This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee. Preface

11.3 Issues and Problems in Elementary and Secondary Education

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. 
   Describe how schooling in the United States helps perpetuate social inequality.
   
2. 
   Explain the difference between de jure segregation and de facto segregation.
   
3. 
   Summarize the evidence on the effectiveness of single-sex education.
   
4. 
   Describe the extent of school violence and the controversy over zero-tolerance policies.
   
5. 
   Discuss how and why social inequality in the larger society manifests itself in higher education.
   

The elementary (K–8) and secondary (9–12) education system today faces many issues and problems of interest not just to educators and families but also to sociologists and other social scientists. We cannot discuss all these issues here, but we will highlight some of the most interesting and important.