Opportunity for All: A Framework for Quality and Equality in Education
Jennifer O’Day and Marshall S. Smith
288 pages, Harvard Education Press, 2019
Drawn from a book that has been 30 years in the making, this excerpt outlines three explanations for why deep disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes persist for so many of our nation’s children despite more than six decades of education equity reforms. These lessons from the past undergird the book’s argument overall, informing both our vision for a more equitable and effective education system and a comprehensive theory of change for how that vision might be realized. In this excerpt, we emphasize the need for a systemic rather than piecemeal approach to closing gaps and improving outcomes for all, examine the importance of implementation and contextual factors that often determine the success of any improvement effort, and recognize the abiding influence of the growing inequalities in the broader community and the need for schools and communities to work together if real progress is to be attained. Throughout the volume, we integrate findings from research with practical knowledge and examples from the field to connect many of the improvement ideas and efforts currently in play in school systems and policy circles across the country.—Jennifer O’Day and Marshall S. Smith
Observations From 60 Years of Equity Reforms: There Are No Silver Bullets
Americans have a penchant for quick fixes and easy solutions. We like to do things quickly, and if we don’t see results right away, we move on to the next new and improved approach. In no arena is this American predilection toward the fast and easy more evident than in education. We have been through numerous reform efforts in the past 60 years, many of them focused specifically on reducing the gaps in opportunities enjoyed by more- and less-advantaged groups in our society and schools. We have thrown money at the problem through supplemental funding streams, like the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and state categorical programs, and through a myriad of state fiscal equity suits and policies. We have tracked and de-tracked students, tried homogenous grouping by ability and heterogeneous cooperative learning in the classroom. We have tried pullout and push-in instructional approaches to give extra support to students who need it. We have focused exclusively on academics only to turn around and chide ourselves for ignoring the whole child. We have thought teacher testing and formal qualifications on the front end were the answer to low educator quality, then moved to test-driven teacher evaluation as the new required solution. And the list goes on.
While these solutions often have a faddish quality, they are not necessarily without merit or void of at least a promising research base. Indeed, in the past 15 years, there has been considerable interest in and policy support for adoption and use of what has come to be referred to as evidence-based practices. The idea is straightforward: figure out “what works” (usually, these are very targeted interventions with a reasonable effect size found in one or more rigorous research studies), adopt and implement the practice at scale, and finally, realize the expected improvements in overall outcomes and gap closings. A corollary to this theme is often the idea that if we adopt multiple evidence-based practices, benefits will cumulate to an overall larger effect.
In the main, we believe that the focus on evidence and effectiveness has been a positive development and has contributed to some gap closings. But almost invariably, when individual interventions are implemented at scale in schools and districts, the results are far less successful than anticipated and sometimes disappear altogether. We see three main interrelated explanations for the diminished effects. First, implementation challenges lead to uneven and sometimes unforeseen results. Second, individual interventions often leave untouched the systemic contributors that underlie and perpetuate disparities. And third, changes in schools must be accompanied by attention to the deep inequalities in children’s out-of-school conditions.
Lesson One: Implementation Dominates Impact
It has been said that implementation is 90 percent of impact. The same intervention applied in one school, locale, or state may yield quite different results when employed in another. Problems of inadequate resources, weak commitment, or poor fit are often cited to explain disappointing outcomes. This situation is not unique to education; in fact, the field of implementation science, which grew out of concerns about the limited uptake of evidence-based practices in medicine, seeks to apply research on implementation patterns and strategies to improve their application and use across a wide range of social domains. “Implementation varied” is probably the most commonly reported finding across decades of policy and program evaluations. Yet implementation considerations generally get short shrift when policy makers and administrators are considering options and calculating expected impact. Decades of implementation research have yielded an extensive array of implementation lessons that could be applied to considerations for equity-oriented policies. Here we focus on three that are integral to our vision of how a more equitable education system would need to operate.
Context Matters
Research on organizational learning and change holds that all change is history-dependent. Schools, districts, and even states differ in their educational histories, including past performance trajectories, experience with previously tried strategies and interventions, and the expectations that derive from these experiences. They also differ in the makeup of both the adult and the student populations in their systems and the histories that each of these groups has had with schooling, inequality, and change. Varying cultures, conditions, and structures across organizational units and systems can influence the ways in which local actors interpret and act on any given reform or intervention. Weatherley and Lipsky’s seminal piece on “street-level bureaucrats” in 1977, which examined variation across three districts’ implementation of special education in Massachusetts, spawned a host of increasingly sophisticated analyses of the causes and manifestations of contextual variation in implementation.
