Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sunday Commentary: Excuses, Defeatists, and the Reality of Low Achievement

by Corey Bunje Bower

In-School vs. Non-School Factors

If there's anything upon which education researchers agree it's that student achievement is influenced more by non-school factors than in-school factors -- and the evidence is overwhelming. But, for some reason, saying this merits serious criticism in some circles.

On July 4, 1966 the government released what came to be known as "The Coleman Report," a comprehensive study that was commissioned in order to prove that more funding would improve the plight of African-American students. Instead, Coleman found that non-school factors were far more important than in-school factors -- which is why they attempted to minimize publicity by releasing it on a national holiday.

Seymour Martin Lipset, a fellow at the Hoover Institute, was overheard summarizing the results to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan thusly: "Guess what Coleman’s found? Schools make no difference; families make the difference."

Indeed, the liberals in Congress were devastated at the results -- they had expected to find that achievement gaps could be solved through more school funding. Meanwhile, conservatives beamed -- the report proved that a strong family was the root of a strong society and that government could not spend its way out of the problem.

Today's Version of the Dispute

At some point between 1966 and 2009 the sides seem to have flipped. The more conservative position now holds that schools can close achievement gaps if people work hard and don't make excuses, while the more liberal position is that we need to fix the underlying causes of the achievement gap (which mostly lie outside of school) before we can truly solve the problem. This is, of course, an oversimplification -- but what's struck me is the reaction of those who argue the latter.

In the original press release announcing the release of David Whitman's book (the new version has been toned down) the Fordham Institute included a passage that lumped together "defeatists" like Charles Murray and Richard Rothstein. I must say that it had never struck me to lump together one of the authors of The Bell Curve, (a conservative who essentially argues that many kids just can't hack it and we should train them for careers instead), with Rothstein (a liberal who argues that we need to address inequality in society as well as in schools if we want to close the achievement gap). I later found out that Fordham wasn't the first to characterize these two as "defeatists -- Jay Greene beat them to the punch.

This classification of people as "defeatists" seems to be a running theme in rhetoric surrounding education policy. Increasingly, many are describing ed policy people as belonging to one of two camps; those who believe that everybody can achieve if we work hard enough and those who make excuses.

In a December op-ed, David Brooks, characterized the battle as one between reformers and defenders of the status quo and pleaded with Obama not to hire Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education so that the world might not come to an end. He's far from the only one to characterize the split this way -- David Whitman penned an op-ed in the Huffington Post a few days prior using much of the same terminology, and referring to the latter position as "the defeatist view of school improvement." The inflammatory rhetoric has led others to retort that the rift is really one between deformers and realists.


But, back to my original contention: if there's anything upon which education researchers agree it's that student achievement is influenced more by non-school factors than in-school factors -- and the evidence is overwhelming. If you know an education researcher who would disagree with this statement, I'd like to meet them -- because I don't know any. Over the 42 1/2 years that have elapsed since the Coleman Report those findings have been replicated countless times. That non-school factors are, on average, much more important than in-school factors is simply not up for debate.

Why? We know that a large achievement gap between races and classes exists before students start kindergarten. We know that this gap widens during the summer and stays pretty stable during the school year. We know that attainment and achievement are much more strongly associated with SES level, race, parental occupation, etc. than any in-school factor. We know that when we control for so-called background variables that there simply isn't much variance across schools. We know that students spend only about 22% of their waking hours in school. In other words, we can come a lot closer to guessing how well a student will do on a standardized test if we're given their background information than if we're given information on what type of school they attend.

And this makes logical sense. If the student bodies of a wealthy, Suburban school and poor, inner-city school switched places we'd expect the inner-city school -- with the same staff and resources it previously had -- to out-achieve the Suburban school.

Somehow, in their determination to improve schools, some people seem to have gotten lost. I know when I started teaching I believed very firmly that I could turn around the life of just about every student with whom I came in contact -- regardless of what else was happening in their life. I believed very firmly that improving schools would fix a lot of society's problems. And when I started hearing research findings indicating how difficult it is for schools to dramatically affect students, I balked. But, eventually, I came to understand why this is.

Every student responds differently to every aspect of a school -- who their teacher is, what sports are offered, what color the wall is painted, etc. The worst teachers still help a few students grow exponentially while the best have some students that don't progress. So attending a school that is "bad" or "good" won't magically affect every student in the same way; students succeed at the worst schools and fail at the best. And it became painfully obvious the more I taught that what was happening at home (or at least outside of school) influenced the lives of most of my students more than I ever could.

In NYC, a very strong correlation (r = .8) exists between the percentage of students eligible for free/reduced-price lunch and the percentage of students passing state English tests. Why? The obvious answer is because the students in these schools come from families and neighborhoods that are often in disarray -- they don't have shelves full of books to read; their parents don't have time to read to them every night or take them to the library; they're exposed to far fewer words and different grammatical norms; they have no quiet place to do homework; they miss days of school to look after younger siblings; they have more health problems; and so on.

