“In Sparta parents would say to their children, ‘Come home with your shield or on your shield.’ My parents say, ‘Come home with scores over 95%, or don’t come home!’” Sardonic comment once made by an Asian American student to the author of this article.
A big question the famous Coleman Report of 1966 asked was: What matters more, schools or parents? The prevailing policy belief was that schools alone could lift people out of poverty and ensure equality of opportunity. Yet, our school system seems to have continually failed poorer African American children. So, what exactly is wrong and how do we fix it?
The Coleman Report was the first attempt to answer why there was such a difference in academic performance between White and Black students in the USA. It had been assumed this was due to differences in schools and funding. Yet, Coleman’s revolutionary conclusions indicated there were background differences in the social, family and economic lives of White and Black students which made schools effective, generally, for White students but often ineffective for many Black students. There was some personal “x” factor helping White kids which Black kids did not have access to.
Finding this x factor and fixing this situation has been elusive. There are still huge performance gaps between races and, 70 years after Brown vs. The Board of Education, America has sunk into the quagmire of a new era of racially segregated schools still reflecting huge performance gaps.
The Coleman Report challenged the optimistic misconception that the American school system could be an equalizing or socially uplifting mechanism – that we could use the formal education of our poorer and marginalized citizens to solve social and economic problems, to give everyone equality of opportunity. The social reformer Horace Mann (in the 19th century) created this utopian dream, that a free, public school system would naturally elevate the poor and marginalized and offer everyone a road to success through education.
Coleman, however, provided the disheartening truth that the existence of quality schools for everyone does not, in itself, create empowerment or equality; instead, some theorized from Coleman that social equality and economic justice might be necessary, first, to even ensure the possibility for effective wide-spread education.
Education would not create the possibility for social justice, but social justice might create the possibility for education. Some research, however, would seem to indicate that massive social and economic reform is not necessary for poorer students to do well academically. For example, relatively poor, Asian immigrant students are currently outperforming every other demographic group in the USA.
It is essential that we figure out what exactly is causing some students to do well and some to do poorly in our schools. Current research seems to indicate that this x factor has to do with parents. More precisely, success in school would seem to involve parental expectations, parental pressure and/or homes where learning has become a family value. New policies can be developed from the awareness, common among teachers, that certain types of parental involvement develop highly successful students and this, more than anything, helps create effective schools.
When people draw the conclusion, from Coleman, that we need economic justice before education becomes possible, this can, in fact, be misleading. Affluence, for example, seems to be an umbrella term for a bunch of factors that come with affluence to influence positive learning behavior in schools. There is research that shows that just giving money to poor families does not improve a child’s academic performance.
So, if it is not affluence, itself, which ensures academic success, what are the affluent doing, specifically, to make sure their kids do well in school?
MIT economist Joshua Angrist recently did studies which show that schools, themselves, are not responsible for academic success. The preparation of students who attend the schools matters more than anything. Well-prepared students seem to congregate at the same schools and these schools necessarily appear to be the “good” schools. What do we mean, though, by “well-prepared”?
Apparently “good” schools are often those loaded with White students whose affluent parents have high academic expectations for their children, learning as a family value and they often apply extreme pressure on the kids to perform at higher levels.
These types of parents know the big secret – it is the students being pushed hard to succeed that you look for when you want to place your kid in a school. If you find where they are going to school, you send your kid there and you, yourself, start pushing the kid. The school itself is almost inconsequential, it is the students who have been prepped so that the school becomes excellent due to them.
70 years after Brown and nearly 60 years after Coleman, White students are still entering schools better “prepared” than African American students.
In other words, Angrist’s research shows that if you have a great school, it is probably not due to the teachers, curriculum or administration. It is probably due to the parents, their resources and the extent to which they set expectations for their kids and find ways to push them to achieve.
For example, it has been known for a while that private Catholic schools are not “better” than public urban schools, although they have this reputation. In 2014, in Are Catholic primary schools more effective than public primary schools? Todd Elder and Christopher Jepsen showed that better scores from the Catholic school system did not come from better schools but from a “selection bias”. By selection bias, it is meant that better-prepared students went to those schools and performed better in those schools, making the schools look better.
Indeed, Elder and Jepsen found that there was academic decline in Catholic school students in math from K through 8, while there was a slight increase in math scores for public school students. This would indicate that the public schools assessed were “better” even though the Catholic schools tended to be perceived as “better”. Elder and Jepsen concluded that any achievement gap was due to “socio-economic standing”. The better-prepared students came from higher economic and social classes.
