| A Nation at Risk | a 1983 report by the Presidential Commission on Excellence in Education; declared the United States "at risk" in the competitive world marketplace and compared the educational system of the nation to an "act of war" by a foreign power; received a great deal of publicity and launched public dialogue on school reform lasting almost two decades.
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| America 2000: An Education Strategy | a set of far-reaching goals for public education to have been reached by the year 2000; instituted by the first Bush administration and continued in the Clinton administration as Goals 2000.
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| antiracist education | an educational approach preferred by some people to multicultural education because it emphasizes the importance of combating racist ideology through educational processes.
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| assimilation | the process in which an individual or group is absorbed into a new social context through a process of acculturation that results in the individual or group's original culture being replaced by the new culture.
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| Athenian citizenship | in classical Athens the status granted to Athenian-born males not of the slave or the metic class; a status that granted civil liberties as well as the right to participate in the governance of Athens.
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| Athenian slavery | an institution of bondage and servitude to Athenian citizens that was an important part of the political and economic system on which Athenian democracy was built.
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| Beecher, Catharine (1800–1878) | an advocate of women's education who remained prominent through most of the 19th century and who argued that women's education should develop their intellectual capacities for better execution of responsibilities in the woman's sphere.
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| bilingual/bicultural education | any of several approaches to teaching through the use of native languages and cultures with the aim of achieving proficiency in both languages and cultures.
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| Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge | a bill for the public funding of locally controlled schools that Thomas Jefferson twice tried to push through the Virginia legislature (1779 and 1817) but which failed to pass.
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| Black Codes | after Reconstruction, local laws passed throughout the South that restricted African Americans' civil and political rights.
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| Black English Vernacular | linguists' term for the grammatical and phonemic variant of English used today in many African American communities; its origins lie in slaves' success in developing a common language from an amalgam of different African languages and English.
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| boarding schools | schools designed to house and teach children away from their home communities. Especially problematic for Native American children because boarding schools were used to replace native culture and language with European culture.
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| bourgeoisie | originally, European city dwellers who were members of the new middle class that emerged after the breakdown of feudalism; neither nobility nor serfs nor clergy, they were part of the new classes that formed as a result of capitalism and commerce.
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| Brown v. Board of Education | Supreme Court case of 1954 in which the Court ruled that racially segregated schools are, by definition, unequal in terms of the educational experiences they provide.
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| Bureau of Ethnology | a bureau of social science active during the New Deal; used experts to create a greater awareness of tribal cultural and potential cultural obstacles to administration.
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| Bureau of Indian Affairs | an agency of the Department of the Interior charged with the administration of American Indian lands and goods.
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| capitalism | the "free market" economic system in which money and credit are exchanged for goods and services according to the laws of supply and demand in an attempt not only to make a living but also to secure financial profits that can be invested to generate further income and wealth; although known as a "free market" system, capitalism can be regulated heavily by governments.
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| career education | a term popularized in the early 1970s to break down the distinction between vocational and general or liberal education by asserting that all forms of education are preparation for careers of some kind; the idea failed to obscure the reality that vocational education is preparation for specific occupations and liberal education is education for more general intellectual development.
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| career ladders | in the context of school reform and reform of the teaching profession, the effort since the 1980s to find ways for teachers to advance in status, rewards, and responsibility without leaving the classroom to go into administration.
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| character education | the effort to shape young people's moral and ethical dimensions; took different forms in different historical periods; grounded in religious instruction in the 17th and 18th centuries; more secular and nonsectarian in the common-school era and increasingly secular thereafter.
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| charter schools | an idea popularized in the 1990s to encourage teachers, parents, and others to develop new approaches to schools and obtain from the state a "charter," or a contract permitting a school to depart from certain state regulations to create an innovative schooling environment.
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| Cherokee Nation v. Georgia | 19th-century Supreme Court case that, with leadership from Justice John Marshall, established the doctrine of Native peoples as "domestic dependent wards" of the federal government.
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| civic freedom | in Aristotle's formulation, the aspect of liberty that emphasizes limitations on the government's power to interfere with the right of the individual to live as he or she chooses; the basis of the notion of civil liberties and civil rights today.
