Think Big, Bigger … and Smaller

The barriers to reducing the gaps are large. In fact, it's doubtful that we can ever bring the social class gap to zero; people with more money are always going to see to it that their children get more and better education than the children of people with less money. The gaps among black, Hispanic, and white children can doubtless be greatly reduced in the short term and completely eliminated in the long run. But the root causes of gaps are complex, and the class and ethnicity gaps are intertwined.

I am a social psychologist, and two important general principles in my field are (1) some big-seeming interventions have little or no effect, and (2) some small-seeming interventions have significant effects. Both of these principles are confirmed over and over again in the field of education.

Preschool Interventions: Big and Bigger

Head Start seems like a big intervention. It's certainly expensive. It places poor and minority children in settings designed to provide developmental support and at least some intellectually stimulating activities. But Head Start's academic effects are slight—reduction of the gap by a few IQ points at the beginning of elementary school, which fades into nothing after a few years of school. The effect on grades is similarly transient (Ludwig & Miller, 2005).

Fortunately, there are bigger preschool interventions that do have marked effects on closing academic achievement gaps. An example is the High/Scope Perry Preschool program serving low-income black children in Ypsilanti, Michigan. This program provided two and one-half hours of quality preschool instruction each weekday from October through May to children at ages 3 and 4. Most of the activities were deliberately chosen to increase intelligence and academic skills, and teachers made weekly home visits to each child's family (Schweinhart, 2003). Another program, the Abecedarian Project, provided even more intense intervention. Participants received a full-day, year-round program with a low child–teacher ratio from infancy through age 5 (Campbell et al., 2001).

Both of these programs employed educators with considerable skill and experience—criteria that Head Start often fails to meet. The souped-up programs resulted in big IQ gains on entry into elementary school and massive academic gains that persisted for the long haul. Just how massive were these gains? The programs cut in half the percentage of children who were put into special education, cut by almost two-thirds the percentage who scored in the bottom 10 percent on standardized tests, reduced by almost one-half the percentage who had to repeat a grade, increased by one-third the percentage who graduated from high school, more than doubled the percentage who went to a four-year college, and cut in half the percentage who were on welfare as adults. The programs were expensive, but the payoff to the public has been estimated at $4–$9 per dollar spent.

So although some big-seeming measures may fail, experience shows that if you really knock yourself out, you can produce enormous effects.

K–12 Interventions: Big and Bigger

We also see some big-seeming interventions in K–12 schools that have produced disappointing results. For example, vouchers sound like a big intervention to many people. You give families money that will pay for education at any school in the community. This arrangement is supposed to match students to the schools that are best for them and either improve or eliminate the least-effective schools as parents begin to shun them. But there is no evidence that vouchers result in better scholastic outcomes for kids (Rothstein, 2004).

How about charter schools? They can design their own programs and hire and fire teachers without necessarily having to deal with unions. But the best evidence we have indicates that most charters are little better than regular public schools, and perhaps slightly worse during their start-up periods (Gleason, Clark, Tuttle, & Dwoyer, 2010).

So-called "whole school" interventions sound ambitious. Corporations go into a school with a new curriculum, lesson plans, special teacher training, reorganization of the administration, and so on. But there's not much evidence that they improve things (Rothstein, 2004). Schools undergoing such makeovers are often only a little improved by the experience—and such interventions are very expensive, so the bang for the buck is poor.

But again, some really big K–12 interventions do make a huge difference for poor and minority kids. Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, Harlem Children's Zone, and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) provide as much as 60 percent more time in school than regular public schools do.

