Spring 2004 Table of Contents-Harvard Educational Review

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (ECCRN) constructed a structural model predicting reading and mathematics achievement in first-grade children from parenting, child-care, and first-grade schooling environments, which is presented in this article. The model provided a strong fit for the data, and parenting emerged as the strongest single contextual predictor of children’s achievement. Nevertheless, the child-care and first-grade schooling contexts independently contributed to children’s academic performance. There were also a number of indirect pathways of prediction that combined environmental and child factors. Overall, results confirmed that multiple factors act in concert over the school transition period to shape children’s reading and mathematics skills. (pp. 1–29)

In this article, Michael Pressley, Nell Duke, and Erica Boling call for a second generation of scientifically based reading instruction that goes beyond the evidence currently informing public policy. The authors argue that the federal government's position on what constitutes "scientific research" embraces only a narrow range of potentially effective instruction. If this definition is expanded, educational policy, including for early reading instruction, can be much more successful. (pp. 30-61)

Harvard Educational Review
Spring 2004 Reviews of Current Books
(Full Text)

Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms: Effects of New American Schools in a High-Poverty District
by Mark Berends, JoAn Chun, Gina Schuyler, Sue Stockly, and R. J. Briggs.
Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2002. 163 pp. $25.00.

Numerous current education reforms focus on individual schools. Notably, however, the schools in which these reform programs are implemented still must operate within school districts, which may or may not have the same mission and goals as individual schools. In Challenges of Conflicting School Reforms: Effects of New American Schools in a High-Poverty District, RAND researchers tell the story of what happens when a school’s program does not mesh completely with its district’s program. The report, part research finding, part cautionary tale, holds advice for policymakers and educators walking a difficult line between school decentralization and increased accountability efforts at the district and state levels.

New American Schools (NAS) is a 12-year-old reform effort, primarily focused on education reform through whole-school reform models. Seven reform models were included in the scale-up phase of NAS: Audrey Cohen College (also called Purpose-Centered Education); Authentic Teaching, Learning, and Assessment for All Students (AT); Co-NECT Schools (Co-NECT); Expeditionary Learning/Outward Bound (ELOB); Modern Red Schoolhouse (MRSH); National Alliance for Restructuring Education (NARE), also called America’s Choice Design Network; and Success For All/Roots & Wings (SFA/RW). As RAND reports, “While each design has unique features, the designs commonly emphasize school change in the following areas (referred to as elements): organization and governance; teacher professional development; content and performance standards; curriculum and instructional strategies; and parent and community involvement” (p. 3).

RAND researchers “examine the conditions of NAS classrooms compared with non-NAS classrooms and . . . study the relationships between classroom conditions and student achievement in a high-poverty district in San Antonio, Texas” (p. xvii). A primary focus of the study was to “examine the relationships among various factors (at the district, school, teacher, classroom, and student levels) and the implementation of designs, classroom practices, and student achievement” (p. 3). During the study period, four of the seven scale-up models were being implemented in San Antonio: Co-NECT, ELOB, MRSH, and SFA/RW. The research design, described in chapters one and two, included teachers at NAS sites in the district and teachers from sites not implementing NAS models. Data collection efforts included teacher and principal surveys, information about student achievement and background characteristics, classroom observations and artifacts, and interviews with district staff.

Chapter three describes the district and state context in which the NAS models were to operate. The authors describe a scenario that will not be foreign to individuals familiar with urban districts: forty-six out of San Antonio’s ninety-four schools were “low performing,” based on the TAAS (Texas’ criterion-referenced test), and the district had just hired a new superintendent. The superintendent restructured the district, “eliminating certain central office positions, creating new ones, and reallocating resources to better serve schools” in an effort to create a “balanced blend of site-based and central operations management” (p. 34).

As part of her reform strategy, the superintendent required principals to pay attention to instruction and created “Instructional Guides,” or master teachers at the school level, both to support and monitor instructional practices at schools and to represent school needs to district staff, and vice versa. Principals and teachers were encouraged to talk with each other within and across schools in an effort to improve collaboration and communication. The district also selected new curriculum materials: Everyday Math, and Balanced Literacy and Widening Parameters for reading. Teacher professional development focusing largely on math, reading, and technology was required; principals also received new training. Finally, the district created a “Parent Community Partnership Network” in the hopes of increasing parent and community involvement in the schools.

