How Not To Fix Our Schools

click on image to see larger image (made with clipart from funnytimes.com)

Recently, a manifesto appeared in the Washington Post called “How To Fix Our Schools”. Written by some of the superintendents of public schools , like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein, the manifesto echos many of the same points made in the recent documentary “Waiting for Superman”. I would like to examine the fundamental claim in the manifesto, that teachers alone determine student achievement and other factors like poverty have no bearing.

According to the manifesto, “as President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income — it is the quality of their teacher.” I had to do a doubletake when I read this. I have a degree in education. According to an educational research class that I took over twenty years ago, the most important factor in determining student achievement was the socio-economic level of the child’s parents. This was first pointed out in a study done in 1966 called the Coleman Report. According to the Coleman Report, teacher quality accounts for only one-third of student achievement. Teacher quality is therefore important but hardly qualifies as the “single most important factor determining whether students succeed.” But its been over 20 years since I’ve taking that class. Maybe there is new research that contradicts this finding.

Well, it turns out there isn’t any. According to an article by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute written in reaction to this manifesto “Decades of social science research have demonstrated that differences in the quality of schools can explain about one-third of the variation in student achievement. But the other two-thirds is attributable to non-school factors.” Recent research such as by Michelle Phillips and Jonathan Crane do not support the manifesto’s claim about teacher quality. I encourage everyone interested in this issue to read his article, especially the footnotes.

My point is that the fundamental belief about teachers mad by people like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein is not supported by educational research. If the analysis behind their proposals is faulty, why should we give any credence to their proposals.

One additional point I discovered in reading Rothstein’s article. Remember that quote attributed to President Obama. It turns out that this is not quite what Obama believes. According to Obama’s remarks at a high school in Missouri “I always have to remind people that the biggest ingredient in school performance is the teacher. That’s the biggest ingredient within a school. But the single biggest ingredient is the parent.” (emphasis mine). What does it say about those that wrote the manifesto that they would resort to distorting what the President believes in order to gain popular support.