CEIC Review, 1(1)

February 1992

Contents

CEIC's Mission: To Improve the Capacity for Education in Inner Cities

Houston Teachers Help Turn Around Five `At-Risk' Schools

Classroom Impact as Important as Other Variables on Learning

African-American Adolescents Maintain Positive Self-Concept

CEIC's Mission: To Improve the Capacity for Education in Inner Cities

by Margaret C. Wang, Director, CEIC, Professor of Educational Psychology, Temple University

The National Center on Education in the Inner Cities (CEIC) was established on November 1, 1990 by the Temple University Center for Research in Human Development and Education, in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Houston. As part of OERI's network of national R&D centers supported by a five-year cooperative agreement with the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), CEIC is conducting systematic studies of innovative initiatives that take bold steps to improve the capacity for education in inner cities.

CEIC is a timely new project for the Temple University Center for Research in Human Development and Education (CRHDE), an interdisciplinary research and development center focusing on the study of emerging problems and challenges facing children, youth, and their families. CRHDE serves as a catalyst for identifying and enhancing the collective efforts and expertise of researchers and other individuals through long-term programmatic research and development projects that draw together a wide range of national, state, and regional programs and resources. During the five years since its inception, CRHDE has earned a national reputation for bringing scientific scholarship and practical know-how to bear on improving life circumstances for young people and their families, particularly in urban environments.

The purpose of the CEIC Review is to summarize CEIC research findings that have implications for policy and practice. In this inaugural issue we highlight some preliminary first-year findings from the various CEIC projects.

Program overview

CEIC consists of three research and development programs and an outreach program for dissemination and utilization. Grounded in theory, research, and practical know-how, the interdisciplinary teams of CEIC researchers engage in studies of exemplary practices, as well as primary research that includes longitudinal studies and field-based experiments.

Program 1. Family: An agent in the education process

Studies included in this program on the family aim to explore and enhance family life and its contributions to education from a multicultural and multigenerational perspective. A particular emphasis is on familial and systematic correlates of adolescent problems with special focus on the problems of substance abuse, teenage parents and the parents of children with disabilities, and families' resource utilization practices.

Program 2. School: Resilience and learning success

The focus of this program is on inner-city schools that "beat the odds" and succeed in enhancing student outcomes, even in adverse circumstances. Among the expected outcomes of the projects included in this program is a detailed database on features, implementation requirements, and outcomes of school programs and practices that foster resilience and learning success of students in inner-city schools that can be replicated across the country.

Program 3. Community: Connection with education

The objective of this program on the community is to analyze relationships among a wide variety of community resources and educational programs. A broad continuum of resources and constraints is envisioned, extending from the pre-birth level to the transition of youth as they leave the schools for employment in the community or for higher education. The schools are part of a larger ecosystem, and the relationship between the school and this ecosystem is being systematically explored.

Dissemination and utilization program

To make certain that the Center's findings are known and used, CEIC includes a broad-based program of dissemination and utilization. The program aims not only to raise consciousness about the opportunities, hopes, and expectations for inner-city children and youth, but also to inform those policy and program implementation efforts that build on what works to improve educational outcomes.

Because CEIC researchers are committed to ensuring that its programs of research are relevant to the work of practicing professionals, they regularly devote time to participate in formal and informal dialogue and exchanges with teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders to promote collaboration and mutual influence.

The task of CEIC is to respond to the great challenges and opportunities of urban life through systematic programs of research, innovative program development, and the utilization and dissemination of research in the most helpful way possible.

What Makes `Ghetto' Schools Succeed or Fail?

by William Lowe Boyd, Principal Investigator, CEIC, Professor of Education, The Pennsylvania State University

Our need to better compete in today's world economy makes an old question more important than ever before: How can we make failing "ghetto" schools perform effectively?

