Our current educational environment is subject to persistent calls for accountability, evidence-based practice, and data use for improvement, which largely take the form of performance metrics (PMs). This rapid proliferation of PMs has profoundly influenced the ways in which scholars and practitioners think about their own practices and the larger…

Reviews C.A. Bowers's book, "The Promise of Theory: Education and the Politics of Cultural Change." Summarizes Bowers's central arguments concerning modernity, the relation of schooled knowledge to the nature of all cultural knowledge, and usefulness of the sociology of knowledge to improving instruction. (KH)

Reviews Sara Delamont's "Knowledgeable Women: Structuralism and the Reproduction of Elites" (1989), a feminist examination of the education of elite women which provides many insights into how gender and class operate within the dominant classes. (DM)

Reviews books considered to advance methodological and conceptual issues pertinent to comparative and historical educational research. (Author/DB)

Replies to a review of another article he wrote which presented a framework for the sociological analysis of special education. Clarifies the distinction between substantialist and contractualist ideologies, and argues that the latter is the basis for special education differentiation. Rebuts the allegation that Marxist sociology has been…

Identifies common points in recent research reports on undergraduate liberal arts education and relates them to traditions in the history of education. Concludes that the recommendations of these reports contain important and basic contradictions. (FMW)

Examines and assesses Marxist debates over schooling and societal reproduction. Argues that, if Marxists insist on using functional analysis to explain schools in capitalist society, the accuracy of these explanations must be empirically assessed. (FMW)

Presents a structural framework for the sociological analysis of special education. Describes special education as one of the ways in which schools perform their reproductive task by differentiating children and allocating them to different educational treatments. Employs the framework to analyze the different histories of special education in…

Reviews an article by James G. Carrier on a social control theory of special education. Argues that Carrier ignores empirical data, and that special education programs in the United States develop cyclically, in response to specific social pressures--not, as Carrier contends, in response to a generalized movement toward a contractualist society.…

G. S. Counts' (1889-1974) perspective on education is more relevant today than a brief review of his controversial pamphlet "Dare the School Build a New Social Order?" suggests. Counts emphasized the broad social responsibility of the educator and the need for broad preparation in education as a social study. (SLD)