The Matthew Effect in Public Education
In Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, the popular thinker invokes the concept called, “The Matthew Effect.”--derived from the book of Matthew in the New Testament: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Gladwell (2008) further explains, “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’ (p. 30)
Malcolm Gladwell applied the Matthew Effect to studies of the impact of a child’s age at school entry on their individual academic outcomes in order to advocate for a shift away from rigid grade-level cohorts exclusively based on age toward more dynamic groupings that better accommodate the variability of students’ developmental progress. Similar to Gladwell, many talented researchers and educators have documented various ways in which the Matthew Effect unfairly manifests in the lives of individual learners.
But what if we take schools (rather than children) as our unit of study? Little is said about how some institutions (in this case schools) are better positioned to succeed than others. How do patterns of clustering advantage and accumulating disadvantage manifest in the trajectories of schools? And when do you see the earliest signs?
I’ll start with my experience, elementary school.
I have spent nearly a decade as a principal at a low-income elementary school in Arizona and 14 years in Arizona public education. The unfortunate truth is that the Matthew Effect better explains school outcomes on quality performance indices than any other instructional strategy or curricular resource used by classroom teachers. Due to the extent of economic inequality and highly localized control of public education efforts and funding, non-school factors influence perceptions and realities of school quality much more than the actual work being done inside. Their impact manifests in a manner utterly congruent to the Matthew Effect.
Allow me to demonstrate the Matthew Effect in schools with two significant, but perhaps less obvious, examples.
Residential Mobility
Every year, some of the most academically capable students at my school transfer during January and February. Their families, which have been living in one of the more affordable large apartment complexes in our school boundaries, seize the opportunity when their leases come up to relocate to a house of their own or a rental in a more desirable area. They often express to us their love of our school and regret their inability to transport their children so they can continue to attend with us. At the same time of year, we receive a number of new move-ins. These midyear transfers are consistently moving under duress and the students are significantly more likely to show up grappling with trauma, behavioral challenges, and academic gaps.
Three miles away from me, there is another district elementary school whose students are drawn almost exclusively from relatively large, single-family homes. This school has a reputation for its quality and the neighborhood is perceived as a destination for families. Consequently, their move-ins are almost exclusively at the start of the school year and are characterized by economic privilege. They are also much more likely to have their students with them for the entire K-6 experience, which is useful for identifying and effectively responding to student academic needs. Research indicates not only that more affluent students relocate less frequently, but also that relocating from a higher to lower income neighborhood has a demonstrably negative impact on students.
Principal Longevity
The stability/instability dichotomy in family housing described above also characterizes staffing patterns at affluent and low income schools. While the increased frequency of teacher turnover in disadvantaged schools is well-documented, patterns in school leadership may be more consequential for the school’s long term prospects. Education experts have argued that principals frequently view leadership of a disadvantaged school as a “stepping stone” to a more desirable, affluent school later in their career.
I can attest to this view based on my own experience. In particular, I remember a conversation during a break at a large district leadership meeting about 6 years ago. I was a few years into my role as principal of my school, and a more experienced colleague complimented me for the work I had done at what he perceived to be a challenging location. He then offered me what he felt was encouragement, saying “Looks like they’ll probably give you a shot somewhere better soon.”
Recruiting and retaining high quality teachers and forming trusting community connections in a disadvantaged school and the surrounding community requires effort, deep contextual knowledge, and, above all, time. Principal turnover often triggers teacher turnover, which leads to hiring patterns driven by urgency rather than efficacy and the vicious cycle of poor performance reinforces itself. Meanwhile, advantaged schools are less likely to face principal turnover and the resulting stability reinforces their teacher retention, parent satisfaction, and student success.
In these two examples, what are the true accountability metrics we should be using? The test scores of students transferring mid-school year under duress will not capture our school’s concerted efforts to help these students succeed–the very real strain on our teachers, counselors, and admin team to successfully integrate these new students socially and academically. And with high administrative and teacher turnover, our schools' lower than average test scores will at least partly reflect a longevity problem that happens all too often in our most underserved communities. In sum, the most high performing students, teachers, and administrators are leaving my school.
Why It Matters
There is extreme variation between the most and least advantaged American public schools. However, because we’re uncomfortable with acknowledging the severity of this inequality, school evaluation metrics operate on an assumption of similarity between these schools that simply isn’t our current reality. School evaluations are primarily based on student performance using infrequent, high stakes tests.
In sum, the result is a set of school quality metrics that are too blunt and imprecise to yield meaningful data about the work educators at a given school are actually doing. Instead, affluent schools’ environmental advantages are passed off as evidence of effective practice and disadvantaged schools both struggle to demonstrate their effectiveness and consistently have some of the most important work they do minimized or overlooked. These schools’ respective patterns of increasing success and failure continue to compound and the Matthew Effect asserts itself yet again.
One way forward is Contextual Analytics, an approach that provides schools and school districts with strategy and data analytic tools appropriately calibrated to uncover what does and does not meaningfully contribute to student success in these disparate settings.