2020 The Matthew Effect: School boundaries, school funding and resources, and school staffing.

5/22/2020 Education Today https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 RESEARCH The Ma hew E ect: School boundaries, school funding and resources, and school sta If we were to submit to the idea that belief drives behaviour, and this is indeed the case in relation to the Matthew E ect within school communities, then it is possible to create learning and teaching communities that stop this phenomenon in its tracks through the deliberate actions of their leaders. RAY BOYD, PRINCIPAL, WEST BEECHBORO PRIMARY SCHOOL (INDEPENDENT PUBLIC SCHOOL), DR NEIL MACNEILL, PRINCIPAL, ELLENBROOK PRIMARY SCHOOL (INDEPENDENT PUBLIC SCHOOL) MAY 29, 2020 The notion that poorer kids will do worse is a falsehood The Gospel Reading from Matthew 13:12 on one Sunday morning struck a dissonant chord because it appeared to be an advocacy for the common inequalities that exist in our communities and schools. 10 And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? 11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. 12 For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. (King James Version) This was like hearing only a part of a conversation, and it became clearer that the Apostle was saying that Jesus spoke in parables so that only those who believed would understand the Mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, and they would be given more; but those who did not, would be deprived of what they had. Unfortunately, this common misinterpretation of this Gospel has now developed a life of its own and in the language of administration, business and nance the Matthew E ect is becoming topical almost 2000 years after the parable was recorded in the Gospels. And, as Rigney (2010, p. 1) observed, this Gospel passage is now commonly interpreted in the lay community as a Biblical justi cation of “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 1/6 5/22/2020 Education Today Robert Merton (1968), who popularised the term Matthew E ect, examined the e ects and in uence that Nobel Prize winners have in science, and he described how the multiplier e ect of success and wealth manifested itself four ways in science: The Matthew E ect in the reward system; The Matthew E ect in the communication system; The Matthew E ect and the function of redundancy; and, The Matthew E ect and the allocation of scienti c resources. Merton further observed: … that eminent scientists get disproportionately great credit for their contributions to science while relatively unknown scientists tend to get disproportionately little credit for comparable contributions. As one laureate in physics put it: “The world is peculiar in this matter of how it gives credit. It tends to give the credit to [already] famous people”. (p. 57) Contemporary research by Bol, de Vaan and van der Rijt (2018) showed that the Matthew E ect is still evident in science funding in Holland. The authors concluded that: … funding of early career scientists exhibits a Matthew E ect that operates through two mutually reinforcing processes: On the demand side, candidates who won prior awards are evaluated more positively than nonwinners, while on the supply side, scientists who were successful in past contests select themselves into applicant pools of subsequent contests at higher rates than unsuccessful scientists (p.4890). The Matthew E ect and the achievement gap in literacy A phenomenon of which teachers and school leaders are very aware is the impact of the Matthew E ect on students’ learning and life prospects. The Achievement Gap is obvious in the earliest years when some prospective students already know their colours, letter names and they can count to 10, while their less fortunate colleagues experience the daily traumas concerning lack of food, lack of sleep, and personal safety. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is such an important descriptor of the factors in uencing success at school. Socio-economic status (SES/SEI) impacts very heavily on children’s vocabulary development and the research by Romeo, Leonard, Robinson, West, Mackey, Rowe and Gabrieli (2018, p. 700) con rmed that, “Children’s language exposure varies substantially in relation to their socioeconomic status (SES). SES represents the social and economic resources of an individual or group, and children from lower-SES backgrounds hear fewer and less complex utterances, on average, than their more advantaged peers”. Compounding this, is the matter of negatively biased teacher expectations that were examined in a number of works (Glock & Krolak-Schwerdt, 2013; Glock, Krolak-Schwerdt, Klapproth, & Böhmer, 2013; Rubie-Davies, Hattie, & Hamilton, 2006; Speybroeck et al., 2012) and built around the seminal work of Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) and their study Pygmalion in the Classroom. Stanovich (1986), researching reading, noted that the good readers get better, and in a relative sense, the poor readers become poorer, as the gap widened: The concept of Matthew E ects springs from ndings that individuals who have advantageous early educational experiences are able to utilize new educational experiences more e ciently (Walberg & Tsai, 1983). Walberg et al. (1984) speculated that "those who did well at the start may have been more often, or more intensively, rewarded or their early accomplishments; early intellectual and motivational capital may grow for longer periods and at greater rates; and large funds and continuing high growth rates of information and motivation may be more intensely re-warded” (p. 381). A stylised representation of the reading Achievement Gap can be seen in Figure 1. Figure 1. The Achievement Gap caused by the Matthew E ect. (Phonic Books, 2017) ICSEA and the Matthew E ect Success in schooling is a multi-factored a air, with a kaleidoscope of con icting in uences impacting on students’ performances daily. After the major kerfu e caused by the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, social scientists played safe and used socio-economic status as the major predictor of students’ https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 2/6 5/22/2020 Education Today success in school. The problem with this in education is that using the SEI/ICSEA ranking is a classic example of implementing a false cause fallacy. Most of us had the mantra “correlation is not causation” drummed into us when learning research methods, but in relation to NAPLAN testing we fail every time we use the imprecise SEI/ICSEA measure because the causes and outcomes are intertwined in a jumbled mix of leaps -of-faith. Boyd, MacNeill, Silcox and Sullivan (2018) highlighted this in the article, Bridging the Achievement Gap when they stated “… we failed our most vulnerable, disadvantaged students” (p. 2) Recruiting, poaching and aversion The brilliant football coach, Mick Malthouse, was always driven by the need to promote the Australian Football League, and he observed that when a vast gap develops between the top and bottom teams, the game su ers. Malthouse said: "History just shows that, in any sport, players who want to change clubs don't change clubs necessarily for money, they change for success. It makes the top sides stronger and makes the bottom sides weaker.” (Max Phillips, 2011). The same thing happens in education where schools in prime locations matched with success, not money, attract the high performing school principals and teachers to make locational choices based on the prospective quality of their lives and their work. However, in private enterprise School Boards are used to buying-in top talent, and talent scouts are employed to sound out prospective leaders who will add to the schools’ public images. Caroline Millburn, in Melbourne (2006), commented on “The Great Scramble to Poach”, and she described John Fleming’s move from Bell eld Public School to Haileybury’s Berwick campus. The Victorian Principals’ Association lamented: … the Government had no strategy to enable public schools compete with the lucrative o ers talented teachers received from independent schools and private industry (Millburn, 2006). The ip-side of the attraction to success and attractive locations is the place of tough schools in school leaders’ career trajectories. The role of the school principals is now recognised as extremely important not only for the ceremonial aspects of schools’ operations, but also in relation to the core business of schools- students’ learning. The most expensive private schools now recruit principals with doctorates, and media experience to signal success and achievement to their school communities. Not unnaturally, it has been found that experienced and highperforming principals are abandoning the “di cult” schools across the world, as research by Loeb, Kalogrides, and Horng (2010) clearly showed: Principals’ stated preferences and their behaviours demonstrate an aversion to leading schools with many poor, minority, and/or low-achieving students. Although these patterns may be driven, not by a distaste for certain students, but more so by a desire to serve a school with a positive climate and good working conditions, the result remains: higher turnover in schools serving more poor, minority, and low-achieving students (p. 227). To this extent, those very school leaders who have the capability to negate or, at the very least, reduced the impact felt in so called tough schools only add to the problem when they too depart. Success breeds success: School catchments The earliest linking of school quality and house prices was attributed by Seo and Simons (2009, p. 308) to Oates (1968) who hypothesised that “consumers who expect a high quality of public services reside in communities with high-quality public service programs”. In Australia, public school enrolment zones are living examples of how high performing schools attract parents who think that entry to these prestigious schools will positively in uence their https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 3/6 5/22/2020 Education Today children’s life prospects. Speaking of the demand for entry into the top public high schools in Melbourne, Craig Gibson (2019) noted, “So intense is the demand that the Real Estate Institute of Victoria reports that some families are choosing to pay close to a $600,000 premium to secure a home near Melbourne’s top public high schools”. In Western Australian schools a similar phenomenon occurs with families relocating into the catchment areas of those schools deemed to be achieving good results. This only exacerbates the perception of the Matthew E ect, not only within the eyes of the sta in those schools that gain students, but also in the mind’s eye of those sta losing them, as it tends to be only those families with the incomes that allow them to be mobile who move out of and into a new catchment area. This can be seen as “reinforcing the lowly status of the have nots in the classroom” (Boyd, MacNeill & Sullivan, 2019, p. 1) when it comes time for the teacher to set the bar for instruction levels and the subsequent expectations around achievement. In the United States it is reported that there is a trend for rich parents being prepared to spend millions to be able to walk their kids to (top) schools (Ho ower, 2019). All is not lost – salvation If we were to submit to the idea that belief drives behaviour, and this is indeed the case in relation to the Matthew E ect within school communities, then it is possible to create learning and teaching communities that stop this phenomenon in its tracks through the deliberate actions of their leaders. As indicated above, one of the most well know instances of this was in Bell eld Public School, Victoria, where the principal John Fleming turned one of the most disadvantaged metropolitan schools in Australia (CIS, 2009) into one of the highest performing schools in the state through altering his sta ’s belief that demographics de ned the destiny of a child. Through structural alignment and clearly articulated accountability processes built on a foundation of highly e ective teaching practices around literacy, Fleming turned the Matthew E ect on its head. We are now seeing similar occurrences in some Western Australian Schools where principals, driving