Friday, December 7, 2007

On Best Practices and Learning from "No Excuses" Schools

Yesterday, someone quipped that I write longer blog posts than Gary Becker. The key difference, of course, is that he is a Nobel prize winner. So here's my attempt to keep it real and keep it short:

1) Can we learn something from "outlier schools?" As I have written in the context of KIPP, looking closely at these schools can reveal potential best practices that warrant further study. This is important and useful, so long as we resist the temptation to make strong causal claims about the impact of a given practice on achievement solely from these cases.

2) Karin Chenoweth, the author of It's Being Done (that got short shrift this week because I am admittedly only half-way through - review to follow in the near future), wrote in yesterday's comments:

Wouldn't it be worth trying to identify those practices and structures and then making sure all children--particularly poor children--have access to them? Then we could have a real discussion of the effects of poverty on learning. Right now it is impossible to separate out the effects of bad schooling on students who grow up in poverty because so many poor children are forced to attend schools that do not use the "practices and structures that increase the odds of success."
I'm all for identifying those practices and making sure that all children have access to them. Holding schools accountable for practices and structures, rather than solely measuring results, is something we should be talking much more about. Robert Pianta has a nice commentary on the need to "measure teaching" in Ed Week. On this point, we agree.

But on your second point, I think we know more about the effects of poverty on student achievement than you are acknowledging. That poverty does not have large effects on kids' achievement and life chances is a deliciously American fantasy - and one that I find frustrating to defend in light of the weight of the social science evidence on this topic. As studies analyzing data from the Early Child Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort (a study of 14,000 children born in 2001) are beginning to show, these gaps emerge early - well before kids ever walk through the school door. Another way of isolating the impact of social class is to compare poor and advantaged kids' learning rates during the summer - where school cannot be the problem - and it's also clear that poor kids are at a disadvantage.

None of this is to deny that schools can, and must, do a lot. So like Debbie and Diane, we agree, we disagree. Can folks on both sides of this argument bridge differences at some point? We'll see.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re: "Wouldn't it be worth trying to identify those practices and structures and then making sure all children--particularly poor children--have access to them? Then we could have a real discussion of the effects of poverty on learning."

1. We ALREADY KNOW the effects of poverty on learning. There is at least a 50-year accumulation of good research on this. 2. Assuming for the sake of argument that we didn't already know those effects, it would be an equally valid experiment, and much more benevolent, to alleviate the poverty and see how much achievement still varies from school to school.

Anonymous said...

You cited objective research using the same data that showed the Ed Trust schools that supposedly beat the odds did not. The author from Ed Trust responded that your critique just presented "stale" and "worn" arguments, but never said any of your facts were inaccurate.

Why would anyone continue to cite a study they know has been so discredited with additional information? Why do we continue to build an education policy built on false and misleading "intelligence"?