Analysis: Yes, National Media, Poor Schools With Big Challenges Sometimes Work Wonders
Years ago, I consulted an older acquaintance, Dave, to determine the top-ranking school district in my home state of Massachusetts. Dave, a former educator turned consultant, has an extensive background in assisting districts in enhancing their operations and staffing. I anticipated that he would mention affluent, predominantly white suburbs such as Wellesley and Weston, known for their exceptional test scores and college acceptance rates.
However, Dave’s response caught me off guard. He likened these high-achieving students to masterpieces that had been painstakingly crafted over the years. Their parents had nurtured their development by reading to them at bedtime, investing in math tutoring, and exposing them to cultural experiences at museums on weekends. While a Picasso or Rembrandt painting may be visually stunning when displayed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, it would still shine even in a parking lot. Merely marveling at a museum’s collection only offers limited insight into the actual work and effort put in by the museum and its staff.
Contrary to popular belief, Dave highlighted a few cities in the South Shore and Western Massachusetts as the best districts in the state. These areas primarily catered to low-income students. While these schools may not have sent as many students to Ivy League universities, they were successful in bridging the academic gap between less advantaged students and their wealthier peers. Through their dedication and expertise, they were able to improve the educational outcomes of students despite the challenges they faced.
This perspective on education had never occurred to me before, and it seems that many people outside the field share the same assumptions. There is a prevailing notion that schools located in upscale neighborhoods, often equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and extracurricular opportunities, are inherently superior. The assumption is that these schools hold the key to higher graduation rates and SAT scores. However, what if the truly exceptional schools and districts are the ones that do not benefit from enrolling the most privileged students? What if they are the ones that go above and beyond to enhance the lives of students who would struggle elsewhere?
This is an age-old question in the realm of education, and it has received renewed attention following a study conducted by renowned researcher Sean Reardon. As a Stanford professor focusing on poverty and educational inequality, Reardon analyzed testing data from 11,000 school districts to determine which ones contributed the most to students’ growth between third and eighth grade. Surprisingly, he discovered that the wealthiest and predominantly white areas were not the top performers. In fact, the Chicago Public Schools emerged as the district with the highest rate of progress, with students’ test scores increasing four times faster than the national average (equivalent to two-thirds of a grade level per year compared to one-sixth).
Chicago is not typically mentioned in the same breath as prestigious towns like Weston and Wellesley. Three decades ago, the U.S. Secretary of Education at the time, Bill Bennett, labeled the city’s school system the worst in the country. Given this context, it is not surprising that Reardon’s study received significant attention from local media. Tennessee, which also received praise, garnered positive headlines as well, and various sources compared their local districts’ results with the top-performing ones.
However, on a national scale, the analysis of Reardon’s research focused on his central argument: affluent communities that produce well-prepared third-graders do not necessarily ensure consistent academic progress in the following years. The New York Times’s data journalism division, The Upshot, featured a widely shared visualization that allowed readers to explore academic growth in any district across the country. Authors Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy noted that Reardon’s findings challenged conventional wisdom: "Some urban and Southern districts are doing better than data typically suggests. Some wealthy ones don’t appear to be as effective. Many low-income school systems do."
This point was further emphasized by Kevin Drum, a writer for Mother Jones, in a lengthy blog post where he observed that numerous underprivileged school districts perform remarkably well. Slate staff writer Isaac Chotiner also found Reardon’s findings to be captivating and unexpected during an interview.
However, the significance of these findings may vary depending on the audience. While the study may not have surprised many experts in the field, it seems that the broader education community may not have given it much attention (to the extent that education media commentator Alexander Russo questioned on Twitter why the research did not receive more coverage).
Although not all experts may agree that Chicago is the highest-achieving urban district in the United States (as noted by some, like David Osborne in ), any graduate student in the field of education would acknowledge that schools tend to reflect the demographics of the communities they serve. Consequently, metrics such as academic growth, which track progress in standardized test scores from year to year, provide a more comprehensive understanding of school quality rather than solely focusing on the scores themselves.
Rewritten Text:
Title: The Growth vs. Proficiency Debate and Al Franken’s Important Concern
To fully comprehend the current heated debates surrounding education, it is crucial to understand this particular phenomenon. Progressives often observe the distressing state of high-poverty schools and argue that efforts to enhance them will be fruitless without a comprehensive agenda to eradicate poverty. Education reformers counter that it is illogical to wait for a world without impoverished families and assert that concrete measures can be taken to improve the schools that serve these families.
However, these arguments do not always reach the general public. Many journalists still focus on the "outputs" of schools (such as the number of students who perform well in class, graduate high school, and attend college) without taking into account the "inputs" (such as family wealth, English proficiency, and special education status). The same Upshot division that publicized Reardon’s findings on Chicago made this same mistake earlier this year when publishing a story on real estate markets and education, mistakenly equating high standardized test scores with overall school quality.
Embarrassingly, one of the researchers cited in that article criticized the authors’ failure to fully consider socioeconomic circumstances when discussing school effectiveness. In the comments section, he wrote, "To attribute test scores solely to ‘school quality’ ignores the significant role that family background plays in shaping opportunities." This researcher was none other than Sean Reardon.
It is highly likely that the major education research questions in 2018 will mirror those of 2017: school choice, accountability, equity, and racial/socioeconomic integration. Reardon, a highly influential expert in the field of education, will play a significant role in shaping these discussions.
His work in this project appears to support the reformers’ argument that significant academic progress is achievable, even in severely deprived communities, through hard work and intellect. Although it is challenging to pinpoint the exact reasons behind Chicago’s progress over the past few decades, it has been a testing ground for reformers since the 1990s, with notable figures like former superintendent and later U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan.
Different stakeholders will draw various conclusions from Reardon’s analysis, and some may even disagree with it entirely. However, these insights will only be of limited value if news providers and their audiences continue to mistake the individual paintings for the entire museum.
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