Prospectus for Students

HLE-342 - Three Education Controversies

Fall Semester l999-2000, Seminar, Tuesdays l0:00 - 12:00

Professor Richard J. Light

Introduction

This course is designed for students who are interested in pursuing, in depth, several controversies about American education policies. One controversy is the effect of different class sizes on students' learning. This topic has been discussed and debated for many years, apparently to no clear resolution. A second controversy is ability grouping, where students at different skill levels are grouped into classrooms homogeneously. A third is how the different backgrounds that students from different families, ethnic groups, and income groups bring to school can affect their learning and their performance. As a related topic, we will examine the educational impact of racial and ethnic diversity in both K-l2 schools and in colleges and universities.

Emphasis of the Seminar.

Each of these controversies has both a substantive dimension, where the question is, "how do students learn best?" Each also has a political dimension. For example, how do we deal with a situation where grouping students by skill level ends up separating students in significant ways by ethnic group, or even by gender? Every student taking this seminar will have spent many years in school, and will have done well in school. So each student will bring their personal observations, experiences, and opinions to our sessions. These observations are welcome. Yet the core focus of this seminar is to explore what sorts of rigorous, concrete evidence can help policy makers to reach conclusions about these controversies. Our goal will be to search for conclusions that depend upon empirical data, rigorously gathered, rather than on hunches or political preferences.

Pre-requisites for this seminar.

Each student must have taken two courses in statistics and empirical methods. This is a serious pre-requisite, and I will assume that everyone is comfortable with principles of research design, regression analysis, statistical inference and data analysis, and principles of evaluation.

Format of our Meetings.

We will meet weekly in seminar style. Enrollment is limited to 25. My hope is to include students from several Schools at the university. For the first several sessions, I will present methodological material to set the stage for in-depth reading of research documents. This material will especially focus on measuring effect sizes of interventions, and also meta-analysis, which is a relatively modern technique for aggregating findings across several policy analyses. We then will turn to reading actual, concrete evaluations of class size, ability grouping, and ethnic group differences in school performance. We will read a diverse set of sources, ranging from The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrnstein, to strong disagreements and rebuttals by Howard Gardner, Stephen Jay Gould, Anthony Appiah, and Richard Lewontin.

Student Obligations

Each participant in this seminar will have several obligations. First, there will be weekly readings, and a weekly response paper for the first few sessions that focus on methodology. Then, each student will be asked to summarize, each week, in depth, an actual policy study of one of the controversies. These will be long and may be time-consuming. I am comfortable if students want to work on these alone, and also comfortable if students want to work in a pair, discussing the policy analysis before they write up a summary.

For the last three sessions of our seminar, students will make presentations that focus on one controversy. You will be asked to take a clear position, to defend it using specific evidence and the tools developed in the course. You will also be asked to respond to critiques, which will be offered by other students, with topics assigned in advance. These presentations will serve to pull together the various arguments about each controversy. They will also serve to launch each student towards preparing a final paper that summarizes a controversy, takes a clear position, and defends that position against its critics.

Textbooks:

Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve, (paperback, 1996)

R. Light, J. Singer, and J. Willett, By Design (paperback, l990)

William G. Bowen and Derek C. Bok, The Shape of the River, (Princeton University Press, 1998).