The question is more important now because a growing number of our elementary and secondary students are "at risk" of educational failure-- already 30% if we look at demographic figures, perhaps 40% if we look at achievement results. Our most acute problems are found in big cities, especially in inner-city ghetto schools where most of the truly disadvantaged students attend.

Overcoming the problems of educating inner-city youth, however, is a complex task that must involve not only the schools, but the students, their families, the community, and the society in which they live. Three categories of theories explaining the source of difficulty in educating the disadvantaged have been proposed by John Ogbu (1988). The categories are institutional deficiency theory, which focuses on problems within the school system; developmental deficiency theory, which argues that disadvantaged children fail in school because their parents do not teach them the needed competencies; and cultural discontinuities theory, which claims that minority children tend to fail because of conflicts between the child's culture and the culture of the school and larger society. Most programs for disadvantaged students have been primarily influenced by one of these three theories.

Problems and solutions within schools

The search for what makes ghetto schools succeed or fail is appropriately begun by looking within the schools. The notion that schools do matter has achieved wide acceptance in recent years, partly as a result of the "effective schools" movement. A body of research now exists that shows there are important differences in the amount of learning that takes place, even between similar urban schools and among similarly disadvantaged inner-city children in the same school. The first wave of current reform began with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. It tried to achieve excellence through state mandates that intensified what was already being done, including higher graduation requirements, more testing, etc.

A second wave later in the 1980s proposed that something different, not more of the same, was needed. Reformers of the second wave support the institutional deficiency theory, emphasizing the dysfunctional nature of school organizational arrangements or emphasizing the counterproductive features of the governance and incentive structures. These reformers see the typical American school as an ill-designed workplace, with an organizational structure that frustrates students, teachers, and school administrators. This structure isolates teachers, discourages teamwork and professionalism, provides inadequate rewards for teaching and learning, and makes unattainable demands on school administrators. Such an organizational arrangement leads to a pattern of informal bargaining behavior among students, teachers, and school administrators.

Teachers, constrained by the need to maintain order and teach content that many students dislike, are inclined to force rather than entice learning. Yet, this force is not only successful--it leads students to seek ways to persuade teachers to reduce what is demanded of them. Teachers and principals also bargain and negotiate the limited "goods" they have available. Thus, a principal may swap lax application of rules for teachers' support and to gain teachers' opinion leadership among their peers. The costs of working out such exchanges are often perceived to be greater than the benefits received. Sometimes a principal may have to resort to strategies such as dividing and ruling, and controlling information.

Furthermore, through all of this bargaining behavior, there is little incentive for productivity, for achieving the learning goals that should be the driving force of the schools. With no profit motivation and with tax-supplied budgets independent of satisfying individual consumers (and with teacher salaries based on seniority rather than performance), educators may be inclined to maximize such benefits as ease of work, power, or prestige and to minimize their psychic costs by avoiding risks and conflict when possible. In short, the personal goals of employees in public schools may take precedence over the official goals of the schools because the rewards for the latter are low. In addition, the organizational structure also has built-in resistance to change. Teacher organizations, for example, generally dislike salary systems based on merit, and administrators are more likely to be concerned about teachers' wishes than those of (generally unorganized) parents who are interested in productivity.

Special problems of urban schools

Unfortunately, large urban school systems where most disadvantaged children are concentrated seem to have three types of problems that are especially intense. One is that these school systems are even more likely to have excessive bureaucracy and problematic reward structures than other schools. Of course, there are always some "maverick" principals willing to take risks and "buck the system" to make their schools work more effectively. But the need is for reforms that make it possible to succeed because of the system, rather than in spite of it.

Difficulties in the urban educational systems are also complicated by out-of-school factors. Escalating violent crime and teenage gang activity, often associated with the exploding problem of illegal drugs, are dire problems for these schools. Sheer survival in some inner-city neighborhoods and getting to and from school safely are two very grave concerns.

