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Article Excerpt
Education matters (OECD 2001). In 2002, the World Bank showed that, for every year of basic education a country provides, its gross national product increases by more than six percent. Investment in human capital is therefore an essential part of expanding an economy and becoming internationally competitive (Psacharopoulos and Patrinos 2002). No nation today can afford poor schools or high dropout rates among its young people unless it wishes to jeopardize its economic future. Without good quality schooling for everyone, important parts of the population are disqualified from participating fully in a nation's political and cultural life, thereby creating a class system and confining the tasks of civic leadership to elite classes as was the case a century ago.
As well, research on health care has found that high school graduates are more likely to use preventative and less costly medical services than non-graduates; make fewer visits to doctors; have a markedly better knowledge of good health behaviour; enjoy a better level of general health, and have better functioning families (see Davis 1982; Bobo and Licari 1989; Ross and Wu 1995). Considering that Canada's health-care programs consume the largest portion of public spending at both federal and provincial levels, improving the country's basic level of education can render enormous health-care savings.
Recently, some researchers have begun to argue that the quality of education matters more to individual and societal growth than does the level of educational attainment (see Hanushek and Kimko 2000; Barro 2001). In a study for the World Bank, Pritchett (1996) uses cross-sectional data from several countries to conclude that more education does not necessarily fuel faster economic growth. Other researchers have shown that, for example, there is little relation between resource use and the quality-of-learning results.(1) Because of such findings, it is easy to understand why government policymakers and educators in Canada continue to seek more effective measures to determine whether our education systems are equipping today's children to "meet the challenges of the future."(2)
Variability in Student Achievement
Public efforts to ensure uniformly high levels of educational achievement in schools have been confounded by evidence that educational achievement correlates more highly with out-of-school factors, such as socioeconomic status, than with in-school factors, such as material resources. One of the earliest studies to advance this idea was sociologist James Coleman's 1966 report, which was broadly interpreted to mean that "schools don't make a difference" (Coleman et al. 1966).(3) Christopher Jencks's 1972 study confirmed Coleman's conclusions that educational attainment was highly correlated with family background and that such elements as school resoures appeared unrelated to students' achievement levels (Jencks et al. 1972).
As recently as 1998, Canadian researchers found that social class variables "such as family income" explained as much as 45 percent of variation in achievement on mathematics and language arts tests for Calgary students in grades three and six, while school-based factors accounted for only 3-to-6 percent of the variation (Lytton and Pyryt 1998). It should be remembered, as de Broucker (2003) has pointed out, that socioeconomic variables are life-long, and educational factors shaping school performance are temporary. A recent New Brunswick study also found that up to 50 percent of variance in elementary mathematics, science, reading and writing scores were attributable to socioeconomic status (Klinger 2000). Coleman's and Jencks's work, and subsequent studies offering sociological explanations for achievement, continue to foster a vigorous debate about factors that make schools effective and influence student achievement.
Variability in student achievement remains a complex puzzle that transcends simple comparisons of home and school factors. For example, educational measurements have long shown that girls outperform boys in reading. What is less well known is that international assessments in OECD countries demonstrate that boys outperform girls at the grade eight level by an average of five points in mathematics and 18 points in science (see Tables 1 and 2 on the following page). These results cannot be accounted for solely by socioeconomic factors, nor can similar variances in student achievement in inter-provincial differences on national and international assessments. Large-scale assessments such as TIMSS and PISA " require participating countries to select randomly from student populations to ensure that sample groups' writing tests share comparable backgrounds. Such assessments show, however, that francophone students in Quebec outperform most other Canadian students in mathematics achievement and have done so for 10 years (see Table 3). How do we explain these differences in student achievement and what can we do about them?
Longstanding socioeconomic explanations for variance in student achievement provided by Coleman, Jencks, and others(4) have been challenged by the findings of more recent research that accounts for such variance in school-level factors. (5) A large body of literature known in educational circles as "school effectiveness research" (SER) or the "effective schools movement," has emerged over the past 30 years and sets out its own explanation for variance in student results. It is the purpose of this discussion to review this research to determine what we know today about factors that shape student achievement.(6)
School Effectiveness Discoveries
The origins of the effective schools movement can be traced to the work of George Weber and, later, to that of Ron Edmonds, who first associated school-level factors with high student achievement using results from studies of inner-city schools in the U.S., where low-SES students' achievement equalled, or surpassed, the national average. Edmonds, in particular, has been credited as the founding father of school effectiveness research, largely due to the publication of his 1979 article, "Effective Schools for the Urban Poor."(7) This article, which appeared in the influential journal Educational Leadership, galvanized professional attention around the issue of student achievement and served as a platform for numerous studies that focused attention on the capacity of individual schools to make a difference in children's lives.
