Politics, Process, and Pyramids

Rogosa, David

doi:10.3102/10769986003001079

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…School effects researchers identified this issue about the level of aggregation in the early 1980s (e.g., Alexander, Pallas, & Cook, 1981;Bidwell & Kasarda, 1980;Burstein, 1980). Burstein (1980) and Rogosa (1978), among others, contended that dilemmas about the choice of the unit of analysis were addressing the wrong question and that the most appropriate and informative model would allow estimation of random variation at the school level. These researchers presaged the appearance of multilevel models that were about to emerge.…”

Section: Methodological Advances In School Effectiveness Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Background and School Effects on Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the Coleman Data

Konstantopoulos

Borman

2011

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/Context A main objective of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey (EEOS), conducted in 1965, was to document the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for minority students in public schools. Another equally important objective was to reveal specific inequalities in facilities and resources available to students in predominantly minority or predominantly White schools. Coleman et al. (1966) analyzed the EEOS data and found surprisingly few differences between the characteristics of schools attended by minority and White students. As a result, Coleman et al. concluded that school characteristics are not strongly related to student achievement in the presence of family background and that family inputs are much more valuable predictors of student achievement than school inputs are. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The present study revisited this issue about the importance of schools in promoting student achievement and reanalyzed the EEOS 12th grade data using multilevel models. Our sample included 12th graders in public schools in the U.S. in 1965. We sought to determine the predictive efficacy of school characteristics on student achievement net of the effects of family background. The overarching question motivating this research is: Would Coleman and his colleagues have reached the same conclusions had they had available today's multilevel modeling statistical methods that are more appropriate for determining school effects? Research Design We used both regression and multilevel models to gauge school effects and compared our findings to those reported by Coleman et al. Our estimates infer strictly correlational, not causal, associations between school characteristics and achievement. Conclusions/Recommendations We found considerable and significant between-school variance in achievement, which suggests school effects. Similarly, the observed school characteristics used in our models explained a substantial proportion of the between-school variation in achievement. Our results also indicated that schools play meaningful roles in distributing equality or inequality of educational outcomes to females, minorities, and the disadvantaged. These results are in congruence with recent studies that examined school effects from the 1970s to the 1990s using U.S. national probability samples of students (Konstantopoulos, 2006; Konstantopoulos & Hedges, 2008).

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Section: Methodological Advances In School Effectiveness Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family Background and School Effects on Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the Coleman Data

Konstantopoulos

Borman

2011

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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“…Coleman and his colleagues specified the student as the primary level of analysis, but others who reanalyzed the data, including Armor (1972), chose the school as the main unit of analysis. More recently, Burstein (1980) and Rogosa (1978), among others, contended that dilemmas such as this that involve the choice of which unit to analyze were addressing the wrong question and that the most appropriate and informative model would allow estimation of random variation at both levels.…”

Section: Recent Methodological Advances In School Effects Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity Data

Borman

Dowling

2010

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

171

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Background/Context The Equality of Educational Opportunity study is widely recognized as one of the most important studies on schooling ever performed. The findings from the report have shaped the field of education, national education policies, and wider public and scholarly opinion regarding the contributions of schools and schooling to equality and productivity in the United States. Despite past reanalyses of the data and decades of research on the effects of schools as organizations, the report's fundamental finding—that a student's family background is far more important than school social composition and school resources for understanding student outcomes—still retains much of its currency. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Using the original Equality of Educational Opportunity data, this study replicated Coleman's statistical models but also applied a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) to measure the effects of school-level social composition, resources, teacher characteristics, and peer characteristics on ninth-grade students’ verbal achievement. Research Design HLM allows researchers to disentangle how schools and students’ family backgrounds contribute to learning outcomes. The methodology offers a clearer interpretation of the relative effects of school characteristics, including racial/ethnic composition, and family background, including race/ethnicity and social class, on students’ academic outcomes. Findings/Results Our results suggest that schools do indeed matter, in that when one examines the outcomes across the national sample of schools, fully 40% of the differences in achievement can be found between schools. Even after statistically taking into account students’ family background, a large proportion of the variation among true school means is related to differences explained by school characteristics. Within-school inequalities in the achievement outcomes for African American and White students and students from families of higher and lower social class are explained in part by teachers’ biases favoring middle-class students and by schools’ greater reliance on curriculum differentiation through the use of academic and nonacademic tracking. Conclusions/Recommendations Formal decomposition of the variance attributable to individual background and the social composition of the schools suggests that going to a high-poverty school or a highly segregated African American school has a profound effect on a student's achievement outcomes, above and beyond the effect of individual poverty or minority status. Specifically, both the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student's school are 1 3/4 times more important than a student's individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes.

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Toward a More Appropriate Conceptualization of Research on School Effects: A Three-Level Hierarchical Linear Model

Bryk

Raudenbush

1988

American Journal of Education

240

145

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Politics, Process, and Pyramids

Cited by 10 publications

References 4 publications

Family Background and School Effects on Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the Coleman Data

Family Background and School Effects on Student Achievement: A Multilevel Analysis of the Coleman Data

Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity Data

Toward a More Appropriate Conceptualization of Research on School Effects: A Three-Level Hierarchical Linear Model

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