Designing Better Schools for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children

A Science of Performance Model for Research

Stuart McNaughton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415886604
• eBook ISBN: 9781136859168
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can schools be better designed to enable equitable academic outcomes for culturally and linguistically diverse children from communities lacking in economic, political and social power? Putting forward a robust 'science of performance' model of school change based on a specified process of research and development in local contexts, this book:

• lays out the traditions of optimism and pessimism about effective schooling for at-risk students
• reviews the international and national evidence for the effectiveness of schools and school systems in reducing disparities in achievement
• describes the challenges educational research must address to solve the problem of school effectiveness, proposes strict criteria against which effectiveness should be judged, and examines in detail examples where change has been demonstrated
• proposes how researchers, professionals, and policy-makers can develop more effective systems.

Bringing together structural and psychological accounts of the nature of schools, and establishing theoretically defensible criteria for judging effectiveness, this book is a critically important contribution to advancing the science of making schools more effective.

1

ONGOING OPTIMISM,
PERSISTENT PESSIMISM
AND THEIR ROOTS

I am an optimist about educational matters. I realized this by accident. The paper I had given at an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development conference in New Zealand in 1998 on ‘Innovations for Successful Schools’ (McNaughton, 1998), followed one that was a critical analysis of schools using concepts from contemporary sociology. Schools were seen to be hegemonic agencies, necessarily reproducing the inequalities we see in society. In my paper I reported experimental demonstrations of how collaborative partnerships between communities and schools can make a difference to the achievement patterns of students from communities traditionally not well served by schools. The rapporteur observed I had much greater optimism about what schools might achieve than some of my sociologist colleagues.

My paper, based on a developmental psychological analysis of teaching and learning, was optimistic about the potential for schools to resist or even modify the predicted stratification. The other paper was more pessimistic. The psychological and the sociological or structural perspectives reflect an enduring tension in applied theories of development and learning and our critical understanding of the role of schooling. We need to understand this tension and clarify the degree of optimism possible, especially so when the disciplinary lines in current research are becoming more blurred. In this book I propose a science of how to understand the effectiveness of schools from which the design of more effective schools can follow. It is a cautiously optimistic approach from a developmental perspective, which specifically recognizes and draws on the insights of critical pessimism.

The tradition of optimism is reflected in how developmentalists in the 1970s saw a natural progression in developmental research. A prescription for developmental psychology was to engage in description, move on to explanation and thence to ‘optimization’ (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980). This grand vision has some notable success stories. One that has for me a local significance as well as an international history is the noted developmentalist Marie Clay’s (1987), design of the Reading Recovery programme for children making low progress after a year at school. The programme is extraordinarily successful. It is a successful intervention programme as attested to by the US Department of Education on its Clearinghouse web site. It really is the “gold standard” against which other early literacy interventions might be compared. A further demonstration of its success is that it has been developed and redeveloped in, at the time of writing this book, educational systems in six countries. It has been adopted, and in the process adapted, in Australia, Barbados, Canada, Denmark, England, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, the United States and Wales, all of whose local contexts vary in terms of age of entry to school, the types of books used to teach early reading, the qualifications of the teachers and other idiosyncratic aspects of schooling. In 2005, 11,000 New Zealand children were taught the early stages of reading to levels equivalent to peers making normal progress and millions have been so taught worldwide.

As a generic programme of research, the description, explanation and optimization sequence underpinned the development of this highly successful programme. Clay (1987) first studied demonstrably effective teachers to determine the features of their expertise. She next designed and experimentally tested the intervention. She then moved to optimization nationally in New Zealand, working to develop a policy context and an ongoing training regime that would mean the intervention was bedded in across the unique features of both urban and rural schools.

This is a success story. But the move to optimization, in the sense of planned implementation across sites, as Clay (1987) herself learned, is not simple. It is not simple especially in a global context where a balance is required between guaranteeing that the components of the intervention, which are research-based, are put in place with fidelity but flexibily enough to take on board new findings and adapt to local context.

