Joint Ventures: Framing a Political Sociology of Educational Provision in the United States

Elizabeth Armstrong, University of Michigan
Mitchell L. Stevens, Stanford University
Laura Hamilton, University of California, Merced

Sociologists elaborately study educational attainment but only occasionally consider education’s provision. We offer a conceptual framework for a political-historical sociology of education that encompasses provision and attainment. The hybrid character of the US polity defines the character of educational provision and its politics. Historical contingency, the tiering of educational funding and governance, and multifarious opportunities for human agency make for an uneven and episodic evolution of educational provision, which is implicated in race and class conflicts that evolve across historical time

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 109. The Future of Comparative-Historical Social Science I: Scholarly Borderlands