Attempts to constrain such variation through emphases on fidelity, scripted instructional programs, and one-size-fits-all policies do not solve the problem, as they often inhibit professional judgment and responsiveness to individual student and local system needs. Indeed, such approaches may be counterproductive.
Capacity Is a Key Determinant of Implementation Quality and Results
At the heart of many of the differences in implementation across contexts is variation in local capacity. Scholars have taken differing approaches to delineating the elements of capacity that matter for improving student outcomes. It is generally agreed that human capital—the knowledge and skills of individual actors and the collective body of actors—in a system or site has broad implications for how a given intervention, program, or policy is understood; whether the actors are able to carry out the required or suggested actions; the degree to which the system can adapt to changing conditions and threats to implementation; and so on. Many research-based efforts, from bilingual education to new math or literacy curricula to teacher evaluation rubrics, fail because those who would implement them lack the requisite knowledge and skills. The amount and appropriateness of available material resources— money, instructional materials, and facilities, among others—also figure substantially in notions of organizational or system capacity. Sometimes these resources are the target of particular reform efforts; often they can determine the success or failure of any given strategy.
One clear example is the implementation of class-size reduction in California in the late 1990s. While districts received state funds to reduce class sizes in K–3 to 20 or fewer students, many districts—particularly urban systems with already overcrowded and understaffed schools—lacked the classroom space and a pool of qualified teachers to make these reductions effectively. This led to a reliance on portable classrooms and the hiring of large numbers of under-credentialed and novice teachers, who were disproportionately assigned to work in schools serving poor students and students of color. As a result, this massive reform effort, intended to benefit low-income students and schools, actually exacerbated disparities in access to qualified and experienced teachers and adequate facilities.
Another aspect of organizational capacity is what several researchers have termed program coherence. Coherence in education implies shared goals and frameworks and the presence of working conditions, structures, and routines that support those goals and allow the actors in the system to focus on their attainment. Like human and material capital, program coherence is not equitably distributed across schools and districts. We have already noted the organizational dysfunction—caused by years of neglect, environmental stresses, and high rates of staff turnover—that characterizes many high-poverty schools. A similar observation could be made of many low-capacity districts. One manifestation of this incoherence is either a flitting from one reform effort to another in search of the panacea or the accumulation of multiple interventions and programs, some well-intended and researched but all vying for attention and resources. Lack of coherence in high-poverty schools and districts makes it difficult for teachers and administrators to select and adapt strategies that build on one another and enhance their ability to systematically address the learning needs of their students.
Implementation Is a Social Process
The past few decades have brought increasing attention to the importance of social capital and trust for diffusing effective practices and for enhancing learning and improvement in the conduct of one’s daily work. Social capital resides in the relationships between and among people, groups, and organizations. For effective implementation to occur, these relationships must be activated not just once but through multiple interactions on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, the isolation of schools and teachers that is common in American education systems is generally exacerbated in high-poverty contexts where turnover and lack of trust impede the development of strong relationships that can mobilize implementation of evidence-based practices. Thus, even those interventions that are specifically designed to benefit such systems and the children and adults in them often never find their way to where they are most needed. Attempts to ensure spread and implementation through administrative mandates do little to solve this problem and often lead to superficial compliance without deep understanding or committed action. When the pressure subsides, so does reform.
Lesson Two: Piecemeal Reforms Ignore Underlying Conditions
Another challenge to effective interventions is the fact that isolated and piecemeal reforms often fail to address underlying systemic contributors to the situation or inequity that they are attempting to address. Take the example of incentive programs that are designed to attract more qualified and effective teachers to work in high-poverty schools but do not touch the dismal working conditions that cause turnover in the first place. Or consider school accountability policies that penalize schools for low performance but let districts off the hook, leaving unaddressed the policies and practices that concentrate low-performing students and inexperienced teachers in those schools and pay insufficient attention to building the capacity for long-term improvement.
