What Schools Cannot Do

It has been a traditional American belief that doing well in school can help even the poorest and most culturally disadvantaged child achieve economic success. But can it? Not according to Harvard Sociologist Christopher Jencks. In a book to be published next month, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (Basic Books, Inc.; $12.50), Jencks asserts that schools do almost nothing to close the gap between rich and poor. Moreover, he argues, the quality of the education that public elementary and high school students receive has little effect on their future income.

That conclusion alone would provoke angry debate among educators, but in reaching it, Jencks makes many other astonishing assertions as well. His book seems destined to be the most controversial educational topic of the season, despite its jargon-laden prose and myriad detailed footnotes. "A fact for nearly every occasion," quips Jencks, and he adds cheerfully: "I think it's safe to assume that we will be decried on all sides."

Jencks draws part of his data from the survey of 4,000 public schools and 645,000 students directed by Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman, who concluded in 1966 that the quality of a school has little to do with how well its students learn. Jencks agrees. "The character of a school's output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children," he writes. "Everything else--the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers--is either secondary or completely irrelevant."

In fact, Jencks believes that schools "serve primarily as selection and certification agencies, whose job is to measure and label people, and only secondarily as socialization agencies, whose job is to change people." The reason, he says, is that schools cannot control the factors that most determine test scores: heredity and home environment. Jencks believes that genes play a significant role in determining IQ, though he does not assign to them the overwhelming importance found by Berkeley Psychologist Arthur Jensen. Just how do genes influence the IQ? Only partly by predetermining the ability to learn, says Jencks. Genes also affect the environment in which a child develops, a factor ignored by traditional methods of estimating genetic influences. "If, for example, a nation refuses to send children with red hair to school, the genes that cause red hair can be said to lower reading scores. This does not tell us that children with red hair cannot learn to read."

Jencks' book particularly challenges all of the nostrums that have been tried over the past decade in an effort to make educational opportunity equal in America. He finds no reason to believe that spending more money will greatly improve the quality of schooling. As evidence, he reports that children who attend elementary schools with high budgets probably gain no more than a five-point advantage on standard tests over those enrolled in low-budget schools. Differences among public high schools affect their students even less. "Almost every high school has some dropouts, some students who take a diploma but do not attend college, and some students who enter college." With surprisingly little variation between schools, the ratio of those groups to one another is now about 1 to 2 to 2, according to Jencks.

Income. Jencks doubts the value of school integration when judged purely by academic achievement. The average white child scores about 15 points higher on both IQ and achievement tests than the average black child. Desegregation helps the black children raise their scores, but only if they go to school with white children from better backgrounds than theirs. In that case the gain might be 20% or 30%, according to Jencks' calculations. One major shortcoming in his book, however, is that there are no large-scale studies on the effects of school desegregation in the South. Therefore Jencks' conclusions are at best tentative.

"There is a general trend in the country to ask what went wrong in the '60s," says Jencks, "and this book is part of that." Specifically, the federal strategy "to try to give everyone entering the job market or any other competitive arena comparable skills" had to fail.

Even if all children could be made to score equally well on tests, the result would do little to erase economic inequality. For example, two people with equal schooling, IQ and family background often have widely differing incomes. At least 75% of the variation, Jencks believes, "must be due either to luck or to subtle, unmeasured differences in personality and on-the-job competence." Thus, he says, "instead of accepting the myth that test scores are synonymous with 'intelligence' and that 'intelligence' is the key to economic success, we would do better to recognize that economic success depends largely on other factors."

Jencks wants to tackle economic inequality directly. He suggests that the Government might force employers to make the wages of their best- and worst-paid workers more equal, pay income supplements to the poor or even provide them with more free public services. Congress is unlikely to adopt this approach. "But that does not mean it [is] the wrong strategy," Jencks writes. "It simply means that until we change the premises on which most Americans now operate, poverty and inequality of opportunity will persist at pretty much their present level."