Believing that the New American Schools models could support the district’s reform efforts, the superintendent and district staff decided that schools should choose and implement one of the district-approved NAS models. Schools could choose from among four preselected models: MRSH, ELOB, Co-NECT, and SFA/RW. While schools did not have to select a model immediately, the superintendent informed school staffs that she expected them to choose a model within three years. The district maintained a support role for schools operating NAS models; for example, district staff made sure that Co-NECT schools (a technology-heavy model) had computer network systems necessary for program implementation. Throughout the district-level reforms, the TAAS was not far from educators’ minds. Schools were rated based on TAAS scores and, in 1995, the state introduced “a financial incentive to demonstrate improvement or sustained success on TAAS” (p. 46).

The conflict between the need to improve TAAS scores and the desire to implement school-selected NAS models is explored throughout much of the book. First, schools that were encouraged to adopt reform models were also the lowest performing schools in the district. Teachers in these schools would come under great pressure to increase TAAS scores. “For one school, this meant neglecting its NAS design altogether in favor of teaching basic skills instruction all year long” (p. 57). Second, the lowest performing schools felt that they had to adopt some model, and this had to be done quickly. While 60 percent of teachers needed to vote in support of a model for it to be selected, non-adoption, particularly among low-performing schools, was not an option. Third, while the Instructional Guides were supposed to help with NAS implementation, teachers perceived that the district’s focus was test results — and schools that adopted NAS models were also expected to follow the district’s mathematics and reading initiatives. In fact, much of the professional development provided by the district supported the district’s initiatives, not the schools NAS-related needs.

There was not complete discordance between the NAS models and the district’s initiatives; for example, schools that adopted SFA/RW were not required to follow the district’s reading program. Notably, however, teachers reported that even the district’s chosen math model, Everyday Math, was neglected in efforts to teach basic skills for the impending TAAS.

While the conflict between centralized district efforts to improve TAAS scores and decentralized school models is apparent, chapter five offers glimpses into how NAS schools were different than non-NAS schools. Teachers in NAS schools reported using nontraditional grouping practice more than their non-NAS peers. NAS school teachers also reported higher levels of reform-like instructional strategies, such as students “work[ing] on problems for which there is not obvious method or solution” and “perform[ing] research projects” (p. 90), than non-NAS teachers, although both groups’ use of such instructional strategies grew over the course of the study. Teachers in NAS schools overwhelmingly reported that NAS had helped improve aspects of their professional lives and had benefited their students, including “job satisfaction, students’ achievement, students’ enthusiasm for learning, classroom curriculum, and students’ engagement in learning” (p. 104). And while teachers did not report major changes in teaching style as a result of NAS design training, many did report a higher degree of involvement in planning lessons and curriculum for their students. Most notably, the differences between NAS and non-NAS schools were often not as great as the differences between survey responses in years one and two of the study, which the researchers conclude “is likely a reflection of the dramatic level of change within the district itself” (p. 106).

Chapter five also offers lessons about reform implementation. Researchers describe reform practices in the district and what these reform practices look like in classrooms (the adopted curriculum versus the enacted curriculum). Notably, schools following the same NAS model were not uniform in their approach to student grouping, even when grouping was an important aspect of the model. Even within schools, teachers did not necessarily follow uniform approaches. In this aspect, the book falls short: it is never clear how well the models are, in fact, implemented within and across schools.

Without this knowledge, it is difficult to proceed through chapter six, where the researchers examine the effects of NAS models on student achievement. Student assessment results could indicate that the models were not associated with student learning. However, the results also could reflect low levels of design implementation. In fact, researchers find little difference between student achievement in NAS and non-NAS schools. While the researchers explain that the results may be due to the early stage of the implementation or that the schools looked similar because of districtwide efforts, it may also be that reforms were not implemented as completely as intended or even as reported.

The authors conclude in chapter seven with lessons for future efforts to reform high-poverty schools. They argue that reforms need to offer specific guidance to teachers about what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it. Further, reforms need to have rewards and sanctions associated with them, and need to have some degree of “authority” — that is, they need to be seen as legitimate and have support from teachers and administrators. Lastly, reforms at the school and district levels need to be in coherence and alignment with each other, stability matters (e.g., when San Antonio’s reform-minded superintendent left the district, so did high-level support for the NAS reform model), and school-level leadership affects reform implementation. While many of these lessons are not particularly new, they present an important reminder for policymakers hoping to enact whole-school reform at the school level, while increasing accountability requirements and centralizing curriculum at the district and state levels.

