The current movement of school restructuring, though touted as progressive reform, can actually hurt student performance. A Penn State study has shown this to be especially true in low socioeconomic school districts, which have the least tolerance for error if educational experiments go awry.
"Proponents of restructuring maintain that it will improve the character and quality of American public schools. In some cases, they've been right," says Dr. Roger C. Shouse, assistant professor of education at Penn State. "In middle-class schools with average resources, restructuring has had some limited success. However, our data show that it has been disruptive to student performance in poor school districts and especially the very poor. Even in affluent schools, it has had no empirical benefit."
Shouse and co-researcher Lawrence J. Mussoline, superintendent of schools with the rural Pine Grove Area School District, between Lebanon and Pottsville, Pa., took their findings from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) Second Follow-up survey of twelfth graders. Their particular analysis involved data from surveys from 371 public schools and a total of 6,994 students.
They presented their results in the paper "Will 'One-Size' School Restructuring Fit All? Some Cautionary Evidence for Disadvantaged Schools," today (Aug. 6) at the American Sociological Association convention in Chicago.
Shouse and Mussoline employed multiple regression, a statistical procedure allowing researchers, for instance, to weigh the respective impact of race, socioeconomic status, class and school size, prior learning and per-pupil spending on student test scores.
"Many components of restructuring are attractive," Shouse notes. "For example, restructuring offers to make school systems more collegial and participatory -- indeed, more democratic. This seems an improvement over `traditional' systems which are comparatively bureaucratic and hierarchical, especially in rural and less wealthy school districts."
"Second, advocates of restructuring like to stress `authentic' forms of instruction and assessment," Shouse says. " `Authentic' means that the focus shifts from `artificial' standardized tests toward performance-based indicators of learning."
For instance, English students would assemble a "portfolio" of their best work to be evaluated by one or more teachers. Chemistry students might be graded on the basis of how well they can conduct an experiment.
Teachers have always used such methods for determining student grades, but proponents of "authentic evaluation" would have them replace standardized tests. According to Shouse, this would be ill-advised in many school districts.
Advocates of restructuring promote a specific agenda of classroom practices, which include individualized or small group instruction, heterogeneous grouping, team teaching, relaxed course requirements and "authentic" forms of instruction and assessment. One of their primary emphases is on the acquisition of "thinking skills" rather than transmission of knowledge.
"Supporters of restructuring tend to use this term in a polarizing manner, often implying that 'restructured' practices would certainly replace 'traditional' under any rational, caring policy," says Shouse. "They often take the implicit view that all schools would benefit from their package of reform. Therein lies the rub."
School leaders have much reason for caution in respect to some restructuring programs, Shouse adds. This is particularly true in low-income communities, which usually rank lowest in "academic press" -- the degree to which the school's culture is driven by traditional achievement-oriented values, norms and goals.
"For one thing, many `restructuring' practices represent educational technologies that are relatively complex or time consuming and often stretch the professional capacities of teaching staffs," says Shouse. "Thematic team teaching across content areas, for example, not only requires the complex coordination of instructional objectives, but also a tremendous investment of teachers' time."
"Heterogeneous grouping or detracking requires teachers to deliver appropriate instruction to a much wider range of student needs and abilities than is typically the case when homogeneous grouping is used," Shouse notes. "And though cooperative learning is often recommended as a means of mitigating such increased demands, to be done well, it too requires highly skilled teachers capable of maintaining effective control over instructional pacing within each cooperative work group."
The type of classroom orchestration needed for successful cooperative learning requires substantial training, which is costly and may be beyond the resources of low socioeconomic schools. It becomes even more difficult when many of the students lack the necessary knowledge, interest or motivation required for meaningful independent academic work, the researchers explain.
"As instructional practices become more complex, they also become riskier in terms of producing student achievement," Shouse notes. "Students in more affluent school districts come from families and backgrounds that value education, and their teachers are more highly skilled. Thus, not only are their teachers better equipped to carry out changes, but, even if they are not, an academic `safety net' outside the school helps to buffer student achievement from teachers' professional mistakes and shortcomings. For large, low-income schools, this safety net is often weak or absent altogether."
"Our study does not take issue with restructuring per se -- for instance, collegiality and shared expertise among teachers are certainly worthwhile," Shouse says. "Our concern is with interpreting or measuring the concept in terms of any prescribed list of specific reforms. Such `agendizing' can even lead to the ironic situation in which district administrators seek to impose `restructuring' upon their teachers, whether they want it or not."
If school restructuring is to be meaningful, researchers, administrators and teachers cannot allow it to become transformed into another policy bandwagon that all must ride. Restructuring, particularly when presented as the one true path of education, has to be viewed with healthy skepticism, the researchers say.
EDITORS: Dr. Shouse is at 814-863-3773 or at rcs8@psu.edu by email.