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ОглавлениеChapter 3
Research on High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools
“We have much more to learn from studying high-poverty schools that are on the path to improvement than we do from studying nominally high-performing schools that are producing a significant portion of their performance through social class rather than instruction.”
—Richard Elmore (2005, p. 45)
Research has identified a steadily growing number of schools where poor and minority students are learning effectively and achieving high academic standards. In the late 1970s, Ron Edmonds and his colleagues began identifying the traits of effective schools where this phenomenon was occurring. Later, scholars at Louisiana State University analyzed more than 100 separate studies over a 10-year period that identified schools in high-poverty areas where the students were achieving at similar levels as middle-class students. More recently, schools associated with the High Schools That Work (HSTW) program reported that all types of underachieving students, particularly poor and minority high school students, could perform satisfactorily when provided with a rigorous, relevant college-prep curriculum and when better supported in their studies (Bottoms & Anthony, 2005).
Perhaps most significant was a series of reports from the Education Trust that began in 1999 and attracted national attention to schools in every part of the nation where poor and minority students were outperforming their more advantaged peers. Dispelling the Myth (Barth et al., 1999) identified 366 schools where more than half of the poor or minority (African-American and Hispanic) students were achieving in the top 25% of the schools in reading and math. Dispelling the Myth Revisited (Jerald, 2001) identified more than 4,500 schools where some aspect of students’ academic performance placed them above 75% of the schools in their states. More recently, Dispelling the Myth … Over Time (Education Trust, 2002) reported on this continued trend, focusing on thousands of schools that were maintaining sustained achievement success. The work of the Education Trust has further documented that effective schools can successfully teach poor and minority students and ensure that they are achieving high levels of proficiency.
The fact is that we can successfully educate all students when we choose to do so. Hopefully, the flawed conclusions of the past about the lack of influence schools have on the academic achievement of poor children and youth have finally been put to rest. The policies and practices inspired by Coleman’s report—and other research of that time—were wrong and destructive. We now possess vivid, powerful evidence to document the tragic errors that have impeded the achievement of generations of children and can begin to correct those errors.
Identifying Strategies for Accelerating the Achievement of Poor Children
Scholars, research organizations, and concerned educators and community members continue their efforts to discover and disseminate information on why and how some schools have been so successful with the children of poverty. By 2005, 18 studies had been published on the policies, programs, and practices that have encouraging results with children of poverty. While our nation has perpetually sought to better our schools, the specific work of improving low-performing schools that enroll a significant number of children of poverty is rooted in the late 1970s when Ron Edmonds and his colleagues began identifying the correlates of effective schools (Edmonds, 1979a, 1979b, 1981, 1982). Soon thereafter, the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study conducted and analyzed a decade of research that explained remarkable school successes with poor and minority students in that state (Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993).
Beginning in the late 1990s and continuing to the present, the number and sophistication of these studies and reports have steadily increased. Joining these efforts are a large number of successful schools and districts that have independently reported the specific strategic actions they have taken that have led to their successes and effectiveness with poor and minority children and youth. This growing body of evidence may well prove to be the most important information ever assembled regarding the effective instruction of the children of poverty.
It is important to note that the accumulation of such specific detail for improving the achievement of students of poverty has been driven by a number of policy changes, including the development of comprehensive state standards and accountability measures, advances in technology that have enabled educators to better understand and use data, state and federal policy changes requiring both comprehensive and disaggregated assessment, as well as required yearly goal-setting and progress reporting. These changes have prompted educators to intensify and accelerate their efforts and resolve to effectively teach the underachieving children of poverty. The framework of research on high-performing, high-poverty schools (figure 3.1, pages 38–39) documents the unprecedented work of many of our schools to better serve the underachieving students of poverty.
A Framework of Research on High-Performing, High-Poverty Research on Schools High-Performing,
“What surprises you about high-poverty, high-performing schools is the whole positive attitude, the can-do spirit…. They are human bulldozers. They literally roll over obstacles and they believe that no obstacle is too great. When you see this in person, the magnitude of how dramatically different this attitude is from that in high-poverty, low-performing schools really knocks your socks off.”
—Louisiana Staff Development Council Investigator (Richardson, 2005, p. 1)
The 18 studies, reports, and data analyses compiled in figure 3.1 document an emerging pattern of school improvement strategies and practices that are being implemented effectively by all types of schools in every area of the country. Analysis of these sources yields eight specific strategies and practices found in successful high-performing, high-poverty schools. According to the studies, these schools:
Ensure effective district and school leadership. Engage parents, communities, and schools to work as partners. Understand and hold high expectations for poor and culturally diverse students.
Target low-performing students and schools, particularly in reading. Align, monitor, and manage the curriculum. Create a culture of data and assessment literacy. Build and sustain instructional capacity. Reorganize time, space, and transitions.
