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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1 Introduction -- Chapter 2 The Context of the Study -- Chapter 3 Pushing Back against the Power-Preserving Tendencies of Bureaucracies -- Chapter 4 Trying to Bend the Bars of the Iron Cage: The Possibilities and Limitations of Charter Schools as Models for Successful School Reform -- Chapter 5 Changes in Students' Aspirations and Conduct: The Role of Institutional Arrangements -- Chapter 6 Conclusions: Contributions to a Theory of Educational Inequality, Social Policy, and the Possibility of Educational Equality -- Appendix 1 Theoretical Orientation -- Appendix 2 Contributions to a Theory of Social Policy -- References -- Index -- About the Author and Contributors.

The prevailing way of conceptualizing multiple pathways to college and career segregates or "tracks" students into college prep or voc-ed curriculum. Recent research and public commentary have shown that tracking neither provides students with equal educational opportunities nor serves the needs of employers for a well-educated workforce. Recognizing that tracked schools are both inequitable and ineffective, educators have been exploring alternatives to tracking practices since the 1980s. This paper focuses on one attempt to redefine and restructure the academic curriculum, pedagogy, and course structures of California schools into "multiple pathways" to college and career. The Preuss School at UCSD "detracks" its curriculum, i.e., establishes high instructional standards and presents rigorous curriculum to all students while varying the supports available to enable all students to meet high the school's academic standards. Detracking high schools can provide students with access to multiple pathways when they complete high school. By gaining access to a rigorous academic curriculum, they are well prepared for both college and career. This approach requires a school district to assemble a portfolio of schools, each with a different theme or focus (such as performing arts, science academies, interactive technology, etc.). When a district assembles a portfolio of theme-based schools, each of them rigorous, then students (and their parents) are enabled to choose from an array of possibilities. This form of curriculum differentiation aligns well with the democratic project of providing equal opportunities for all students to learn and to have significant life choices when they complete high school.

"Le constructivisme social" est un thème commun aux études cognitives en sociologie et en psychologie. Le constructivisme social postule que les structures sociales et les structures cognitives se composent et se situent dans l'interaction entre les gens. En sociologie cette perspective constructiviste remonte à la phénoménologie constitutive; actuellement, elle se développe avec t'ethnométhodologie. De récentes études qui analysent les structures sociales du monde quotidien en interaction sont commentées. On fait état d'un développement parallèle en psychologie, à partir du "structuralisme constructiviste" de Piaget, jusqu'à l'école soviétique socio-historique. On commente aussi de récentes études qui situent dans l'interaction les structures cognitives et leurs processus. Enfin, on note la convergence entre la sociologie et la psychologie, entre les sciences sociales occidentale et soviétique.

The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis – that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process – are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are assessed. The paper concludes with a discussion of two unresolved issues: the integration of social structure and interaction in interactional analysis and the reconciliation of conflictual and consensual dimensions of learning.

Tracking contributes significantly to the achievement gap between low-income, minority students and their more affluent peers. Ethnic and linguistic minority students from low-income backgrounds frequently remain in general and vocational education classes. As a result, they do not become eligible for college enrollment. Achievement Via Individual Determination (AVID), an educational reform program based in San Diego, "untracks" low-achieving ethnic and language minority students by placing both low- and high-achieving students in the same rigorous academic program. The program gives students explicit instruction in the hidden curriculum of the school–the implicit educational rules and expectations, such as knowledge about what courses to take for the college-bound, what teachers to take or avoid, the importance of tests, and how to study– and helps the students make the transition to college. The AVID program has successfully prepared under-represented students for college: from 1988 to 1992, 94% of AVID students enrolled in college, compared to 56% of all high school graduates (AVID Center, 1999). African Americans and Latinos enrolled in college in numbers that exceeded local and national averages (Mehan, Villanueva, Hubbard, & Lintz, 1996; Mehan, Hubbard, Lintz, & Villanueva, 1994). As AVID is being adopted by school districts through-out the country, researchers at the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE) are examining the process by which a "design team," in this case AVID Center, exports its prototype of educational reform to new settings–three schools in California, two in Kentucky and two in Virginia. This "scaling up" study focuses on a) the interrelationship between multiple contexts of implementation, b) the degree of variation in the implementations of AVID guidelines at the new sites, and c) the contribution of institutional processes that facilitate or inhibit academic success. This research builds upon work in the sociocultural tradition, especially Rogoff (1995) and Tharp (1997), who identify personal, interpersonal, and community levels or "planes" of interaction, and McLaughlin & Talbert (1993), who depict organizations in concentric circles, where the classroom is in the center, surrounded by the school, the district, and the community. It extends this work by explicitly calling attention to political and economic conditions that enable possibilities and impose constraints on education in general and school reform in particular.