The third problem is that urban school reformers are constrained by inadequate information. There are few data available on urban school performance and operation and what data are available tend to be difficult to compare and assess. For example, there is some research evidence that graduation rates and reading levels of inner-city African Americans are rising; other reports show the opposite. We need to reconcile such contradictions. We need to know how large urban systems are responding to changing and intensifying problems. Finally, we need information about trends in labor relations in urban schools. Recent successes in reforming urban districts seem inevitably tied to positive trends in labor relations and support by teachers' unions and we need to know more about those dynamics.

The effective schools movement

A program that has achieved great support among educational reformers is the "effective schools" movement. All that is needed to make city schools more effective, according to its supporters, is to copy a more focused and achievement-oriented approach to schooling that has been proven successful in the handful of urban schools where student outcomes show them to be effective. Among the achievement-oriented strategies are a school-wide instructional focus, high expectations for achievement, and a shared culture or ethos that binds students, teachers, and principals together. Critics see the movement as too simplistic and the research on which it is based as suspect. However, support for it is so widespread that Congress passed the Hawkins- Stafford School Improvement Act of 1988 which includes incentives for following effective schools principles. A pertinent survey (Snider, 1989) found that over half of the U.S. school districts have initiated or planned programs based on effective schools research.

The main problem with expecting the effective schools movement to bring needed reform to dysfunctional schools is the difficulty involved in "mass-marketing" programs borrowed from schools that were effective after years of development. To create a positive and productive school climate where one does not exist requires a sustained school improvement process that takes time and outside support. Effective schools prescriptions cannot just be mandated by legislatures and quickly slipped into place.

Another difficulty with effective schools prescriptions is that the underplay differences among students and among schools. Implementation in a secondary school is difficult, especially if it has a schoolwide instructional focus on tracking students of differing social classes. To successfully introduce effective schools strategies into a high school, the school would have to provide access to better educational processes for all students regardless of social class, gender, or track membership. In addition, the school would have to provide incentives for teachers of low groups to establish and maintain high academic expectations of students and would have to draw disadvantaged students into a sense of membership in the school community.

Segregated schools

The effort to end racial segregation in the schools was one of the earliest attempts at making schools more effective for disadvantaged racial minorities. While many authorities continue to believe that disadvantaged students should benefit from schools that have middle- class academic expectations, desegregation in America has had mixed results. It appears that its results are neither as good nor as bad as its friends and foes expected.

Broader problems and solutions

"Out-of-school" factors also have a large influence on learning. Of the three categories of theories mentioned earlier, two concentrate on students, their families, and their communities.

Developmental deficiencies. In the 1960s, disadvantaged children were thought to be "culturally deprived." Today we tend to think of "cultural differences" rather than deficits, but the preschool and compensatory programs designed to overcome deficits, such as Head Start and Chapter 1, still thrive. While these programs have gained a great deal of popular support and have been generally beneficial, they do not seem to make a large difference for most disadvantaged children.

Cultural discontinuities. Based largely on the views of John Ogbu (1988), the cultural discontinuity theory maintains that the barriers to school success for African-American children in America are much steeper than could be explained by deficits in our institutions or in child development. Involuntary minorities such as African Americans, as opposed to immigrant minorities, have developed survival strategies to cope with economic, political, and social exploitation. The strategies are in opposition to the white cultural frame of reference and, therefore, are in opposition to schooling. Opposition to schooling is also found among the poor and working class youth here and in other nations where family and peers discourage school achievement so strongly that individuals who do what teachers and the school desire are negatively sanctioned.

Ogbu's solution is to try to reduce the cultural gap between schools and African-American children, and to convince students that social and economic opportunities really are open to them.

Ogbu's conclusions do not explain why disadvantaged Hispanic youth, who are immigrant minorities, have school performance problems as acute as those of African-American youth. Regardless of problem sources, however, the research points to the need for comprehensive approaches to the education of the disadvantaged.