The framework identifies these eight primary recommendations or conclusions of the studies as well as successful strategies and practices from the individual participating schools. These strategies and practices are marked with asterisks.
The findings from these 18 efforts (listed chronologically in the framework) provide a sufficient basis to conclude that this pattern can be successfully applied by other schools and districts attempting to improve their educational programs for underachieving students of poverty.
Figure 3.1: Framework of Research on High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools
Louisiana School Effectiveness Study (LSES): “Schools Make a Difference” (Teddlie & Stringfield, 1993)
One of the earliest studies occurred in Louisiana and attempted to understand why a number of high-poverty schools were so successful in achieving academic proficiency for their students. The Louisiana School Effectiveness Study (LSES), initiated in 1980, spanned a 10-year period during which its multiple phases explored and compared differences in student achievement that related to student socioeconomic status and school climate. The LSES further identified and studied effective and ineffective schools and sought to understand how students in some of the state’s poorest communities were achieving up to and beyond students in the schools in more affluent communities. The study found that effective low-socioeconomic-status schools often possessed:
Motivating principals and teachers
Increased instructional time in reading and math
High principal and teacher expectations for student achievement
Principals that frequently visited classrooms
The use of teacher aides
Younger and less experienced teachers
Principal autonomy in staff selection (Teddlie & Stringfield, p. 34, 1993)
Leadership was continuously referenced as an essential characteristic of success in this study. The ability to instill in students a belief that they can achieve was identified by the LSES as central to effective teaching of low-socioeconomic-status students. This study concluded that schools indeed do make a difference in student achievement regardless of the socioeconomic status of students. The study also acknowledged the importance of engaging parents, communities, and schools and of reorganizing time and space as characteristics of success in high-performing, high-poverty schools.
Education Trust: Dispelling the Myth, Revisited, and Over Time (Barth et al., 1999; Jerald, 2001; Education Trust, 2002)
Beginning in 1999, staff of the Education Trust, an independent nonprofit organization committed to a “single-minded attention of what is best for students—especially low-income students and students of color” (www2.edtrust. org), attempted to summarize the common characteristics of the high-performing schools they had been analyzing. The Education Trust was one of the first national organizations to study and bring attention to the existence of large numbers of K–12 schools with high-poverty, high-minority enrollments where students were dramatically outperforming schools of far greater economic advantage.
Their Dispelling the Myth reports reviewed the growing database of state test results that revealed thousands of high-poverty or high-minority schools that were outperforming over 75% of the schools in their respective states. The Education Trust identified the reasons for these gains:
Extensive use of state and local standards to design curriculum and instruction, assess student work, and evaluate teachers
Increased instruction time for reading and mathematics
Substantial investment in professional development for teachers that focused on instructional practices to help students meet academic standards
Comprehensive systems to monitor individual student performance and to provide help to struggling students before they fall behind
Parental involvement in efforts to get students to meet standards
State or district accountability systems with real consequences for adults in schools
Use of assessments to help guide instruction and resources and as a healthy part of everyday teaching and learning (Jerald, 2001, p. 3)
Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, further summarized the characteristics of schools successfully teaching poor and minority students. She indicates that in these schools:
Standards are the key.
All students must have a challenging curriculum.
Students need extra help.
Teachers matter a lot. (Haycock, 2001)
Four additional elements have emerged as the Education Trust has continued to investigate high-performing, high-poverty schools:
1. They make no excuses. Everybody takes responsibility for student learning.
2. They do not leave anything about teaching and learning to chance. High-performing districts:
Have clear and specific goals for what students should learn in every grade, including the order in which they should learn it.
Provide teachers with common curriculum assignments.
Assess students every 4 to 8 weeks to measure progress.
Act immediately on the results of these assessments.
3. They insist on rigor in every respect. Leading districts and states:
Align high school exit standards with the skills and knowledge necessary for further education and work.
Make college prep the default curriculum for all students.
4. They know that good teachers matter more than anything else.
Just for the Kids: Studies of High-Performing School Systems (1999–2006)
To promote a better understanding of the role of academic standards and data in increasing student achievement, civic leader and public education advocate Tom Luce launched Just for the Kids (JFTK) in 1995. A Texas-based nonprofit organization, JFTK “motivates educators and the public to take action to improve schools by giving them a clear picture of a school’s academic condition and identifying the effective practices found in high-performing schools” (Just for the Kids, 2006).
In 1997, the organization began analyzing state test data in search of successful schools and the practices they employed. This work grew into the Just for the Kids School Reports designed to provide educators with a clear and comprehensive picture of a school’s academic performance by subject and grade coupled with comparisons of schools with similar demographics that have achieved high levels of academic performance. The comparative aspect of the school reports was assembled through case studies of high-performing schools and the practices they used to acquire their high-performing status. The study resulted in the Best-Practice Framework.
