Editor’s note: This op-ed is by William J. Mathis, the managing director of the National Education Policy Center and is a former Vermont school superintendent.
Since the 1970s, education reformers have been lured like moths to “Lighthouse Schools.” That is, schools with all the odds against them yet they turn in high test scores. Researchers scurry to discover their secrets and share them with other schools. Lighthouse candlepower is especially bright during hard economic times because it implicitly promises, “See! We can improve the schools without it costing anything.”
As sensible as this approach appears, it just hasn’t panned out. There are a number of reasons: First, the lighthouse schools are often described in fluffy and exaggerated anecdotes designed to push some favored policy notion. The federal “Race to the Top” relies heavily on such stories. Second, the facts are often not what they seem. For example, the so-called “low-cost” charter schools have frequently received huge amounts of off-the-books foundation money. Third, Lighthouse Schools are often misinterpreted statistics or simply blips. In the Florida reforms, the claimed successes just evaporated when a colder light was cast upon the actual results.
Despite this long, checkered history, the Vermont Department of Education just entered the lighthouse business with the identification of the “14 Effective Schools (in) Closing the Achievement Gap.” In the accompanying press release, “Vermont Schools Closing the Achievement Gap,” the reader is led to infer that by modeling these Lighthouse Schools, the academic handicaps of poverty will be eliminated.
Such a conclusion would go too far.
- Eight of the 14 selected high performing gap-closers had more affluent student bodies than the state average. Four more were within eight percentage points of the state average.
- Unexamined are the more than 75 schools with poverty greater than 60 percent of the student body. Only one of these made the list. That’s not much of a success rate.
- Only students who had been in the school for three years were counted. While this allows a focus on the effects of the school, our most deprived and needy children are highly mobile. They were deleted from the analysis.
- All 14 of the effective schools were elementary schools. Since the bottom falls out of eleventh grade math scores, having no high schools in the group is what we would expect. Our less affluent students are systematically tracked into high school courses with less rigorous instruction. Until we deal with ability grouping, simple math says we cannot have high math scores.
- Thirteen of the 14 Lighthouse Schools are from rural supervisory unions.
- Ten of the schools enroll 150 or fewer students. Howley’s studies across various states show that the achievement gap gets smaller as school size gets smaller due to the more personalized climate in small schools.
- The highly successful schools had an average of 11.6 students per teacher. This is at the state average. Vermont has favorable teacher ratios and high test scores. The small class sizes and the personal attention we provide our neediest children may be our strongest asset.
Do these 14 schools demonstrate that Vermont is “closing the achievement gap?” No, such a conclusion is unwarranted. Instead, they demonstrate that Vermont’s needy children consistently do quite well on elementary school standardized tests if they have stable housing, are in towns free of impacted poverty, go to school and attend classes with more affluent peers, enroll in small schools in rural areas, and have favorable adult ratios.
While demographics are not destiny, there is an undeniable connection. Making schools better is far more than simply highly focused instructional programs. Solid educational progress means social and educational programs working hand in hand. For example Montgomery County, Maryland, requires socio-economic integration in housing. This translates into economically integrated schools. RAND researcher Heather Schwartz found that this factor alone improved both school climate and student expectations. The resulting positive effects were four times greater than what is typically found with educational reform ideas.
While the state did not deal with impacted poverty or the achievement gap in their lighthouse effort, most of the elements they tout in “Roots of Success” rightly deserve our attention. School leadership, school climate, an expectation and belief that all students can learn, an emphasis on continuous faculty improvement, genuine and positive working relationships with parents, and social support networks are essentials for a productive school.
Although the state faces economic problems, cutting school expenditures, staffing, and support services in the belief that some more “efficient” magic bullet will eradicate the effects of poverty is to misread what we know about demographics, social policy and effective schools. False lights may not be a lighthouse. They might just put us on the rocks.
