Book Review: Sweating the Small Stuff

Today marks the release by the Fordham Institute of David Whitman's new book Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism. I had a chance to read an advance copy and I thought I'd share a few thoughts on it.

In the book, Whitman details the strategies of 6 high-performing inner-city schools: 4 charter, 1 neighborhood, and 1 private (American Indian Public Charter School, Amistad Academy, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, KIPP Academy, The SEED School, and University Park Campus School). He concludes that they all have one thing in common: they are highly paternalistic.

In other words, all of these schools go to great lengths to manage every little detail of students' lives, no matter how small (hence the title). Though most of the schools' leaders reject the term "paternalistic," Whitman does seem to have a point.

In defining the term "paternalistic" Whitman builds on the prior work of Lawrence Mead, who once wrote that "the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free" (p. 36). As Whitman writes, "the paternalistic presumption, implicit in the schools portrayed here, is that the poor lack the family and community support, culutral capital, and poersonal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse."

While I'm sure that many of the founders and leaders of the schools profiled would be hesitant to explicitly endorse either of these views, their schools certainly implicitly endorse at least something similar to this. Whitman makes a strong argument that these schools essentially strive to remove students from their current environments and inculcate them into a new culture -- in other words to accept the social and cultural norms of the middle or upper class and reject those that they see in the streets.

Whitman is, however, hardly a dispassionate observer. He makes no attempt to mask his loathing of liberals, "multicultural activists," unions, and Richard Rothstein. The book is certainly written from a particular point of view -- which should probably not come as a surprise given that it is published by a think tank that also pushes a particular point of view. It is perfectly clear that Whitman wants more charter schools and fewer unionized teachers. That said, the main topic of the book is not one that should be particularly susceptible to one's ideological beliefs. He points out that despite the fact that many conservatives have extolled the virtues of these schools that most of their founders are, in fact, unabashedly liberal. In the end, the main purpose of the schools is to raise student achievement -- not serve as guinea pigs in any ideological debates.

The tales that Whitman tells of the schools paint a clear portrait of six schools that, while very different, operate quite similarly. All of the schools take a no-nonsense approach to discipline and work hard to create a positive school culture in which bad behavior is unacceptable and good behavior is rewarded. All of the schools go to great lengths to explicitly teach various social behaviors that one would expect to be second nature to middle and upper-income youth. All of the schools put great emphasis on attendance and manage to lengthen the school year and/or day in some fashion. And all of the schools have produced results that are quite impressive.

Whitman acknowledges some limitations to the these results -- the KIPP in the Bronx enrolls students that outperform their community peers before entering, The SEED School expells about 5% of their students, and Cristo Rey only admits students that they believe are capable of working in an upscale office, for example. And he also addresses some of the limits to replicability on a national scale -- most notably that there may not be enough individuals willing to put forth the time and effort that managing or teaching in one of these schools requires. Although he sings their praises for 311 pages, he acknowledges that they do not necessarily represent a definitive and simple solution to all of our nation's woes.

While Whitman makes a strong argument that increased paternalistic tendencies in schools have a good track record and merit more investigation, he fails to address a few major points. In the beginning of the book he extolls the virtues of self-discipline and details a study that found it to be a more important determinant of success than IQ. Whitman fails to investigate whether a more paternalistic environment does, in fact, develop more self-discipline in students and, if it does, whether it is the most effective way in which to develop self-discipline. I suspect that there's a body of literature of this in psychology or child development. He also fails to ask at what point paternalism becomes a negative instead of a positive. He highlights the successes of such schools, but leaves one wondering at what point a school could be so paternalistic that Whitman would no longer be enamored. In other words, how much control is too much?

Lastly, Whitman compiles a list of the 20 things that these schools have in common and that other schools should copy (p. 259). While many of these points are self-evident, some appear to be part of the list more as a result of ideology than anything else. Number 13, for example, reads "Eliminate (or at least disempower) local teacher unions." While none of the schools have strong unions, it's unclear whether the schools succeed because they don't have strong unions or that they don't have strong unions because they succeed. If management and labor get along, unions serve little purpose. In the case of schools, if teachers trust the people running their school then there is little reason for the union to exist. So it's unclear whether the lack of a strong union helps these schools or whether a strong positive culture simply means that teachers don't feel the need to join together and defend themselves. Similary, point 17 reads "Don't waste resources on fancy facilities or technology." While most of the schools don't have fancy facilities, this does not establish that nicer surroundings are bad -- it simply establishes that success is possible without them. Every year we see a barefooted runner succeed in the Olympics or another big running race. This makes it clear that human beings are capable of running without shoes, but does not prove that buying shoes does not help.

