Achieving High Educational Standards for All Conference Summary (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Why Racial Integration and Other Policies Since Brown v. Board of Education Have Only Partially Succeeded at Narrowing the Achievement Gap
Why Racial Integration and Other Policies Since Brown v. Board of Education Have Only Partially Succeeded at Narrowing the Achievement Gap
Pages 183-217
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From page 183... ...
The reading-score gap between black and white 17-year-olds in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) was less than half as large in 1988 as in 1971, when the Educational Testing Service (ETS)
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From page 184... ...
" And "Do we know enough about class size effects to justify strong claims about the advantages of class size reductions for raising achievement, compared with investments in instructional quality? " Our aim is to present an informed perspective on what research has established and what remains to be learned about a number of important questions.
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From page 185... ...
Board of Education aimed to challenge white supremacist ideology and the moral injustice of forced segregation. In addition, they hoped that giving black children access to the schools and classrooms in which white children studied would help to equalize educational resources and academic outcomes.
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From page 186... ...
The likely result is that courtordered desegregation will soon be only a memory. Around the time that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 set the wheels in motion to enforce desegregation orders, the War on Poverty introduced the federal Head Start program (in 1965)
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From page 187... ...
Specifically, most studies find that Head Start raises school readiness, as measured by achievement test scores (see the discussion of this point in Oden et al., 2000~. However, most also find that the initial advantage fades during the elementary years, such that achieve
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From page 188... ...
Increasing the long-term sustainability of the gains generated by Head Start depends almost surely on improving the primary and secondary schools that Head Start graduates attend, including those assisted by Title I While the federal government was introducing Head Start and Title I in 1965, local districts were continuing a century-long trend toward reducing class sizes for children of all backgrounds.
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From page 189... ...
Some also used the scores to determine eligibility for remedial programs and promotions. O'Day and Smith believe that instruction focused heavily on basic skills in preparation for minimum competency tests was among the important reasons that black students' scores rose on the NAEP during the 1970s (for 9-year-olds)
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From page 190... ...
In it, the Court ordered Southern states to desegregate their schools with "all deliberate speed." However, it defined neither "desegregation" nor "all deliberate speed." Instead, the ruling left the interpretation and enforcement of Brown II to federal district courts in the South. Under heavy pressure from local Southern politicians, schools remained heavily segregated, with only 1 out of 50 Southern black children attending integrated schools in 1964 (Orfield and Eaton, 1996:7~.
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From page 191... ...
Other Studies of Integration Effects Beyond studies of court-ordered desegregation, a parallel literature seeks to understand whether natural variation in the level of school integration can explain differences in student achievement, controlling for family background factors. While these studies use nationally representative data for schools that are not operating under desegregation orders, they cannot overcome the possibility that selection bias has affected their findings.
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From page 192... ...
Consistent with this view, there is a considerable literature that documents the reduced opportunities available in schools that have extremely high concentrations of poverty. Schools in high-poverty areas are less likely to offer college preparatory classes, and they have much higher rates of teachers' teaching out of subject areas, greater teacher turnover, and lower test scores.
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From page 193... ...
While there has been considerable debate in the academic literature about how much these school-level factors affect achievement independent of student background, it is undeniably true that the interaction of poverty, segregation, and inadequate school resources heavily disadvantages the poor and minority students who attend high-poverty schools. Accordingly, the most striking effects of integration have been measured in case studies of interdistrict programs in which a limited number of city children are bused to suburban schools.
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From page 194... ...
Elementary schoolchildren in the Section 8-only group score higher than the controls in reading but not math. Achievement data for adolescents are too limited to draw specific conclusions about effects on test scores.
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Even today, however, it remains true in racially integrated schools that black students are overrepresented in lower levelclasses. It also seems to be common (or at least it remains a common perception)
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From page 196... ...
Explanations include differences in proficiency, in the advice received from parents, counselors, and teachers, and students' own preferences to be with their friends.~5 For at least the past century, there have been recurrent debates among educators about whether ability grouping and tracking are helpful or harmful, especially for low achievers and minority students. In its standard form, the debate confuses at least three questions, on which we comment in what follows.
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From page 197... ...
However, it does not follow directly that moving students into heterogeneously grouped arrangements will typically improve learning outcomes. As Good's list reminds us, even in heterogeneously grouped schools and classrooms, minority students in integrated schools may receive inferior instruction if they are overrepresented among low achievers (Phillips et al., 1998)
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From page 198... ...
