A Study Of School Diversification In The United States Since The1980S

How to build diverse, unique school education institutions and the corresponding courses and teaching modes that meet various needs of individual student is an important issue faced by educational reform of every country. Since the1980s, Americans began to criticize the unified school system. They believed that the traditional single public school system lacked flexibility and was unable to meet the diverse needs of students, thus leading to the inefficiency of schools. In this context, the United States started a new round of educational reform,"School Restructuring Movement", aimed at improving the quality of education. The calls for reform made the United States establish a lot of newly typed schools that were different from the traditional public schools, such as magnet schools, charter schools, home schools, independent schools and some other alternative school educational institutions. All these combined have created a new situation for the diversified development of schools. At the same time, various school programs based on school diversification are massively expanded across the United States, even in many other countries. School diversification, an obvious tendency in the fundamental educational reforms, not only resulted in profound changes in the American public school system, but also exerted an extensive impact on the world’s basic educational reforms. This paper, through analyzing the diverse school systems adopted by American schools since the1980s, aims at studying the new achievements in the field of school system reforms, and exploring diverse institutional mechanism in the context of globalization, diversification and informatization, so as to have an implication on our Chinese elementary educational reforms.School diversification in this paper refers to the external manifestation of the diversification of the school organizations, and mainly reflects a variant present state or trend of development of the school organizations and management mode within certain areas and phases. This paper focuses on the diversification of American schools since the1980s, including a variety of school subjects, educational forms and management systems. The major tasks of the study include tracing back to the history of the formation of the American school diversification, analyzing specific social and historical conditions of its formation, summing up the manifestation and the characteristics of school organizations, as well as exploring the value orientation, reforming strategies and the actual effects of its diversification reforms. This paper consists of the following parts:Chapter One describes the formation of the U.S. public school system and the crisis it encountered. In the early20th century, the United States formed a unified public school system. It had managed to turn the multi-track while disjointed school institutions in Western Europe into a single-track and jointed "educational ladder", especially managed to develop the comprehensive school system with American characteristics. By setting up a series of parallel programs, it successfully put the children with different learning tendencies "under the same roof". This unified public school system fully reflected the "melting pot" nature of American education, and was billed as "the best system". However, the U.S. public school system also contains a profound contradiction between unity and diversity. The unification of school forms conflicted with the diversification of ethnics, religions, and values rooted in American culture, and the evolution of conflicts between these two constitutes the logical starting point for understanding reforms of diversification of American schools.Chapter Two discusses the evolution of the American school diversification process. By tracing back to the history of the elementary educational reform since the World War II, and with institutional theory as its basis, this chapter aims at combing the historical vein of the institutional transformation of American educational system. Since the beginning of the20th century, the essential issue that has long troubled American education is how to solve the educational diversification problem resulted from the discrepancy between students’ability and levels. Although curriculum diversification reform in the1950s and ethnic diversification reform in the1960s and1970s presented various ways of education diversification, they turned out to be unsuccessful in terms of improving the quality of education. And according to the institutional theory, only when we start from changing the educational system and embark on a road of school diversification can the school reform have a new way out. This change led to the emergence of the school diversification reform in the1980s.Chapter Three discusses the diversified ideological foundation and reform of American school. There are various kinds of theories and motives concerning school reforms. Those theories belong to different theoretical schools and explain the reasons and significance on the diversification of the school systems from different perspectives. First, the unified school system has long been under the suspicion of liberalism. Secondly, the criticism on the school bureaucracy evokes the calls for reform; additionally in the late20th century, the influence of individualized education and postmodern education ideological trend, and the application of organizational ecology theory in education provide a theoretical basis for school diversification. The rise of school reconstruction movement and the penetration of neo-liberalism respectively constitute the internal and external causes for educational reforms in the United States. In addition, the development in economy, justice, education management systems and information technology provides the strong social support for school diversification.Chapter Four summarizes the patterns and characteristics of school diversification in the United States. By studying the magnet schools, charter schools, independent schools, church schools, home schools and some other alternative schools without unique teaching principles, we have summarized several main characteristics of American school diversification in modern times. To start with, in American diverse school systems, public schools take the majority. And there are mutual influences between public and private schools. Second, education marketization and privatization are forceful trend of the future. Thirdly, diversification of schools would provide people with alternatives for their different education requirements. Fourthly, school diversification means diversification of both teaching modes and teaching principles.Chapter Five analyzes the principles of school diversification in the United States in four aspects i.e. quality, performance, freedom and equality. Speaking of the overall objectives of the reform, the school diversification achieves improvement in education quality by providing alternative schools and market competition. In terms of school management, education performance is enhanced by drawing on enterprise management modes and performance accountability strategy as well as encouraging the teachers’professional development. To achieve maximum education freedom and meet various educational requirements, school diversification includes the diversification of training objectives, curriculum, teaching and management modes. As for equality, school advocates equality with multidimensional scaling, which would benefit, to an extent, the harmonious cooperation among races, education reimbursement for disadvantaged groups and the balanced development of schools.Reformers proposed new ideas and correspondent reform strategy aiming at tackling the education failure of traditional public schools. The problem is whether school diversification could achieve the expectation.Chapter Six analyzes the practical strategy for the virtuous development of school diversification based on the experience and academic discussion about American primary and secondary school diversification, and discusses the problems and possible trend of school diversification in contemporary American elementary education, taking the core idea and principles as reference. The practice of American education reform demonstrates that school diversification involves a diversified look on education quality. We cannot simply rely on the interference of marketing nor can we overstress the independent administration authority of schools.Chapter Seven is a summary. It puts forward a core concept "meaningful school diversification" and tries to give some enlightenment on China’s elementary education reform. A variety of school forms are rooted in the school internal value and motivation. A variety of educational models do not necessarily lead to a variety of school forms. Differences between the "formal diversification" and "school diversification in essence" are more meaningful. To achieve that goal, we need to carry out characteristic internal constructions in the aspects such as the educational goals, curriculum resources, teaching methods and school cultures on the basis of the institutional reform, so that we can deliver the internal dynamism of diverse schools. Learning from the educational reform of diversification in the United States, we should reflect on the evaluation mechanism and school education reform strategy, focus on building a diverse education standard system, let schools become the subjects of reform and adjust school reforms strategies according to respective circumstances.