In the end, the book provokes a compelling discussion about what is right and wrong about our urban schools and how we might push them to succeed. While it may not technically be research, it provides interesting insights and original ideas. The notion that the most successful are paternalistic is an idea that is not frequently discussed in the academic literature. If the key to success is, in fact, to remove students from their home environments and acculturate them to different norms and behaviors then this shifts the frame of thinking surrounding school reform. What remains to be seen is how easy it will be to replicate what these schools have done. I've said many times before that discipline is one of the largest hurdles that high-poverty urban schools face, and I'm curious to see how well the successful discipline systems of these schools can be replicated. Is it possible, for instance, to replicate these systems in schools that cannot expel students and where every student is admitted regardless without having to apply? Only time, and quality research, will tell.

Update: Read David Whitman's response to this review (along with my response to his response)

ASA Day 2

The stream of interesting papers continues here in Boston. Here are some tidbits from today:

-In a paper on racial inequalities in learning, Priyank Shah found that higher expectations of a child's future educational attainment was much more strongly related to higher achievement among White and Asian students than among Black and Hispanic students. Additionally, Parents of Blacks and Hispanics expected higher educational attainment than did Whites.

-In a paper on the roles of class and race on achievement, Dennis Condron found that school exacerbates the achievement between black and white first graders -- i.e. it was larger at the end of the year than at the beginning of the year -- but shrinks the gap between upper and lower class students. He attributes the effect to the segregation currently present in schools, as students in schools with high-minority populations performed the worst.

-In a paper on Desegregation, Argun Saatcioglu found that desegregation improved the odds of graduation among Cleveland students despite the fact that overall graduation rates didn't rise. Cohorts that went through high school before and after desegregation were harmed by their schools while a cohort that attended during the desegregation era was actually helped by their schools -- especially Black students. Using fixed-effects he found that about 20% of the variation in graduation rates was attributable to school factors and about 80% were due to home factors.

-In a paper on Charter Schools and Segregation, Deborah Marie Warnock found that increasing numbers of charter schools in Ohio caused the traditional public schools in those districts to be more economically segregated. She used a measure called the dissimilarity index to arrive at her conclusion.

-In another paper on school choice and segregation, Kristie Phillips, Charles Hausman, and Elisabeth Stuart looked at who transferred schools in a district with open enrollment. In other words, any kid in the district could enroll in any school in the district (though none of the schools were charter). They found that students were less likely to transfer to another school if they were an English Language Learner, had a single parent, or were eligible for free/reduced price lunch but that students were more likely to transfer when they were zoned for schools with over 50% free/reduced price lunch eligible students. Additionally, wealthier students were zoned for better schools than poorer students but also transferred into better schools than the ones to which poorer students transferred.

One more day to go and I hear there's going to be a stellar presentation tomorrow.

Home vs. School Influence

I previously asserted that the largest reason for the failures at my school was not anything in the school but, rather, what took place at home.

Ken DeRosa, over at D-Ed Reckoning, took the time to thoughtfully respond to a lot of what I had to say (he disagrees with me) and I'd like to respond to some of his comments.

*The first point he makes is that my assignment of causality to home factors over school factors is suspect. He has a point. I can't be 100% sure about that. I didn't rigorously evaluate student attitudes toward school, survey parents, observe home environments, run regressions, etc. I did not use rigorous research methodology to determine what caused what and, as such, I won't be publishing it in an academic journal anytime soon. But what I did do is spend all day in the school for two years straight. I taught about 70 different kids in my two classes, and probably at least a thousand others while covering other classes. I held conferences with parents. I got to know students. I talked to teachers. I observed other classrooms. In short, I knew the school inside and out. I can't empirically prove that home factors matter more than school ones, but I have plenty of good reasons to believe it. There's certainly no way to disprove my theory either.