Less time is wasted on material that is too elementary or too advanced for any given group member, and instruction that serves one student well is more likely to serve others well too. Furthermore, contrary to the belief that ability grouping harms the self-esteem of low achievers, Kulik's (1992)
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From page 199... ...
Department of Education (2000:1~: The Class Size Reduction Initiative is an initiative to help schools improve student learning by hiring additional, highly qualified teachers so that children especially those in the early elementary grades can attend smaller classes. A growing body of research demonstrates that students attending smaller classes in the early grades make more rapid educational progress than students in larger classes, and that these achievement gains persist well after students move on to larger classes in later grades.
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From page 200... ...
Education production functions use data on child, family, classroom, school, and community characteristics as predictors of academic outcomes such as test scores and graduation rates. In most such studies, the data have been generated for purposes unrelated to the study and seldom include all of the variables that the researcher's theory suggests should be included.
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From page 201... ...
These assumptions are not testable, so there is an intellectual standoff.23 Our own view is that the literature on educational production functions is sufficiently flawed, especially in the way that it treats class size, that neither method is very reliable.24 The latest and most effective challenge comes from economist Alan Krueger, who challenges the way that Hanushek selected estimates from the education production function literature to include in his summaries. For example, Hanushek's 1997 review included 277 estimates of class size effects from 59 different studies.
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From page 202... ...
In any case, when Hanushek's summary was the only one available it was regarded by many as definitive, but there is no research consensus today on what the education production function literature shows regarding the effectiveness of class size reductions. The Tennessee Star Class Size Experiment Consensus is growing among researchers, including all those cited directly above, that the only way to reliably estimate the effect of class size is by doing experimental studies that randomly assign otherwise similar students (and teachers as well)
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From page 203... ...
, they found that the relationship between falling class sizes and the narrowing of the black-white test score gap among 4th graders on the NAEP is very close to what one would have predicted based on class size effects estimated in Project Star (also see Grissmer et al., 1998; Grissmer et al., 2000~.
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From page 204... ...
The study design is quasi-experimental, not random assignment. Specifically, the evaluators are comparing academic progress in schools in which class sizes are being reduced to 15 students per teacher in the early grades to similar schools that have regular class sizes.
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From page 205... ...
This in fact is similar to the results from Tennessee Project Star, in which most of the differential gain comparing small and larger classes was concentrated in the first year that a student spent in small classes, and the differential was roughly twice as large for blacks as for whites. Similar to what we suggested above in the discussion of Tennessee's Project Star, there is a possibility in Wisconcin's SAGE that black children who spend 1st grade in small classes need to remain in small classes for 2nd and 3rd grades in order to retain the gains from the lst-grade year.
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From page 206... ...
In our view, until more extensive and definitive research on class size gets done, class sizes larger than the low 20s are probably ill-advised, especially in elementary schools in which students are disruptive or need lots of individualized attention. Because we lack definitive evidence from other sources, our judgment is based primarily on what teachers themselves report.
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From page 207... ...
Integration came too slowly and then produced fewer benefits than it should have. Head Start failed to produce as many lasting benefits as it would have if the schools to which graduates matriculated had more often been strong enough to sustain the gains.
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From page 208... ...
Entitled, "Bloodstains on White Marble Steps," it proclaimed, "Human blood may stain southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be in the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation.
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From page 209... ...
For example, states will receive incentives from the Bush administration to test every child annually in grades 3 through 8 and to require schools to report results separately by race, gender, English language proficiency, disability, and socioeconomic status.
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From page 210... ...
, suggest that class size may have threshold effects. The existence of such effects has not been widely explored, however, and, like the rest of the literature on education production functions, problems with having the appropriate data make it difficult to be certain regarding the levels at which such thresholds might occur.
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From page 211... ...
Tennessee State University, Center of Excellence for Research in Basic Skills. Braddock, J., and R.E.
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From page 212... ...
Currie, J., and D Thomas 1995 Does Subsequent School Quality Affect the Long-Term Gains from Head Start?
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From page 213... ...
2000 Certification test scores, teacher quality and student achievement. In Analytic Issues in the Assessment of Student Achievement, D.W.
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From page 214... ...
Williamson 2000 Improving Student Achievement: What State NAEP Test Scores Tell Us. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
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From page 215... ...
One reason why Head Start effects fade out. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 17~1~:62-82.
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2000 The effects of small classes on academic achievement: The results of the Tennessee class size experiment. American Educational Research Journal 37:123-151.
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From page 217... ...
Crain 1997 Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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