JES Spring 2009

Journal for Effective Schools research

practice

Spring 2009

policies

Volume 8, Number 1

Our Mission

Effective Schools Movement: History, Analysis, and Application Leslie S. Kaplan and William A. Owings

The Journal for Effective Schools provides educators and administrators involved or interested in the Effective Schools process with the opportunity to share their research, practice, policies, and expertise with others.

Published by the Journal for Effective Schools at Old Dominion University College of Education Educational Foundations and Leadership

Journal for Effective Schools

Volume 8, Number 1

Effective Schools Movement: History, Analysis, and Application

The Journal for Effective Schools

by

Leslie S. Kaplan and William A. Owings

Note: This article is adapted from the authors’ text, American Education: Building a Common Foundation, published by Wadsworth/Cengage in 2010.

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From the Editor’s Desk…

This issue of JES marks a major change. The journal has moved from Idaho State University – where it was envisioned and begun by Dr. Gene Davis and ably continued by Dr. Chuck Zimmerly – to Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The transition has been much more complex than any of us imagined.

Now the transfer is complete as we go to press (belatedly) with the Spring and Fall ‘09 issues. The Spring issue contains one article – Effective Schools: History, Research, and Application. You will find it to be a thorough review of the literature while offering practical suggestions and discussion items to review with faculty members or graduate students.

Our new website can be found at:

http://EffectiveSchoolsJournal.org

On the next few pages you will find information about the Journal for Effective Schools.

Scope of Journal JES publishes original contributions in the following areas: • •

•

•

Empirical Research – Empirical studies focusing on the results of applied educational research specifically related to Effective Schools.

Educational Practices – Descriptions of using the Effective Schools practices as supported by theory and research in classrooms, schools, and school districts to include instructional effectiveness, assessment, leadership, policy, and governance.

Preparation of Educational Personnel – Research supported practices related to the initial and advanced preparation of teachers, administrators, and other school personnel including staff development practices based on the Effective Schools literature.

Other – Scholarly reviews of research, book reviews, and other topics of interest to educators seeking information on Effective Schools.

The following correlates of effective schools further clarify the journal’s scope.

Correlates of Effective Schools A clearly stated and focused mission on learning for all - The group (faculty, administration, parents) shares an understanding of and a commitment to the instructional goals, priorities, assessment, procedures, and personal and group accountability. Their focus is always, unequivocally, on the student.

A safe and orderly environment for learning - The school provides a purposeful, equitable, businesslike atmosphere that encourages, supports, allows mistakes, and is free of fear. School is a place that does no harm to developing psyches and spirits.

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Uncompromising commitment to high expectations for all - Those who are leaders empower others to become leaders who believe and demonstrate that all students can attain mastery of essential skills. This commitment is shared by professionals who hold high expectations of themselves.

Instructional leadership - Although initially coming from the principal, teacher or administrator, the goal is to include all participants as instructional leaders as their knowledge expands as a result of staff development. New insights excite and inspire. In the accountable learning community, everyone is a student and all can be leaders.

Opportunity to learn is paramount - Time is allocated for specific and free-choice tasks.

Students take part in making decisions about goals and tasks.

Frequent monitoring of progress - Effective schools evaluate the skills and achievements of all students and teachers. No intimidation is implied. Rather, monitoring often is individualized, with improvement in learning as the goal.

Enhanced communication - Includes home, school and community coming together as partners in learning for all.

JES Mission The Journal for Effective Schools has earned a positive national reputation for featuring thoughtful, carefully researched and written articles by scholars and practitioners in the area of Effective Schools. It is the JES mission to publish original contributions in the areas of new research related to Effective Schools; applied research related to the Effective Schools literature; descriptions of research-supported Effective Schools practices in classrooms, buildings, districts, and policy and governance; research and practice related to preparation of educational personnel; and scholarly reviews of research, book reviews, and other topics related to Effective Schools.

Editorial Policy The Editors welcome articles concerned with the problems and issues of Effective Schools. The Journal for Effective Schools exists to disseminate knowledge in the field of Effective Schools. This includes research and policy advancement in the preK-12 education environments. Four criteria apply to reviewing and selecting articles for publication. First, articles must advance knowledge, theory, and practice. Second, the articles’ content must be accurate and technically competent. Third, articles must be well written, clear, well organized, and stylistically correct. Fourth, articles should reference the Effective School Correlate/s germane to the manuscript.

A manuscript submitted for publication to JES must be original and not under consideration for any other publications. When a manuscript is published by the JES, it becomes the property of the Journal with the Journal possessing exclusive right to publication. All authors will be required to sign a consent-to-publish form upon acceptance.

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Submission Guidelines Electronic manuscripts should be sent to Dr. William Owings, Editor, Journal for Effective Schools, at JESeditor@odu.edu for consideration. Manuscripts not following specifications described here will be returned to the author(s). The editors conduct a blind peer-review process; therefore, authors must exclude their names, institutions, and clues to authors' identities from within the manuscript text.

Length, Typing, Style: Manuscripts must be submitted in Word (2003 or 2007) as an attachment. The title should appear at the top of the first page. A manuscript, including all references, tables, and figures, should be 20-40 pages in length. In rare circumstances, longer manuscripts may be considered. Authors should keep tables and figures to a minimum and include them at the end of the text. All text, including titles, headings, references, quotations, figure captions, and tables, must be typed doublespaced with one-inch margins all around. All pages must be numbered. Any abbreviations and acronyms not well known to the average reader should be explained.

For writing, editorial style, and references, authors must follow the guidelines in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Sixth Edition).

Abstract and Cover Page: All manuscripts must include an abstract. Abstracts describing the essence of the manuscript must be 100-150 words and be typed doublespaced on a separate page. On the cover page, authors must include their name(s), title, institution, mailing address, daytime phone number(s), fax number, email address, and a brief (10 words of fewer) description(s) of area(s) of specialization.

Publication Schedule: JES is published bi-annually: Spring and Fall.

Editorial Style: APA, 6th ed.

Number of copies to be submitted: Email is the preferred submission method.

Author’s responsibilities: If the manuscript is accepted for publication, all graphs and illustrative materials must be provided in camera-ready form by the author.

Specifications will be sent to the author upon acceptance.

Editorial Procedures: Manuscripts submitted to the JES are processed as follows. Upon receipt, the manuscript is initially reviewed by the staff. If the manuscript does not fall within the scope of the Journal or is not formatted according to APA, 6th ed., it will be returned to the author.

If a manuscript is in accord with the guidelines, an email acknowledgment is sent to the author. All references to the author’s name and affiliation are removed and the manuscript is submitted to two or more reviewers. With the advice of the reviewers, the Editor will make one of four decisions: accept, accept contingent upon satisfactory revision, revise and resubmit, or reject. In the case of conditional acceptance, the Editor will specify the necessary revisions in writing to the author. In the case of a request for revision and resubmission, the Editor will suggest or specify revisions in writing to the author. Upon resubmission, the manuscript will be treated as a new manuscript and will be submitted to the same blind review as the initial process. Manuscripts which have been rejected will not be returned to the author.

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Manuscripts submitted to the Journal for Effective Schools cannot be under consideration for publication by other journals. If a paper has been presented at a meeting or conference, the author should state where and when the paper was presented. After acceptance, a manuscript or any portion of a paper may not be published elsewhere without written approval from the Editor of the Journal for Effective Schools.

If a manuscript is accepted, the author will be notified and given an indication of the volume and issue in which it will be published. At this time, the author must submit the final copy of the manuscript in electronic attachment form, preferably in Microsoft Word (2003 or 2007). The email should indicate the file(s) name(s) and the software used. Any graphs or other illustrative materials contained in the manuscript must be provided as a grayscale TIFF, PDF, or EPS file by the author and NOT embedded within the text.

Tables should be provided at the end of the manuscript.

The staff of the Journal for Effective Schools agrees to process manuscripts promptly. In most cases, an editorial decision may be expected eight to 10 weeks after submission.

Technical and Stylistic Requirements: Manuscripts submitted to the Journal for Effective Schools must be grammatically correct and stylistically consistent. See APA, 6th ed., for scientific and statistical works required style.

JES prefers that manuscripts be submitted for review in Word format with no author reference in the file. Submit a separate file with title page, author names, and contact information in Word format. Final manuscripts should be in one file in Word format.

Copy should be double-spaced with margins of 1" at top, bottom, and both sides.

Manuscript should contain an abstract, introduction, and conclusion. The reference list must be complete and consistent with in-text callouts. See APA for guidelines. There should be no hyphenated words on line endings; no printed borders; and no numbered line indicators on the left margin. Clearly indicate heading levels throughout manuscript.

It is suggested to keep tables and graphs to a maximum of five.

The title page should contain the following: title of the paper; the author’s(s’) full name; institutional affiliation and position, telephone number, and e-mail address; statement of place and date of previous oral presentation of the paper, if any; and a disclaimer statement, if applicable. All correspondence and contact during the review and production processes will be addressed to the first author listed. The Journal for Effective Schools does not publish statements of acknowledgment to colleagues who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript.

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This new issue (Volume 8, Number 1) contains the Journal’s Monograph on Effective Schools. Written last year by my wife and me, the Journal had sold this at extra cost in the past. We bring this to you now as part of our regular subscriber service.

This monograph can be used in different ways. Professors can use this as part a course activity. It contains questions for reflection. School administrators can use this in professional development activities. School improvement specialists can use this as well.

We hope you enjoy this and find much use for its contents. Happy reading!

Bill and Leslie

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Table of Contents Effective Schools Movement: History, Analysis, and Application Leslie S. Kaplan and William A. Owings

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 The History of the Effective Schools Movement ..........................................................................3 The Early Studies ..............................................................................................................3 Early Effective Schools Studies ........................................................................................5 Types of Effective Schools Research ................................................................................6 Edmonds Coined the Effective Schools Concept .............................................................. 8 Criticism of Edmonds Effective Schools Research ........................................................... 10 Rutter Studies in London, England ................................................................................... 11 Brookover and Colleagues Studies .................................................................................... 12 Comparing the Effective Schools Correlates .................................................................... 14 Limitations of the Early Effective Schools Research ........................................................16 Effective Schools Research in the 1990s ...........................................................................19 Effective Schools Today ....................................................................................................22 The 90/90/90 Schools .............................................................................................22 No Excuses Schools ..............................................................................................24 Recent Case Studies of Effective Schools ............................................................25 In a Nutshell ..........................................................................................................30 The Correlates of Effective Schools: Current Research Findings .................................................30 Strong Instructional Leadership ........................................................................................31 First Generation ....................................................................................................31 Second Generation ................................................................................................31 Discussion .............................................................................................................31 A Leadership Model ..............................................................................................32 Teacher Leadership ...............................................................................................33 Clear and Focused Mission ...............................................................................................35 First Generation ....................................................................................................35 Second Generation ................................................................................................35 Discussion .............................................................................................................36 Harnessing Vision and Mission ............................................................................36 Communicating Well With Teachers Is Essential ................................................38 Safe and Orderly Environment ..........................................................................................40 First Generation ....................................................................................................40 Second Generation ................................................................................................40 Discussion .............................................................................................................40 Climate of High Expectations ...........................................................................................43 First Generation ....................................................................................................43 Second Generation ................................................................................................43 Discussion .............................................................................................................44 Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement ..................................................45 Students’ Response to Teacher Expectations .......................................................48 Teacher Bias or Self-Fulfilling Prophesy ..............................................................50 Frequent Monitoring of Student Progress .........................................................................52 First Generation ....................................................................................................52 Second Generation ................................................................................................52

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Table of Contents Effective Schools Movement: History, Analysis, and Application Leslie S. Kaplan and William A. Owings

Discussion .............................................................................................................53 Using Formative and Performance Assessments to Advance Learning ................53 Assessments and Reducing Achievement Gaps ................................................... 54 Positive Home-School Relations .......................................................................................56 First Generation .....................................................................................................56 Second Generation ................................................................................................56 Discussion .............................................................................................................56 Research on Parent Involvement and Student Achievement ................................57 Effective Parental Involvement Practices .............................................................59 Class and Culture Influence Children's School Success .......................................61 Effective Home-School Partnerships in Practice ..................................................63 Developing Parent Partnerships ............................................................................67 Opportunity to Learn and Student Time on Task ..............................................................69 First Generation .....................................................................................................69 Second Generation ................................................................................................69 Discussion .............................................................................................................70 Varieties of Opportunity to Learn .........................................................................70 Curriculum and Opportunity to Learn ..................................................................72 Effective Teaching and Opportunity to Learn ..................................................... 72 Time and Opportunity to Learn .............................................................................73 Research Findings on Opportunity to Learn .........................................................74 Opportunity to Learn and National and State Policy ............................................75 Opportunity to Learn and Funding Schools ..........................................................76 A Realistic Look at What Effective Schools Can and Cannot Do .................................................78 Summary ........................................................................................................................................80 Conclusions ....................................................................................................................................82

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Effective Schools Movement: History, Analysis, and Application Leslie S. Kaplan and William A. Owings

“We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need to do that.” 1 - Ron Edmonds Reviewing our country’s educational history with minority and low income children can be discouraging. Sociological and cultural variables have often placed severe obstacles to minority and low income students’ learning. Child raising practices and resource scarcities put low income students cognitively and academically behind their middle and upper class cohorts even before they arrive at school. Many students enter school with language difficulties due to a languagepoor childhood or simply because their primary language is not English. Likewise, schools’ traditional selecting and sorting practices and institutional norms have kept traditionally underserved students from entering the educational mainstream and getting the education they need to survive and thrive in a complex, changing world.

Even though U.S. schools have never been more focused on providing educational equity in students’ achievement, measuring how well diverse students are meeting state proficiency standards, future educators may wonder whether or not they – and their schools – can really make a meaningful difference with traditionally underserved students. The good new is they can! Schools can adopt promising practices that improve minority and low income students’ – in fact, all students’ – chances to succeed. Research affirms that when teachers, administrators, and the community hold high expectations for students, effectively deliver a strong and appropriate curriculum, and provide high levels of support, learning typically improves.

At the same time, schools have not been able to overcome the social and economic effects that have weakened family, community life, and childrearing in the United States. In recent decades, evidence continues to underscore the limitations of schooling’s impact on students. Research documents the importance of nonschool influences on children’s school performance.2 Which research is correct?

Both schools and society share a major responsibility for improving education. This is not an either-or situation that lets any party off the hook.

Educators and the public need a larger recognition of the complexities involved in the achievement gap. As a nation we must look at the ways schools can change their perspectives, policies, and practices to increase minority and low income students’ achievement.

In spite of the reports calling family influence the most important variable in student learning, many educators believe in their hearts and from their own 1

Edmonds, Ronald. (1979, October). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37 (1), p. 23.

2 Evans, Robert. (2005, April). Reframing the achievement gap. Phi Delta Kappan 86 (8):582-589.

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experiences that effective schools can make a measurable difference with traditionally underserved students. In the early 1980s, educators began researching to see if schools could increase low income and minority students’ achievement. They identified schools that successfully educated all students regardless of their socioeconomic status or family background. These schools were located in varying regions and communities both large and small.

Investigators noted that these schools had certain philosophies, policies, and practices in common. All these effective schools had strong instructional leadership, a strong sense of mission, held high expectations for all students, demonstrated robust instructional behaviors, practiced frequent monitoring of student achievement, operated in a safe and orderly manner, provided opportunities for students to learn, and had positive home-school relations.

Eventually, these attributes became known as the Correlates of Effective Schools. Over 20 years, research has continued to support these basic beliefs.

The Effective Schools Movement asserts that:3 • • • •

•

All children can learn and come to school motivated to do so.

Schools control enough of the variables to assure that virtually all students do learn.

Schools should be held accountable for measured student achievement.

Schools should disaggregate measured student achievement in order to be certain that students, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status are successfully learning the intended school curriculum.

The internal and external stakeholders of the individual school are the most qualified and capable people to plan and implement the changes necessary to fulfill the “Learning for All” mission.

This monograph will look closely at the Effective Schools Movement and the school-based factors that make a difference for all students, especially poor and minority students. We will examine: • • • • • • • • •

The History of the Effective Schools Movement Instructional Leadership Clear and Focused Mission Safe and Orderly Environment Climate of High Expectations Frequent Monitoring of Student Progress Positive Home-School Relations Opportunity to Learn and Students’ Time on Task A Realistic Look at What Effective Schools Can and Cannot Do

3

Lezotte, Lawrence. (2001). Revolutionary and Evolutionary: The Effective Schools Movement.

Okemos, MI: Effective Schools Products Ltd. p. 2.

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The History of the Effective Schools Movement “The very great proportion of the American people believe that family background and home environment are principal causes of the quality of pupil performance. In fact, no notion about schooling is more widely held than the belief that the family is somehow the principal determinant of whether or not a child will do well in school. …Such a belief has the effect of absolving educators of their professional responsibility to be instructionally effective.” 4 When teachers expect little achievement from certain students, they usually get it.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the struggle against poverty, racial and unequal educational opportunity grew more intense. After 1960, legislative efforts attempted to address these problems. Trying to document and remedy the problems of unequal educational opportunity, especially for low income minority children, provided a major push for school effectiveness studies.

The Early Studies.

For a long time, policy makers and popular opinion agreed that schools did not make a difference. In this viewpoint, the schools only reinforced, and did not add to, what students brought with them. Families, not teachers, determined students’ achievement outcomes. Several research studies supported this conclusion.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act specified that the Commissioner of Education conduct a nationwide survey of availability of educational opportunity. James Coleman headed the research team that conducted the largest survey of public education ever undertaken.5 Over 640,000 students in grades 1,3,6,9, and 12 categorized into six ethnic and cultural groups took achievement tests and aptitude tests. About 60,000 teachers in over 4,000 schools completed questionnaires about their background and training.

In July, 1966, James Coleman published his study, Equality of Educational Opportunity (commonly referred to as the “Coleman Report”). He concluded that family background, not the school, was the major determinant of student achievement and life outcomes.6 He wrote that “Schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer 4

Edmonds, Ronald. (1979). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership 37 (1): p. 21.

5 Marzano, Robert. (2000). A New Era of School Reform: Going Where the Research Takes Us. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning, p. 2 6 Coleman, James. et. al. (1966). Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office.

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environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.”7 Coleman’s findings proposed that children from poor families and homes, lacking the prime conditions or values to support education, could not learn, regardless of what the school did. These findings created considerable controversy.

They also had a profound influence on how Americans viewed public schooling. The Coleman Report made schools appear unable to overcome or equalize the disparity in students’ academic achievement due to environmental factors. It also encouraged the idea that school differences had little of any relationship with student achievement. One well-publicized findings was that school accounted for about 10 percent of the variance in school achievement while student background characteristics accounted for the other 90 percent.8 Likewise, in 1972, Christopher Jencks, a Harvard University professor of social policy and his colleagues corroborated Coleman’s findings. In Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America, Jencks reanalyzed Coleman’s data and concluded that the schools’ influence was “marginal.” Jencks surmised that schools did little to lessen the gap between rich and poor students or between more and less abled students. Students’ achievement is primarily a function of the students’ background. Further, little evidence existed that educational reform would improve schools’ influence on student achievement. A school’s output, Jencks concluded, depends almost entirely on the entering children’s characteristics. “Everything else – the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers – is either secondary or completely irrelevant.” 9 Coleman’s and Jencks’ studies affirmed the statistical correlations between socioeconomic status and school achievement. They found that the higher a family’s socioeconomic status, the better their children’s school achievement. While the research and its reevaluation brought additional data to light that undercut the original conclusions, the initial reports’ misleading but highly publicized first impression remained. Most people only remembered that schools could not overcome family background. As a result, the belief that for academic achievement, “families matter and schools don’t” has become part of our popular culture. In fact, “many public school educators have uncritically accepted the hypothesis of familial effects, along with its corollary: that teachers cannot be held accountable for students’ failure to learn when the students come from poor home environments.”10 In a similar vein, in 1969, Arthur R. Jensen, a University of California at Berkeley educational psychology professor, published a highly controversial article.

7

Coleman, et. al. (1966). Ibid. p, 325.

Madaus, G.F., Airasian, P.W., and Kellaghan, T. (1980). School Effectiveness: A Reassessment of the Evidence. New York: McGraw-Hill.

9 Jencks, Christopher, et. al. (1972). Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books, pp. 255-256.

10 Orlich, Donald C. (1989, March). Education reforms; Mistakes, misconceptions, miscues. Phi Delta Kappan 70 (7): p. 516.

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He argued that a student’s IQ was the best single predictor of scholastic achievement and IQ was largely genetic. Jensen hypothesized that the test score differences between African American and white students resulted largely from genetic differences in IQ and that environmental factors were of little importance.11 Jensen’s conclusions drew strident criticism from many members of the academic community and the public at large.

Coleman, Jencks, and Jensen were among a group of social scientists during the 1960s and 1970s who believed that family factors such as poverty or a parent’s lack of education prevented children from learning in school regardless of the instructional method or resources teachers used. Their reports and the related literature prompted the federal government to create compensatory education programs, chiefly through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary School Act. These programs focused on changing students’ behavior in order to make up for their disadvantaged backgrounds. These programs made no effort to change schools’ behavior.

This early research prompted an important reaction. By claiming that schools did not make a difference in predicting student achievement, the Coleman Report stimulated researchers and educators who believed the opposite – that effective schools could make a difference in student learning regardless of students’ family backgrounds or socioeconomic status. These later investigators developed a body of research that concluded that all children can learn. Most importantly, they concluded that the school controls the factors needed to assure student mastery of the core curriculum. They also noted the family’s important role in promoting student learning.

Early Effective Schools Studies.

Over the last 40 years, we have gained ample evidence that schools can and do make a powerful difference in students’ academic achievement.

Ironically, discouraging reports about schools’ limitations prompted the search for schools that effectively educated poor and minority children to high levels.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans became concerned that the public schools were rapidly declining in quality. Standardized test scores were rapidly dropping. Studies that investigated the test score decline found that if students did not attend school regularly or did not take basic academic courses in science, English, and mathematics, they scored poorly on standardized tests.12 No single factor accounted for these score decreases.13 11

Jensen, Arthur R. (1969). How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review 39: 1 – 123.

12 Orlich, Donald C. (1989, March). Education reforms: Mistakes, misconceptions, miscues. Phi Delta Kappan 70 (7): 512-517.

13 Harnischfeger Annegret, and Wiley, David E. (1975). Achievement Test Score Decline: Do We Need to Worry? Chicago: Central Mid-Western Regional Educational Laboratory.

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Likewise, the Coleman, Jencks, and Jensen studies upset many educators.

To counter these arguments, several sets of researchers launched studies in the late 1970s to demonstrate that schools could be effective. They began to identify public schools whose graduates scored higher than the national average on standardized tests. Academic growth, not decline, characterized these schools. Soon, hundreds of studies and research-based analytic papers tried to identify the characteristics or “correlates” of these schools which were unusually successful with students regardless of their socioeconomic background.

So began the school effectiveness movement – a set of studies and reform efforts begun in the 1970s and early 1980s. They shared the common purpose: identify those in-school factors that affect students’ academic achievement. In addition, these studies were loosely coupled by the relatively small network of likeminded people conducting them and the relationship between studies. Each study built on the previous investigations’ findings.