His second point that he makes surrounding validity is that the students' behavior was confounded by previous academic experience. All the kids should have attended school for at least 5 years prior to coming to our school (NYC doesn't mandate kindergarten), and I know very little about those experiences or how they affected learning and behavior. This is true. If I were publishing this in a journal, it would be a major weakness if not a fatal flaw. Again, I can't be 100% sure -- but given my in-depth knowledge of the situation, I'm fairly confident in my position.

*DeRosa says that behavioral problems weren't caused by poor home environments but, rather, by poor management and instructional strategies. Given that DeRosa has never, to my knowledge, stepped foot in my school it's hard for him to know exactly what was happening and why. That said, I agree to some extent. My classroom management skills were lacking, as were most of the other new teachers'. My training was not enough, and I (and other teachers) certainly could have used better techniques. But he'll have to trust me when I say that I've managed plenty of kids in plenty of situations in my lifetime and that the kids in this school were different. They were angrier. They were more defiant. They had less self-control. Of course the adults in the building failed to do enough to create a positive and structured environment, but doing so was much, much harder than it should have been because of the social norms to which the kids were exposed outside of school.

In summary of what went wrong at my school, let me be clear: myself and the other adults in the school failed the kids in many, many ways. The school was poorly run. I lacked adequate training. We could have done any number of things better (especially around discipline) and it would have helped the situation. But I stand by my assertion that the largest cause of problems at the school was the home life of the children. And I apologize for the obscene length of this post, but I'm going to explain why.

1.) When I started teaching I was convinced that the reason why schools such as mine were failing was because they were underfunded and that the teachers didn't work hard enough. I was at least 100% confident that I could turn around the life of every student I encountered. I believed I could overcome every problem they've faced simply by being inspiring, demanding, and generally awesome. But I slowly came to realize that this was not the case.

I saw many problems in my school, including: incompetent administrators (not all of them, mind you), high teacher turnover (and, therefore, inexperienced teachers), few resources and supplies, a dilapidated building, etc. I wanted to believe that with the right policies that we could be as good as any other school, but here's what I realized (and feel free to disagree on this point). If you were to lift a school from, say, Scarsdale and plop it down where our school was and then plop our school down where theirs was, you would have an interesting experiment. Our school, with the lack of resources, inexperienced teachers, etc. would now be populated by wealthy suburban kids. The Scarsdale school, with much higher expenditures, more experienced teachers, nicer facilities, smaller classes, etc. would be populated by our kids. Which school would be better?

Before I started teaching, I would've thought that the former Scarsdale school would be better. No longer. In my mind, our school would instantly become superior once it was populated by kids who were well-fed, well-adjusted, well-behaved, and had involved parents. In other words, all the of the structural factors matter less than the population of the school.

2.) My final summer in the Bronx, I taught at a private school that ran a special summer program for public school kids who had fallen behind. I taught Math, which I'd never taught before. The students came from the same neighborhoods (there was an income cap to get into the program). Despite this, the program was an unmitigated success. Students came to school on-time and ready to learn. Students smiled. Students listened when I talked. Students completed homework. Students learned. I had fun.

What was different? Certainly the program was well-run. Classes were capped at 15. I had two or three high school mentors as assistants in each class. The facilities were shiny (they even washed the board for me at night!). The teachers were good. All these things made a difference, but the largest difference was the home environment from which these kids came. The students had parents who went out of their way to apply to a selective program, come in for face-to-face interviews, make sure their kids attended so that they would be allowed to remain, and attended parent day even though they had to take a day off work.

To be fair, the program was selective and had no qualms about removing students who didn't show up or didn't cooperate. As a result, we were left with kids that came from stable families but that lived in poor neighborhoods.

Again, I have no empirical evidence -- but my experiences have convinced me that the home lives of these students contributed more to the success of the program than did the competency of the adults involved. I'm not arguing that the other stuff didn't matter, just that it mattered less than what happened at home.

3.) DeRosa argues that "The problems Corey sees may start at home, but there is no reason to believe that they cannot be solved and compensated for by schools." I disagree. I see no reason why they can't be assuaged, but schools with current levels of resources will never fully overcome what happens at home.

