Now that MacArthur "genius" Roland G. Fryer's new paper on school inputs and effectiveness is beginning to get attention, it seems appropriate to look back at the most pioneering of studies on inputs and student achievement, the Coleman Report of 1966.
Sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995) released "Equality of Educational Opportunity" after conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in American history and one which ultimately found that how well we enhance school inputs -- money, teacher credentials, library materials -- has little correlation to how well students perform. Fryer and co-author Will Dobbie, both of Harvard University, similarly looked at the input measures at 35 charter schools and found that the most traditional measures -- class size, per-pupil spending, certified or uncertified teachers -- are not correlated with school effectiveness. Instead, Fryer and Dobbie show that frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time and high expectations "explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness."
Modern-day reform critics and even historians tend to lose sight of the suggestions Coleman himself proposed in journal after journal in the years following his landmark report. In particular, Coleman took to The Public Interest in 1966 to suggest what he called "a modest, yet radical proposal" to achieve equality of educational opportunity.
Specifically, he wrote:
a) For those children whose family and neighborhood are educationally disadvantaged, it is important to replace this family environment as much as possible with an educational environment -- by starting school at an earlier age, and by having a school which begins very early in the day and ends very late.
b) It is important to reduce the social and racial homogeneity of the school environment, so that those agents of education that do show some effectiveness -- teachers and other students -- are not mere replicas of the student himself. In the present organization of schools, it is the neighborhood school that most insures such homogeneity.
c) The educational program of the school should be made more effective than it is at present. The weakness of this program is apparent in its inability to overcome initial differences. It is hard to believe that we are so inept in educating our young that we can do no more than leave young adults in the same relative competitive positions we found them in as children.
In 1981, sociologist James S. Coleman made the claim that tuition barriers to private schools are "certainly harmful to the public interest, and especially harmful to the interests of those least well-off." He was referring particularly to Catholic schools and to his just-completed research identifying the social capital that families invested in Catholic education and the benefits that investment yielded in even the most disadvatanged youth.
Last week, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced that it planned to close 27 schools, ejecting 4,700 students. While the New York archdiocese has been aggressively consolidating some schools and converting others into charter schools in recent years, the announcement signals a further strain on a mission-driven style of education that has suffered from more than 1,600 school closings and consolidations nationwide in the last 10 years alone.
Coleman was urging policymakers to consider ways to expand the role of private schools in American public education. While state and locally facilitated vouchers and tuition tax credit plans have helped urban, inner-city families by the hundreds obtain a Catholic education in ways that didn't exist during Coleman's time, that has happened in only a handful of regions. Most Catholic schools depend on tuition revenue to stay afloat, and this trend of school closings and enrollment declines threatens the mission of an institution that has long reached out to impoverished neighborhoods. As RiShawn Biddle recently noted on his blog, Dropout Nation, that mission continues today, "with blacks, Latinos, Asians and American Indians making up 26 percent of its students."
Future posts on this topic will be frequent on redefinED. For now, here's a brief look at the trends in Catholic education, by the numbers (according to the National Catholic Educational Association):
The Cooperative Catalyst team this morning introduced the uniquely creative mind of Ken Robinson, whose animated presentation on new education paradigms made its way on YouTube in October and has since enjoyed more than 2.4 million hits.
Calling for a radical rethinking of public education today, Robinson argues that we're "educating people out of their creativity" in an education system "modeled on the interests of industrialization, and in the image of it."
"Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines -- ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects," Robinson says in his presentation. "We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are."
To paraphrase, we still falsely assume that children have identical needs, and we assume one school works for all students. A top-down, assembly line model. The critique is similar to one made by sociologist James S. Coleman 50 years ago in The Adolescent Society:
The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry ...
Author Zoe Weil, in her post on Cooperative Catalyst, takes Robinson's arguments one step further and proposes five solutions to develop new education paradigms. As Coleman did decades ago, Weil calls for a reassessment of the way schools are financed and structured so that education can flourish in an environment of choice:
Restructure how schools are paid for and create real school choice for every family; public funding for schooling based on zip code is inconsistent with our core values. Providing equal and adequate funding for every child that can travel with the child to any school will provide opportunities for creative school approaches to flourish and a variety of teaching and learning styles to meet the needs of each child.
