I wrote elsewhere on this page that according to this study, there is no determinable correlation between total education spending and pupil performance. In order to raise performance in low-income schools, we do not need more money to do so, but a more rational, results-oriented use of funds, along with a greater level of autonomy for good teachers that demonstrate good results. The poorest districts are often, though not always, those within large inner cities which are saddled with layers of administrative bureaucracy and government. Some good teachers like Jaime Escalante break through the red tape with the help of lenient principals, but the normal situation among poor inner-city districts is that politically-connected bureaucrats, most of whom are incompetent at teaching, end up running the system. They set the curriculum and rules under which teacher and student performance invariably suffers.
Here is a large excerpt from an old but still relevant LA Times piece on what works (and what doesn't) in low-income schools in the LA area. Note the focus on curriculum. Since these schools all hail from an equivalently low economic status, the issue is clearly not a difference in educational funding but a difference in educational methods.
MATH LESSONS: BEYOND RHETORIC, STUDIES IN HIGH ACHIEVEMENT By David Klein Los Angeles Times Sunday, February 11, 2001
Schools with low-income students tend to have low test scores. Low academic achievement, especially in mathematics, is often one of the consequences of poverty. Nevertheless, some schools beat the odds.
Bennett-Kew Elementary School in Inglewood is an example. At Bennett-Kew 51% of the students are African American, 48% are Latino, 29% are not fluent in English and 77% of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a standard measure of poverty in schools. Yet test scores at Bennett-Kew require no excuses. The average third-grader at Bennett-Kew scored at the 83rd percentile in mathematics on the most recent Stanford Achievement Test, double the score for Los Angeles Unified School District.
In the summer of 2000, the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, commissioned me to find three high-achieving, low-income schools in the Los Angeles area, and to write a report about how they teach math. That report is available from www.mathematicallycorrect.com. In addition to Bennett-Kew, the report describes William H. Kelso Elementary School, also in Inglewood, and Robert Hill Lane Elementary School in Monterey Park, part of LAUSD. Students at these outstanding schools also exhibit unusually high achievement in mathematics despite modest resources.
What accounts for the high academic achievement of these schools? Can their successes be replicated?
For starters, consider how they are alike. [In all three schools,] direct instruction, as opposed to "student discovery," is the primary mode of instruction. All three schools focus on basic skills as prerequisites to problem solving and understanding of concepts. Calculator use is rare or nonexistent. Faculty at all three schools are well-coordinated and work together. Principals at these schools are strong leaders, and they are careful to hire dedicated teachers. The principals have found that noncredentialed teachers are sometimes better than credentialed teachers. All three schools have programs that provide remediation, and the principals closely monitor student achievement. But the most important characteristic of all three schools is that students are held to high expectations. The principals were adamant about high expectations and dismissive of excuses.
These days almost everyone uses buzzwords like "high expectations." But Nancy Ichinaga, the former principal of Bennett-Kew and now a member of the California State Board of Education, took her students beyond the rhetoric of these words to their actual substance. The same may be said for retired principal Marjorie Thompson of Kelso and principal Sue Wong of Lane Elementary.
What prevents hundreds of L.A. schools from following suit? Part of the answer is that ideology trumps common sense in LAUSD. School administrators have long believed that "learning styles" are strongly correlated with race and gender, and that "dead white male math" is just not appropriate for minority students. As a consequence, the LAUSD board decided last year to prevent its elementary schools from buying the successful but traditional math program used at Bennett-Kew, called Saxon Math.... So, what has LAUSD deemed appropriate for minority students? LAUSD last year left hundreds of schools saddled with vacuous calculator-based, anti-arithmetic programs like MathLand, which is not even remotely aligned to the [standards] upon which students are tested....
Perhaps the worst blunder is yet to come. Instead of focusing on [good standards] written by world-renowned mathematicians at Stanford University, LAUSD Supt. Roy Romer is now promoting standards [which are] faddish, low level and incoherent.....
School board members should put an end to the continual bombardment of students and teachers with the latest education fads.
David Klein ([email protected]) is a Professor of Mathematics at Cal State Northridge
Achieving success in low-income districts comes down not to an equivalence of funding to wealthy neighborhoods but to 1) proper curriculum choices that use proven teaching methods instead of faddish and incoherent PC methods, and 2) genuine care for students -- which almost always comes from local teachers and principals and almost never comes from distant big-city or D.C. bureaucrats. Good teachers are not robots that regurgitate the directives of a distant machine. In terms of effectiveness, proximity tends to trump distance because local love is more responsive than a distant bureaucracy.
As for economies of scale, if teachers are given the autonomy to focus on "what works" instead of "what bureaucrats dictate," then I believe the economies of scale will be achieved more organically and for the right reasons. Ineffective methods will continue to die out ever more rapidly while effective methods will become more ubiquitous and cost-effective, at least among the teachers that care enough about results to find out what the most successful teachers are doing.
Consider the analogy of two Olympic athletes who share a particular sport: If you compare the training methods of one Olympian to another Olympian in the same sport, you'll find a striking similarity in training methods and workouts, regardless of home country -- not because any government dictates those training methods, but because word has spread among coaches and athletes that those methods are the most effective. On the other hand, with an entrenched political bureaucracy pulling strings with what is taught in the classroom, they invariably start pushing ineffective (but politically-correct) teaching methods that often abandon the real-world, scientifically-demonstrated techniques that can demonstrably inculcate automaticity -- which is the very foundation of higher achievement in any field.
Jazz musicians, both rich and poor, know that automation of basic tasks is a foundational requirement for higher-level thinking and creative improvisation. If automaticity is effective for musicians and athletes, regardless of funding, why do we focus our attention on educational funding over educational techniques? My point is, with a decent teacher and the right curriculum that focuses on results, you can learn from ratty 30-year-old used textbooks in a poor run-down shack and still run mental circles around some rich kid with a calculator in Massachusetts. Regardless of the utility of mental abacus training, these kids will never be intimidated by STEM subjects when they reach higher education. They've already gained confidence that even the lowest performer among them has the power of mental mastery... all with a fraction of the funding of even our poorest schools.
As long as a most basic low level of funding is present, better methods will always trump bigger funding. That's one of the reasons why we're not looking at a Jeb Bush wall-street-funded presidency. Yes, everything requires some money, but on the whole, techniques trump spending, regardless of the endeavor. Recall that Jimi Hendrix's first guitar was only $5.
I apologize again to everyone for the ridiculously long post.