‘How Schools Really Matter’ Review: Learning Outside Class
March 3, 2021
The hyper-specialization of the academy has had some unfortunate effects. Among much else, it has led professors to spend too much energy addressing debates internal to their discipline and too little to areas they see as lying outside their area of expertise. Both effects—along with an effort to address important questions about educational differences—are on display in Douglas B. Downey’s “How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption About Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong.”
Mr. Downey, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University, begins with a compelling observation: Gaps in achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged kids can be traced mostly to the time when children are not in school—to home, habits, neighborhood, culture. And the gaps begin to appear well ahead of school itself. By measuring student performance seasonally, we see that an inequality of outcomes—in school and in later life—is evident before children start school and that schools, on average, simply keep students on the trajectory they were on before. As Mr. Downey puts it: “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life.” That schools themselves are a major driver of inequality is the “mostly wrong” assumption in the book’s title.
