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Convocation 2011: Faculty Speaker Address

I am pleased to have the opportunity to represent our marvelous faculty in speaking to you today. The title of my talk is: "Five Challenges from Five Decades of School Effectiveness Research."

I chose this topic for two reasons. First, I think all of us here today care about improving the effectiveness of schools, especially for children for whom education is the best hope that their lives will be less difficult financially than those of their parents’. Second, I have been thinking about this topic for a long time. My first exposure came in the 1950s at my family’s kitchen table, where my mother, a middle school English teacher, talked about strategies for encouraging children to write, and my father, a high school principal, talked about new ways to recruit good teachers at a time when the children from the large baby boom generation were enrolling in the nation’s schools.

My thinking evolved when I worked as a high school mathematics teacher in the late 1960s. I learned painfully that knowing how to do algebra was by no means sufficient for being able to teach algebra successfully. This led me to think more about what it takes to create and sustain schools that helps both children and their teachers to fulfill their potential.

I am going to focus my talk on landmarks in research on the effectiveness of elementary and secondary education in the United States. However, I believe that the five challenges I describe pertain to every country in the world, and to pre-school as well as to post-secondary education. So let’s turn to the first decade, the 1960s.

The modern era of school effectiveness research began with Equality of Educational Opportunity, a 733 page report published by the U.S. Office of Education in July 1966. Better known as the Coleman Report after its first author, the eminent sociologist James Coleman, the document provided abundant evidence of large gaps in reading and mathematics skills between black children and white children and between children from poor families and those from more affluent families. But this is not the reason the Report garnered so much attention. Instead, the attention came from the evidence bearing on the sources of the achievement gaps. As one reporter summarized the report: Families matter, Schools don’t.

I don’t think any of us here would deny that families matter. Indeed, few of us would be here today without the support of our families. But the media take-away from the Report, that school quality does not affect children’s achievement, was disturbing, especially coming one year after passage of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Programs, a cornerstone of which was that improving schooling for disadvantaged children would reduce economic inequality in the U.S.

The Coleman Report catalyzed almost 50 years of subsequent research on school effectiveness. This research has demonstrated that school quality does have an enormous impact on children’s life chances. However, the research has also documented the sobering reality that children most in need of the nation’s best schools are the least likely to attend them. Changing this is the first challenge I present to you. In other words:

Make equality of educational opportunity a reality. The 1970s might be characterized as the decade of school finance reform. Beginning with the Serrano court case in California, advocates for changing the way public schools were financed argued that reliance on local property taxes denied children living in property-poor communities the right to a good education. The result of these court cases was an increase in state funding of public education, with most of the money going to previously low-spending communities. Most advocates for school finance reform thought that equalizing expenditures would pretty much solve the problem of equalizing school quality. However, that did not turn out to be the case, in large part because much of the extra money schools received was not used in a way that affected children’s daily experiences in school, -- and consequently did not affect what children learned. This leads to the second challenge:

Use money so that students’ daily experiences change. The big school-related publicity event in the 1980s was the publication of A Nation at Risk. This document, the report of a group commissioned by President Raegen. was short – 36 pages, which is one reason it drew even more media attention than the massive Coleman Report. Another reason was the graphic language used to describe its conclusions: “. . . the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threats our very future as a Nation and a people.”

One might conclude from that language that U.S. schools were much less effective in the early 1980s in educating children than they had been in the past. However, that turned out not to be the case, at least as measured by student scores on reading and mathematics tsets. The real problem was that the economy was changing rapidly, and the education that was good enough for the 1960s, when most workers did the same tasks over and over, was not good enough for an economy in which those jobs were rapidly disappearing due to computerization and outsourcing to lower wage countries, and the new jobs paying a middle class wage required skills that the previous jobs had not. This is the basis for the third challenge:

Prepare children to thrive in a rapidly changing society. The 1990s were a decade of enormous interest in expanding school choice, especially by increasing the number of charter schools. The evidence on charter schools, which are public schools free from many constraints hampering conventional public schools, continues to evolve. However, three patterns are evident.

First, charter schools have provided a good education to many children. Second, and the other side of the coin, is that it has proven much more difficult to start and sustain a successful charter school, especially one serving economically disadvantaged students, than most advocates predicted. The third pattern is a set of disputes about whether charter schools and conventional public schools compete on a level playing field. Points of contention concern funding levels and whether charter schools serve a proportionate share of children who are expensive to educate, especially children with learning disabilities. The disputes matter because they affect the educational options of the most disadvantaged children. So the challenge is:

Make school choice work for the most disadvantaged. The hallmark document of the first decade of the 21st century was No child Left Behind, This legislation, passed by the U.S. Congress in 2001, sought to increase the accountability of the nation’s public schools. A strength of NCLB is that it draws attention to the academic skills of children from low-income families, children of color, children whose first language is not English, and children with disabilities – groups that historically have not been well served by American schools.

A weakness of NCLB is that it created perverse incentives for schools that had the least capacity to educate children well. In many such schools, the pressure to increase reading and math scores led school leaders to mandate that an inordinate amount of time be spent on test preparation at the expense of instruction that would prepare students to succeed in life after school. Thus, the challenge is to design and implement school accountability systems that result in better education for all children.

So to summarize, I see five challenges from the last five decades of attempts to improve schools. These are challenges that I believe all of you will have the opportunity to tackle in the decades ahead, whether in the U.S. or in other countries around the world. Again, the challenges are:

  • Make equality of educational opportunity a reality
  • Use money so it affects students’ daily experiences
  • Create schools that prepare students for the future
  • Make school choice work for the most disadvantaged.
  • Create school accountability systems that improve education for all children.

These challenges are clearly daunting. However, we, the faculty, have been extraordinarily impressed by your skills, creativity, and hard work. Most of all, we marvel at your passion for improving education, and your dogged, relentless pursuit of this passion. We have no doubt that you will make progress in meeting these five challenges and that your good work will improve education for the world’s children.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.

For full coverage of Commencement 2011, visit http://wpdev.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/tag/commencement/.

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