scientific and technical work, or work in organizational harness, is no longer necessary in the affluent society. Here they share Herbert Marcuse's view of surplus repression.

Even at an avant-garde institution like Harvard College, however, such judgments, at once hedonistic and despairing, are widely voiced but less widely shared. My colleagues and I have continued to find students who are interested and alert. Sometimes they feel guilty because their interests do not appear to respond to the great causes of war and peace, racial conflict, urban decay or environmental protection. They may need to be sustained in the hope and belief that it will not help the abysses of our society to pull down the heights of culture. And faculty members also need to be sustained against the dangers of complete dependence on a student audience. This is especially true among that growing group of graduate students who have come to deprecate specialized research and who seek out positions in liberal arts colleges where they can devote themselves wholeheartedly to undergraduates. This very dedication is one source of the factionalism and schismatic tendencies in many small liberal arts colleges whether they are self-consciously experimental or not. Faculty members may engage in a competition to show themselves more pure, more devoted. than their colleagues-perhaps with the end result that their loss of visibility in their discipline may mean that their institution is stuck with them just because they have been so evidently devoted.

Such considerations have led me increasingly to believe that colleges need to protect their faculty members against the temptation of becoming missionaries in the cause of anti-specialist teaching and total involvement with undergraduates and with the institution. I think it is often of doubtful value to students to face mentors who have no other constituency than the local one. Yet when I have raised these misgivings with faculty members and administrators, many have contended that no one has the authority to interfere with their decision to make a complete commitment to undergraduate teaching. Like some young pepole attempting to develop new styles of life in communes. these faculty members see themselves as building an international community, uncorrupted by pressures to publish or otherwise to maintain visibility in a larger world.

In a different kind of society, which gave teachers at all levels higher status and greater authority, and in which values and concepts changed rather slowly, it might be possible to sustain a life as a college teacher with less anxiety about losing one's single constituency altogether. But in the American academic world, that seems a very distant vision. It is my judgment that those colleges have fared best over a considerable period of time where faculty members have been encouraged not to limit themselves to their undergraduate teaching but to seek other sources of stimulation-which need not necessarily take the form of regular publication of standard academic output. For example, both Bennington and Sarah Lawrence have made places where faculty were involved in the arts or in community and political work, or who have other ties to adult society.36

36 The late William Fels, former President of Bennington College, once reported to me that on the whole his faculty who had such connections were also regarded by students as better teachers than those who were confined to their teaching. His judgment was based on student reports of the quality of teaching which he then compared with faculty performance in extra-mural work of all sorts. For further discussion, Cf. David Riesman, Joseph Gusfield, and Zelda Gamson, Academic Values and Mass Education: The Early Years of Oakland and Monteith (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1970), chap. 12 and 13.

What I am suggesting in these last remarks is that we must guard against the victory even of our reforms, for while it is on the whole a benign development that there is now more concern for teaching than was the case a few years earlier, we must recognize that any social advance turns up new problems or uncovers unsolved old ones. We must continue to adapt our experiments to the local landscape, resisting innovations that have come out of a different academic turf. This means that we academicians need to decide what are the essential issues on which we are prepared to stand firm and if necessary to be defeated, and what are the arenas in which we can compromise and temporize without giving way to the excesses of the cultural revolution. At many points my own position, immersed in ambiguities, lacks the solace of clarity. My hope is a modest one, that what can be discovered will become cumulative, and that even our failures, if we do not deceive ourselves as to why they occurred, may help our succes sors avoid our errors before they invent their own.

OPPORTUNITY AS IT IS RELATED TO HOME BACK

1

GROUND AND SCHOOL PERFORMANCE 1

By FOREST I. HARRISON, Claremont Graduate School

One of the major problems, if not the major problem, confronting the educational researcher is an understanding of the nature of inequities in educational opportunity and its effect on achievement. The acquisition and immediate application of this understanding have become primary objectives for many of us involved with education. Stated operationally, the issue of concern is that if all students are to succeed in school, then each must be afforded the educational opportunity to do so.

The study reported here represents an attempt to understand further the nature of the relationship between achievement and opportunity, not just here in the United States but in other countries as well. The foremost purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the opportunity afforded academically successful students differed from that afforded nonsuccessful students within six countries.

Additionally, we know from such major works as those by Bloom. Davis, and Hess, and Coleman et al.,3 among others here in the United States, that opportunity is related not only to performance in school but to the home background of the students as well. In the Coleman report, it was concluded that what children in the United States bring to school with them accounts for more of the variation in their achievement than any other factor. Opportunity, however, was found to be significantly related to achievement. Thus, a further purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the opportunity afforded the students from advantaged home backgrounds within each country differed from that afforded the disadvantaged students in that country.

One additional purpose, of no lesser importance than the others, was to explore the implications of studying educational opportunity as a process. While Coleman et al. have used the usual omnibus measures of opportunity-pupil-teacher ratio, expenditure per pupil on teaching, and the like the procedure used to measure the variable opportunity in this study was an attempt to measure educational opportunity as a process.

