Julian R. Betts and PPIC's Andrew C. Zau and Lorien A. Rice, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)
2003
This short book from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) provides a close analysis of data from San Diego and seeks to illumine equalities and inequalities in school resources; trends in pupil achievement and achievement gaps; and, especially, which factors in school and classroom have the most influence on changes in student performance. On the first point, the authors found that the main resource discrepancy between affluent and non-affluent elementary schools in San Diego is teacher experience and preparation. On the second point, they unearthed "shocking" achievement gaps in all the usual directions - but also found nearly all of those gaps narrowing between 1998 and 2000. (That's before the onset of the much-publicized "Blueprint for Student Success" reform strategy of Alan Bersin and Tony Alvarado.) What turns out to influence student achievement from school to school and year to year? There's much technical stuff here, though Betts & Co. do an exceptionally nice job of making it accessible to ordinary mortals. It turns out - no big surprise - that attending school actually matters, i.e. kids who are absent a lot learn less. Peer group matters, too, but more at the grade level than the classroom level: the higher achieving a child's grade-mates, the better he/she is apt to do. Class size matters some, although only in reading in the early grades. And teachers matter, but the usual ways of defining their "qualifications" matter only intermittently. In what may turn out to be their most controversial conclusion, they say, "In very few cases did we find any statistically significant difference between the effectiveness of fully credentialed teachers with ten or more years of experience and teachers with less experience, regardless of whether they held a full or emergency credential or an internship." (The big exception: high-school math, where "subject authorization level" matters greatly.) Perhaps most important: schools don't generally cause achievement gaps. They're present when kids arrive at school. Policy makers may therefore want to give greater emphasis to pre-school. Though it's a case study of a single district, this book is so careful and perceptive that you may well want a copy. It's hard to believe these findings don't apply elsewhere. The ISBN is 1582130442 and you can get more information at http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=321.
