Chapter 13: Collaborative School Partnerships in Career Counseling

Schools matter. It is irrelevant whether prevailing thought is of schools as “microcosms of society,” (Morrison, 2001) or that of Social Reproduction Theory (Adams, Blumenfeld, Castañeda, Hackman, Peters, & Zúñiga, 2010), which says schools perpetuate or reproduce the dominant culture of society at large. Regardless of whether schools create society or society plays out within schools, what happens in schools has the potential to create an impact in society. Thus, schools “have civic and public purposes,” (Saltmarsh, Hartley, & Clayton, 2009, p. 3).

The impact of schools on society bears out in the pattern evident throughout the history of the American Education System. After a global social/political/economic event, American schools are called to action to respond, and ensuing legislation to promote educational accountability for that action then follows. The thinking appears to be, “it’s the schools’ fault and, if we just fix what’s wrong with today’s schools, we can solve this global political/economic/societal issue.” One of many examples of this pattern can be found in the 1957 Sputnik I launch, followed by American public blame “for the lag in technological development” attributed to public schools, with the National Defense Education Act, or NDEA, swiftly passed in 1958 (Spring, 2011, p. 369). Fast forward 25 years to the 1983 A Nation at Risk report precipitating the very same media scorn and political rhetoric surrounding lagging public schools. The legislative Action for Excellence in 1983, was a report “like the proclamations of school reformers and public leaders in the nineteenth century, …[labeling] education as a panacea for society’s ills,” (p. 434). Even well into the 21^st century, the pattern has persisted with international scores and comparisons pitting the United States against Singapore and Finland (among others), No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation evolving into the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and a continued and pervasive perspective of schools as a panacea for society’s problems viewed through the microscopic lens of accountability (Darling-Hammond, 2015).