It’s not uncommon to hear someone inaccurately state that the teacher has the biggest influence on student achievement — period. Of course, the true statement is that — of the in-school factors — teachers have the biggest influence. On top of that, research has shown that over two-thirds of the factors that influence student achievement occur out of school.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continually look at ways to help teachers become better. It does mean that we should also figure out ways to change the outside factors, too — lack of affordable housing, health care, safety. That is one of the main messages of my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, which offers practical suggestions on how schools can work with parents on these issues. It also means that placing all the blame on teachers, which some “school reformers” are prone to do, is disingenuous.
In addition to my book, I thought I’d bring together links to other resources that provide research (and analyze it) about this topic. Feel free to offer additional suggestions.
Here are my choices for The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher (& Outside Factors) Have On Student Achievement:
How To Fix Our Schools by Richard Rothstein
Teachers Matter, But So Do Words from the Shanker blog (thanks to Alexander Russo for the tip)
The Family: America’s Smallest School from The Educational Testing Service
I’m embedding this very good thirty minute Here’s how the Education Testing Service describes it:
Rothstein, a former New York Times national education columnist, discusses the false narrative about public education — especially urban schools — that currently exists. Rothstein maintains that many education reform proposals, especially those that focus on teacher accountability, are based on a misinterpretation and misuse of data. He stresses the direct correlation between poverty and educational failure.
Rothstein makes many important points but, because of some of the key ones he makes, I’m adding the video to this list.

Joe Nocera at The New York Times takes on school reformers in a column:
…school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.
Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.
Is Poverty the Key Factor in Student Outcomes? is from The Texas Observer.
Says Who? Lots of Folks, Actually… is by Robert Pondiscio. He’s gathered quite a few quotes from school reformers on the topic of the role of poverty and the role of teachers. I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement. He also raises some questions about a post written by Nancy Flanagan. You can find her response in the comments section there and in
Is Poverty the Key Factor in Student Outcomes? is an article and video from The Texas Tribune.
Closing the Poverty Gap: The Way Forward for Education Reform is the title of guest column in Ed Week by Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville.
After citing some pretty irrefutable data documenting the role of poverty in student achievement, here are some excerpts from what he writes:
Some want to make the absurd argument that the reason low-income youngsters do poorly is that, mysteriously, all the incompetency in our education systems has coincidentally aggregated around low income students. In this view, all we need to do is scrub the system of incompetency and all will be well. An equally absurd variant on this theme is that poor performance in low-income districts is a function of, again coincidental, misalignment between state standards and local curriculum. Get these in line and all will be fine say the ideologues. Others want to banish any discussion of socio-economic status (SES) and educational performance for fear that it suggests that SES is destiny. It does not. We all know of notable individual exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptions. The averages tell the story….
It is now blatantly apparent to me and other education activists, ranging form Geoffrey Canada to Richard Rothstein to Linda Darling-Hammond, that the strategy of instructional improvement will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty.
As others have argued, we need “a broader, bolder” approach, one that meets every child where he or she is and gives to each one the quality and quantity of support and instruction needed to attain the standards. Those of us who have the privileges of affluence know how to do this at scale with our children. We wrap services and supports around these children from the pre-natal period through their twenties. We know how to do it, but do we have the will to do it for “other people’s children”? And do we know how to institutionalize the necessary services and supports that are best provided through families?

It’s not uncommon to hear that our schools need to be run more like businesses. That argument holds a lot of appeal to some people (including, but not limited to, people who might make a profit out of it).
I thought I’d bring together a few resources that provide a counterpoint to those beliefs. I’m starting off with a short list, and hope that readers will provide additional suggestions in the comments section of this post.
Here are my choices for The Best Posts & Articles Explaining Why Public Education Should Not Be Run Like A Business:
My Sacramento colleague Alice Mercer has written an excellent post titled The Business of Education. Here’s a short excerpt:
While I think there are some things that can be learned from best practices in other fields, trying to adopt reform models from business on a “wholesale” basis ignores some basic differences between the function and ecology of public education, and a for-profit business.
Diane Ravitch provides a good response to the third question (which is on the topic of business models and schools) in this Public School Insights interview.
Nancy Flanagan points out that schools might be able to learn some things from businesses, as long as we look at the right businesses.
Why schools can’t be run like a business is a post from A Year In The Life Of A Teacher that tells a well-known story illustrating that point.
I’ve written a post about some of the consequences hospitals are experiencing in their efforts towards creating more “efficiency” and its implications for schools. It’s titled Should “Efficiency” Really Be The Driving Force In Hospitals (And Schools)?
“The Price Is Double” — Two Stories About School Reform & Money is another related post I’ve written.
Turning the Tide: Taking Competition Out of School Reform comes from Edutopia.
Déjà vu all over again: A lesson from the history of school reform is by Mike Rose and appeared in The Washington Post.
Business and Education Don’t Mix is by Walt Gardner at Ed Week.
What Do Teachers “Produce”? is by Diana Senechal and appeared in the Core Knowledge Blog.
I made some revisions to my book excerpt that appeared in Education Week recently, and it was just published in The Washington Post. My small changes connected the idea of helping students motivate themselves to school reform, and how perhaps making schools adopt what some see as business practices might not be a good idea.
Students & Their Families “Are Not Consumers”

