Have current school reform efforts overlooked a powerful tool for improving student achievement? According to Carrie Leana, author of the cover story of the Fall 2011 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Missing Link in School Reform,” they have. Leana argues that “social capital,” or interaction and collaboration among teachers within a school, has been greatly undervalued as a mechanism for improving public schools.
A professor of organizations and management at the University of Pittsburgh, Leana has studied human and social capital in many districts. Her paper describes specific findings from research in New York City between 2005 and 2007, and argues that schools with strong social capital take collective responsibility for school improvement and achieve significant results via teacher-to-teacher trust and collaboration.
“Students showed higher gains in math achievement when their teachers reported frequent conversations with their peers that centered on math, and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness among teachers,” she writes. “In other words, teacher social capital was a significant predictor of student achievement gains above and beyond teacher experience or ability in the classroom.”
Leana argues that social capital has the potential to extend the impact of exceptional teachers. Rather than fostering reliance upon superstar teachers, systematized social capital creates an environment where all teachers share those practices they are good at, thus extending their expertise across their schools.
The findings are important because they provide an alternative to the current reform narrative that focuses on the primacy of human capital (increasing individual skill), individual teacher responsibility (highlighted by current teacher evaluation efforts,) and superhuman efforts (see Waiting for Superman) to improve schools.
But while Leana argues that the ultimate measure of strong social capital in schools is improved academic performance of students, any move toward widespread systematization requires measures not just of results, but also of interim indicators – a point Ted Jackson of Ascendant Strategy Management Group raises in a recent blog post about Leana’s work when he asks, “how would you measure social capital in schools?”
As if on cue, the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago recently announced survey-based school reports that begin to answer that question: the 5 Essential Elements of School Success (5E). Designed to help provide school reformers with “research-based evidence to set priorities that will accelerate learning and drive test score gains” and based on 15 years of data, the Five Essentials measures, among its essential elements, “professional capacity,” which it defines as how “teachers collaborate to promote professional growth” – a leading indicator of improved student performance. (Urban Education Institute research indicates that schools strong in the 5 Essentials are 10 times more likely to improve than schools that are not.)
With so many schools struggling to raise improvement, we cannot simply rely on teachers’ collegial impulses to bridge the gap. Successful development of social capital as a scalable tool for improvement depends on policies that foster collaboration, and that give teachers the time and support they need to collaborate and develop meaningful peer-to-peer relationships. School leaders must begin to systematically strengthen social capital. And in a highly politicized environment where no reform effort can pass muster without metrics-based support, they should consider the 5E survey as one valid way to measure progress.