A Student’s Guide to Methodology
by Peter Clough and Cathy Nutbrown.
London: SAGE, 2002. 212 pp. $24.95.

With the passing of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 and the establishment of the Institute of Education Sciences, educational researchers are under increasing pressure from governmental agencies to engage in rigorous evaluation of their work and to focus on improving various aspects of their research methodologies. While this pressure could have healthy consequences, the obstinate obsession of mainstream researchers and government officials with methodologies driven by statistics can hamper, rather than support, students’ ability to explore questions of methodology in depth. Most often, for example, courses in statistics ignore substantive questions about the nature of methodology and the logic that undergirds the relationship between research questions and choice of methods. In A Student’s Guide to Methodology, Peter Clough and Cathy Nutbrown offer an easy-to-use introduction to the kinds of substantive questions and ideas that students of educational research often do not have room to ponder. Ultimately, the kind of guidance the authors offer can determine the quality and rigor of any research endeavor, experimental or not.

A Student’s Guide to Methodology is carefully crafted and accessible to beginner students; it is also useful for experienced researchers. The authors begin with an exploration of what it means to do research and what the concept of methodology implies. They offer clear definitions of the key concepts with which they define research and which they use as a framework for understanding the various aspects of methodology, such as the four “Ps” — persuasive, purposive, positional, and political. Clough and Nutbrown follow by outlining the research process along four “radical” practices — looking, listening, reading, and questioning. Through the notion of radical practices, the authors describe various stages of research, from literature reviews to drawing out implications for future research. The guide ends with reflections on the process of making research public, without which, the authors argue, an empirical project does not amount to research.

The greatest strength of this volume is the clarity of the frameworks that guide students through the complexities of methodology. The book is not only easy to read and to follow, it also covers a lot of ground in a simple format. In some instances, however, the connection between specific aspects of research and the four radical practices that Clough and Nutbrown outline feels awkward. For example, the authors discuss both critical literature reviews and observations in the field as kinds of “radical reading.” While it is true that “many aspects of research involve ‘reading’ the research setting as well as reading the literature” (p. 96), these two ways of reading hardly fall under the same category. But while the latter may have fit better within the discussion on “radical looking,” the discussion of these two aspects of research, as with others, is clear, and the exercises and the examples are quite useful.

Another clear strength of the book is its interactivity. Clough and Nutbrown offer many tools and exercises to engage readers in thinking through fundamental questions about methodology. As the authors argue, many of these exercises can provide the basis for research proposals and help researchers — even experienced ones — organize what can often be an overwhelmingly disorganized thinking process. Although the authors do not directly suggest this, these tools might be most useful in the context of a group, a course with an experienced researcher, or with a peer study group with which to work through the challenging exercises. Determining an appropriate course of action often requires more than just reflection and writing, and the exercises may be most fruitful when shared with others engaged in the same process.

The plethora of resources and the many references for further reading that the authors offer throughout the book are also invaluable. Clough and Nutbrown draw on concrete examples of their own published research to illustrate the various facets of methodology articulated in the book. While it seems somewhat contrived that the examples come from the authors’ own work, the excerpts are carefully chosen and connect clearly to the rest of the text. As with most examples, there is always the danger that students might take them as models, and the authors do not offer enough cautionary language to make sure that readers do not do so. However, guidance from an experienced researcher would help students avoid such pitfalls and make the best of this otherwise useful guide.

Clough and Nutbrown offer simple yet extremely useful tools for introducing students to the complexities of thinking about and implementing social research. Their book is flexible, and instructors can adjust it to the particulars of specific courses. Educators teaching research design and methodology might use the book to organize courses and to provide exercises for their students. If more educational researchers, including those hell-bent on narrow definitions of what constitutes “scientific” research, understood some of the basic principles outlined in A Student’s Guide to Methodology, the debate about what constitutes rigorous, usable research would be more intelligent and ultimately lead to more profound changes in the relationship between research and educational practice.

In the Deep Heart’s Core
by Michael Johnston.
New York: Grove Press, 2002. 224 pp. $22.00.

Michael Johnston’s memoir of teaching in an underresourced school in the Mississippi Delta follows in the footsteps of Herbert Kohl, Jonathon Kozol, and this book’s foreword contributor, Robert Coles. In the Deep Heart’s Core is the story of Johnston’s two-year tenure as a Teach for America (TFA) corps member teaching high school English in the Mississippi Delta. Teach for America is a national organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach for two years in underserved school districts in twenty urban and rural communities across the country that have experienced teacher shortages.