Types of effective schools research. Much of the effective schools research might informally be considered as “outlier” studies.14 An outlier is a statistical term to identify something that is at the far end of the distribution. In other words, one example of an outlier would be a school with all students eligible for free or reduced price lunch and the student achievement test scores were extremely high. These studies identified those schools that stood apart from schools with similar student socioeconomic backgrounds in terms of the expected student achievement. These investigations contained some methodological limitations, however, and small samples and statistical issues made results vary widely. Nevertheless, these outlier studies clearly show that effective schools are characterized by good discipline, high teacher expectations regarding student achievement, and effective administrator leadership.15 In an example of an outlier study, a 1974 investigation of two inner-city New York City public schools with similar student populations, one high-achieving and the other low-achieving, had similar findings. School factors had an impact on reading achievement. Investigators noted: • • • •

14 15

Schools controlled the factors most responsible for the achievement differences between schools.

Administrators’ behavior, policies, and practices had a significant impact on school effectiveness.

The more effective school’s administrators provided a good balance between management and instructional skills.

Classroom reading instruction between the two schools did not differ.

Scheerens and Bosker. (1997). Op. cit.

Sheerens and Bosker. (1997).

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Teachers’ expectations of their ability to help their students learn (or not) in spite of their non-school factors created an environment in which teachers expected (or did not expect) children to succeed.

Children responded to unstimulating learning experiences by being apathetic, disruptive, or absent. 16

Another group of school effectiveness research includes case studies.

In these studies, investigators analyzed a small set of schools in depth.

Typically, researchers organized the schools by outcome measures: highachieving schools versus low- achieving schools. The school characteristics in a group were then studied by demographic and survey techniques.

George Weber, an early contributor to the school determinants of achievement literature, illustrates the case study approach. In 1971, Weber looked at four instructionally effective inner-city schools in which students were reading successfully on the basis of national norms. Weber intended to show that Coleman (1966), Jensen (1969) and other researchers were wrong.17 Weber named five characteristics common to these successful schools:18 • • • • •

Strong leadership by the building principal.

High expectations by the teaching staff.

An orderly, safe, and purposeful learning environment.

Deliberate and consistent focus on pupils mastering basic skills.

Consistent and legitimate reinforcement of student achievement through frequent and careful evaluation of student progress.

Weber observed that while high expectations for school success were necessary, they were not enough to make student achievement happen.19 Additionally, Weber’s study did not have a comparable student group of less successful schools, and he lacked clear definitions for the school characteristics.20 This created limitations in generalizing his findings.

Another school effectiveness study in 1976 paired 21 matched California elementary schools. Schools differed only on the students’ standardized achievement test scores. Again, the higher achieving inner-city schools had strong principal leadership, higher expectations for students’ achievement, an academically focused atmosphere, and instructional emphasis as essential institutional influencers of pupil performance.21 Researchers noted that while 16

Edmonds. (1979). Op. cit.

Edmonds, Ronald. (1979, October). Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership 37 (1): 15-24.

18 Weber, George. (1971). Inner-City Children Can Be Taught to Read. Four Successful Schools.

Washington, D.C.: Council for Basic Education.

19 Weber. (1971). Ibid.

20 Purkey, Stewart C. and Smith, Marshall C. (1983, March). Effective schools: A review. The Elementary School Journal 83 (4): 426-457.

21 Edmonds. (1979). Op. cit.

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these characteristics were common to all the improving schools, they operated and interacted in unique ways in each school. 22 Ronald Edmonds Coined the “Effective Schools” Concept23 Until his untimely death in 1983, Ronald Edmonds had been one of the key figures in the school effectiveness movement. “Edmonds, more than anyone, had been responsible for the communication of the belief that schools can and do make a difference.”24 Edmonds, the late Michigan State education professor, acknowledged that students’ family background did make a difference, but he refused to accept the Coleman Report ‘s conclusions. In 1979, as Director of Harvard’s Center for Urban Studies, Edmonds set out to find schools where students from low income families were highly successful. He wanted to prove that schools can and do make a difference for their most challenging students. Edmonds believed that all children were educable regardless of their background, and schools could positively impact education’s quality.

In perhaps his most notable contribution, Edmonds also articulated the five school-level variables that are strongly correlated with student achievement, the five effective schools’ “correlates”:25 • • • • •

Strong administrative leadership with attention to instructional quality.

High expectations for all students’ achievement.

A safe and orderly climate conducive to teaching and learning.

An emphasis on basic skill acquisition.

Frequent monitoring and measuring of pupil progress so teachers and principals are constantly aware of pupil progress in relationship to the instructional objectives.

Although other researchers proposed somewhat different lists (see Table 1), Edmonds’ five correlates of effective schools became immensely popular. They became the framework for thinking about school effectiveness for at least a decade and probably longer.26 Next, Edmonds operationalized the definition of effective schools.

Edmonds defined an “effective” school as one in which low-income and minority students’ basic skills are at least as well-developed as the middle class children’s 22

Purkey and Smith. (1983). Op. cit.

Crisci, Pat Eva and Tutela, Alfred D. (1990). Preparation of educational administrators for urban settings. Urban Education 24 (4): 414-431.

24 Good, T.L. and Brophy, J.E. (1986). School Effects. In M.C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of rd Research on Teaching. (3 ed., pp. 570-602). New York: Macmillan. p. 582.

25 Edmonds, Ronald R. (1982, December). Programs of school improvement: An overview.

Educational Leaders 40 (3): 4 – 11.

26 Scheerens, Jaap. and Bosker, Roel J. (1997). The Foundations of Educational Effectiveness.

New York: Elsevier.

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skills. An effective school closed the achievement gap between low and high socioeconomic students. “To be effective, a school need not bring all students to equal mastery levels, but it must bring an equal percentage of its highest and lowest social classes to minimum mastery.”27 As Edmonds saw it, in an “effective” school, one could not guess a student’s SES from reading test scores.

In addition, Edmonds found that schools that were instructionally effective for poor and minority children were “indistinguishable” from instructionally less effective schools on SES factors (father’s and mother’s education, category of occupation, percentage of white students, mean family size, percentage of intact families). The large student performance differences, therefore, could not be attributed to differences in pupils’ social class and family backgrounds.28 These findings directly contrasted with the Coleman and Jencks’ conclusions that variations in student performance levels from school to school was only minimally related to the schools’ characteristics.

Edmonds also worked with others seeking to find effective schools. Along with Wilbur Brookover, Lawrence Lezotte, and others, Edmonds looked at achievement data from schools in several major cities -- schools with student populations composed mainly from poverty backgrounds. In one study, Edmonds and colleagues compared successful schools with similar schools, in like neighborhoods, where children were not learning, or learning at a low level. They observed and documented characteristics describing both types of schools. They concluded that:29 • • •

Public schools can and do make a difference, even those comprised of students from poverty backgrounds.

Children from poverty backgrounds can learn at high levels as a result of public schools.

Schools where all children are learning regardless of family background have common characteristics and processes.

Edmonds and colleagues concluded that effective schools are committed to serve all their pupils without regard for family background. But these schools did not conduct “business as usual.” They recognize the need to modify curricular design, text selection, teaching strategies and the like in response to differences in pupils’ family background. Their clear sense of purpose, high expectations, focused and safe environment, and adapted instructional practices made a measurable difference for their students.

27

Edmonds. (1982). Op. cit. p. 4.

Fredericksen, J. (1975). School Effectiveness and Equality of Educational Opportunity.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for Urban Studies.

29 Lezotte, L., Edmonds, R, and Ratner. G. (1974). Remedy for School Failure to Equitably Deliver Basic School Skills. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for Urban Studies.

(1996). What is Effective Schools Research? Association for Effective Schools. Retrieved June 4, 2009 from: http://www.mes.org/esr.html 28

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Although Edmonds’ studies had methodological limitations,30 their findings provided valuable lessons about how schools could make a difference in student achievement. Moreover, his review of the effective schools literature and his own investigations led him to conclude that no one model explained school effectiveness for the poor or any other social class of students. Also, the relationship between effective schools correlates and increased student achievement was correlational and not cause and effect. In these studies, both the correlates and higher student achievement appeared together. They had no evidence that one factor caused the other. 31 Edmonds’ contributions were primarily thought provoking and conceptual.32 He insisted that schooling could be powerfully influential in students’ lives, and that the poor and minority students’ failures were really educators’ failures. He asserted that schools can and do make a difference in student achievement. His work and those of his colleagues motivated several decades of educators to improve their schools’ capacities to help all children succeed.

Criticism of Edmonds’ effective schools research. The school effectiveness research had its critics.33 Skeptics questioned researchers' faith in Edmonds' five30

Edmonds’ studies looked at relatively few and largely homogenous schools using norm referenced tests which made it difficult to see actual student learning gains or schools’ effectiveness.

31 Other research, however, does suggest a cause and effect relationship between teacher practices and student achievement. Studies on teacher effectiveness have focused on the teacher behaviors and classroom characteristics that describe instructionally effective classrooms. These studies found that teacher effects explain more than the students’ family backgrounds in producing student achievement. The school effectiveness and the teacher effectiveness research and the value-added research on teachers’ impact on student achievement stress that behaviors within the school are the major determinants of achievement in students’ basic school skills. See: Brophy, J.E. and Good, T.L. (1974). Teacher: Student Relationships. Causes and Consequences. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston; Good, T. and Grouws, D. (1979). The Missouri mathematics effectiveness project: An experimental study in fourth grade classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology 71: 355 – 362; Rosenshine, B. (1978). Instructional Principles in Direct Instruction. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois. Mendro, R.A., Jordan, H.R., Gomez, E., Anderson, M.C., & Bembry, K.L. (1998). An application of multiple linear regression in determining longitudinal teacher effectiveness. Dallas, TX: Dallas Independent School District; Sanders, W.L. & Horn, S.P. (1995). Educational assessment reassessed: The usefulness of standardized and alternative measures of student achievement as indicates for the assessment of educational outcomes. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 3(6):1-15: Sanders, W.L. & Rivers, J.C. (1996). Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center: Sanders, W.L. & Rivers, J.C. (2001). EVAAS Reports for Educational Assessment: Jefferson County Public Schools. Cary, NC: SAS in Schools.

Sanders, W., Saxton, A., & Horn, B. (1997). The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System: A quantitative outcomes-based approach to educational assessment. In J. Millman (Ed.), Grading teachers, grading schools: Is student achievement a valid evaluation measure? (pp.137-162).

Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc. 32 Marzano. (2000). Op. cit. p. 13 33 Raptis, Helen and Fleming, Thomas. (2003, October 1). Reframing education: How to create effective schools. C.D. Howe Institute Commentary. Retrieved June 6, 2009 from: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11856261_ITM

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step approach to improve student achievement. They also claimed that researchers and, indeed, school leaders, generally ignored Edmonds' own warning that "no one model explains school effectiveness for the poor or for any other social class."

Instead, educators often treated Edmonds’ work as something to be replicated, confusing correlations with cause-and-effect factors that actually shape student achievement. Critics also pointed to additional methodological issues that concerned them.34 More recently, researchers using sophisticated statistical models have determined that teachers can have more impact on student test scores than other school factors.35 As a result, methodological improvements transformed Edmonds' initial, narrow and managerial view of effective schooling into a more comprehensive notion of effective education, which encompasses classroom instruction, as well as staff and community relations.36 Rutter Studies in London, England As Edmonds was researching in the United States, Michael Rutter and colleagues were conducting a longitudinal study in London high schools.37 In 1970, Rutter and his team collected aptitude, reading achievement, and behavioral data on 10 year olds in one inner-city London borough. In 1974, they followed up on students in this cohort group. Again, they tested students for general aptitude, reading achievement, and behavioral problems. This became baseline data. They also collected student demographic data including their home environment, parental education, and income level. Once again, in 1976, investigators assessed these students for attendance, behavior, academic achievement and delinquency and studied certain school-level characteristics.

Rutter found that effective schools had factors including: teachers’ classroom management that kept students actively engaged in learning. They also found teachers who frequently praised their students and who infrequently but firmly applied discipline. Likewise, teachers held high expectations for students’ success, gave many students responsibility for personal and social duties, provided clear and recognized guidelines for student behavior, demonstrated staff concern for student and group welfare, and maintained a clean comfortable physical environment. This positive school climate led to better student outcomes for attendance, in school behavior, and achievement test scores.38 34

For a more detailed discussion of the critical reviews, see: Purkey, Stewart C. and Smith, Marshall S. (1983, March). Effective Schools: A Review. The Journal of Elementary Education 83 (4): 426-257.

35 See: Mendro, et. al. (1998). Op. cit.; Sanders and Horn. (1996). Op. cit; Sanders and Rivers, (1996, 2001). Op. cit., and Sanders, Saxton, and Horn. (1997). Op. cit.

36 Raptis and Fleming. (2003). Ibid.

37 Rutter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimer, P., and Ouston, J. (1979). Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children. London: Open Books.

38 Rutter, M. Maugham, B., Mortimer, P., Ouston, J., and Smith, (1979). A. Fifteen Thousand Hours. Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Critics, however, noted that the more effective schools had a higher proportion of middle class students and a small sample size.39 The factor making the difference, therefore, might have been the student composition as much as the school effectiveness variables.

When researchers correlated the baseline and outcome data, they found: • • •

Schools differed significantly in behavior problems, even after controlling for students’ behavior initial characteristics.

Schools’ physical or material characteristics had little or no relationship with their students’ behavior or academic achievement.

School factors that had a significant relationship with student outcome measures (e.g., achievement, behavior, attendance) were academic emphasis, teaching behavior, use of rewards and punishments, degree of student responsibility, staff stability, and staff organization.

In this British study, school factors made a difference in student achievement and behavior. In spite of its methodological and statistical shortcomings, publication of 15,000 Hours further ignited serious interest in studying effective schools.40 Brookover and Colleagues Studies.

In an additional series of effective schools research, Wilbur Brookover and colleagues conducted one of the most significant school effectiveness studies, important for its timing as well as for its breadth and rigor.

In the early to mid 1970s, Brookover and colleagues tried to identify the school climate factors that distinguished between effective and ineffective elementary schools with students of similar SES backgrounds but with different achievement levels.41 Using 68 elementary schools, they matched schools with atypical achievement to schools with low SES and high achievement to schools with similar student background and racial characteristics but significantly different achievement levels. Researchers looked at three sets of variables – school inputs (e.g., students’ SES, school size), school social structure (e.g., teacher satisfaction, teaching practices, parental involvement), and school social climate (e.g., pupils’ sense of academic futility, principals’ focus on academic achievement, high expectations for student achievement).

They found that high achieving schools had several variables that the low achieving schools did not.42 Accordingly, they concluded that certain aspects of the 39

Purkey and Smith. (1983). Op. cit.

15,000 Hours refers to the number of hours a student will spend in school through high school.

41 Brookover, W.B. and Schneider, Jeffrey M. (1975). Academic environments and elementary school achievement. Journal of Research and Development in Education 9: 83-91.

42 Brookover, W.B., Schweitzer, John H., Schneider, Jeffrey M., Beady, Charles H., Flood, Patricia K., and Wisenbaker, Joseph M. (1978). Elementary school climate and school achievement. American Educational Research Journal 15 (2): 301-318.

40

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schools’ social environment clearly made a difference in the schools’ academic achievement. This study established that school climate was a central feature of effective schools. Again, this research was correlational, not cause and effect, but the findings were intriguing.

In another case study investigation in 1979, the Michigan Department of Education asked Brookover and Lawrence W. Lezotte to investigate a set of Michigan schools characterized by consistent pupil performance improvement or decline. Brookover and Lezotte chose to study eight Michigan schools (six improving and two declining). Trained interviewers visited schools and administered questionnaires to many school personnel. They tried to identify the differences between improving and declining schools. Researchers found consistent differences between schools where students achieved well and where they didn’t. 43 These included: •

•

•

• •

Clear instructional focus: Improving schools clearly accepted and emphasized the importance of the reading and math objectives while declining schools gave less emphasis to such goals and did not specify them as fundamental.

High teacher expectations: Staffs of improving schools tended to believe that all their students could master the basic objectives.

Teachers also perceived that their principals shared this belief.

Teachers in improving schools reported higher and increasing levels of student ability while teachers at declining schools believed their students had low abilities and could not master these basic objectives.

Teachers at improving schools also had higher expectations for their students’ educational accomplishments while teachers at declining schools were much less likely to believe their students would complete high school or college.

Commitment to and responsibility for student achievement In improving schools, teachers and principals were more likely to assume responsibility for and were committed to teaching the basic reading and math skills. On the other hand, staffs at declining schools felt that teachers could not do much to influence their students’ achievement, displacing responsibility for skill learning to parents or students.

Time-on-task. Teachers in improving schools spent more time on achieving reading and math objectives while teachers in declining schools spent less time in direct reading instruction.

Principal as instructional leader. In improving schools, principals were more likely to be instructional leaders, more assertive in their institutional leadership role, more of a disciplinarian, and they regularly evaluated achievement of basic objectives. Alternately, principals in declining schools were more permissive, emphasized

43

; Brookover, W.B. and Lezotte, L.W. (1977). Changes in School Characteristics Coincident with Changes in Student Achievement. East Lansing: Michigan State University, College of Urban Development.

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• •

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informal and collegial relationships with teachers, and emphasized general public relations rather than evaluate school effectiveness in providing a basic education for all students.

Accountability. The improving schools showed greater acceptance of accountability and used measured student learning as one sign of their effectiveness.

Dissatisfaction with current achievement. Generally, teachers in improving schools were less satisfied than staffs in declining schools.

Staffs in declining schools were complacent and satisfied with current achievement levels.

Unclear role of parent involvement. Differences in parent involvement levels were not clear cut. Improving schools had higher levels of parent initiated involvement but less overall parent involvement.

Compensatory education. Classroom teachers in improving schools focused on teaching reading. They spent less time planning for compensatory education and less emphasis on paraprofessional staff. On the other hand, classroom teachers in declining schools spent more time identifying students to be placed in compensatory reading activities and greater emphasis on programmed instruction.

In short, the 1979 Brookover and Lezotte findings present a relatively clear profile of achieving schools that are congruent with other researchers’ urban school studies. They showed that teacher and principal expectations and behaviors created the school conditions that allowed low-income students to make achievement gains that their same-SES peers in schools without these in-school factors did not make. In the achieving schools, the educators believed that they could help their students learn. They did not blame their students’ low achievement on inherited, social, or family factors. Also, the educators committed considerable time to direct teaching and evaluating their students’ reading and math performance.

Achievement in necessary academic skills was a school prioriy. Moreover, educators were motivated to help their improving student perform even better. .

At the same time, Brookover and Lezotte concluded that no single combination of variables will produce an effective school. The overriding point, however, is that in and of itself, pupil family background neither causes nor precludes elementary school instructional effectiveness.

Comparing the effective schools correlates. In 1990, Daniel Levine and Lawrence Lezotte developed another widely used updated list of school-level factors. In their review of the research literature, they relied heavily on case studies, using “outlier” schools, and focusing on the characteristics of the top 25 percent of schools as opposed to the bottom 25 percent of schools. Their analysis produced the following now-familiar factors:44 44

Levine, Daniel U. (1990). Update on effective schools. Findings and implications for research and practice. The Journal of Negro Education 59 (4): 577-584.

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• • • • • • •

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Productive climate and culture An orderly environment; faculty committed to shared and articulated mission focused on achievement; faculty input into decision making, faculty cohesion, collaboration, consensus, communications, collegiality; school wide emphasis on recognizing positive performance Focus on central learning skills Maximum available and use of time for learning; emphasis on mastery of central learning skills High expectations and requirements.

Appropriate monitoring of student progress Strong leadership Effective instructional arrangement and implementation Practice-oriented staff development at the school site Salient parent involvement.

Likewise, other investigators’ performance an analysis of the research literature similar to Levine and Lezotte’s but used more quantitative studies.

Their findings produced almost identical school-level factors:45 • • • • • • • • • • •

Professional leadership Concentration on teaching and learning Shared vision and goals A learning environment High expectations Purposeful teaching Positive reinforcement Monitoring progress Pupil rights and expectations Home-school partnership A learning organization.

Table 1 presents an assortment of effective schools correlates proposed by different researches. All four lists show considerable overlap in areas of instructional leadership, high expectations, orderly climates, curricula, teaching, and monitoring/assessing student progress. Extracting common ideas from this research, effective schools exhibit characteristics such as consensus about high quality curriculum, clear goals and high achievement expectations, a healthy school climate that encourages teaching and learning, strong instructional leadership by the principals and teachers, and involved parents.

45

Sammons, Pam. (1999). School Effectiveness: Coming of Age in the Twenty-first Century.

Lisse, The Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger; Sammons, Pam, Hillman, J., and Mortimore, P. (1995). Key Characteristics of Effective Schools: A Review of School Effectiveness Research.

London: Office of Standards in Education and Institute of Education.

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Table 1 Sets of Effective Schools’ Correlates “Correlates” of Effective Schools Strong administrative leadership High teacher expectations for student achievement An orderly atmosphere conducive to learning Emphasis on basic skills mastery Frequent monitoring of student progress Clear instructional focus Time on task, opportunity to learn Principal as instructional leader Achievement-oriented policies Planned and purposeful curriculum Sense of community & cooperation Parental support and involvement Collegial and collaborative planning

Edmonds 1974 X X

Brookover Scheerens & Lezotte & Bosker 1979 1997 X X

X

Marzano 2003 X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X

X X

X X

X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Sources: Brookover, W.B. and Lezotte, L.W. (1979). Changes in School Characteristics Coincident with Changes in Student Achievement. East Lansing: Institute for Research on Teaching. Michigan State University. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 181 005); Edmonds, R.R. (1979).

Effective schools for the urban poor. Educational Leadership, 37: 15 – 27; Purkey, S.C. and Smith, M.S. (1983). Effective schools: A review. Elementary School Journal, 83: 427 – 452.: Marzano, Robert J. (2003). What Works in Schools. Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, p. 19.

Limitations of the early effective schools research. Although effective schools share common characteristics, these studies (as well as others)46 also 46

Other studies looking at program evaluation have also found results consistent to these effective schools’ studies. Armor et. al (1976) examined 20 Los Angeles schools participating in a special program to improve reading. He found the following school characteristics associated with gains in reading scores: 1). Teachers’ strong sense of their own effectiveness and high expectations for student achievement, 2). Maintaining orderly classrooms, 3). High levels of parent-teacher or teacherprincipal contact, 4). On-going teachers’ professional development plus informal teacher

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share serious limitations. The early studies are small comparative studies of exceptional schools. The investigators used an outlier or case-study approach with few samples, looking at schools performing at the highest and lowest levels and comparing them. For the most part, they focused on poor urban elementary schools rather than including schools at other levels with other student demographics and in other settings. In addition, schools had relatively homogenous pupil populations. As a result, some argue their in-school effective practices may not be transferable.

