Bruce Fuller

Raising School Effects While Ignoring Culture? Local Conditions and the Influence of Classroom Tools, Rules, and Pedagogy

How educators and researchers define and study school effectiveness continues to be shaped by two divided camps. The policy mechanics attempt to identify particular school inputs, including discrete teaching practices, that raise student achievement. They seek universal remedies that can be manipulated by central agencies and assume that the same instructional materials and pedagogical practices hold constant meaning in the eyes of teachers and children across diverse cultural settings. In contrast, the classroom culturalists focus on the implicitly modeled norms exercised in the classroom and how children are socialized to accept particular rules of participation and authority, linguistic norms, orientations toward achievement, and conceptions of merit and status. It is the culturally constructed meanings attached to instructional tools and pedagogy that sustain this socialization process, not the material character of school inputs per se. This article reviews how these two paths of school-effects research are informed by work conducted within developing countries. First, we discuss the school’s aggregate effect, relative to family background, within impoverished settings. Second, we review recent empirical findings from the Third World on achievement effects from discrete school inputs. An emerging extension of this work also is reviewed: How input effects are conditioned by the social rules of classrooms. Third, we illustrate how future work in the policy-mechanic tradition will be fruitless until cultural conditions are taken into account. And the classroom culturalists may reach a theoretical dead end until they can empirically link classroom processes to alleged effects. We put forward a culturally situated model of school effectiveness—the implications of which are discussed for studying ethnically diverse schools within the West. By bringing together the strengths of these two intellectual camps, researchers can more carefully condition their search for school effects.

What School Factors Raise Achievement in the Third World

Within industrialized countries, much is known about the relationship between schools’ material inputs or social practices and pupils’ achievement levels. Less is known about school effects in developing countries. In the Third World, the secular school is often a novel institution, operating in social settings where written literacy and formal socialization are relatively recent phenomena. Therefore, even schools with limited material resources appear to have a stronger impact on academic achievement, independent of pupils’ family background, than within industrialized countries. This optimistic claim is undercut, however, by limitations in how pupil background characteristics have been specified within empirical models. I review 60 (multivariate) studies conducted in the Third World that (a) report on the school’s aggregate influence on academic achievement versus the influence of family background and (b) assess the relative influence of alternative school inputs and organizational practices, pointing to more efficient strategies for raising pupil achievement. A framework is introduced to critically evaluate this existing empirical work and to suggest a second generation of questions that researchers might ask in the future.

Ethnic differences in child care selection: the influence of family structure, parental practices, and home language ☆

Abstract Recent work reveals sharp disparities in which types of children participate in centers and preschools. Enrollment rates are especially low for Latino children, relative to Black and Anglo preschoolers, a gap that remains after taking into account maternal employment and family income. Early attempts to model parents’ likelihood of enrolling their youngster in a center have drawn heavily from the household-economics tradition, emphasizing the influence of cost and family income. Yet we show that, after controlling for household-economic factors, the household’s social structure and the mother’s language, child-rearing beliefs, and practices further help to predict the probability of selecting a center-based program. Children are more likely to be enrolled in a center when the mother defines child rearing as an explicit process that should impart school-related skills—reading to her youngster, frequenting the library, teaching cooperative skills, and speaking English. After taking these social factors into account, ethnic differences in center selection still operate: African American families continue to participate at higher rates for reasons that may not be solely attributable to family-level processes, such as greater access to Head Start centers or state preschools. In addition, the lower center selection rate for Latinos appears to be lodged primarily in those families which speak Spanish in the home, further pointing to how cultural preferences are diverse and interact with the local supply of centers. These findings stem from an analysis of whether, and at what age, a national sample of 3,624 children first entered a center, using discrete-time survival analysis. We discuss how center selection can be seen as one element of a broader parental agenda, linked to parents’ acculturation to middle-class Anglo commitments and involving the task of getting one’s child ready for school.

Early child-care selection: variation by geographic location, maternal characteristics, and family structure.

More than half of all U.S. infants and toddlers spend at least 20 hr per week in the care of a nonparent adult. This article uses survival analysis to identify which families are most likely to place their child in care and the ages when these choices are made, using data from a national probability sample of 2,614 households. Median age at first placement is 33 months, but age varies by geographic region, mothers employment status during pregnancy, mothers education level, and family structure (1 vs. 2 parents, mothers age at 1st birth, and number of siblings). Controlling for these effects, differences by race and ethnicity are small. Implications for studies of child-care selection and evaluations of early childhood programs are discussed.