While his efforts fall short of re-creating the archetype of teacher memoir, Johnston does succeed in following the well-worn territory of well-intentioned young White teachers who meet with moderate success with their students. His stories of students who triumphed and failed academically and personally provide detailed accounts of how we, as a nation, have not done enough to provide a quality education for all students—particularly those that are poor and Black. Unfortunately, these stories are told with Johnston as spectator instead of participant.

Most poignant, though, are the moments when Johnston recounts his stories of being a Yankee in the South. His attempts to live in a Black neighborhood are thwarted by a landlord portrayed by Johnston as a likely racist who disapproves of his desire to cross the color line. Ultimately, Johnston is selected as a tenant for a house wanted by Black families in an all-White neighborhood. The second landlord hesitantly admits to Johnston, “You’re single, you’re young, you’re a school teacher, you’re white. I gotta tell you I jumped at it when I got your call” (p. 22). This was one of several glimpses into the context in which Johnston tries to be a good teacher and good person invested in the lives of his students and their families.

The book has four parts. Part One focuses on Johnston’s arrival in the Delta, setting the scene of an America stuck in a time warp at least twenty-five years behind. In the Mississippi Delta, Johnston finds country living, extreme poverty, and segregation marked by the age-old railroad tracks in the middle of town. His first day of school begins with a daunting walk to the cafeteria where teachers collect their homerooms. Faced with a fight between two high school girls, Johnston is forced to “impose a teacher’s authority” (p. 30) on the situation, but fails miserably.

Part Two begins the chronicling of individual student stories. There is Corelle, Johnston’s nemesis and the most poignant example of a teacher’s triumph and failure; Jevon, a hard worker who had fallen through the cracks of a failing public school system; and, finally, Larry, a rebellious yet quiet student turned class clown.

After playing a game of chess during a late afternoon detention, Larry and Johnston gain a quiet respect for each other:

Part Three further elaborates on the social challenges of living in poverty faced by his students. An honor student at Greenville High is shot and killed, and Johnston details how he and his students deal with grief while life goes on. The narrative reveals Johnston’s deep personal feelings of grief for the fallen student. Substance abuse, teenage sex, and the allure of dealing drugs all challenge the lives of Johnston’s students. In telling the stories, Johnston is both bystander and intimate participant at any given moment. His story of grief gives way to a detached recounting of those students who are also parents. At a loss for words, we see Johnston hearing about the sex lives and moral dilemmas of his students without hearing his personal reactions. Part Four condenses his second year of teaching into a few short vignettes of successes, as if the trials of the first year disappeared in a puff.

Despite some pitfalls, Johnston’s book puts a face to the plight of underfunded rural public schools. The stories Johnston became privy to during his two-year teaching stint are the stories that illustrate the need for policy interventions that bring financial and human resources to an outdated school system that relies on local taxes and is built on generations of racial segregation. Much of the difficulty faced by Johnston’s students was exacerbated by a public school system that further complicated the lives of students with teachers and administrators that were ineffective or unsupportive.

Johnston’s book is among the first teaching memoirs of Teach for America corps members. It is important to note that this story comes from the rural perspective, while the majority of teachers placed by TFA serve urban schools. Powerful education advocates, including Kozol, have been longtime supporters of Teach for America. One goal of the organization is to encourage its alumni to be lifetime advocates for educational equity for all children. Johnston makes a valiant attempt to do just that in his book.

Using Data/Getting Results: A Practical Guide for School Improvement in Mathematics and Science
by Nancy Love.
Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon, 2002. 550 pp., with CD-ROM, $69.95.

With the recent authorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, district- and school-level data have taken on new importance. Educators will need to disaggregate achievement data, track progress of all students over time, and examine assessment results to identify problems and plan appropriate instructional interventions. Noticeably absent from the calls to explore, examine, and use data to inform instruction is a roadmap laying out how to engage in this process at the district, school, and classroom levels. Nancy Love’s aptly named Using Data/Getting Results: A Practical Guide for School Improvement in Mathematics and Science ably fills this void with a straightforward guide and handbook for practitioners new to the data process and those seeking to create schoolwide efforts to use data to inform instructional improvement and support educational reform.

