role of social foundations in education school prestige, The

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by Bredo, Eric

The point of this diagram is that it shows that the higher ranked schools (tiers 3 and 4) do not offer Social Philosophical Foundations and Educational Psychology as luxuries to top off their strengths in other areas. Rather these are their areas of strength (including, to a lesser degree, Higher Education).

The implication is that school status and program status are related in a complex, interactive way. If one compares the areas of strength of the highest tier institutions with those of the lowest tier institutions, one begins to get a picture of the nature of the status hierarchy of education schools, which seems to be based on the status of the jobs for which the graduates of a school are being prepared. For instance, the top schools generally do not do Vocational/Technical Education. They also do not offer or excel in Special Education or Counselor Education. Instead, they train future scholars and academics, as well as university administrators, policy makers, and the like. The lowest ranked schools are better at Counselor Education, Special Education and Elementary Education, while neglecting Higher Education, Educational Administration, and Social Foundations. Even lower rank schools would place even more of their emphasis on educating teachers. Thus there is a qualitative change in the nature of the market in which education schools at different ranks participate. For some schools in the top (fourth) tier, for example, Social Foundations (e.g., philosophy of education, history of education, sociology of education, anthropology of education, etc.) accounts for a third or more of their faculty. Far from being a marginal "luxury," it is one of the principal components of the education school, usually sharing this status with educational psychology. Thus, Social Foundations status and education school status seem to be related in a more complex way than is implied in the notion that high education school status allows one to attain high program status in these areas. Becoming able to compete in areas like Social Foundations, Educational Psychology and other areas that educate for scholarly and administrative positions in higher education is pretty much what it means to be a high status education school.

Conclusions

The research reported here is an initial look at these issues using a small group of top institutions and scores that may turn out to be unstable. Clearly the issues should be investigated in more depth as more data become available and the arguments sharpened. I hope this study is at least provocative of further thought about the nature and causes of status relations among education schools.

The most stunning result of the study is the strong and robust relationship between the status of a Social/Philosophical Foundations program and the overall status of its education school. Social Foundations status is the single strongest predictor of education school status, followed by Educational Psychology. Including college status in the analysis does not substantially reduce the predictive power of Social Foundations or Educational Psychology. Both remain strong independent predictors of an education school's status.