Chubb, John E. & Loveless, Tom (Eds.). (2002). Bridging the Achievement Gap

	Chubb, John E. & Loveless, Tom (Eds.). (2002). Bridging the Achievement Gap. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press. Pp. 236 $46.95     ISBN 0-8157-1401-7 Reviewed by Patrick McQuillan Boston College June 7, 2003 A Limited Perspective on How to Promote Greater Educational Equity: Review of Bridging the Achievement Gap This work represents an effort by John E. Chubb and Tom Loveless, two fellows from the Brookings Institute, to examine key issues linked to the longstanding achievement gap in American public education, a gap in which "[t]he average black or Hispanic student, in elementary, middle or high school, currently achieves at about the same level as the average white student in the lowest quartile of white achievement" (p. 1). And they certainly achieve this end, as the authors in this collection examine many central strategies and important topics linked to bridging this gap. Further, in their introductory chapter the editors maintain that the strategies for bridging the achievement gap presented in this work "span the ideological spectrum. [As] both liberals and conservatives can be counted as their advocates" (p. 9). While the chapters explore a range of strategies for bridging this gap, as someone inclined toward the liberal end of that continuum, I don't see them spanning the ideological spectrum. This collection has a distinct political orientation, not to imply the scholarship is poor. Far from it. But in my view this collection emphasizes quantitative data and statistical analyses. It promotes market-based approaches to school reform, both implicitly and explicitly. And teachers and students play a very small role, at best, in any chapter. Their voices are largely absent from this collection. They are mainly the numbers from which some authors propose their hypotheses. That isn't spanning the ideological spectrum; it is sitting pretty much right on top of the neoconservative point of view. That said, once more let me emphasize that this is solid research, focused on important topics, aimed at addressing a critical shortcoming of our educational system. It just doesn't span the political spectrum. Consequently, there are lots of ideas and points of view that are not considered at all in this work, and this has implications for the overall utility of the collection. The book begins with the editors presenting a theoretical overview of the causes and consequences of the achievement gap and then outlining the chapters included in the collection. In the second chapter, "Would Smaller Classes Help Close the Black-White Achievement Gap?" Alan Krueger and Diane Whitmore conduct a statistical analysis of the impact a class size reduction strategy, Tennessee's Project STAR, had on the nearly 12,000 African American and white students involved in the study. They found that, while all students achieved at higher levels when in smaller classes, the benefits largely dissipated for white students as they progressed through school. But they endured for African Americans, which thereby lessened the achievement gap and offered statistical validation for the benefits of having a smaller class size, at least in the early elementary grades (K-3). In the third chapter, "Voucher Programs and the Effect of Ethnicity on Test Scores," Paul Peterson and William Howell review recent studies of the impact voucher programs have had on U.S. education. Based on statistical analyses, the authors maintain that, for African American students, attending a private as opposed to a public school led to an improvement in test scores that was "moderately large" (p. 54). However, "no significant differences were found between the test score performance of [Latino and white] students who switched from a public to a private school" (p. 53). Chapter four offers an overview of the Success for All (SFA) school reform program, an impressive restructuring initiative aimed at promoting broad, institutional change, "from curriculum and instruction to parent involvement, provisions for children experiencing difficulties, and assessment" (p. 77). The program, first piloted in Baltimore in 1987, now includes about 1600 schools in 48 states and serves nearly one million students. The architects of SFA and authors of the chapter, Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden, describe the program's features, document its membership and regional presence, and conclude with an array of statistical data to substantiate the success they have had working primarily with low-income students of color in difficult urban settings. The authors of chapter 5, Alex Molnar, John Zahorik, Phil Smith, Anke Halbach, and Karen Ehrle, focus on the effect reduced-size classes had on low-income, minority student achievement, specifically, their performance on standardized exams in reading, language arts, and mathematics carried out over a three-year period. Overall, as with the study by Krueger and Whitmore, they found that "reducing class size to fifteen students can result in improved performance" for African American students in the primary grades (p. 105). In "High-Stakes Testing, Accountability, and Student Achievement in Texas and Houston," authors Laurence Toenjes, Gary Dworkin, Jon Lorence, and Antwanette Hill document how African Americans, Latinos, and whites have all, over