In each of the implementation challenges discussed above, the success of individual reforms is constrained or thwarted by conditions endemic to the system itself. What’s more, incoherence and instability in the policy environment make it difficult to identify and change these conditions. Superintendents, school boards, and legislators come and go, but disparities in resources and practices go on, bolstered by institutionalized structures and beliefs. Edicts from the federal government and states are often contradictory and ill-suited to the specific and varied conditions across contexts. Fragmented governance, politics, top-down compliance, inadequate data systems, bureaucratic human resource policies, and isolation of schools from other systems and organizations affecting children’s welfare combine to reinforce existing disparities in resources and processes. On the ground, schools in high-poverty neighborhoods lack the information, trust, and capacity they need to examine their practices and results over time and are pulled in multiple and conflicting directions by the mixed messages they receive. High-stakes testing and accountability measures can compound these issues and have the effect of placing emphasis on avoiding consequences for adults rather than ensuring progress for students.
Seeing the limitations in the current system as insurmountable barriers, some politicians and reformers have turned to charter schools and school choice as a way to remove regular public schools—particularly those serving poor students and students of color—from a system that has repeatedly failed these children. Charters and choice have formed a rallying cry for the Trump administration (with preference going to private school choice through for-profit charters and vouchers). Though promising in many ways, however, charters are no more a panacea than any other intervention. They do free schools from many constraints and allow more innovation and experimentation, and schools associated with a few of the charter management organizations (CMOs)—deliberately formed groups of charter schools that are similar in vision and strategy—do show signs of significant success. These CMOs include Aspire, KIPP, Achievement First, and High Tech High, among others. One might look at the more successful CMOs as similar to the more successful districts we discuss throughout this book. The more innovative ones could serve as a learning ground for the larger system and the field as a whole, and some districts have made use of their charters in this way. However, much of the research suggests that most charter schools are quite similar to traditional public schools in both their organization and results. And in most cases, mechanisms for feeding information back into the larger system in ways that it can be effectively used are either limited or absent altogether. As a result, charters as a whole do little to address the situation for the vast majority of underserved students in American schools.
Lesson Three: Schools Can’t Do It Alone
The lessons above are not new, and some districts and schools—like those mentioned in chapter 1—have been applying them in whole or in part for years. That is, they have taken a systemic approach to the selection, adaptation, or development of strategies to ensure equity and excellence for their students. They have implemented those strategies with attention to differences in contexts between schools or even between classrooms. And they have focused on building capacity and connections among the adults and within their organizations and units to ensure depth and sustainability of improvements over time. These actions have produced some success in improving overall outcomes and reducing gaps between advantaged and traditionally underserved students.
There are many observers and reformers who regard such examples of progress as proofs that schools and districts can ensure educational equity on their own and that any discussion about the need to address students’ conditions outside of school is merely buying into “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” This perspective, often articulated through the rhetoric of “no excuses” education, emerged in the 1990s and 2000s and became codified in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which held schools and districts accountable for ensuring that 100 percent of their students met challenging proficiency standards by 2014. “No excuses” also became a rallying cry for a subsection of the charter school movement, which was characterized by extended learning time, ongoing professional development, data-driven instruction, and very highly structured student discipline. The intention was for educators to take responsibility for doing all they could to ensure the success of all students, irrespective of their background.
Despite some evidence of success among students who remained in no-excuses schools for at least three years, many such schools have been criticized for rigid and demeaning discipline practices (“no excuses” for the students rather than for the systems), high attrition rates, and little responsiveness or support for the real stresses in many students’ daily lives. In recent years, even some former leaders of the no-excuses movement have begun to see its limitations and have shifted their approach to incorporate more supportive practices and services.
Part of this shift is the recognition that students’ basic needs—such as food, shelter, mental and physical health—must be met for them to take full advantage of the learning opportunities in even the best of schools. Educators have neither the resources nor the expertise to address all these needs on their own, but there are examples across the country where schools and school districts are collaborating with social service agencies, health clinics, community-based organizations, and early childhood and postsecondary institutions to help level the playing field.
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These lessons from past improvement efforts, coupled with a comprehensive consideration of the underlying causes of educational inequity, undergird the volume from which this excerpt is taken. In it, we construct an evidence-based picture of what a more equitable and effective education system could look like in the United States and then proffer a multi-pronged theory of change for making this vision a reality.