This enthusiasm for optimizing was expressed by theorists early in our traditions. It is captured by John Dewey’s (1915) lectures in 1899 to an audience of parents interested in the University of Chicago’s own experimental Elementary school.

Such a school is a laboratory of applied psychology. That is, it has a place for the study of mind as manifested and developed in the child and for the search after materials and agencies that seem most likely to fulfill and further the condition of normal growth.

(Dewey, 1915, p. 88)

A similar enthusiasm was present in England at the same time. William McDougall (1912) writing about child psychology and education, made similar claims to Dewey with a tone that is almost gleeful about the prospects – “Here then is an immense field for research, the extent and importance of which we are now beginning fully to realize. And it is a field for the psychologist” (p. 139).

Despite such examples as Reading Recovery, the initial optimism of developmental psychology has not been widely fulfilled in relationship to substantial educational change and especially for those students and their communities who need educational change the most.

Who are these communities and children? In successive chapters I will refer, where possible, to specific communities, rather than resorting to the often-used labels of ‘minority’ and ‘disadvantaged.’ These are too broad and often misleading, inaccurate, or carry connotations that denigrate the cultural and linguistic richness of the communities. The question in this book is the degree of optimism possible about what schools can do for those culturally and linguistically diverse children and their communities who are not economically, socially and politically advantaged in Western developed societies. These are children and their communities in different countries from particular indigenous groups, from particular immigrant groups, from particular working groups, from groups whose historical and current lived experiences have positioned them with less access to and less utilization of the panoply of resources for well-being in their society. Current circumstance may have derived from histories of slavery, subjugation or colonization but may derive also from recent patterns of immigration and asylum seeking. When writing more generically, I will refer to the groups of children for whom schools have traditionally been risky places in which to achieve well.

How optimistic can we be about what schools can change in the relative position these communities and their children have? A spectacular test of the applications of our developmental and educational psychological ideas took place in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Across many sites and with many approaches, attempts were made to impact on what was called the ‘poverty cycle’ in attempts to raise the educational achievement of ‘disadvantaged’ children.

There have been arguments about the success of these interventions. In essence these attempts were not as successful as they should have been given the promises. ‘Head Start’ programmes before school had some notable effects but they were limited. ‘Follow Through’ programmes at school also had some notable successes, but were again limited. Effects on measured intelligence were short lived, and the direct impact on academic achievement was limited (Consortium of Longitudinal Studies, 1983). However, important longer-term benefits have sometimes been detected. In subsequent reevaluations and redevelopment of programmes the scientific community has realized that the optimism needs to be tempered and we need to guard against overselling benefits and to be realistic about what can be accomplished (Zigler, & Styfco, 1994). Importantly, this has led to rethinking basic concepts about development, some of which will be reconsidered in this book (Ramey, & Ramey, 1998).

Developmental and educational psychologists have learned a lot from the Head Start exercise and from other optimization types of research since that time. For example, researchers engaged in the school reform interventions in the US are much more guarded in their optimism than their colleagues in the 1960s and are able to be more precise about what is possible. Their data suggest that trying to change schools so that they are more effective with culturally and linguistically diverse students is not easy (Borman, & Dowling, 2006). Gains are often quite small. It takes a considerable commitment, in current estimates about five years of research and development with a school, to meet criteria for being effective, such as accelerated achievement. I will describe these criteria in later chapters.

But the optimism is still there. There is a new set of strong voices that celebrate the potential of an applied developmental science to solve real world problems. The optimists have more humility, greater caution and are better informed than their predecessors, but they remain optimistic.

Others have commented on the optimism of developmental psychology and in its extreme formulations have called it naive. The theoretical psychologist William Kessen (1979) developed this idea in a brilliant essay in his classic “The American child and other cultural inventions.” In that essay he argued that at the birth of modern psychology there were several parents in terms of philosophical traditions. These were buttressed in the United States by three strong themes each positive and inherently optimistic. And each led to a naive view of what is possible.

