Heinrich Mintrop, Education Policy Analysis Archives
January 15, 2003
In this report from the Education Policy Analysis Archive, UCLA's Heinrich Mintrop suggests that putting failing schools on probation as part of a state accountability system only helps some of them to improve, while causing new problems. He studied eleven low-performing (and mostly poor/minority) schools in Maryland and Kentucky - half of them elementary, half middle - that were put on probation under their states' accountability systems. The question was what effects did probationary status have on the schools. The problem is that Mintrop focused on what teachers and principals thought and did rather than on the performance of their pupils. Though it was weak student performance that led to probationary status in the first place, he doesn't seem very interested in whether that performance improved as a result of this kind of state intervention. In fact, he never gets around to saying whether it got better or worse in the Kentucky schools in his small sample. (In the Maryland schools, he notes that MSPAP scores stopped declining in the probationary schools and two of them made "notable strides" in reading and math, while the others more or less leveled off.) His data consist largely of principal and teacher interviews and classroom observations. Not too surprisingly, he finds that, while probation made school staffs aware that they had a problem, it didn't lead to much improvement in instruction and it fostered various kinds of negative behavior among teachers. Also not surprising, he found that much of the instruction in these schools simply wasn't very good. For example, "Only one third of all observed Maryland lessons were deemed highly coherent, i.e. beginning, middle, and end hung together; the majority lacked conceptual depth." You'll learn a bit more from this study than its abstract suggests, so you may want to have a look for yourself (see http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v11n3.html on the web for a copy), but please keep in mind that it's based on a tiny sample and that its focus is what teachers do (and feel) rather than how much their students learn.