Promising comprehensive programs

The programs that come closest to successful education for ghetto youth--both inside and outside schools--seem to be those advocated by James Comer and Henry Levin. Comer (1988) advocates interventions in schools that promote psychological development in students, encourage bonding to the school, foster positive interactions between parents and school staff, reduce destructive interactions, and establish cohesiveness and direction to the school's management and teaching. Comer has established two project schools that demonstrate his approach.

Levin (1987) tries to build on the strengths of culturally different children rather than focusing on their deficits. His "accelerated school" is a transitional elementary school designed to bring students up to grade level and to involve parents, staff, and outside volunteers in the school program and in actively assisting children.

Conclusion

Effective programs for the disadvantaged must successfully address all three clusters of problems identified here: institutional deficiencies, developmental deficiencies, and cultural discontinuities. Meeting this challenge requires more than a quick or simple remedy. More research is needed, especially in the area of cultural discontinuities. In the meantime, long-range planning and interventions that involve the broad community and that turn around one school at a time are needed.

Finally, the entire society in which we live must become more supportive of children and learning. We must make a conscious effort to promote all those with talent and leave no one behind.

Editor's Note: William Lowe Boyd's article "What Makes `Ghetto' Schools Succeed or Fail?" was published in its entirety in Advances in Educational Administration Volume II: School Leadership, edited by Paul Thurston and Philip Zodhiates and published by Jai Press, 1991. A condensed version of the article also appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Columbia University's Teachers College Record.

References

Comer, J. P. (1988, November). Educating poor minority children. Scientific American, 259(5), 42-48.

Levin, H. M. (1987, March). Excellent schools for disadvantaged students. Educational Leadership, 44, 19-21.

Ogbu, J. U. (1988). Diversity and equity in public education: Community forces and minority school adjustment and performance. In R. Haskins & D. MacRae (Eds.), Policies for America's public schools: Teachers, equity, and indicators. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Snider, W. (1989, September 27). Survey confirms rapid spread of "effective schools." Education Week, p. 4.

Houston Teachers Help Turn Around Five `At-Risk' Schools

by H. Jerome Freiberg, Principal Investigator, CEIC, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Houston

A study of five Houston elementary schools with a large percentage of minority students form low socioeconomic backgrounds indicates that when teachers of "at-risk" elementary school students participate in determining the school's program goals and are given ongoing, inservice training, student outcomes improve significantly. These results support findings of other researchers in such areas as classroom management, school climate, and instructional and school effectiveness.

In April 1987, the faculty at the five Houston schools adopted the Consistency Management Program, which translates research in classroom management, instructional effectiveness, school climate, school effectiveness, and staff development into practical classroom and school application. The program is designed to prevent problems which might interfere with learning and eliminate or reduce the need for more costly and time-consuming interventions.

The Consistency Management Program required that teachers and principals devise a schoolwide consensus for teaching and learning to be consistently implemented during the following academic year. Ninety percent of the teachers attended two voluntary planning sessions to devise the management plan.

During the 1987-1988 school year, the management plan devised by the staff was implemented in all five schools. To support the plan, six staff development workshops were held at each school. Each round of workshops focused on a specific topic, including techniques for communicating with parents, questioning strategies for higher level thinking, cooperative grouping and peer tutoring, and the use of learning centers for math and reading in place of worksheets. For the third workshop, teachers brought a 30-minute audio tape of their classroom and analyzed the tape in discussions with peers. Teachers also observed the interactions in peers' classrooms and discussed their observations and strategies for creating relaxed but productive classrooms.

Measuring results

Results indicate that between 1986 and 1988 in all five program schools, students showed statistically significant improvement on the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills (TEAMS) measure. The overall percentage of students who passed the TEAMS increased from 61% to 78% in the program schools, while the percentage of students who passed the TEAMS in the nonprogram schools decreased from 63% to 61%. Results also showed significantly higher individual scores for program students than for nonprogram students on the MAT6 standardized test. Interviews with school principals also indicated a significant drop in discipline referrals. School discipline referrals dropped from 109 before the program to 19 after it was implemented. Nine of the 19 referrals were made by substitute teachers. In addition, one of the schools that had been identified in 1986-87 as one of the lowest achieving schools in the district won the Governor's Excellence Award for Achievement in 1990. Thus, while it is always difficult to assess program effect in schools because so many factors contribute to student achievement, this study suggests management system programs have very positive effects.

