Teaching tolerance in public and private schools

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 82, Issue 7, 2001, Pages 542-546

  Godwin, Kenneth ^a,b   Ausbrooks, Carrie ^a,c   Martinez, Valerie ^a,d  

^a Center for the Study of Education Reform   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS   (United States)

^c Department of Educational Administration ^*

^d TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0012377664     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170108200713     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. David Blacker, "Fanaticism and Schooling in the Democratic State," American Journal of Education, February 1998, pp. 241-72.
2. George Marcus et al., With Malice Toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3.
3. For a review of this literature, see Marcus et al., chap. 2.
4. Herbert McClosky and Alida Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance (New York: Sage, 1983), p. 13.
5. Patricia Avery et al., "Exploring Political Tolerance with Adolescents," Theory and Research in Social Education, vol. 20, 1992, pp. 386-420.
6. Horace Mann, "The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government," in Lectures on Education (New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 123-26;
7. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1948);
8. James A. Banks, An Introduction to Multicultural Education (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1994);
9. Sonia Nieto, "Moving Beyond Tolerance in Multicultural Education," Multicultural Education, vol. 1, 1994, pp. 9-38;
10. and Melinda Fine, Habits of Mind: Struggling over Values in America's Classrooms (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).
11. For an excellent statement of this argument, see Eamonn Callan, "Virtue, Dialogue, and the Common School," American Journal of Education, vol. 104, 1995, pp. 1-33.
12. Richard W. Riley, "What Really Matters in American Education," available on the U.S. Department of Education website at http://ed.gov/Speeches/09-1997/index.html (September 23).
13. Cited in Jay Greene, Joseph Giammo, and Nicole Mellow, "The Effect of Private Education on Political Participation, Social Capital and Tolerance: An Examination of the Latino National Political Survey," Georgetown Public Policy Review, Fall 1999, p. 54.
14. John Goodlad and Timothy McMannon, "Introduction," in The Public Purpose of Education and Schooling (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), pp. 1-17;
15. David Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals," American Educational Research Journal, vol. 34, 1997, pp. 39-81;
16. Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 110-18;
17. and Benjamin Barber, "Education for Democracy," The Good Society, Spring 1997, pp. 1-7.
18. Alan Peshkin, God's Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
19. Blacker, God's Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School ( 1986). op. cit.
20. Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (New York: Doubleday, 1955);
21. Clyde Wilcox and Ted Jelen, "Evangelicals and Political Tolerance," American Politics Quarterly, vol. 18, 1990, pp. 25-46;
22. and Bruce Hunsberger, "Religion and Prejudice: The Role of Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism," Journal of Social Issues, vol. 51, 1995, pp. 113-27.
23. It may be that the assumption that public schools are more heterogeneous is incorrect, at least at the level of the classroom. The Harvard Project on School Desegregation has found that 67% of blacks and 74% of Latinos attend predominantly minority public schools and that these percentages are increasing. See Gary Orfield et al., Deepening Segregation in American Public Schools (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Project on School Desegregation, 1997), p. 11. In addition, sorting students into academic or vocational tracks is much more common in public schools than in private schools.
24. See Valerie E. Lee and Anthony S. Bryk, "Curriculum Tracking as Mediating the Social Distribution of High School Achievement," Sociology of Education, April 1988, pp. 78-94.
25. Using descriptions provided by the Fort Worth Independent School District and the Texas Association of Independent Schools, we evaluated all Fort Worth schools and assigned them to one of six categories: 1) public with balanced proportions of white, African American, and Latino students; 2) public with a majority of African American students, 3) public with a majority of Latino students, 4) private secular, 5) private Catholic, and 6) private evangelical. A similar procedure was used in New York City.
26. Patricia Avery, "Political Tolerance Among Adolescents," Theory and Research in Social Education, vol. 16, 1992, pp. 183-201;
27. and Avery et al., Theory and Research in Social Education, p. 4.
28. John Sullivan, James Pierson, and George Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982);
29. Marcus et al., Political Tolerance and American Democracy (1982); op. cit.
30. and Avery et al., Political Tolerance and American Democracy (1982); op. cit.
31. This is a subset of the groups used in Marcus et al., Appendix B.
32. Readers who wish to examine the questions asked as well as the reliability of the scales for tolerance, threat, and democratic norms can find these data at the website of the Center for the Study of Education Reform (www.coe.unt.edu/cser). Readers may also obtain copies of the paper describing the research by writing to Kenneth Godwin, P.O. Box 305340, Department of Political Science, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5340.
33. We tested for structure using inter-item reliability of the scales, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural analysis.
34. Marcus et al., Political Tolerance and American Democracy ( 1982); op. cit.
35. William Sander and Anthony C. Krautmann, "Catholic Schools, Dropout Rates, and Educational Attainment," Economic Inquiry, vol. 33, 1995, pp. 217-33;
36. and Arthur R. Goldberger and Glen G. Cain, "The Causal Analysis of Cognitive Outcomes in the Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore Report," Sociology of Education, April-July 1982, pp. 103-22.
37. We used probit regression to estimate the probability that any given student would attend a particular type of school. To do this, we used variables that predict enrollment in a particular type of school but do not predict a student's level of perceived threat, support for democratic norms, or political tolerance. The variables we used were the number of children in a family, the interactions between a student's ethnicity and his or her parents' education, and a student's score on the self-esteem scale. We then used this probability as the selection bias variable in OLS (ordinary least squares) regressions in which scores on threat, democratic norms, and tolerance scales were the dependent variables. The predictions were done separately for public school student versus non-evangelical private school student and for public school student versus evangelical private school student. These variables correctly predicted more than 80% of the students who attended each type of school.
38. Robert Crain, Private Schools and Black-White Segregation: Evidence from Two Dig Cities (Stanford, Calif.: Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Government, Stanford University, ERIC ED 259 430, 1984);
39. and Jay P. Greene and Nicole Mellow, "Integration Where It Counts: A Study of Racial Integration in Public and Private School Lunchrooms," unpublished paper, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin, 1998.