In the best-researched program, KIPP, students start as early as 7:30 a.m. and stay as late as 5:00 p.m., attend school on some Saturdays, and continue into the summer for a few weeks. Kids get experiences that are typical of what upper-middle-class children get—museums, sports, dance, art, theater, photography, and music lessons. Teachers visit parents and children in their homes, insist on kindness and civility, and hand out rewards on the spot for good behavior and academic achievement. One KIPP teacher described the atmosphere:

We've never had a kid talk back to a teacher, and we've never had kids fight. I don't attribute this to the discipline system. It's from setting expectations from the start. … It's because kids believe that this is an extraordinary place, and we've taught them that. I don't think they don't tease because they are afraid of the bench (for bad behavior). It's just something that they would not do at KIPP. This is the one school they've been to where there's no teasing. They feel safe, and they are learning more. (David et al., 2006, p. 16)

And KIPP gets results. A Stanford Research Institute study found that students who entered 5th grade in KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay area achieved marked improvement in a year. The proportion of students scoring at or above average on a nationally standardized language arts test rose from 25 percent at the beginning of the school year to 44 percent in the spring. In math, the proportion was 37 percent in the fall and 65 percent in the spring. Progress continued at a good clip through middle school (David et al., 2006).

Again, big-seeming interventions sometimes fail to have big effects, but really big interventions can have huge effects.

How about high school? There are no KIPP-type programs for high school yet, but we do have a pretty good idea of what can be achieved with poor minority students in math. You may have seen Stand and Deliver, the movie about math teacher Jaime Escalante's achievement in getting his East Los Angeles barrio students to pass advanced placement (AP) calculus at higher rates than students in most elite U.S. high schools. But is the story true?

There's good news and bad news about Escalante's feat. It's perfectly true that it happened. But it didn't happen in the way the movie implies. Escalante didn't just suddenly announce to unsuspecting seniors that he was going to make them into math whizzes that year. He built up math programs at junior high feeder schools, which brought highly prepared students into his three-year high school. Then, he made sure his students had excellent courses in high school math before he ever got them as seniors (Jessness, 2002). Once again, ambitious interventions can make a real difference.

The Potential of Thinking Small

I started out by saying that big interventions don't always have big effects, but small interventions can have big effects. That's decidedly true for small interventions that address ethnic achievement gaps.

For example, social psychologist Carol Dweck found, not surprisingly, that students who believe that ability is a matter of hard work get higher grades than students who believe that ability is fixed from birth. Dweck and her colleagues taught a group of low-income, minority students that learning forms neural connections and changes the brain and that students are in charge of this process. Dweck reports that some tough junior high school boys were actually reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their own control. Students exposed to the intervention worked harder, according to their teachers, and got higher grades than students in a control condition. The intervention was more effective for students who initially believed that intelligence was a matter of genes than it was for students who already tended to believe it was a matter of hard work (Dweck, 2007).

Aronson, Fried, and Good (2002) performed similar experiments, with dramatic results. They conducted one study with low-income, minority students in Texas who were entering junior high school. The intervention was short and simple. For the first year of junior high, each student was assigned a college-student mentor who helped him or her explore a variety of issues related to school adjustment.

The mentors for the control group gave their mentees information about drugs and encouraged their mentees to avoid taking them. The mentors for the experimental group told their mentees about the expandable nature of intelligence and how the brain can make new connections throughout life. Students in each group were introduced to a website that reinforced their mentors' message; the experimental group website included animated illustrations of how the brain forms new connections when it solves new problems. The mentors also helped the students design a web page in which they presented this message through words and pictures of their own making.

The effects of the intervention were dramatic. On the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) in math, the performance of male students exposed to the intervention was much higher than that of males not exposed to the intervention; for females, the difference was even larger. Students exposed to the intervention also did much better on the TAAS reading test than did students in the control group.

Oyserman, Bybee, and Terry (2006) set up an easy-to-pull-off intervention with low-income students in a largely black and Hispanic junior high school. The students attended several sessions designed to make them think about what kind of future they wanted to have, what difficulties they might encounter along the way, how they could deal with those difficulties, and which of their friends could help them. These sessions were supplemented with others in which students worked in small groups, exploring how to deal with everyday problems, social difficulties, academic challenges, and the process of getting to high school graduation. The intervention had a modest effect on grade point average (enough to take a student from the 40th percentile to the 50th percentile); a bigger effect on standardized test scores (enough to take a student from the 35th percentile to the 50th percentile); and reduced by more than one-half the likelihood of being retained in grade.