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| classical liberal | historians' term for an array of beliefs and values that emerged in about the 16th century after the breakdown of feudalism, emphasizing individual rights and liberties, social progress, human reason, and scientific inquiry; "classical" denotes links to classical Athenian roots and differentiates it from the "modern" liberalism of 20th century.
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| college education of women | historically restricted to males, college level education of women began to be more common in the 19th century as women's colleges were founded, of which several exist today, though some have merged with historically male colleges; most women throughout the 20th century were educated in coeducational institutions, though for most of the century women's professional options were concentrated in teaching, nursing, social work, and other female-dominated occupations.
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| colonial education of women | generally available only to middle-class White girls and women, usually provided at home by parents and tutors, and often justified by the need for women to be able to read the Bible and teach their sons.
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| community college | a two-year college developed to provide local postsecondary education, largely for vocational purposes but also equipping some students to transfer to four-year institutions.
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| community control | emphasis on community democratic decision making in contrast to state or federal government control of social and educational programs.
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| conservative | an orientation to social policies and practices that seeks to preserve the existing social arrangements and hierarchies or even return to those of the past rather than seek social change toward an envisioned future state of affairs.
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| consumerism | a learned response to an advertising-laden, typically capitalist culture in which people are induced to believe that satisfaction can be found in purchasing goods and services.
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| containment | U.S. foreign policy that used multiple strategies (military, economic, and political) to keep communism and socialism from power in foreign nations, former colonies, and the developing world in general.
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| conventional literacy | an account of literacy that accepts a minimal criterion, such as the ability to sign one's name, as evidence of the ability to read and write and that results in estimates of literacy rates in contemporary society from 97 to 99 percent.
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| critical literacy | an account of literacy that emphasizes not merely the ability to read and write but the ability to use reading and writing as the basis of higher-order thinking skills that allow a person to analyze and critically evaluate that which is read and written.
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| critical theory | an educational perspective that focuses on the problem of how power is unequally distributed in contemporary society. This perspective focuses on the educational consequences of antidemocratic social arrangements, as well as ways to educate people to live more democratic lives. This critical perspective analyzes inequalities based on many social factors including class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.
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| cult of domesticity | emphasized in the 18th and 19th centuries; the general view that a woman's place is in the home, with the corollary view that women should be educated to execute the responsibilities of home and hearth.
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| cultural deficit theory | explanations that find that the cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups are the source of low-income and minority children's relatively weaker academic performance in schools.
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| cultural deprivation studies | sociological studies conducted in the 1960s that appeared to prove that the source of low-income and minority children's relative lack of success in public schools was insufficient cultural and linguistic stimuli at home, dooming to failure efforts to teach such children in schools.
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| cultural hegemony (ideological hegemony) | an explanation of social harmony in the presence of deep social inequality; emphasizes the domination of public discourse by such a limited range of explanations that the disadvantaged lack access to alternative explanations of the social order that might mobilize resistance to powerlessness.
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| cultural literacy | a conception of literacy that emphasizes not the ability simply to read and write but the ability to make sense of what is read through familiarity with a wide range of cultural references and allusions.
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| cultural pluralism | a condition in which social and educational values encourage a variety of ethnic and cultural perspectives, languages, and values that enrich one another through their harmonious coexistence.
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| cultural subordination theory | an explanation for the learning gap between the haves and the have-nots that emphasizes that the primary thing the haves possess is the power to reward their cultural knowledge, skills, and styles though institutions that favor those factors over other forms of cultural capital.
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| culturally relevant pedagogy | approaches to and methods of teaching that seek to respond to and incorporate the cultural knowledge of students, with an eye toward building new learning on respect for what students already know from their own cultural experiences.
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| culturally responsive pedagogy | approaches to and methods of teaching that seek to respond to and incorporate the cultural knowledge of students, with an eye toward building new learning on respect for what students already know from their own cultural experiences.
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| Dawes Allotment Act | a statute of 1887 that enabled American Indian tribal members to claim private ownership of tribal land.
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| day school | a community school for American Indians designed to ameliorate the problem of students traveling far from home for many months or years to receive schooling.
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| decentralization | in the context of school governance, the shift from a single authority for all schools in a region or district to more local forms of authority.
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| democracy | usually understood as government by informed popular consent rather than by a monarch or an elite group; defined more specifically by Jefferson, Du Bois, and Dewey, among others, who emphasize democracy as a mode of government that educates citizens through participation in decision making (see developmental democracy).
