208. Unstack the Odds--More Views on Learning

Unstack the Odds: Help All Kids Access College—and Graduate!

by

Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

4. More Views on Learning

University of Chicago researcher Benjamin Bloom, who edited the classic work Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals—Handbook I: Cognitive Domain (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1956) and was later recognized as an authority on mastery learning, succinctly expressed this view:
“It is the history of the individual learner which in large part determines his present learning, and it is this accumulated history (past and present) which will have major consequences for his future learning.” (Benjamin S. Bloom, Human Characteristics and School Learning, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976, p. 202.)

Bloom elaborated on his view of learning this way: “The central thesis of this book is that variations in learning and the level of learning of students are determined by the students’ learning history and the quality of instruction they receive. Appropriate modifications related to the history of the learners and the quality of instruction can sharply reduce the variation of students and greatly increase their level of learning and their effectiveness in learning in terms of time and effort expended.” (Ibid., p. 16.)

The importance of the home and a family on the achievement of children was famously observed by another in the pantheon of researchers on education, Johns Hopkins sociologist James S. Coleman, who stated:
“Taking all these results together, one implication stands out above all. That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school [emphasis added.] For equality of educational opportunity through the schools must imply a strong effect of schools that is independent of the child’s immediate social environment, and that strong independent effect is not present in American schools.” (James S. Coleman, “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” in Equality and Achievement in Education, ed. Marta Tienda and David B. Grusky, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990, p. 119 in Peter Sacks, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007, p. 15.)

Richard Rothstein, former national education columnist for The New York Times and visiting lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University, commented on Coleman’s findings: “Nonetheless, scholarly efforts over four decades have consistently confirmed Coleman’s core finding; no analyst has been to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students. (Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, New York: Teachers College Economic Policy Institute, 2004, p. 14.)

Furthermore, Rothstein compiled a list of “the many ways in which social class differences prepare children differently to learn.” As he summarized: “These differences appear not only in how families can support children from current income, but also in how families support children from other economic resources like savings for college, home equity, or access to stable rental housing; in their varied childrearing philosophies, conversational styles, literacy practices, role modeling, and parental social networks; in children’s health that impacts learning, with differences in vision, hearing, dental care, lead poisoning, asthma, immunizations, birth weight and maternal smoking and alcohol use; in the ethnically and racially patterned cultural expectations about the payoff to education; and in the athletic and other enriching experiences that children enjoy in the afterschool hours, and in the summer.”

Rothstein concluded that “each of these contributes only a tiny bit to the learning gap between lower-class and middle-class children, but combined, the effects could be huge, and it is hard to see how even the greatest schools could overcome them.” (Ibid., p. 61.)

Finally, Donna Y. Ford, Professor of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, summarized issues faced by Black youth in her book’s chapter entitled “Social Factors as Correlates of Underachievement” in this way: “Several social factors place Black students at risk for educational disadvantage on a consistent basis—poverty, residing in a single-parent family, mother’s low level of education, racial minority status, and English as a second language.” (Donna Y. Ford, Reversing Underachievement Among Gifted Black Students: Promising Practices and Programs, New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, p. 70.)