Want to meet your child's first teacher? Look in a Mirror!

The first and most solidly based finding is that the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school – their abilities and attitudes, and family and community background. (OECD, 2005, page 2)

For some examples of the incredibly powerful nature of out-of-school factors, you might explore the Educational Testing Service report, “The Family: America's Smallest School (ETS, 2007). In this Policy Information Report, the authors point to research looking at state level data for four out-of-school factors in order to predict eight grade reading scores for each state. The four factors were ratio of students to parents (number of single parent families), attendance rate data, television watching data, and the percentage of children whose parents were reading to them every day. (Note that schools do not generally have any direct influence on three of these variables.) Using the data, researchers predicted the scores for each state, and in 45 states, the predicted scores were within six points of the actual scale score for that state. (Really close, in other words.) The authors from ETS are careful to point out the complex nature of student achievement factors, and caution the readers of their report about coming to premature conclusions about the relative importance of any factors.

When the OECD (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group which includes the United States, talked about the greater importance of outside (of school) factors in student learning, they followed the statement which opened this post with this statement.

Such factors are difficult for policy makers to influence, at least in the short-run.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility to develop a comprehensive public relations campaign based on impacting at least three of the above factors? How controversial would it be to invite parents to understand the relationships between television access, reading to their children, getting them to school, and the academic achievement of their children? Is this really any harder than a similar campaign aimed at stopping parents and caregivers from “shaking babies”? Why do policy makers seldom consider these possibilities? In part, because we accept myth-information and are looking for “quick results.” Haven’t we learned anything from the business models so loved by those seeking to foster these “competitive practices” in our nation’s schools? A focus on the next quarterly earnings report, driving out a focus on long-tern viability or the public good, sounds an awful lot like focusing on the next round of student testing results.

It is my hope that those who read this blog will carefully evaluate the claims (and myth-information) presented by so-called education "reformers" and ensure that presentations and reports which might be used to guide their policies are screened and fact-checked prior to their incorporation into policies which impact our state’s school children. In addition, it is my fervent hope that the ideology of those who would hold our schools totally accountable for the academic achievement of all students will be questioned by leaders with an understanding of the research on educational achievement that clearly does not support such ideology or mythology.