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| democratic ethics | in the context of teaching as a profession, the commitment to democratic values, including the view that all people should be educated toward having an effective voice in the decisions that affect their lives.
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| democratic localism | an emphasis on the value of people making shared decisions in their immediate circumstances as much as possible so that they have genuine influence on the decisions that affect their lives in local contexts.
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| democratic pluralism | related to cultural pluralism; values cultural differences and seeks to preserve them in processes of self-governance.
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| developmental democracy | a political and educational view that values popular participation in decision making in part because such participation educates or develops the capacities of those who participate in it.
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| Dewey, John (1859–1952) | a philosopher of democratic life and democratic education who founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School to test and develop his progressive educational theories.
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| "divine right" of the nobility | a late feudal period justification for the absolute authority of the monarchy in which it was claimed that the authority of the monarch derived from God's will and therefore could not be questioned.
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| dominant culture | that culture which is most strongly represented in a society's power structure and institutions such as government and schooling; may be a numerical minority in the culture as a whole but exerts disproportionate power.
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| Du Bois, W. E. B. (1868–1963) | a scholar and political activist; author of Souls of Black Folk and numerous other books; founded and edited the Crisis, an early NAACP publication.
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| due process protection in schools | grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution; equal protection under the law is granted to students and teachers just as it is to citizens in the larger society.
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| economic freedom | the aspect of liberty that emphasizes the constraints on government to interfere with the right of an individual or group to generate as much profit and wealth as possible in a market system.
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| Education for All Handicapped Children Act | passed by Congress in 1975 as Bill 94-142; required school districts to educate special education students in the "least restrictive environment" possible so that they would be educated as much as possible with the general population of students, with accommodations made to support the learning of students with special needs.
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| education through participation | in government, an emphasis on democracy as a system of government that develops people's capacity for decision making and self-rule while engaging them in processes of democratic decision making; in education, applies to the philosophy of learning by doing.
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| educational excellence | a term popularized in the 1980s when the report A Nation at Risk drew public attention to the mediocrity of schooling in the United States.
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| Educational Testing Service | considerably influenced by James B. Conant; established in 1947 by the College Entrance Examination Board, the Carnegie Corporation, and the American Council on Education as a nonprofit center for administering the Scholastic Aptitude Examination and other higher education exams.
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| elementary school | a local school for teaching the basics of literacy, mathematics, and social knowledge and skills, with origins in colonial America and with a prominent role in Jefferson's efforts and later efforts to provide public education in the United States.
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| Eliot, Charles (1834–1926) | perhaps the most influential educator of his era; Harvard University president from 1869 to 1909; represented many of the social efficiency dimensions of progressive education.
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| equality | sameness of treatment or condition, as distinct from equity, which emphasizes fairness of treatment or condition.
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| equity | fairness of treatment or condition among two or more parties; does not entail equality of treatment or condition; sometimes requires differential treatment.
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| ESL instruction | techniques of teaching English as a second language; differs from bilingual instruction in that little or no effort is made to teach in the student's native language; often used when speakers of several languages are instructed at the same time in English.
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| ethnic diversity | a condition in which people from two or more different cultural backgrounds share a common social or institutional space.
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| ethnicity | a person's cultural inheritance, including language, values, customs, beliefs, and usually cultural identity.
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| eugenics | a view emerging in the latter half of the 19th century that the human gene pool should be controlled by social policy that discourages reproduction of some populations of people while encouraging reproduction among other, more desired groups.
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| expert management | an element of modern liberal ideology that seeks to place institutional decision making as much as possible in the hands of a few people who have been trained to have specialized knowledge and skills.
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| faculty psychology | a theory of learning, popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, asserting that the mind is a collection of separate faculties (such as memory, reasoning, and aesthetic taste) that can be developed through vigorous exercise and that learning in some areas transfers to increased learning in other areas; at its most extreme, led to the nonscience of phrenology, which measured the human skull to draw conclusions about a person's character and mental faculties.
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| faith in human reason | a prominent element of classical liberal ideology; asserts that if individuals and groups are free from government oppression, their inherent ability to reason will be the most effective authority for their actions, especially if that reason is informed by education.
