While socioeconomic status does affects students' success, both in academics and in future status in adult life, it does not have to be the only deciding factor. In his study, Alternate Route to School Effectiveness and Student Achievement

Alternate Route to School Effectiveness and Student Achievement

Circumventing Socioeconomic StatusBy Patrick Chudi Okafor

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Chudi Okafor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3045-0

Contents

Foreword...................................................................................................................................xvIntroduction...............................................................................................................................xixWhat's the Fuss about Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement?.......................................................................xixChapter I The Overarching Framework Enveloping this Study.................................................................................1Chapter II The Historical Development of the Concepts: School Climate and School Effectiveness............................................8Chapter III Rationale and Propositions....................................................................................................28Chapter IV Results of Tested Hypotheses, Discussions, Limitations, and Implications for Policy, Teaching and Learning.....................36Chapter V Other Implications and Suggestions for Educational Policy, Teaching and Learning................................................62Conclusion.................................................................................................................................85Notes 2 Methodology and Procedures........................................................................................................89References.................................................................................................................................94

Chapter One

The Overarching Framework Enveloping this Study

The School as an Open System

Scott (1992, 1998) examined and categorized three most competing views of organizational systems as rational, natural and open. These three concepts though fairly distinct are somewhat complementary. An open system is also rational and natural, and the school integrates all these elements (Hoy & Miskel, 1996). As a rational system, the school strives to achieve its goals structurally and methodically; as a natural system, it is conceived of social groups (administrators, teachers and students) in interrelationships striving for survival. The open system cycle revolves around "inputs", "transformations", and "outputs". The input phase incorporates human, material and financial resources fed into the school; the transformational phase deals with the internal processes and structures of the school as an organization; whereas the output section involves performance outcome measures, the products or the goals (Hoy & Miskel, 1996). For Mouzelis (1967), an open system is a social system with various subsystems embedded in the wider society. An open system is, "a set of interacting elements that acquires inputs from the outside, transforms them, and produces outputs for the environment" (Hoy & Miskel, 1996, p. 26). As an open social organizational system the school incorporates interacting elements, which could be human and material, quantitative and qualitative (see Figure 1).

In this study, the author will be examining the relationships amongst the school climate as openness and health, pupil control ideology, and their interrelationship to effectiveness. Climate in its various forms involves internal processes and structures of the school as an open system. Effectiveness is a performance outcome criterion, it overruns the spheres of the school's input, transformation, and output; hence, it is an integrative open system's measuring instrument.

Socioeconomic status is the grading of an individual or a family in terms of possession and influence over wealth, power and social status; it incorporates parental income, education and occupation. Individual student come to school either with the advantages or burdens associated with socioeconomic status. Giving the right resources of an open and healthy climate the school can transform the human input it receives from its environment into successful people, notwithstanding the low socioeconomic background and the academic burden each student brings.

The family as an open system

The family falls within the confines of the general system theory, a wider base for models of family relationships (Fawcett, 1976). The concept of the open family system had preoccupied family studies for years (Constantine, 1983). As an open system, the family is made up of interrelated parts with members working together within a given environment. As earlier stated, an open system is embedded within an environment; it receives input, processes it and generates output to the same environment (see Figure 1). According to Constantine, "An open system is one which has significant exchanges of matter and/or energy with its environment" (1983, p. 726). An open system is transformational and therefore, non-static. Open systems have boundaries, which could be flexible and dynamic. As a rational system, it is structured; and as a natural system, it is composed of members in interrelationships. The family possesses all these characteristics. However, irrespective Alternate Route to School Effectiveness and Student Achievement of shared commonality in openness among all families, there is no rigid behavioral or operational uniformity among them, "they differ markedly in their manifest patterns of behavior and in the mechanisms by which these patterns are maintained and regulated" (Constantine, 1983, p. 726).

Socioeconomic status incorporates parental income, education, and occupation; it is the grading of an individual or a family in terms of possession and influence over wealth, power and social status. Children enter school with academic strengths and liabilities acquired from their families. The family climate makes up a significant portion of the home environment. A healthy open family system makes a good home, a necessary capital needed by a child to succeed both in the school and the society. The importance of the home in the academic development of a child and his or her later success in the life is of paramount importance. An open functional family with a healthy academic home environment will enhance the academic potentials of a child; a closed dysfunctional family will have an opposite effect.

Open system is therefore, most suitable for the conceptual underpinning guiding the course of this study. The variables to be investigated fall within its confines. The framework of an open system is thus, the conceptual underpinning and the overarching structure shadowing this study. It will be wonderful for the reader to have this in mind as the author explores alternate means of school effectiveness and students academic achievement as bypass to socioeconomic status.

School Climates As Openness, Health And Pupil Control Ideology; And Effectiveness: Definition

When people talk about climate, the tendency is for them to think in terms of the weather conditions: temperature, humidity, rain, sunshine, winds, clouds or the prevailing weather condition of a place. With regard to its usage in school as an organizational concept, there is some similarity but there is contextual difference. It is a technical term for describing the atmospheric condition of the school organizational environment; even in this context, it has many model usages.

The word climate as an organizational term originated from social and...