On Controlling for Family Influence on Achievement — Part One

As I review Berends’ and colleagues 2008 volume Charter School Outcomes (Lawrence Erlbaum), a key assumption of Anglo-American political theory, namely that inequality is the result of “natural distinction” (as opposed to social distinction), undergirds the authors’ efforts to improve research methods for evaluating school choice policies. I think exposing their position as emanating from political theory more than the natural and behavioral sciences might prove helpful in both evaluating the book and articulating the political significance of school choice policy more generally.

Random Trials as Opportunity Science

Of note is the book’s adoption of U.S. Department of Education, and in particular the Institute of Educational Sciences, insistence on the “gold standard” of experimental design: the “random assignment of units to experimental and control or contrast conditions (2).”

“Randomized field trials” are thus adopted as the key method for studying school choice. By studying the measurable outcomes of applicants who were lotteried into an oversubscribed charter school or voucher program to those who were lotteried out and attended a traditional public school, the influence of family background can be separated out from that of the school itself.

According to the authors, the strength of this method and other efforts such as over time measures of “value added,” is that they help “take into account the powerful influence of families” and help “establish the separate and distinct contribution of the school to a student’s achievement.”

The postulate that experimental design is equally the gold standard for the social sciences as it is for the natural sciences is taken for granted. It presents itself as a solution to a perennial problem in school evaluation research predating even the “Coleman Report”: controlling for the influence of family characteristics on school outcomes. It seems as a rational way out of that conundrum — but only if certain things are ignored or forgotten.

Questions

What is the assumption behind the presupposition that students must be separated from their historical position, their social circumstance, in order to assess the quality of their school and the degree to which they have learned what is required of them? How does this premise inform the cultural meaning of “achievement” as distinct from student learning?

What is the political significance of the fact that this kind of “controlling” for social circumstance was largely impossible under a traditional public school model where place of residence determined school assignment for all but a tiny minority of public school students?

Irrespective of the logic justifying the “controlling” for social circumstance, is not such a project irrational? Can one “control” for social circumstances — that is, such efforts reveal a profound distortion and patently unscientific view of social reality? Does not the entire project of “controlling” for social circumstance — which includes everything from assumptions about “ethnicity” and parental “SES” to larger understandings of religion, culture and sub-cultures of neighborhoods — constitute a social circumstance and a patently normative project which serves the interests of some over others?