budding scholar

In about 5 weeks on May 10th we have our first-year oral exam! I’ve been emailing with a student from last year to get sample questions to supplement those sent to us by our professor, and here are a few:

1. What are the prospects of one of the following reforms for improving, reconceptualizing, and/or reforming how school is practiced and its outcomes in the United States?
a. Charter schools
b. Small schools
c. Accountability policy

2. There is a tension in national accountability legislation like NCLB between centralizing control of education and yet leaving elements of implementation and articulation of standards and appropriate tests to the state and local level decision makers. How do you explain this tension and how it came to be?

3. How do you explain the policy to practice divide (aka the “Great Divide”)? Why don’t policies turn out according to plan? Choose a reform with which you are familiar and discuss.

4. Choose a particular era of school reform from American educational history and discuss what kind of lasting legacy this reform has had on how education is practiced today?

5. Given multiple purposes of education, what are mechanisms for handling/accommodating/reconciling conflicts over these purposes? Which of these methods do you believe holds the most promise and why?

6. What types of policies – federal, state, and local – attempt to influence approaches to teaching within the classroom? Under what conditions would you expect each of them to have any effect on what teachers do?

Later, a post sketching out an answer to one of these questions! It is sure to reveal how much studying I still need to do to link themes from my different reading this year.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 1:32 am and is filed under Program Milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.