Whenever reports come out comparing standardized test scores among school districts within metropolitan areas, there is lots of discussion about the causes of the differences between the high and low-performing schools. I have heard that individual students improve significantly when transferred from a low-performing school to a high-performing one, and that makes sense to me.
However, I have often wondered what would happen if the entire student bodies were switched. That is, take all the students from a low-performing school and put them in a high-performing one, and put all the students from a high-performing school into the low-performing one. Keep everything else the same - buildings, facilities, teachers, administrators, etc.
I am not an educator, but I would hypothesize that there would be marginal increases in scores for the former low performers and marginal decreases for the former high performers, but no significant overall changes.
I can’t imagine parents allowing this experiment to be performed with their children, but has anything similar ever been done? If so, what were the results?
(Note: While the question as asked would seem to have a factual answer, I expect a wider discussion. Hence GD)
I doubt it would make much difference at all. Schools don’t succeed or fail because of the facilities, the administrators, or even (very much) the teachers. It’s the students and the parents.
Just transplanting the culture from school A to school B and school B to school A takes all the problems and advantages and moves them around. There might be other minor factors - if the schools were further away, truancy might go up (in both schools) and parental involvement might go down, and if the school was in a bad neighborhood, you might get similar amounts of vandalism and drugs and so on. But overall, I would not expect any significant or long-lasting changes to occur.
Keeping in mind that we are moving all the students from A to B and vice versa - this is not like busing.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree, pretty much, with Shodan. I taught in one of those underperforming schools for many years. There is a very limited amount that a school can do to overcome the student’s home and neighborhood environment. When neither your parents, nor your friends, nor your friends’ parents esteem education and that is the sea in which you swim, it is unlikely you will esteem education. Yes, there were individuals who were different, but changing an entire culture takes more than a switch in buildings.
I wonder how much (and what kind) of a difference it would make, just attributable to novelty factors such as different transportation routines and knowing it’s an experiment.
There’s also a built-in assumption in the OP that standardized tests validly show what they’re supposed to show.
That’s a good point. I’m not at all sure what they’re supposed to show other than to be a common yardstick to compare … something … among various environments, all of which are supposed to accomplish the same goal.
In our district they moved one elementary school from a high school which is one of the best ranked in California to another one - not underperforming, but just average. The scores at the second school went up.
The facilities at the “good” school are no better and often worse than other ones, and when my son-in-law went there the teachers didn’t seem to be any better. It seems to be a function of the parents. I’ve seen this in other places also.
It helps that the per student funding was exactly the same for both schools. If an underperforming school is also underfunded, things might not come out the same.
The OP might find the “This American Life” episode The Problem We All Live With - Part One interesting. It does not contemplate what is proposed in the OP but does report on kids moved from one district to another (basically accidental desegregation).
The story is amazing. Kids from a poor school (black kids) sent to a rich school (white kids) and the rich school parents lose their fucking minds over it.
Long story short, it goes ahead anyway and no bad things happen and the bussed in kids do well.