Neglected Evidence - educational research

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1998 by Richard Whitmire

And yet the history of federal inner-city education programs is replete with compromises. Head Start, which was established in 1965 to help poor children succeed in school, has suffered ever since from low quality staffing, an aversion to academics, and an emphasis on social welfare gains over learning. Each of these problems violated the lessons of Ramey and Schweinhart; each chipped away at the promise of Head Start. "Head Start was conceived socially rather than academically," says E.D. Hirsch, author of The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. Lacking any academic coherence, it should not be surprising that Head Start's gains fade about two years after the program concludes, say Hirsch and other critics. To this day, Head Start retains the academic fuzziness built into its 1965 launch: Fewer than 30 percent of Head Start teachers have bachelors degrees; salaries run about $10,000 less than the salaries of starting teachers, and parents at each center must be involved in developing that center's education approach. "Imagine a hospital where patients were expected to decide which treatments were most appropriate," says former Education Department official Diane Ravitch.

If our primary school programs have ignored the best research, middle schools have fared no better. (American fourth-graders rank close to the top on the Third International Math and Science Study; by eighth grade, they're close to the bottom among developed nations.) The reforms that were supposed to turn around middle schools were pioneered a decade ago by the Carnegie Corporation's "Turning Points" report. But Carnegie officials were frustrated to find that most schools adopted only the "face-lift" part of their recommendations, such as the stuff that addresses adolescent self-esteem problems, and ignored the part about raising academic standards.

Is there hope for change? Perhaps. Suddenly, "research proven" has become the mantra of education reform, with Congress and the Department of Education offering up "whole school" redesigns emerging from university research. You have to know the lingo here: whole-school means making over your school from top to bottom to introduce some academic coherence. Congress even offers $150,000 grants to schools deciding to introduce programs such as Success for All, Core Knowledge, or Accelerated Schools. Sounds good, and it should be good. It's the future of the $7 billion Title I program aimed at poor schools. Instead of pulling Freddie out of a class for "remedial" education, Freddie stays in class to get a healthy dose of Core Knowledge or Success for All.

Lesson One

Perhaps the most surprising part of the new trend toward educational research is that it's pointing educators toward the most obvious and seemingly unquantifiable factor of all: good teachers. Such is the conclusion of a new data-crunching methodology pioneered by William Sanders at the University of Tennessee, known as "value added assessment." The method breaks down learning into little bits of data, allowing researchers to sift out factors such as poverty and the education level of the parents. In short, it tells who or what is really adding value, and it turns out that some schools in wealthy communities in Connecticut might not be adding as much "value" as a ghetto school in Houston.