RALEIGH – When it comes to conducting, analyzing, and explaining scholarly research on education reform, Herbert Walberg has pretty much done it all.
Dr. Walberg, an Emeritus University Scholar and Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has written or edited dozens of books and more than 350 articles on education issues. Formerly a professor at Harvard, Walberg serves as a project investigator at the Vanderbilt University National Center on School Choice and has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for more than a decade.
Not content merely to fill the shelves of university libraries and think tanks with his writings, Walberg has been personally involved in several significant projects and trends in education policy.
As a founding member of the National Assessment Governing Board, Walberg helped create the most rigorous and reliable testing program in the United States, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). As a contractor for the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, he conducted key research comparing the educational systems of Japan and the U.S. And as the chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Walberg helped create a widely used set of international education statistics.
Now, Walberg has performed perhaps his greatest service to the cause of research-based education reform. He has just published a concise, crisply edited book for the Hoover Institution Press entitled Advancing Student Achievement. In it, he summarizes a lifetime of research findings, from his own work and that of colleagues around the world, on such varied topics as teacher quality, curriculum reform, parental effects, school choice, the economics of education, merit pay, preschool intervention, teaching techniques, and instructional technology.
On virtually every page, the book offers key insights for policymakers, reformers, and educators to ponder. Here are some examples:
• Student success is not simply a matter of genetics or family background. While childhood intelligence is the single-best predictor of educational outcomes, it predicts only 20 percent of the variation in college grades and 30 percent of the variation in years of education. And while parenting plays a far greater role than schooling in a child’s life, Walberg notes that “parental behavior can be altered” by sound school design and that “an excellent teacher can increase learning so substantially that it can positively affect learning over several subsequent years.”
• One way to alter parental behavior for the better, it turns out, is to give parents more authority over where their children attend school. “If school choice can increase the family’s learning efficacy by 10 percent annually,” he writes, “it would produce a huge effect over the 12 years of schooling, roughly twice as much as school factors by themselves can yield.”
• Overall, the case for choice as one lever for advancing student achievement is compelling. Surveying dozens of studies – ranging in quality from random-assignment experiments (the gold standard) and countrywide studies in Europe and Asia to econometric models and small-scale pilots – Walberg concludes that few educational policies offer as much promise for significant, sustained improvement as parental choice. Much of the compelling evidence comes from overseas, where parental choice is long-established, widespread, and successful.
• Incentives matter. Monetary incentives (of sufficient size) induce both students and teachers to perform at higher levels. Other incentives can be effectively harnessed to change behavior, too. Chicago’s Summer Bridge program, for example, gives failing students the choice of repeating a grade or passing a final exam in an intensive, academically focused summer course. The results are impressive – gains of a half to a whole year’s worth of reading and math achievement.
• The best research on teacher quality reveals that graduate degrees have no relationship to teacher quality, and experience typically correlates with effectiveness only in the case of the first few years in the classroom. Paying teachers according to seniority and advanced degrees is a foolish waste of resources.
Advancing Student Achievement is itself an impressive achievement. Organized into issue-themed chapters for easy reference, Walberg’s book is a valuable resource for anyone engaged in the public policy debate about education reform.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.