What makes a good school? If you're to believe the Century Foundation, good schools are defined by the number of affluent students they serve. Too few? Bad school. Nearly all? Good school.
This is, of course, the idea behind economic integration. Give more poor students the privilege of attending wealthier schools and student achievement will improve.
The idea is not altogether without merit. The Foundation's recent report finds, unsurprisingly, that poor students who attend low-poverty public schools demonstrate significantly better student achievement results than those who attend high-poverty (or even moderately wealthy) schools.
But why?
In a report released this month, the Century Foundation attributes it to five contributing factors: teacher quality, school environment, parent involvement, teacher-student interactions, and peer interactions. Certainly it's well documented that peer effects make an enormous difference, so merely being surrounded by a greater number of students with high academic aspirations is likely to help. And parent involvement is far greater in the wealthiest schools than the poorest.
But I challenge the assumption that, on balance, teacher quality is better at wealthier schools. Or that it's a foregone conclusion that school environment (or teacher-student interactions, for that matter) needs to be better.
If you scrape beneath the surface, I'm willing to bet that you'll find just as much mediocre instruction and poor classroom management in wealthy schools as you do in poor schools. (And I challenge you to find a stronger school culture than, say, KIPP: Infinity in Harlem, which serves only disadvantaged students.) It's just that the wealthier schools are buoyed by two things.
First, children of more affluent parents typically start school ahead of children of poorer families. It's spectacularly unfair, but it's the reality that we're faced with. And it means that schools that serve predominantly wealthy students can start at an entirely different place than students serving more disadvantaged students.
Add to that the fact that affluent parents are going to do whatever it takes to ensure that their children excel. They'll get tutors, spend extra time on homework, demand higher standards and more advanced work, and on. So, regardless of how bad the instruction is in more affluent classrooms, those students are going to succeed (and mediocre teachers are going to be made to look much better).
That's no doubt why the positive effects of integration are strongest in schools where fewer than five percent of students are poor, and practically non-existent in schools where barely a third of the students are poor. In short, if you add too many disadvantaged students to your average school, you'll see student achievement plummet, because it's just harder to educate students who come to school behind and who are faced everyday with challenges most of us will never know.
And so, by introducing greater numbers of harder-to-educate students into supposedly high-performing schools, large-scale economic integration will likely do little more than expose the instructional inadequacies that I'm sure exist in many of our wealthiest ?high performing? schools.
So, rather than dipping our toe in another pond of forced integration, let's spend our time and resources helping to diagnose and fix instructional problems in all schools, rather than using those scarce resources to shift students around and hope for the best.
?Kathleen Porter-Magee
