I wanted to take note of a WSJ op-ed from Roland Fryer. The short version is that there are good ways to reform our educational system, particularly in the lowest-performing schools. Here’s the kernel of the op-ed:
In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices: more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and high-dosage tutoring. Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.
Armed with that evidence, we searched for districts willing to test the model—from Haiti to Harlem. Most weren’t interested. But in Houston, superintendent Terry Grier opened the door. Together we applied the Five Tenets in 20 struggling public schools serving nearly 20,000 students. We lengthened the school year by 20%, brought in hundreds of tutors, replaced 95% of principals and half the teachers while retraining the rest, embedded data into instruction, and built a culture of high expectations. It was one of the most ambitious social experiments in American public education.
The results were astonishing. In elementary-school math, students gained the equivalent of four extra months of learning a year—enough to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years if we implemented these practices in the lowest-performing half of schools nationwide. In secondary schools, where skeptics said reform was impossible, students gained nearly eight additional months of learning in a nine-month school year. These were bigger effects than those produced by the Harlem Children’s Zone. Bigger than Success Academy. Bigger than anything else I’ve seen in my career.
For context, cutting class size yields about three months of extra learning. Teach for America adds two months in math. Head Start delivers about two months in early literacy. The Houston schools doubled those gains—year after year. By the third year, elementary students had accumulated the equivalent of an extra academic year. In middle and high school, it was two. These weren’t “miracle kids” or “superhuman teachers.” The system—not the students—changed.
He concludes:
High-dosage tutoring, extended learning time, relentless use of data and feedback, and refusing to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations—these aren’t theories. They’re proven. They worked in Houston. They worked in Denver. They can work anywhere, if we have leaders with the courage to act. Kids don’t get a do-over on their school years. If we squander another decade, the damage will be permanent.
The nation faces a choice. We can let another school year pass while students—especially minority students—fall further behind. Or we can finally summon the will to scale what works and sustain it beyond the news cycle. America’s children hang in the balance.
Per Dr. Fryer nobody is doing that. My question is why?
I could speculate but it would only be a speculation. My conjecture is that Dr. Fryer’s strategy gores too many sacred cows.
Mississippi has been making some real progress in their education. Growing up in South Carolina, we were always thankful for Mississippi schools so we wouldn’t be dead last in the country. Lately, Mississippi has made some serious progress. They have moved up to number 5 in the nation in fourth grade reading. When adjusting for poverty, they are #1. That is an incredible turnaround.
These changes can be made to education, but like you said, the strategy gores too many sacred cows. Teachers unions have been the ones pushing for credentials and smaller class sizes because it boosts their money, not because it improves student performance.
This sounds like one-on-one tutoring: i.e., class size equals one.
Count me skeptical with extreme prejudice.
For one, they don’t report results by race, and all the worst performing schools are almost entirely black. Second, they don’t report results by sex, and young boys famously perform worse at academic stuff than girls, which is one reason the women who run our schools dope the boys into somnolence.
He tells you why no one is doing it, funding. If you want lots of tutors you are going to have to spend a lot of money, especially if you are going to lengthen the school year. There is no reason to think the people of Houston are especially cruel or hate kids but they are taxpayers and there is a limit to what they are willing to pay, especially for poor kids. So we have 2 ways to improve test scores for poor kids, selection bias and spending money. Meh.
Steve
“He tells you why no one is doing it, funding.”
I didn’t realize you had to pay parents to be attentive to their children and their school work.
What the guy showed was that with enough money he was able to at least partially overcome poor parenting. American schools do OK with teaching kids in middle class and above where parents are involved, but with poor kids who have only one parent or even two parents who arent attentive we suck bur claim it on the educational system.
As an aside, we arent ever going to do as well as Asian cultures when you measure education results by test scores. Asian parents, as a rule, are much more involved and demanding. American parents, even when involved and attentive tend to value independence much more which means the kids develop more self-discipline and creativity rather than having it imposed externally. Which is one of the reasons, I suspect, that Asian countries do better on tests but we do better in real life.
Steve
Dig deep enough into apparent success and you’ll find issues of selection. One apparent from the clip here is that just about all school districts want such experiments to include the entire population being served, including special needs students. That is considered a poison pill, and the Alpha School program in Texas wasn’t willing to accept it and is private (and charging $40k per year).
To give a concrete example of what that means, a neighbor kid has severe autism, often loudly vocalizes animal noises. Her mother fights to keep her child integrated into the regular school curriculum (supplemented with special instruction), wanting her child to maximize her ability to have any sort of independence as an adult. I can imagine teachers and parents of teachers in those same classes might find it more convenient if she was somewhere else. Somewhere in here one can see why public schools cost more and why there is pressure for smaller class sizes so teachers can address these and misbehavior more easily.
One of the Five Tenets is “no excuses” which in the charter school context means if the student doesn’t shape up eventually they will be expelled. Schools don’t fail the students, students fail the schools.
Cowen covered this story and more info has come out and questions about the study. While the schools supposedly had 8k-9k students enrolled only about 6k took the tests that showed improvements. What happened to the other students. In one high school they had 450 students at the start of the program but only 275 graduated. Note that improvements took place in the first year, almost entirely in math, but then leveled off as they apparently decreased tutor time.
So again, flood schools with a bunch of math tutors and I think you can expect some better math scores. Better yet get rid of the problem kids. It’s not clear how much of their success was due to the latter.
Steve