I'm sure just about everybody reading this could point out a school or ten that have overcome this. First of all, an exception doesn't disprove a rule. Secondly, many of the schools that have overcome home disadvantages go far beyond what we normally expect schools to do. Take KIPP schools for example, students not only self-select but are asked to leave (or simply told they will be held back if they stay) when they don't cooperate. The schools run, I believe, about 9-10 hours per day. Millions of dollars in grants are brought in to provide all sorts of extra opportunities. I think this is great. I would encourage many of the kids that I taught to go to a KIPP school if they could, but it doesn't accurately reflect what we'd normally expect schools to do.

Take, as another example, the SEED school in D.C. By all accounts, it has been tremendously successful. But it's a boarding school. If that's what it takes to overcome disadvantages stemming from students' home lives, then I'm all for it -- but we can't reasonably expect all inner-city schools to become boarding schools.

As a final example, let me provide one more anecdote. The leader of YES! Prep in Houston was on campus to speak in the fall. He opened with a question that read something to the effect of "can a school educate poor students as well as wealthy ones when they have the same resources?" And their answer was "YES!" As far as I could tell, the school did a phenomenal job. They had a dedicated staff that went the extra mile to make sure students succeeded. But they didn't provide the same resources as a suburban school, they provided the same resources as both a suburban school and a suburban family. They had extended school hours and all sorts of social activities. They raised money to provide their kids with college scholarships. They raised money to take their kids on college visits and on weekend trips to museums, plays, etc.

In short, I'm not arguing that it's not possible for a school to overcome a great deal of what happens at home, but rather that it's not possible given our current level of school resources. If somebody can figure out a way to fund a doubling of school hours, cultural trips, college visits, etc. then I'll be more open to considering schools as a full remedly for social ills rather than a partial one. Let's not forget that once a student is old enough to attend school they only spend about 22% of their waking hours inside a school building. The other 78% of the time, not to mention the first 5 or 6 years of their lives, have an awful lot of influence ((180*7/365*16) = .22).

4.) Last point, I promise. Let me get away from personal anecdotes and move on to some research. The Coleman Report was commisioned in the 1960's to prove that poor kids (especially African-Americans in segregated schools) were failing because their schools didn't have enough resources. Instead, it found that home life mattered more than what happened in school. It's now been about 42 years since the study was released, and countless follow-up studies have confirmed this finding. If there's any certainty in educaiton policy research, it's that homes influence academic achievement more than schools.

The only exception of which I'm aware is what's known as the "Heyneman-Loxley Effect" based on a paper written by Stephen Heyneman and William Loxley in 1983. The pair studies 29 countries and examined the influence of home vs. school. They found a strong correlation (-.72) between the GNP of a country and the percentage influence of home vs. that of school. In other words, schools mattered more in poor countries and homes mattered more in rich countries.

In Conclusion: I stand by my assertion that the largest problem affecting my school was the home lives of our students. This does not mean that I made excuses rather than working hard. If anything, this motivated me to work harder. This does not mean that schools can't make a world of difference. I wouldn't be studying education if I didn't think it could make a difference in students' lives. What this means is that problems exist both inside and outside of schools -- and that schools can't fix everything.

Narrowing Gap

A new report out today from the Fordham Institute apparently describes how the bottom 10 percent of students have made more progress this century than the top 10 percent of students.

Given that the low-performing students in the U.S. lag behind low-performers in other countries while high-performing students hold their own against other high-performers (previous post), it's hard for me to see this as anything but a good thing.

A Broader Approach

The blog world seems to be obsessed with the report released yesterday by EPI. I've read too many posts on the topic to cite them all. But I notice one recurring theme among a number of them: complaints that the report is tackling a problem that doesn't exist.

Let's take a step back. The report purports to take both a "bolder" and a "broader" approach to education reform than other solutions that have been floated. It argues, in short, that schools alone cannot close the achievement gap and that while improving schools is a worthy goal that it's not enough.

It seems a number of people have essentially asked "who ever said schools could do it alone?"

Maybe it's just because I'm cranky today, but this seems like a preposterous, if not disingenuous, question to me.

There is an overriding assumption behind a lot of the recent legislation and commentary on education that schools alone are expected to cure all social ills. When people argue that is not possible they're told that they're being defeatist and not to make excuses. It would be quite difficult to not to have noticed this*.

Here's the reality of the situation: schools can help, but they can't change everything. I taught for two years in an atrociously run middle school in the Bronx. Every day was filled with much chaos and little learning. And here's what I learned during my two years: the biggest reason for the failure of the school was what was happening at home. Now, that's not to say that we couldn't have done better. I could name a couple incompetent and mean-spirited administrators that should've been replaced. Us teachers certainly could have done better. The school could've been better organized. Any number of things would have helped the situation.

