Part I: Comparative Orientations

Toward a Science of Comparative Education
On Teaching a 'Scientific' Comparative Education
Defining Comparative Education: Conceptions
A Comparative Study of Outlier Schools in Metropolitan Settings
Other Schools and Ours
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish in Comparative Education
Use and Abuse of Comparative Education
State of the Field
Dependency Theory in Comparative Education
The Darling Young
The Comparative Mind: Metaphor in Comparative Education

Source:  Max A. Eckstein, "A Comparative Study  
of Outlier Schools in Metropolitan Settings," 
Notes on Education.  New York: Institute of 
Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers
College, Columbia University, 8 (1975): 3-5.

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF OUTLIER SCHOOLS IN METROPOLITAN SETTINGS

The projected research project described in this paper is directed by the following questions, theoretical, methodological and pedagogical:

1. Are there exceptional schools, that is, do some schools do better (or worse) than most others in similar socio-economic settings in metropolitan school systems? If so, what explains this?

2. Do particular teacher behaviors or competencies make the difference?

3. How far can such explanations be generalized to the metropolitan context?

4. What is the utility of studying outlying cases rather than averages?
   
   With the writer as a project director and Harold J. Noah as consultant and close associate, the study is an outgrowth of their earlier work on cross-national metropolitan school and social dynamics.¹

Four successive phases are projected for this proposal. The first consists in identifying the outlier schools within given socio-economic communities in metropolitan areas. The second involves describing the schools, both the special characteristics of their surrounding communities and the particular features of the schools themselves, those items usually described as "school inputs". The next, and perhaps most difficult step, is to describe the classroom behavior of teachers (or a sample of them) in the outlier schools in such ways as to permit discrimination between teaching and other behaviors. It is at this point that attention can be given to the hypothesis which first provoked this line of investigation, that what differentiates the outlier schools is a particular dimension of teaching behavior. However, the final phase is crucial: to mount a series of replications in different socioeconomic communities, in different metropolitan areas in North America, and in selected large cities in Western Europe. For, without such replications, the generalizability of findings is severely restricted. When we seek to understand what the schools can or cannot do, given the social inequities of society, urban deterioration, systematic or casual discrimination, we are beset with contradictory evidence and argument. Studies seeking to explain why school achievement differs have shown that by far the largest portion of variance can be assigned to home background of the pupils or socio-economic community of the school. Coleman's contribution to the empirical base for this knowledge² has been complemented by the IEA work,³ a comparative investigation of pupil achievement in seven subjects in twenty countries. The conclusion is inescapable: social background variables are a far more powerful force for variation in school achievement than are those factors amenable to changes in school policy. Though the importance of the social background variables does differ according to the kind of achievement (subject), the age of the student, and the country, the generalization holds true notwithstanding these factors, at least, within the city limits set by the range of variation in school inputs that we have so far observed.

Such research has encouraged the view that the great expectations for ameliorating society's ills by changing educational policies were merely part of a traditional American social myth. Social equity, for example, could not be achieved by reforming the schools but only after devising radical changes in income policy.⁴ Resources poured into compensatory education schemes such as Headstart and Title I projects could not really improve anything; they were merely palliatives, an infusion to prevent things from becoming even worse. The optimistic myth that society would be improved through educational reform, gives way to the determinist notion that schools are passive tools of social and economic forces, and that the processes are unfathomable and uncontrollable. Faith in the potential of reform to deal with some of the school problems in large urban areas has been eroded as much by these research findings as by the immensity of the socio-educational problems themselves. In the United States, as in many Western nations, a majority of the population is now urban, and the problems of metropolitan school systems do not seem to be diminishing.

The Coleman-type study finds that teacher characteristics, school and classroom organization, teaching styles, differential patterns of school staffing, finance, and management are all unimportant relative to the socio-economic background factors. One might argue that the wrong things have been measured, or that an incorrect explanatory model was applied, or that errors of statistical procedure were committed, and that we had better turn our attention back to the philosophers and discard the statisticians. Alternatively, one could conclude that the findings are, on the whole, true and that one can only concede that formal education is inherently a less powerful force than it has been believed to be.

However, without rejecting the results of research mentioned, we still have some logical and empirical bases for assuming that significance attaches to variations in school organization and teaching practice.