But, according to some, this isn't what causes low achievement -- it's poor-quality schools and teachers that make excuses rather than teach. In order to make a serious case for the latter, you'd have to believe that the worst, least-dedicated teachers and administrators systematically distribute themselves so that there are more of them in schools with more kids from poor families; that teachers in the South Bronx routinely put forth less effort than teachers in Chelsea, and that their level of effort and competency correlates almost perfectly with the number of kids from impoverished families at the school. This is simply not plausible.

Reality vs. Rhetoric

Now, where it gets interesting is how people react when others say such things. One of the reasons that I reject the notion that there's truly a firm divide between two camps of education policy is because people on different "sides" often believe similar things -- they just use different rhetoric. To be sure, different people believe different things: some believe that charter schools are the way to the promised land, while others claim that choice solves nothing; some believe that unions cripple schools while others believe that unions create a less abusive environment -- and so on. But I reject as false the current dichotomy that many pushing as an accurate description of world of education policy world; the largest split is rhetorical. People on both sides agree that:

Schools are important, but are not omnipotent. All students can succeed, but not all will (depending, of course, on the metric being used). Hard work and dedication can improve schools, but effort and success will not correlate perfectly. We should do everything possible to prevent students from being left behind, but me must also realize that there is no silver bullet.

I value the insights of many people across the spectrum, and I truly believe that the jury is still out on most of the reforms that are pushed by various groups. But it's clear that one side is winning the rhetorical war despite the fact that when you take their rhetoric to the logical end that it simply doesn't stand up to reality.


What too few people are willing to admit is that we can start with the fact that non-school factors are more important and build on it in multiple ways -- none of which involve simply giving up. The fact that non-school factors are currently more important could be used as an impetus to radically enlarge the role of schools in the lives of many children. A number of the most successful inner-city schools dramatically extend the school day and year -- the SEED Foundation has even created boarding schools in Baltimore and D.C. In other words, one way to address the situation is to increase the influence of schools on students' lives. Another direction we can go with this is to attempt to improve the lives of children outside of school, whether through the construction of health clinics, the improvement of housing conditions, the creation of tutoring programs and such, or in other ways. Both are fundamentally trying to do the same thing: provide students with a different life experience, expose them to different societal norms, and subsequently improve outcomes.

People who advocate either of these positions have a ton of evidence to support them; they are both eminently reasonable positions. But for some reason, people who support the latter are under rhetorical attack. And this attack is both unproductive and illogical. The reality of the situation is that the problems facing low-income children are huge and small solutions are not enough; this is reality, no matter how badly anybody wants it not to be. And it's possible to both face this reality and help children.

Corey Bunje Bower is a Ph.D. student in education policy at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. Before beginning his studies he taught sixth grade at a low-performing middle school in the Bronx that has since been shuttered. His research focuses on issues surrounding high-poverty, urban schools including teacher retention, discipline, and school climate.


Nancy Flanagan said...

Excellent post, Corey--puts a succinct but cogent historical framework around the concept of accountability in reform. Since you mentioned in your post yesterday (re: Sunday commentaries) that you would be proof-reading, I am hoping that the last sentence of paragraph eight is a slip-up and not deliberate. Ha.

I would take very mild exception to your contention that one side is winning this war. The testing/accountability camp has certainly been ascendant in the past seven years, to a degree that many educators and schools which should have been subjected to ongoing scrutiny have found shocking. But--looking over policy-practice swings in the past four decades, since I entered the classroom, it's also possible to construe the past two months as the place where the discourse has begun to turn. The number of times I've seen Richard Rothstein's latest book, "Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right" as a respected resource for new thinking (rather than yet more excuse-making by the status quo crowd) is one little signal that the discussion has morphed.

Corey Bunje Bower said...

I'm not sure that one side is winning the actual war (especially since I don't think there are really only two sides), but I get an increasing sense that one side is winning the war of rhetoric.

No slip-up -- "deformers vs. realists" was what I meant to write as a juxtaposition of "reformers vs. defenders of the status quo"

KDeRosa said...

Corey, I think you are misinterpreting the Coleman Report.

"The Coleman Report,
which found that measured school resources explained a small portion of the variance in student achievement, has been commonly interpreted as implying that “schools don’t make a difference.” This interpretation confuses the effects
of measured differences with the full effects of schools and has been shown to be wrong. There is a significant difference
between measured resources (of the kind on which policy frequently focuses) and the true effects of schools."

From Conclusions and Controversies about the Effectiveness of School Resources

The other issue is the term "non-school factors" which includes innate student traits (like IQ and drive) and out-of-school environmental factors (family factors, SES, etc.). the former are intertwined with the latter and prevent the kind of generalizations you make in the post.

