Making schools better “should be only one part of our national strategy” on education, writes Harvard’s Ronald Ferguson. “Life at home has been a relatively neglected topic and needs to come out of the shadows.” In a commentary at CNN.com Ferguson, who heads the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, says helping parents do their best needs to be as big a priority as achieving excellent schools.
This goes beyond public policies. I am talking about changes in mindsets and lifestyles in a national social and cultural movement to close achievement gaps between groups — a movement to achieve excellence with equity. More reading at home is a place to start….Black and Hispanic students reported less leisure reading at home compared to whites, watched television more, were much more likely to have televisions in their bedrooms and (perhaps as a consequence) were more prone to become sleepy at school. Also, blacks and Hispanics, including those with college-educated parents, reported fewer books in their homes than whites whose parents had fewer years of schooling.
Ferguson cites research indicating that high achieving students across racial lines have parents who are “both responsive and demanding.”
According to the study, white parents were much more likely to be both responsive and demanding than black and Hispanic parents; whereas black parents, in particular, were often highly demanding, but tended not to be as responsive in the ways the study measured. Among early adolescents, differences along these dimensions helped account for the higher test scores of whites as compared with blacks and Hispanics.
“Findings like the above should be part of the conversation among black and Hispanic community leaders as they respond to the fact that even the children of college-educated parents often achieve at lower-than-expected levels,” Ferguson writes.
Charter schools in Boston are “significantly outperforming” both traditional public schools and the city’s “pilot schools,” according to new data from researchers at Harvard and MIT. The study, conducted for the Boston Foundation, examined state standardized test scores for students of similar backgrounds over a four-year period at three kinds of schools — charters, public schools and so-called pilot schools, which embrace innovative practices like charters, but are still within the public school system. “The findings could present a setback for Governor Deval Patrick’s education overhaul,” the Boston Globe notes, ”which seeks to emulate pilot schools around the state while resisting calls for more charter schools.” But here’s the real grabber:
The study stands apart from volumes of other research produced over the more than decadelong debate over charter schools by including a section that compared the performance of students at the charter and pilot schools to students who entered the lottery to attend those schools but did not get in. This was an attempt to dispel the perception that charter schools perform well in comparative studies because they generally attract more academically-motivated students and parents – not necessarily because they have better teaching methods.
Paging Jennifer Jennings! Last month, Eduwonkette foresaw a new round of “Charter Wars” over data. “The only defensible approach here is to compare students who entered the charter lottery and won with those who entered the lottery and lost,” she wrote. Case closed? Like Jennings, I’ve long believed that charters benefit from a selection advantage (and I have no problem with that whatsoever), attracting students from more motivated families, regardless of their achievement level. This study appears to indicate that even when you account for that selection bias, charters still outperform other kinds of schools.
Nelson Smith, head of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, used the data to call on Governor Deval Patrick and Massachusetts legislators, “in the strongest possible terms, to lift the caps on public charter schools this coming legislative session.”
Update: Eduwonkette answers the Batphone. She sees ”enough positive evidence here to support the creation of more charter schools in Boston,” but with two caveats.
Pity poor Harvard. The Boston Globe notes that big losses in the university’s massive endowment have “blown in a new age of austerity across the campus.”
“The cuts are big and small. There are the hiring freezes that run to the core of the university’s mission. But there are also the cookies and soft drinks eliminated from small faculty gatherings. A noon-hour seminar series that used to provide catered lunches from local ethnic restaurants will now serve pizza. Faculty members, who are not slated for raises next year, will be expected to pitch in on clerical work.
Harvard’s faculty is worried about “losing out on a generation of young academic talent, as hiring has become virtually impossible,” the Globe notes. Reality check: Harvard’s endowment is still $30 billion, by far the largest of any university. If they can’t afford top talent, who can?
Waiting until children are 6 to enroll them in kindergarten is having a negative impact on academic achievement, and potentially the U.S. economy, according to a new Harvard study. The New York Sun makes front-page news of it:
The practice has grown substantially: In 1968, 96% of 6-year-olds were enrolled in first grade or above. In 2005, the number had fallen to 84%, according to the paper by the Harvard researchers, part of a series issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Children across the country are entering primary school at older and older ages — and opening themselves up to a likelier possibility of dropping out with less education,” report the Sun, which also notes that public school kids are much more likely to be affected by “redshirting” than their private school peers. It also means one fewer year that the children, once they are adults in the workforce, will pay into America’s Social Security system, the authors report.
…and all I got was this lousy safety school.
Update: Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed has a serious — and solid — take on all this.
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