In short, the studies looked at too few schools with too narrow student demographics to justify firm conclusions. What is more, researchers looking at middle class students and at secondary schools did not find the same results as those studying elementary schools.47 Also, the achievement tests were norm referenced, making it difficult to see actual student learning gains or schools’ effectiveness. Critics argue that the methods used in these studies did not meet the standards of social science research. “Although the five-factor model has considerable face validity” – it looks like it makes sense – “the empirical evidence that these factors are more important than some other set of factors is not compelling.”48 On the other hand, the consistent findings of the school effectiveness factors – strong principal or staff leadership, high expectations for student achievement, a clear set of instructional goals, an effective school-wide staff training program, an emphasis on order and discipline, and a system for monitoring students’ progress – give substantial credibility to the diverse studies’ findings.49 Critics also claimed that effective schools enthusiasts confused correlational studies with cause and effect. Simply because two factors appear consultations about their reading program, 5). Strong principal leadership with maximum autonomy for teachers, and 6). Teacher flexibility in modifying and adapting instructional approaches. Trisman et al. (1976) also examined schools with especially effective reading programs and found similar school characteristics. These and other program evaluation studies found a consistent list of variables that impacted high student outcomes – including high expectations, principal leadership, teacher autonomy over instructional and training decisions, clear school goals, and an orderly learning environment. See: Armor. D., Conry-Oseguera, P., Cox, M., King, N., McDonnell, L., Pascal, A., Pauly, E., and Zellman, G. (1976). Analysis of the School Preferred Reading Program in Selected Los Angeles Minority Schools. Santa Monica, CA: Rand; Trisman, D.A., Waller, M.I., and Wilder, C. (1976). A Descriptive and Analytic Study of Compensatory Reading Programs: Final Report. Vol. 2.

(PR. 25-76). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

46 Trisman, D.A., Waller, M.I., and Wilder, C. (1976). A Descriptive and Analytic Study of Compensatory Reading Programs: Final Report. Vol. 2. (PR. 25-76). Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

46 Purkey and Smith. (1983). Op. cit.

47 For a more complete discussion of criticisms of effective schools research, see: Wimpelberg, Robert K., Teddie, Charles, and Stringfield, Sanel. (1989). Sensitivity to context: The past and future of effective schools research. Educational Administration Quarterly 25 (1): 82-107.

48 Willms, J.D. (1992). Monitoring School Performance: A Guide for Educators. Washington, D.C.: The Falmer Press. p. 327.

49 Purkey and Smith. (1983). Op. cit.

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to be related does not prove that one causes the other. Educators trying to put effective schools correlates into place in their schools found this reality in practice. During the 1980s, effective schools research had a large impact on educators’ school improvement plans. Several implementation studies tried to change school-level behavior on one or more of the factors considered important to effective schooling. These studies assumed that the effective schools correlates had a cause and effect relationship with student achievement, even though the earlier studies were correlational and did not claim to represent cause and effect. Programs were initiated in Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, San Diego, St. Louis, Washington, D.C. and many other smaller school districts.50 The projects achieved mixed results.51 In light of both two decades of effective schools’ research findings and the methodological criticism, in 1990, Levine and Lezotte reached several conclusions: 1. The effective school correlates should be viewed more as prerequisites for attaining high and equitable student achievement levels. They are not a guarantee that their presence will make schools successful. This is partly because a few correlates’ presence is not enough. All correlates must be present to make a difference.

2. The correlates represented issues and challenges for their schools.

They were not “prescriptions” or “recipes” for attaining a high achieving status. Enacting each correlate takes many steps, and no specific action or steps is right for every school. Every school situation is unique and one size does not fit all.

3. Much of the positive results at unusually effective schools involve teachers and administrators identifying and addressing obstacles to student learning. Changes one place usually creates ripples elsewhere, Making sure that changes in one sphere do not create negative repercussions elsewhere takes constant monitoring and adjusting that cannot easily be written in a “to do” list.

50

Cuban, Larry. (1984). Transforming the Frog into a Prince: Effective Schools Research, Policy, and Practice at the district Level. Harvard Educational Review, 54:129-151.

51 For example, Milwaukee’s Project RISE began in March, 1979 when the school board presented a mandate to district administrators to improve achievement in 18 elementary and 2 middle schools with historically low achievement test scores. Project RISE was based on the assumption that manipulating eight critical factors could improve student achievement. These assumptions included the shared belief that all students could learn and schools could help facilitate that learning. After three years, Project RISE showed moderate increases in student achievement, especially in mathematics. Most noteworthy is that schools achieved these modest gains without increase in staff, no new materials, and only a small amount of additional funds. This appears to be the pattern for efforts to implement effective schools research focusing on Edmonds’ five correlates or variations. See: McCormack-Larkin, M., and Kritek, W.J. (1983).

Milwaukee’s project RISE. Educational Leadership, 40: 16 – 21; Marzano. (2000). Op. cit. p. 19.

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4. Schools cannot tackle all reforms at once or they would go into overload. 52 Effective Schools Research in the 1990s During the 1990s, Charles Teddlie and David Reynolds observed that educators made substantial conceptual and empirical progress in understanding and explaining effective schools.53 The new models were more specific about the school factors and their interactions. In addition, the concept of context was now broadened to include public and private elementary, middle, and high schools from communities with all social classes. These schools were in rural, urban, and suburban settings and had various levels of support. This second generation of effective schools models and research not only focused on schools serving all types of students in all types of settings. They also emphasized growth in achievement and school improvement across all contexts.

In fact, school effectiveness is now understood as sets of interacting variables. Most of the early effective schools research used the outlier or case study method to examine a small number of schools and determine the school factors that made a positive difference in low income and minority students’ achievement. In the 1990s, Jaap Scheerens and Roel Bosker reviewed a number of school effectiveness models. They conducted one of the most quantitatively sophisticated reviews of the research literature on the factors influencing student achievement.54 Using a complex statistical model to organize their research, they produced a meta-analysis of an international literature base of the effects of nine factors on student achievement: They found that these included: • • •

Cooperation – the extent to which staff members in schools supported one another, sharing resources, ideas, and problem solutions.

School climate – the extent to which the school has an achievementoriented culture and maintains order in a positive manner.

Monitoring – the extent to which the school seeks out and uses feedback relative to whether it is accomplishing its academic goals.

52

Levine, Daniel U. (1990). Update on effective schools: Findings and implications for research and practice. The Journal of Negro Education 59 (4): 577-584.

53 Teddlie, Charles and Reynolds, David. (Eds.) (2000). The International Handbook on School Effectiveness Research. New York: Falmer.

54 Scheerens and Bosker. (1997). Op. cit.; Scheerens, J. (1992). Effective Schooling: Research, Theory, and Practice. London: Cassell; Bosker, R.J. (1992). The Stability and Consistency of School Effects in Primary Education. Enschede: University of Twente; Bosker, R.J. and Witziers, B. (1995, January). School Effects, Problems, Solutions, and a Meta-analysis. Paper presented at the International congress for school Effectiveness and School Improvement, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands; Bosker, R.J., and Witziers, B. (1996). The Magnitude of School Effects: Or, Does it really Matter Which School a Student Attends? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York.

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Content coverage – the extent to which the school monitors the coverage of the identified curriculum.

Homework – the extent to which the school articulates and implements a homework policy Time – the amount of time a school allots for instruction Parental involvement – the extent to which parents are involved in the schools’ functions.

Pressure to achieve – the extent to which the school communicates a strong message that academic achievement is a primary goal.

Leadership – the extent to which the school has strong leadership for academic achievement.

Their findings identified a pattern of support across all literature bases for academic pressure to achieve, parental involvement, orderly climate, and opportunity to learn. Likewise, Ronald Heck’s 2000 and 2005 studies found that schools with higher quality educational environments (principal leadership, high expectations, frequent monitoring of student progress and climate) produced higher than expected achievement gains after controlling for the students’ characteristics.55 These schools have principal leadership that is rated as more supportive and directed towards instructional excellence and school improvement.

Likewise, in these schools, teachers receive higher ratings for creating a classroom environment that emphasizes academics – using more class time for instruction, keeping students more frequently on-task, and providing students with extra help when needed. These schools show stronger expectations for student learning (e.g., provide challenging school work, inform parents and students of expectations). Also, in these high achieving schools, the climate – teacher caring and safety – is seen positively. Students, teachers, and parents perceive that the relationship between the school and home is more constructive than in lower achieving schools. Even more, schools with stronger school environments also produced greater than expected improvement in student learning over time.56 Nonetheless, the school’s community and socioeconomic context influences student achievement. Many observed differences in student performance are due to characteristics of their schools and communities – even though these are beyond their schools’ control. In order to help students learn, it is important to understand and accommodate these outside factors. 57

55

Heck, Ronald H. (2000). Examining the impact of school quality on school outcomes and improvement: A value-added approach. Educational Administration Quarterly, 36(4): 513-552; Heck, Ronald H. (2005). Examining School Achievement over Time: A Multilevel, Multi-group Approach. In W.K. Hoy and C.G. Miskal (Eds.), Contemporary Issues in Educational Policy and School Outcomes (pp. 1-28). Greenwich, CT: Information Age. 56 Heck. (2000). Op. cit.

57 Heck. (2000). Op. cit.

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Implementing certain correlates in the absence of others does not produce the desired results. A 2006 study finds that school management structures that promote teacher cooperation, collegiality, and participation in decision making are not especially powerful determinants of student achievement at either the elementary or secondary levels. 58 When unconnected to higher expectations for student learning or other effective schools correlates, teacher collaboration, alone, does not significantly impact student achievement.

Other recent research finds that while principals’ strong instructional leadership is important, its impact on school effectiveness is indirect.59 The research appears to show that principal leadership makes a difference in student achievement indirectly in three ways:60 •

• •

Setting and communicating direction by envisioning clear, shared, and understandable courses of action and goals, generating high performance standards, and providing feedback about performance to others.

Developing people by providing educators and others with the needed support and training.

Redesigning the school organization by making it work, ensuring that a wide range of conditions and incentives support teaching and learning.

Simply because principals’ efforts to influence student achievement are indirect, however, does not reduce their important contributions to school effectiveness. Evidence finds that principal leadership is second only to teaching among the school-related factors in its impact on student learning.61 Research on these issues continues.

In sum, the school effectiveness movement produced fairly consistent findings about the characteristics of high-performing urban elementary schools. Most studies focused on identifying schools where students performed better than expected 58

Miller, Robert J. and Rowan, B. (2006). Effects of organic management on student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 43 (2): 219-253.

59 Goddard, R.D., Sweetland, S.R., and Hoy, W.K. (2000) Academic emphasis and student achievement. A multi-level analysis. Educational Administration Quarterly 5: 683-702; Goddard, R.D., Tschannen-Moran, M, and Hoy, W.K. (2001). Teacher trust in students and parents: A multilevel examination of the distribution and effects of teacher trust in urban elementary schools.

Elementary School Journal 102: 3 – 17; Goddard, R.D., LoGerfo, L, and Hoy, W.K.. (2003, April).Collective Efficacy and Student Achievement in Public High School: A Path Analysis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL. 60 Leithwood, K. and Jantzi, D. (2005). A review of transformational school leadership research 1996-2005. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 4 (3): 177-199; Leithwood, K., Louis, K.S., Anderson, K.S., and Wahlstrom, K. (2004). How Leadership Influences student Learning. New York: Wallace Foundation. Retrieved June 12, 2009 from: http://www.wallacefoundation.org/NR/rdonlyres/E3BCCFA5-A88B-45D3-8E27B973732283C9/0/ReviewofResearchLearningFromLeadership.pdf 61 Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom. (2004). Ibid.

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based on their family background or SES. The literature indicates that school climate heavily influences a student’s chance for success in learning cognitive skills. A school culture that presses for an academic achievement helps shape the school environment and climate in which the students learn. An academically successful school is likely to have clear goals related to student achievement, teachers and parents with high expectations, and a school structure designed to maximize students’ learning opportunities. Everything and everyone in the schools emphasizes successful teaching and learning. Finally, the effective school correlates are likely to have a cumulative impact on student achievement.

Effective Schools Today Effective schools research and practice continue to the present day.

While the in-school factors contributing to their success are identical to those named in the effective schools literature, the present studies do not publicly place themselves within the effective schools movement. Nonetheless, they represent elementary and secondary schools in various locations that are successfully raising low income and minority students’ academic achievement through successful school interventions. Whether or not they identify with the effective schools movement, these schools continue its tradition of creating effective learning environments that can overcome students’ family backgrounds in producing high levels of academic achievement.

The 90/90/90 Schools. In the last decade, a body of case studies known as the 90/90/90 schools joined the effective schools literature. In hundreds of these schools, 90% of students were eligible to receive free and reduced price lunches, at least 90% were minority children, and 90% or more of these students were meeting or exceeding high academic standards as measured on standardized tests.62 Research included a variety of school setting (elementary through high school), locations (inner-city urban, suburban, and rural schools) and student populations (overwhelmingly poor and/or minority or largely Caucasian and/or economically advantaged). Through site visits and analysis of student accountability data, researchers tried to identity common principal and teacher behaviors.

The high achieving 90/90/90 schools were found to have five commonalities:63 A focus on strong emphasis and focus on achievement. The schools’ halls, classrooms, and offices visibly and publicly displayed graphs, tables, charts, and exemplary student work and data about student achievement. The consistent message to students, “It’s not how you start here that matters, but how you finish.”64 Even the most casual observer could see that this school highly prized academic achievement. Teachers and administrators paid particular attention to students whose 62

Reeves, Douglas B. (2000). Accountability in Action. A Blueprint for Learning Organizations.

Denver, CO: Center for Performance Assessment, p. 185.

63 Reeves. (2000). Ibid. p. 188.

64 Reeves. (2000). Ibid. p. 189.

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weaknesses in reading and writing would have a serious impact on their success in other subjects. Some students spent up to 3 hours daily in literacy interventions designed to get students to the desired academic levels. Different schools used different intervention activities, but they shared the common focus and intensive interventions with students in need.

Clear curricular choices. Schools focused on a few accountability indicators of improvement (in contrast to the typical school improvement plan that contains many unfocused efforts). Likewise, schools spent more time on core subjects of reading, writing, and mathematics and less time on other subjects. This initial narrowing of focus intended to improve students’ opportunities for success in later academic courses. Yet despite the language and math skills emphasis, these schools significantly out-performed their peer schools on science tests as well. In reality, every subject area tests are reading and writing tests.

Frequent assessment of student progress and multiple opportunities for students to show improvement. Many high-poverty schools had students with skills significantly below their academic grade level. Students with less-than-proficient performance would have many chances to improve their performance (not receive a low grade and move to the next unit). Students were not “failures;” they simply needed more time and help to learn to the expected level. Most schools assessed student progress weekly using teacher-made tests. When students performed poorly, teachers used the test information as formative data to help students learn where they were weak. Students received more work, improved their performance, and gained respect for teacher feedback. Sometimes intervention programs lasted up to three hours per day until students are ready to meet the standards.

Strong emphasis on writing in all academic areas. The writing emphasis had two purposes. First, students process information more clearly when they are required to write an answer. They “write to think.” Next, students’ writings give teachers the chance to gain rich and complex diagnostic information about students’ thinking and mastery. Did the student not understand or follow directions? Was the problem with vocabulary? Was the student reason incorrect? Students’ writings could let teachers diagnose – and remove – learning obstacles. Moreover, teachers and students consistently used a scoring rubric or guide to evaluate every piece of student writing.65 Students knew the standard for good writing, knew they had to produce quality work each time, and they learned how to do it. The research correlation between writing improvement and science improvement was high for social science research (74%), strongly suggesting that the writing emphasis had a significant impact on students test scores in other subjects, including science.

External scoring of student work. Instead of relying on teachers’ often subjective and idiosyncratic judgments about what was “proficient,” high achieving schools developed common assessment practices by regularly exchanging student 65

Student writings included book report, lab report, analysis of a sporting event, creative essay, or description of a common event.

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papers. Teachers exchanged papers with other teachers. Principals exchanged papers with another school. Even principals evaluated students’ work. Teachers routinely collaborated to develop a uniform basis to evaluate student work, to increase their interrater reliability, and to develop clear and consistent expectations for “quality work.” They also regularly work together to discuss how they can better increase student learning. These assessment practices help teachers align their curriculum, assessment practices, and expectations.

Most importantly, researchers found that 90/90/90 schools kept their excellent results year after year. Their students remained poor, but they continued to learn to excellent levels – without using a special expensive programs, textbooks, curriculum materials, or secret information. Plus their content standards, consistent focus on learning priorities, and consistent use of certain instructional practices and assessment techniques could be duplicated elsewhere. .

No Excuses Schools. Similarly, another study appears to confirm the effective schools correlates. In "No Excuses: Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools" 66 Samuel Casey Carter at the Heritage Foundation, highlights schools whose predominantly low-income Hispanic and AfricanAmerican students score significantly above the national average in core subjects.

These schools include KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Academies in New York and Houston and 19 other schools. The common thread: principals and teachers who demand excellence and reject the notion that poor kids can't learn.

Although at least 75 percent of the students in these schools come from lowincome families, they score in the 65th percentile or higher on national exams.

Nationwide, schools with 75 percent low-income students typically score below the 35th percentile on national exams.67 The defining traits of a No Excuses school include:68 • • • • • •

A strong principal who knows how to spend money, whom to hire, and what to teach.

The school sets measurable goals.

"Master" teachers assume leadership roles among the faculty.

Regular testing leads to continuous achievement.

Holding students to high academic standards with regular testing.

Student achievement helps maintain discipline.

66

Carter, Samuel Casey. (1999) No Excuses: Lessons form 21 High-Performing, High Poverty Schools. Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation.

67 (2000, April 18). “No Excuses” for Poor Children Not to Learn, Research Shows. Press Release. Washington, D.C.:The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved June 12, 2009 from: http://www.heritage.org/Press/NewsReleases/nr041800.cfm 68 Butcher, Jonathan and Kafer, Krista. (2003, September 15). Identify the traits that define a “No Excuses” school. Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved June 12, 2009 from: http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed091503b.cfm

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The school sets up contracts with parents to "make the home the center of learning."

Teachers and students work longer than the traditional school day.

As with other effective schools research, this study also has serious flaws.

Critics of “No Excuses” note that the study is not formal research and it “suffers inordinately from research by anecdote and inference by innuendo.”69 Again, skeptics challenge the methodology and ask if the test scores are real. Investigators, they argue, rely on the “heroic efforts” of extraordinary principals and teachers in a few schools. Schools’ funding sources are unclear, but several appeared to have outside funding sources. In addition, many of these schools have lengthened school days and school years, increasing students’ learning time. Most of the schools themselves are small. For instance, one school 152 students in grades Pre-K-6, another has 285 in grade Pre-K-12. The largest school has 1,342 students in grades K-8. While evidence on small classes is clear, evidence also exists that small schools themselves have beneficial effects apart from any specific interventions.

Moreover, the study’s schools are selective. Several have high tuition.

Several are private schools that can admit whomever they please. Two of the schools are charters. While some charters must admit by lottery if oversubscribed, there could well be selectivity in who applies in the first place. One is a magnet school. Some have contracts with parents that require parents to participate in certain ways. Others are self-selective. Students are admitted by interview (in which the principal explains that they will have to work hard if accepted) and two letters of recommendation. The schools are also highly selective about teachers.

The report contends that only "a fraction" of the nation’s schools could be staffed with teachers like those found in the 21 schools studied. For instance, one principal interviews 100 to 150 candidates before making a hire. Critics also talk about students’ test-wiseness (from frequent assessments) and missing data.70 A recent criticism focused on the high attrition rates at certain schools, wondering if the exiting students are the lowest performers, raising the schools’ test scores.71 Recent case studies of effective schools. Other case studies also illustrate effective schools correlates in action. Education Trust, a Washington, D.C. organization that advocates for higher academic achievement for all students, describes three high schools that produce high achievement for low-income and largely minority students.72 While the report does not specifically mention 69

Biddle, Bruce, and Bracey, Gerald W. (2000, July 1). No excuses. Lots of reasons. A review of No Excuses. Lessons from 21 high-poverty, high-performing schools. Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. School of Education. Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation. Retrieved December 12, 2009 from: http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/peer_reviews/cerai-0019.htm 70 Biddle and Bracey. (2000). Ibid.

71 Robelen, Erik W. (2007, June 13). KOPP student-attrition patterns eyed. Education Week 26 (41): 1, 16-17.

72 These three high schools are Elmont Memorial Junior/Senior High school in Nassau County, New York, University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Granger Park High

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“effective schools correlates,” their results confirm effective schools’ findings. In addition, Karin Chenoweth, an education writer using the case study approach, cites several high poverty high minority elementary schools in which children are learning to high levels. 73 What is more, since high schools serving low-income and minority students report that nearly half do not graduate on time, identifying schools that not only keep their students through high school graduation but which also help them achieve to high levels is important.

Once again, several familiar characteristics consistently appear in these effective high schools: •

•

•

•

•

Strong instructional leadership. Principals insist on and enforce high achievement and behavior standards for students and teachers. All teachers must believe that they can bring every student to meet rigorous standards.

Climate of high expectations for all students’ achievement. Every student is expected to behave and perform well, and every teacher is expected to teach well. The schools only offer college preparatory, advanced (Advanced Placement) college-level curriculums. Throughout the school year, peers and educators recognize and reward student achievement.

Clear focus on good instruction. Administrators implement an intense system of observations and assistance to help teachers become better.

Good instruction is recognized and weak instruction is identified for improvement.

Safe, caring, and orderly environment. Schools create a culture of respect and support. Teachers and students build strong positive relationships, and school structures (e.g., advisory periods, “looping”) help accomplish this. Students’ concerns (personal and academic) receive prompt, caring attention. Many students are involved with after school clubs and sports and develop a strong sense of belonging and sportsmanship. Gang related clothing is banned. Graffiti, if it appears, is quickly removed.

Data to frequently monitor student progress and achievement. Schools keep close track of all student achievement data. The data not merely numbers but human stories. They identify the children who need academic assistance in order to eventually lead an independent and secure adult lives. At the same time, the data also reveal the teachers whose students are not learning. Data is information about people that is carefully used.

School in Yakima Valley, Washington. For the complete article see: Chenoweth, Karin. (2005, November). The Power to Change: High Schools That Help All Children Achieve. Washington, D.C.: The Education Trust. Retrieved June 14, 2009 from: http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/012DC865-97CA-4C2F-8A049924E2F392F0/0/ThePowerToChange.pdf 73 Chenoweth, Karin. (2007, April 11). ‘It’s being done.” Commentary. Education Week 26 (32): 31, 35.

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Opportunity to learn. Students who need extra help and extra instruction get it before school, after school, during lunch, on weekends, or during summers.

Strong school and community/parent ties. Schools work closely with the community and parents to support their children’s education.

While these schools do overwhelmingly serve low-income and minority students, they also have certain features that not all public high schools can have. One school has 350 applicants for every teaching position. Two of the three high schools are very small (208 and 330 students, making it easier to know each student well, address each student’s unique challenges, build a community and shared achievement culture. One school also has selective student admissions, financial resources to permit an extended school day for tutoring, and summer programs for students to learn basic skills. Nevertheless, these three offer examples of how the effective schools correlates can create successful learning environments.

In another case study, the Education Trust looked at the practices in four public high schools that do an unusually good job of “growing” the performance of students who enter behind and compare these to three demographically similar schools that get more average results.74 Investigators looked only at schools that serve 60 percent or more low-income students or 50 percent or more non-White and at least 20 percent (but less than 60 percent) low income.

They wanted to find what school characteristics and practices are especially effective at improving previously low-performing students’ academic performance and help them make greater than expected gains. In their research design, they compared schools making greater-than-expected gains over three years with schools with similar demographic schools that make only expected gains. What orientations and practices made the difference?

