Joni Lakin recommends How Schools Really Matter

How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption About Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong

By Douglas B. Downey (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

I love books that question our basic assumptions about public education — even better when they rely on compelling analyses of solid data. How Schools Really Matter is a great read for just this reason. Downey surveys enormous amounts of research, highlighting data that challenge what we thought we knew about schooling, especially the assumption that public schools, and their differences in resources and teacher quality, are the primary drivers of inequality across the United States. Many of the findings discussed in the book (on student achievement gaps, for example) are well known to researchers and policy makers. However, Downey shows that if we take a closer look at familiar studies, the data actually contradict many of the key arguments that have been made by school reformers. For one thing, achievement gaps do not grow during the school years, as reformers have often claimed — they are in fact present at the start of kindergarten, and they may even shrink over the succeeding years. And while policy makers have long viewed school effectiveness ratings as objective representations of school quality, Downey shows that the methods used to quantify school performance can easily generate entirely different conclusions about which schools are performing better than others.

I don’t agree with everything in the book, particularly when Downey appears to engage in deficit thinking about the quality of childhood care provided by poor and/or minority caregivers. I am also wary of his reliance on findings from economists and other social scientists who may not fully understand the complexities of measuring and modeling variables in K-12 education.

Despite these limitations, the book encouraged me to question the assumption that K-12 school reform is the best or only way to address inequitable educational outcomes — for instance, Downey sees early childhood education having a much greater long-term impact on student performance. I still believe we must do more to broaden access to high-quality schooling. But Downey convinced me that we need to consider complex out-of-school factors when seeking to raise student performance.

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