This dissertation seeks to answer two questions. First, why is an introductory sociology course offered in only some high schools? Second, what are the larger historical, intellectual, and structural forces that have shaped and currently shape the content and objectives of high school sociology courses, and how have they exerted an influence? The first question has been answered only once before and the second has never been asked. Regarding the first, I argue that teacher changes and shortages, students' needs and desires, ongoing curriculum revision, the movement toward standardized testing, and the school budget all play a role in determining whether sociology is offered in a particular school from one year to the next. My attempt to answer the second research question brings together the subfields of the sociology of sociology and the scholarship of teaching and learning. I demonstrate that teachers' decisions about course content and objectives are not entirely idiosyncratic, as is often implicitly assumed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. I show instead that decisions about the content and objectives of the high school course are the products of both individual and contextual factors, thus bringing the sociology of sociology's insights to bear on teaching. Specifically, I document how two groups have tried to shape the high school sociology course. On one hand, teachers have consistently taught social problems with an eye toward developing good citizens. Their formulation of content and objectives has been shaped by the historical and social context, curriculum pressures, the textbook market, students' needs and desires, and the limits of their own backgrounds and educations. Sociologists, on the other hand, have pushed for scientific sociology in the high school classroom, especially since 1960. They have been influenced by the persistent tension within sociology between science and reform, by the New Social Studies movement of the 1960s, and by the activities and position of the American Sociological Association. I conclude with practical recommendations for bridging the historical gap between teachers and sociologists. I also recommend paying more empirical and theoretical attention to the study of teaching sociology generally.

In this dissertation, I argue first that for policy and research purposes, identifying the agent who controls the child's labor reveals more about child work than simply identifying the child's attachment to the labor market. Children are not perfectly substitutable between different types of work either; the child's sex determines the kind of work assigned to the child. Thus in addition to the importance of agent controlling the child's labor, the dissertation asserts that at the margin, the trade-off between school and work partly depends on the task assigned to the child. The important findings in this dissertation are as follows: By using non-parametric analysis, I uncover that as household wealth improves, children are withdrawn from third party employment, but continue to work under parental control. Often, but not always, children working for third parties work harder compared to children working under parental control; and in some cases, children from better-off households work far more hours than the children of poor households. I then build a model in which a child's time is allocated to school, market and domestic work. The model predicts that, at the margin, the trade-off between school and work depends on the task, which may not fall under market boundaries. I then test the two theses of the dissertation using a dataset from Turkey. The results reveal that in Turkey, girls lose the priority in schooling in the presence of brothers, while boys gain by having sisters. Having assets complementary to child's work shifts boys' time away from third party employment to work under parental control, and parents adjust only their daughters' time when the household infrastructure is less developed. The dissertation contributes to our understanding of work and schooling outcomes of children living in the so-called Third World in three ways: first, by highlighting the importance of the agent controlling the child's work; second, by emphasizing that the trade-off between domestic work and schooling may be as crucial as the trade-off between market work and schooling, and last, by highlighting the need for different policy tools in order to improve Turkish children's schooling.

With the declining interest among college students toward preparation for occupations in the field of education, educational policy makers look toward establishing practices which will more adequately professionalize teaching. It is considered that empowerment will attract neophytes to the profession and also provide a challenge to the most able veterans to remain in the field. This study investigated the behaviors of a number of principals to determine if, in reality, these principals are utilizing behaviors which truly foster meaningful (being of great consequence) teacher empowerment in consequential decision-making situations (those which impact the quality of life in the school). The population surveyed includes all of the three hundred eighty-one principals working in the Southeast Educational Region of Massachusetts with two-hundred eight responding. Quantitative methodology was employed. This author constructed a questionnaire and the forced choice method was used to determine the extent to which principals employ behaviors which foster the creation or development of teacher empowerment. Personal and background information, along with the measure of degree of use of the identified behaviors which were gathered through the choice and comment survey items, were marginally tabulated to determine the manner in which the population distributes itself on the response alternatives for each of the items. Frequency and degree of behavior use, along with correlation of gender and levels of schools were analyzed. Through the construction of the questionnaire the specific behaviors used by principals in daily decision-making activities were identified. The response choices of usually, sometimes, and usually not, were utilized to identify the degree to which the activities are implemented by the administrators. A comment section on the questionnaire provided information which expanded and clarified the objective responses. Principals reported the highest percentages in areas where middle level empowerment behaviors existed on the continuum. Repeatedly, teachers have been most significantly included in decision-making activities in which the principal participates as a partner. This finding reflects the need of these principals to exert some degree of control over situations in "their" building. Principal behaviors of this type are an improvement over the autocratic approach but trust must develop between the parties before true teacher empowerment can exist.

The focus of this inquiry is upon higher education programs that offer post-secondary educational opportunities to men and women incarcerated in correctional facilities operated by the Massachusetts Department of Correction. The inquiry is exploratory, and both descriptive and theoretical. Its purpose was to generate a preliminary "social facts" description of prison higher education and a theoretical lens capable of guiding an examination of higher education as a mechanism for status reformation among prisoners. Because cultural analyses seek to make explicit social structures that make meaning possible, the inquiry design incorporates both deductive and empirical methods. Prison higher education was defined as a special case in the more general expansion of higher education. Higher education was viewed as a system of contexts that reproduce a stratified society by regulating the social value of participation. The efficacy of prison higher education as a status transformation mechanism was seen to be delimited its location within this system of contexts. The directors of six (6) prison higher education programs in Massachusetts participated in the empirical component of this inquiry by completing a questionnaire that sought information about personal backgrounds, program characteristics, and perceptions regarding the intersection of higher education and incarceration. The empirical findings were reported in Appendix A and comprise a preliminary description of prison higher education in Massachusetts. That description facilitated continuation of the theoretical discussion regarding the concept of prison higher education. It was concluded that higher education's historical pattern of expansion through the creation of educational forms and contexts that roughly mirror social expectations about participants lends strong support to the proposition that it became possible to educate prisoners precisely because some of those forms and contexts are no longer wholly in conflict with social expectations of what it means to be a prisoner. Support was also gained for the tentative propositions that prison higher education in Massachusetts is an element of mass education, that it may be evolving into an educational specialized context within mass education, that participation in programs of prison higher education is not likely to result in credible status transformations within or beyond the structure of confinement.

Includes bibliography. / Although the provision of education for gifted pupils has been widely criticised as elitist by liberals and radicals alike, this charge has never been specifically substantiated. In this dissertation, the relationship of socially defined giftedness to social power is explored from two major directions. The first is through an analysis of the ideology in theory conventionally informing gifted education, including selected information-processing models of intellect and creativity, theories of emotional and intellectual development, and justifications for gifted education in terms of social benefits. The second direction is through a historical analysis of the dramatic growth of the gifted education movement in the South African social and political context. Explanations for this growth are suggested and are explored through examining four selected issues in the South African context (i) the rhetoric of the gifted education movement, (ii) the changing role of the private associations advocating gifted education, (iii) the process of official acceptance of gifted education, (iv) the role of the HSRC, including discussion of the proposed national policy for gifted education. In these analyses, it is demonstrated thta gifted education is contributing to the complex reproduction of social relations and therefore inhibiting significant social change. It is concluded that a case can be made for the provision of gifted education but that there is an urgent' need for gifted education theory which is adequately formulated in terms of South African social reality, and for specific interventive strategies to offset the elitist function of gifted education and to redistribute its benefits.

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