Why Johnny Can't Teach

Without knowing What works in the classroom, American educators have become fad followers.

Jonathan Marshall from the December 1993 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Teachers at the school get lots of flack from ideologues who teach the latest educational fads at local colleges, Schindler says, so "we have to defend ourselves against the trends." Fortunately, their results are defense enough. "Our program is probably not the answer to all the world’s problems, but all of our children read, and our first-graders are writing really well. Teachers with long experience say they are seeing a big improvement." Jerry Fry, program director for the entire district, says "this is the first time in my career that I’ve been in something that prevents failure. It’s magic. It takes work, but it works."

Slavin devised his program based on years of careful evaluation of teaching programs. A stickler for rigorous research design, he won plaudits from the National Research Council last year for using systematic methods "not un

Uncommon in the natural sciences, but. . . rare in education research and development."

The best evaluations of teaching methods, Slavin argues, have much in common with the experimental design used by medical researchers in testing a new drug. Teachers and students are selected randomly for an "experimental group," which uses the new approach, and a "control group." Both groups are tested before and after implementation of the new method. Ideally, testing continues some years out to see whether any improvements stick or fade with time.

Howard Bloom, an economist at New York University, calls such experimental design "the most powerful existing methodology for measuring the impacts of social programs." Random assignment ensures that factors such as age, education, and race do not bias the results. Of even greater importance, he says, it ensures that experimental and control groups are "comparable in terms of unmeasured factors such as motivation, intelligence, and emotional stability. Therefore, any subsequent differences between outcomes for these groups can be attributed to differences in the treatments to which they were exposed."

Randomized tests are not a panacea. As in all evaluations, there must be some objective criteria of success and a sufficiently long testing period to give the program a real tryout. Political problems sometimes stand in the way. If a new program seems especially promising, says Ricky Takai, a senior Department of Education official, parents and teachers often resent being left behind in the control group, at least until administrators convince them that selection by lottery is fairer than any other method when experimental slots are limited. Another limitation is that the test may indicate only that a program works, but not which of its components count the most or why. Close field observation of actual classrooms is needed to supplement and interpret the results.

Slavin says much educational research does not even come close to these standards. Evaluations are often conducted by the program developer, who tests under optimal conditions by selecting the most enthusiastic teachers and best-motivated students for the program. No comparison groups are used, much less randomly selected control groups; instead classes are simply tested at the beginning and end of the year, and gains in grades or test scores are attributed to the program. Research assumptions and limitations are often poorly documented or ignored altogether.

cumented or ignored altogether. And results are not replicated in other settings before the developers begin beating the drum for the latest fad.

The National Diffusion Network, a government-funded clearinghouse that informs states and local districts of promising new educational methods, seeks to weed out the worst of these research claims. Even so, "their standards are still very low," Slavin charges. "Few of the programs or reports [they endorse] had control groups. There are some 500 projects in the book that are listed as being effective; let me assure you there aren’t 500 methods that really are effective."

If anything, interest in the use of scientific research methods in education is waning, not growing. Instead of investing in large-scale, long-term evaluations of classroom teaching methods, most research today favors impressionistic studies of individual classrooms and teachers. "You have an absurd movement to anecdotal, anthropological studies of classrooms," says Herbert Walberg, a renowned educational researcher at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. "In my view it’s almost anti-science. But two-thirds of the members of the American Educational Research Association would disagree with me."

Funding is also scarce for really good field research. Most federal research money goes to regional research centers that disseminate information rather than oversee careful experiments.

And yet it is sheer folly not to invest the money to fmd out what works. The federal government pumps more than $6 billion a year into so-called Chapter I funds, which aid school districts with sign)ficant numbers of "disadvantaged" students. One of the chief ways local districts use the money is to reduce class sizes–just about the most expensive possible intervention given the cost of hiring extra teachers and building more facilities. Yet strong teacher lobbies with a stake in new hiring promote class-size reduction as the answer to America’s educational needs. As Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, declared, "If we’re serious about improving learning in America, there’s no more important place to begin."

But does it work? For years nearly everyone had an opinion, but nobody really knew until recently because hardly any systematic tests had ever been done to answer the question. Intuitively, it seems obvious that smaller classes should help, yet Japanese students manage to excel in mathematics despite class sizes in the low 40s.

In the mid-‘80s, the Tennessee legislature decided it needed a definitive answer. With help from researchers in the state university system, it appropriated $12 million to carry out a bullet-proof test. (The actual research cost less than $1 million; the rest paid for smaller classes.) Known as Project STAR, the study took 7,500 students in grades K-3 and assigned them randomly to three types of classes: normal ones with 23 kids and a single teacher; normal-size classes that included a teacher’s aide; and classes with only 15 children per teacher. Teachers were also assigned randomly to avoid bias. Careful, consistent testing tracked the children through these classes and into later years.

The results of Project STAR were fascinating and instructive: Students who attended smaller classes made sign)ficant cognitive gains in all subjects, proving for the first time that smaller classes really do aid learning. (In contrast, teacher’s aides did not help academic performance at all.) At the same time, however, the performance gains were modest–well below those achieved by several proven teaching methods, such as mastery learning and cooperative learning, that work well in normal-size classes.

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