You can enhance the following activities from the Instructor's Resource Manual by incorporating the resources available on the World Wide Web.

Selectivity versus Inclusiveness

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests:
Analyze the rise of the American comprehensive high school as the dominant institution of secondary education. Have students debate the question: Are American secondary schools designed to be selective or inclusive institutions?

To help students with their analyses, you might point them to some sites dealing with high schools or secondary teaching:

120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait
This publication that you can download from the National Center for Educational Statistics contains text and charts statistical trends of elementary, secondary, and higher education institutions.

Center for Adolescent Studies
This center, at Indiana University, offers a set of links relevant to adolescent issues, Teacher Talk, a newsletter for teachers of adolescents, and the Teacher Talk forum, an area for teacher discussion.

High School: The Shifting Mission
This special report collection of articles from Education Week about U.S. high schools today finds them still coping with some of the questions they have faced throughout their history.

MiddleWeb
This site is all about middle school, and may also be of interest for students working on this assignment.

Political, Social, and Cultural Influences

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests these three possible assignments for your students:

• Using Overview 6.1 as a guide, identify additional political, social, and cultural events that influenced American schooling from 1630 to the present. Describe the events, discuss their significance, and explain how they are congruent with or deviate from other historical forces of the period in which they occurred.
• Select a major newspaper or weekly news magazine and cut out education-related articles printed over the course of four weeks. Identify the major issues, attempt to trace their historical origins, and analyze their effects on education today.
• Write a short history of an elementary or secondary school in your home community. Emphasize how the school has been affected by economic, social, and political trends of various periods. Consult local librarians, PTAs, school administrators, members of local Phi Delta Kappa chapters, and longtime community residents for pertinent information.

To help students with these assignments, you may wish to direct them to some web resources:

The History of Childhood and Education
This site has an extensive collection of links to information on the history of U.S. education, including some suggestions for learning more about local educational history.

Newslink
This site, associated with the American Journalism Review, provides links to newspapers, magazines, and television stations all over the world.

National PTA
The Community page of the National PTA web site can help students locate local chapters.

Phi Delta Kappa International
The Chapter Services page of the Phi Delta Kappa web site offers a list of local chapters.