CHAPTER 2
Decide Which Research to Trust
This chapter considers seven common challenges to educational research and offers a respectful reply to each challenge. Specifically, it considers seven arguments for research about success in high-poverty schools and how you might decide whether this research is worthy of your trust. The chapter concludes with a recommendation for locally generated research for the greatest level of credibility with teachers, administrators, and community members.
In the descriptions of the following seven arguments, I rely on extensive conversations with tens of thousands of teachers in fifty states and more than thirty countries. Whether the venue is Topeka or Tasmania, Louisiana or Lusaka, the arguments about research are strikingly consistent.
Argument 1: “The Research Doesn’t Apply to Us”
When the locations of the research are anonymous, it lacks credibility with many teachers and administrators because of the deep suspicion that the participants in the studies are vastly different from the practitioners in their schools. The situation is similar to much of the psychological research performed not on the general population, but on college sophomores taking a psychology class (the students fill out surveys or participate in experiments week after week, all in the pursuit of their professor’s publication). This is also one of many reasons so much psychological research is not replicable (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2019). Similarly, if finding exceptional student performance results in the laboratory schools of universities and colleges, where students are often the children of exceptionally bright and committed graduate students and are only temporarily living on a low income, those results can hardly be labeled representative of the larger population of students from low-income families.
In the original equity and excellence research (Reeves, 2004), by contrast, every school was from public educational systems in the United States, and schools ranged in location from the West Coast (where there were also very high populations of students not speaking English at home), to the Midwest (where there was multigenerational poverty), to the eastern United States (where political upheaval, financial disasters, unemployment, and persistent social ills made for a difficult learning environment for students and a challenging working environment for teachers). None of the schools are exceptional, and none are university lab schools. Indeed, one of the most important elements when selecting schools for the study was they must be similar in every respect to the other unselected schools in the same system—the same union contract, per-pupil funding, teacher assignment policy, and neighborhoods. In other words, equity and excellence schools truly are representative of high-poverty schools across North America. The only differences are in academic achievement and the professional practices teachers and leaders employ to achieve those high levels of performance. It is also important to note that the programs in use did not distinguish the successful schools, but rather the differences were due to the specific actions of teachers and leaders. A consistent theme in the research is that practices, not programs, make the difference for student results.
It is important to regard equity and excellence research as the starting gate, not the finish line. Part II (page 29) of this book addresses what equity and excellence schools do differently, and part III (page 89) describes how they do it, but equally important is the information in part IV (page 137), which requires the continual assessing of implementation through accountability systems. In order to institutionalize the most effective practices for your school or district, it is imperative for you to create a continuous cycle of professional learning that links the causes of academic achievement with the effects. Only in this way will you know, based on data from your students in your school and community, the professional practices most effective for you. I believe equity and excellence research makes an effective case that the practices in the following chapters are strongly associated with improved student achievement. However, I readily acknowledge that the most effective way to sustain effective practice is not merely by reading the research of others but also by committing to local observation and research to overcome the objection, “We are different.”
Despite efforts to match equity and excellence schools in other low-income schools across North America, it is certainly true that no external sample of schools will precisely mirror the characteristics of the school or district in which you work. Every sample, whether from a few schools the researcher chooses as a sample of convenience or a larger sample that closely mirrors the characteristics of students in the original research, is limited because practitioners contend, “That sample did not include my students and my school.” Indeed, even when the sample does address this challenge by including “my students in my schools,” skeptics could contend the sample used last year’s students and this year’s students are different.
The only response to this challenge is not to argue over the representative nature of samples, but to shift the research focus from external to internal. In Reframing Teacher Leadership to Improve Your School (Reeves, 2008b), I offer a method for teachers to conduct and assess action research that has, in my experience, been transformative for promoting effective and sustainable change. This method is colloquially referred to as the science fair approach, as the method mirrors the three-panel cardboard displays fourth graders often use for their science fair projects. Although the research topics vary widely based on the individual needs of each teacher and school, the format of these three-panel cardboard displays is consistent.
1. Left panel: Challenge
2. Middle panel: Professional practices
3. Right panel: Results
Here are some examples from schools I observed.
• Challenge: High school failures due to missing work (more than 90 percent of D and F grades were due to missing work, not attendance or behavior).
• Professional practices: Teachers implemented a daily required intervention immediately before lunch. All students used the same agenda, and all teachers agreed to use a stamp system to indicate when students completed the work. When students were missing a stamp, they were directed to the appropriate room to complete the work.
• Results: D and F grades declined by 67 percent in one semester.
• Challenge: Middle school behavior was out of control and suspensions at an all-time high.
• Professional practices: Teachers implemented restorative justice schoolwide and agreed on a chart of responses for what is required for in-class, in-office, and out-of-school discipline.
• Results: Suspensions decreased by 55 percent in one year.
• Challenge: Chronic absenteeism in elementary through high school.
• Professional practices: Teachers implemented the sixty-second report—all students not seated in the classroom within one minute of the tardy bell were added to a list in the principal’s office and called within the first twenty minutes of school. All staff members who were not in front of students attended a stand-up meeting in the principal’s office.
• Results: Absenteeism decreased by more than 80 percent in one year.
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