In his article, Edmonds advocated bringing "the children of the poor to those minimal masteries of basic school skill that now describe minimally successful pupil performance for the children of the middle class" (Edmonds 1979b, 16). In support of this objective, Edmonds outlined six characteristics essential to the success of effective schools, including: strong administrative leadership; high expectations; an orderly atmosphere;(8) basic skills acquisition as the school's primary purpose; capacity to divert school energy and resources from other activities to advance the school's basic purpose, and frequent monitoring of pupil progress (ibid.).(9) These six characteristics touched an immediate and responsive chord in administrators and government policymakers. Before long, however, educational researchers dropped "capacity to divert energy and re resources" from Edmonds' list and later condensed his list to a "five-factor model" widely heralded by administrators as the principal framework for reforming failing schools.(10)
Following Edmonds, subsequent researchers have defined effective schools as institutions that "successfully impart basic computation and communication skills, plus some knowledge of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities" beyond achievement levels that could be estimated by socioeconomic status.(11)
Soon after publication of Edmonds' influential findings in "Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," critics began challenging school-effectiveness research. Skeptics questioned researchers' faith in Edmonds' five-step approach to improve student achievement (Edmonds 1979b, 22).(12) They also claimed that researchers and, indeed, school managers, generally ignored Edmonds' own admonition that "no one model explains school effectiveness for the poor or for any other social class" (ibid.) and often treated his work as something to be replicated, confusing correlative variables with causative factors that actually shape student achievement Recently effectiveness researchers in North America and elsewhere have discovered, through the use of multi-level modeling, that "more variance is accounted for by the classroom level than by the school level."(13) As a result, methodological improvements transformed Edmonds' initial, narrow and managerial view of effective schooling into a more comprehensive notion of effective education, which encompasses classroom instruction, as well as staff and community relations.
Recognizing Effective Education
Altogether, current research reveals that eight major characteristics have been widely identified as factors that positively influence student achievement. How these traits have been described in the literature and how researchers have associated them with improvements in school effectiveness is the subject of the following discussion.
Student Achievement
The most frequently cited characteristic of effective education in today's research is a focus on student achievement at school and classroom levels. Emphasis on student achievement is hardly surprising since researchers ordinarily measure effectiveness in the of students' results on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests.(14) First described by Weber in 1971 as a "strong emphasis on reading," focus on student achievement remains at the heart of effective schools research.
Reiterating Weber's 1979 finding, Edmonds says that "[E]ffective schools get that way partly by making it clear that pupil acquisition of basic school skins take precedence over all other school activities." He adds: "School energy and resources can be diverted from other business in furtherance of the fundamental objectives" (Edmonds 1979b, 22). Effective schools, in essence, are defined as institutions capable of reallocating resources--time, for instance--to optimize teaching and learning basic school skillg.(15)
Arthur Steller, Oklahoma City's Superintendent, synthesized effective schools research in 1988, reporting that the "centerpiece of the school is instruction in the academics," and that effective schools exhibit a clear instructional focus that staff and the school's community understand (1988, 23). To Steller, academic focus calls for teachers to know the curriculum for their own grade level, as well as for preceding and following grades. In other words, teachers are cognizant of students' academic records and of their professional responsibility to prepare pupils "for success with their next teacher" (ibid., 24). Many worthwhile activities can be distracting from the school's central focus on instruction," Stellar cautions, and he advises teachers and principals to prevent interruptions that "interfere, or conflict with, the school's instructional goals." Scholastic achievement, in short, depends on keeping school personnel focused on "the instructional issues at hand and how to help youngsters achieve" (ibid., 23).
Lee and Bryk's 1989 study of mathematics achievement illuminates the importance of instruction from another angle. Using multi-level modeling to analyze factors affecting mathematics results, they report that "differentiation among students in mathematics course-taking and larger schools is both associated with a more dis-equalizing distribution of achievement in schools along class and academic background lines" (1989, 185). In large schools offering a shopping mall of courses, students appear to be tracked along class and academic fines, a process leading to greater variance in student achievement. In schools where fewer alternatives are available, achievement tends to be homogeneously higher.
Syntheses of effective schools research highlight the achievement focus throughout the 1990s. Levine and Lezotte's 1990 review supplements earlier findings by observing that a "focus on central learning skills" requires two key components: maximizing time for learning and mastery of central learning skills. The first necessitates reducing time-consuming transitions between classes and "off-task" behaviours. Skill mastery, according to Levine and Lezotte, is achieved by concentrating on academic content, adhering to principles of mastery learning, and teaching students learning strategies in explicit ways.(16) This mastery concept upholds Edmonds' second characteristic that "no children are permitted to fall below minimum but efficacious levels of achievement" (Edmonds 1979b, 22).(17) Since the 1970s, many alternative education programs, sometimes referred to as shopping mall schools, have distinguished themselves by their singular emphasis on teaching students core learning skills. This focus has been obtained largely by eliminating what researchers call "time-consuming transitions" between subjects and assorted "off-task" behaviours.
A 1995 literature review by Sammons, Hillman, and Mortimore found that a focus on teaching and learning optimized learning time and enhanced achievement results. Cotton's 1995 review supports that study, as well as Levine and Lezotte (1990), by concluding that academic achievement in basic subjects is a school's core business. Cotton advises administrators and teachers to "focus on student...
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