Love opens the book by laying out the “Guiding Principles for Our Work,” focusing on collaborative inquiry and the use of data to “fuel reform.” Two key points are made in her discussion of the inquiry cycle. First, that inquiry and reform must be aimed at all times at improving instruction, and second, that equity be placed “center stage” in the inquiry and improvement process. While the focus of Love’s work is on examining data, she cautions early on that “nothing changes if classrooms don’t change; school reform must impact teaching and learning” (p. 7). Love’s data-inquiry process is not about data for academics or for accountability’s sake; instead, it is geared toward improving instruction. Love sees data inquiry as a collaborative and iterative cycle (see “Collaborative Inquiry into Student Learning”). A cycle calls for planners, including administrators and teachers, to commit to student learning, collect and analyze data, formulate learner-centered problems, set measurable learning goals, develop a learner-centered action plan, take action, monitor results, and start again.

Love’s focus on equity is heartening for teachers and school leaders attempting to disaggregate data by student groups, such as low-income children and limited English speakers. Love’s vision goes farther than these traditional data analysis groups. She writes, “By equity, we mean the right of every student to achieve at high levels” (p. 11). Love believes that this principle should drive data analysis and leads to questions such as, “To what extent do performance gaps in mathematics and science exist among racial, class, cultural, or gender groups in our school?” and “How prevalent are beliefs that block equity in our school? How do they manifest in school and classroom practices?” These questions reflect an interest in analyzing data and in improving instruction for all students.

The heart of the data process comes in chapters two through six. Chapter two explores the practical issues of using data to inform school reform and instructional improvement. It describes types of data that school staffs might explore, including assessment results, examples of students’ work, teacher and student surveys, master schedules, demographic breakdowns of student enrollment in particular courses and extracurricular activities, interviews, and classroom observations. In this chapter, Love also introduces “The Phases of Inquiry: Framing the question, collecting data, analyzing data, organizing data-driven dialogue, drawing conclusions and taking action, and monitoring results” (p. 32). Ideally, these phases are also iterative, leading back to new questions and starting the cycle anew. Recognizing that there are technological, structural, and capacity issues embedded in the data process, Love provides guidelines for designing databases to house data, offers suggestions on how to create common planning time necessary for teachers to look at data collaboratively, and includes advice on how to help teachers and school staffs engage in what can be hard and possibly threatening conversations around student performance and instruction. Chapter two, like the others that follow, ends with a lengthy catalog of additional resources that readers might find helpful. This is not simply a reference list; rather, Love provides brief summaries of each additional source, enabling readers to identify easily the readings that would be more (or less) helpful to pursue.

Chapter three explores the intricacies of data analysis, exploring the types of data that may be available (e.g., standardized test results, state and performance assessment results, and examples of students’ work), and describing ways in which the data can be analyzed and displayed. She does not limit her discussion to test scores; she also presents samples of rubrics with student work. In addition to examining how to summarize and analyze student achievement data, the chapter delves into how one might assess students’ “opportunities to learn” (p. 95). Here, Love introduces new types of data to include in the analysis: master schedules, teacher qualifications, tracking, quality of curriculum, and access to technology, among others. This chapter also provides numerous tools for identifying questions to answer with data. Finally, Love reminds readers that data analysis is only the beginning; once challenges are identified and causes are hypothesized, staffs must develop action plans and ways to assess the effectiveness of these plans.

In chapter four, Love discusses the curriculum and assessment decisions that need to be addressed if data-driven instructional reform is to take place. To this end, the chapter follows the journey of a fictitious science reform team engaged in reforming a school district’s curriculum, assessment system, and instruction. The chapter discusses methods to assess whether the new curriculum and instructional reforms are taking root. Through teacher and student interviews and surveys, classroom artifacts (such as lesson plans), and classroom observations, school staffs have an idea of the extent to which reforms are being implemented at the classroom level. It is notable that this chapter explores creating and analyzing student achievement data (the learning result of the new curriculum and assessment system) last. This step must come after the curriculum is developed, teachers have received support in implementing the curriculum, and students and teachers are active participants in its implementation. Love warns readers that they must ask how well — and why — instructional changes are being implemented before assessing their impact.

Chapter five will no doubt provide great assistance to school staffs seeking to comply with the most basic reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind. In this chapter, Love describes ways to disaggregate data by race, class, gender, and English-language proficiency. It goes further than the act, however, urging staffs to investigate potential structural hurdles to equity at the school level, such as tracking practices and placement in advanced and special education classes. The chapter also presents staffs with ways to examine their own practices for actions that might indicate prejudice and discrimination. It is not enough, Love says, to identify winners and losers in a tracking system.