The research reported herein was performed pursuant to a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, OEG-3-6-068260-1626. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the Standing Committee of the International Project for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (I.E.A.) for providing, as data source, the I.E.A. Data Bank. This study was reported to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, in Chicago, February S.

1968.

2 B. Bloom, A. Davis, and R. Hess, Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965).

3 James Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, D.C.; Govern ment Printing Office, 1966).

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid. Coleman, "Equality of Educational Opportunity Reconsidered" (naper presented before the Symposium on Operations Analysis of Education, Washington, D.C., Novembr. 1967).

Before turning to a discussion of the procedures of the study, it needs to be emphasized that the focus of this study was on specific group differences within each of the countries, not on the differences between countries. Insofar as possible, the conclusions of the study were reached only after generalizations were drawn from the results of the analyses within each country.

Procedures

To resolve the problem as posed, an international data source with extensive information on a large number of students was needed. This requisite was satisfied through the use of the data bank of the International Project for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (I.E.A.). The I.E.A. Data Bank resulted from a recent international study of achievement in mathematics. This bank contains information on over 130,000 students in twelve countries. With these data, it was possible to secure student samples and approximate estimates of their home background, school performance, and educational opportunity

in selected countries.

Educational Opportunity

Opportunity was measured by qualifying the teacher's perceptions of the students' opportunities to study a particular topic in mathematics. The teachers had been asked to judge the extent to which their group of students were afforded an opportunity to learn to solve the types of problems presented by the mathematics achievement test administered to the students. Each teacher rated all of the seventy test items as to their appropriateness for his group of students. For each item, the response alternatives available to the teacher were as follows: (a) all or most, at least 75 percent, of this group of students had an opportunity to learn this type of problem; (b) some, 25 per cent to 75 per cent, of this group had an opportnity to learn this type of problem; and (c) few or none, under 25 per cent, had such an opportunity. The teacher's ratings were then scaled by assigning a value of 87.5 per cent to the first alternative, a value of 50 per cent to the second alternative and a value of 12.5 per cent to the third. The rating given by a teacher to each of the seventy items in the test taken by his students were averaged. Thus, for each teacher this was a measure of the opportunity his students had been afforded to learn the content covered in the mathematics achievement test. This score was assigned to each of his students, and it was interpreted as that percentage of the content of the mathematics test which the student had the opportunity to study. Home Background

As an indicator of the student's home background, the educational levels of his parents and the status of occupation of his father, taken in combination, were used. These variables are ones traditionally used to estimate home background. The educational levels were number of years of education completed by each parent; the status of the father's Occupation was represented by a coded occupational scale consisting of seven ordinal categories.

School Performance

A cognitive variable, mathematics achievement, and an effective variable, interest in mathematics, also in combination, were used as an

Torsten Husén (ed.), International Study of Achievement in Mathematics, Vols. I and II (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967).

indicator, albiet gross, of performance in school. The achievement level for a student was his corrected score on the 70-point mathematics achievement test. The variable, interest in mathematics, was an 11point index, derived from the student's desired occupation and his interest and grades in mathematics." The larger scores on this index indicate greater interest in mathematics.

Samples

The samples selected for this study were thirteen-year-old students in six countries: the United States, England, France, Japan, Scotland, and Sweden. In these countries, nearly all thirteen-year-olds are still in school. From the representative national samples taken by the I.E.A., the samples for this study were drawn selectively, using the multiple criteria father's education, mother's education, status of father's occupation, mathematics achievement, and interest in mathematics. To detail the selection process in the United States, the advantaged students who were selected were those students both of whose parents had completed at least thirteen years of education and whose fathers were in occupations in the four highest-status occupational classes. The disadvantaged students were those students both of whose parents had completed no more than ten years of education and whose fathers had occupations in the three lowest-status occupational classes. Within these groups of advantaged students and disadvantaged students, the successful and non-successful students were selected. The successful students were those students who had achieved a score of 16.25 or higher on the 70-point mathematics test and a score of 7 or more on the 11point interest in mathematics index. The non-successful students who were selected were those students who had a mathematics achievement score of less than 16.25 and also a score of less than 7 on the interest index. The application of the process resulted in the formation of four groups of selectively sampled thirteen-year-olds in the United States: the advantaged-successful, the advantaged-non-successful, the disadvantaged-successful, and the disadvantaged-non-successful.

This process was repeated for each of the remaining five countries The criteria for selecting the groups of students were adjusted, however, for each of the countries. Such adjustments were necessary to assure that, with respect to all other students in their country, only those students who were distinctly advantaged or disadvantaged and who were either the most successful or non-successful were included for study. The parents' educational levels of the advantaged students were ten years or more in England, eight years or more in France, nine years or more in Japan and Scotland and seven years or more in Sweden. The disadvantaged students in each country were those students whose parents' educational levels were less than the levels established as criteria for membership as advantaged students. And, in all countries. the advantaged students were those whose fathers were in occupations in the four highest occupational classes; the disadvantaged were those whose fathers were in the three lowest classes.

Within these advantaged and disadvantaged groups, the successful students selected in England were those who had achieved a score of 19.50 or higher on the mathematics achievement test; selected in France were those students who scored 18.50 or higher, 31.25 or higher

Ibid., I, 212.