided into four tiers. Tiers were determined by taking the first five education schools (Harvard to UCLA) as the top tier (labeled "tier 4" to make the graph go up as tier status goes up). The next six schools (Vanderbilt to Pennsylvania) were selected as tier 3. After that the next eight (NYU to UVA) became tier 2, and finally the bottom eleven schools in this group of top-thirty schools (Northwestern to Washington) were considered to be tier I (See Table 4). Determining the break points between these different tiers was admittedly a matter of judgment, the only hard and fast criterion being that the tiers would become larger as one goes down the hierarchy.

In order to find the areas of strength of the schools in each tier, the average rank achieved in each program area by all of the schools in a tier was determined. Program areas that were not given a rank by US News, presumably because the school did not fall within the top 30 or had no program in the area, were given a score of 30. Thus not having a program with a numerical rank dragged the score of the schools in a tier down, although perhaps not as much as it should have since the "real" rank could have been lower than 30. Averaging the scores by program area for the institutions in a tier shows differences in the areas of excellence of institutions in each tier. It also shows the degree that institutions in a tier specialize, having strengths in some fields and weaknesses in others, or more or less equivalent strengths across a variety of fields (Figure 1).

Figure I shows that schools in the highest tier in this top group of 30 top schools (tier 4) are more specialized in their areas of excellence than the lower tier schools, as indicated by the diverging lines to the right of the diagram. Top tier schools tend to be good in academic areas, such as Social Foundations, Educational Psychology, and Higher Education, while being less competitive in areas like Counselor Education, Vo/Tech Education, and Special Education. Tier three schools (one down from the top, shown by the dots just to the left of the top tier schools) tend to be good at Elementary Education, Social Foundations, Curriculum and Instruction, Secondary Education, and Educational Psychology, although there is less "spread" in their areas of excellence. Second tier schools (three down from the top) have their greatest areas of excellence in Elementary Education, Special Education, Secondary Education, and Counselor Education, while doing less well in Social Foundations and Educational Psychology. If one omits Vocational/Technical education (the jagged line at the top), which is based on an extremely small set of schools, then there is even less spread in areas of excellence in this set of schools than in tier 3. Finally, the lowest first tier schools on the left side of the graph also have relatively great homogeneity with respect to areas of strength, although they retain strengths in Counselor Education and Special Education.