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Chapter 5 |
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Chapter Five: Structural and Organizational Issues in Schools, focuses on classrooms and schools as places for true democracy. A democracy imagined by Dewey and others as a liberatory practice, offers equal educational opportunities for all students. Unfortunately, many of the students in U.S. schools are not given the opportunity to see themselves as equal citizens due to educational structures that limit their potential. These structural and organizational issues include tracking, retention, standardized testing, curriculum, pedagogy, climate and physical structures, disciplinary policies, limited roles of teachers and limited family and community involvement. In this chapter, the reader will examine each structure and relate it to the multicultural agenda of comprehensive school reform. While this chapter does place emphasis on institutional causes of educational inequities, Nieto and Bode urge the reader to keep societal issues such as government policies and school financing in mind because they too are "all implicated in school failure."
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