Again, the researchers did not specifically reference the “effective schools correlates,” but their findings confirm them. While the high impact schools’ characteristics are now familiar, the descriptions of what the schools did to make student achievement happen are informative.

•

Strong instructional leadership. Principals at high-impact schools exert more control over who joins their staff and assignment to classes on basis of students’ needs (rather than teacher seniority or preference) as compared to average-impact school principals. High-impact school principals protect academic time and have more strategies to efficiently use time than do principals in average impact schools.

74

The four high schools were in Fayetteville, NC, Hacienda Heights, CA, Biscoe, NC, and Farmville, NC. (2005, November). Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground. How Some High Schools Accelerate Learning for Struggling Students. Washington, D.C.: The Education Trust. The complete report is available at: http://www2.edtrust.org/NR/rdonlyres/6226B581-83C3-44479CE7-31C5694B9EF6/0/GainingTractionGainingGround.pdf

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High expectations for student achievement and teacher effort. The high impact schools focus on preparing students for life beyond high school – specifically for college and careers. In comparison, the average-impact high schools focus more on preparing students for high school graduation. They have consistently high expectations for all students, regardless of students’ prior academic performance. Moreover, principals, teachers, and counselors have a hands-on responsibility for helping students succeed.

Clear and focused academic mission. In the high impact schools, administrators and teachers consistently talk about academic achievement goals. Average-impact schools focus on the rules.

Student Achievement Data Used for Decision Making. Schools use assessment data for future planning (such as improving the curriculum or making teacher assignments). Administrators and teachers discuss the data face- to-face. Teachers are responsible for reviewing their students’ prior test achievement and determining what content and skills need to be the current year or semester’s focus. They must also spell out in writing how they plan to address any student weaknesses that test scores identify. Average-impact schools tend to use data primarily to measure past student performance.

Opportunity to learn. While both high- and average-impact schools provide extra instructional time in English and math to students who arrive behind in mastery, high-impact schools help in ways that keeps students on track with college-preparatory requirements. Average-impact schools provide the extra help in a way that delays entry into grade-level courses, making it harder for students to complete college-preparatory requirements. Also, in high-impact schools, administrators and teachers take responsibility for ensuring that struggling students get the extra help they need while average-impact schools generally offer extra help but make it optional.

Clear instructional and achievement focus. High-impact schools use factors such as past student performance and teacher’s area of expertise to make teaching assignments. They make teacher assignments on the basis of students’ need rather than teachers’ preference. Average-impact schools tend to make teaching assignments based on seniority and teacher preference.

Strong school, parent, and community relationships. While both high-impact and average-impact schools have business and college partnerships, highimpact schools use those partnerships to aid students prepare for postsecondary opportunities. Average-impact schools tend to use their partnerships for dropout and drug-abuse prevention.

The Education Trust study found that school culture, their focus on academics, the support schools provided for struggling students, their teachers’ high expectations for all students’ achievement, their effective instructional practices, and the time and other resources devoted to students’ achievement contributed to these positive outcomes. Most notably, high-impact schools took the long-term view of the students’ best interests. They intended to prepare students for college and careers, not merely

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to graduate from high school. And, schools supported their vision with concrete behaviors. These findings point to the necessary but not sufficient steps schools can take towards increasing their economically disadvantaged, minority students’ academic performance.

Likewise, other small and selective schools have found successful practices to boost economically disadvantaged students’ academic achievement. For example, Village Academies in Harlem, New York City, begun in 2001, are currently two public charter schools. The two schools have small enrollments, 205 and 110 enrolled in grades 5 – 8.75 Village Academies maintain rigorous standards and believe that all children can achieve at high levels, regardless of socio-economic background. Village Academies ranks among the highest performing charter schools in the country.

Students enroll in Village Academies by open lottery, two to four years or more behind grade level. They go on to achieve test scores that rank higher than New York City and New York State public schools.76 Teachers at Village Academies keep track of every student's level of skill mastery on a weekly and monthly basis. Teachers analyze data to identify precisely what standards students have mastered, and provide tutoring and targeted, small group instruction daily, focusing on areas of difficulty identified by the data. Students needing extra help are quickly identified and promptly receive the specific instructional support they need. In the end, teachers are accountable for what students learn (not just for covering material), and principals are accountable for school-wide academic achievement. Principals hire and fire teachers, assign faculty as needed, and hold faculty accountable for student achievement results. Principals also select curriculum and service providers. In fact, administrator and teacher compensation depend, in part, on how well their students achieve.

Village Academies serve New York’s neediest children: 100% minority and 88% poverty, with students entering two to four years below grade level.

Academic achievement results have been excellent. Reading scores increased 175% and math scores increased 203%. Parent involvement stands at 96.5%, homework completion is 96.5%, attendance is 96%, and parent satisfaction rates are at 94%.77 Again, without specifically referencing the “effective schools correlates,” the components of these successful Village Academy schools include: •

Strong principal leadership.

75

Village Academies plan to open a high school in fall 2007.

Kenny, Deborah. (n.d.). Changing the World One Child at a Time. Village Academies.

Retrieved June 14, 2007 from: http://www.villageacademies.org/home.html 77 Kenny, Deborah. (n.d.). Ibid. Retrieved June 14, 2007 from: http://www.villageacademies.org/home.html 76

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High expectations for all students’ achievement Safe, caring, and orderly school environment A clear focus on instruction.

Weekly progress reports and student achievement data used for decision making.

Close school and parent relationships. Teachers communicate frequently with parents, working as a team to address student learning needs and celebrating students’ achievements.

Of course, Village Academies are another school case study with selective admissions and hiring practices, small enrollment, and educator control over curriculum, instruction, and assessment. This provides a welcome environment in which to implement the effective schools’ correlates – a situation that is not generally true for most other public schools.

In a nutshell. The effective schools correlates are clearly related to higher student achievement for economically disadvantaged and minority students. These benefits occur independently, over time, across the country, and whether or not the researchers are specifically looking for these variables. The effective schools correlates appear in elementary and secondary schools.

At the same time, critics accurately note that these correlates are related but are not causal. Researchers tend to find them in a few schools of small and often selective student enrollment. Frequently, students are there because their parents have initiated and sustained the process to get their children a quality education. Further, the research methodology tends to use case studies or outlier studies rather than a strict empirically controlled environment.

Nevertheless, these effective schools correlates consistently appear where public schools are effectively educating those students traditionally underserved.

This, alone, merits attention. When and to the extent possible, they merit replication.

The Correlates of Effective Schools: Current Research Findings We have reviewed the pioneering and influential studies that compose the effective schools literature. Likewise, we have repeatedly identified the effective schools correlates appearing throughout the studies. These investigations clearly show that school factors can have a major impact on student learning. Effective schools can often overcome students’ family backgrounds in producing high achievement. Likewise, we have looked at contemporary case studies of schools that make a substantial academic achievement difference with economically disadvantaged and minority students. All share the same in-school characteristics – the effective schools correlates.

The effective schools correlates evolved over time. Their meanings have matured over the years and have a somewhat different connotation today than when

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first defined. As a result, effective schools correlates now have first and second generations. The updated definitions incorporate the available research findings and represent a higher developmental stage than when they first appeared.78 Moreover, schools must initially implement the first generation correlates successfully before they can profitably implement the second. One step builds upon the next.

Let’s look more closely at each of the correlates, describe what they look like in schools, and see what the research literature has to say about their impact on student achievement.

Strong Instructional Leadership First Generation. In the effective school, the principal acts as an instructional leader and communicates the academic mission persistently and clearly to the staff, parents, and students. The principal understands and applies the characteristic of instructional effectiveness in managing the instructional program.

Second Generation. The second generation includes teachers in the school’s instructional leadership. In a complex organization, the principal cannot be the only leader. Instead, leadership means creating a community of shared values.

Accordingly, the principal becomes the “leader of leaders” rather than a leader of followers. Some leadership functions – such as instructional expertise – are distributed throughout the organization. In this new role, principals develop their skills as coach, partner, and cheerleader as well as organizational leader and manager. By consistently communicating and reinforcing the school’s purpose in words and deeds, and by sharing leadership with teachers the principal creates a professional environment in which teachers can thrive and contribute to the overall school goals and environment. 79 In addition, the research evidence shows small but significant effects of leadership actions on student learning across all schools. Successful leaders have the most impact on schools that are in more difficult circumstances. “Indeed, there are virtually no documented instances of troubled schools being turned around without interventions by a powerful leader. Many other factors may contribute to such turnarounds, but leadership is the catalyst.” 80 Discussion. “Instructional leadership” has been a fashionable term for decades, and has become the desired model, especially for principals. The term, however, is more often a slogan than a well-defined set of leadership practices. It

78

Lezotte, Lawrence. (1991). Correlates of Effective Schools. The First and Second Generation.

Okemos, MI: Effective Schools.

79 Lezotte. (1991). Ibid.

80 Leithwood, Kenneth, Louis, Karen Seashore, Anderson, Stephen, and Wahlstrom, Kyla. (2004).

Review of Research. How Leadership Influences Student Learning. New York: The Wallace Foundation. P. 7.

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stresses the importance of keeping teaching and learning as the touchstone for making decisions.

According to one national analysis of 15 years of research on school leadership, an outstanding principal “exercises a measurable though indirect effect on school effectiveness and student achievement.”81 Similarly, Marzano, Waters, and McNulty’s 2005 meta-analysis on 30 years of research on the effects of principals’ practices on student achievement found a significant, positive correlation of .25 between effective school leadership and student achievement. For an average school, having an effective leader can mean the difference between scoring at the 50th percentile on a given achievement test and achieving a score 10 percentile points higher.82 Effective schools do things that make them more rewarding places to teach and learn than other schools. As the “official” school leader, principals set the climate, create the expectations, clarify the direction, and deliver the resources needed to make teaching and learning satisfying and successful endeavors.

Effective school leaders build their organizational cultures on participatory decision making and collaborative planning, goal setting, and problem solving. As strong instructional leaders, principals can help socialize teachers to take on broader responsibilities – such as assure that each student learns to high levels and accept leadership roles within their schools.

What is more, when principals find that the current school’s practices and structures do not allow them to reach these goals, strong instructional leaders don’t downsize their vision or mission to fit. Instead, they change the institution to permit the vision and mission to flourish.

A leadership model. One leadership model asserts that leadership (apart from instructional expertise) depends on certain factors: helping set an organization’s direction, developing people, and redesigning the organization.83 Setting an organization’s direction involves identifying and articulating a vision, fostering group acceptance of the mission, and creating high performance expectations. Having clear expectations and personally meaningful, challenging, yet achievable goals motivates teachers. Clear expectations and goals give direction, focus, and meaning to teachers’ work. It also helps them find a sense of identify within their work setting. For example, when principals clearly, repeatedly, and convincingly tell teachers that they have (or can gain) the professional skills to help all students learn to high standards without excuses and they can become agents for 81

Hallinger, P. and Heck, R. (October, 2000). “Exploring the principal’s contribution to school effectiveness, 1980-1995”. In Leadership for Student Learning: Reinventing School Leadership st for the 21 Century. Washington, D.C.: The Institute for Education Leadership.

82 Marzano, Robert J., Waters, Timothy, and McNulty, Brian A. (2005). School Leadership that Works. From Research to Results. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

83 Leithwood. Et. al. (2004). Ibid. p. 8.

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social justice, teachers better understand their purpose. Motivated, teachers can harness their energies and knowledge to make high achievement for all a reality.

Along the way, effective principals help teachers grow professionally. The ability to develop people depends, in part, on leaders’ knowing the “technical core” of what improves the quality of teaching and learning. Such professional knowledge and interpersonal capacity are the essence of “instructional leadership.” For instance, when principals observe teachers in their classrooms and give constructive critical feedback, provide relevant professional development tied to improved classroom practice, and build collaborative opportunities for teachers to work together to improve their skills and increase student learning, principals not only help teachers know where they are going. They also build teacher confidence and skill in their ability to get there.

This ability to develop others, however, is part of “emotional intelligence.”84 Recent evidence suggests that leaders show emotional intelligence, for example, through their personal attention to an employee and by using the employee’s capacities. These attentions increase the teacher’s enthusiasm and optimism, reduce frustration, transmit a sense of mission, and indirectly increase teacher performance.85 Principals develop their faculty and staff to meet these high expectations by offering intellectual stimulation, individual support, appropriate models of best practice, and the basic beliefs needed to sustain and grow the school’s learning community.

Similarly, principal leadership changes the school organization to better support their teachers’ efforts. Giving teachers time each day to plan and work collaboratively with other teachers, designing a bell schedule that allows for extended student learning time and extended teacher planning time, and providing high quality and relevant professional development tied directly to what teachers need to know and do to improve student learning in their specific curricula are ways that principals can modify the organization to support shared goals. Working with teachers, parents, and the community on school improvement planning is another way for principals to lead their schools in positive change.

Teacher leadership. Similarly, teachers have an important instructional leadership role to play. Excellent teachers have content and instructional expertise. They possess knowledge of children and subject matter, empathy, dedication, technique, sensitivity to communities and families, readiness to help, team spirit, ability to communicate, and many more attributes that are essential to

84

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., and McKee, A. (2002). Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

85 McColl-Kennedy, J.R., and Anderson, R.D. (2002). Impact of leadership style and emotions on subordinate performance. The Leadership Quarterly 13 (5): 545-559.

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school leadership.86 In fact, “all teachers harbor leadership capabilities waiting to be unlocked and engaged for the good of the school.”87 When administrators create school cultures that welcome shared leadership, spirited and inventive teachers will willingly work as part of the team to bring improvements to their schools. What is more, when teachers participate in their schools’ instructional leadership, they become less isolated. They gain the personal and professional satisfaction from comes from improving their schools. They gain a sense of instrumentality, investment, and membership in the school community. With this involvement, teachers also learn new things about schools, about the change process, and about themselves. “And all these positive experiences spill over into their classroom teaching. These teachers become owners and investors in the school, rather than mere tenants. They become professionals.”88 How do teachers know when their principal is acting as an instructional leader? Several investigators have developed lists of principal leadership behaviors.89 • • • • • • • • •

The principal makes student achievement the school’s top goal.

The principal states the school’s mission and goals in clear, concrete, and understandable terms to teachers, students, parents, and the community.

The principal takes the lead to resolve instructional problems within the school.

School administrators work with teachers, students, and parents to develop the school’s improvement plan.

On-going, two-way communication occurs between school administrators and school personnel.

On-going, two-way communication occurs between school administrators and parents.

The school administrators regularly observe classroom instruction and provide teachers with feedback about their classroom instruction.

The school administrators offer helpful suggestions for instructional improvement as a part of the observation of classroom instruction.

Administrators and teachers share leadership roles, using individual and team strengths.

86

Usdan, Michael, McCloud, Barbara, and Podmostko, Mary. (2001, April). Leadership for Student Learning: Redefining the Teacher as Leader. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Educational Leadership.

87 Barth, Roland. (2001, February). Teacher leader. Phi Delta Kappan 82 (6): 444.

88 Barth. (2001). Ibid. p. 445.

89 Heck, Ronald. (2000, October). Examining the impact of school quality on school outcomes and improvement: A value-added approach. Educational Administration Quarterly 36 (4): 541.; Waters, Tom, Marzano, Robert J., and McNulty, Brian. (2003). Balanced Leadership: What 30 Years of Research Tells Us About the Effect of Leadership on Student Achievement. A Working Paper. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

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The principal makes available sufficient resources for effective instruction – including professional development.

The principal ensures an effective, on-going system for evaluating the school’s progress towards its goals.

The principal keeps informed about current research & theory regarding effective schooling.

The principal systematically engages staff in discussions about current research and theory from involving staff in reading articles and books about effective practices.

The principal systematically considers new and better ways of doing things.

The principal involves teachers in the design & implementation of important decisions & policies.

The principal seeks teachers, students, parent, and community input to develop the school’s improvement plan.

The principal uses a leadership team including teachers in decision making.

The principal provides conceptual guidance for teachers about effective classroom practice.

The principal and assistant principals handle student concerns and troubles promptly and effectively.

The principal often talks with students.

The principal attempts to solve problems, not just talk about them.

Teachers participate as leaders on school improvement teams, as mentors to new teachers, on curriculum and textbook selection committees, and in other ways that affect the school climate and student learning.

Clear and Focused Mission The First Generation. The effective school has a clearly articulated mission through which the staff shares an understanding of and commitment to the instructional goals, priorities, assessment procedures, and accountability. Staff accepts responsibility for student’s learning the school’s essential curriculum.

The Second Generation. The first generation’s mission emphasized teaching for learning for all. In practice, this meant that many educators focused on student mastery of mostly basic, low-level skills. They believed all students could learn – but not very much.

In the second generation, however, the teaching and learning mission’s focus shifts towards a more appropriate balance between higher-level learning and those more basic skills required for their mastery. In addition, the second generation advocates learning for all. This change is more than word-smithing. Now, the emphasis is on the “learning” (what the student is doing and gaining) rather than on the “teaching” (what the teacher is doing). Results, not merely inputs, matter.

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Finally the concept of learning for all includes the educators’ – as well as the students’ – continued learning 90 Discussion. If principals are to make their schools into successful learning environments for students and teachers, school leaders begin by defining a compelling vision and a focused mission. A vision is an intelligent sense of what a better future can be, and a mission is the purpose or direction to reach that end. A vision articulates a view of a credible, realistic, attractive future for the organization. “A vision is a target that beckons” 91 For instance, when President John Kennedy set the then-almost-unimaginable goal of placing a man on the moon by 1970, and when Bill Gates, Microsoft’s founder aimed at putting a computer on every desk and in every home, they were focusing attention on worthwhile, highly challenging, and attainable achievements. A vision provides a bridge from the present to the future. Only when one knows where one wants to go can one plan how to get there.

Harnessing vision and mission. Leaders bring vision into action by sharing it with others. An essential leadership skill is the capacity to influence and organize meaning for the organization’s members. Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained unsaid. They invent images, metaphors, and mental models that help direct attention. They picture a desirable future state of their organization for us.

“This image…may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement.” 92 By doing this, leaders bring together or challenge the prevailing wisdom. Developing and living a vision are essential leadership elements.

Managers are people who do things right, and leaders are people who do the right thing.”93 In business settings, leaders deal with effectiveness. Managers deal with efficiency. Life in schools, however, is more complex. Principals as school leaders are concerned with both efficiency and effectiveness. But doing the right thing is their leadership purpose. .

Nevertheless, vision and mission are not always thought of as two separate things. Instead, they are both aspects of the same whole. Steven Covey, popular author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, refers to vision as a destination and an inner compass, while he sees mission statement as a philosophy that focuses on what one wants to be and do and the values or principles upon which being and doing are based. The vision tells where one wants to go, and the mission tells how one will get there. Both deal with values and purpose. One step is a prerequisite for the next.94 90

Lezotte. (1991). Op. cit. 3-5..

Bennis, Warren and Nanus, Burt. (1997). Leaders. Strategies for Taking Charge. New York: HarperCollins, p. 82.

92 Bennis and Nanus. (1997). Ibid. p. 82.

93 Bennis and Nanus. (1997). Ibid., p. 20.

94 Covey, Stephen R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon and Schuster. `p. 106.

91

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The effective schools movement did not use the term, “vision.” They did not artificially separate vision from mission. To them, “clear and focused mission” meant challenging the conventional wisdom that students’ achievement depended almost totally on their family backgrounds which schools could not overcome. The effective schools’ mission assumed vision as an integral part. One could not exist without the other. In fact, the clear and focused mission made the vision of high expectations for all students regardless of family background doable. Without the mission, the vision would remain only a daydream. Similarly, without the vision, the mission had nowhere to go.

In an effective school, first the principal and then other school leaders point the way. They champion a particular image or vision – expressed through a clear and focused mission – of what is possible, desirable, and intended. All participants can use this goal to realize their own deepest desires for meaning, accomplishment, and self-fulfillment. With this clear and focused mission, teaching becomes more than a job. It becomes a means to enact one’s values, and fully engage one’s energies and talents as they educate children for lifelong learning and economic opportunities. This sense of direction urges and shapes action, powering great efforts and deeds.

A persuasive and shared vision/clear and focused mission are powerful because they compel the organization to attend to what is really important and where it intends to go 95 Vision/mission creates meaning for everyone in the organization. It makes the world understandable. It helps explain why things are being done they way they are. It tells why certain things are considered good and rewarded while others are not. Once the principal and school leaders can help the teachers and staff see the “big picture,” the team members can understand how their own jobs relate to it. They can fit their skills and interests into the school and where it is going.

Vision/mission also provides a worthwhile challenge. It stretches teachers by showing them a shared accomplishment of which they can be a part. It generates the pride of being part of the team with a useful goal. It makes teachers feel important and encourages them to higher levels of commitment and performance. Likewise, vision/mission is energizing. It provides something to believe in. It is exciting and exhilarating. It inspires new ways to think, act, and learn.

Then too, vision/mission brings the future into the present. When one imagines what can be and gives it a name, it becomes real in the present moment.

It can change perceptions, attitudes, and decisions. It can focus concentration, resources, and decisions to where they matter.

95

Nanus, Burt. (2001). “Why does vision matter?” (pp. 381-383). As cited in Osland, Joyce, S., th Kolb, David A., and Rubin, Irwin M. (Eds.). The Organization Behavior Reader. 7 Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Finally, vision/mission creates a common identity. People work together with a sense of shared ownership and destiny. The common identity fosters cooperation and promotes synergy.

When enough energized, purposeful, and able teachers share a vision of a school that lifts all children to high levels, they become motivated to direct their behaviors towards the desired ends. They know the target, and they know the plans for reaching it. The clear and focused mission’s sense of direction allows teachers to make their judgments and decisions more easily. They ask, does this help me towards my goal or prevent me from reaching it?96 With such a touchstone, decisions become easier.

In sum, compelling vision and a clear and focused mission – where we want to go and how we are going to get there – allow principals and other school leaders to inspire, attract, align, and energize their faculty and staff. The vision and mission empower others by encouraging them to become part of a common enterprise dedicated to achieving the vision. Teachers gain status, self-esteem, a sense of accomplishment, and a meaningful existence from sharing in an important, common endeavor.

While the school without the clear and focused mission may operate reasonably well in the short run, they lack energy, excitement, and a sense of renewal. Or, they may not be serving their students or teachers well. As a future educator, in which school would you prefer to work?

Communicating well with teachers is essential. For a clear and focused mission to drive the school, excellent communication is key. It is the principal’s job to create, “sell”, and monitor the clear school mission’s implementation. Although the principal usually collaborates with school and community leaders to define the school’s mission, the principal is responsible to see that the mission is clear and communicated to all stakeholders. To do this effectively, a principal should create the common vision, build effective teams to implement it, and get faculty and staff to commit to investing their persistence and hard work needed to get all students learning. Research shows that by fostering group goals, modeling the desired behaviors for others, providing intellectual stimulation and individual support (towards personal and professional development), principals directly impact a school’s culture and climate and indirectly influence student achievement. 97 Teachers are the essential agents who make a clear and focused mission work. They need to do more than blindly accept the principal’s vision and mission.

Teachers must make the goals, values, and direction their own, making them personally meaningful through their own words and deeds.

