these situations, the students are different, but the curriculum, assessments, time allocation, schedule, and teacher are the same. Finally, in the third case, the teacher might compare her results with the results of colleagues with similar students who did not change professional practices. Such studies allow for minimal variables and, hence, enable the teacher to draw powerful, generalizable conclusions about the effects of the professional practice she changed.
Every school and system, no matter how small or large, can conduct systematic comparisons like these. Teachers do not require a federal research grant, university evaluators, or any special expertise. Reframing Teacher Leadership to Improve Your School (Reeves, 2008b) provides a number of systematic comparisons examples at the elementary, middle, and high school levels.
Level 5: Preponderance of the Evidence
The apex of the research-type levels is when different researchers, operating independently using different research methods and working with subjects in different parts of the world, come to strikingly similar conclusions. For example, professionl learning facilitator Jenni Donohoo’s (2017) synthesis of research finds that teacher efficacy is strongly related to gains in student achievement. John Hattie and colleagues also cite collective teacher efficacy as a powerful variable related to student results (Waack, n.d.). My own quantitative analysis of more than two thousand U.S. and Canadian schools places teacher efficacy at the top of the influences of student achievement over the course of three years (Reeves, 2011b). Qualitative researchers who engage in deep observations and case studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). When focusing on level 5 research, we move away from the claims of dueling experts. Some of the reasons teachers may be cynical about education research are because “You can always find an expert to say anything,” and “Today’s claim may be discredited tomorrow,” so they don’t know what to believe. But if several different researchers using different methods in different places substantiate a claim, we are no longer looking at anecdotes or isolated claims, but rather at the preponderance of the evidence. Such research provides compelling evidence for why educators should try implementing a particular change in their schools.
The original 90/90/90 research was a hybrid of what this chapter describes as Level 3: Collective Experience and Level 4: Systematic Comparisons research. But in the second decade of the 21st century, the research on success in high-poverty schools is firmly rooted in Level 5: Preponderance of the Evidence. Different researchers using different methods operating independently have come to very similar conclusions about the elements of success in these schools and, most importantly, the replicability of those findings.
Summary
Advocates of improved teaching and leadership practices are caught in a quandary. When they propound good ideas without evidence, they are guilty of vacuous rhetoric. But even when they have evidence from a variety of sources and methods, they meet the wall of opposition labeled, “But it doesn’t apply to me.” The same argument could perhaps be made against any variety of medical interventions, as the research on pharmaceutical and surgical interventions is all performed on someone aside from the patient for whom those interventions are now recommended. In these cases, patients are wise to discount the experience of a single other patient, but they can often be persuaded based upon a combination of systematic comparisons—patients who survived compared to those who did not—and the preponderance of the evidence. While all research is imperfect, the application of the standards of evidence suggested in this chapter can offer the reader a thoughtful method for separating the most credible research from the rest.
CHAPTER 2
Decide Which Research to Trust
This chapter considers seven common challenges to educational research and offers a respectful reply to each challenge. Specifically, it considers seven arguments for research about success in high-poverty schools and how you might decide whether this research is worthy of your trust. The chapter concludes with a recommendation for locally generated research for the greatest level of credibility with teachers, administrators, and community members.
In the descriptions of the following seven arguments, I rely on extensive conversations with tens of thousands of teachers in fifty states and more than thirty countries. Whether the venue is Topeka or Tasmania, Louisiana or Lusaka, the arguments about research are strikingly consistent.
Argument 1: “The Research Doesn’t Apply to Us”
When the locations of the research are anonymous, it lacks credibility with many teachers and administrators because of the deep suspicion that the participants in the studies are vastly different from the practitioners in their schools. The situation is similar to much of the psychological research performed not on the general population, but on college sophomores taking a psychology class (the students fill out surveys or participate in experiments week after week, all in the pursuit of their professor’s publication). This is also one of many reasons so much psychological research is not replicable (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2019). Similarly, if finding exceptional student performance results in the laboratory schools of universities and colleges, where students are often the children of exceptionally bright and committed graduate students and are only temporarily living on a low income, those results can hardly be labeled representative of the larger population of students from low-income families.
In the original equity and excellence research (Reeves, 2004), by contrast, every school was from public educational systems in the United States, and schools ranged in location from the West Coast (where there were also very high populations of students not speaking English at home), to the Midwest (where there was multigenerational poverty), to the eastern United States (where political upheaval, financial disasters, unemployment, and persistent social ills made for a difficult learning environment for students and a challenging working environment for teachers). None of the schools are exceptional, and none are university lab schools. Indeed, one of the most important elements when selecting schools for the study was they must be similar in every respect to the other unselected schools in the same system—the same union contract, per-pupil funding, teacher assignment policy, and neighborhoods. In other words, equity and excellence schools truly are representative of high-poverty schools across North America. The only differences are in academic achievement and the professional practices teachers and leaders employ to achieve those high levels of performance. It is also important to note that the programs in use did not distinguish the successful schools, but rather the differences were due to the specific actions of teachers and leaders. A consistent theme in the research is that practices, not programs, make the difference for student results.
It is important to regard equity and excellence research as the starting gate, not the finish line. Part II (page 29) of this book addresses what equity and excellence schools do differently, and part III (page 89) describes how they do it, but equally important is the information in part IV (page 137), which requires the continual assessing of implementation through accountability systems. In order to institutionalize the most effective practices for your school or district, it is imperative for you to create a continuous cycle of professional learning that links the causes of academic achievement with the effects. Only in this way will you know, based on data from your students in your school and community, the professional practices most effective for you. I believe equity and excellence research makes an effective case that the practices in the following chapters are strongly associated with improved student achievement. However, I readily acknowledge that the most effective way to sustain effective practice is not merely by reading