In chapter six, Love provides proof that this data-inquiry process can work in real schools and real districts. She presents “reform in action” accounts of five districts where staffs are using data to reform instruction, increase minority student enrollment in high-level math classes, implement standards-based reform, curriculum development, and to create and maintain a “performance-based learning and assessment system.” By describing these districts — their successes as well as the challenges they faced — Love provides an encouraging glimpse into the role that teachers collaborating around data can have in transforming schools.

Lengthy appendices constitute the remainder of the book, and it is these appendices that school data teams might find most useful. Love includes samples of surveys, self assessments, tools for examining state and district assessment results, interview protocols for interviews with students, protocols for rating text books, and a host of other tools. By presenting so many different tools and approaches to the inquiry of data, Love makes clear that there is no correct way to explore data and to improve instruction, nor is there any “correct” data to analyze. At the end of chapters three through five, Love provides “planning tools.” These tools include samples of team planning question guides that schools can use as they begin to plan, and data collection plan forms to help guide data inquiry (the tools also are included in modifiable format on a CD-ROM that accompanies the book). In compiling so many user-friendly tools for teachers, Love surely creates “a practical guide for school improvement.” However, the notion that this is a guide only for improvement in math and science is not quite accurate; while many of the examples in the book are geared toward math and science, they also could be adapted to meet the data needs of other disciplines. In short, Love’s guide and handbook provide the missing roadmap to using data to inform instruction and reform practices.

Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds
by Wendy Luttrell.
New York: Routledge, 2003. 238 pp. $23.95.

In her new book, Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds, Wendy Luttrell succeeds in recasting the image of pregnant teenage girls from societal problems to logical, savvy, struggling young mothers-to-be. Combining traditional ethnographic methods with multiple methods of gathering girls’ self-representations — including self-portraits, media collages, and drama — Luttrell provides a stunningly believable picture of a particular group of pregnant teens and their reinterpretation of their identities in a postmodern world.

Minds is the product of Luttrell’s five-year study of a public educational program for pregnant girls called the Piedmont Program for Pregnant Teens (PPT). An ethnographer and mother who has studied the intersection of motherhood and education, Luttrell arranges her analysis into three succinct parts. The book first sets a context for studying pregnant teens — a much-maligned group who are both inscribed by society’s disapproval of them as “bad” and their idealized role as inherently “good” mothers. Luttrell tackles the stereotype of bad mothers by teasing apart society’s conflicted views about teenage pregnancy:

In Part Two, Luttrell launches into the heart of the matter: How do these girls see themselves and manage the conflict of teenage pregnancy? The beauty of Luttrell’s methodological approach is that it allows the reader access to the girls’ stories while allowing the reader to decide for him or herself what to make of the phenomenon. Several pieces of artwork produced by the PPT girls appear in this section — some in full color. Building on the various collages and self-portraits, Luttrell reveals several themes about the very conflict described in Part One. Most poignant are the ways the girls deal with the dominant representations of teen pregnancy. They develop what Luttrell calls “body smarts,” a way of both expressing grief for their loss of innocence and demonstrating their insight about how they are viewed and how they view themselves.

Luttrell’s role as curator of the PPT girls’ artwork and dramatic performances reveals how commonly held interpretations of teenage pregnancy can be problematic. Through the lens of psychology, Luttrell uses ethnographic data from the girls’ process of creating the artwork to understand their meanings. For example, many of the girls’ media collages included pictures of money, credit cards, and luxury brand names, suggesting a certain attitude about consumerism and materialism — what Luttrell calls “money talk.” In many cases, the girls explained their use of such symbols and their desire for money as necessary to care for their babies. Luttrell interprets this money talk as part of the larger class-based and racialized discourses:

Other themes explored through the artistic creations of the girls include idealized motherhood, developing a sense of racial selfhood and identity, and defending their morality. The girls’ dramatic play-acting, an activity Luttrell facilitated to gather stories from the girls, revolved around the “pregnancy story” and often included trips to the local health clinic. Luttrell recounts an emotional moment where she is drafted by the girls to portray a pregnant girl confronted by a judgmental nurse. Despite the make-believe context of the skit, Luttrell isn’t able to be tough enough to conceal her vulnerability and burst into tears in the face of the mean nurse being portrayed by one of the PPT girls. The girls are at first impressed by her realistic portrayal, but when Luttrell reveals that she was “intimidated,” they share feelings of empathy but explain that a girl in this situation can never “let on” feelings of shame and fear. This kind of morality play revealed the very real conditions of the PPT girls’ lives and the ways they chose to represent themselves in various contexts.