While persuaded by the research that on average, school policies and practices are relatively unimportant factors in measured student achievement, exceptional cases may in fact exist. When all the data are assembled for multiple regression analyses, they include some schools which are unusually effective or ineffective. But these exceptions are buried in the results which are conventionally statements of central tendency. Few studies have been made of the "exceptional" school, and fewer still contain data which are usable and free of bias.⁵

One recent study of the Philadelphia school system,⁶ examining the effect of variations in a large number of inputs (measures of school resources and climate) upon growth in student achievement, has concluded that certain variables are quite significantly important for particular groups of students. High achievers, for example, appear to benefit from some items which do not affect average or low achievers (and vice versa); some school inputs are quite important for, say, the poor but not for students in high-income families (or vice versa). In a similar way, a study initiated over fifteen years ago in New York State (the Quality Measurement Project) showed how some local school systems did especially well by their high achieving students or their low-achievers (but rarely both) and how few, if any, systems were successful with students of different socio-economic status: if the system worked well for a wealthier population, it usually worked less well for others -- if it worked well for the poor, it generally did not for the better off. ⁷ The present study seeks to extend research strategies of this type and to pursue further those school features that do make a difference. The intention is to study relationships among social context, school organization, teachers, and outcomes (achievement) in s (achievement) in those big-city schools which, considering their social contexts, exhibit unusually high or unusually low outcomes. In more technical terms, this approach will investigate "outlier" schools, that is, those schools which lie well off the regression plane, not fitting the statements of average tendency.

An important assumption of the projected study is that, while social class variables do explain much of the variation in the outcomes of schooling, they "explain" in only a limited sense. We hold to the fairly simple, but hopefully not simple-minded, view that learning (in the sense of conventionally measured school achievement) is greatly determined by teaching (incidentally one of the few generalizations emerging from the IEA studies which supports this intuitive view is that the more time spent teaching students a given subject and in student study or homework, the more learning occurs, on average). The reason why social class looms so large is that it impedes or enhances the capacity of teachers to teach (as opposed to manipulate, entertain, discipline etc.). While children, regardless of social origin, may all be equally open to learning, responsiveness to being taught, we suggest, is a function of earlier, home-based training, that is, of social origin. We know that when children come to school well-groomed, well-fed, prepared to be taught, socialized in certain ways and with the appropriate values, their school achievement tends to be better than chance would suggest and than their m Once selected as relatively high achieving students, they are likely to improve further still. When children are not thus prepared for schooling, the opposite obtains.⁸ Teachers, too, behave differently according to whether their students are, from the beginning, more or less prepared to learn.

The hypothesis offered here is that, within a given (student) social stratum, some schools are outstanding because their teachers do more (or less) of this set of behaviors called teaching. Thus a second purpose of this study, once the existence of exceptional schools has been established, is to establish whether it is teacher behavior (or teaching competence) which distinguishes these more or less successful schools.

The third basis for this study is the view that comparative research is the foundation upon which educational generalizations may be built. Thus for this work we propose to use a case study approach, performing a series of replications in different socioeconomic settings in New York, then in different metropolitan settings in the United States, and finally in non-U.S. comparable metropolises.

NOTES

1. Max A. Eckstein and Harold J. Noah, Metropolitanism and Education: Teachers and Schools in Amsterdam, London, Paris and New York. New York: Institute of Philosophy and Politics of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1973. [BACK]

2. James S. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Office of Education, 1966; Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., On Equality of Educational Opportunity. New York: Random House, 1972. [BACK]

3. Reference is to over a decade of research by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. [BACK]

4. Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books, 1972. [BACK]

5. George Weber, Inner-City Children Can Be Taught to Read: Four Successful Schools. Washington: Council for Basic Education, Oct. 1971; State of New York, Office of Performance Review, School Factors Influencing Reading Achievement: A Case Study of Two Inner City Schools, March 1974; Robert E. Klitgaard and George R. Hall, "Are There Unusually Effective Schools?" Journal of Human Resources X:1 (1975):90-106; Robert E. Klitgaard and George R. Hall, A Statistical Search for Unusually Effective Schools. Rand Corporation, 1973. [BACK]

6. Anita A. Summers and Barbara L. Wolfe, "Which School Resources Help Learning? Efficiency and Equity in Philadelphia Public Schools," Business Review. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Feb. 1975. [BACK]

7. Samuel M. Goodman, The Assessment of School Quality. Albany, N.Y.: New York State Department of Education, 1959. [BACK]

8. J. W. B. Douglas, The Home and the School. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964: 118. [BACK]