The absurdity of applying the business model to public schools knows no boundaries. In an essay published in The Wall Street Journal on May 5 titled "If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools," Donald J. Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University and senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, tries to show why the present monopolistic system of public education in the U.S. is indefensible. He attempts to make his case by supposing that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education.
At first, I thought the piece was intended to be a satire. But then I realized that Boudreaux was dead serious. What he writes shouldn't come as a surprise, however, because the Mercatus Center was founded and funded by the Koch Family Foundations. According to SourceWatch, the Koch family has additionally contributed more than $30 million to George Mason University.
But more to the point, Boudreaux's model is not new. In 2003, St. Louis Public Schools hired Alvarez & Marsal, a marquee-name New York bankruptcy firm which preferred to be called turnaround experts, for a one-time fee of $5 million to address abysmal test scores and plummeting enrollment. It was successful in getting William Roberti, former Brooks Brothers chief executive, named superintendent even though he lacked any educational experience. I wonder if this set a precedent for the appontment of Cathie Black as former chancellor of New York City schools?
During his 13 months at the helm, Roberti shuttered 21 schools, chopped $79 million off the school budget, privatized many school services and fired more than 1,000 employees (although none were teachers). The real impetus for these changes, however, came from the Broad Foundation, whose proclaimed goal is to reform public schools along business lines.
Roberti took these steps in the belief that a school district operates much like a retail business. In fact, he viewed each school as a retail store and teachers as retail clerks. He asserted that the key is "supply chain management." As he explained: "Many people talk as if there's some magic to education. But the job of getting supplies from a warehouse to a building is the same in schools as it is in business as it is in the federal government." What this has to do with educating students, I still don't understand. Three months after Roberti left, student enrollment continued to decline, teacher morale was at a nadir, parents were angry about school closures, and voters were outraged about high salaries paid to top administrators. (For a detailed account of the fiasco, see "This is reform?" by Peter Downs.)
Regardless of the evidence, supporters of an educational free market are not deterred. They insist that not enough school districts have adopted the strategy to draw any final conclusions. They look to Milton Friedman as their hero. In 1955 when he issued his then radical proposal to disentangle government funding of education from operation of schools, Friedman was motivated more by ideology than by disaffection with the status quo because public schools during the era in question enjoyed widespread taxpayer approval. Since then, however, that support has slowly eroded as a result of a sophisticated disinformation campaign.
So maybe it's time to clarify why the laws of economics and the principles of education don't mix.
First, in an open marketplace, consumers possess ease of entry and exit. They immediately signal their satisfaction or dissatisfaction by their buying behavior. But in the case of schools, the ability to do so is expensive and disruptive. Certainly, parents can sell their homes or rent an apartment in an area to meet residency requirements or to make the logistics of attending schools easier. But the price paid financially, socially and psychologically is steep.
Second, even when parents are willing to pay the price, there's no assurance that they'll be able to enroll their children in coveted neighborhood schools because supply and demand are too often out of synch. In an open marketplace in business, this disconnect is routinely remedied by opening new branches. But it is very expensive to convert existing buildings to schools because education is extremely labor intensive. As a result, there are no economies of scale. The process is costly no matter how often it is repeated.
Third, product differentiation in education is at best minimal. Even when parents are guaranteed the right to choose, similarities between schools tend to overwhelm their differences within the same community. This doesn't mean parents can't find schools to meet the unique needs and interests of their children, but it is not nearly as simple as free marketeers assert.
Finally, the supermarket paradigm that Boudreaux offers is predicated on efficiency. But education by its very nature is not efficient. There will always be uncertainty and ambiguity in schools that aim for educational quality. That's why the business model of reform for public education won't work. The best it can do is to turn out students who perform a trifle better on standardized tests.
Nevertheless, I fully expect to see even deeper inroads into public schools made by Corporate America. The estimated $700 billion spent annually on K-12 education is too tempting to pass up. Joanne Barkan said it best in a essay published in the Winter 2011 issue of Dissent:

Engineering

• COMSATS Abbottabad
• UET NWFP Abbottabad

Primary and Secondary

• Abbottabad Grammar School
• Aligarh Public School & College
• Abbottabad Jamia Public School
• Abbottabad Public School
• Army Burn Hall College
• Beaconhouse Hassan Town
• Beaconhouse Liaquat Road
• Concept School of Learning
• Government Girls' College No. 1 Abbottabad
• Government Girls' College No. 2 Abbottabad
• Government Girls' High School No. 1 Abbottabad
• Government Girls' High School No. 2 Abbottabad
• Government Girls' Higher Secondary School Comprehensive Abbottabad
• Government College No. 2 Abbottabad
• Government High School No. 1 Abbottabad
• Government High School No. 2 Abbottabad
• Government High School No. 3 Abbottabad
• Government High School No. 4 Abbottabad
• Iqra Academy Abbottabad
• Jinnah Public School
• Modern School System
• Modernage Public School
• Pakistan International Public School
• Pine Hills Public School
• Present Times Public School