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| family culture versus school culture | the theory that for some children, family values, practices, and language correspond so well with the school environment that those students have very few adjustments to make to schooling; advantages those students over others whose family values, practices, and language require them to make more adjustments to the school environment.
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| feminization of teaching | a change in the profession of teaching that came about in the 19th century; the majority of schoolteachers were male at the beginning of the 1800s but were female by the end of the Civil War.
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| feudalism | a system of political and economic organization prevailing in Europe from about the 9th to the 15th centuries; based on the holding of lands by the nobility and clergy, with serfs bound to the land and the landholder by birth and a system of tenant farming and without a voice in government.
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| Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution | adopted on March 30, 1870; reads in part, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
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| Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution | adopted on July 28, 1868; reads in part, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside... nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of such laws."
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| Freedman's Bureau | formed by Congress in 1867 under the first Reconstruction act; a U.S. government agency designed to help ex-slaves exercise new economic, civil, and political rights and freedoms in the post–Civil War United States.
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| freedom | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology; committed to preventing government interference with individuals and groups in their personal, intellectual, and economic lives.
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| Freire, Paulo (1921–1997) | author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972); a Brazilian educator whose work was translated throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s and after his death in the 1990s; seminal theorist in critical, liberationist pedagogy.
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| functional literacy | a conception of literacy that emphasizes the level of ability to read and write necessary to function well in a particular society.
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| gender sensitivity versus gender bias | a distinction based on the difference between awareness of when differences in gender may contribute to differences in how life and learning are experienced and the assumption that characteristics in individuals are based on their membership in a sex group.
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| general academic track | the "middle" ability group or "track" that emerged in 20th-century schools between the academic or college preparatory track and the vocational track.
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| general education | broad education across the major domains of mathematics and science, social sciences, and humanities to produce a well-educated person in a nonspecialized sense.
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| genetic deficit theory | the view that differences in group achievement among different ethnic groups can be explained by a different genetic endowment of intellegence in those groups.
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| GI Bill of Rights | an act of Congress passed after World War II that allowed military veterans to attend colleges and universities at government expense.
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| glass ceiling for women | an invisible barrier in the workplace and government above which it is supposedly difficult for women to rise; explains the very low percentage, for example, of women in CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies and of women in the U.S. Senate.
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| Goals 2000: Educate America Act: | a congressional act to implement a set of far-reaching goals for public education to be reached by the year 2000; outlined by the first Bush administration as America 2000 and continued in the Clinton administration as Goals 2000.
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| grammar schools | in Jefferson's proposal for public schooling in the state of Virginia, the tier of schooling after elementary school; reserved for those who could afford it and those meriting scholarships; formal academic work would include the study of Latin, Greek, composition, mathematics, and other liberal studies.
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| Grimke, Sarah M. (1792–1873) | a radical feminist political activist and author who was prominent in the first half of the 19th century.
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| happiness | a term Jefferson borrowed from Aristotle to designate the fundamental importance of the satisfaction of the individual as a measure of the goodness of the social order, as in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
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| Head Start project | a federal government–funded program that started in the Great Society years of the early 1960s; supported preschool education for low-income children.
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| heterogeneous grouping | the practice of placing children with different academic skill levels in the same group for purposes of instruction (as opposed to homogeneous grouping).
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| hidden curriculum | a term coined by the educational researcher Philip Jackson in the 1960s to describe the socializing processes of schooling that are not described in the formal or academic curriculum.
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| Hispanic versus Latino | terms debated among the descendants of Spanish-speaking Americans because each of these identity names has its own history and political significance and because different Americans identify more with one of those political histories than with the other; similarly, some Americans of Mexican descent prefer the designation Chicano to either Hispanic or Latino.
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| historically Black colleges | colleges (some of which have become universities) that were founded for the higher education of African Americans after the Civil War.
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| Holmes Report | named after the former dean of the Harvard School of Education and published by representatives of about a hundred leading research universities in the United States in 1985; the first Holmes Report presented a blueprint for the education of the nation's teachers; later reports focused on reform of schools of education of the teaching profession.
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| homogeneous grouping | the practice of placing children with similar academic skill levels in the same group for purposes of instruction (as opposed to heterogeneous grouping).