The Organizational Context of Individual Efficacy

Efficacy—the individual’s perceived expectancy of obtaining valued outcomes through personal effort—appears to yield a variety of important effects in school organizations. Efficacy has been identified as a social psychological antecedent to many individual-level outcomes, such as student performance and teacher effectiveness. Program implementation and evaluation studies also increasingly point to efficacy as a significant determinant of resistance to, or persistence of, organizational interventions. This paper moves from looking at research on individual efficacy as the antecedent to various school outcomes, to the dependent variable linked to characteristics of organizational structure. First, alternative views of the efficacy construct are reviewed, pertinent to varying interpretations of how the same structural feature may differentially influence alternative forms of efficacy. Second, a distinction is made between organizational and performance efficacy. Then, general images of structural determinants of individual efficacy are outlined from existing organizational theory. The paper concludes with specific propositions related to the pattern of interaction between contiguous structural levels which might guide future research and practice on efficacy in school organizations.

Third World School Quality: Current Collapse, Future Potential

Eager to boost literacy, economic growth, and national institutions, Third World governments and international aid agencies have greatly expanded schooling since the 1950s. Enrollments have quintupled since the late ‘50s, from 100 million children to now more than 500 million. The sharp economic decline felt over the past decade throughout the developing world, however, has led to deep cuts in education budgets. Child populations are doubling every 20 years in many countries. Popular demand for primary schooling, as manifest in enrollment rates, continues to skyrocket. This conflict between ever-rising enrollments and falling resources is severely eroding school quality. We detail and illustrate this collapse of educational quality, calling on North American educators to recognize this quiet crisis and to contribute to its remedy. In addition, we map out a strategy for attacking the problem, drawing on the growing body of Third World research and new initiatives coming from international organizations.

Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?

Many policymakers feel pressure to claim that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is boosting student performance, as Congress reconsiders the federal government’s role in school reform. But how should politicians and activists gauge NCLB’s effects? The authors offer evidence on three barometers of student performance, drawing from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and state data spanning the 1992–2006 period. Focusing on the performance of fourth graders, where gains have been strongest since the early 1970s, the authors find that earlier test score growth has largely faded since enactment of NCLB in 2002. Gains in math achievement have persisted in the post-NCLB period, albeit at a slower rate of growth. Performance in many states continues to apparently climb. But the bar defining proficiency is set much lower in most states, compared with the NAEP definition, and the disparity between state and federal results has grown since 2001. Progress seen in the 1990s in narrowing achievement gaps has largely disappeared in the post-NCLB era.

What is “appropriate practice” at home and in child care?: Low-income mothers' views on preparing their children for school

Abstract In this qualitative, longitudinal study, multiple interviews were conducted over 3 years with 14 low-income single mothers (4 White, 6 Black, and 4 Latino). The women talked about socialization goals for their preschoolaged children as well as their views concerning the role of mother and the role of child care providers in attaining those goals. A central objective for all mothers was preparing their children to succeed in school. Most of the women expected their childs provider to engage in didactic lessons aimed at teaching basic literacy and numeracy skills. However, they all viewed other teacher-structured activities as important (e.g., art, music, cooking, field trips, and book reading). Most did not see play as being related to learning, although they acknowledged the emotional and physical benefits of play. These womens views of learning were not entirely congruent with the constructivist position of many early childhood educators, nor were they narrowly defined solely in terms of academic skills. They were receptive to information from child care professionals and other “experts” when these perspectives furthered their own goals for their children. Their views about preschool learning were linked to other cultural models of childrearing including respecting authority, contributing to ones family or community, and differentially allocating responsibility for teaching to parents or to teachers.

How Textbooks Affect Achievement in Developing Countries: Evidence From Thailand

For the past decade, researchers have documented the effects of textbooks on achievement in developing countries, but no research has explored the mechanisms that account for this contribution. This paper analyzes longitudinal data from a national sample of eighth-grade mathematics classrooms in Thailand and explores the effects of textbooks and other factors on student achievement gain. The results indicate that textbooks may affect achievement by substituting for additional postsecondary mathematics education of teachers and by delivering a more comprehensive curriculum.

Market Failure? Estimating Inequality in Preschool Availability.

Activists within education and family-policy circles are debating two questions: Is the overall availability of preschools and child-care centers sufficient, and is supply distributed equitably? These issues grow more salient as demands on an already fragile preschool “system” intensify: Head Start spending has climbed, rising interest in “school readiness” prompts concern over preschool distribution and quality, and welfare reform will boost enrollment pressure. We report on two studies that employ differing levels of analysis to better understand the distribution of preschool availability. Study 1 examines distribution among 100 counties nationwide, revealing clear inequalities in availability associated with county wealth and demographic features. Study 2 analyzes zip-code-level data for Massachusetts, showing more similar levels of supply in low-income and affluent neighborhoods. In between we find lower availability in working-class and some middle-income communities. Together, the two studies show that the degree of distributional equity varies among states and locales, conditioned by levels of household income, parental education, family structure, and the surrounding policy environment. Assertive government action has yielded progress toward distributional equity. Carefully targeted efforts to reduce access inequality also would conserve resources to help improve preschool quality.