K-12: A new formula for success

Here's how you fix what's wrong with K-12 education.

Heard that before?

How is it we put so much energy into reforming K-12 education without ever getting it where we want it?

It might be that we keep pursuing the wrong solutions.

W. Norton Grubb, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating that.

Grubb, an economist, published his findings in a book called "The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity."

I asked him why he thought his book was different from the annual avalanche.

"There are a couple of puzzles in education reform that have never been solved," he said. His book addresses them.

"First, why is it so difficult to link money to outcomes?" There are lots of examples of programs that spend more money without getting better results, he said.

Second, what works? If more money isn't the answer, what is?

Grubb says money is important, you need a basic level of it, but there are other resources that affect outcome.

A huge problem in education reform is that people get stuck arguing about money and class size, class units, teacher credentials, and test scores — things that can be reduced to numbers and easily measured.

What gets left out are critical attributes that are more difficult to get at, "compound, complex and abstract" factors.

Those include teaching approaches, school culture and stability, tracking systems. Resources that he says must be "constructed by school leaders and teachers working cooperatively with one another."

Grubb draws his conclusions from studies of schools that have dramatically improved outcomes for their students.

And he makes extensive use of data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, which followed a national sample of students from eighth grade in 1988 through 2000 when most had been out of high school for eight years.

So he had much more than a couple of test scores to go on, and that depth infuses his analysis.

That shows in his discussion of race and equity issues.

The achievement gap actually gets worse as students move through school, falling further behind because in early grades they didn't get the skills higher levels build on.

Many Latino and black students are hurt by ineffective teaching, low-quality curriculum tracks and detrimental school climates. He also cites the way in which discipline is applied, "the tendency to ignore racial-minority students, lower expectations and various forms of disparagement."

All of this is compounded by poverty.

Grubb writes, "In the United States, then, we have created a vicious circle between education inequality and social and economic inequality, each contributing to the other."

Grubb notes that many studies have shown that money and class size matter a little, teacher experience is weakly associated with student performance, but family matters heavily.

That suggests a need for more emphasis on early education and parent education.

That's one of the recommendations a state task force report delivered to the Legislature this session. Maybe people are starting to see beyond numbers.

There is no single magic bullet, but shifting focus from what's easy to count to what really counts is a good first step.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.