Write an essay proposal on the social foundations of education.

Write an essay proposal on the social foundations of education. The proposal should be brief, a few paragraphs saying what you plan to write about, the arguments you want to make, and why they are important. In addition to those paragraphs, indicate the assigned readings, lectures, and PowerPoint presentations you plan to use. List at least ten sources from class, and indicate how you think they relate to your planned paper.

Here are some questions you can use to write about:
1. A prominent educator says, critics and observers [of education] raisesignificant issues when they remind us, first of all, that knowledge is ordinarily distributed unequally in existing schools. In the ongoing processes of cultural reproduction, we are told, only a relatively few are likely to benefit from the encouragement of free rational judgment. Most students will be trained to take their allotted roles in a stratified society. The languages they speak and their cultural experiences will be consistently disconfirmed: they will be taught that they are in important ways inferior, ineffectual, and powerless. (Maxine Greene, How We Think about Our Craft, Teacher College Record, 86, no. 2: 63-64)
Drawing upon readings, lectures, and discussions, evaluate the accuracy of Greenes description of schooling in America. (In your description, feel free to criticize the perspectives offered in my lectures.) Argue both for your conception of democracy and any educational approaches you recommend. Do the changes in educational policy and practice associated with A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind make the things Greene describes better or worse?

2. Discuss the argument made in readings and lectures that schools have been used drive a wedge between parents and their children and to alienate teachers from the mothers of their students and from the communities in which they teach. If these arguments are correct, do ANR, NCLB, and Floridas A+ program help mothers and teachers build a fruitful alliance or drive them farther apart?

3. Throughout the term, I have criticized arguments that schooling can end poverty and solve a host of social problems. Develop this argument using lectures, readings, and discussions. Contrast arguments that poverty results from individual shortcomings and that schooling can overcome those shortcomings to arguments that advocate direct intervention in US economy, as occurred in the New Deal. Take a position on whether education can end poverty.

4. Kliebard contrasts Deweys philosophy of education with that of the advocates of scientific management and efficiency. Develop Kliebards arguments and evaluate them. Use his analysis to examine current educational policy, say NCLB.