Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Downey challenges the ideas that schools are engines of inequality and that schools can be effectively transformed to substantially reduce inequality. Having completed some of the most influential recent work on the topic, he shows that most of the inequalities we observe are rooted in skills children do and do not possess on their very first day of school., and the evidence suggests that For the most part, schools keep differences from getting bigger. Schools can only get you part of the way If you want to have to a more equal opportunity structure for kids. If equality of opportunity is your goal, then you have to invest more heavily in solutions outside rather than inside of schools."--Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison "This book is a must-read for anyone interested in education equality and policy. How Schools Really Matter offers a much-needed corrective to the assumption that student achievement gaps are the product of woefully inadequate schools and teachers. Downey shows that schools compensate for out of school inequality much more than we give them credit for."--Janice Aurini, University of Waterloo "Downey's book takes on the widely held belief that our public schools are failing our neediest children, most especially children of low-income background. Critics on the left invoke underfunded schools, underqualified and undermotivated teachers, and hyper-segregation; for those on the right, and some on the left, it is the opening for charter schools and vouchers. Wrong, says Downey: our schools, on the whole, lift up poor children, not hold them back, implicating instead inequities experienced over the preschool years and in children's home lives outside of school. Read this important book with an open mind. It could very well change how you--how we all--think about schools and inequality." --Karl Alexander, co-editor of The Summer Slide: What We Know and Can Do About Summer Learning Loss "It's not often that a publication changes the way we think the world works. Communicated in remarkably clear prose, Downey's incisive empirically based analysis reveals that inequality increases significantly when children are out of, not while they are in, school. How School's Really Matter is an eye-opener, as well as a call to action--that is, a more focused endeavor to reduce the large disparities in children's social and physical environments, including those of their early childhood." --William Julius Wilson, Harvard University
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part I: Why We Shouldn’t Be Blaming Schools So Much
Chapter 1: The Forgotten 87 Percent Herbert Walberg’s outrageous claim
Trying to understand how schools matter when you have an eight-hundred-pound gorilla problem
Chapter 2: Chickens, Eggs, and Achievement Gaps When do achievement gaps emerge?
Scaling matters
Why the early years are so important
Relative deprivation matters too
Conclusion
Chapter 3: One Very Surprising Pattern about Schools Soccer coaches and schools
Trying to understand how schools matter
Seasonal comparisons
What do we learn from the few studies that have collected data seasonally?
Conclusion
Chapter 4: And Now a Second, Even More Surprising Pattern School achievement, growth, and impact
Objections
Conclusion
Part II: A New Way to Think about Schools and Inequality
Chapter 5: More Like Reflectors than Generators Schools generating inequality
Two examples of schools reflecting broader society
What about those high-flying schools?
Underestimating early childhood
Conclusion: A diminished role for schools, an enhanced role for early childhood
Chapter 6: As Helping More than Hurting Schools as compensatory: The weak form
Schools as compensatory: The strong form
Conclusion
Chapter 7: A Frida Sofia Problem Schools and inequality: Stuck within the traditional framing
Our value for limited government
Fear of “blaming the victim”
Gender and the vulnerability of schools
Conclusion
Chapter 8: The Costly Assumption Rich guys trying to reduce achievement gaps
The never-ending quest to reform schools
The great distractor
So what should we do?
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Datasets (ECLS-K:1998 and ECLS-K:2010)
Appendix B: Limitations of Seasonal Comparison Studies
Appendix C: How Should Social Scientists Study Schools and Inequality?
Notes
References
Index