One was a commitment to science and technology and what they can achieve. There was a belief that we can find the truths, and if only we can provide the right guidance based on these truths to parents and teachers, appropriate development will be assured. Kessen (1979) argues this theme is associated with an underlying ‘Salvationist’ view, captured in the old adage that the ‘child is father to the man.’ But, he argued, the truths are often relative, often legitimizing after the fact of changes that have already occurred, often dependent on other economic and political changes and often appropriate to historical times and places. Without understanding these relativities the guidance is at best naive and likely to be of limited lasting value.

A second was a belief in caregivers and caregiving, in the first instance in mothers and the need for early experience with them. Underlying this theme is a fraught assumption that someone is responsible for development, for good or for ill. The naivety here is in placing the blame for developmental problems at some one person’s (or group’s) door.

The third was a belief in the individual and self-contained children. This implied that the appropriate unit of analysis is the child, and the child and his or her development must be studied in isolation from wider social and cultural forces to discover fundamental principles. It follows too that the individual child should be the focus of our attempts to optimize. Kessen (1979) saw this as conceptually weak because children’s development is embedded in contexts and derives from sources of interaction and patterns of constraints and affordances in those contexts. The former view means a limited focus on where to look for optimizing.

The iconic image of the child as the single unit of analysis is captured in the ‘Skinner box’ for studying behaviour that used rats and pigeons. The box was designed to reduce extraneous factors such as fluctuations in food, temperature, and access to gratification and light; keeping these to a minimum in a controlled environment. The true and basic processes of behaviour and learning then could be studied without contamination. Context was a problem (technically a source of error variance) if it wasn’t controlled and the Skinner box did a superb job of reducing the seemingly extraneous variables. In a science that can explain achievement patterns in schools and develop principles for the design of more effective schools, the unit of analysis has to be context enriched. Indeed, a multifaceted context, including those dimensions that are economic and political, need to be central to the analysis.

Like Kessen (1979), the arguments in this book challenge these beliefs. Collectively the earlier beliefs have supported a scientific approach based on a simplistic view of the physical sciences. We attempted to discover abiding laws that are context free, and then have layed blame on parents, families, and communities (or schools) for their children’s low achievement at school.

Kessen (1979) contributed to a sea change in thinking that led to the idea that children and families are located in cultural and social systems. Children develop within and are a reflection of social, cultural, physical, economic, and political forces that create contexts for development. Even more threatening to developmental science, his central claim was the idea that not only are children cultural inventions, developmental psychology is itself a cultural invention, and we developmentalists, by contributing rationales or even modifications to the practices of childhood and development, conspire in that invention.

This postmodern psychological view does not fatally undermine the optimism in my view. But it radically tempers how optimistic we can be and provides a basis for integrating psychological approaches to the design of schools with the critical structural analysis. In its new forms the developmental psychology of change has found new names. For example, some developmentalists have proposed establishing an ‘applied developmental science’ to recapture the optimization of the earlier definition (Lerner, Fisher, & Weinberg, 2000). The science would recognize the grounded and contextualized nature of children’s development. With interdisciplinary help and better-designed research strategies we would be able to study how historical and contemporary forces, including social and economic policy contexts, create conditions for development. Having studied these we can contribute to the design of new systems.

This book builds on the idea of an applied developmental science summarizing the approach using the concept of a “science of performance”. Atal Gawande (2007) used this term to describe how medical researchers solve real world problems in health to make medical practice more effective. I propose that in addition to having multifaceted models of contexts, we need to understand how development and learning take place, we need to understand also why they vary in the complicated and messy everyday sites of schools, families, and community settings. We need better evidence from the systematic study of effectiveness to design generalizable practices. Our research needs to involve ideas and evidence that are shared between researchers, professionals, community members and policy makers to enable collaboration in the design and implementation of change.

So there is a long history of optimism about how psychology in general, and developmental psychology in particular, might contribute to child rearing and education. The optimism in Western thinking about education can be traced back earlier than the advent of modern psychology. Steven Shapin (1995) in A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth century England, describes the founding of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. The scientists such as Bacon, Boyle, and Newton who established that esteemed society were passionate advocates of discipline-based debate and discussion. Their view was that through scientific conversation, truth seeking, and truth telling, truths could be established. Science could lay the foundation for better education and better societies could be created.