clear improvement agendas built around highly e ective foundational literacy practices, are negating the Matthew E ect. The Matthew E ect has the potential to o er excuses for poor instructional practices rather than school leaders/teachers looking at their current classroom instruction, and the teaching and learning communities’ embedded beliefs as a root cause of the problem. Conclusion The moral dimension of serving students in schools can be considered a calling, and in the low SEI and tough schools. most teachers are driven by the intention of doing good for the less fortunate students. In this situation the Matthew E ect is often alive and well, but there is often a limit to the strength of the moral intent of teachers and principals working in tough schools. Sooner or later many of these teachers will renege on martyrdom and will join the sti competition to win a safer position in a school in a better location with less behavioural problems, and better academic achievement records. Furthermore, examining school resourcing. The Matthew E ect is seen as strongest in the so-called elite schools where auditoria and swimming pools are seen as a normal part of the rich curriculum passage being o ered. We often observe that teachers in the lower SEI schools seem to have to work so much harder in minimalist environments in their individual attempts to negate the Matthew E ect and bridge the achievement gaps. References Bol, T., de Vaan, M., & van der Rijt, A. (2018, May 8). The Matthew E ect in science funding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(19), 4887-4890. Retrieved from www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115 Boyd, R., MacNeill, N., Silcox, S., & Sullivan, G. (2018, February). Bridging the achievement gap: Delivering the best teaching and learning experiences to our students. Education Today, 18(1), 10-12. Retrieved from http://www.educationtoday.com.au/article/Transformational-and-Transactional-Leadership-1433 Boyd, R., Sullivan, G & MacNeill, N. (2019). No failure learning: Growing the skills and knowledge in every student. Education Today, 19(1), 32-34. Centre for Independent Studies (2009, October 9). Educating disadvantage. Issues Analysis,Retrieved from https://www.cis.org.au/app/uploads/2015/07/ia116.pdf https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 4/6 5/22/2020 Education Today Gibson, C. (2019). Do school catchment areas a ect local property prices? Retrieved from https://www.openagent.com.au/blog/do-school-catchment-areas-a ect-local-property-prices Glock, S., & Krolak-Schwerdt, S. (2013). Does nationality matter? The impact of stereotypical expectations of student teachers’ judgments. Social Psychology of Education, 16, 111–127. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-012-9197-z Glock, S., Krolak-Schwerdt, S., Klapproth, F., & Böhmer, M. (2013). Beyond judgment bias: How students’ ethnicity and academic pro le consistency in uence teachers’ tracking judgments. Social Psychology of Education, 16, 555– 573. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11218-013-9227-5 Ho ower, H. (2018, September 6). Rich US parents are paying millions to be able to walk their kids to school. Business Insider. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/rich-families-pay-millions-live-near-bestpublic-schools-2018-9?r=US&IR=T Huang, F.L., Moon, T.R., & Boren, R. (2014). Are the reading rich getting richer? Testing for the presence of the Matthew E ect. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 30(2), 95-115. doi: 10.1080/10573569.2013.789784 Loeb, S., Kalogrides, D., & Horng, E.L. (2010, June). Principal preferences and the uneven distribution of principals across schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 32(2), 205-229. doi: 10.3102/0162373710369833 Merton, R.K. (1968, January 5). The Matthew E ect in Science. Science, 159(3810), 56-63. Millburn, C. (2006, September 4). The great scramble to poach. The Age. Melbourne, Victoria. Retrieved from: http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/the-great-scramble-to-poach/2006/09/01/1156817095710.html# Phillips, M, (2011, August 7). Stop the rot. a .com.au. Retrieved from http://www.a .com.au/news/newsarticle/tabid/208/newsid/120381/default.aspx Phonic Books (2017). What is the Matthew E ect when it comes to reading instruction? Retrieved from https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/2017/06/04/matthew-e ect-comes- reading-instruction/ Rigney, D. (2010). The Matthew E ect: How advantage begets further advantage. New York: Columbia University Press. Romeo, R.R., Leonard, J.A., Robinson, S.T., West, M.R., Mackey, A.P., Rowe, M.L., & Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2018). Beyond the 30 million word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700=710. Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectations and pupils’ intellectual development. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02322211 Rubie-Davies, C., Hattie, J., & Hamilton, R. (2006). Expecting the best for students: Teacher expectations and academic outcomes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 429–444. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/000709905X53589 Seo, Y., & Simons, R.A. (2009). The e ect of school quality on residential sales price. Journal of Real Estate Research, 31(3), 307-327. Speybroeck, S., Kuppens, S., Van Damme, J., Van Petegem, P., Lamote, C., Boonen, T., & De Bilde, J. (2012). The role of teachers’ expectations in the association between children’s SES and performance in kindergarten: A moderated mediation analysis. PloS ONE, 7(4): Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/ le? type=printable&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0034502 Stanovich, K.E. (1986, Autumn). Matthew E ects in reading: Some consequences of individual di erences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360-407. Image by stevep under icr cc attribution license https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 5/6 5/22/2020 Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/The-Matthew-Effect-4936 Education Today Top ↑ 6/6