Word: sociologists
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...been a traditional American belief that doing well in school can help even the poorest and most culturally disadvantaged child achieve economic success. But can it? Not according to Harvard Sociologist Christopher Jencks. In a book to be published next month, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (Basic Books, Inc.; $12.50), Jencks asserts that schools do almost nothing to close the gap between rich and poor. Moreover, he argues, the quality of the education that public elementary and high school students receive has little effect on their future income...
Jencks draws part of his data from the survey of 4,000 public schools and 645,000 students directed by Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman, who concluded in 1966 that the quality of a school has little to do with how well its students learn. Jencks agrees. "The character of a school's output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children," he writes. "Everything else-the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers-is either secondary or completely irrelevant...
...book also has its strong defenders, for example Harvard Urbanologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "All new information is thought to be threatening at first," he says. Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell calls Inequality "an argument both against stilted American myths and vulgarized Marxism," and Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, former director of the U.S. Office of Child Development, agrees that "we've been sold a bill of goods. School people keep saying we should do more, whereas the real wave of the future is for schools to do less and let other social institutions play a larger role...
...writer for the New Republic, Jencks has spent his career as an activist scholar. At Washington's Institute for Policy Studies in 1965, he helped devise what in watered-down form became the Teacher Corps, which recruits and trains teachers for slum schools. Soon afterward, he collaborated with Sociologist David Riesman on The Academic Revolution, which accused research-oriented American universities of smothering diversity in education. Out of one chapter of that book grew the questions that led to Inequality. While writing Inequality, Jencks also found time to develop for the Office of Economic Opportunity the controversial voucher system...
...saxophone players disgruntled? The Music section tells of a recent assembly of sax men in Toronto, how they feel unheard these days, and what they plan to do about it. In Behavior, Sociologist Vance Packard's newest book provides the basis for an unsettling look at the nomadic living habits of many Americans...