A whopping 19 out of 20 principals were replaced in the Houston experiment

Sunday, September 25th, 2022

Connie Morgan believes that Dr. Roland Fryer may have cracked the code on how to eliminate the academic gap between races:

White students score about 30 points higher on math tests than black students. Fryer implemented a strategy at a failing Houston school district that closed the gap. He did it by applying to elementary and secondary schools in the Houston district the five tenets of school success that he discovered in researching the habits of highly successful charter schools. Theories on how to close the academic achievement gap vary from “fix the home” to “fix the school” to “fix the community.” Fryer’s results make a compelling case for “fix the school.”

The five tenets are clear-cut:

  1. Increased Time in School
  2. Good Human Capital Management
  3. High Dosage Tutoring
  4. Data Driven Instruction
  5. Culture of High Expectations

Increasing time children spend in school may be unpalatable for parents concerned about indoctrination but this concern is addressed with the human capital management tenet (more on this in the following paragraph). Others may balk at longer schooldays, citing conflicting research on foreign schools pointing to shorter days as a tenet of student success. However, research on small homogenous countries like Finland is unlikely to reveal practices easily transferable to the United States. Fryer’s experiment confirms, in contrast, that when time in school is spent well, it’s good to spend more of it, particularly when the alternative might be a home environment non-conducive to children’s learning. Fryer had treatment schools in the Houston district increase time on task in various ways, including eliminating breaks between classes, expanding the school day by one hour, offering weekend classes, and adding days to the school year.

Human capital management is probably the most obvious tenet of improving education. In other words, get rid of teachers who won’t embrace the mission and hire ones that will. This tenet is likely the most difficult to execute. Politics and scarcity of resources are the challenges. A whopping 19 out of 20 principals were replaced in the Houston experiment. It took over 300 interviews to find 19 principals to replace them. Of the teachers, 46% were replaced. The district spent more than $5 million buying out teacher contracts. Additionally, feedback to teachers was constant. In the treatment schools, teachers received ten times more observations and feedback than those in the control group. Principals regularly lead staff development and training sessions.

Few schools tutor the number of students for the length of time that Fryer recommends. Remember that extra hour added to the school day? This is where it’s put to work; daily, focused small-group tutoring. In the Houston experiment, low performing fourth graders and all sixth and ninth graders were intensively tutored.

Like their teachers, students in the experiment were constantly being evaluated. Many schools collect data, but few are good at adjusting instruction in light of data. In Fryer’s experiment, treated schools held assessments every three weeks as well as benchmark exams three times in a school year. These results informed tutoring and allowed teachers to set highly specific performance goals with students.

A culture of high expectations is the trickiest tenet to measure. The tenet goes beyond posters that say “Nobody Cares, Work Harder.” Indicators that a real attitude shift has occurred may include things like professional dress codes for teachers, posted achievement goals and/or contracts between parents and schools agreeing to honor expectations.

Math achievement rose significantly in the schools that implemented Fryer’s tenets. Assessment scores increased by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations in a year. In layman’s terms, under this program, there is potential to close the math achievement gap between black and white students in less than three years. Even more important than comparison between groups and closed gaps is the absolute good of increased math proficiency among students who have been too long neglected.

The original paper notes that “injecting best practices from charter schools into traditional Houston public schools significantly increases student math achievement in treated elementary and secondary schools — by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations a year — and has little effect on reading achievement.”

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling, who expects any gains to fade out.)

Comments

  1. Ezra says:

    Arnold is right. Not so much poor principals and teachers but poor students. A don’t care attitude for the most part. Sounds like Michelle Rhee in Wash D.C. Big expectations but then slow but sure fade out. Michelle got a strong dose of Rhee-ality.

  2. Contaminated NEET says:

    OK, now give all the White kids intensive one-on-one tutoring and tell me the results.

    Oh, the “gap” only “closes” when you pour resources into your favored group and deny them to your rivals? Wow, very impressive.

  3. Mike-SMO says:

    Definitely interested in how this will work out over time. I would like to see a detailed break-out of the results. “Bright” students will probably do well, no matter what regime they experience. The gains will probably be in “marginal” students who need some guidance. Were the true “defectives” and ” uncontrollable” students culled from the group using disciplinary or absenteeism criteria? I would expect there to be an “under-class” who could not tolerate the classroom environment. If the distractions of such an “under-class” were eliminated, many of the “marginals” have a chance to learn. Documenting the “under-class” by race would be very useful. Replacing deficient principals ( and teachers) probably made a big difference.

  4. szopen says:

    My intuition tells me “bright” students gain the most when they are put in classes with other “bright” students, with all the disruptive assholes removed. In my son’s school there was a kid who was toxic waste, seriously. He beat other kids, disrupted class, called teachers names. The process of his removal lasted a long time, because it seems that school, suprisingly, has now not that many tools to discipline such hools. When finally they got rid of them (don’t know the details), average grades rised almost instantly.

  5. szopen says:

    got rid of HIM, dammit. I hate when I notice such stupid errors seconds after I click “submit”

  6. bomag says:

    Assessment scores increased by 0.15 to 0.18 standard deviations in a year. In layman’s terms, under this program, there is potential to close the math achievement gap between black and white students in less than three years.

    Rather innumerate as written. If all scores increase, no gap is closed. And intelligence gains don’t grow linearly forever.

    Really is a big mistake to concentrate on “closing the gap.” Should work on educating everyone to a baseline level; and let the high achievers soar high into the sky, and be happy for that.

  7. McChuck says:

    How to improve schools rapidly:
    Segregate schools by race and sex. Establish and maintain discipline.

    Teach the students appropriately to their abilities. Girls mature faster than boys. Blacks learn more slowly, but are good at memorizing. Give the smart kids separate classes. Hold everyone to a high but not unrealistic expectation.

  8. Shadeburst says:

    Szopen, I watched a YouTube video on NetFlix. They have empirical proof that introducing one unmotivated or substandard person into a group of excellence drags the whole team down to quite a large degree, twenty per cent or am I making this number up. Introducing one excellent person into a mediocre group works well in a combat team where it is called stiffening, but apparently not so much in business.

  9. Szopen says:

    Shadeburst, I haven’t seen it, but I absolutely can believe it.

  10. David Foster says:

    “I watched a YouTube video on NetFlix. They have empirical proof that introducing one unmotivated or substandard person into a group of excellence drags the whole team down to quite a large degree”

    There was a study showing that *one* disruptive person in a classroom can have a lifetime negative impact on the earnings of other students. There are some issues with the way the study was done, but that was probably the best they could do with the data that was available.

    Shadeburst, do you remember the name of the video you referenced?

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