Family Matters - A Lot

Michael Winerip writing in the Sunday New York Times links No Child Left Behind to a recent ETS study on family and student achievement – and starts his column by proclaiming that in an “awful lot” of cases, a school’s failure to perform on NCLB tests is not its fault.

Instead, he writes, four factors over which schools have zero control account for most of the large differences among states in NAEP reading scores. 

ETS researchers looked at how family conditions affect development and achievement and how gaps persist throughout life. In a press conference on the report, co-author Rich Coley pointed out that teachers don’t have a “magic wand” to wave to help children catch up. 

Winerip reports:

The ETS researchers took four variables that are beyond the control of schools: The percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily, and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state’s results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

Winerip properly calls out the single-parent factor and puts some qualifiers around it, lest some are tempted to turn student achievement into a ”family values” problem.

Nonetheless, there’s plenty in this report, and others like it, to give pause to NCLB report card results – and to question whether education reform really needs to begin at home. Testing and then punishing schools is intervention at the wrong point on the continuum.

Or as ETS’s Coley puts it, if we’re serious about closing achievement gaps, “We need to focus as much attention on the starting line as we do on the finish line.” 

Read more about ETS’s “The Family: America’s Smallest School” — full report, summary, news releases, videos.

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