Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Thursday, August 10, 2006
Do schools even matter?
(Teacher Jessica Chilbert with first graders on the first day of school last year at Orville Wright Elementary School, one of Dayton’s many high poverty schools)
I’ll tell you my answer to the question in the headline right now — yes, schools matter. Anyone who believes otherwise (I honestly don’t think there are many) should not be involved in education, or writing about it for that matter.
There is big edusphere buzz about this topic, fueled by Diana Jean Schemo’s thought-provoking On Education column in the New York Times this week called “It Takes More than Schools to Close Achievement Gap.” (Alexander Russo at This Week in Education has a decent round-up of some of the blogging commentary on the column.)
Here’s a taste from Schemo’s piece:
“In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas. To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families. For years, education researchers have argued over his findings. Conservatives used them to say that the quality of schools did not matter, so why bother offering more than the bare necessities? Others, including some educators, used them essentially to write off children who were harder to educate.”
The whole topic made many edubloggers uneasy. If there was one barrier NCLB indisputably crossed it was to force the idea that the nation, or at least the federal government, believed schools could make a difference and expected them to do so.
Even so, Schemo, who covered education in Washington, D.C., for the Times, raises an interesting topic that deserves discussion. Few dispute that the background and resources of the family correlate to some degree with how well a child scores on standardized tests. My recent study of this question using Miami Valley school districts even offers supporting evidence of a fairly strong correlation between median income and school district success on state report cards.
But by now there is certainly evidence out there that a good school can educate poor kids well despite their challenges and even make a difference in standardized test scores. (A couple of my favorite examples are the SEED charter school in D.C., a public boarding school, and Dayton’s own Dayton Early College Academy, an the campus of the University of Dayton. Both are successful, if expensive, examples of schools educating kids from challenging backgrounds.)
The bigger question in education right now is which strategies employed by successful schools can best be replicated on a wide scale, not whether we should even bother to try. I’d love to hear your thoughts on family background and its impact on test scores or good schools and how they can make a difference for poor kids.
(Image credit: Bill Reinke, DDN)
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