Interesting. All that school reform brouhaha is based on a false assumption that there is something wrong with the schools and it needs to be fixed - competition, privatization, and similar buzzwords seem to be the usual answer.
However, scholastic achivement is a product of three factors: the effect of the school itself, the effect of the student's neighborhood, and the effect of the student's household. These three effects can be analytically separated e.g. by testing achievement at the begginning and the end of each school year. The comparison of the beginning and the end school year scores measures the combined effects of all three factors, while the comparison of the end of the previous and the beginning of the next school year (i.e. the
change over the summer vacation span) measures only the effect of neighborhood and family. This way we can net out the effect of school.
This approach (taken by Hopkins researchers and cited in WSJ) reveals very interesting findings:
1. the net increase in achievement scores over the duration of the school year is similar for all students regardless of their social class (i.e. middle class kids benefit as much as the underclass kids)
2. the net increase in achievement scores over the vacation period has been observed for middle class students, but not for the underclass students, whose scores tend to drop over the same period
3. the net decrease of the achievement scores over the vacation period is the sole factor responsible for the growing gap in achievement score between students of different social classes over the course of schooling.
These findings clearly suggest that it is the social environment (dysfunctional neighborhoods and households) and NOT the quality of schools that is responsible for poor scholastic achievement. It thus follows that the solution to the low achievement problem is not competition or privatization of schools, but the extension of the school year (i.e. the elimiantion or substantialk reduction of summer vacations) to counteract the negative effect of social milieu.
wojtek