It’s very easy to see how a totally dysfunctional environment could negatively impact students, whereas it’s a little more difficult to tease out the additional impact on students once the basics are in place.
There may be exceptions to the null hypothesis on the extreme down side. That is, the very worst parents, the very worst teachers, and the very worst schools might have an adverse effect on young people that is causal, significant, long-lasting, and replicable.
I think I read that peer quality – working through mechanisms of social group psychological influence – is a big enough deal that even a few bad apples can spoil the bunch. At schools with the worst peers, I find it plausible that even talented students with natural aptitude can go down a path that negates their gifts. I met a few of these in the military.
Of course, peer quality is not equivalent to peer test scores and is both hard to measure and difficult to disaggregate from other features of the local school and students.
Arnold:
Have you ever come across the following quote from Edward Gibbon:
“But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. ”
(https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Decline_and_Fall_of_the_Roman_Empire)
Charters on average don’t raise test scores, No Excuses schools raise test scores but have no impact on income.
This is easily explained by what I call the false god of elementary test scores. For over 30 years, education reform efforts have been on elementary school, in the believe that getting kids up to speed by 8th grade will get them ready for high school. They forget that the intellect that needs the force feeding of No Excuses in order to get anywhere near 8th grade ability is not the same as the intellect that can watch TV and eat Crispy Cocoa Puffs every day and be at 8th grade level by 4th grade.
So what has been documented for years is that KIPP, Success Academy, and Rocketship students just aren’t doing remarkably better in high school. Their SAT scores are indifferent or worse. Their college completion levels are no better than the kids of similar abilities who didn’t go to KIPP–even though KIPP has basically an alumni program in which elite schools give preference to KIPP kids.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/random-thoughts-on-the-idiocy-of-vam/
Notice, of course, that KIPP hasn’t had particularly good results in high school charters. In fact, they don’t even try them that much unless they ruthlessly skim and cream. .
High school is much harder. All that no excuses schools are doing, at best, is taking motivated kids, teaching them longer, and stuffing in enough information to get them test scores equivalent to the grade level of kids who don’t need all that extra help. And then off they go to high school and lose it again.
Education Realist wrote:
“The intellect that needs the force feeding of No Excuses in order to get anywhere near 8th grade ability is not the same as the intellect that can watch TV and eat Crispy Cocoa Puffs every day and be at 8th grade level by 4th grade.”
= – = – = – =
This is well said. Years ago I became a fan of the education realist, and it’s because of sentences like that.
What changes in high school? I don’t think it’s just the level of academic demands, but it’s something more.
High school requires more foresight, more planning, more stamina, and more of what Bruce Charlton would call conscientiousness (finishing and handing in lab reports). At least that’s my recollection.
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2012/08/reliable-but-dumb-or-smart-but-slapdash.html
And then in college it gets more so–getting out of bed and getting to class, starting assignments early, choosing friends who will not steer you in the wrong direction (even more so than in high school).
I’m just thinking out loud.
i also wonder about the role of heavy discretionary reading. in the late 70s, some of my fellow junior high school students were reading _the Hobbit_ and then _the Fellowship of the Ring_ in 6th of 7th grade. And not under duress, but for fun.
Robert Sternberg has written (let me paraphrase) that “heavy discretionary recreational reading is for white people,” especially middle or upper middle class white people. Among ghetto dwellers, only the most socially marginal people want to sit with their nose in a book (if I recall Sternberg’s summary of ethnographies on the topic).
I’m guessing it’s the heavy discretionary reading, and not just the dinner table conversations, magazines and newspapers, (and not even the genes) that leads some people to become proficient, effortless readers, which opens up new worlds in school and reduces the “cognitive load” of all sorts of work in school.
What causes voracious reading? if it’s a dependent variable, what are the independent variables?
What causes “having ones act together” to turn in work in high school, for that matter. ???
I could hypothesize that the worst school environments incubate oppositional behavior–but it’s probably more complicated.