Interviews with teachers and principals indicated that the inservice training was interesting and useful. Teachers particularly appreciated the discussion and interaction among participants and the continuing support from colleagues and presenters at each session. Overall, the management system was viewed by teachers and principals as a useful approach to classroom management.

It is clear that teacher involvement was instrumental in creating a positive learning environment for the students and an orderly and supportive working environment for the teachers and administrators. But it is critical that we look closely at the schools themselves and examine improvement efforts in relation to the factors that contribute to their decay. Eroding some of the most extraordinary efforts to improve the learning environment of students are monumental social problems such as proliferation of crack houses in inner-city neighborhoods, economic recessions that place a disproportionate burden on inner cities, and changes in immigration patterns that create multilingual student populations in schools that do not have multilingual teachers on staff.

Lessons learned

Several ideas resulting from this study could be applied in similar troubled-school settings:

A school mission, derived from a school-community consensus, is necessary for school success. An explicit public social contract between all parties creates a foundation upon which other programs can be built.

Consistency is key to school success. Once a mission has been established, each member of the school must work in unison to achieve it.

Inservice programs must be timed to fit the learning and organizational needs of teachers and administrators. Rather than waiting until August, right before classes begin, staff development sessions should take place in April, May, and June to allow teachers time to assimilate the information and plan new ideas and programs. August workshops should serve as refresher courses that build on previous faculty development activities.

Nationally standardized achievement scores and state criterion level test scores should be used as a guide rather than an absolute measure of school success.

Collegiality and a professional learning environment, both important elements of school success, can be fostered through informal meal-time meetings that focus on exchanging ideas.

Parent participation must reflect family changes related to working parents or single family homes. Rather than relying on one particular program or activity to draw parents into school, a much more flexible approach to parent and community involvement is needed.

Policy implications

As long as community and family needs are not being met by the larger society, then extraordinary efforts will be required to maintain the necessary equilibrium to continue school improvement efforts. Unfortunately, many federal, state, and district policies and procedures that respond to inner-city schools' greatest needs are withdrawn soon after schools show improvement. The very support systems that allowed an at-risk school to recover may be redistributed to other newly identified at-risk inner-city schools. Improvement efforts begin to decay as teachers and administrators both see tangible and intangible supports being removed. As a result of withdrawn support, teacher attrition and student mobility rates increase and, within a relatively short time, the once-improved school becomes at risk again and in need of new interventions.

Because change takes time, preventing the decay of highly effective school improvement efforts like the Consistency Management Program will require sustained external support. For this to happen, policymakers may want to redefine what they mean by the phrase "support for at-risk schools." Without a solid commitment to improving at-risk schools, it is not just the students who are at risk of failing but the schools themselves. To a large extent, our nation's schools provide a safety net between what may be a bleak and difficult existence and a hopeful and productive future.

Classroom Impact as Important as Other Variables on Learning

by Margaret C. Wang, Director, CEIC, Professor of Educational Psychology, Temple University

Research has accumulated a great deal of information about why some students learn in school more easily than others. Hundreds of variables that influence how a student learns--both inside and outside of the classroom--have been discovered and reported. As might be expected, research results and expert opinion don't always agree. But a comprehensive study by Margaret C. Wang, Geneva D. Haertel, and Herbert J. Walberg (1990) indicates that those variables directly related to students' engagement with the material to be learned are critical to learning.

