The Main Findings and Influence of Our Research

Through the combined efforts of our intellectual community over fifteen years, we have established a set of findings that have become established within the broader communities of educational research and practice, and upon which we base our continuing research.  Here, we list our findings, beginning with those most relevant to our current work.

• Adolescents drop out of school for reasons related to their educational experiences in school.  There are no quick fixes or interventions for this problem.  To understand more about it, we need research that goes behind the numbers to understand causes.   Center for Education researchers work to find valid numerical indicators of the dropout problem, then combine those findings with fine-grained studies of what causes dropping.  We relate those causes back to an analysis of policy, educational practice, and social conditions to understand why so many children are being lost from our schools.  We have found that it is essential to look behind the numbers, behind the rhetoric, behind the official indicators; to do this, it is necessary to be inside schools and to keep a focus on what is happening to the children.  That approach enabled us to uncover the fact that despite the official dropout numbers reported from in Houston were 2-3%, freshman classes of 900 dwindled to 300 seniors with perhaps 250 of those graduating.  This finding is more than a statistical adjustment; it has propelled our work to the forefront of the public and scholarly discussion of the dramatic, and growing, losses of youth from our schools. Our expertise inside the classrooms and schools of Houston have allowed us to collaborate and add knowledge about the reasons students drop out of schools to the findings of researchers at such organizations as CSTEEP at Boston College and the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Click here for findings from our recent conference on the dropout issue in Texas.  

• The pressures of  high-stakes testing and accountability, rather than  raising academic standards, may actually lower educational quality.  The pressure on school personnel and students to master a single indicator (a high-stakes test) may actually standardize curriculum and teaching methods in ways that reduce educational quality by favoring discreet, testable knowledge over the ability to analyze, reason, and create.  Now that the Texas accountability model has become the basis for national legislation, what at first seemed local findings are playing out in very similar ways across many other states and district.  Because the accountability policies that began in Texas have now become the basis for the federal education legislation, the fact that we have studied the effects of these policies for more than a decade makes our study of local schools a valuable resource to policymakers, media and educators across the country.

• We have found that research that informs policy needs to trace the effects of policy to the level where those effects impact children, and it needs to do so over a long period of time.  We were able to see the negative effects of highly centralized standardization on the quality of instruction by not merely examining print curriculum or looking at resulting test scores, but by doing systematic and sustained observations in a wide range of schools and classrooms over time.  Detailed documentation of what was being taught in classrooms and how classroom time and teacher efforts were changing over time provided insights into why "accountability" was not necessarily improving the content of schooling, a finding now being confirmed by researchers in other areas, but one which was initially hidden behind the apparent improvement in indicators such as test scores.  The power of seemingly objective indicators to inform the public and media is so strong that only research that goes into a great deal of depth, that builds a strong body of information over time, and that continually moves between the system level and the school or classroom will have the capacity to identify what is actually happening in schools.

An early finding in one of our studies was that overly bureaucratic control of schooling interferes with the educational process by setting up a system that causes the teachers to comply with controls rather than teaching the kids.  We have found that policy that is not based in a thorough understanding of teaching and learning may actually mitigate against strong teaching.

• The key to successful school improvement is developing teachers’ capacity and knowledge in the areas of subject content, pedagogy, and the cultures of the students they serve .  We have found that the school structure and cultures that support high quality, equitable schooling are supportive of teachers' intellectual life and development as well as of children's learning and family cultures.  Our researchers have produced a considerable body of work rooted in positive case studies of good schools and powerful educational practice in order to discover the dynamics that combine to create environments for powerful learning, including the use of technology as tools for constructivist learning, science teaching, early literacy, and writing in the high schools.  Time and again, it has become clear that building teachers’ capacity is central to school improvement.  Our research (on which we also base our programs) argues that schools and partner organizations need to provide sustained, content-rich, powerful, and flexible opportunities for teachers to learn, in ways that support them as professionals at the same time as setting expectations that they work to bring that knowledge to their students.