Education policy: Wishful thinking, faulty reasoning

The cornucopia, or horn of plenty, dates back to the ancient Greeks. Zeus’s mother Rhea was trying to keep his father Cronus from eating him, so she hid young Zeus in a cave where he was cared for by a goat. One day while Zeus was playing, he accidentally snapped off one of the goat’s horns. The broken horn became a source of never-ending nourishment.

Over the centuries, the goat’s horn has evolved into the wicker harvest symbol that graces many Thanksgiving tables. It’s also, however, a fitting symbol of public education’s bounty of wondrous ideas. Here are a few in honor of the season.

The positive correlation between parent involvement and student success dates back almost as far as Zeus. Naturally, some forms of involvement are more constructive than others. For example, many schools lure parents to meetings by handing out gift cards and pizza. Others err by recruiting parents for committees where most lack the expertise to be of any more service than I would be helping my doctor analyze my lab results.

Snacks and empowering flattery aren’t the keys to engaging parents in their children’s education. Parents first have to care about what and how well their children are learning. Fortunately, many do. Unfortunately, some don’t. It does no good to pretend otherwise.

The problem is, schools do a lot of pretending. One think-tank expert makes the valid point that constructive parental engagement “means shooting straight with parents” about their child’s school performance. He’s right that schools aren’t always honest about student achievement. I’ve sat in on plenty of conferences where parents were assured by someone at the table that their child was bright when he was average, diligent when he was lazy, and a “nice kid” when he was a terror.

Of course, if our thinktanker were really being honest, or knew what he was talking about, he wouldn’t conclude his pitch for straight shooting by instructing schools to make “the hard changes” that will deliver success and “fix the problem.” The real truth we often owe parents is that nothing the school can do will fix the student’s “problem.” That’s commonly because the school is already doing and changing everything it practically can.

Our expert concludes by urging schools to deal with unsuccessful students by joining with parents to “nudge those young people back to where they need to be.” If he were a teacher and not an expert, he’d know that a student can’t go back to where he needs to be if he’s never been there in the first place. He’d also know that in most of the cases he’s talking about, teachers are already well past nudging.

Speaking of parent involvement, the U.S. tates Census Bureau recently confirmed a link between “educational outcomes” and “parental interactions with their children.” The bureau’s results also suggest that positive interactions with their parents tend to improve children’s overall “well-being.” In an equally unstartling finding, parents reported having “frequent interactions” with their children.

At school, children who choose to “participate in three or more activities” like athletics and afterschool clubs are “more engaged in school” than those who don’t participate. Students from low socioeconomic status homes, the current euphemism for poverty, tend to be the ones who don’t participate as much. This could be because low SES students are less likely to have leisure time, transportation, or positive feelings about academics in particular and therefore toward school in general.

While all races and ethnicities appear equally engaged in general family interactions, black and Hispanic parents are less likely to read to their children. They’re also less likely to have attended college. Low-achieving students tend to come from low-SES families where parents are less educated.

Stop me when I get to something you didn’t already know without a census survey.

In a final data outburst, a Missouri research team found that 93 percent of elementary teachers report a “high stress level.” Survey respondents were asked how stressful their jobs were, and how well they were coping with that stress.

When investigators “linked” those data with “student outcomes,” they found high teacher stress was associated with “lower grades” and “frequent behavior problems.”

Investigators further concluded that teachers experiencing “low levels of stress” who also claim to possess “high coping abilities” are “practically nonexistent.” Since teachers who don’t feel stressed are unlikely to feel the need to develop coping mechanisms, and since only seven percent of participating teachers reported low stress levels in the first place, that’s hardly surprising.

I’ve taught middle school students for over 30 years. I’ve felt twinges of stress from time to time, and I’ve found ways to cope with it, humor being among the most useful. I think elementary teachers have it tougher, if only because their students scurry around more.

But 93 percent? How meaningful is that precise number? How do you define “high stress level”? How does the guy next to you define it? Does it matter that only 121 teachers were surveyed, or that they all taught in the same school district?

Education policy too often rests on wishful thinking and faulty reasoning. Education data is too often a fancy word for numbers like these.

School reform’s cornucopia overflows with the obvious, the unsound, and the misconstrued.

We could do better with less of what spills from this horn of plenty.