time, achieved at increasingly higher rates on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, and thereby diminished the achievement gap between these groups. Further, they address claims that these gains were achieved, in part, by pushing out students in the ninth grade, before they take the exam. They conclude that the gains are real, not a product of unethical coercion of underperforming students. Chapter six, "Schools That Work," by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, is by far the most qualitative, classroom- and school-based study in the collection. This study moves back and forth between the classroom of Rafe Esquith, a fifth grade teacher in inner-city Los Angeles whose students post impressive gains across the academic spectrum, and two Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools, one in the Bronx, the other in Houston. In fact, Esquith was the inspiration for the founding of KIPP, and practices and policies employed in his classroom are now being implemented in the two KIPP schools. In these case studies, one sees the critical importance of setting a distinct ethos focused on "diligence, thoroughness, and self-discipline" (p. 146) that is widely embraced within a school, holding students to consistently high standards, and simply asking students to "take responsibility for their own lives" (p. 150). Clearly, students in these schools are asked to do more than most urban school children and, based on this chapter, they respond to the challenge in impressive ways. Chapter seven, by David Klein, a university math professor who spent time in the Los Angeles County Office of Education, examines math and literacy achievement in three high-poverty southern California elementary schools that serve many students of color. Klein touts the work of the female principals at these three schools and highlights their curricular focus on solid content and basic skills. For instance, students in these schools cannot use calculators, whole language instruction is not allowed, and non-native-English-speaking students are taught through immersion classes not bilingual education. In line with a theme that runs through a number of chapters, this study too emphasizes the importance of having high expectations for all students. In fact, Klein challenges what he considers to be a series of invalid assumptions regarding gender differences in mathematical understanding, that "males for example learn better deductively in a competitive environment" (p. 165), and cites such facile explanations of student math failure as a common rationale for the "creation and widespread use of low-quality mathematics textbooks and curricula" (p. 165). He concludes with a series of three proposals for math reform: (1) establish high quality standards for all grades; (2) create textbooks that align with these standards; and (3) ensure that teachers have sufficiently high knowledge of math to teach to the standards. In chapter 8, "Tracking and the Achievement Gap," Samuel Lucas and Adam Gamoran examine the question of whether race/ethnicity has an impact on student tracking. After presenting data on achievement gaps between whites and African Americans and whites and Latinos, and somewhat to my surprise, asserting that African Americans, Latinos and other nonwhites "were more likely than whites to enter the college track" (p. 181), the authors inject a fourth ethnic group for consideration, Asian Americans. Because these students are disproportionately able to gain access to higher tracked courses, the authors conclude that "race matters, even though the advantaged racial group is Asians, not whites" (p. 188). One aspect of this study that may be of particular interest is how the authors explicate the complexities of what "tracking" means. That is, must your track apply to all courses, or are students likely to be in different tracks for different classes? If so, how does one characterize their "track?" The authors conclude that a "more direct way of identifying the structural aspects of tracking is by examining the courses in which students have enrolled" (p. 175), which may seem self-evident but which has often not been the case in studies of student tracking. In the final chapter, "The Role of Federal Resources in Closing the Achievement Gap," Ann Flanagan and David Grissmer take a wide angle view of the achievement gap. Disaggregating NAEP data by race, region, and locality, the authors find the most extensive gaps in the Midwest and Northeast, as rural and suburban students in these areas perform at the level of world-class standards, while urban students, most of whom are low-income students of color, have some of the lowest scores in the nation. Drawing out the practical implications of their findings, the authors propose that the federal government intervene to address inequities in funding across the states, direct more funds toward research and development on "children and education" (p. 219), and work to improve teacher quality by adopting special benefit packages for new teachers much like those used by the U.S. military to retain soldiers. Overall, this collection examines various key issues linked to the achievement gap. In many cases, the chapters provide a very clear sense for what happened: "These students progressed this much on this exam over this time period." The largely quantitative data support their claims