Equations. Critics have already raised serious questions about Jencks' methods and conclusions. Most telling is the argument that his way of analyzing data is faulty. Financed by $750,000 in grants, primarily from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Jencks worked for three years with seven collaborators at Harvard's Center for Educational Policy Research. The team gathered almost no new data, depending instead on hundreds of existing studies that vary widely in scope and method.

To weave together the scattered data and reach his conclusions, Jencks employed a sophisticated statistical technique called "path" analysis, which has long been used by researchers in genetics and biology but only recently in sociology. For this book it involved programming a computer with a chain of mathematical equations embodying the variables that Jencks assumed influence economic success--among them family background and education. The computer then gave back estimates of the relative importance of each variable. If any one of the assumptions were wrong or if a factor were missing, it could throw off at least some of the conclusions. Admits Jencks: "It's beguiling to assume that because you've fitted a very complicated world into your assumptions that they are right. In fact, path analysis tells you nothing about how good they are."

Jencks, of course, believes that both his assumptions and his conclusions are correct. Other scholars, however, have doubts. Says Berkeley Education Professor James Guthrie: "We are just beginning to learn what questions to ask in education, let alone coming to any conclusions. Moreover, the data on which Jencks bases his conclusions are so frail, so faulty, as not to justify any public policy position." Adds Stanford Education Professor Henry Levin: "We have only the crudest understanding of the actual forces creating differences in people's abilities. It's like analyzing what is beauty. You can study fingernails and knuckles, but this would have nothing to do with the overall concept of beauty."

In addition, critics like Guthrie see Jencks' findings as "political dynamite" that is likely to be misused by politicians as an excuse for giving up on the schools. Jencks agrees. "It's a message a lot of people want to hear pieces of," he says, and adds with a trace of bitterness: "If, as we argue in this book, intellectual and moral experiments on children have little effect on adult life, many people are likely to lose interest in schools. Children per se do not interest them very much."

The book also has its strong defenders, for example Harvard Urbanologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "All new information is thought to be threatening at first," he says. Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell calls Inequality "an argument both against stilted American myths and vulgarized Marxism," and Yale Psychologist Edward Zigler, former director of the U.S. Office of Child Development, agrees that "we've been sold a bill of goods. School people keep saying we should do more, whereas the real wave of the future is for schools to do less and let other social institutions play a larger role."

Vices. At 35, Jencks is accustomed to scholarly debate. Reared in a vigorously intellectual home in Baltimore, he graduated from Exeter and Harvard, studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and at the London School of Economics. He never earned a doctoral degree and, as a result, he says, "I have all the vices of an autodidact: thinking you can make sense of more of the world than most scholars think."

Except for two years as a writer for the New Republic, Jencks has spent his career as an activist scholar. At Washington's Institute for Policy Studies in 1965, he helped devise what in watered-down form became the Teacher Corps, which recruits and trains teachers for slum schools. Soon afterward, he collaborated with Sociologist David Riesman on The Academic Revolution, which accused research-oriented American universities of smothering diversity in education. Out of one chapter of that book grew the questions that led to Inequality. While writing Inequality, Jencks also found time to develop for the Office of Economic Opportunity the controversial voucher system of school financing, which will be tested in a school district in San Jose, Calif., this year.

Jencks has been twice married and divorced (his second wife was the Ms. and New York feminist writer Jane O'Reilly). He cares little for teaching or administration, being chiefly interested in new ideas, which he spins out almost continuously. Even while reading the final galleys of Inequality, he was making computer runs of data to double-check possible new interpretations. His next project will be a two-year, Carnegie-financed study of alternative ways of bringing up children, which will be conducted at the Cambridge Institute, a think tank he helped found.

It is ironic that Jencks, who strongly favors integration and school reform, should author a book that is likely to be misinterpreted as an argument against both. Jencks fervently wants schools to be stimulating, inviting and open to any students who want to attend them. His reason is not, however, that such schools may reduce inequality among their alumni in later years. Promising this leads, in the long run, to disillusionment. Good schools can be more than justified, Jencks says, on the grounds that they make life better for children and teachers right now.

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