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| humanitarian reform | in the context of 19th-century reform movements in the United States, refers to various efforts to address social problems such as alcoholism, slavery, prison cruelty, urban poverty, and discrimination against women.
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| ideological hegemony | an explanation of social harmony in the presence of deep social inequality; emphasizes the domination of public discourse by such a limited range of explanations that the disadvantaged lack access to alternative explanations of the social order that might mobilize resistance to powerlessness.
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| ideology | as used in this book, the constellation of beliefs, values, and habits of thought shared by people in a large or small social group; a society's explanations of and justifications for the prevailing social order or an envisioned ideal order.
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| Indian New Deal | a term used to describe the social and educational programs originating in the Depression era that affected tribal members and communities.
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| Indian Reorganization Act | a federal statute of 1934 that established tribal self-government and tribal constitutions.
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| information marketplace versus marketplace of ideas | a distinction designed to draw attention to the difference between the Jeffersonian ideal of an unfettered exchange of ideas in search of the truth and contemporary practices that package new ideas as products to be sold to the consumer.
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| intellectual freedom | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology; emphasizes the right of the individual to believe as he or she chooses, uncoerced by government power; closely related to religious freedom.
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| John Birch Society | an extreme right-wing group particularly active in southern and southwestern states in the middle of the 20th century.
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| labor market | the totality of jobs for which people may offer themselves for employment; the labor market for physicians is typically more limited than the labor market for fast-food workers.
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| Lau v. Nichols | Supreme Court decision that Chinese-language students were not receiving sufficient support for learning in schools; led to legislation mandating bilingual instruction in public schools when non–native English speakers needed bilingual instruction to be able to learn subject-matter material.
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| liberal education | historically, the education appropriate to a free person; typically construed today as a broad, general education that equips a person to think well in a wide range of domains and to know at least one discipline in depth.
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| life-adjustment education | an approach to public education popularized by Charles Prosser and others in the 1940s who thought that for students who were not college-bound, an education preparing them for their life roles as family members and consumers was appropriate; criticized as a "soft" curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s.
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| literacy as a cultural construction | a concept emphasizing that what counts as literate, like how important it is to be literate, varies with the cultural context.
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| manifest destiny | a term coined by the journalist John O'Sullivan and later used to describe the perception that it was God's intention for European Americans to dominate the North American continent.
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| Mann, Horace (1796–1859) | a prominent Massachusetts legislator and advocate of humanitarian reforms who became executive secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and took a leadership role in establishing a system of public common schools and normal schools that would become models for the nation.
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| mass media | broadcast, electronic, and print media that reach large proportions of the population nationally and internationally in the contemporary world.
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| McCarthy, Senator Joseph (1908–1957) | a rabid anticommunist congressman during the 1940s and 1950s; his vicious attacks on "communist sympathizers" and "fellow travelers" who were prominent in entertainment and the arts destroyed many careers and eventually his own.
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| meritocracy | a term for the view popularized by Jefferson, Conant, and others in different times and places that a society's institutions should be led by those who merit it by their talent and character.
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| Merriam Report | "The Problem of Indian Administration"; a report that increased the awareness of social and educational problems on tribal lands during the 1920s.
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| Mississippi Plan | a system of codes and laws instituted by the state of Mississippi to deprive African Americans of their civil and political rights after Reconstruction; the eventual basis for Jim Crow laws throughout the South until the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.
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| model minority | a term wrongly applied to Asian Americans to show that Asian American immigrant groups have adjusted successfully to U.S. mainstream culture.
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| monopoly capitalism | in contrast to simple capitalism, a 19th-century development that consolidated control of the market for particular goods or services in one or a few companies.
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| multicultural education | an educational reform initiative to improve learning for all children by emphasizing the cultural contexts of learning and helping schools respond better to children of different ethnic backgrounds by using those differences as a foundation on which to build new learning.
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| NAACP | the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; an advocacy group formed in 1910 to fight for the legal, civil, and political rights of African Americans.
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| NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) | an ongoing longitudinal study of student learning in schools; sometimes referred to as "the nation's report card" because it is informative about educational progress across the United States.
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| National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) | founded with philanthropic funds as a direct result of the school reform movement that began in the 1980s; began assessing teacher quality by using a portfolio assessment method in the mid-1990s; has assessed thousands of teachers who have applied voluntarily for certification.
