Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

The Chicago board of education has announced that it will close 61 elementary schools at the end of the year. This is the largest number of school closures by a district in a single year in U.S. history, according to some reports. And this is just the beginning. Chicago Public Schools reports that 330 of its schools are underutilized; 129 of those schools were finalists for closure this year.

Under its current enrollment, CPS has more buildings than it needs or can afford. Making matters more complicated, enrollment in district-run schools will continue to drop. The city lost 200,000 people over the last decade , and charter schools become more popular every year with families who stay in Chicago. So for years to come, the district will continually be faced with the need to close additional schools. My advice to the district: close your middle schools, for starters.

Recent research suggests that school districts should move away from middle schools, towards the K through 8 elementary schools that were once the norm across the country. The coming consolidation of CPS facilities would allow the district to go back to this model.

Middle schools became prominent in the 1960s and 70s. There was little academic justification for creating them; most of the middle school pedagogy found today was developed after middle schools were built. There wasn’t much anxiety about comingling adolescents and younger children; that was a post hoc justification. Districts simply built middle schools to house sixth through eighth graders from elementary schools that, after the Baby Boom, were actually overfull. Recent research shows that this was a huge unforced error. Districts should have just built more K-8 schools. For students, the transition from elementary to middle schools has negative, long-term impacts.

A pioneering study of middle schools was published in 2010 by Columbia University researchers Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood. They compared New York City students at middle schools and K-8 elementary schools. They found that middle schools had a large negative impact on students test scores. Almost all of the learning losses were suffered by disadvantaged students with lower incoming test scores.

Harvard researchers Marty West and Gino Schwerdt have used the same methods to examine Florida middle schools. They found practically identical, negative effects in urban areas like Miami. These effects persisted into high school. Again, disadvantaged students were the ones who suffered the largest learning losses in middle schools, thus widening achievement gaps that reformers usually hope to close.

Middle schools were a mistake in New York and Miami. We have every reason to think they were a mistake in Chicago, too.

In Chicago, school buildings will be shuttered, an unpleasant fact. But the New York and Florida research suggests that there’s an opportunity at hand for CPS.

Consider a typical cluster of three half-empty elementary schools, all of which feed into a half-empty middle school. It’s unaffordable to keep all four schools open indefinitely. Under the status quo, if CPS was to stick with its current grade configurations at its elementary schools, the only feasible way to consolidate schools would be to close one of the K-5 feeder schools. Students would be forced to transfer to one of the other two feeder schools. Then those same students would soon feed into the middle school, which would remain under-enrolled. Some students at consolidated elementary schools will be forced to switch schools twice in as many years, first when their elementary school was closed, next when it was time to transfer to middle school.

The middle-school research points to a different strategy. The district should stop feeding students into half-empty middle schools. Instead, it should allow kids to stay at their current elementary schools by simply adding an older grade to the school. As elementary schools add one grade per year, they’d eventually become K-8 schools — they certainly have the space to do so. Middle schools would shrink in size and staffing levels, since they’d have no more incoming classes.* Eventually, the middle schools would have no more students left, since all of their present students will graduate to high school. In a couple short years, most underused middle schools could be closed.**

Under this scheme, no student would be forced to leave her current school. The district could close a large number of underused buildings. And student performance would improve.

Closing middle schools is not a cure-all. CPS will need to close more buildings than just its middle schools So goes its budget. And the district will need to pursue more than one reform policy – look at its test scores. But it should start with a no-brainer and phase out its middle schools.

* Jonah Rockoff made an excellent point to me when he visited the University of Arkansas, where I work and study, earlier this month. There are a few under-enrolled middle schools that might be led by a better staff than the elementary schools that feed into it. In that instance, you might consider letting that middle school grow from the bottom up, starting with kindergarten. That middle school’s feeder elementary school(s) would receive no new students, eventually phasing itself out as its kids grew into the rare under-enrolled but good middle schools.

** The question then becomes, what to do with the empty buildings? That’s a matter for a future post, though here are some clues.

In my last post I mentioned a large-scale random assignment study of the effects of school tours of an art museum that I am conducting with my colleagues, Brian Kisida and and Dan Bowen.  Some people have asked for more information about that project.  So, here is a brief summary of what we are doing in that study as well as some related projects examining cultural education.

The random assignment study of field trips was made possible by the fact that the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Northwest Arkansas, an area that had never before had a major art museum.  Because there was intense interest from schools in the area in having school tours there were many more applicants for field trips than the museum could accommodate right away.  We worked with the museum to randomly assign tours to applicants.

Specifically, the museum received more than 300 applications for tours during the first semester.  We organized those applicants into matched pairs, which were often adjacent grades in the same school or the same grade in different schools with similar demographic characteristics.  We then randomly assigned one school in each matched pair to be the treatment group and one to be the control group.  We randomly ordered the matched pairs and the museum scheduled the first 55 treatment groups for school tours last spring.  The 55 matched control groups were guaranteed a tour during the next semester for participating in the study.

We then administered surveys to the randomly assigned treatment and control group students and teachers a few weeks after the treatment group visited the museum.  Those surveys were designed to measure five types of outcomes: 1) whether the school tour helped create cultural consumers (students who want to return to museums and engage in other cultural activities), 2) whether the school tour helped create cultural producers (students who want to make art), 3) whether the school tour increased student knowledge about art and history, 4) whether the school tour improved student critical thinking about works of art, and 5) whether the school tour altered student values, like empathy and tolerance.

