Educational Determinism

February 11, 2007 by dave

Once again, Checker Finn from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has brought clarity to the fuzzy world of public education with this piece from the Education Gadfly. Checker describes three common types of educational determinism, which contend that improving public education is impossible because of these other factors. They include:

The first is most apt to come from educators and experts who contend--forget four decades of post-Coleman evidence to the contrary--that there's some sort of linear relationship between what goes into schooling by way of resources and what comes out by way of learning. Hence if we crave more of the latter we had best cough up more of the former.

The second--I've long thought of it as the "Gee, Officer Krupke" argument--is typically heard from well-meaning liberals (e.g., Richard Rothstein) who earnestly want income to be redistributed, health care provided, families propped up, racial barriers eased, and so on. They see kids, especially disadvantaged kids, facing non-school challenges that swamp what schools can accomplish. Solve those larger societal problems, they say, and educational achievement will flourish. (The latest Quality Counts from the publishers of Education Week contains a whiff of this. And one often hears something like it from educators who contend that any achievement shortfalls are really the parents' fault.)

The third form of determinism, most prominently associated with Charles Murray, holds that IQ is destiny--and is immutable. With half of everyone having below-average intellect, he writes in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere (see here), schools are fruitlessly trying (as the schoolteacher wife of a prominent education-reform governor once said to me) to cram a quart of learning into a pint pot.

Of course these are really just excuses. I'm not saying that funding, poverty or IQ don't have an impact on a student's ability to learn. These issues and others do make it difficult for students to excel in school. However, as Checker points, out the existence of high-performing, high-poverty, high-minority schools across the country prove that these factors do not determine a children's school success or lack thereof.

Chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry, it scarcely matters which flavor of fatalism you select. All send the same signal: that standards-based reform in general, and NCLB in particular, are doomed. That school choice can't accomplish much, either. Indeed, that nothing within the realm of education policy and practice, or within the control of schools and those who work in them, is really capable of producing significant achievement gains.

I beg to differ. Education reform is all about making schools more effective and productive so that kids do in fact learn more. That's no fantasy, even if the determinists want us to think it is. Rather, it's the reality in hundreds of high-performing, high-poverty schools across the country, be they district, charter, or private. They all start with more or less the same sorts of kids with the same sorts of problems and with similar cognitive capacities. Yet they produce markedly better results. They may not get to 100 percent proficiency, but they get a heckuva lot closer than your typical school serving disadvantaged youngsters.

No, we don't have nearly enough super-schools today. That's the education reform challenge. But it doesn't take many such schools to belie the claim that it can't be done. As Kant wrote, the actual proves the possible.

I've been getting really tired of hearing educrats insisting that NCLB's 100% of students to grade-level proficiency by 2014 is not achievable. I love this comment from Checker on that issue:

Even if 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is dreamy, what a different country this would be--how much better, stronger, and prosperous in so many ways--if we moved from today's 30 percent proficiency (using NAEP standards) to, say, 70 or 80 percent. And if poor and minority kids, in particular, were doing lots better and those vexing gaps were shrinking.

Combating the determinists and fatalists is a multi-front war. But one well worth fighting--and winning.

Right on Checker! Instead of arguing that the goal isn't achievable, let's try to improve out public schools to the point that we can get 70 or 80 percent of students to grade level. That would be an incredible improvement and millions of students across the country would be leaving school with the education that they thought they were going to get.

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