October 24th and 25th at  Alfred Lerner Hall, Columbia University

Toward Skilled Parenting & Transformed Schools Inside a National Movement for Excellence With Equity

Presenter:

• Ronald F. Ferguson
  

Summary:

“A movement for excellent with equity should aspire to high quality learning opportunities for children and adults alike.”

• In evaluations of school readiness that control statistically for parenting differences, racial and ethnic gaps close by 25-to-50 percent. Successful interventions can alter parenting behavior to improve school readiness, especially among low-income households.
• “Transformative, district-level reform may be the only way to make progress at the scale the nation needs. To date, most districts – city, suburban and rural – are only steps from the starting line, with some standing behind it.”

Parenting

• Research has established five dimensions of preschool parenting that contribute to school readiness: nurturance, discipline, teaching, language and materials. “In all instances, when the average for blacks or Hispanics differs from that for whites, whites rate higher on the measured practices.”
• “This constellation of findings should cause those of us who are parents of school-aged children to take notice. One response is “to campaign against presenting such data in public they might stigmatize and contribute to stereotypes.” But “a more constructive response is to consider whether there are things we should be changing in our own homes, then act on what we decide.”
• Numbers of children''''s books in the home for kindergarten children reported by college-graduate African-American mothers were more similar to reports from high-school educated than college educated whites. Equalizing the number of children''''s books reduced the residual black-white gaps in arithmetic and reading-readiness scores by the equivalent of one fifth and one third respectively.
• Resource disparities partly explain why parenting practices and opportunities for effective parenting differ across groups. Socioeconomic resource disparities significantly predict the test score gap between whites, on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other.
• Middle-class whites should by no means serve as the sole model for effective parenting. For example, “tough love” – parenting that combines tough discipline and interpersonal warmth – is more commonly employed by older black mothers, and differs in prevalence and effectiveness across racial groups.
• “Working with middle-class households, especially among blacks and Hispanics, might best be pursued by asking organizations that these groups control to take lead roles in designing, implementing and monitoring new efforts.”

School transformation

• “Over past decades, educators have designed and implemented a huge number of programs to help teachers become more effective. Most have not been widely replicated and few have been rigorously evaluated.”
• “No program is guaranteed to work under all conditions and findings are always mixed.”
• “Those with more finely specified components, better training for teachers and professionally managed implementation tend to show the most consistent results.”
• The main reason why teacher effectiveness interventions fail is that teachers don''''t implement them, due to workload, inadequate support and training, and failure by school leaders to hold them accountable. These findings highlight “the importance of capacity and leadership in the selection, introduction, scheduling support and training, and overall management of professional development programs.”
• Superintendents rarely leave their most talented people in district-level instructional jobs, instead assigning them to manage political crises. Thus some experts believe that teacher professional development needs to be based outside the system in freestanding intermediary organizations and program vendors.
• Backed by political support that allowed it to keep talented leaders in curriculum and instruction jobs for as long as a decade, Union City, New Jersey, transformed itself from the second-lowest performing district in the state in 1989 to the leader in student test scores among New Jersey''''s largest cities by 2000. Though “not a template to be carbon copied,” the Union City experience “establishes that whole districts, not simply individual schools, can be reformed.”
• The Council of Great City Schools has identified preconditions and strategies for successful district-wide reform, including a school board focused on policy-level decisions that support improved student achievement; a shared vision between superintendent and board; specific goals for student achievement (on fixed schedules, with consequences for failure for district and building level staff); district-level curricula and instructional approaches aligned with state standards; district-wide professional development supporting reforms; and special attention for lower performing schools, including extra resources and an infusion of quality teachers.
• High-performing, high-poverty schools on the “Ohio Schools of Promise” list have been found to focus on a limited number of skills or topics as priorities for improvement; assemble teachers to work in groups to learn new teaching materials, sometimes with professional development from outside the school; monitoring teachers'''' implementation of new instructional approaches, with midcourse corrections; and monitor student progress.

Presentation Papers

• Toward Skilled Parenting & Transformed Schools Inside a National Movement for Excellence With Equity