We have already collected results from almost 6,000 K-12 students and teachers from 80 different schools during last spring’s research.  This fall we are adding another 4,000 students and teachers to the study from another 60 or so schools.  When it is all done and analyzed it will probably be the biggest, most comprehensive, and highly rigorous examination of the effects of school tours of an art museum.

As part of the study we are also asking students in grades 3-12 to write short essays in response to paintings that they have probably never seen before to assess how they critically analyze a new work of art after they’ve had a school tour of an art museum.  Last semester we coded almost 4,000 essays in response to Bo Bartlett’s painting, The Box, which was pictured in my previous post.  This semester we wanted to try something a little more abstract, so we we will be coding another 2,500 or so essays in response to Marsden Hartley’s painting, Eight Bells Folly, which is pictured above.  Dan Bowen has taken the lead in the coding and analysis of these essays and will soon be on the job market in case anyone is looking for a great and innovative researcher to hire.

There are obvious limitations to our study.  We can only measure short term effects since the control group receives the treatment the following semester.  And we can only measure a limited set of outcomes from an art experience.  But we will know a whole lot more and with higher confidence than we do now.

We are also conducting two studies with the Walton Arts Center, which is a performing arts theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  In one study we are are working with our colleague in the music department, Lisa Margulis, to learn about the effects of information in program notes on students’ experiences during school field trips to see performances.  We are randomly assigning students to receive program notes with information about the show they are seeing or “placebo” program notes  that do not tell them about the show they are seeing.  The question is whether information alters the experience.

And in the other study with the Walton Arts Center we are surveying more than 2,000 7th grade students in area schools to link the past performances they have seen on school field trips to their current behaviors as cultural consumers and producers as well as some empathy and tolerance outcomes.  We are also going to use attendance zone boundaries as an exogenous source of variation to make stronger causal claims about how past school field trips may have contributed to current behaviors and attitudes.

We are also in talks with various folks about additional studies, all of which will use random assignment or similarly rigorous methods.  This line of work is particularly exciting because there is a limited amount of rigorous research out there on how school cultural activities affect students.

(link edited)

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on a large-scale random assignment experiment of the effects of school tours of an art museum on students and their learning.  We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on school field trips and billions more on art museums, but we have relatively little rigorous evidence on how field trips and art museums affect students.  Soon we are going to have a lot more information.

Since the world of art and museum education is new to me, I’ve been trying to learn about how people in that field think about what they are trying to accomplish and what kind of evidence they present to justify the resources required.  Some  people try to justify the place of art in education by claiming that art positively affects achievement in math and reading — subjects whose importance is a matter of broad consensus.  Unfortunately, the evidence linking art education to improved math and reading achievement is generally weak and unpersuasive.

Why do people bother trying to justify art in terms of math and reading achievement?  Math educators don’t try to frame their accomplishments in terms of reading or vice versa.  Why do people in art try to frame the benefits of their field in terms of other subjects?

The problem is that a good number of  policymakers, pundits, and others who control the education system seem to think that the almost-exclusive purpose of education is to impart economically useful skills.  Math and reading seem to these folks to be directly connected to economic utility, while art seems at best a frill.  If resources are tight or students are struggling, they are inclined to cut the arts and focus more on math and reading because those subjects are really useful while art is not.

This economic utility view of education is mistaken in almost every way.  Most of what students learn in math and reading also has no economic utility.  Relatively few students will ever use algebra, let alone calculus, in their jobs.  Even fewer students will use literature or poetry in the workplace.  When will students “use” history?  We don’t teach those subjects because they provide work-related skills.  We teach algebra, calculus, literature, poetry, and history for the same reasons we should be teaching art — they help us understand ourselves, our cultural heritage, and the world we live in.  We teach them because they are beautiful and important in and of themselves.  We teach them because civilized people should know them.

Most parents understand that education is not entirely about imparting economically useful skills.  Yes, they want their children to get good jobs but they also want to have their children develop good characters, appreciate the good life, and generally be civilized human beings.  Of course, different parents may want a different mix of economic and cultural education for their children and school choice would allow them to find the schools that offered the mix that suited their needs and tastes.

But policymakers, pundits, and others suffering from PLDD who control our increasingly centralized education system focus almost exclusively on economic utility as the criteria for making education policy decisions.  Math and reading test scores are the only clubs they have to beat their opponents in establishing their preferred policies.  And economic payouts are the only objective measures they can use to justify expenditures.  Parents don’t think about education this way, but they have less and less say over what happens in the rearing of their children to become what they hope will be civilized human beings.

Some policymakers, pundits, and other PLDD sufferers have noticed that not everything taught in math and reading is economically useful and want to fix that.  You have folks like Tony Wagner and the 21st Century Skills movement suggesting that we cut algebra because students won’t “need” it.  Instead, students would be better off learning communication skills, like how to prepare an awesome Power Point (TM).  And you have Common Core cutting literature in English in favor of “informational texts.”

Of course, the logical culmination of the idea of school as job-skills provider is that we would do away with school altogether and just have apprenticeships.  I see nothing wrong with apprenticeship but it is not what I or most parents view as an “education.”

People in the art world can justify what they do by arguing for art in its own right.  They can rigorously measure art outcomes, as we are in our random-assignment field trip study.  In fact, as part of our study we had 4,000 students write short essays in response to Bo Bartlett’s painting, The Box (pictured above).  It may be harder to code and analyze essays about paintings than to run another value-added regression on the math and reading scores that the centralized authorities have collected for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important.  The purpose of education isn’t only what the centralized authorities decide it is and bother to measure.