About this ebook
This comprehensive anthology features classical readings on the sociology of education, as well as current, original essays by notable contemporary scholars. Assigned as a main text or a supplement, this fully updated Sixth Edition uses the open systems approach to provide readers with a framework for understanding and analyzing the book’s range of topics. Jeanne H. Ballantine, Joan Z. Spade, and new co-editor Jenny M. Stuber, all experienced researchers and instructors in this subject, have chosen articles that are highly readable, and that represent the field’s major theoretical perspectives, methods, and issues.
The Sixth Edition includes twenty new selections and five revisions of original readings and features new perspectives on some of the most contested issues in the field today, such as school funding, gender issues in schools, parent and neighborhood influences on learning, growing inequality in schools, and charter schools.
About the author
Jeanne H. Ballantine is Emerita Professor of Sociology at Wright State University, a state university of about 17,000 students in Ohio. She has also taught at several 4-year colleges, including an “alternative” college and a traditionally Black college, and at international programs in universities abroad. She has been teaching introductory sociology for more than 30 years with a mission to introduce the uninitiated to the field and to help students see the usefulness and value in sociology. She has been active in the teaching movement, shaping curriculum, writing and presenting research on teaching, and offering workshops and consulting in regional, national, and international forums. She is a Fulbright Senior Scholar and serves as a Departmental Resources Group consultant and evaluator. Jeanne has written several textbooks, all with the goal of reaching the student audience. As the original director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Wright State University, she scoured the literature on student learning and served as a mentor to teachers in a wide variety of disciplines. Local, regional, and national organizations have honored her for her teaching and for her contributions to helping others become effective teachers. In 1986, the American Sociological Association’s Section on Undergraduate Education (now called the Section on Teaching and Learning in Sociology) recognized her with the Hans O. Mauksch Award for Distinguished Contributions to Teaching of Sociology. In 2004, she was honored by the American Sociological Association with its Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. In 2010, the North Central Sociological Association awarded her the J. Milton Yinger Award for Distinguished Career in Sociology.
Joan Z. Spade is Professor Emerita of sociology at The College at Brockport, State University of New York. She received her PhD from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York; her MA from the University of Rochester; and her BA from the State University of New York at Geneseo. In addition to courses on gender, Joan taught courses on education, family, research methods, and statistics. She published articles on rape culture in college fraternities and on work and family, including women’s and men’s orientations toward work. She has also coedited two books on education and published articles on education, including research on tracking, and gender and education. Joan was active in Sociologists for Women in Society, Eastern Sociological Society, and the American Sociological Association. In addition to visiting children and grandchildren with her significant other, she enjoys RVing, music and the arts, travel, and being outdoors.
Jenny Stuber is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Florida. Her research focuses on social class inequality, especially in terms of how people understand and enact it within institutional settings. Her book Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education (Lexington) explores the reproduction of class inequalities that takes place within higher education’s social and extra-curricular domains. Currently she is working on an ethnographic project in Aspen, Colorado, examining how middle-class residents respond to and resist the growing class inequality within their community. In addition to two textbooks—Exploring Inequality (Oxford University Press) and The Sociology of Education (Routledge), the latter co-authored with Jeanne Ballantine and Floyd Hammock—her research has also appeared in numerous academic journals. A dedicated instructor, her teaching focuses on social inequality, research methods, and annual study abroad trips to Iceland.