Part Three of Minds provides words of wisdom and potential roadmaps for further ethnographic research and for practitioners working with youth. Luttrell suggests the importance of engaging participants themselves in the work of representation in order to avoid the trap of assuming too much authority as researcher. In chapter six, “Entering Girls’ Worlds,” Luttrell explores the messiness of fieldwork across differences and her own journey of interpreting the data, saying,

Luttrell hints that the work of teachers is also laced with the challenges of representation by offering these activities as pedagogical tools. She reminds her audience of the importance of art in learning and the power of play and drama in adults’ understanding the worlds of teenagers in and out of crisis.

What seems most clear about Minds is that it reaches its goals with elegance and verve. Luttrell has written a book that is accessible to a wide audience and relevant across several disciplines.

Lessons to Learn: Voices from the Front Lines of Teach For America
by Molly Ness.
New York: Routledge Press, 2003. 256 pp. $24.00.

On the heels of Michael Johnston’s book, In the Deep Heart’s Core, comes the broader-themed Lessons to Learn: Voices from the Front Lines of Teach for America (TFA) by Molly Ness. Ness, who joined the national teacher corps in 1999, writes a book that seeks to describe the broad range of experiences corps members report, and to “tell their stories of hope and determination” (p. xiv).

Teach for America, the national teacher corps conceived in the 1989 senior thesis of Princeton undergrad Wendy Kopp, has often been criticized by the education establishment for promoting the perception that anyone can teach. While the organization prides itself for recruiting talented undergraduates through a rigorous selection process to the neediest public school classrooms, some scholars argue that the six-week training and weak model of ongoing support is a detriment to schools and students most in need.

Claiming not to be a propaganda vehicle for the often-controversial organization, Ness describes in detail the typical journey of TFA corps members, from their training to their impressions about teaching gained through their two-year commitment. She shares multiple vignettes of corps members throughout the history of Teach for America’s existence to illustrate the challenges of public education. Ness claims to have spent six months “pounding the pavement” in search of the most diverse group of interviewees from the first decade of TFA. The book offers stories from both male and female corps members of various races and ethnicities, and includes both success and failure in urban and rural classrooms and beyond, but tips toward the positive:

Chapter one offers a quick synopsis of the evolution of the organization itself — following a story similarly told by founder Wendy Kopp in her 1999 book, One Day, All Children . . . The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way. Ness sprinkles this history with snapshots of corps members teaching in schools woefully in need of basic materials. She also acknowledges her own passionate commitment to the mission of Teach for America to recognize the day when all children have access to a quality education. All of this notwithstanding, the tone of the book illustrates the salience of this mission to the thousands of young people who have applied to and participated in the corps.

Subsequent chapters detail the evolution of the summer training institute by presenting the voices of corps members and external critics. Ness reviews the various models for corps member success in the classroom, highlighting the work they do outside the “classroom walls.” She chronicles what corps members have done once they have completed the two-year teaching commitment and offers some predictions about the future of the organization as its ranks of alumni swell.

Most of the stories shared by corps members detail the way their work with Teach for America opened their eyes about the inequity in public schools. Almost all of these young people share situations where they connected with a student in a way that changed not only the child’s life, but also the life of the young teacher.

One Los Angeles corps member, Kelly, was transformed by her TFA classroom experience because it gave her insight into “what it means to be poor, what it means to live in the inner city” (p. 182), which now informs her politics and understanding of economic inequity in the United States. While teaching fourth grade, Kelly began to see and understand how the system hindered and ignored the needs of her students:

Ness leaves her readers with her own personal questioning of Teach for America’s success and how best to reach the goal of educational equity: Can it be reached by increasing the number of TFA corps members? Will providing the best possible training and support be enough? Are the works and the accomplishments of the alumni network the most promising path to educational equity? Throughout the book, she offers critiques of the organization — the main one being that schools in crisis need more than underprepared teachers who commit for a mere two years. She claims to still look at the organization “with intrigue, but also skepticism” (p. 224).

For Ness, leaving her teaching assignment after completing those two years was bittersweet. In the end, she claims, the weight of her TFA commitment to her students did not leave her shoulders once she was out of the classroom. It seems that her writing this book is another effort to keep acting on her desire to see the day when all children do receive a quality education.

Case Study Research: Designs and Methods (3rd Ed.)
by Robert K. Yin.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003. 181 pp. $26.95.

