Essential Questions

This morning, Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan is expected to be named Secretary of Education by president-elect Barack Obama. Duncan is a brilliant choice by Obama, as he has experience running the third largest school system in the nation, which has included closing down failing schools, opening new community schools, building bridges with the teachers' unions and fostering the growth of new charter schools. Few educational leaders anywhere have such a history of strong leadership, improving performance and building bridges with parents, teachers and communities.

The Greatest Educational Opportunity
In a US House of Representatives hearing on Improving Public Schools, Duncan made the following observation:

"Tapping the great potential of underprivileged inner-city children represents the greatest educational challenge and opportunity facing our country."

That statement captures why Duncan is such a powerful and effective leader. Everyone sees the challenges educating underpriviled inner-city children (unless they are blind). But few people are able to see, as Duncan does, that these children also represent the greatest untapped potential for problem-solving and meaningful social contribution in this country. With Duncan's approach, he can engage with crisis communities - as he has in Chicago - and involve those children and their families in crafting sustainable solutions.

Community Schools
Another of Duncan's great strengths is his ability to admit and address weaknesses. In the same public school hearing he acknowledged that schools have very often not welcomed parents. We have expected parents to drop their kids off on time and pick them up on time, but have not treated them as the most important stakeholders in the educational process. Duncan's community schools have made steps in the right direction by intentionally welcoming and engaging parents. If Duncan can bring this paradigm to scale, the impact could be enormous.

The Highest ROI
As the new Secretary of Education, Duncan will face a significant challenge. How can he address the needs of families during the most critical time of a child's development: the years before a child reaches school age? In a resource-scarce environment, how can he leverage existing infrastructure to engage communities in education from birth so that children arrive prepared to thrive in community schools? There area host of great organizations around the country doing just this. Parents as Teachers is a prime example. The math is compelling. A significant achievement gap exists before students enter kindergarten, and early intervention saves between $4 and $7 in special education, welfare and incarceration for every dollar spent (that is an ROI of 400 to 700%, not 4-7%). The question for Mr. Duncan is how to cast a compelling vision of early parent involvement as the norm so that herculean rescue efforts are not necessary.

If you want to solve a problem, you need to begin with the right questions. With respect to education, one of the most essential questions is:
What is the most accurate predictor of student achievement?
If it can be identified, and can be influenced, then you can begin to focus on truly transformational solutions. So what is the most accurate predictor of student achievement? According to a report covering 66 studies, reviews, reports, analyses, and books:

"[T]he most accurate predictor of student achievement is the extent to which the family is involved in his or her education."

Family involvement can be influenced, which opens the door wide to real educational change - starting with families.

Are you concerned about social justice? Are you concerned by the "achievement gap"? If you are, then a recent study in brain research may help focus the way forward. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley found detectable differences between low- and higher-income kids in the response of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

"Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult," said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. "We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."

That means that poverty itself cannot be the only issue. There are variables within low income groups that affect brain development.

"This is a wake-up call," Knight said. "It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums."

The "impoverishment" is strongly related to language use, problem solving and creativity. That means that the answers are not far away:

"In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids" can boost prefrontal cortex performance, [study co-author W. Thomas] Boyce said. . . . "[C]hanging developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation. . ."

Silvia Bunge, UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology reflected, "The study is suggestive and a little bit frightening that environmental conditions have such a strong impact on brain development." It may be frightening, or it may be exciting. Since environmental conditions have such a strong impact on brain development, it means that the way to address the roots of educational inequity and poverty is to inform, engage and empower parents. Parents really do matter. The nurture that they provide, particularly during the first five years does have a significant influence on their children's brain development - and therefore on education and social opportunity. The question now is: Do we have the courage to change?

Perhaps more than any author to date, Paul Tough has brought together early childhood research and educational reform history in a way that is accessible for those who are not experts in either of those two fields. Surveying the history of education reform in its primary contours, Tough notes that the Equality of Educational Opportunity report (which came to be known as the Coleman Report, for its lead author, sociologist James S. Coleman), though mandated to demonstrate that educational opportunities in the United States were racially unequal, arrived at further conclusions.

"Coleman and his coauthors determined that a school's financial resources were not the main contributing factor to a child's educational success. It was the child's family background, they said, that made the more significant difference." (Whatever it Takes)

This finding is both common sense, and a political hot potato. Of course the child's family background matters. If you look at a group of families from the same income group, some with a strong value for education and others without, whose children would you expect to excel in school? Not surprisingly, Tough notes that the Coleman report was "greeted mostly with silence or dismissals." Who wants to deal with that hot potato?

An African-American friend who lived through the Civil Rights movement, and attended an educational equity conference with me (and one of the authors of the Coleman Report, Dr. Edward Gordon) pointed out the dynamic that makes this issue so potent. He said, "If parents don't lead, then environment takes over. For the white kids in suburban schools, if their parents are deadbeats, the strong educational environment may sweep them along with the tide. For black kids in urban centers, if their parents aren't involved, their environment is only going to make things worse."

That is why the Coleman Report could be valid in its findings, while not being racist or denying the continuing educational inequities. Funding, while important, was not the main factor. The main factor was the family and the environment in which the family lived. In that respect the findings of the Coleman Report remain both valid and important for addressing the ongoing educational crisis. Do funding inequities continue? Yes. Are they important? Yes. Should they be remedied? Yes. Are they the most important factor? No.

So when are we going to set our eyes on engaging and inspiring parents?

In his excellent book Whatever It Takes, Paul Tough surveys the field of research on education and poverty and draws out the themes that frame the contemporary discussion. In one poignant paragraph he identifies how both conservative and liberal "solutions" have a common starting point:

"Despite their many differences, the two books [one conservative and one liberal] both rested on a series of assumptions about human nature - and especially about the nature of poor Americans in ghetto neighborhoods - that were as yet untested. Murray and Wilson agreed that lives in Harlem were deeply affected by decisions made in Washington, D.C. If the right set of incentives and disincentives and opportunities were dangled in front of poor ghetto residents, they would respond in predictable ways: they would get jobs, they would become better educated, they would be more likely to marry, and they would raise their children more conscientiously. The two men acknowledged that the dysfunction of ghetto families was the result of decades - generations - of discrimination, isolation and cultural decay, as well as one of the most cataclysmic shifts in the economy in American history. But they shared a faith that the problems those forces had produced could be fixed simply by the passage (or the dismantling) of the right federal laws" (emphasis mine).

Tough is quite right that that this is the shared faith of vast swaths of education reformers, and that it pertains to their assumptions about human nature.

What if those assumptions are false? Is it really the case that these people will simply respond to certain incentives, disincentives and opportunities in predictable ways? Does that treat them with dignity as responsible decision makers? Or does it further malign them as sub-human subjects of social manipulation? Are any the great actions of human history attributable to social manipulation? Are not the great actions, like those of Dr. Martin Luther King, great precisely because they could never arise merely from social manipulation - those actions that are responsible, courageous, visionary and profoundly human? Could it be that the very necessity of reform is to admit that the poor are persons who have a very important, responsible role in addressing the issues of education and poverty?