The framework was based on a 4-year analysis of more than 100 high-performing schools through data, observations, and interviews. The framework identified effective district, school, and classroom practices around five organizing themes. It also takes into account four critical areas common to these schools:
1. Mobility
2. Percent of low-income students
3. Percent of limited-English-proficiency students
4. School, grade, and classroom size
Using JFTK data tools, a school can perform a self-audit that adjusts for the four critical areas, compares achievement data from recent tests and current classroom practices in the school, and then applies the framework to locate comparable schools with higher achievement, opening a path for educators to consider in targeting improvements.
The National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA) was created in 2001 as a partnership between JFTK, the Education Commission of the States, and the University of Texas at Austin to “promote higher student achievement by improving state data collection and identifying practices that distinguish consistently high-performing schools from others and disseminating these findings” (Olsen, 2005, p. 24).
The NCEA, funded through a variety of individual, corporate, government, and private foundation sources, works closely with affiliates in almost half the states to implement NCEA-guided studies of high-performing schools. The Broad Foundation, through a $1.2 million grant, supported this work through 2006 in more than 450 schools located in 17 states. Schools qualifying as study candidates must have demonstrated three consecutive years of high performance on state tests and must make annual yearly progress by No Child Left Behind standards (Olsen, 2005).
To determine key features of high performance, NCEA adapted the Texas Best Practice Framework into its own framework, which focuses on determining evidence of student learning. The framework, presented as a matrix of themes, practices, state and district standards, core beliefs, resources, and local influences, identifies precisely what high-performing schools do to accomplish their success (figure 3.2, page 44). Jean Rutherford, center director, describes the underlying value of this common framework as having “clear and specific goals for students, rooted in state content standards” that have “clearly emerged as the bedrock foundation, … which provides a penetrating, deep understanding of what it is children are to know and be able to do and how to connect it across grades” (Olsen, 2005, p. 24).
Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL): “Raising the Achievement of Low-Performing Students” (Goodwin, 2000)
In 1999, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL, formerly the Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory) commissioned seven papers from national experts on diversity issues. The goal was to identify causes of the low performance on achievement tests of “marginalized students” (poor and minority), and then to identify research-based strategies for ensuring that these students meet state educational standards. These papers synthesized more than 300 research reports and related documents and focused their recommendations on school district and state policy makers. The summary identified seven research-based conclusions for improving the academic performance of poor and minority students:
Figure 3.2: Best Practice Framework—Fundamental Principles of Strong Learning Systems (Used with permission of the National Center for Educational Accountability and Just for the Kids.)
1. Provide all students with rigorous curriculum.
2. Help teachers improve instruction.
3. Provide support to students.
4. Create smaller classes.
5. Increase parent involvement.
6. Identify the five ways low performance is manufactured.
7. Establish strong, yet fair, accountability. (Goodwin, 2000, p. 1)
The study also acknowledged the importance of understanding and holding high expectations for poor and minority children and the need for sustained support and assistance from instructional leaders.
North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL): “Wisconsin’s High-Performing/High-Poverty Schools” (Manset et al., 2000)
The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) studied high-performing, high-poverty schools in Wisconsin. The study identified 17 features within five prominent characteristics of effective schools.
1. Effective implementation of theory or philosophy
Shared leadership
Data-based decision-making
Student-centered practice
High expectations with safety nets
2. Effective professional development opportunities
Staff-initiated in-service topics
Peer coaching and mentoring
Opportunities for collaboration
3. Parent and community involvement
Multiple means of communicating with parents
Parent advisory committees
The school as a community center
4. Effective classroom instruction
Emphasis on assessment
Project-based instruction
5. Effective classroom structure and organization
Small class size
Alternative within-school programs
Integrated curriculum
Curriculum alignment with state standards
School-wide discipline system (Manset et al., 2000, pp. iii-iv)
Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE): “The District Role in Building Capacity” (Massell, 2000)
Research has also focused on the effective strategies of school districts in achieving success with low-performing students. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) is composed of scholars from five of the nation’s premier research universities: Harvard, Stanford, and the Universities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin-Madison. Diane Massell led a research team from CPRE that identified four essential capacity-building strategies that were observed in 22 successful school districts in seven reform-active states over a 2-year period. These strategies included:
1. Interpreting and using data
2. Building teacher knowledge and skills
3. Aligning curriculum and instruction
4. Targeting interventions on low-performing students and schools (Massell, 2001, p. 1)
While the study did not specifically identify leadership as an essential capacity-building strategy, the critical importance of effective leadership in successfully implementing these four capacity-building strategies and others found in high-performing, high-poverty schools was implied. Participants in the study also acknowledged the importance of engaging parents, holding high expectations for students, and reorganizing time and space.
