Families? Characteristics
Goals and strategies
 High Schools Programs and Resources  Effects on students Post high school Transitions

Community Profiles
Resources, role models, expectations

Recall that this is an analytical paper in which you offer evidence about social and educational processes through accounts of the experiences of two individuals. Maintain a balance in your presentation of your work between details about schools, families, individuals, and communities and analytical points that explain how and why schools, families, and communities appear to influence individuals the ways they do. We expect you to make use of course concepts and the readings they are found in as you discuss the embeddedness of schools, details of pedagogy, curriculum, and organization, and the links between families and schools and communities and schools that contribute to sociologically significant patterns of educational attainment and advancement. We ask to see informed use of two theoretical/conceptual writings from the syllabus in your paper, and of two empirical studies about schools and their attributes reflecting social forces or contributing to sociologically significant outcomes.

Gathering information for your paper

1. Select appropriate informants.

2. Working with www.census.gov create a data profile of the communities your informants come from.

3. Working with https://www.ed-data.k12.ca.us/ create a data profile of the high school your informants came from.

4. Create a data profile on the educational attainments (highest levels of schooling achieved) of the parents and siblings of your informants.

5. Create a post-high school achievement profile of your two informants: schools attended since high school; jobs held; other activities. Describe goals of your informants during high school, at graduation from high school, and now. Note if those goals include or require academic attainments.

6. Determine if your informants judge their activities in school, employment, or elsewhere as helping them realize their goals that they established during high, at graduation, or at the present.

7. Create a profile on the way the families of your informants participated in forming their goals for academic or non-academic attainment.

8. Create a profile on the way the families supported their progress through school ? monitoring schoolwork or activities, interacting with teachers, administrators, and parents. How detailed was the knowledge of families or other significant adult others outside school about students? course selection, academic performance, extracurricular life, employment, and peer group activities?

9. How did families invest time, money, and resources in the academic and non-academic development of their offspring?

Interview Agenda: School Topics to Consider

What academic programs did informants follow in school? What programs were available? How was their availability made known?

Was there tracking and were your subjects aware of it?

Was college counseling available in school? How extensive? Were those resources used by your informants? Did college bound students use private college counseling or information networks outside the school?

What kind of real world advising was available, especially for non-academic students? What types of work experience or skill building for occupations was available? Were these resources used?

Did informants have any close relationships with teachers, counselors, other adults at school?

Were there mentors or role models outside of school that guided informants in their academic or school-based lives?

What school based extracurricular activities did informants take part in? What kinds were available?

What peer groups did informants associate with? Why?

Were students in school organized informally on the basis of race/culture, linguistic background, social class, neighborhood, academic interest?

What forms of academic support were available to support students? learning in case of difficulty? How were students able to access support for academic difficulties: referred by teachers, self-referred, referred by counselors?

What kind of disciplinary procedures were followed in the school? Did you interviewees ever face them?

Teachers? and other staff approach to partnership with parents: parents welcomed as partners in children?s development? Parents seen as having little to contribute to child?s development except support the demands of the school? Parents seen as ?problems? or obstacles to kids? development?