Raising school effects while ignoring culture? Local conditions and the influence of classroom tools, rules, and pedagogy

How educators and researchers define and study school effectiveness continues to be shaped by two divided camps. The policy mechanics attempt to identify particular school inputs, including discrete teaching practices, that raise student achievement. They seek universal remedies that can be manipulated by central agencies and assume that the same instructional materials and pedagogical practices hold constant meaning in the eyes of teachers and children across diverse cultural settings. In contrast, the classroom culturalists focus on the implicitly modeled norms exercised in the classroom and how children are socialized to accept particular rules of participation and authority, linguistic norms, orientations toward achievement, and conceptions of merit and status. It is the culturally constructed meanings attached to instructional tools and pedagogy that sustain this socialization process, not the material character of school inputs per se. This article reviews how these two paths of school-effects research are informed by work conducted within developing countries. First, we discuss the school’s aggregate effect, relative to family background, within impoverished settings. Second, we review recent empirical findings from the Third World on achievement effects from discrete school inputs. An emerging extension of this work also is reviewed: How input effects are conditioned by the social rules of classrooms. Third, we illustrate how future work in the policy-mechanic tradition will be fruitless until cultural conditions are taken into account. And the classroom culturalists may reach a theoretical dead end until they can empirically link classroom processes to alleged effects. We put forward a culturally situated model of school effectiveness—the implications of which are discussed for studying ethnically diverse schools within the West. By bringing together the strengths of these two intellectual camps, researchers can more carefully condition their search for school effects.