• Latest Newsletter (Fall 2009 — PDF 2.5 MB) *New*
• Hopkins Predoctoral Training Program in Education Research
• Minutes of the 2008 SOE Business Meeting
• 2008-09 SOE Officers Announced
• Research in the Sociology of Education, Vol. 16: Strong States, Weak Schools: The Benefits and Dilemmas of Centralized Accountability
• The Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the Institute for Educational Initiatives, University of Notre Dame Fellowship
• Is There Really a Shortage of Mathematics and Science Teachers?
• National Academy of Education (NAEd) Fellowships
• 2007 Willard Waller Award givern to Charles Bidwell
• AERA Grants Program Call for Applications
• Universities offering Sociology of Education
• Scholarly Lives on the Boundary: Markets, Demand, and the Erosion of Identity—Join the discussion

2007 Willard Waller Award Recipient

On behalf of the Sociology of Education Section we are pleased to announce that this year the Willard Waller Award for a career of distinguished scholarship goes to Charles Bidwell.

Charles Bidwell of the University of Chicago has had a long and distinguished career in the sociology of education.  His early career is marked by one of the field's all-time classics, a paper that still resonates today.  This work on schools as organizations inaugurated a theme that would characterize much of his research over the decades, establishing him as one of the field's most important scholars of schools as organizations.  In this agenda-setting article, published in James March's Handbook of Sociology in 1965, Bidwell managed to identify several primary foci of future educational research, including the questions on how a variety of "constituents" are recruited to the school organization; how staff are professionalized for their roles; how school organizations are rationalized structures, yet also marked by "looseness in articulation" between subsystems in the organization.  It is noteworthy that the characterization of schools as "loosely coupled" first appeared in Bidwell's writing.  In his overview of a field that was at that time in formation, we see the clear rivulets of any number of future powerful research streams in the sociology of education.  Interestingly, Bidwell's own organizational focus changed over time, from an emphasis on school structure in the early work to an emphasis on social relationships in the later work, where schools are seen as informal organizations, with their landscape of power relations between staff and students, social networks, norms, and resistance.  Smart, clearly written, careful, and accessible, much of Bidwell's work has, and promises to continue to, stand the test of time.

In awarding this prize to Charles Bidwell, we also recognize two other marks of a distinguished career.  First is his exemplary leadership in the field, including his editorships of the American Journal of Sociology, the Sociology of Education, and the American Journal of Education.  He was also the chair of the Sociology of Education section not once but twice in 1966 and 1978, and he served as vice president of the AERA in the 1970s.  His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and election to the National Acedemy of Education, the Sociological Research Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In addition to noting his publication and service record, we also honor his teaching and mentoring of graduate students in the sociology of education.

This year's Waller Award committee was Amy Binder (chair), Adam Gamoran, and Mitchell Stevens. (View list of past recipients)

Is There Really a Shortage of Mathematics and Science Teachers?

Presenter: Dr. Richard Ingersoll, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

• View Presentation and Transcript  

Dr. Richard Ingersoll gave this presentation at the Math Science Partnership Learning Network Conference on Jan. 31, 2006.

Dr. Ingersoll's webpage can be found here.

Read Richard Ingersoll's accompanying paper, Understanding Supply and Demand Among Mathematics and Science Teachers.