One small intervention with students in a racially mixed high school had breathtakingly large effects. Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, and Master (2006) asked students just beginning high school to write about their most important values—sports, school achievement, family, and so on. This activity had no effect on white students or high-performing black students. But it had a huge effect on low-performing black students, substantially improving their grade point averages and reducing the need for remediation from 18 percent to 5 percent. The researchers reasoned that the exercise was self-affirming, building students' confidence, making them feel more a part of things and more comfortable in their surroundings, and helping them overcome stereotype threat (performance-inhibiting anxiety about being judged on the basis of negative stereotypes). Interestingly, the same intervention had no effect on black students in a racially segregated school, where stereotype threat would assumedly be less of a factor.

Small interventions can also make a difference in college. Most new college students worry about social acceptance and fitting in on campus, but this can be particularly worrisome for black and Hispanic students. Walton and Cohen (2007) performed a modest intervention to address race-based doubts about belonging among black students at a prestigious private university. They invited 18 black and 19 white freshmen to review the results of a survey of older students at their school, which revealed that worries about social acceptance were common among students of all races and that most students eventually found a comfortable social niche.

The intervention had no effect on white students, but it had a big positive effect on black students. Following the intervention, the black students reported studying more, making more contacts with professors, and attending more review sessions and study group meetings. During the subsequent term, the black students in the intervention group earned much higher grades than the black students in the control group did.

What Will It Take?

We know that much can be done from infancy through college to reduce the achievement gap. We also know that some expensive and big-seeming interventions have little effect, whereas some even more expensive interventions can have huge effects.

How much more expensive? If we put the poorest one-sixth of elementary school students in KIPP-type programs, that would cost about $18 billion dollars a year. (Current KIPP-type programs cost little more than regular public schools, but that's only because their teachers work about 60 percent more than regular public school teachers for only slightly higher pay. We clearly can't duplicate that on a large scale.) If we put the poorest one-sixth of young children into highly effective preschool programs, the cost would be about $50 billion a year. Both of these moves would be good investments if we're really serious about equalizing educational opportunity and outcomes.

Can we afford this kind of outlay for education for the poor? Well, Congress felt in 2001 that we could afford $130 billion a year in tax cuts for the richest one percent of Americans. And the bill for bailing out AIG was $145 billion dollars.

Bear in mind that some very big-seeming interventions don't cost much more than school as usual. Jaime Escalante's enriched math classes are one example. And of course, the small-seeming interventions with notable effects discussed here cost next to nothing.

So when it comes to reducing the achievement gap, don't think big. Think very big … and very small.

References

Aronson, J., Fried, C. B., & Good, C. (2002). Reducing stereotype threat and boosting academic achievement of African-American students: The role of conceptions of intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 113–125.

Campbell, F. A., Pungello, E. P., Miller-Johnson, S., Burchinal, M., et al. (2001). The development of cognitive and academic abilities: Growth curves from an early childhood educational experiment. Developmental Psychology, 37, 231–242.

Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., & Master, A. (2006). Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention. Science, 313, 1307–1310.

David, J. L., Woodworth, K., Grant, E., Guha, R., Lopez-Torkos, A., & Young, V. M. (2006). Bay area KIPP schools: A study of early implementation (First-year report 2004–05). Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.

Dweck, C. S. (2007). The perils and promise of praise.Educational Leadership, 65(2), 34–39.

Gleason, P., Clark, M., Tuttle, C. C., & Dwoyer, E. (2010). The evaluation of charter school impacts: Final report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/pdf/20104029.pdf

Jessness, J. (2002). Stand and Deliver revisited. Reason. Retrieved from www.reason.com/news/show/28479.html

Ludwig, J., & Miller, D. L. (2005). Does Head Start improve children's life chances? Evidence from a regression discontinuity design (Working Paper 11702). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Oyserman, D., Bybee, T., & Terry, K. (2006). Possible selves and academic outcomes: How and when possible selves impel action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 188–204.

Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools: Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black-white achievement gap. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

Schweinhart, L. J. (2003, April). Benefits, costs, and explanation of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program. Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development meeting, Tampa, Florida.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2007). A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 82–96.