There is an even earlier history leading to this enlightened thinking which can be traced from before the empiricist philosophers and their scientific colleagues back to debates by the Greek philosophers over the nature of permanence and impermanence and the function of education for individual freedom or for political position (Plato, trans. 1984).

This is the optimist part; from where did the more pessimistic view of what schools can achieve come? There are several roots to the view of schools as filtering devices that are iconoclastic and largely impermeable to anyone who is not part of the controlling and powerful communities whose institutions they reflect. One can find the recognition of the significance of social stratification in Plato’s (trans. 1974) arguments about the need to create and control strata for a productive and orderly society. Interestingly, in Plato’s plan (trans. 1974) educational assessment would play a central part in consigning people to their appropriate strata. This becomes in Hobbes’ (1651/1962) view the problem of man’s brutish nature and the need to manage that by solving the problem of a good order. Through Hegel (as cited in Popper, 1952) and his view of the war of nations comes the war of classes, that there is an inevitability about needing to keep order using institutions that control.

Modern writers do not necessarily share the early views of the need to control but there is a basic recognition that that is what schools do. The eminent language and educational theorist Basil Bernstein (2003) wrote about de facto and deliberate stratification through the processes of schooling. The process is inherent in how language signals identity and creates ways of knowing, and classroom teaching filters and selects at least partly on this basis. The French philosopher Bourdieu (1996) uses the powerful concept of ‘cultural capital.’ Children’s knowledge and skills develop through the socialization processes provided by communities and families. Those skills and that knowledge are of various sorts. Some are reflected in and are recognized by schools because they are valued and promoted in schools. That means they have capital, they can be cashed in at school.

The development of the concept of ‘cultural capital’ signals another root, one in Marxist theorizing. Perhaps this is also where the clash with psychological views of the promise of schools was fueled. Marx opposed what he denigrated as psychologism captured in the epigram “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather it is his social existence that determines his consciousness” (as cited in Popper, 1952, p. 89). Marx’s influence on educators’ pessimism comes through his ideas about determinism; what Karl Popper (1952) calls ‘historicist prophecy’ (p. 87). This was the idea that capitalism creates forms of existence that determine forms of consciousness. This is what has led educators in capitalist societies to a more pessimistic view, expressed by Gintis and Bowles (1988) thus:

The transformation of schools cannot proceed without parallel development at the site of capitalist production. Demands for the democritisation of the social relations of education therefore are likely to be effective only in the context of workers demands for the democratisation of the production process – in short the full development of workers’ control.

(Gintis, & Bowles, 1988, p. 30)

But, curiously, the Marxist root is both pessimistic and optimistic at the same time and only partly deterministic. The original position claims that social existence determines consciousness. But it also proposes that it is possible for workers’ consciousness to change, which could enable the structural changes. Marx’s view includes the promise that collectively individuals can act effectively to overcome structures. This resonates for educators with an emancipatory concern, a concern for equity. From where does the change in individual consciousness come; could schools have a role in changing consciousness? This is another way of expressing the tension – in what direction is change possible? Can one change schools to change structures? Or is it necessary to change structures so that schools can change and in doing so create new forms of cultural capital?

As a footnote to this history, Marx’s critique of psychology would now be wide of the mark as more recent psychological views of the nature of learning and development have been profoundly influenced by Russian psychological theorizing, seeing both individual and social and cultural processes as mutually constructive. The proposals in this book are based on this later history of socio-cultural or co-constructivist theorizing about development, learning and teaching that have drawn on the Russian traditions (McNaughton, 1995; Rogoff, 2003; Valsiner, 1994...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Ongoing Optimism, Persistent Pessimism and Their Roots
• 2. Weighing Up the Evidence
• 3. Explaining Our Limitations
• 4. Optimism in the Detail
• 5. Problems For an Optimist – Matthew Effects
• 6. What is Being Effective?
• 7. Summer Learning
• 8. Sustaining Change
• 9. Scaling Up
• 10. Understanding the Contexts for Effective Teaching
• 11. A Science of Performance
• 12. Building More Effective Schools
• References
• Index