96

Nanus, Burt. (1992). Visionary Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Leithwood, K. (1994). Leadership for school restructuring. Educational Administration Quarterly 30 (4): 498-518.

97

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At the same time, many teachers as school leaders partner with the principal to create that vision and mission. Working with the principal, teachers accept responsibility for designing a better future for their school. Since teachers will likely be the persons putting the new practices into play in their classrooms, they need to be solidly invested in the mission and how it will be enacted. Helping create, make sense of, and communicate the mission to others is one way teachers can further their own investment in the process and in the results. Likewise, this teacher endorsement gives the mission much credibility among their colleagues.

What is more, involving teachers as leaders increases their retention.

Helping to design the school mission helps keep teachers invested in the school and its success. Including teachers in the change process is more likely to retain effective and influential teachers in the school, despite the traditionally high turnover rate among teachers early in their careers.98 Creating an atmosphere in which teachers are considered professionals and have opportunities to continue their professional development both inside and outside the school leads teachers – and their students – towards excellence.

What does a school with a clear and focused mission look like?99 • • • • • •

• • • • • • •

Everyone (teachers, students, parents, community) can tell you that student learning is the school’s top goal.

The school has high concrete goals and expects all students to meet them.

The school’s beliefs and mission are clearly stated and free of jargon.

The school’s policies and practices are aligned with their beliefs.

The school gives continual attention to every student’s achievement.

The school has a collaborative process for developing the school’s vision, beliefs, mission and goals that engages the school community in an in-depth study and assessment of important information sources and shared values.

Student learning goals are measurable.

The school regularly reports back to stakeholders about their progress towards meeting the mission’s goals.

The school has strong lines of on-going, two-way communication with teachers, students, and parents.

Teachers have effective ways to communicate with each other.

Teachers have materials, equipment and professional development needed to do their jobs successfully.

Teachers use class time is used for instruction, not busy work.

Teachers present academic work in ways that students find interesting, varied, and actively involving.

98

Darling-Hammond, Linda. (1997, September). Quality teaching: The critical key to learning.

Principal 77 (1): 5 – 11.

99 Heck. (2000). Op. cit. p. 542; Fitzpatrick, Kathleen A. (1998, July). Indicators of Schools of Quality. Volume 1. Schoolwide Indicators of Quality. Schaumberg, IL.: National Study of School Evaluation. P. 149.

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• • •

• • • • • •

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All students learning includes both basic-level academic skills and higherlevel cognitive abilities.

Teachers continually assess their instruction’s effects to refine their teaching.

Teachers use formative assessments to identify students needing additional help and the weaknesses to remedy; teachers then provide the specific assistance needed.

Students receive enough time and help to master the basic skills.

Teachers collaborate to develop and refine the academic curriculum.

Teachers use methods such as cooperative learning, peer tutoring, and computer-assisted instruction to promote learning success for all students.

Teachers participate in on-going professional development activities to keep up-to-date on instructional practices tied to their classroom teaching.

Students believe they are learning a lot in most of their classes.

The achievement gap between middle class and working class and minority students is markedly decreasing or eliminated altogether.

Safe and Orderly Environment The First Generation. As initially conceived, effective schools have an orderly, purposeful, businesslike atmosphere, free from threat of physical or psychological harm. The school climate is not oppressive and is conducive to teaching and learning.

The Second Generation. The second generation moves beyond the absence of undesirable student behaviors, such as students fighting, to emphasize the presence of certain desirable behaviors. Now safe and orderly environment includes cooperative team learning, students helping each other, and all showing respect and appreciate human diversity and democratic values.100 Discussion. A safe and orderly environment is a critical aspect of effective schooling. It is essential that teachers and students feel safe and comfortable if they are to have the psychological energy needed for teaching and learning. Without a minimum level of safety and calm, a school has little chance of positively affecting student achievement. “A school that does not attend to this factor risks undermining all other efforts at school improvement.“101 At the federal level, Goals 2000 stated by the year 2000, every school “will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.”102 Many studies have singled out a safe and orderly environment as critical to academic achievement. 103 In general, research finds the more safe and 100

Lezotte. (1991). Op. cit. p. 1-2.

Marzano. (2003).Op. cit. p. 54.

102 (1994). Goals 2000: Educate America Act. National Education Goals Panel. PL- 103-227. p. 13.

103 Chubb, J.E. and Moe, T.M. (1990). Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute; Mayer, D.P., Mullens, J.E., Moore, M.T., and Ralph, J. (2000).

Monitoring School Quality: An Indicator’s Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education: National Center for Education Statistics.

101

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orderly the school climate, the higher the students’ math and reading achievement levels. One study that controlled for student background characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, found that students in schools with high levels of violence had lower math scores and were 5.7 percentage points less likely to graduate.104 In addition, the stronger the climate’s academic emphasis in middle schools, the higher the students’ standardized reading, writing, and math achievement tests. A school characterized by a safe and orderly environment is significantly related to less student fear, lower dropout rates, and higher student commitment.105 In these schools, continually improving instruction, increasing all students’ achievement and on-going professional development of teachers and principals are achievable goals.

Teachers say that rowdy or unsafe school environments hurt student learning. Table 2 shows the percent of teachers in one 2000 study of approximately 1200 public, private, and Catholic schools who reported that some of their students’ classroom behaviors kept them from teaching “a fair amount” or “a great deal.”106 Table 2 shows that approximately 1 out of 4 teachers or more in the study (from 24% to 34%) reported an unsafe and disorderly environment in their classrooms.

Table 2 Percentage of Teachers Reporting Some Students’ Classroom Behaviors That Kept them from Teaching a Fair Amount or a Great Deal, 2000 School Level & Location All Schools Level – Middle/Junior High - High School Location – Rural - Suburban

Percentage of Teachers 27% 34% 24% 25% 27%

104

Grogger, J. (1997). Local violence and educational attainment. The Journal of Human Resources 32 (4): 659-692.

105 Hoy, W.K., and Hannun, J. (1997). Middle school climate: An empirical assessment of organizational health and student achievement. Educational Administration Quarterly 33 (3): 290311; Hoy, W.K., Hannum, J. and Tschannen-Moran, M. (1998, July). Organizational climate and student achievement: A parsimonious and longitudinal view. Journal of School Leadership 8 (4): 1 – 22; Hoy, W.K. and Sabo, D. (1998). Quality Middle Schools: Open and Healthy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press; Goddard, R.D., Sweetland, S.R., and Hoy, W.K. (2000). Academic emphasis of urban elementary schools and student achievement: A multi-level analysis. Educational Administration Quarterly 36 ( 5 ): 683-702; 106 Gottfredson, Gary D., Gottfredson, Denise, C., Czeh, Ellen R., Cantor, David, Crosse, Scott B., and Hartman, Irene. (2000, July). National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools. Final Report, Grant No. 96-MU-MU-0008. p. 2 – 11. Ellicott City, MD: Gottfredson Associates. It is important to note, researchers add, that many schools refused to participate in the study, leading the researchers to suggest the results may show bias and not be representative of schools in general. What is more, since students and teachers answering the survey questions may not accurately remember or interpret events, a sampling error may also exist.

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- Urban

31%

Source: Adapted from: Gottfredson, Gary D., Gottfredson, Denise, C., Czeh, Ellen R., Cantor, David, Crosse, Scott B., and Hartman, Irene. (2000, July). National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools. Final Report, Grant No. 96-MU-MU-0008. p. 2 – 11. Ellicott City, MD: Gottfredson Associates.

Worry about safety shifts the brain’s attention. When students and teachers worry about their personal safety, their focus insistently turn to protecting themselves. They become very cautious and watchful, hyper-alert to potential dangers. At such times, the emotional parts of their brain are more fully aroused and their cognitive areas become less active. In such environments, they cannot find any extra energy to pay attention to teaching and learning.

Achievement suffers.

On the other hand, in a school with a safe and orderly environment, teachers and students feel no personal danger so their cognitive capacities can become more fully engaged. The learning environment is focused and businesslike. Teachers are committed to teaching and learning. They set high but achievable goals for students. Likewise, students work hard on academic matters, are highly motivated, and respect peers who achieve academically.

Each classroom has enough supplies and instructional materials.

Finally, in a safe and orderly school, people smile at each other. The principals are friendly and approachable. Teachers like each other, trust each other, are enthusiastic about their work, and feel proud of their school. Teacher and student morale are high. This is a “healthy” school.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

107

Signs that a school has a safe and orderly environment include:107 The school is clean, inviting, and comfortable.

Graffiti or disorder is promptly noticed and removed.

Custodians clean the halls and common student areas after each time students use them throughout the school day.

People at the school say that they feel safe.

Students at the school tell visitors that they want to learn.

Students show respect for self, other students and all adults in the school.

Students sit in mixed race groups in the cafeteria and classrooms.

Teacher-student interaction is positive.

Teachers enjoy teaching at the school.

Teachers and administrators do not allow students to congregate unsupervised.

Wait times for students to enter and exit common areas are at a minimum.

Rules and expectations are clearly and visibly communicated (and frequently reviewed and enforced) to students (and parents) stressing mutual respect and responsibility.

Adapted from Marzano. (2003). Op. cit, pp 55 -59; Heck. (2000). Op. cit. p. 545.

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Teachers, administrators, and other adults are visible in the halls and common areas whenever students are using them, from morning entry to afternoon dismissal.

The principal and administrators are aware of the details and undercurrents in the running of the school and use this information to solve and prevent problems.

The principal is aware of the informal groups and relationships among staff.

Students breaking rules receive fair and consistently administered consequences.

Early recognition systems identify students with high potential for violence and extreme behaviors and educators intervene to help solve and prevent problems.

The school has low discipline referral rates and few (and declining) suspensions for disciplinary infractions.

Student and faculty achievements are celebrated and recognized.

All adults (principal, teachers, secretaries, custodians, cafeteria workers) help students learn self-discipline and responsibility.

Challenging students have in-school adult mentors with whom they regularly discuss concerns and solve problems.

Adults show students how to behave appropriately through modeling, role playing, and discussing appropriate behaviors.

Classroom environments stimulate learning without undue pressure.

Students stay after school to work one-on-one with teachers to make up or gain more understanding about their schoolwork.

Students and parents say that their teachers really care about them.

Students and parents say that their classmates and friends in school want to learn.

Students and parents say students enjoy coming to school.

Teachers and students are active in developing the school rules.

The learning environment is cognitively challenging for all students.

The school staff works cooperatively.

The curriculum includes multicultural education.

People in the building smile at each other freely and frequently.

Climate of High Expectations The First Generation. The effective school has a climate of high expectation.

The staff believes and demonstrates that all students can attain mastery of the essential school skills, and the staff also believes they are capable of helping all students achieve that mastery.

The Second Generation. While the first generation gave expectations for how teachers should behave or deliver lessons, it did not charge teachers with assuring student mastery. Teachers needed only to teach, test, and move on.

Providing each student with the ”opportunity to learn” was enough. Teachers held high expectations and acted upon them, but not all students learned.

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In the second generation, however, teachers’ expectations broaden.

Teachers are now responsible for student learning to high standards as well as using an increased instructional repertoire. For example, teachers regularly use formative assessments such as observations, class work, and quizzes to see how well each student is doing. Teachers reteach and regroup students as needed to ensure that each student develops the necessary knowledge and skills. What is more, the entire school as an organization takes a systemic approach to continually identify and support students who do not learn.108 Teachers are now responsible for knowing the mastery level each student needs in each curricular area and is accountable for getting each child to meet them.

This revised expectation presents a real change in what teachers’ require of themselves. To maintain a climate of high expectations, teachers must first hold high expectations for themselves. Teachers need to accept responsibility for their students’ learning the taught content and skills. Likewise, the schools must restructure its organization to provide teachers with more “tools” to help them achieve successful learning for all. Lastly, schools as cultural organization must transform from institutions designed for “instruction” to institutions designed to assure “learning.”109 Discussion. “As students and teachers immerse themselves in the routines of schooling, both perceptions and expectations reflect and determine the goals that both students and teachers set for achievement, the strategies they use to pursue the goals, the skills, energy, and other resources they use to implement the strategies, and the rewards they expect from making the effort.” 110 Teachers’ perceptions and expectations affect school climate and interpersonal behaviors as well as standardized test scores.

The effective schools movement holds educators to higher expectations for their students and for themselves. In the face of Coleman and Jencks’ studies that showed that students’ family backgrounds placed allegedly insurmountable limits to what they could learn, investigators identified public schools whose low-income and minority graduates scored higher than the national average on standardized tests. Contrary to popular beliefs, these public schools showed academic growth, not decline.

The effective schools research reinforced the importance of teacher expectations’ impact on student performance. Edmonds, Brookover, and Lezotte found that teachers and principals in schools where achievement scores were improving had higher expectations for their students than did the staffs in schools

108

Lezotte. (1991). Op. cit. pp. 2-3 Lezotte. (1991). Ibid.

110 Ferguson, Ronald R. (2003). Teachers’ perceptions and expectations in the black-white test score gap. Urban Education 38 (4): 460-507.p. 461.

109

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where achievement was declining. As discussed earlier, many other studies found comparable results.111 Teacher expectations and student achievement. Expectations can be selffulfilling. In the classic study, employees at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, Illinois improved their production almost regardless of the experimental manipulation used simply because they enjoyed receiving the researchers’ attention.

Similarly, in the Pygmalion in the Classroom study, elementary school teachers told that certain children were “late bloomers” and could be expected to be “growth spurters” treated these randomly selected students as if they were very bright and capable and increased their achievement. When teachers expect students to do well, students tend to do well; when teachers expect students to fail, they tend to fail.112 Teachers’ beliefs about their students’ abilities to learn can influence how they relate to these students and how they teach them. Low teacher expectations (along with a low level and unexciting curriculum and instruction) leads to low student achievement. Low achievement then reinforces teachers’ low expectations.

Likewise, when students feel their teachers expect them to do poorly, they do poorly.

When students believe their teachers expect them to do well, they do well. Each behavior reinforces and prompts the next. These shared expectations create an interactive self-fulfilling prophesy.

Researchers have tried to identify how teacher expectations for student achievement influence teacher behaviors. Abundant evidence has indicated that teachers do form expectations for student performance.113 Then, teachers tend 111

Brookover, Wilbur B. and Lezotte, Lawrence W. (1979). Changes in School Characteristics Coincident with Changes in Student Achievement. East Lansing:P Michigan State University, Institute for Research on Teaching; Edmonds, Ronald R. and Fredericksen, J.R., (1978). Search for Effective Schools: The Identification and Analysis of City Schools That are Instructionally Effective for Poor Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Center for Urban Studies; Brophy, Jere E. and Evertson, C. Learning From Teaching. A Developmental Perspective.

Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon; McDonald, R. and Elias, P. (1976). The effects of teaching performance on pupil learning. (Vol. I, final report). Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study, Phase 2, 1974-1976. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service; Rotter, M., Maughan, B., Mortimore, P., Ouston, J. and Smith, A. (1979). Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects of Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

112 Rosenthal, Robert and Jacobson, Lenore. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teachers’ Expectations and Pupils’ Intellectual Development. New York: Rineholt and Winston.

113 Brophy, Jere and Good, Thomas. (1970). Teachers’ communication of differential expectations for children’s classroom performance: Some behavioral data. Journal of Educational Psychology 61: 365-374; Dusek, J.B., and O’Connell, E.J. (1973). Teacher expectancy effects on the achievement test performance of elementary school children. Journal of Eductional Psychology 65: 371-377; O’Connell, E., Dusek, J. and Wheeler, R. (1974). A follow-up study of teacher expectancy effects. Journal of Educational Psychology 66: 325-328; Rist, Ray. (1970).

Students’ social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophesy in ghetto education.

Harvard Educational Review 40: 411-451.

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to treat students differently depending on these expectations. For example, teachers tend to respond less favorably to low-achieving students than to highachieving students. Teachers demand less from low achievers. Teachers act in a less friendly manner with low achievers and seldom give them the benefit of the doubt on tests. With low achieving students, teachers tend to give general, insincere praise; provide less frequent and less informative feedback; require less effort; more frequently interrupt student speech. Teachers pay less attention to the student; offer fewer opportunities to respond in class; reduce wait time; give more criticism; make less eye contact; give fewer smiles; have fewer public and more private interactions; monitor and structure activities more closely; make less use of student ideas; provide fewer cues to improve responses; reward more incorrect answers or inappropriate behavior; and assign seats further from the teacher. 114 A related study found that teachers spent less time in close proximity to perceived low achievers115 and that inner-city teachers tended to expect their students to perform poorly. 116 What is more, teacher expectations for student performance and teachers’ behaviors that reflect these expectations have also been shown related to measures of student academic achievement.117 More than two decades of research have affirmed that teachers’ perceptions of current students’ performance as well as their expectations for students’ future performance are generally accurate. 118 For example, first grade teachers can learn enough about children in the first few weeks

114

Braun, C. Teacher expectation: Sociopsychological dynamics. Review of Educational Research 46: 185-213; Brophy and Good. (1970). Op. cit.; Good, Thomas L. and Brophy, Jere E. Teacher-child dyadic interactions: A new method of classroom observation. Journal of School Psychology 8: 131-138; Rothbart, M., Dalfen, S., and Barrett, R. (1971). Effects of teacher’s expectancy on student-teacher interaction. Journal of Educational Psychology 62: 49-54.

115 Rist, R. C. (1972). Social distance and social inequality in a ghetto kindergarten classroom.

Urban Education, 7, 241-260.

116 Rist, Ray. (1970). Students’ social class and teacher expectations: The self-fulfilling prophesy in ghetto education. Harvard Educational Review 40: 411-451.

117 Brophy and Good. (1970). Op. cit.; Dusek, J.B. (1975). Do teachers bias children’s learning?

Review of Educational Research 45: 661-684; Rosenthal, R. On the Social Psychology of the Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Further Evidence for Pygmalion Effects and Their Mediating Mechanisms. New York: MSS Modular Publications; Rosenthal, R. (1976). Experimenter Effects nd in Behavioral Research. 2 Ed. New York: Irvington.

118 Egan, O. and Archer, P. (1985). The accuracy of teachers’ rating of ability: A regression model. American Educational Research Journal 22: 25-34; Hoge, R. and Butcher, R. (1984).

Analysis of teacher judgments of pupil achievement level. Journal of Educational Psychology 76: 777-781; Mittman, A. (1985). Teachers’ differential behavior toward higher and lower achieving students and its relation to selected teacher characteristics. Journal of Educational Psychology 77: 149-161; Monk, M. (1983). Teacher expectations? Pupil responses to teacher mediated classroom climate. British Educational Research Journal 9: 153-166; Pedulla, J., Airasian, P., and Madaus, G. (1980). Do teacher ratings and standardized test results of students yield the same information? American Educational Research Journal 17: 303-307; Good, Thomas L. (1987). Two decades of research on teacher expectations: Findings and future direction. Journal of Teacher Education 4: 32-47.

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of school to predict with some accuracy the students’ rank order on exams taken at the beginning of second grade.119 Once set, teachers’ expectations change little. 120 Moreover, Jeannie Oakes’ research found evidence suggesting that teachers (consciously or unconsciously) treat bright students as future peers and less bright students as future subordinates.121 When asked to list the five most important lessons to be learned by high schools students, the list for the bright students was very different than the list for the rest. Teachers hope the brightest would learn to think logically and critically (important skills for future leaders). Meanwhile, they hoped that the less bright would learn good work habits, respect for authority, and practical or work-related skills, all important attributes for future subordinates.

In addition, student characteristics are related to teacher expectations.

Students’ physical attractiveness, socioeconomic status, race, use of standard English, and retention status are related to the degree of difference between teacher expectations for academic success and actual achievement.122 In a study of how teachers explained student performance, investigators found that teachers attributed the success of perceived high achievers to ability and perceived low achievers’ success to luck. These teacher beliefs about success’s causes or attributions would make it difficult for students they think are low achievers to change their teachers' expectations through their own efforts.123 Teachers would simply interpret the improved achievement as the students’ good luck rather than ability or effort.

On the other hand, teachers’ sometimes guess wrong about their students’ future achievement. The better they teach, the more all their students achieve, and the less accurate teachers’ initial predictions about who will or won’t learn become. Studies find that the more inviting and responsive instruction is to children’s efforts to improve, the less teachers’ initial perceptions and expectations 119

Brophy, Jere and Good, Thomas. (1974). Teacher-Student Relationships: Causes and Consequences. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

120 Ferguson. (2003). Op. cit.

121 Oakes, Jeannie. (1985). Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

122 Cecil, N. L. (1988). Black dialect and academic success: A study of teacher expectations.

Reading Improvement, 25(1), 34-38; Crowl, T. K. (1971). White teachers' evaluation of oral responses given by White and Negro ninth grade males. (Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1970). Dissertation Abstracts International, 31, 4540-A; Dusek, J. B., & Joseph, G. (1983). The bases of teacher expectancies: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75(3), 327-346; Gaines, M. L., & Davis, M. (1990,April). Accuracy of teacher prediction of elementary student achievement. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, MA. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 320 942); Kenealy, P., Neil, F., & Shaw, W. (1988). Influences of children's physical attractiveness on teacher expectations. The Journal of Social Psychology, 128(3), 373-383: Williams, J. H., & Muehl, S. (1978). Relations among student and teacher perceptions of behavior. Journal of Negro Education, 47, 328-336.

123 Peterson, P. L., & Barger, S. A. (1984). Attribution theory and teacher expectancy. In J. B. Dusek (Ed.), Teacher Expectancies (pp.159-184). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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will predict later success. 124 In his studies, Thomas Guskey, University of Kentucky education professor, found that teachers’ expectations for student success change as the teachers, themselves, became more effective instructors.

As teachers learn and use more helpful instructional practices that help more students learn, teachers’ become more optimistic about their students’ success.

It is also possible that when teachers become more effective in their classrooms, they may treat all students as high achieving students, providing them with similar praise, similar feedback, and making similar demands for work and effort.125 In short, teachers’ initial expectations about students’ being high or low achievers weaken as teachers get better at their jobs and develop the expertise to have all their students to learn the curriculum.

Other researchers have explored each component of the teacher expectancy model: the accuracy of teacher expectations, the variations in teacher behaviors based on their expectations, and student interpretations and internalization of teacher expectations and behaviors. Briefly, researchers have found that teachers overestimate the achievement of high achievers, underestimate that of low achievers, and predict least accurately low achievers’ responses.126 Another study examining whether teacher expectations influenced their students’ IQ test scores found that the better the teachers knew the students, the more accurate were their expectations for student academic success. Teacher expectations were especially accurate in the early elementary grades (Grades 1 and 2) and in Grade 7 than for upper elementary grades.127 Investigators have also found that when a community pressures its schools to set higher expectations, all their students’ performance improves.128 Sharing the high expectation for student achievement with the community in a clear and focused mission has a positive impact on student achievement.

Students’ responses to teacher expectations. In turn, students notice and respond to their teachers’ expectations. From their first years in school, students 124

Ferguson. (2003). Op. cit. p. 483.

Guskey, Thomas. (1982, July-August). The effects of change in instructional effectiveness on the relationship of teacher expectations and student achievement. Journal of Educational Research 75 (6): 345-349.

126 Coladarci, T. (1986). Accuracy of teacher judgments of student response to standardized test items. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(2), 141-146; Hoge, R. D., & Butcher, R. (1984).