But that doesn't hide the fact that most of the problems existed before students ever set foot in the building. I had some horribly disruptive students my second year. The only thing that seemed to help one's behavior was calling home. But when I did that he would come back with large welts across his arms. When I would call the home of another one, his mother would tell me that she didn't know what to do. Kids would stroll into the building late with an empty stomach and an angry demeanor. When an argument erupted, it was quite difficult to defuse because kids would tell me that they were under instructions from their parents not to "stay hit." Kids would come in and fall asleep b/c they had been kept up till the wee hours of the morning by any number of activities. A couple kids disappeared for a month to go visit family in the Dominican Republic. And on, and on, and on.

Does that mean that it's impossible for a school (or a teacher) to make a difference? No. None of that stopped me from working till I dropped from exhaustion at night, setting my alarm for 5:15, and working until the bell rang in the morning. I usually stayed at school until I was too hungry to work anymore. Sometimes I'd go get dinner and find a janitor to let me back in. I kept threatening to sleep at school, but never followed through. I set high expectations from my students, and made them sign their work certifying that it was their best possible effort. But I didn't change the world. Some of the students did better, sure, but there were too many things at play for me to unalterably change the course of every life I touched.

Every person involved with a local school should focus their effort on helping children rather than making excuses, but that doesn't change the reality that schools are not only asked, but expected to do the near-impossible on a daily basis.

The report is somewhat weak. None of the policy proposals are particularly specific or ground-breaking. But I'm going to "sign" it, and here's why: the tenor of the discussion needs to be changed. I don't expect this report to do all that much, but at least it's a start. A lot of important people have signed on to the general idea that we need to improve the lives of children both inside and outside of school. I agree.

*Wording has been changed from original version to reflect a more civil tone. Thanks to KDeRosa for pointing this out.

Is America's Entire Education System Failing?

Bashing our education system has been a popular sport since well before I was born. Indeed, if I didn't think there were serious problems I wouldn't be studying education policy. Nonetheless, I sometimes wonder if people go too far. After reading Bob Herbert's op-ed in the Times today I decided I should take a little time to wonder if our education system is really that bad.

Though standardized tests have their shortcomings, they're usually the best way to compare the performance of different countries' school systems. Pasted above is a chart I made last semester of the reading ("Literacy") scores from just the G-8 countries (basically the 8 wealthiest countries in the world) so that we're comparing apples to apples. The scores are broken down by percentile for each country and then ranked.

The U.S. ranks 5th out of the 8 countries for median score, substantiating the feeling that we're falling behind and that reform is needed. But, you can see a large difference in performance for the top scorers vs. the bottom scorers in our country. Only two of the countries have top scorers that do better than the top scorers (90th and 95th percentiles) in the United States. Meanwhile, the bottom scorers (5th and 10th percentiles) in the U.S. only outperform two of the other seven countries.

So maybe the problem isn't really the entire system. Maybe our system does fine for some students while it fails others. You hear a lot in the news about impoverished schools in the inner-city or rural America, but you also hear a lot about the proliferation of AP tests, and the increasing competitiveness of admissions to the top colleges.

So maybe it's not our system that's broken but, rather, part of our system. We have both a lot of success stories and a lot of failures. Maybe we should be trying to fix the system that exists for the least fortunate students rather than berating the entire system.

Which Matters More: Race or Wealth?

I've wondered about this question for a while. I was under the impression that a rich white kid outperforms a rich black kid, but that a rich black kid outperforms a poor white kid. And then I heard a throwaway line in a documentary I saw in class last semester that said something to the effect of "if we control for wealth (including home equity) instead of income, the black-white gap disappears."

What? Really? Since then I've been trying to figure out where that information came from and if it were true or not. Finally, yesterday, a friend who's been working on a huge project on the achievement gap forwarded me an article (abstract) from the latest issue of the journal Child Development. In it, the authors use a large dataset to see if wealth mediates the achievement gap. Before I get to the findings, let me stop for a second and answer a question that might be in your head. Why would wealth matter more than income? In this study, Whites earn about twice as much as Blacks, but have about five the times the amount of wealth, on average. Think about it: one family that makes x dollars/year but has no money in the bank and rents an apt. will not have the same lifestyle as another family that makes x dollars/year but owns their own house and has a large portfolio of stocks and bonds.

