Education Policy Analysis Archives

Volume 10 Number 12

February 13, 2002

ISSN 1068-2341
A peer-reviewed scholarly journal
Editor: Gene V Glass
College of Education
Arizona State University

Copyright 2002, the EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES .
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Articles appearing in EPAA are abstracted in the Current Index to Journals in Education by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation and are permanently archived in Resources in Education.

How Schools Matter:
The Link Between Teacher Classroom Practices
and Student Academic Performance

Harold Wenglinsky
Educational Testing Service

Citation: Wenglinsky, H. (2002, February 13). How schools matter: The link between teacher classroom practices and student academic performance. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(12). Retrieved [date] from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n12/.

Abstract
Quantitative studies of school effects have generally supported the notion that the problems of U.S. education lie outside of the school. Yet such studies neglect the primary venue through which students learn, the classroom. The current study explores the link between classroom practices and student academic performance by applying multilevel modeling to the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress in mathematics. The study finds that the effects of classroom practices, when added to those of other teacher characteristics, are comparable in size to those of student background, suggesting that teachers can contribute as much to student learning as the students themselves.

Introduction

Much of the discussion in educational reform hinges on the question of whether schools matter. Over the past two decades, policymakers have called for improvements in the academic performance of U.S. students. Many educational reformers, particularly those associated with the standards movement, hold that the key to improving student performance lies in improving the schools. If academic standards are rigorous, curriculum and assessments are aligned to those standards, and teachers possess the skills to teach at the level the standards demand, student performance will improve. However, this perspective is to some extent at odds with another that has emerged from the discussion about school improvement, namely that it is students rather than schools that make the difference. Hence, a New York Times story on how to improve the academic performance of low-income students can include the headline: "What No School Can Do (Traub, 2000)." Or, as Laurence Steinberg puts it in Beyond the Classroom: Why School Reform has Failed and What Parents Need to Do, "neither the source of our achievement problem, nor the mechanism through which we can best address it, is to be found by examining or altering schools (Steinberg, 1996, p. 60)." In this view it is the social backgrounds of students that play the key role in their ability to learn, and only by moving outside of the educational system and attacking the pervasive economic inequalities that exist in the U.S. can student performance be improved.

Quantitative research on whether schools matter has generally supported the notion that the problems of U.S. education lie outside of the schools. Some research finds that when the social backgrounds of students are taken into account, school characteristics do not seem to influence student outcomes, suggesting that schools do not serve as avenues for upward mobility, but instead reinforce existing social and economic inequalities (Coleman et al., 1966; Jencks et al., 1972). Other researchers contend that school characteristics can have a greater effect on student outcomes than would be expected based upon student background (Lee, Bryk and Smith, 1993). But while the research in support of this contention does find significant effects for school characteristics, the magnitudes of these effects tend to be modest, far overshadowed by the effects of student background characteristics.(Note 1)

A possible reason for the lack of large school effects in quantitative research is the failure of such research to capitalize on an insight from qualitative research: the central importance of the classroom practices of teachers. As far back as Willard Waller (1932), qualitative researchers have noted that the interaction which occurs between teachers and students in the classroom is greater than the sum of its parts. Students can leave the classroom with their knowledge and attitudes dramatically altered from what they were before they entered. Quantitative research neglects this dimension of schooling by treating it as a "black box," not worthy of study (Mehan, 1993). Often teaching is not studied at all, and, when it is, only the characteristics of teachers that are easily measured but far removed from the classroom (such as their level of educational attainment) are included.

The current study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by using quantitative methods to study the link between student academic achievement and teacher classroom practices, as well as other aspects of teaching such as the professional development teachers receive in support of their classroom practices and the more traditional teacher background characteristics, referred to here as teacher inputs. Such a study is made possible by the availability of a large-scale nationally representative database, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which includes a comprehensive set of classroom practices along with student test scores and other characteristics of students and teachers. For this study, the 7,146 eighth graders who took the 1996 assessment in mathematics are studied along with their mathematics teachers. The statistical technique of multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) is employed to address the major methodological shortcomings of the quantitative literature, namely the failure to distinguish between school- and student-level effects, to measure relationships among independent variables, and to explicitly model measurement error. The study finds that classroom practices indeed have a marked effect on student achievement and that, in concert with the other aspects of teaching under study, this effect is at least as strong as that of student background. This finding documents the fact that schools indeed matter, due to the overwhelming influence of the classroom practices of their teachers.

Background

Much of the quantitative literature linking school characteristics to student outcomes focused on the impact of economic characteristics, or school resources. These studies are known as production functions. One of the earliest of these studies was the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study, commonly referred to as the Coleman Report (Coleman et al., 1966). This study applied Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis to nationally representative samples of elementary and secondary school students to relate school resources such as per-pupil expenditures to student academic achievement and other outcomes. The study found that, on average, when student background was taken into account, school resources were not significantly associated with student outcomes. Nearly 400 additional production function studies have since been conducted. Meta-analyses tabulating the results of such studies between 1964 and 1994 reached divergent conclusions. Some concluded that these studies showed no consistent relationship between school resources and student achievement (Hanushek, 1997, 1996a, 1996b, 1989), while others concluded that the studies showed a consistent, albeit modest, positive relationship (Greenwald, Hedges, & Laine, 1996; Hedges & Greenwald, 1996; Hedges, Laine & Greenwald, 1994).(Note 2)

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