Analysis of teacher judgments of pupil achievement level. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(5), 777-781; Patriarca, L. A., & Kragt, D. M. (1986). Teacher expectations and student achievement: The ghost of Christmas future. American Review, May/June, 48-50.

127 Raudenbush, S. W. (1984). Magnitude of teacher expectancy effects on pupil IQ as a function of the credibility of expectancy induction: A synthesis of findings from eighteen experiments.

Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(1), 85-97.

128 Brophy, Jere and Good, Thomas. (1970). Teachers’ communication of differential expectations for children’s classroom performance: Some behavioral data. Journal of Educational Psychology 61: 365-374; Good, Thomas L. and Brophy, Jere E. (1987). Looking in Classrooms.

New York: Harper & Row. 125

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can perceive differences in teacher expectations for their own and their peers’ performance.129 Young students see that low achievers receive more directions, rules, work, and negative feedback. High achievers enjoy higher teacher expectations for their performance and more freedom of choice. 130 One study found that students for whom teachers held low expectations receive more teacher feedback unrelated to their efforts at learning but designed to control their behavior. Consequently, those students are less likely to develop beliefs in the value of effort, are less persistent, and ultimately, less successful.131 Moreover, students alter their self-concepts as students and their achievement motivation to conform to teachers’ expectations. Students who think their teachers expect them to learn see themselves as able, and they do learn.

On the other hand, students who think their teachers do not expect them to learn come to see themselves as unable, and they do not learn.132 Investigating how students’ responses to their teachers’ expectations affects student behavior and achievement, Karen A. Brattesani, from the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues studied classrooms where teachers treated high and low achieving students very differently. They found that teachers behave in ways that communicate their high or low achievement expectations to their students, and students perceive and use these expectations. The greater the differences between teachers’ expectations and behaviors towards high and low achieving students, the more the students behave as their teachers expect.

These researchers also found that holding high expectations for students can make a positive difference. The greater teacher helpful attention and support to individual students can actually weaken the link between students’ past and future performance. For instance, low achieving students treated as if they were high achieving students perform better than they had before. It also appears that teacher expectations do not merely sustain pre-existing differences in student achievement. They can also increase student achievement. 133 It is clear that 129

Wittrock, M. C. (Ed.). (1986). Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan.

130 Weinstein, R. S., Marshall, H. H., Brattesani, K. A., & Middlestadt, S. E. (1982). Student perceptions of differential teacher treatment in open and traditional classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 678-692.

131 Cooper, H. (1983). Communication of teacher expectations to students. In J. Levine & M. C. Wang (Eds.), Teacher and student perceptions: Implications for learning. Hillsdale, N J: Erlbaum.

132 Brophy, Jere and Good, Thomas. (1970). Teachers’ communication of differential expectations for children’s classroom performance: Some behavioral data. Journal of Educational Psychology 61: 365-374; Good, Thomas L. and Brophy, Jere E. (1987). Looking in Classrooms.

New York: Harper & Row. 133 Brattesani, Karen A., Weinstein, Rhona S. and Marshall, Hermine.H. (1984). Student perceptions of differential teacher treatment as moderators of teacher expectation effects. Journal of Educational Psychology 76 (2): 236-247.

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how students’ perceive their teachers’ treatment of them and others is a major factor makes a difference in student achievement. .

Teacher bias or self-fulfilling prophesy? One might wonder how much do teachers’ expectations create – or reflect – student achievement? Do teachers’ expectations reflect a bias on their part (teachers expectations influence their judgment of students’ performance) or a self-fulfilling prophesy (teachers’ expectations actually influence their students to not perform at their best)? Or, how much are teachers’ expectations accurate predictors of students’ future achievement?

One study tried to find an answer. Among a sample of 98 teachers and over 1,700 students in sixth-grade math classes, researchers assessed the extent to which teacher expectations (a) were accurate, (b) changed students' achievement through self-fulfilling prophecies, and (c) biased teachers' evaluations of students' achievement. They determined that approximately 80 percent of the correlation between teacher expectation and the students’ math test score were accurate. The expectation reflected student achievement. About 20 percent of the correlation resulted from teachers’ perceptual biases and the self-fulfilling prophesy.134 Finally, most teachers report that they do not feel well prepared to effectively teach minority children. Eighty percent of teachers who participated in a 1999 selfappraisal told the National Center for Education Statistics that they were not well prepared for many of the classroom challenges ahead, including teaching students with disabilities or with limited English proficiency.135 Another study of schools of education deans indicated that preservice teachers in their programs were not being prepared to meet the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students.136 Similarly, in a 2000 study, only 32 percent of teachers surveyed felt they could address the needs of students from diverse cultural backgrounds.137 When teachers do not feel knowledgeable or comfortable working closely with certain student populations, opportunities for teacher expectations to affect their behaviors, whether bias or self-fulfilling prophesy, are more likely to limit student learning.

Traditional practices and conventional wisdom takes a long time to disappear. Low expectations for economically disadvantaged and minority children still exist. Many educators and administrators have uncritically accepted 134

Jassum, Lee and Eccles, Jacqueline S. (1992, December). Teacher expectations II: Construction and reflection of student achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63 (6): 947-961.

135 Gregorian, Vartan. (2001, August). Teacher education must become colleges’ preoccupation.

Chronicle of Higher Education 17: B – 7.

136 Gomez, Joel. (1998). An analysis of federally funded bilingual education personnel preparation programs: The perception of higher education administrators on the ability of faculty to prepare teachers to work with language minority students. Unpublished paper. Washington, D.C.: George Washington University. Cited in Futrell, Mary H., Gomez, Joel, and Bedden, Dana. (2003, January). Teaching the children of a new America: The challenge of diversity. Phi Delta Kappan 84 (5): 381 – 385.

137 Parsad, Basmat, Lewis, Laurie, and Farri, Elizabeth. (2001, Fall). Teacher Preparation and Professional Development: 2000. Education Statistics Quarterly 3 (3): 33 – 36.

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the hypothesis that family effects limiting certain students’ capacity to learn.

They likewise believe that teachers cannot be held accountable for students’ failure to learn when the students come from impoverished home environments.

“Simply cajoling teachers to raise their expectations for …children, using phrases such as ‘all children can learn,’ is probably a waste of time. However, good professional development programs can make a difference.”138 Teachers with an effective repertoire of teaching practices and the desire to help each student learn can make a positive difference in student achievement.

Professional development can help.

Like anyone else, teachers feel good about themselves and their students when all their students learn. When teachers see evidence that they can help each student achieve, their expectations for each student’s mastery increases.

Accordingly, their behaviors become more supportive of students’ learning, and students learn.

What do high expectations for student achievement look like in schools?139 • • • • • • • • • • •

The school has developed a shared vision of a school with all students achieving at high levels, regardless of family background.

Student achievement the school’s top goal Student achievement goals are visibly posted within the school.

School standards are both challenging and attainable for all students.

The school has a very low dropout rate and very high promotion or graduation rate.

The school has standards in place to avoid both grade retention and social promotion.140 Teachers, administrators, parents, and students expect all students to learn a full range of skills – from basic mastery of needed skills to higher level, complex problem solving. And they act on this belief.

Teachers have confidence in their skills to help all their students master the basic and higher level skills, regardless of their family background.

And they act on this belief.

Teachers clearly inform students and parents of what students are expected to know and be able to do by the end of the unit or semester.

Teachers help students use what they already know to learn new knowledge, develop new skills, and expand their understanding.

Teachers assume responsibility for student learning, not just for teaching the content.

138

Ferguson. (2003). Op. cit. p. 494.

Waters, Marzano, McNulty. (2003). Op. cit.; Heck. (2000). Op. cit. p. 543.

140 See: Owings, W.A. and Kaplan, L.S. (2001). Retention and Social Promotion: A History and Alternatives to Two Public Failures. PDK Fastback Publication, Phi Delta Kappa: Bloomington, Indiana.

139

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Teachers use a variety of effective instructional approaches to ensure that all students learn.

The school has on-going and collegial professional development tied to the classroom curriculum to help every teacher improve instructional effectiveness.

Students are encouraged to set high learning goals for themselves.

Students are encouraged to put serious effort and time into their learning.

Students use, evaluate, and refine what they are learning to solve a variety of problems.

Students gather and use information effectively, classify and organize knowledge, support inferences and justify conclusions appropriate to the context and audience.

Students and teachers believe that their effort is more important than their ability in producing their final achievement.

Special needs students receive regular instruction in the regular classrooms from the regular teacher with assistance from a collaborating teacher.

English language learners receive support to learn academics in the regular classroom.

Students and parents believe that their teachers have confidence in their ability to master the curriculum and expect them to do well Students and parents say their schoolwork is challenging but attainable.

Students and teachers work together during class time and after school (if needed) to master the expected content and skills.

Frequent Monitoring of Student Progress The First Generation. Effective schools use a variety of assessment procedures to frequently measure student academic achievement. Schools use the results to improve individual student performance and improve the instructional program.

The Second Generation. For the second generation, measuring student progress continued to shift away from reliance on summative, standardized norm-referenced paper and pencil tests and move towards formative, curricular-based, criterion referenced measures of student mastery. In addition, teachers monitored students’ learning by emphasizing more authentic assessments including students’ projects, performances, and portfolios.141 Teachers also paid more attention to aligning the intended, taught, learned, and tested curriculum. Educators asked, “What is worth knowing?” and “How will we know when students know it?”

Most influentially, part of the first generation’s definition on frequent monitoring of student progress has become central to teaching and learning in the United States, with No Child Left Behind.

141

Lezotte. (1991). Ibid.

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Discussion. Schools are under intensifying political and educational pressure to increase all students’ achievement regardless of family background.

Educational accountability has become the primary public space in which we focus on racial, ethnic, class, and educational inequities. Assessment and accountability, vital features of effective schools, have become key components in teaching and learning across the country. Today’s educators have a historic opportunity to permanently change the norm for success with low income, minority, and disabled children.

At the same time, assessment and accountability systems have problems. Evidence shows that they may both increase and decrease equity.

NCLB’s standards, many argue, are too low and too narrow. Yet, in spite of its limitations, ensuring that economically disadvantaged and minority children receive the same quality education and perform at the same high levels as we expect for middle class children can only bring all students closer to the knowledge, skills, habits, and attitudes they need for 21st century survival and satisfying lifestyles.

Even with the frequent monitoring of student progress and annual disaggregating data by student subgroup, NCLB’s assessment approach does not make schools “effective.” Standardized tests are typically summative assessments, used at the end of the learning process. They cannot measure many of learning’s important aspects. They do not often assess higher levels of students’ thinking. They are not sensitive to students’ ability to apply skills and knowledge to real world problems. In fact, standardized tests sometimes do the opposite by narrowing the range of cognitive skills used and removing knowledge from real world uses.

Neither do standardized tests support many of the most useful teaching strategies. They do not identify individual students’ specific learning weakness in ways and at times that teachers can use to quickly diagnose and intervene to get learning back on track. On the other hand, effective schools use assessments in quite different ways.

Using formative and performance assessments to advance learning.

Effective schools frequently monitor student progress to promote all students’ learning, not just to measure it at instruction’s end. Formative assessment can be an on-going and integral part of the teaching and learning process, not a once a year hurdle. Using a wider array of assessments throughout the school year, teachers can both support student achievement and increase the types and qualities of student learning.

Well designed performance (authentic) assessments (e.g.,projects, portfolios, presentations) can actually motivate student interest and boost achievement. Unlike multiple choice tests, performance assessments are actual student achievements that have meaning and value beyond the classrooms. Likewise, by making the assessment setting as similar as possible to the real world setting for which the

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learner is being prepared, performance assessments also foster a transfer of knowledge.142 In these instances, students can use what they learn outside school.

Being “authentic”, however, is not enough to ensure learning. Performance or authentic assessments are “minds-on.” Authentic intellectual accomplishments require that disciplined inquiry guide knowledge construction. Learning is not random or whimsical. It is purposeful. Students must use a prior knowledge base, strive for in-depth understanding rather than superficial awareness, and express their ideas and findings fully and clearly. They need the facts, vocabulary, concepts, theories, and models which teachers provide during direct instruction. Then, students use their knowledge to develop a deeper understanding of the specific problems, look for, propose, and test relationships among key concepts to clarify possible issues and solutions.

Finally, students use complex communication forms to present their findings. They use verbal, symbolic, and visual tools to explain, describe, and elaborate upon their results. Through such disciplined inquiry, students investigate, research related issues, reason through their findings, test possible solutions, and present their findings in oral presentations, graphic illustrations, or other complex and thorough ways. Through these interrelated activities, the students learn.

Then too, authentic assessments have value beyond school. Significant intellectual accomplishments have utilitarian, aesthetic, or personal value outside the classroom. When students conduct meaningful investigations about real world issues and develop new and constructive responses, their learning becomes more than a limited exercise to determine the student’s competence on a narrow skill or bit of information. Instead, the learning process reflects how individuals solve actual problems in adult life. The student’s competencies now are fully developed and integrated life knowledge and skills, not simply school knowledge and skills.

Research supports these performance assessments as a way to increase all students’ achievement. A 2001 study in Chicago schools found a substantial relationship between students receiving challenging intellectual assignments and students’ measured reading, math, and writing skills in grades 3, 6, and 8. What is more, these learning gains were true regardless of the students’ family income, race, and ethnicity 143 Students with both high and low prior achievement benefited academically from participating in these intellectually rigorous and engaging classrooms.

Assessments and reducing achievement gaps. Nevertheless, using performance assessments to increase learning equity will not reduce the achievement gaps between low income, minority, and special needs students and their middle class or affluent white peers. It is true that alternative assessments motivate students to show their best performance – performance 142 143

Tanner. (2001). Op. cit. p. 74.

Newmann, Bryk, and Nagaoka. (2001). Ibid. 21-28.

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that standardized, fixed-response tests with “boring” content may have masked.

Exchanging one high-stakes tests for another, however, will not automatically result in equitable assessment or end students’ performance gaps. Using performance assessments will not make the achievement gap disappear. They will provide a wider and more equitable data sources by which to make decisions about students and schools.

Linda Darling-Hammond writes, "Changes in forms of assessment are unlikely to enhance equity, unless we change the ways in which assessments are used as well, from sorting mechanisms to diagnostic support, from external monitors of performance to locally generated tools for inquiring into teaching and learning, and from purveyors of sanctions for those who already underserved to levers for equalizing resources and enhancing learning opportunity. Authentic assessment can, however, enhance equity, in part by informing teachers more fully about how their students think and learn, as well as what they know. As teachers understand student learning more fully, they are more able to adapt their teaching to student needs and to create opportunities for student success." 144 Each type of assessment has its own strengths and weaknesses. It is not realistic to believe that any single assessment tool will fairly identify student mastery or be useful in promoting student learning. Instead, an assessment system made up of multiple assessments (including norm-referenced or criterion-referenced assessments, alternative assessments, and classroom assessments) used regularly and appropriately can produce comprehensive, credible, dependable information upon which important decisions can be made about students, schools, districts, or states. Such assessment systems are components of effective schools.

Frequently monitoring students’ progress means using a wide assortment of assessments for instructional and appraisal purposes. Formats range from paper and pencil to authentic performances. Purposes include generating formative and summative data that teachers and students use to guide on-going learning – not only to measure mastery after learning is done. In these ways, frequent monitoring of student progress can bring students the quality of high level learning that they all need to be successful and satisfied adults.

What do schools that use frequent monitoring of student progress look like?

• • •

Indicators of students’ and the school’s progress and achievement are visibly posted within the school.

Teachers use a variety of assessments to guide and develop student learning, not merely to measure it.

Teachers use formative assessments to give on-going feedback to students on their learning progress.

144

(1996). Darling-Hammond, Linda. Cited in: Winking, Deborah.(1997). Critical Issue: Ensuring Equity with Alternative Assessments. North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. Retrieved November 9, 2009 from: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as800.htm

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Teachers use feedback from student assessments to inform (and adapt) their instruction to meet individual student needs.

Teachers use a variety of assessments to evaluate student learning.

Teachers give clear explanations about what students are to do and the criteria used for determining its quality before assigning students work.

Teachers clearly explain their grading system, frequently using rubrics to give students models of quality work and how to improve their own.

Teachers promptly grade and return student work and give useful feedback.

Teachers diagnose student learning difficulties early and act to remove them.

Students have an active role in assessing and evaluating their own progress.

Students use prompt feedback to extend their learning.

Students are constantly aware of how well they are learning and progressing.

Students and parents understand how students’ work is graded.

The principal and leadership team monitor the effectiveness of curriculum, instruction, & assessment and their impact on student learning.

The principal ensures an effective, on-going system for evaluating the school’s progress towards its goals.

The principal recognizes & celebrates school accomplishments & acknowledges failures.

The principal systematically and fairly recognizes and celebrates teachers’ and students’ accomplishments.

Positive Home-School Relations The First Generation. In the effective school, parents understand and support the school’s basic mission and are given the opportunity to play an important role in helping the school to achieve this mission.

The Second Generation. Although many educators said they wanted parents more actively involved in their children’s schooling, many teachers and administrators interpreted parent involvement as unqualified support for teachers and schools.145 The second generation more clearly defines parents’ role in educating their children.

In the second generation, the parent-school relationship becomes an authentic partnership. Both parents and teachers have much to learn from each other about how to best inspire their students to learn what the school teaches.

To help them realize their mutual goal – an effective home and school for every child – educators and parents need to build genuine trust and clear, two-way communication.

Discussion. “The way schools care about children is reflected in the way schools care about the children’s families. If educators view children simply as 145

Lezotte. (1991). Op. cit. p. 7.

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students, they are likely to see the family as separate from the school. If educators view students as children, they are likely to see both the family and the community as partners with the school in children’s education and development. “146 As partners, educators and parents recognize their shared interest in and responsibility for children. They assume that if children feel cared for and encouraged to work hard as students, they are more likely to do their best to learn to read, write, compute, and learn other skills and talents and to remain in school. Teachers and parents work together to create better opportunities for children that will help them succeed in school and in later life.

Research on parent involvement and student achievement. Over 30 years of research show that family involvement is a powerful influence on student achievement.147 When schools work together with families to promote student learning, children tend to succeed not just in school but in life.

Studies have documented that when their families become involved with their education, students: 148 • • • • • • • • • •

Earn higher grades and test scores and enroll in higher level programs.

Attend school regularly and do more homework.

Are promoted, pass their classes, and earn more course credits.

Show higher math proficiency.

Show improved reading proficiency.

Receive fewer placements in special education.

Have better social skills, show improved behavior, and adapt well to school.

Receive fewer disciplinary actions Have higher graduation rates Have greater enrollment in postsecondary education.

146

Epstein, Joyce L. (1995, May). School/family/community partnerships. Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan 76 (9): 701-712.

147 For a review of recent research in this area, see: Epstein, Joyce L. (2005, September).

Developing and Sustaining Research-Based Programs of School, Family, and Community Partnerships. Summary of 5 Years of NNPS Research. Johns Hopkins University, National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS). Retrieved November 27, 2009 from: http://www.csos.jhu.edu/P2000/pdf/Research%20Summary.pdf. For a collection of 66 earlier studies, reviews, reports, analyses and books that discuss the research on family’s positive impact on student achievement, see: Henderson, Anne T. and Berla, Nancy. (Eds.). (1994). A New Generation of Evidence: The Family is Critical in Student Achievement. Washington, D.C.: National Committee for Citizens in Education. Retrieved December 26, 2009 from: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/66/e0.pdf 148 Henderson and Berla. (1994). Ibid. p. 1; Epstein, J.L. (1991). Effects of students’ achievement of teacher practices of parent involvement. In S.B. Silvern (Ed.). Advances in Teaching/Language Research: Vol. 5. Literacy through Family, Community, and School Interaction. (pp. 261-276).

Greenwich, CT: JAI Press; Henderson, Anne T. and Mapp, Karen L. (2002). A New Wave of Evidence. The Impact of School, Family and Community Connections on Student Achievement, Annual Synthesis 2002. Eric Document No. ED 474521. Austin, TX: Center of Family and Community Connections with Schools. Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

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Just as important, research also shows that what a family does is more important to student success than what a family is or earns. Parental involvement improves student learning whether the child is in preschool or upper grades, whether or not the family is struggling financially or affluent, and whether or not the parents finished high school or earned graduate degrees.149 Family involvement is more important than the parents’’ education or household income as the most reliable predictor of academic achievement. Regardless of family income, children succeed in school when their families are able to:150 • • •

Create a home environment that encourages learning.

Express high (but not unrealistic) expectations for their children’s achievement and future careers.

Become involved in their children’s education in school and in the community.

In addition, low income and ethnically diverse students benefit from parent involvement in their schooling. Research shows that when schools support families to develop the three conditions noted above, children from lowincome families and diverse cultural backgrounds approach the school grades and test scores similar to students from middle class families. Similarly, they are more likely to take advantage of a full range of educational opportunities after graduating from high school. Even with only one or two of these conditions in place, children do measurably better in school. 151 149

Henderson and Berla. (1994). Op. cit.; Henderson, Anne T. and Mapp, Karen L. (2002). A New Wave of Evidence. The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement Annual Synthesis, 2002. ERIC Document No. ED 474521. Austin, TX: National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Retrieved July 7, 2009 from: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1a/e3/85.pdf 150 Henderson, Anne T. and Berla, Nancy. (Eds). (1994). A New Generation of Evidence: The Family is Critical to Student Achievement. Washington, D.C.: National Committee for Citizens in Education, p. 15.

151 ; Catsambis, S. Expanding knowledge of parental involvement in children’s secondary education” Connections with high school seniors’ academic success. Social Psychology of Education 5: 149177; Catsambis, S. and Beveridge, A.A. (2001). Does neighborhood matter? Family, neighborhood, and school influences on eighth grade mathematics achievement. Sociological Focus 34: 434-457; Epstein, J.L. and Sheldon, S.B. (2002). Present and accounted for: Improving student attendance through family and community involvement. Journal of Educational Research 95: 308-318; Sheldon, S.B, and Epstein, J.L. (2002). Improving student behavior and discipline with family and community involvement. Education in Urban Society 35 (1): 4 – 26; Sheldon, S.B. and Epstein, J.L. (2004).

Getting students to school: Using family and community involvement to reduce chronic absenteeism. School Community Journal 4 (2): 39-56; Sheldon, S.B. and Epstein, J.L. (2005a).

Involvement counts: Family and community partnerships and math achievement. Journal of Educational Research 98: 196-206; Sheldon, S.B. and Epstein, J.L. (2005b). School programs of family and community involvement to support children’s reading and literacy development across the grades. In J. Flood and P. Anders ( Eds.), Literacy Development of Students in Urban Schools: Research and Policy. (pp. 107-138).

Newark, DE: International Reading Association (IRA); Simon, B.S. (2004). High school outreach and family involvement. Social Psychology of Education 7: 185-209;

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Families often need information and resources to guide their children’s out-of-school time. Students spend 70 percent of their waking hours outside school. How they spend that time and with whom is critical to their success in school. Studies have found that students who spend at least 20 hours a week out of school in “high yield learning activities” with responsible caring adults tend to have higher grades and test scores.152 What is more, families benefit from close ties to schools. Parents develop more confidence in the school. The teachers they work with have higher confidence in them as parents. They have higher expectations for their children.

