We all want our kids and grandkids to have the best education possible, but it is very hard to measure the effectiveness of a school system. We can look at per-pupil spending, but there’s no shortage of inefficient systems that spend a lot of money. The student-teacher ratio is also easy to measure, but it often doesn’t correlate with good test results.
So we usually look at standardized test results, but these are confounded by the socio-economic status of the students taking the test. Years of measurements have shown that children from lower socio-economic backgrounds will, on average, score lower than children from higher socio-economic backgrounds, no matter how good their schools.
A Stanford professor named Sean Reardon has come to the rescue. He has created what seems to me to be a much better way to judge the effectiveness of a school system.
Reardon looked at the results of 3 million standardized tests given in the third and eighth grades to students in 11,000 school districts nationwide between 2009 and 2015; he measured the change that occurred in the five years between the two tests.
So, if the students in the third grade in a school scored on average what you’d expect from students in grade 2.8 and five years later those same group of students, now in the eighth grade, scored on average what you’d expect from students in grade 7.9, the school would be seen to have advanced its students 5.1 grades in the five-year period.
On the other hand, a school where the grade level went from 3.2 to 8.1 in five years would have showed only 4.9 years of advancement, even though its students had higher scores, because only advancement is measured. This removes the effect of socio-economic status.
Using this system, the highest-scoring system was, to everyone’s surprise, Chicago — at 6.2 years of grade advancement in the five-year period. (The lowest system, Rochester, New York, scored 2.9.) Chicago was a big surprise to the researchers. “Here’s the third-biggest school system in the country that’s dramatically outperforming not just the other big poor districts, but almost every district in the country, at scale,” Reardon told The New York Times. (The article is available at https://nyti.ms/2Au3YL6.) If we understood what was causing that, in Chicago and in other disadvantaged but high-growth districts, that might help reduce educational inequality, he pointed out.
The Times article contains a feature that allows people to look up their school system and compare its score to that of their neighbors. I did that for my town, Sandwich, and several other towns on Cape Cod and the Islands. I was surprised by what I saw.
The systems showing the greatest advancement were Edgartown (5.6), Sandwich (5.3) and Nantucket (5.2). All three advanced their students more than five grades in five years. They were in the top quarter of the 11,000 systems measured.
At the other end of the scale were Barnstable (3.9) and Mashpee (4.0). These systems are in the bottom 10 percent of systems measured.
In between are Brewster (4.5), Falmouth (4.5), Dennis-Yarmouth and Bourne (both 4.3). Falmouth ranks roughly in the middle of the 11,000 systems (half did better; half did worse).
There is a large difference in educational efficiency from the most efficient to the least efficient systems. We cannot attribute it to per-pupil spending, since the top mainland system, Sandwich, spends less per pupil than its lower-scoring neighbors, Falmouth, Mashpee and Barnstable.
What does Sandwich do that these other towns do not? If one stood at the back of the classroom and watched what was going on, could we tell? If we could figure out what factors make a school system more efficient, we could train every system to use them.
Looking at Chicago is not much help. “It’s hard to untangle what’s been most effective,” Elaine Allensworth, who leads an education research consortium at the University of Chicago, told The New York Times. But she is confident the results are real.
“I go into schools now and I see places that are very different from what I saw 15 years ago,” she said. “It’s much more collaborative among teachers and data-focused, and focused on students.”
Another factor in Chicago may be more autonomous school principals. Teachers are always studied, but the effect of principals on education is often underestimated.
Whatever is going on, we need to figure it out and replicate it before we can actually realize the goal of no student left behind.
— Jack Edmonston lives in East Sandwich.