Chapter 11: The Impact of School Composition: New Insights into an Enduring Problem

Over the last two decades the catch cry of school effectiveness research (SER) has been that “schools can make a difference” (Brookover et al., 1979). This stance has been picked up and used by reforming governments around the globe to hold schools highly accountable for student achievement. Yet it rests on a highly partial view of the history of educational research as outlined by SER proponents David Reynolds and Charles Teddlie:

The key problem with this account is that Coleman, Jencks, Bernstein and their colleagues are used as straw men for SER’s reforming agenda by the inaccurate portrayal of their sociological findings as entirely dismissive of the impact of schools on students. For instance the argument of Bernstein as outlined in the seminal New Society article cited by Reynolds and Teddlie was never that “schools make no difference,” but rather that, as the title of the article put it, “education cannot compensate for society,” a different argument altogether. The enduring strength of the 1960s and 1970s research was to demonstrate that student achievement is powerfully influenced by students’ individual and collective family backgrounds. To sociologists the issue has always been less whether schools “can make a difference” than whether or not they can make a substantial or important difference compared to the individual or collective effects of family background.