As a result, parents develop more confidence not only about helping their children learn at home, but also about themselves as parents. Then too, when parents become involved in their children’s education, they often enroll in continuing education courses to advance their own learning. 153 have:154 • • • • •

Schools and communities benefit, too. Schools that work well with families

Improved teacher morale.

Higher ratings of teachers by parents.

More support from families.

Higher student achievement.

Better reputations in the community.

The bottom line: when parents are authentically involved in their children’s education, their children do better in school and in life.

Effective parental involvement practices. Parent involvement is more than attending school-sponsored events or participating in a school’s volunteer program. The strongest support for learning comes at home through positive parenting styles, nightly reading, homework policies, and high expectations.

Studies show that children who are doing well in school have families who:155 •

Establish a daily family routine – provide a time and a quiet place to study, assign responsibility for completing household chores, are firm about times to get up and go to bed, and have dinner together.

152

Clark, Reginald. (2002). “Ten Hypotheses about what predicts student achievement for African American students and all other students: What the research shows” in Walter L.. Allen et al.

(Eds.). African American Education: Race, Community, Inequality and Achievement – A tribute to Edgar G. Epps. Oxford, UK. Elsevier Science.

153 Henderson and Berla. (1994). Ibid.

154 Henderson and Berla. (1994). Ibid. p. 1.

155 Henderson and Berla. (1994). Op. cit. p. 9.

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Monitor out-of-school activities – set limits on TV watching, check-up on children when parents are not at home, and arrange for after school activities and supervised care.

Model the value of learning, self-discipline, and hard work – communicate through questioning and conversation, show that achievement comes from hard work, use reference materials and the library.

Express high but realistic expectations for achievement – set goals and standards that are appropriate for children’s age and maturity, recognize and encourage children’s special talents, and inform friends and family about the children’s success.

Encourage children’s development and progress in school – maintain a warm and supportive home, show interest in children’s school progress, help with homework, discuss the value of a good education and possible career options, and stay in touch with teachers and the school staff.

Read, write , and discuss among family members – read, listen to children read, and talk about what is being read; discuss the day over dinner, tell stories and share problems; write letters, lists, and messages.

Use community resources for family needs – enroll in sports programs or lessons, introduce children to role models or mentors, and use community services such a libraries, museums, etc.

Regardless of family socioeconomic status, families which provided their children with a quiet place to study, emphasize family reading, and stay involved with their children’s education have successful students. What is more, those students most likely to enroll in and complete post secondary education have parents who were highly involved in their education, no matter what their SES background.156 Parent encouragement at home and participation in school activities are key factors related to children’s school achievement. These factors are more significant than the student’s ability or the family’s socioeconomic standing or cultural background. 157 In addition, parent advocacy and support have a protective effect on children. The more families can speak out for children and support their progress, the better their children do and the longer they stay in school. To be effective advocates, parents must know how the education system works. They must work with school staff to plan for their children’s future, guiding children through the system, and steering them to higher-level classes and programs.

156

Eagle, Eva. (1989, March). Socioeconomic status, family structure, and parental involvement: The correlates of achievement. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA 157 Ziegler, Suzanne. (1987, October). The Effects of Parental Involvement on Children’s Achievement: The Home/School Links. Toronto, Canada: Toronto Board of Education. Also available at ERIC # ED304234.

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Effective parent advocates know where to get help when their children need it, and speak out for their children and other children when problems arise.158 Class and culture influence children’s school success. Even as parent involvement can help close the achievement and aspiration gaps, social class and culture still impact students’ academic achievement. Although parenting styles that produce strong school achievement can be found in all social classes and ethnic/cultural groups, better school performance remains strongly associated with greater parental education and income. Low-SES students whose parents provide a strong home learning environment and who stay in touch with teachers and school officials do not perform as well in school as high SES students from similar home environments.159 Class and culture create obstacles to parent-school partnerships. Low income parents may have difficulty finding transportation to get to school for attending events or conferencing with teachers. Then too, many working-class parents who value of education tend to see school and home as different and distinct realms. They see educators are the “experts” in charge at school.

Further, to questions educators’ practices would be disrespectful. Such beliefs reduce the opportunities for home-school communication and collaboration and it lowers teachers’ expectations for these students.160 Similarly, low-income parents are much more likely than middle or upper class parents to be put off or fear school authorities. Frequently, they are less comfortable than middle class parents in the school environment, sometimes making teacher conferences more awkward and less productive. They may not trust school, and trust is fundamental to partnership.161 Likewise, parents who speak a different language than teachers, who do not know how the system works, or who have themselves experienced school failure have additional difficulties to overcome in trying to partner with the schools.

On the other hand, middle class culture and social networks more easily build connections between home and school, reinforcing usually middle class teachers’ positive attitudes towards middle class students. Middle class families have the time, 158

Henderson, Anne T. (2007, March 28). Effective strategies for engaging parents and communities in schools. Testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. NCLB Reauthorization. Retrieved December 7, 2009 from: http://www.ncpie.org/docs/Henderson.Testimony.Senate.March2007.pdf.

159 Eagle, Eva. (1989, March). Socioeconomic status, family structure, and parental involvement: The correlates of achievement. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA ; Benson, Charles, Berkeley, Stuart, and Medrich, Elliott A. (1980). Families as educators: Time we contribute to school achievement. In School Finance Policies in the 1990s. A Decade of Conflict. Cambridge: M.A. Ballinger.

160 Lareau, Annette. (1987, April). Social class differences in family and school relationships: The importance of cultural capital. Sociology of Education 60 (2): 73-85.

161 Keller, Bess (2006. September 20). Views differ over NCLB rules on involving parents.

Education Week 26 (4): 12-13..

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money, and resources to be active partners with schools. What is more, their children come to school with an extensive vocabulary and many enriching experiences. Often, these parents’ own education helps them be more comfortable with teachers.

Regardless, when schools and parents work together, children of all backgrounds tend to do well. If children know that their parents and teachers respect and understand each other, children feel comfortable with who they are and can more easily reconcile their home and school experiences. The two environments share consistent and encouraging expectations. Satisfying parents satisfies teachers. Alternately, when parents receive useful information from teachers with whom they feel comfortable, parents more often put these strategies into practice 162 While class and culture may impact parent-teacher involvement, this connection benefits students. The situation presents positive opportunities.

Teachers and administrators may have to become more aware, resourceful, and sensitive when dealing with parents low-income, minority, and English language learners’ parents. This is a bridge worth crossing if students are to learn.

When schools encourage families to work with their children and provide helpful information and skills, they reinforce a positive development cycle for both parents and students. The studies above show that such interventions, whether based at home or in school, started before or after a child enters school, has significant, long lasting effects.

The reverse is also true. If the school discourages parents, treats them as negative influences, or cuts them out of their child’s education, they promote family attitudes that inhibit school achievement. Programs and policies that want to improve student outcomes will be much more productive if they build on their families’ strengths and enlist them as allies.

No Child Left Behind (2002) provided a new emphasis on home-school partnerships, viewing parents as agents of accountability. It expands parents’ power over their children’s education and gives them more information about student achievement than ever before.163 Armed with information and choices, the law’s authors assume that parents will advocate for schools to improve.164 The law’s 2008 reauthorization will likely further increase parent-school involvement.

162

Henderson and Berla. (1994). Op. cit. p.12.

Hoff, David J. (2007, April 4). More p0arental power in revised NCLB urged. Education Week 26 (31):23.

164 Keller. (2006, September 20). Op. cit. p. 13. For example, NCLB requires all schools to make information on teachers’ credentials available to parents and to tell parents of children whose first language is not English of their child’s placement in a language program and of their right to opt out. Districts and schools are required to distribute an annual report cared on the schools’ performance, tell parents of children attending Title I schools (compensatory education) if their child does not have a ‘highly qualified” teacher, and spread information about effective parentinvolvement practices and help schools with lagging parent-involvement programs. Further, Title 163

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Effective home-school partnerships in practice. Most families, students, and teachers believe that partnerships are important for helping students succeed across the grades. Good partnerships, however, look different in each site. Schools tailor their practices to meet their students’ and families’ needs and interests, time and talents, ages and grade levels. Commonalities across programs, however, do exist.

Joyce Epstein, Director of Johns Hopkins Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships and research professor of sociology, has developed a framework of six major types of parent involvement. This framework helps educators develop more comprehensive school and family partnerships. The six types of school-parent partnerships include parenting, communications, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community. Each type of involvement includes many different partnership practices and challenges. Each type of parent involvement leads to different results. 165 Table 3 describes these variations of parent involvement, sample practices, and expected results for students, parents, and teachers.

Table 3 Six Types of Parental Involvement, Practices, & Expected Results

Type 1 Parenting

Description

Sample Practices

Expected Results

Helps all families establish home environments to support children as students

*Suggest home conditions that support learning at each grade level. * Workshops, videotapes, recorded phone messages. * Parent education * Home visits at transition points (grades 3,5,8). * Neighborhood meetings to help families understand schools and schools understand families

* Students – Awareness of school’s importance & family supervision; good or improved attendance. * Parents – Understanding and confidence in their parenting, child & adolescent development, changes in home conditions for learning as child moves through school. * Teachers – Understanding family backgrounds, culture, concerns, and views; respect for families’ efforts and strengths; understand student diversity.

I schools identified under NCLB as needing improvement must inform parents in an understandable way for the school’s status and their options to transfer or tutoring, explain how parents can be involved in addressing the schools’ academic problems, and write schoolimprovement plans that include strategies for parent involvement.

165 Epstein, Joyce L. (1995, May). School/family/community partnerships. Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan 76 (9): 701-712.

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Design effective Communicating forms of school-tohome & home-toschool communications about school programs & children’s progress.

2

3 Volunteering

4 Learning at Home

Recruit & organize parent help & support for school activities.

Provide information & ideas to families about how to help students at home with homework and other curriculumrelated activities, decisions, &

* Students – Awareness of own progress and actions needed to maintain or improve grades; understanding school policies on behavior, attendance; informed decisions about courses & programs. * Parents – Understand school programs & policies; monitoring & awareness of child’s progress; responding effectively to student’s problems. * Teachers – Appreciation for & use of parent network for communications, increased ability to elicit & understand family views on children’s programs & progress. * School & classroom * Students - Skill in communicating with volunteer program to help teachers, adults; increased learning administrators, students of skills that receive & other parents. tutoring or targeted * Parent room or family volunteer attention. * Parents – Understanding center for meetings, teachers’ job; increased resources for families. comfort in school, & carry* Annual postcard over of school activities at survey to identify all available talents, times & home; self-confidence locations for volunteers. about ability to work in school and with children. * Class parent, * Teachers – Awareness telephone tree, or other of parents’ talents and means to provide all interests in school & families with needed children; greater individual information. attention to students with help from volunteers. * Information for families * Students – Gains in skills, abilities, & test on skills required for scores linked to homework students in all subjects & class work; homework at each grade. completion; positive * Information on attitude toward school homework policies & work; improved selfhow to monitor & concept of ability as discuss schoolwork at * Annual parent conferences with followups as needed. *Parent/student pick-up of report card with conferences on improving grades. * Language translators as needed. * Weekly or monthly folders of student work sent home for review & comments. * Regular schedule of useful notices, phone calls, newsletters. * Clear information on choosing courses, schools, programs & activities within schools

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5 Decision Making

6 Collaborating with community

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planning.

home. * Regular schedule of homework that requires students to discuss & interact with families on what they are learning in class. * Summer learning packets or activities.

Include parents in school decisions, developing parent leaders & representatives

* Active PTA/PTO or other parent groups, advisory councils, or committees (curriculum, safety, school improvement) for parent leadership & participation. * Independent advocacy groups to lobby & work for school improvements. * District-level councils & committees for family & community involvement. * Information on school or local elections for school representatives.

Identify & integrate resources & services from the community to strengthen school programs, family practices, & student learning & development.

* Information for students & families on community health, cultural, recreational, social support & other programs or services. * Information on community activities linked to learning skills and talents. *Services to the community by students, families, & schools (e.g. recycling, art, music, drama, and so on). * Participation of alumni in school programs for students.

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learner. * Parents – Know how to support, encourage, and help student at home each year; understand each year’s instructional program and what child is learning in each subject. * Teachers – Respect of family time; recognize helpfulness of each family type; satisfaction with family involvement & support. * Students – Understanding that students’ rights are protected; awareness of family representation in school decisions. * Parents – Input into policies that affect child’s education; feeling of ownership of school; awareness of parents’ voices in school decisions.

Teachers – Awareness of parent perspectives in policy development & decisions; view of parents having equal status on committees & leadership roles. * Students – Increased skills & talents through enriched curricular & extracurricular experiences; awareness of careers & options for future education & work. * Parents - Knowledge & use of local resources by family & child to increase skills & talents or to obtain needed services; interactions with other families in community activities. * Teachers - Awareness of community resources to enrich curriculum &

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instruction; openness to & skill in using mentors, business partners, community volunteers to assist students & enhance teaching practice.

Source: Adapted from: Epstein, Joyce L. (1995, May). School/family/community partnerships.

Caring for the children we share. Phi Delta Kappan 76 (9). pp. 704-706.

Using this framework can help educators see their schools’ strengths and build upon them to create a comprehensive approach to parent and community involvement that can support student success.

Practices noted in Table 3 are not all inclusive. They represent only a few of the hundreds that a school may select or design for each type of parental involvement. While the framework provides a guide, each school chooses the practices to meet its families’ and students’ needs.

It is also important to realize that not all family involvement raises children’s achievement test scores. Instead, certain practices are more likely than others to influence students’ skills and scores while other practices are more likely to impact students’ attitudes and behaviors. While students are the partnerships’ main focus, the varieties of involvement promote positive results for parents and teachers. For example, the expected results for parents include leadership in decision making as well as confidence about parenting, productive curriculum-related interactions with children, and many useful interactions with other parents and the school.

Likewise, the expected results for teachers include improved parent/teacher conferences and school/home communications. They also provide teachers with better understanding of families, new approaches to homework, and other productive connections with families and the community.

On the other hand, parent-school partnerships may fail. If educators design or conduct the practices poorly, they may end up excluding families or creating greater communication barriers. Research has identified barriers that have kept many low income and minority parents “bit players in their children’s formal education.”166 For instance, parent/teacher relationships are easier to form when groups share a common culture, language, and background. Relationships that must bridge cultures and languages, however, require more effort to create and sustain. Educators need to learn their families’ “funds of knowledge” – or ways of knowing, learning, and acting – that exist within culturally and

166

Keller, Beth. (2006, September 20). Views differ over NCLB rules on involving parents.

Education Week 26 (4): 12 – 13.

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linguistically diverse families. In this way, teachers can see their students and families’ strengths and opportunities rather than deficits.167 Likewise, parent-school involvement tends to decrease with student grade levels, with elementary school parents more involved than middle or high school parents. As students move from elementary to secondary school, all domains of family engagement suffer, with the school’s support for home learning losing the most ground. 168 Teachers and administrators must make special and appropriate efforts to welcome parents, provide effective two-way communication between parents and educators, reach out to families, and support learning at home if they are to encourage family engagement with schools as children grow older.

Developing parent partnerships. Successful school/home partnerships grow by making incremental progress, connecting to curricular and instructional improvement, and redefining staff development.169 Partnerships take time to develop, must be reviewed periodically, and be continuously improved.

Developing a partnership is a process, not a single event. Not every teacher or student becomes involved in all activities all at once. Not every activity will succeed with every family. With good planning, thoughtful implementation, welldesigned activities, convenient timing, and targeted improvements, more and more families and teachers can learn to work with one another on behalf of their children.

At the same time, not all students instantly improve their attitudes or achievements when their families become involved in their education. After all, student learning depends mainly on good curricula, effective instruction, and student effort. With a well-implemented partnership, however, more students will receive support from their families and more will be motivated to work harder.

Communicating and collaborating with parents and families does not always come naturally to teachers. Teachers may benefit from professional development to enhance their cultural awareness and to understand and capitalize on their culturally and linguistically diverse students’ and families’ strengths. These in-service programs actively build teachers’ talents and capacities for interacting with parents.

Writing newsletters and memos to communicate clearly with parents, structuring parent conferences to include listening and responding to parents’ concerns, and working jointly with parents on projects of mutual interest all enhance teachers’ communication skills. At the same time, they widen and deepen teachers’ understanding of their students’ backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. These provide useful insights into how to help each child learn more fully and to higher levels.

167

Colombo, Michaela W. (2006), December). Building school partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse families. Phi Delta Kappan 88 (4): 314-318.

168 Constantino, Steven M. (2007, March). Tops for moving parents to the secondary school.

Principal Leadership 7 (7): 34-39.

169 Epstein. (1995). Op. cit. p. 710.

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Then too, parents benefit from workshops, meetings, and informational mailings to help them understand the teachers’ and school’s expectations.

Frequently, parents have no idea of how to become involved in their children’s schools. Some may trust teachers to be the experts and feel it to be disrespectful to question classroom practice. Others feel uncomfortable inside schools, selfconscious about their English skills and own lack of formal education. Recognizing and planning programs to overcome these various obstacles to successful partnership events is a necessary first step.

Parents become more motivated to support their children’s learning when they receive clear invitations and support from teachers and other school staff to be engaged, when they are confident about their ability to help their children, and are clear about what they should do to support their child’s learning.

Teachers can have a big impact on these factors, especially on making parents feel invited and welcome.

When parents and educators work together successfully, you will see the following practices in schools: • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Current school posters, frequent newsletters, memos to parents and other parent communications are clearly worded, available in parent languages, linked to children’s success in school.

Communications are available for parents who do not speak English well, do not read well, or who need large type.

Schools provide clear information about ways parents can help student learn at home with homework, other curricular related activities, program decisions, and planning at each grade level.

The school offers parents various options for involvement, including helping students in school, at home, and joining educators in leadership and decision making roles.

The school provides clear information about the curriculum, assessments, and achievement levels and report cards.

Language translators are available at school for parent- teacher conferences.

Bi-lingual or multilingual employees work in locations to meet and greet parents.

School uses innovative ways to communicate with all families, not just those who attend school events.

Family support programs help families with health, nutrition, and other services.

Parent volunteers from various student demographics work visibly in the schools in a variety of roles to help teachers, administrators, students, and other parents.

Teachers send home folders of student work weekly or monthly for parent review and comment.

Each parent and teacher holds formal conferences at least once a year.

Teachers regularly call parents to discuss their child’s progress and problems.

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Teachers schedule regular interactive homework that requires students to demonstrate and discuss what they are learning with a family member.

Teachers understand and relate positively to student of diverse backgrounds.

Teachers feel comfortable understanding and discussing parents’ concerns about their child’s academic and behavioral progress.

Teachers call on parents to use their talents and interests in school to help students learn.

Activities for parents are held at convenient times – aware of work schedules and child care issues.

Teachers understand and effectively work with parents of children from families and cultures unlike the teachers’ own family.

Teachers use their awareness of families’ perspective when developing policy and making decisions.

Teachers and administrators continually look for ways to involve parents, students, and the community in school decision making Students are aware of their family’s influence on school decisions.

Students better understand and follow school rules and policies because they have discussed these with their parents.

The school schedules events at different times during the day and evening so that all families can attend some throughout the year.

The school provides a community resource directory for parents and students with information on community services, programs, and agencies.

The school assures that the central office is aware of the school’s accomplishments.

Opportunity to Learn and Students’ Time-on-Task First generation. In effective schools, teachers dedicated a significant amount of classroom time to instruction in the essential curricular areas. For a high percentage of the period, students actively engaged in whole-class or large group, teacher-directed, planned learning activities. Likewise, time-on-task implied that each teacher has a clear understanding of the essential learner objectives, grade by grade and subject by subject. Once teachers were clear about what students should be learning, students received the time to learn it.

Second generation. Time remains a difficult problem for teachers. Insufficient time to learn the required material compromises students’ opportunity to learn (OTL). While the curriculum expands, the time for teaching and learning does not. In most schools, teachers have too much content to teach without enough time to teach it so students can learn it.

Even more, the public’s expectations for students’ learning have changed.

In the past, teachers were oriented towards “covering the curriculum.” When they received more content to teach, teachers simply speeded up their delivery.

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Students received more information in less time. They did not, however, receive the opportunity to understand it, make it relevant or personally meaningful, or connect it with prior knowledge in ways to enable them to learn, remember, and use it later.

Today, the community and school expect teachers to assure that students master the content taught. This requires more than turning textbook pages. Effective schools are willing and able to determine their curricular priorities and act upon them. Not every topic is equally important. Schools may have to abandon some less important content so they can have enough time to seriously study the most valued areas. Likewise, schools may adjust the available time in the school day to make more time available to those who need it to reach mastery. These extra learning opportunities would have to be provided in a quality program that students did not perceive as punitive.170 Discussion. Common sense tells us that for students to achieve, they must have the appropriate opportunities to learn. Of all school level factors that impact student achievement, opportunity to learn is the strongest.171 Opportunity to learn refers to equitable conditions or circumstances within the school or classroom that promote learning for all students. It includes providing the high quality curricula, learning materials, facilities, teachers, and instructional experiences that enable students to achieve high standards.

Additionally, opportunity to learn relates to the absence of barriers that prevent learning. Moreover, opportunity to learn the designated curriculum for a grade level or age group is a major equity issue for students who are at risk of not developing academically to their fullest potential.

Content, teaching practices, teaching resources, and time are all parts of opportunity to learn. If all students are to be held to the same high standards, they must have equal access to high quality instruction and curriculum. Having high expectations for all students, a clear and focused mission, a safe and orderly learning environment, frequent monitoring of student performance and positive home-school relationships will little impact student achievement unless schools ensure that all students have the opportunity to learn the essential content and skills.

Varieties of OTL. Student achievement depends not only on students’ abilities and efforts. It also depends whether the student actually took the appropriate academic classes at the appropriately level of rigor. It depends whether their teacher has taught the subject in class with enough explanation, alignment with the assessment. It depends on the amount of relevance, personal meaning, practice, and feedback that students received in an appropriate learning environment. Likewise, if children are to have the opportunity to learn, teachers do 170

Lezotte. (1991). Op. cit. p. 5 Marzano, Robert J. (2003). What Works in Schools. Translating Research into Action.

Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, pp. 22-25.

171

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not have the option to disregard or replace the content they are assigned to teach simply because they have “favorite” units or feel uncomfortable with certain topics.

For instance, a student tracked into a lower level course may not receive the same quality curriculum as the high tracked students. A student who is frequently absent from school, whose teacher does not follow the school district’s curriculum or pacing guide, or whose classroom is constantly disrupted by student outbursts loses the opportunity to learn. This student will not receive the same education as a classmate with perfect attendance, a teacher who closely follows the district’s curriculum guide, and who maintains a calm, caring, focused, and orderly classroom. Even with identical academic abilities, the student in the latter class is more likely to be academically successful. Clearly, differences in students’ learning experiences can make tremendous differences in whether or not – and how much – they achieve.