The research indicates that the innate student traits are the ones that dominate achievement and are diffciult to change, expecially by about age 10. The remianing non-school factors are easier to cahneg but don't seem to have much of an effect when we try to improve them. And, when I say not much of an effect I mean less than in-school effects by changing something like instruction (something Coleman did not measure by the way).

The following two quotes from pages 20 and 21 are helpful:

For most minority groups, then, and most particularly the Negro, schools provide no opportunity at all for them to overcome this initial deficiency; in fact, they fall farther behind the white majority in the development of several skills which are critical to making a living and participating fully in modern society. Whatever may be the combination of nonschool factors--poverty, community attitudes, low educational level of parents-which put minority children at a disadvantage in verbal and nonverbal skills when they enter the first grade, the fact is the schools have not overcome it.

The conclusion can then be drawn that improving the school of a minority pupil will increase his achievement more than will improving the school of a white child increase his. Similarly, the average minority pupil’s achievement will suffer more in a school of low quality than will the average white pupil’s. In short, whites, and to a lesser extent Oriental Americans, are less affected one way or the other by the quality of their schools than are minority pupils. This indicates that it is for the most disadvantaged children that improvements in school quality will make the most difference in achievement.

Corey Bunje Bower said...

KD: I don't think I'm misinterpreting the Coleman Report at all.

I tried to make it pretty clear that schools make a difference -- the Lipsey quote was one reaction to the report, not the consensus of the research community.

You make a valid point about innate student traits and school experiences being intertwined, but by non-school factors I meant only out of school environmental factors. They're called different things in different papers (Heyneman & Loxley, for example, call them "preschool influences" -- which I found a bit confusing), I thought my terminology was clearer -- maybe I was wrong.

I like the two quotes you cite from the Coleman report -- and subsequent research has backed them up (though with different terms for racial and ethnic groups). But they don't say that non-school factors are less important than in-school factors when determining student achievement. They point out the achievement gap is created outside of schools, but that it's not closed in schools and that different groups benefit disproportionately from good schooling. I think those conclusions are sound. And it's one reason why I believe improving school quality, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods, is so important -- it's why I'm chosen to pursue a career in education. But it doesn't change the fact that currently, on average, non-school factors have a larger influence on achievement than do in-school factors. The main point of my long-winded post was supposed to be that school reform is still vitally important even though we know this to be true.

I find it odd that you quote a Hanushek paper in which he writes that "These studies yield a simple conclusion, one that is supported in detail elsewhere (Hanushek 1997): there is no strong or consistent relationship between school resources and student performance. In other words, there is little reason to be confident that simply adding more resources to schools as currently constituted will yield performance gains among students." as evidence of the supremacy of school effects over non-school effects.

In the section you quote Hanushek refutes the notion that schools don't make a difference. Once again, I never said that schools don't make a difference. Schools do make a difference. Schools are important. And I need you to realize that saying that "schools don't make a difference" and saying that "student achievement is influenced more by non-school factors than in-school factors" are two very different things. For example: let's say that research found that mothers have a larger impact on school performance than do fathers -- would that mean that fathers don't make a difference? Would that mean that fathers aren't important? No, it wouldn't.

Roger Sweeny said...


It's hard to disagree with anything in your (not long-winded at all) post. Okay, one thing. You ask why students in poor neighborhoods do poorly in school and you begin like this,


But this isn't disarray. It's difference, even--dare I say it?--diversity. It's people who do not read or write much passing on that preference to their friends and relations. It's people who do not talk like school teachers passing on that way of speaking.

Now this is going to hurt the kids when they go to school. But neutral "services" like better health care aren't going to change these aspects of poor kids' lives. You may be making a case for "cultural imperialism," or, to borrow a word from the Whitman posts, paternalism.

jenny rain said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

You had some good points Corey. I have been teaching for eighteen years and I have not heard anyone - parent, teacher, or administration, mention or even believe that a strong family contributes to a strong society in the future. And with that said the responsibility of the home and parents is to foster a nurturing and a rich learning environment. I strongly agree that student success does heavily depend on non-school factors. Before pre-school, parents and family should be actively engaged in educating their child by reading to them, initializing recognition of colors and shapes, and reciting the alphabet and numbers.

A point I would like to make is that schools do make a difference in a child’s life. Schools provide community exposure and experience, learning support, and a social environment where children learn to communicate and apply appropriate social behavior. If there is a lack of rich and nurturing environment at home then the school and teachers provide that learning environment. It may be the only positive influence that would positively affect the child to do better and improve their life situation.

Some students with minimal support at home could be difficult to motivate. And due to the fact that non-school factors affect students success there has been programs and support created for students and parents before school, during school, and after school. The concern I have is with all the support created to promote student success in and out of school, have we taken the accountability away from parents who made the decision to have children? Schools and teachers are often blamed for the failing grades of student. It is a hard concept for parents and some administrators to grasp that teachers do not give Fs, the students earn them.