and, in the present political climate in which the White House promotes "rigorous, scientific research" and much of the public is skeptical about the performance of the public school system, this approach seems wise. However, as my initial comments regarding the ideological inclinations of this collection imply, the chapters don't explain everything. There are important and glaring gaps in this collection. In the introduction, for instance, the editors acknowledge that the "book's success stories primarily feature programs at the elementary school level " (p. 9). Indeed, we hear little about successful reforms at the secondary level, and secondary school students appear only as statistical indices in three chapters. Otherwise, secondary schools are totally absent. Yet at the secondary level the achievement gap becomes most pronounced. Given the book's focus, greater attention to secondary schooling seems warranted. Teachers receive even less attention than secondary schools. This is another tremendous oversight. Although one chapter highlights the efforts of an inner-city Los Angeles teacher, no other teacher is heard in any chapter. Since the book intends to address the achievement gap, in my opinion these persons must be central to any enduring solution. Students too are largely excluded in this collection, although the cover does ironically feature a picture of a student working diligently, pencil in-hand. While we learn how various reforms have impacted measures of student achievement that can be standardized, we have no idea what any student thinks about these reforms. No student voices are heard, except for occasional one-line statements in the chapter on "Schools That Work" that affirm whatever point the authors want to make. In fact, Peterson and Howell base their statistical analyses of the impact of vouchers on what parents say their students think about various school practices. Having interviewed considerable numbers of students and parents in our very age-segregated society, it is clear that these two groups often see the world quite differently. If the goal is to the bridge the achievement gap, and teachers and students are the persons who must inevitably enact this change on a day-in and day-out basis, it seems both illogical and disempowering to exclude them from this entire work. The other shortcoming of this collection derives from its quantitative focus. Even though the authors offer specific insights into certain reforms and certain aspects of reforms, the reader hears little about the "why" behind any such developments. For example, while Krueger and Whitmore maintain that African American students achieved at a faster rate in smaller classes, the authors admit, "The question of why African American students in reduced-size classes achieved at a faster rate than white students. . . has not been researched" (p. 107). Likewise, in the study of high-stakes testing in Texas the reader learns of rising achievement test scores but hears nothing about the cause of this rise. Are teachers teaching to the test and ignoring those subjects, such as art, music, and social studies, that aren't on the exam? Are students working harder? Or are they taking more rigorous courses? The authors offer no insight into these important questions. In similar fashion, the chapter on Success for All is focused on aggregate test scores and never offers a picture for what reform looks like on a routine basis. SFA program description is relegated to a sidebar. And in their analysis of voucher programs, Peterson and Howell readily admit, "All that we know is that along some dimension, the impact of the switch from public to private school for African Americans was greater than for Latinos" (p. 64). In essence, these authors are confident in their findings but uncertain as to their cause. This makes me question the utility of the research, as one is left uncertain as to the precise mechanism by which change emerged. Thus, how might one replicate or enhance the reform? In closing, let me reiterate: Much of this is important research. But from my point of view, it has been undertaken from a decidedly political point of view that values quantitative data and market-based reform and largely excludes the messy and confusing perspectives of teachers and students. Ultimately, for the achievement gap to be closed, these persons will have to be part of the solution and we will need to understand not only what works, but why certain reforms are effective. As so many important questions remain unanswered, the absence of qualitative data highlights the need for complementing quantitative data with qualitative research. Should the Brookings Institute choose to publish a second volume focused on the achievement gap, I strongly encourage them to expand their focus. The topic may well be the most pressing issue facing U.S. public education. To remedy this situation we need not only statistical validation of what works, but qualitative insights into why these reforms are effective. About the Reviewer Patrick McQuillan Lynch School of Education Boston College Email: mcquilpa@mail.bc.edu Patrick McQuillan is an Associate Professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. His research focuses on educational reform and urban schooling. Of late, he has worked primarily with small schools and small school conversions from larger comprehensive high schools.