The “good school” myth: The (UK) Financial Times weighs in
Leaning somewhat over to the political right, Britain’s Financial Times printed an interesting and unusual report in its February 22, 2012 edition, entitled “The social mobility challenge for school reformers”. The authors documented 2010 exam scores for 16-year-olds in England and graphed them by socio-economic status (SES). If schools were able to compensate for SES, the graph would show a flat line – no difference between rich and poor. But it did not. The data showed what much research has shown and what most people already know – the higher the SES level, the higher the scores, while the poorest and most disadvantaged students had the lowest scores. The authors then removed all ‘failing schools’ from the data, with minimal change to the graph. Removing 40%, and then 45%, then 50% of the lowest-performing schools made remarkably little difference – the poorer the child, the lower the performance. The author states:
The killer problem for social mobility is not that there are a few schools which have all the poor children in them (though that is a factor), it is that poorer children tend to do badly even when they go to good schools. Sort out the bad schools, by all means, but social mobility is much tougher than that.
The Times Educational Supplement of April 6 discussed the finding, referencing Professor Harvey Goldstein of Bristol University, who argued that the school-effects literature suggested variations between 2% and 20% in the effect of the school (rather than poverty/wealth) on achievement, but that his estimate was about 10%.
But the TES highlights some caveats – that research might benefit from looking at outliers rather than averages, as some schools very clearly were making a difference, so looking at their approaches might prove useful to find direction for improvement. Within some schools, individual teachers and some departments were also making headway in improving achievement for students living in poverty.
Curiously, none of the authors suggest attacking the root cause of inequality linked to access and outcomes – poverty. If poverty appears the prime cause of huge disparities in educational achievement, might a reasonable direction be the eradication or amelioration of poverty, rather than the endless search to ‘fix’ schools? Where societies reduce inequality, they improve outcomes in education, as well as in health and other areas. Richard Wilkinson discusses this in a video interview about his book (co-authored with Kate Pickett), The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger, which can be accessed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y0sBsZfzJk.
References:
Cook, C. (2012). “The social mobility challenge for school reformers.” Financial Times, February 22; http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2012/02/22/social-mobility-and-schools/#axzz1n6Xg9ZMT
Stewart, W. (2012). “The good school myth.” Times Educational Supplement, April 6; http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6204413 (extract).
Submitted by: Charlie Naylor, cnaylor@bctf.ca
April 24, 2012
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