to encourage collaborative scoring of student work in order to deliver consistent expectations of students and reliable scoring by teachers provides time in staff meetings and collaborative team meetings to accomplish those important tasks. That means that the focused leader is deciding not only that collaborative scoring is vital but also that competing activities in those meetings—like the primitive practice of making verbal announcements—will be discarded. While many leaders claim to value focus, few can articulate how they will save time by discontinuing announcements, stop the expectations that texts and emails be responded to within minutes of receipt, and ban classroom activities—such as twenty-year-old word search puzzles—that have zero educational value. When leaders decide what to stop doing, teachers know that they and their time are respected.
Argument 5: “Results Are Distorted Because the Criteria for Success Are Too Low”
Many studies of high-poverty schools’ success sometimes receive criticism because readers claim the schools’ standards for success are too low and not reflective of success in the real world. For example, the New York Regents exam provides a four-point scale for students, and a score of three or four is regarded as passing (Pondiscio, 2019). It could be argued that the bar should be higher, but the plain fact is that only a minority of urban schools in New York meet the standard of a three. In the original equity and excellence research (Reeves, 2004), the criterion for meeting standards is only at the basic level, which was the criteria at that time used by the state. Some critics have approached me in meetings and argued that this bar is too low to count as success. But in that review of 135 high-poverty schools, only seven met the basic criteria. Few people argue against setting the bar high for student achievement with classroom expectations to match, but when only seven of 135 schools meet a criterion, it seemed to me that it was, to put it mildly, evidence of comparative success. Thus, these U.S. schools met the state criteria at a far higher level than most schools with similar demographic characteristics. But the criticism is nevertheless well taken. In many states, students can score only 40 percent of the answers on the test correctly and still be labeled proficient. Part of the flaw in descriptions of proficient is that proficiency is a moving target. Even in states claiming a commitment to standards-based education for more than two decades, some change the cut scores—the percentage of correct answers the state deems adequate—every year. If too few students and schools do well, then the state lowers the cut score. If too many of the students and schools do well, then the state raises the cut score. This procedure is precisely the opposite of standards-based assessment. Safety professionals do not, for example, relax or strengthen the criteria for left-hand turns for teenage drivers or safe landings for pilots based on annual variations in other drivers’ or pilots’ performance. The standard is the standard. This is also a reason the best and most reliable measurements of student achievement are based on consistent criteria during the same year in a class with largely the same students, teacher, curriculum, and assessments. Although this emphasis on consistency is imperfect, it is far superior to attempts to draw inferences about student success when the tests and criteria for proficiency change from one year to the next, and when the students compared are also different from one year to the next.
In the absence of a national assessment of student performance, accompanied by a systematic analysis of teaching and leadership practices in every school, the best data that we have is that provided by districts and states. This leads to inevitable variation about what success really means. While that is a legitimate concern, it does not deny the fact that when the same assessment is given to a wide variety of students in the same subject and same grade with the same socioeconomic status, some do better than others. The explanation is neither money nor zip code, but teaching and leadership practices. The United States does provide the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), labeled the “Nation’s Report Card,” but it offers nothing in the way of school-by-school analysis of instructional and leadership practices.
Argument 6: “The Funding Is Higher for Successful Schools”
It is true that successful high-poverty schools often have higher levels of funding than other schools without high populations of students from low-income families. This is almost always due to their eligibility for Title I funds, which the U.S. Department of Education allocates to all high-poverty schools. One goal of equity and excellence research was to ensure the findings would transfer to all schools, so our methodology included carefully monitoring the levels of per-pupil funding. By doing this, the successful and unsuccessful schools under review had nearly identical per-pupil funding. As a result, readers can implement the findings with confidence that the differences in success are, in fact, due to changes in teaching practices and not due to a particularly high level of funding.
Because federal Title I funds are distributed on the basis of the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, it is not unusual to find high-poverty schools and districts with higher levels of per-pupil funding than schools which are not eligible for Title I funds because they serve a more affluent population. On the other hand, more affluent schools benefit from a higher residential property tax base, and therefore enjoy economic advantages. But whatever the source and rationale for funding, the consistent findings of the research cited earlier in this book is that while money is important for schools, money alone is not the variable that determines student success. High-poverty schools benefit not only from Title I funds but also from a plethora of grants and special allocations designed to support one initiative after another. This funding creates the illusion of prosperity because these schools are flooded with people and programs all designed with good intentions. But the reality is the schools are fragmented in so many different directions that administrators cannot monitor effective implementation of the programs, and the teachers do not have time to focus on any single program in order to provide effective implementation. The key to success is not funding; it is in the specific implementation of carefully selected teaching practices.
Argument 7: “Successful Schools Cherry-Pick Students”
An argument frequently levelled against magnet and charter schools is that some, but by no means all, have higher levels of success because they can select, or cherry-pick, their students. Yes, the critics argue, a high percentage of students might be from low-income families (Bambrick-Santoyo, 2018; Pondiscio, 2019). But if the school has a low percentage of special education students or students with significant discipline problems, mental health issues, or learning disabilities, then it cannot be compared to schools with similar student demographics that have significantly greater percentages of students with these same needs. This is a very fair concern, and it is a reason reviewers of successful high-poverty schools case studies should ask questions about the extent of the special education population—Is it similar to or different from the schools it is being compared to? Even if the allocation of students with special needs is identical, however, there is no question that students in magnet and charter schools have parents who made the effort to enter a lottery or otherwise advocate for their children to attend a particular school. As Pondiscio (2019) acknowledges, successful charter schools may not cherry-pick students, but they certainly cherry-pick parents, as the lottery systems on which most of them depend require parents to submit applications, take an interest in their children, and in some cases, make extra efforts to ensure on-time attendance and help students adhere to strict discipline and academic policies that are not always present in traditional public schools. That is almost never the case for children in homeless shelters, living with adults who are not their parents or who otherwise do not take an interest in education. These children are generally left to their own devices for entry into selective schools. The same concern is true for exam schools, where (in Boston and New York, for example) the score on a single exam decides who will be admitted to Boston Latin School or The Bronx High School of Science and who will not (Gay, 2019a; New York Times Editorial Board, 2019). Although the demographics may be similar to non-exam schools, there is no question that if a school starts with the top 1 percent of students in exam-taking ability, that school will show higher degrees of success when the measurement is, most commonly, exam-taking ability.
Of all the criticisms of the research on successful high-poverty schools,