So, what's the answer? Which one is more important? Well, it looks like . . . neither.

The authors have data on a lot more than just wealth and race, and when they include all their other variables neither race nor wealth are statistically significant predictors of achievement in most of their models (they have both reading and math scores for 3-5 and 6-12 year-olds). The variables that are most frequently statistically significant are parent's occupation and mother's cognitive ability. Depending on the model, parental education, grandparent's education, debt, stock ownership, and a variety of home environment measures are also statistically significant.

So, according to this dataset, there is no difference in achievement between blacks and whites who have parents with the same job, cognitive ability, and some other factors. I e-mailed the author to make sure I had this right before writing about it (I did). I also asked if race were still a statistically significant predictor when only controlling for wealth (I didn't see a table with only these variables in it) and I was told that it was.

So, there appear to be two main lessons out of this paper (for me, anyway).

1. Race, in and of itself, doesn't seem to determine achievement level. Now, maybe it influences what kind of job somebody can get (for example), and that influences achievement level -- but if a parent is able to get that job then their kids should score about the same as other kids of parents with similar jobs regardless of their race.
   
2. Though a better predictor of achievement than income, wealth does not fully mediate the effects of race on children. In other words, white children whose parents own a certain amount of property, stocks, etc. will out achieve (on average, of course) black children whose parents have the same level of wealth.

But -- and this is important -- no one study will ever definitively answer a large question like this one. In the literature review, they cite studies with findings that both agree and disagree with this one. Furthermore, the paper was an analysis of large dataset. These analyses provide compelling information on general trends, but can never answer questions as complicated as this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the authors took the time to do this -- I think it's important -- but race, wealth, and other factors impact each individual differently. It sounds like the data they used are quite good, but about 70% of the variance in achievement is left unexplained in these models. In other words, the paper looks to be pretty solid, but only a body of literature (including both quantitative and qualitative analyses) can provide conclusive evidence.

Class Size and the Achievement Gap

I hesitate to say this before having read the article (it's not out yet), but I think I figured out what's going on. This article in was published last Wednesday in EdWeek and describes a forthcoming journal article in which the author claims that smaller classes do not reduce achievement gaps. Meanwhile, another researcher who looked at the same data says that they do. I didn't have time to really think it through the first time I read it, but I think I see the difference now.

Both researchers look at data from the Tennessee STAR project, which is the only randomized trial of class size (students were randomly assigned to a class with either 13-17 or 22-26 students for a few years) and took place about 20 years ago. The author of this article, Spyros Konstantopoulos, says that the gap between the high and achievers was higher within small classes than it was in large classes. In other words, higher achieving students benefited more from smaller classes, so smaller class sizes do not impact achievement gaps.

Meanwhile, another researcher, Alan Kreuger, says that his research shows that lower-performing students and African-American students benefited more, and that, therefore, smaller classes reduce achievement gaps.

What? They're both looking at the same data. How can they reach different conclusions? Barring dishonesty or highly-technical formulas, here's what I think it is:

I think the answer is simple. In the newer article, he looks at the gap between the high and low achievers within each class, not the average score for each class. Meanwhile, the older study looks at the gap between the higher and lower performers across the sample. So the average score for lower performing classes could rise more than the average score for higher performing classes (many, if not most, classes are not extremely diverse -- they're within schools that are in wealthy suburbs or poor inner-city neighborhoods), meaning that the gap between high and low performing classes shrinks while the gap between the high and low performers within these classes actually increases. In other words, the lowest scoring students overall gained more than the highest performing students, but the highest-scoring kids within each class gained more than the lowest scoring kids within each class. So, in short, both of them are right.

If they're both right, to whom should we listen? Does reducing class size work or not? Well, you can argue it both ways. On the one hand, the society-wide "achievement gap" is really what we care about but, on the other, it seems that reducing class size doesn't reduce this in quite the way we'd anticipate. It seems that using the newest study to imply that smaller classes don't reduce the achievement gap is misleading, but that the way these changes affect distributions of achievement within classes offers food for thought. Of course, it would be nice to have a second study, one that's less than twenty years old, to compare to these findings.