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| nationalism | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology, emerging from and in contrast to feudalism; the emphasis is not on the tribe, estate, or city-state but on the nation as the basic political unit and source of political identity.
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| natural aristocracy (meritocracy) | classical liberal term used by Jefferson to indicate the need for a system that granted leadership to those with talent and character as opposed to those with inherited wealth and power, whom Jefferson termed the "false" aristocracy.
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| natural law | one of the basic components of the classical liberal ideology that emerged in the Enlightenment era; committed to the view that the universe (nature) operates according to scientific principles or laws that are understandable by human reason.
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| negative freedom | freedom achieved through a lack of government interference.
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| new immigration | the 19th-century shift in immigration to the United States from northern and western European immigrants to southern and eastern European immigrants.
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| new psychology | a loose constellation of approaches to studying the psyche and human learning; emerged around the beginning of the 20th century and emphasized nonrational, subconscious, behavioral sources of human actions rather than rational and consciously chosen sources.
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| No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 | controversial centerpiece of the George W. Bush education platform, emphasizing educational accountability for school systems, high-stakes testing for all students, and an increased requirement for "highly qualified" teachers.
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| normal school | initiated in the United States by Horace Mann; a postsecondary or college-level school for the preparation of teachers.
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| On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) revolutionary 1859 scientific study of how species evolve over time to adapt to their environment.
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| parents in school decision making | the many possible kinds of parent involvement in schools, often supported by the local parent–teacher association (PTA).
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| patriarchy | a social system that privileges the status of males and their power over females.
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| pedagogy | approaches to and methods of teaching.
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| pedagogy of love | Horace Mann's view that teachers could be more effective by developing relationships with their students based on affection rather than relationships based on authoritarianism and punishment.
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| Plato's myth of the metals | the "noble lie" or "necessary fiction" that people are born with gold, silver, or bronze in their systems and thus are destined to be in one of three levels of society: at the apex, in the second leadership tier, or among the broad masses.
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| political economy | according to Webster, "a modern social science dealing with the relationship of political and economic processes"; more generally, a society's institutional arrangements and processes.
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| political freedom | a distinction first made by Aristotle, identifying the freedom to exercise political, as distinct from civil, liberties. Whereas civil liberties emphasize the right to live as one chooses, political freedom emphasizes the right to participate in government.
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| populism | a 19th-century movement in the United States that had its origins in rural life and advocated "industrial democracy," or greater local and popular control of industrial production rather than factory production organized and controlled through corporate and governmental collaboration.
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| profession | typically, a "white-collar" occupation characterized by a specialized body of knowledge, requiring college education or beyond, and rewarded with special status and prestige.
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| professional autonomy | the expectation that the members of a profession, such as teaching, will be free to exercise independent judgment based on their expertise.
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| professional ethics | codes of conduct typically meant to ensure that professionals will exercise their expertise in the service of the interests of their clients.
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| professionalization versus professionalism | a distinction intended to emphasize the difference between an occupation taking on the external characteristics of a profession and a commitment among its members to professional conduct, expertise, and ethics.
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| progress | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology; emphasizes the inevitability of social improvement through the ability of people to reason about how to achieve their best interests together.
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| progressive educational reform | various and sometimes conflicting policies and practices that changed education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from traditional, academically oriented studies for all students to different schooling experiences for different children, depending on the perceived needs of the child in the context of the perceived needs of the social order; changed the governance of schooling from local to more centralized forms of decision making.
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| provisional freedom | a notion of freedom that is not absolute, but subject to change, even temporary, depending on changing political contexts.
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| Prussian model | the educational system of 19th-century Prussia, which provided free public education, well-educated teachers, and different school experiences for different positions in the social order.
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| race | a term used to identify supposed biological differences among human beings; does not stand up to scientific scrutiny based on biology; based more on social perceptions of human difference and often used to sustain and justify unequal power relations among cultural groups.
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| racism | the practice of treating people unequally and inequitably because of their membership in an ethnic group.
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| Reconstruction | the period mandated by Congress after the Civil War in which the political, social, and economic structure of the South would be rebuilt without slavery; lasted from 1865 to 1877.