This third edition of Robert Yin’s Case Study Research: Designs and Methods updates and slightly expands earlier editions of the book. The new edition retains much of what made the first two best-selling research methods books, includes new analytic strategies, and explains in greater detail the strengths of different types of case study research. This book also contains what many methods books lack: numerous specific examples of case study data collection, analysis, and interpretation on a wide variety of topics.

Those who have used earlier editions of Yin’s book will find the third edition comfortably familiar. As in earlier editions, each chapter opens with an introduction of questions and topics that will be explored, and ends with exercises that are useful guides for reviewing information in the chapter. Readers will be glad to know that the book’s straightforward, clearly written style has not been altered.

Chapter one specifies that case study research is most appropriate when researchers are interested in learning how or why something occurs, when the research focuses on contemporary events, and when no controls of behavioral events are necessary. Yin readily acknowledges that the results of case studies are not generalizeable to populations, and that their purpose is to “expand and generalize theories” (p. 10). He makes clear that the case study is “an all-encompassing method” (p. 14), including design, data collection, and data analysis techniques. He also carefully distinguishes between the case study strategy and other qualitative research methods, writing that, while case studies may be based on detailed observation and attempts to “avoid prior commitment to any theoretical model,” they may include both qualitative and quantitative research, and actually need not include “direct, detailed observations as a source of evidence” (p. 15).

Chapter two covers case study design in great depth. Yin explores the five major components of case study research design: the study’s questions, propositions, units of analysis, logic linking data to the propositions, and criteria for interpreting the findings. Yin also provides criteria for assessing the quality of research design, explaining that case studies must meet construct validity, internal validity, external validity, and reliability checks in order to be useful designs. This chapter explains and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of single and multiple case designs. Yin presents clear examples of each so that readers can easily identify differences among designs and, more importantly, choose the design that is best for their own research questions and interests.

In chapters three and four, Yin describes the preparation for and the collection of data. Beginning with a description of skills that case study researchers need to bring to the table, he truly prepares the researcher to enter the field by exploring the role of case study (as opposed to interview) protocols and by describing how to conduct pilot case studies. Further, Yin provides clear guidance for researchers in their data collection processes by enumerating the different types of data that may be collected in the field, by considering how these data may be triangulated (with each other, as well as among different researchers exploring the same data), and by presenting ways to keep track of case study through case study databases and notes.

Chapter six, “Analyzing Case Study Evidence,” is where experienced readers will find the greatest amount of new information. Here Yin describes three analysis strategies: relying on the theoretical propositions that lead to the study, thinking about rival explanations, and developing a case description. In earlier versions, while Yin advised that researchers always attempt to consider rival explanations, this was not listed as an analysis strategy in its own right. Yin also adds a lengthy discussion of logic models to his list of specific analysis strategies discussed in earlier editions (namely, pattern matching, explanation building, time series analysis, and cross-case synthesis). Citing Peterson and Brickman and Rog and Huebner, Yin writes, “The logic model deliberately stipulates a complex chain of events over time. The events are staged in repeated cause-effect-cause-effect patterns, whereby a dependent variable (event) at an earlier stage becomes the independent variable (causal event) for the next stage” (p. 127). Yin discusses different types of logic models and provides useful explanations of when such models would be fitting. He cautions that, while newer computer tools may assist in organizing and coding data, it still remains the job of the researcher to choose and implement an appropriate analytic strategy.

Case Study Research concludes with practical guidance on how to report case studies, keeping in mind the study’s analytic strategy, structure, and purpose (e.g., explanatory, descriptive, or exploratory). Yin offers advice on issues common to many researchers and research methods, such as when to start composing the report, how to deal with anonymity concerns, and identifying who should review the draft report and how their input should be incorporated into the text. Yin concludes with hallmarks of good case study research. While these are not new, they are worth repeating. First, case studies should be significant; that is, they should be of general interest and should deal with important issues. Second, they should be complete. Third, case studies should consider alternative perspectives to avoid presenting only one side of a story. Fourth, they must display sufficient evidence. Finally, case studies should be composed in an engaging manner so as to draw readers in.

Case Study Research: Designs and Methods provides a useful and straightforward guide for those considering case study research. By including samples of case studies throughout the book, Yin helps readers gain solid footing in how to conceive and conduct this research. For those familiar with the second edition, Yin provides new analytic approaches and a more extensive discussion of different approaches to conducting case studies. For new and old readers alike, the book remains a definitive guide to this ubiquitous research method.

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