To find out the relative importance of the classroom and other variables, and identify and describe those variables most likely to maximize school learning across a wide range of educational settings, Wang, Haertel, and Walberg conducted a large-scale synthesis of the past two decades of research findings. First, they developed a conceptual framework of 228 variables related to school learning. Then, they researched more than 150 selected handbook and annual review chapters, commissioned papers, and other authoritative reviews containing over 10,000 statements commenting on the strength of one or more variables related to school learning.

After summarizing these massive findings into 3,700 statements, they rated each from 1 (a weak or inconsistent relation to school learning) to 3 (a strong relation) based on research results or other evidence. Based on these ratings, the investigators divided the conceptual framework of 228 variables into six categories and rated all variables on the same 1 to 3 scale.

Findings contradict conventional wisdom

The scores shown in Figure 1 (see end of article)contrast sharply with the "conventional wisdom" of the mid-1960s which maintained that quality of classroom instruction has relatively little impact on schooling outcomes, especially when compared to socioeconomic variables. As might be expected, Out-of-School Contextual Variables, which included items associated with home, community, and peer groups, and Student Variables, which are related to characteristics of the students, were found to have a significant influence on learning inside the school. But it is noteworthy that the highest and the third-highest rated categories are related to classroom instruction.

Top-rated category: Program design variables

This category includes three subcategories of variables related to curriculum and its design, instruction, and the physical arrangements for delivering instruction. Rated the highest of these three subcategories, Demographic and Marker Variables included variables related to size of instructional group (whole class, small group, or one-on-one instruction), number of classroom aides, and needed resources. The investigators' findings indicate that more teacher's aides, smaller groups, and increased material resources are each associated with improved student learning.

The second-highest rated subcategory within the Program Design Variables category was Curriculum and Instructional Variables, suggesting that student learning is highly influenced by the use of a variety of instructional strategies within an orderly classroom environment. Within this subcategory, several highly-rated teaching strategy variables, including techniques to control classroom disruptiveness, indicate that students learn more easily in classrooms that accommodate student diversity and offer individualization.

The third subcategory within the Program Design Variables category, Curriculum Design, also contains several highly-rated variables that demonstrate the importance of offering a variety of instructional materials and approaches that accommodate individual differences.

Overall, these findings offer solid evidence that program design variables do make a difference in student learning.

Classroom instruction and climate variables

The largest of the six categories shown in Figure 1, (Classroom Instruction and Climate Variables, contains 79 of the study's 228 variables, divided into eight subcategories. The highest-rated of these eight subcategories and, more importantly, the highest rated variable in the entire study was Classroom Management, which included variables dealing with the active participation of students and student awareness of learning goals and expectations.

Quantity of Instruction was rated the second-highest subcategory in the Classroom Instruction and Climate Variables category and included three variables related to time spent on direct instruction, time spent on homework, and length of the school day.

How students and teachers interact with each other was noted to be very important based on the high ratings of 17 related variables. These variables characterized a classroom where teacher and students interact cooperatively and in which students are involved in classroom decision making, work with several classmates, share common interests and values, and pursue cooperative goals.

Overall, findings related to Classroom Instruction and Climate Variables indicate that instruction which is organized, academically oriented, and has applications students find meaningful, along with an emphasis on self-monitoring of comprehension and student responsibility, leads to more learning.

In this study, Wang, Haertel, and Walberg found that a large number of variables are moderately related to learning outcomes and that schooling processes respond to a multitude of influences interacting in kaleidoscopic patterns. Although conventional wisdom maintains that quality of schooling is of little importance compared to out-of-school factors, this study suggests that from kindergarten through twelfth grade, across a range of content areas and educational contexts, quality and quantity of instruction are roughly equal in importance to student characteristics and out-of-school variables.

References

Wang, M. C., Haertel, G. D., & Walberg, H. J. (1990). What influences learning? A content analysis of review literature. Journal of Education Research, 84(1), 30-43.

Figure 1. Six categories of variables and their average (mean) importance in relation to school learning.

Mean Score on a 3-Point Scale