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| redemption | the period after Reconstruction when the South would be "redeemed" from the federal interference with state autonomy and White rule.
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| religious revelation | truth revealed through religious texts and authority rather than through the processes of science or reasoning, which could create a basis of opposition to religiously "revealed" truth (revelation).
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| republicanism | a system of government that allows people to choose representatives to speak and vote for their interests in legislative processes.
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| resistance theory | an effort to explain the school performance of low-income and minority children and youth in terms of their noncompliance with school norms that seem "stacked" against them; noncompliance, or resistance expressed in antiacademic and antisocial behaviors, may be seen as an assertion of self in a cultural environment that may not seem to value each child's identity equally.
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| Rockfish Gap Report | a nickname for Jefferson's proposal for public education in Virginia, from elementary school through university.
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| Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) | founded in the early 20th century to provide a fair predictive tool for college success across secondary schools with different academic standards; has been shown to be of limited predictive value but remains in wide use in the United States.
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| school choice | an educational policy that supports the right of parents to choose whatever public school they want for their children; justified by the view that students perform better if they attend a school chosen for its compatibility with the beliefs and values of the family.
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| school restructuring | a general term for any of a number of approaches to school reform that emphasize changing such organizational features of schooling as how decisions are made, the length of the school day, and the allocation of time during the school day.
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| schooling versus education | a distinction intended to point out that whatever takes place in schools (schooling) may or may not help develop the individual's qualities of mind and body (education).
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| scientific administration | the application of social science research to social policy.
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| scientific reason | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology; emphasizes the human ability to understand the world through agreed-on, systematic processes of discovery of truth as opposed to understanding the world through revealed truth or on the authority of others.
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| sectarianism | in organized religion, the strong focus on differences among various orders (or sects) of the same religion, even to the point of conflict among them.
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| Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 | historically important conference on women's political and civil rights held in Seneca Falls, New York, featuring notable activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
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| service occupations | the fastest-growing sector in the late 20th-century and early 21st-century labor market in terms of the total number of jobs; usually refers to relatively low-skill, low-pay jobs providing services to others, such as domestic labor and food service.
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| sex versus gender | a distinction between the biological differences between males and females and the social meanings attached to those differences; "gendered" occupations are grounded not in biological differences between the sexes but in social beliefs about what is appropriate for men and women to do.
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| sex-role socialization | the shaping of beliefs, values, and behaviors in accordance with gendered social expectations about differences between the sexes.
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| skilled artisanship | in contrast to low-skill factory labor, a mode of production of goods that emphasized highly skilled labor producing and marketing uniquely individual products one piece at a time, whether in textiles, leather, wood, or another type of conversion of natural resources to handcrafted products.
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| Slums and Suburbs | written in the early 1960s by James B. Conant after the success of The American High School Today to address educational differences between low-income urban neighborhoods and middle-income, largely White suburbs.
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| social education | in the context of American Indian educational policy, a constellation of institutional and educational efforts toward the "adjustment" of Native American populations to dominant cultural institutions.
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| social efficiency | a philosophy of centralized public policy or educational policy formation that places the good of the larger social order ahead of a commitment to full participation by all individuals in shaping that order.
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| social foundations of education | the cultural contexts within which human learning takes place; the study of those cultural contexts.
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| social meliorism | the belief that society can be improved slowly over time through organized human effort.
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| social theory | efforts to explain data about humans living together in groups of various kinds; perspectives on human association used to guide the search for information about social groups as well as to explain that information.
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| socioeconomic class | term derived from sociology, which describes a status level in society derived from income, occupation, and family economic history.
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| socioeconomic status (SES) | a sociological term used to distinguish different economic groups of people not just by income differences but by a range of indicators, including parents' education, the number of books in a household, and real estate value.
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| sovereignty | the entitlement to self-governance independent of other nations or authorities except for commitments voluntarily made by treaty or agreement.
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| Sputnik | the Soviet Union's first human-made vehicle to orbit the earth in space (1957); preceded a similar effort by the United States and caused national concern over Soviet technological superiority.
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| standardized achievement testing for accountability | a 1990s emphasis of the contemporary school reform movement, continuing into the new century, that seeks to hold school districts, schools, administrators, teachers, and students accountable for learning through frequent and systematic use of achievement tests to measure student learning.