Yet, an umbrella term like “economic standing” needs to be broken down to what aspects of economic standing provide the advantage – research suggests that parental expectations, home learning values and parental pressure are the factors that make the difference.
There is, after all, significant research which suggests that achievement pressure can be intense in communities of affluence. In a comparison of high- and low-income families, Luthar and Latendresse (2005) found that students from high-income families did experience substantially higher parental expectations and pressure to succeed. The downside was that the researchers also found correlations to both stress and substance abuse among students pressured to succeed. This is the “catch” I mentioned in the title. (More on this in a couple minutes.)
So one conclusion we have to entertain is that if a school wins a US Department of Education Blue Ribbon award, it should probably go to the parents’ association and not the administrators.
Furthermore, in schools where you have classes filled with students under the pressure of high expectations, you don’t seem to need any fancy teaching methods or super-creative teachers. You can potentially have a system of conservative, underpaid disciplinarians who use old-fashioned techniques and you’ll still probably get good standardized scores. You just have to make sure the students have the right textbooks and someone to make sure they go through them.
This creates a possible paradox. Better performing private schools may have students pushed by aggressive parents but “mediocre” teachers. Underperforming public schools may have highly trained, dedicated, enthusiastic and idealistic “great” teachers working hard but working with struggling students who are not being pushed at home to reach high standards.
Politicians have been maligning American public-school teachers under the “Great Teacher” myth. Teachers who majored in education, received a masters degree, received certification, did their training, have experience, are highly motivated and truly care, are blamed for the results of social and economic factors in their classrooms that demagogic politicians refuse to fix.
Most urban public schools in the USA are staffed by highly qualified and caring individuals who are put into difficult situations and then attacked for not having supernatural powers.
ALL schools are potentially good schools. Can we create policy to ensure that all of our schools are good schools? This leads to the catch. If we know that stress and pressure and high expectations and competitive attitudes developed at home work to “motivate” students, do we dare classify these motivational tools as necessary for academic success and try to impose them on students of lower economic classes?
Morally, the answer would have to be “No”. Indeed, the corrosive and competitive values that have heretofore worked to provide us with a plethora of Ivy League applicants should be soundly rejected by anyone who loves both children and learning. The research which shows that intense parental pressure leads to academic “success” as well as possible psychological problems makes it imperative for us to begin considering how to create a humane form of motivation for all students.
I mentioned earlier that because of our Asian students, we can no longer say “poverty” is necessarily a cause of low academic output and that affluence naturally leads to high academic success. Stuyvesant High School, the best specialized high school in New York City, one of the best high schools in the country, had an Asian enrollment of 72% in 2022/2023. These Asian-American students made it to Stuyvesant through performance on a high-stakes admissions exam (the SHSAT).
Stuyvesant is hardly a school for the affluent. About half of the students are classified as economically disadvantaged. In the past I worked at summer programs to help working-class Asian-American students prepare for the SHSAT. I recall when I asked one student what his mom did, he told me she worked at a sweatshop 12 hours a day. His father worked at a fish market.
I would say that the Asian community in the USA strengthens the argument that parental expectations and parental pressure can off-set any poverty issues. But is it right to subject children to a type of pressure which causes undue stress and harm? Is this the only way that human beings can learn?
When we look at the nature of what is taught in schools, where students are supposed to master insane amounts of material they may not even be interested in, the stress and pressure model of motivation works best. We have a school system that invites the stress and pressure model of academic success.
Education is at a crossroads. The only legitimate question now is: How do we ensure that excessive and soul-crushing pressure is not applied to children in our reform efforts? What would the proper balance be? Can self-motivation be instilled instead of parental pressure? Are there any schools trying to divorce themselves from a model that rewards parents who put excessive pressure on their kids to perform?
In all candor, how much does a student really need to learn anyway? Under our cruelly competitive system which fosters anxiety and pressure as motivators, the answer is more, more, more until the competition drops out. Under the present system, students are presented with an overabundance of academic material (85% of which they forget), most of which is irrelevant and easily forgotten.
Under the current system the best students become adept at mastering more and more material and skills to set themselves apart as “better” than other students. They do this, mainly, because parents exert pressure on them.
The ultimate goal of making sure that every school in the USA can be a “good” school will only happen when we focus on how we can motivate students to learn life affirming and relevant topics in a humane and meaningful way. If we find the key to motivation, schools can finally become engines of social change.
References:
Angrist, Joshua, Peter Hull, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters. 2024. “Race and the Mismeasure of School Quality.” American Economic Review: Insights, 6 (1): 20-37.
Study: Catholic schools not superior to public schools | MSUToday | Michigan State University
Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being – PubMed (nih.gov)