Even more, with OTL, one size does not fit all. Opportunity to learn for one student may not meet the learning needs of another student in the same classroom. Research shows that students learn using different modalities, at different paces, and with different levels of prior knowledge, motivation, and interest that all impact their learning achievement.172 In classrooms where teachers are attuned to the range in opportunities to learn that a group of students may need, teachers foster individualized student growth and development. This is especially important for those with established individualized educational programs (IEPs). Although students with IEPs may need more accommodations, a classroom that provides equitable opportunities to learn will provide enough flexibility in its scope, sequence, and instruction to support all students' progress toward successful achievement. 173 Much of the OTL research has focused on three areas of indicators. The first area deals with the instructional content (curriculum) including the degree and depth that teachers’ cover academic material for different student groups. A second area is the pedagogical process of how teachers organize classroom work and the extent that teachers have varying skill levels. The third area incorporates instructional resources used in delivering instruction, including curricular materials,

172

(n.d) Learner-centered psychological principles. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Center for Psychology in Schools and Education. Retrieved December 9, 2009 from: http://www.apa.org/ed/governance/bea/learner-centered.pdf; Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

173 Opportunity to learn is a particular issue for English language learners and disabled students.

English language learners have still more difficulties securing opportunity to learn the required curriculum with an unfamiliar vocabulary until they can understand and communicate more fluently in English. The same lack of opportunity to learn is true for those disabled students who are not receiving their academic subjects in the regular education classes.

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technology, safe and secure school facilities, and use of instructional time. To some degree, these categories overlap.174 Curriculum and OTL. Having a guaranteed and viable curriculum is the first school-level factor impacting student achievement. This issue includes both opportunity to learn and time. Both factors correlate strongly with academic achievement yet are so interdependent that they may be considered as one feature.175 Schools actually have four curricula. The intended curriculum is the content specified by the state, district, or school to be addressed in a particular course at a particular grade level. The taught curriculum is the one the teacher delivers in the classroom. The attained curriculum is the one the students actually learn, and the tested curriculum is the one about which students must answer questions on classroom and standardized tests. Any mismatches cost student learning and reduce their OTL. It may seem surprising that the intended curriculum and taught curriculum are not always identical. Public education provides teachers with much guidance on content standards for specific courses and grade levels. Yet even when teachers use highly structured textbooks as the basis for curriculum, teachers commonly make independent and individual decisions about what they will cover and to what extent. Different teachers omit or include different topics. This practice frequently creates large holes in the curriculum – and in students’ learning.

In a high-stakes testing environment such with NCLB, it is very important that all students have opportunities to learn the same content – in its same information, skills, depth and complexity – that they will see on assessments.

Unless students have the chance to learn the expected content to the same level of complexity, they will not have the opportunity to learn.

Effective teaching and OTL. As OTL’s critical players, teachers bring together all elements in the classroom. Do the teachers have enough time to fully explain the material and connect it to students’ prior knowledge and experiences?

Do the teachers align the taught content to the expected curriculum and the assessed curriculum? Do students have enough time-on-task to learn the material, show what they understand, and receive the detailed feedback needed to adjust, refine, or confirm their mastery? Do the teachers identify understanding gaps of those students who fail the classroom tests? Do the teachers find ways to relate the abstract concepts to something within the students’ experience to help them learn? Do the teachers account for the students’ attitudes, developmental, linguistic, cultural, and disability variables in planning learning activities? If

174

Venezia, Andrea and Maxwell-Jolly, Julie. (2007). The Unequal Opportunity to Learn in California Schools.: Crafting Standards to Track Quality. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Policy Analysis for California Education.

175 Marzano (2003). Op. cit. p. 22.

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instruction does not account for these variables, then one can argue that it does not provide all students with an adequate or equitable opportunity to learn.176 Schools must continuously adjust their teaching practices to promote student learning. Tests, themselves, do diagnose students’ learning difficulties.

They merely indicate whether students have mastered the required material. It is the teachers’ responsibility to identify the specific obstacles each student faces in his or her learning. Moreover, teachers must reflect on whether their own pedagogy is sufficiently linked to the curriculum and assessment standards to provide an adequate OTL. With this in mind, teachers must make every effort to provide differentiated learning opportunities with instruction that is clearly aligned with state curriculum standards and adequate time frames to allow learning to occur. In short, teachers must know their subject, the standards to which they and their students will be held accountable, the unique learning needs of each student for each assigned topic and skill, and instructional practices and resources (including extra time) to ensure that each student receives the instruction and time needed for mastery.

Such OTL teaching requires high levels of professional competence.

Improving opportunity to learn includes teachers developing better diagnostic skills to identify each student’s learning obstacles in each required topic or skill. It means teachers learning how to deliver instruction in a variety of ways that best suit the material and the students. It means designing new lessons that connect the students to the content in ways that are meaningful and relevant to them. It means allowing occasions for demonstration, practice, and prompt feedback which students immediately use to increase their learning. Then too, teachers will need to find new motivational strategies to promote students interest in what is being taught and learned.

OTL teaching also means teachers forming partnerships with parents and guardians to have them support good learning and study habits at home. It means teachers and parents frequently communicate about students’ progress and academic programs. Further, these teachers and resources must be available to every student in every classroom. Conducting these teaching behaviors competently requires teachers to have significant professional knowledge and skills. They will also need to become life-long learners to continue developing their professional expertise.

Time and OTL. Time is another critical OTL variable. Robert Marzano, noted author and researcher with Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) in Aurora, Colorado found that most state, district, and school curricula are too large to fit neatly into the school day. To illustrate this, researchers identified some 200 standards and 3,039 benchmarks in national and

176

Starratt, Robert J. (2003, December). Opportunity to learn and the accountability agenda. Phi Delta Kappan 85 (4): 298-303.

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state level documents for 14 different subject areas.177 Classroom teachers then estimated the amount of time it would take to adequately address the content these documents described – 15,465 hours!178 Assuming that most K-12 schools use a 180 day school year, with an average of 5.6 hours of class time each school day, teachers would have a maximum of 13,104 hours (13 years of instruction x 1,008 hours per school year) to address all these standards.179 Not only can 15,465 hours not fit into 13,104 hours of available class time.

In reality, not all the available classroom time is actually used for instruction.

Classroom disruptions, socializing, informal breaks, and other non-instructional activities use class time, too. Research finds the upper boundary of class time for instructional purposes is 69 percent – or 9,042 hours, or 695.5 hours per year (9,042 divided by 13 years of instruction). Clearly, 15,465 hours of standards do not fit into 9,042 hours of instructional time.180 Without a doubt, today’s teachers are expected to teach students more content and skills than they can realistically complete for all students in the allotted time. Marzano recommends that schools should drastically reduce the amount of content teachers are required to address in class.181 Research findings on OTL. The research findings are quite mixed on whether OTL indicators predict improved student performance. For example, certain instructional materials and facilities – including supplies of books, laboratory space, libraries, computers, and clean facilities – do not consistently predict children’s achievement levels except when these resources fall below minimum thresholds. Measuring OTL indicators remains imprecise, further complicating the research.

On the flip side, descriptive data show that large differences exist in basic instructional resources and facilities among school districts and across schools.

These disparities often reflect the surrounding communities’ wealth or poverty.

Teachers are far more likely to face severe shortages of these resources when they teach in poorer communities.182 OTL is clearly a factor, however, when discussing tracking and student achievement. Tracking students into different curriculum denies them access to high level content, access to the most experienced and knowledgeable teachers, 177

Kendall, J.S. and Marzano, R.J. (2000). Content Knowledge: A Compendium of Standards rd and Benchmarks for K-12 Students. (3 . Ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

178 Marzano, R.J., Kendall, J.S. and Gaddy, B.B. (1999). Essential Knowledge: The Debate Over What American Students Should Know. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory.

179 Marzano. (2003). Op. cit. p. 24.

180 Marzano. (2003). Obid. p. 25.

181 Marzano. (2003). Ibid. p. 26.

182 Venezia and Maxwell-Jolly (2007). Op. cit. p. 9.

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and access to high quality learning experiences. Further, research on tracking practices show reduced achievement for those in the lower tracks. Students gain from being in high ability groups and lose from being in low ability groups.183 Students continuously tracked into low-ability groups lose ground academically over the years while those kept in high ability groups make learning and achievement gains. High tracked students in tracked secondary schools tend to benefit compared with comparable students in low track classes.184 Researchers suggest that these benefits result from the enhanced instructional and learning opportunities in these classes rather than from their homogeneity.185 Even more, tracking influences students’ attainment and life chances above their academic achievement. Track placements are quite stable, reflecting years of differentiated education. Students’ early assignment affects their later course experiences. By high school, college track students have better prospects for college attendance, school grades, and future high status occupations with financial and social rewards than comparable non-college track peers.186 OTL and National and State Policy. Since the effective schools research, opportunity to learn has become a national policy issue. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act includes opportunity to learn in its accountability structure and specifies that lack of classroom equity can result in serious adverse consequences for schools and teachers.

Opportunity to learn is not just an aspect of accountability. It is a moral consideration. Not addressing opportunity to learn within an accountability system violates concern for social justice.187 When all students do not have the opportunity to learn the material on which they are being tested, and when the failure to pass the test can result in retention, mandatory remediation, or denial of a diploma, assuring OTL becomes not just a practical concern. It becomes a moral one.

183

Slavin, Robert. (1987). Ability grouping and student achievement in elementary schools: A best evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research 5, 293 – 336; Slavin, Robert E. (1990).

Achievement effects of ability grouping in secondary schools: A best evidence synthesis. ;.

Madison, WI: Wisconsin Center for Educational Research; Slavin, Robert E. (1991 March). Are cooperative learning and untracking harmful to the gifted? Educational Leadership 48 (6): 68-71; Brewer et al (1995). Op. cit.

184 Gamoran, Adam. and Mare, Robert G.. (1989 March). Secondary school tracking and educational inequality: Compensation, reinforcement, or neutrality? American Journal of Sociology 94, 1146 – 1183. Goldring, Ellen B. (1990). Assessing the status of information on classroom organizational frameworks for gifted students. Journal of Educational Research 83: 313 – 326; Hoffer, Thomas B. (1992 Fall). Middle school ability grouping and student achievement in science and mathematics. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, pp. 207 – 227; Brewer et al. (1995). Op. cit.

185 Oakes. (1992). Educational Researcher. Op. cit.; Jaeger, Richard M. and Hattie, John A. (1995 November). Detracking America’s schools. Phi Delta Kappan 77 (3): 218 – 219.

186 Gamoran, et al. (1991) op cit; Vanfossen, B., Jones, J., and Spade,J. (1987). Curriculum tracking and status maintenance. Sociology of Education 60, 104 – 122; Wolfe, L. (1985). Postsecondary educational attainment among whites and blacks. American Educational Research Journal 22, 501 – 525.

187 Starratt. (2003). Op. cit.

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At the state and federal levels, the OTL perspective avows that neither schools nor students should be held responsible for learning if schools did not have the resources to teach their students the material that would be assessed. It is an issue of both equity and practicality. Since the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the country has affirmed the principle that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited schools that receive federal funds from implementing policies that treat students differently based on their race, color, or national origin or that result in disparate impacts on students. All students, therefore, should have access to education of equal quality.

As policy, the commitment to OTL standards varies widely. Some believe that the school infrastructure not be subject to federal recommendations about opportunity to learn indicators. OTL supporters, conversely, see the establishment of OTL standards as a social contract between the schools and the larger community. The largest practical obstacle to instituting OTL standards, however, is their likely cost and the possibility of lawsuits arising from those who might claim their school is violating the OTL standards mandate. 188 OTL and funding schools. In this vein, the question remains of whether schools are receiving adequate funding to provide the kinds of instructional systems that would actually result in all children learning at a high level. Twentyeight studies in 20 different states conducted by diverse sponsors and researchers have shown that an average increase of 30% in educational dollars will be needed if we are to provide an adequate education for all students.189 Few states have calculated the actual cost to make an instructional system which provides high quality learning opportunity for all students a reality.

Lawsuits dealing with equitable distribution of educational resources are making their way through state courts. They may ultimately result in states refining their ambiguous language about students’ educational rights and the role OTL standards will play in students gaining equitable and excellent education.

Until states supply adequate funding for schools to achieve this goal, one may logically ask whether it is right or fair that children who “fail” state exams “be punished by the system that failed them – a system that, at best, provides a one-size-fits-all opportunity to learn, rather than comprehensive and differentiated opportunities to learn.” 190 188

Schwartz, Wendy. (1995). Opportunity to Learn Standards: Their Impact on Urban Students.

ERIC/CUE Digest Number 110. ED 389816. ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education. Retrieved November 9, 2009 from: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/14/49/5f.pdf 189 Mathis, William J. (2004, April). Two very different questions: The cost of leaving No Child Behind? Or, the cost of implementing No Child Left Behind? Education Week 23 (32): 48, 33.

190 Starratt. (2003). Ibid. p. 303.

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Every student must receive the same, high level curriculum that every other student receives. It must be identical with state and local standards, and teachers must have the necessary time and resources (instructional and material) to assure that each student masters it. Without these conditions, students will lack the opportunity to learn.

What opportunity to learn looks like in schools: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

All students participate in the high-status, high level thinking academic curriculum.

Schools establish curricular priorities, ensure appropriate teacher assignments, and provide students with needed supports.

No public address announcements or other classroom interruptions occur during instructional time.

Teachers maximize students’ academic engagement time by aligning instructional goals with strategies, resources, learning activities, and assessments of student learning.

Teachers identify students’ individual learning problems or misunderstandings early in the learning process and provide additional supports.

Teachers use various instructional strategies to meet students’ learning needs in achieving the essential knowledge and skills.

Teachers receive materials, equipment, & professional development necessary for their successful job performance.

Teachers emphasize essential knowledge and skills and higher order thinking skills to enhance all students’ understanding of information and ideas.

Teachers involve all students in synthesizing, generalizing, explaining, hypothesizing, or drawing conclusions that produce new meaning and understanding for them.

Teachers use effective classroom management and organizational strategies to maximize learning time.

Teachers emphasize helping students develop positive attitudes and perceptions about their learning and to take pride in their work.

Teachers design challenging (but not frustrating) learning tasks for students that are adjusted to accommodate students’ learning needs while keeping resulting mastery levels high.

Teachers participate in on-going professional development to expand their instructional repertoire for preparing engaging learning activities in the standards-based curriculum with all students.

Teachers balance whole-class and small group learning activities to expand occasions for students to achieve.

Classroom instructional resources for learning are equally accessible to all students.

Transitions between instructional activities and classroom routines occur smoothly with little time loss.

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Students receive learning opportunities that enable them to make connections between what they are learning and the world beyond the classroom, and to apply their learning in addressing real-life problems.

Students receive opportunities to apply their learning in meaningful contexts that call for decision making, investigation, and problem solving.

Special education students are included in all academic classes and are supported with collaborative teaching.

Students have opportunities to receive additional individualized assistance that address their specific learning challenges (e.g., teacher or classroom aide, peer tutor, interactive technology based instructional resources aligned with the curriculum, other).

Students who are peer tutors receive training in how to serve effectively.

Students who fail tests receive meaningful opportunities for remediation that focus on the knowledge and skills on the test and give enough time for them to remedy any weakness in that area before retaking the test.

A Realistic Look at What Effective Schools Can and Cannot Do How are effective schools different from other schools? Effective schools integrate the elements that make good schools – instructional leadership, clear and focused mission, safe and orderly environment, a climate of high expectations, frequent monitoring of student progress, positive home-school relations, and opportunity to learn. If policy makers and practitioners want to make a positive difference, they can focus on what excellent schools do and how they do it. It is not merely making the available resources but how schools use them that is important.

Over the years, the effective schools movement has identified certain realities that impact their use to improve schools: • •

• •

•

No one model of effective schools exists. No single set of variables can produce an effective school. Each school has its unique student and community factors that will impact how the correlates will work.

The correlates are prerequisites for attaining high and equitable achievement levels for low income and minority students. The correlates are not guarantees that their presence in schools will increase student achievement, but they are proxies showing the school is moving towards being more effective in student achievement.

The correlates are interacting and synergistic. They work together and influence each other in unique ways in different school environments.

The correlates are challenges for schools to meet. They are not “recipes” to create high achieving schools. Each correlate has many steps that must be implemented correctly for each school’s unique situation and in interplay with the other correlates.

Schools must monitor and attend to all the correlates and the possible obstacles and repercussions their implementation may produce.

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Schools cannot undertake all the correlates at one time, nor can they overlook implementing any one of them. Yet they must all be present if student achievement is to increase.

Each school’s community socioeconomic context influences student achievement. Both family and school contribute to student learning.

Expectations matter. Many studies have shown that children will perform in school according to their teachers’ expectations. Holding high expectations for all students and teachers – and acting proactively on this belief with the appropriate instructional and support activities – raises students’ achievement.

As a result, minority and low-income students’ skills in effective schools are at least as well-developed as those of middle class children. In effective schools, a child’s socioeconomic status cannot be determined by looking at test scores.

Even though the effective schools correlates have been shown to improve student achievement among low income and minority students, these successful schools are largely successful examples rather than common practice. That the same set of effective practices appears over and over again, in schools at all grade levels and in separate regions of the country and among researchers who are not part of the effective schools movement assures us that these correlates exist and have merit. That critics question the research methodology or claim that their increased achievement scores may be random fluctuations that occur when one identifies schools at the top of the test-score distribution simply means the effective schools correlates are not a panacea or easily put into place 191 It does not discount their merit or usefulness in promoting student learning.

Likewise, despite educator testimonials about how well their well designed and organized instructional approaches worked, little independent and accepted research evidence supports the notion that such programs can successfully – by themselves – bridge the achievement gap. In fact, these assertions of the successful intervention often become the rationale for politicians to ignore social inequities. Instead, they claim that all other public schools are “failing.” 192 Educators cannot completely close it by intensively implementing effective schools reforms without also dealing with the underlying social problems that affect the children who attend our schools.193 “To pretend that schools can singlehandedly overcome a lifetime of deprivation through a ‘whole-school action plan’ or through rigorous and intensive adherence to a particular reading program is more an exercise in ritualistic magic that an realistic solution to social, economic, and

191

Mathis. (2005). Ibid.

Mathis. (2005). Ibid.

193 Borman, Geoffrey, D. and Hewes, Gina M. (2002, Winter). The long-term effects and costeffectiveness of Success for All. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 24 (4): 243-266; Rothstein, Richard. (2004). Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. New York: Teachers College Press.

192

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personal problems.”194 Many children come to school with issues affecting their health, mobility, housing, nutrition, housing, parents’ unemployment, family structure, medical and dental care – all of which impact how well they learn.

It remains our moral obligation to bridge the achievement gaps between rich and poor, boys and girls, and between brown, black, and white. External social forces and political actions do not remove educators’ responsibilities for providing educational equality and excellence. Nor do they remove educators’ demands for using the best leadership, curricular, instructional, assessment, school climate, and parent involvement approaches available. We still need to engage all students, improve teaching, use diverse instructional and support methods, use formative assessments to aid student learning, disaggregate data, and continuously track every student’s progress. Yet by themselves, these approaches cannot be completely successful. Six hours of daily instruction for 180 days a year cannot overcome the effects of a deprived and impoverished home environment for 18 hours a day, 365 days a year. But they can narrow the achievement gap. With educators’, parents’ and communities’ help, the effective schools correlates can create opportunities for children’s learning and futures that would not have happened without these approaches. The Journal for Effective Schools, exists with the purpose of sharing research, policies and practices of effective schools with others.195 When the effective schools correlates that we know can work take root in every school, when our society provides the necessary resources to make this a reality, and when each community invests in education throughout children’s developmental years to advance their learning, we can build a society without achievement gaps.

Summary.

Schools and society share the major responsibility for improving education.

Sociological, cultural, and school factors have often placed severe obstacles to minority and low income students’ learning. Research, however, affirms that when teachers, administrators, and the community hold high expectations for students, effectively deliver a strong and appropriate curriculum, and provide high levels of support, learning and achievement typically improves. Effective schools can make a measurable difference with traditionally underserved students, increasing student achievement regardless of their family background.

The belief that schools cannot overcome family background is widespread and controversial. In 1966, the Coleman Report concluded that students’ academic achievement was primarily a function of their family background which schools could not overcome. In 1972, Jencks concluded that the schools’ had only “marginal” 194

Mathis, William J. (2005, April). Bridging the achievement gap: A bridge too far? Phi Delta Kappan 86 (8): 591.

195 http://effectiveschoolsjournal.org/

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influence on students’ achievements. In 1968, Jensen hypothesized that the test score differences between African American and white students resulted largely from genetic differences in IQ and that environmental factors were of little importance.

In reaction to these reports, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the effective schools research began to identify public schools whose graduates scored higher than the national average on standardized tests. Soon, hundreds of studies and research-based analytic papers tried to identify these schools’ characteristics or “correlates” which were unusually successful with students regardless of their socioeconomic background.

Edmonds coined the term “effective” school as one in which low-income and minority students’ basic skills are at least as well-developed as the middle class children’s skills. An effective school closed the achievement gap between low and high socioeconomic students. In addition, Edmonds found that schools that were instructionally effective for poor and minority children were “indistinguishable” from instructionally less effective schools on SES factors. These findings directly contrasted with the Coleman and Jencks’ conclusions.

Among the earliest studies, Edmonds articulated the five school-level variables strongly correlated with student achievement, the five effective schools’ “correlates”: Other early studies, including Rutter and colleagues in London, Brookover and colleagues, and Brookover and Lezotte all found similar results.

School factors made a difference in student achievement and behavior.

Over the years, many researchers have compiled a list of school-based factors that contribute to high student achievement. While the lists and the terms used vary, the school factors that make a difference in student achievement include: • • • • • • •

Strong instructional leadership A clear and focused mission including a balance between basic skills and higher level learning.

A safe and orderly school environment conducive to learning.

High teacher expectations for student achievement Frequent monitoring of student progress.

Positive home-school relations Opportunities to learn and student time-on-task

These early school effectiveness studies, however, share serious limitations.

They are small comparative studies of exceptional schools using an outlier or casestudy approach with few samples. They focused on poor urban (most often elementary) schools rather than include schools with other student demographics and in other settings. In addition, schools had relatively homogenous pupil populations. As a result, their in-school effective practices may not be typical. Moreover, effective schools enthusiasts confused correlational studies with cause and effect. On the

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other hand, school effectiveness studies’ consistent findings give the correlates substantial credibility.

Since 1990, the effective schools models and research increased their focus to include schools serving all types of students in various settings. They also emphasized achievement growth and school improvement across all contexts. In addition, school effectiveness is now understood as sets of interacting variables. The school effectiveness correlates are likely to have a cumulative impact on student achievement.

In the last decade, a body of case studies known as the 90/90/90 schools, No Excuses Schools, and other examples joined the effective schools literature.

While these newer arrivals did not specifically use the term, their practices directly mirrored the effective schools’ correlates. They likewise share some of the same methodological limitations.

The school effectiveness movement produced fairly reliable findings about the characteristics of high-performing urban schools. An academically successful school is likely to have clear goals related to student achievement, teachers and parents with high expectations, and a school structure and climate designed to maximize students’ learning opportunities. Everything and everyone in the schools emphasizes successful teaching and learning. These in-school factors can overcome limitations of students’ family backgrounds.

Conclusions.

The effective schools correlates are clearly related to higher student achievement for economically disadvantaged and minority students. These benefits occur independently, over time, across the country, and whether or not the researchers are specifically looking for these variables. Effective schools correlates consistently appear where elementary and secondary public schools are effectively educating those students traditionally underserved.

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Published by Journal for Effective Schools at Old Dominion University College of Education Educational Foundations and Leadership Norfolk, Virginia 23529