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| students' expectations versus fears | a distinction made by educational researchers to investigate the difference between where students believe they most likely will be after high school and where they are afraid they may end up.
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| students' future aspirations | a term used in educational research to refer to how students think about where they would like to be in education or the workplace after secondary school.
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| students' hopes versus expectations | a distinction made by educational researchers to investigate the difference between where students would like to find themselves after high school and where they think they are most likely to find themselves.
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| Taylorization | named after the efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor; a process of factory production developed in the late 19th century and early 20th century that broke complex production skills into the simplest component parts so that each worker would repeat a simple activity over and over to achieve increased productivity.
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| teacher–parent collaboration | a relationship in the potential support network for each student; one that most teachers have little formal preparation in developing.
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| The American High School Today | a book published by James B. Conant in 1958; popularized the modern conception of the large comprehensive high school and helped shape policies to make such schools the norm in urban and rural communities.
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| The Crisis | a journal founded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois shortly after the founding of the NAACP in 1910; dedicated to educating people about racial discrimination; reached a peak circulation of 100,000 in 1918.
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| Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution | adopted on December 18, 1865; reads in part, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
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| Title IX | a federal act passed in 1972 that prohibits inequitable treatment of students in schools on the basis of sex, including in extracurricular and sports activities; has been credited for U.S. women's successes in world athletic competitions since the mid-1990s.
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| tracking and detracking | tracking refers to the practice of "ability grouping" students by skill differences in schools for the purposes of instruction and preparation for different academic and occupational futures; detracking is the effort to resist such grouping of students.
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| training versus education | a distinction intended to point out the difference between being prepared for the reliable performance of skills for a particular role (such as in medical training or musical training) and being prepared for a variety of social roles that may require a wide range of knowledge, skills, and critical perspectives (such as a liberal education).
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| tribal self-determination | a term that developed during the 1960s to describe the desire of Indian tribes and communities for self-government.
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| Troy Female Seminary | founded by Emma Hart Willard in 1821 in Troy, New York; a school for young women that prepared hundreds of schoolteachers for eastern schools before the normal school system was developed by Horace Mann.
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| trust relationship | the relationship between tribal governments and the U.S. federal government in which tribal lands and goods are considered to be under federal protection.
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| Tuskegee Institute | founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881; an institution for the vocational training of African American youth that later became a major university and is now counted prominently among the nation's historically Black colleges and universities.
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| university | in the United States today, a higher education institution that typically has undergraduate and graduate degree programs in multiple fields in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities; has its origins in 17th- and 18th-century colleges and academies as well as in 19th century normal schools, historically Black institutions of higher education, and the European research university.
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| urbanization | growth in the size and/or number of cities as a society's population shifts from rural to urban life.
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| varieties of parent involvement | researcher Joyce Epstein, among others, has documented a number of different kinds of parental involvement that can support the academic success of children and youth in schools.
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| virtue | one of the basic components of classical liberal ideology; emphasizes the good character of the individual as demonstrated in good works for others and visible religious devotion or piety.
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| vocational education | the policy and practice of providing experiences that prepare people for specific occupational futures; historically implemented at the expense of a more general or liberal education that develops a range of intellectual capacities for a wide variety of political, personal, and occupational possibilities.
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| voucher system for schools | a proposed approach to public schooling that would provide government money to the family, not to the school system, so that the family could spend that educational allocation (voucher) in any school it chose, public or private, religious or secular.
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| Washington, Booker T. (1856–1915) | founder of the Tuskegee Institute and a high-profile leader of African Americans at the end of the 19th century and the first 15 years of the 20th; the author of Up from Slavery.
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| Willard, Emma Hart (1787–1870) | the founder of the Troy Female Seminary in Troy, New York, and a prominent advocate of women's education.
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| Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–1797) | an 18th-century British feminist who argued for political and civil rights and equality for women and wrote that marriage was an ingenious device for enslaving women; author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
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| Worcester v. Georgia | a Supreme Court case that strengthened the federal status of tribes and excluded them from state control.
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| youth culture | a constellation of values, beliefs, language, self-presentation, and tastes in music and other forms of entertainment distinctively shared among youth not just locally but nationally and to some degree internationally.
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| youth markets | young people as consumers of goods and services produced for profit.
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