Here we go.
For over two decades, a big standardized test has been used to measure student achievement. It’s not a particularly useful measurement.
While there is ample evidence of correlation between test scores and life outcomes, correlation is not causation. There’s still a huge gap in research around the test; we are still missing evidence that changing a student’s test score will change the student’s life outcome.
There is ample research to suggest that the big standardized test actually measures, as researcher Christoper Tienken put it, “the family and community capital of the student.” Tienken has repeatedly shown that he can use a demographic profile of a community to predict a school’s test scores.
In short, while some education reformers have insisted that raising test scores would raise income and job success, the research suggests they might have that exactly backwards. But perhaps there is yet another answer.
A new paper seeks to break down more precisely what factors go hand in hand with achievement, what opportunity gaps drive the achievement gaps between children of poverty and children of affluence.
The paper has the very unsexy title “Accumulation of Opportunities Predicts the Educational Attainment and Adulthood Earnings of Children Born Into Low- Versus Higher-Income Households” and was written by Eric Dearing (Boston College), Andre S. Bustamante (University of California, Irvine), Henrik Zachrisson (University of Oslo), and Deborah Lowe Vandell (University of California, Irvine).
The researchers looked at an array of twelve “opportunities,” theorizing that a disparity between opportunities would “help explain, statistically” the connection “between household income in early childhood and adult outcomes.”
They settled on twelve opportunities: three from early childhood, five from middle childhood, and four from adolescence. The list included family income, structured after-school activities, neighborhood, and elements of the home environment.
The authors concluded that the prevalence of opportunities was a more powerful predictor of future achievement than childhood poverty alone. The more opportunities for the student, the better the outcome. The researchers were not surprised that the wealthiest students had many opportunities, but were struck by how few children from low-income families had— often as few as one or none. And when those students had even four opportunities, that moved their odds of graduating from a four year college from 10 to 50 percent.
As Dearing told Jackie Mader at Hechinger report, “The more chances you get … the greater the likelihood that you will find that setting, that activity, that place in life that aligns with your strengths and your talents and your abilities.”
The findings echo other work such as Robert Putnam’s Our Kids, which argues for the value of accruing social capital in shaping the future of students. The website diversitydatakids.org offers a detailed interactive map that breaks down child opportunities by census tract.
Education policy has been stuck in an unproductive argument for decades. On the one hand, those arguing that if schools get students to score higher on the big standardized test, it will reduce poverty in America. On the other, the argument that reducing poverty in America would increase student achievement. The former calls for a counterfactual view of how testing works; the latter calls for political will and policy ideas not currently in evidence.
But research like the new paper suggests another approach—providing all students with opportunities like high quality pre-school and strengthened communities. Can we provide children from low-income families the same sort of opportunities available to the wealthy? Targeting specific opportunities would still require political will, policy ideas, money, and a willingness to look past single silver bullet solutions (such as getting students to score higher on a single standardized test).
“What I hope we’re making clear,” Zachrisson told Mader,” is that the idea of a single solution to alleviating negative consequences of poverty is just nonsensical.”
