Group items tagged

"Systems like the APPR system in NY mistakenly place an emphasis on human capital rather than social capital and thus are doomed to failure. Rooted in what Michael Fullan categorized as "wrong drivers of change," systems that emphasize individual human capital over social capital and that emphasize the use of accountability data in a punitive way are simply doomed to failure. To replace old systems with similar systems, repeatedly, gets us to the insanity that some other than Einstein, Franklin, or Twain described."

We use several data sets to consider the effect of teaching practices on student beliefs, as well as on organization of firms and institutions. In cross-country data, we show that teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital, from beliefs in cooperation to institutional outcomes. We then use micro-data to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation both with each other and with teachers, and students' involvement in civic life. A two-stage least square strategy provides evidence that teaching practices have an independent sizeable effect on student social capital. The relationship between teaching practices and student test performance is nonlinear. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes social capital.

"School quality is heavily dependent on social capital. When families flee their neighborhood schools for charters, magnets, private schools, or other "choice" schools, they are essentially seeking out a greater concentration of social capital. Shifting it from a "failing" neighborhood school to a charter or other choice school only exacerbates the problems that a lack of social capital can cause."

"The problem with this fight is that it drains the system of energy - energy that should be spent on the teaching and learning process. This very visible fight, often fought through the media, is a significant distraction from the work that needs to occur in schools. What's worse, however, is that the battle is over the wrong things. The problem is that the battle lines are all over a misplaced emphasis on human capital over social capital."

"For the past few months, we have been insisting, through this blog series, on the idea that education reform has a social dimension or level that often is overlooked in mainstream debate and policy. Under this broad theme, we've covered diverse issues ranging from how teachers' social capital can increase their human capital to how personnel churn can undermine reform efforts, or how too much individual talent can impede a team's overall performance. This collection of issues may prompt a number of important questions: What exactly is the "social side?" What are its key ideas? I would like to offer a few initial thoughts and share some resources that I've compiled."

"KIPP, TFA, and other programs may well have started out as well-intentioned attempts to make things better for underserved students, schools, and neighborhoods despite poverty. But they have morphed over time into fiscal and social conservative models for how to create miracles without needing to address critical social and economic issues. Whether that transformation reflects the political views of those running these programs or simply represents mission slip combined with the influx of capital from those who saw an opportunity to promote panaceas meant to convince politicians and the general public that obviously most public schools were horrible (and please note, this analysis slyly shifts tactics by starting with the neediest, most disadvantaged schools and communities but then creating policies like NCLB that are guaranteed to make the vast majority of public schools appear to be "failing" because of doubtful criteria and truly crazy mathematics). Once the notion that "US public schools are failing" becomes accepted common wisdom, the financial vultures move in with a host of projects that are almost entirely about making a profit from a crisis. This is the way disaster capitalism operates."

This paper notes how the theory of disruptive innovation, which arose at Harvard Business School in the late 1990s, and the Tools of Cooperation and Change, a supporting theory that arrived in 2006, together represent the epitome of neoliberal dispossession-based marketization paradigms. The language they bring to debates on policy reform is concise and revealing, the tools practical and effective. Yet in the dozen or so years since their arrival they too have become, to use their own vocabulary, an entrenched interest that serves to perpetuate the status quo of male-dominated capitalism. Education policy makers who understand that "public education is central to the construction of a cosmopolitan moral democracy" (Reid, 2007:292) can at the very least benefit from understanding the language and recognizing the tools. Perhaps they can even turn them to a socially responsible purpose, employing them to help "move the public/private debate past its current impasse" (ibid, 293).

In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations that strengthen skills, competence, and a school's overall social capital

A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children's educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents' current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents' cur- rent class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social back- ground are related to parenting practices and children's academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

I'm currently deep into Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation, a highly recommended read for those committed to learning about struggles for social justice in public education. An excerpt captured from the book's introduction serves as a catalyst for thought and questioning. In the foreword teacher activist Adam Sanchez interviews Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools.

"One of the problems with current reform is that there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current reform movement. There is an implied philosophy and it is a basic economic/human capital one: Education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability. This focus is legitimate but incomplete, for it narrows the purpose of education in a democracy, which should also include intellectual, social, civic, and ethical development. The theory of learning embedded in an accountability system based on standardized testing is a simplified behaviorist one. Learning is pretty much the acquisition of discrete bits of information measured quantitatively by a standardized test. Teaching is likewise reduced to a knowledge delivery system based on the mastery of a set of teaching techniques."

The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children - offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school year, we implemented five strategies gleaned from best practices in "No Excuses" charter schools - increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations - in nine of the lowest performing middle and high schools in Houston, Texas. We show that the average impact of these changes on student achievement is 0.276 standard deviations in math and 0.059 standard deviations in reading, which is strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children's Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools - two strict "No Excuses" adherents. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of the scalability of the experiment.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

An article in yesterday's New York Times covered some recent research on the increasing education achievement gap between rich and poor. It's worth a read, but it misses a couple of important points.