RAISING SCHOOL EFFECTS WHILE IGNORING CULTURE - LOCAL CONDITIONS AND THE INFLUENCE OF CLASSROOM TOOLS, RULES, AND PEDAGOGY

How educators and researchers define and study school effectiveness co ntinues to be shaped by two divided camps. The policy mechanics attemp t to identify particular school inputs, including discrete teaching pr actices, that raise student achievement. They seek universal remedies that can be manipulated by central agencies and assume that the same i nstructional materials and pedagogical practices hold constant meaning in the eyes of teachers and children across diverse cultural settings . In contrast, the classroom culturalists focus on the implicitly mode led norms exercised in the classroom and how children are socialized t o accept particular rules of participation and authority, linguistic n orms, orientations toward achievement, and conceptions of merit and st atus. It is the culturally constructed meanings attached to instructio nal tools and pedagogy that sustain this socialization process, not th e material character of school inputs per se. This article reviews how these two paths of school-effects research are informed by work condu cted within developing countries. First, we discuss the school's aggre gate effect, relative to family background, within impoverished settin gs. Second, we review recent empirical findings from the Third World o n achievement effects from discrete school inputs. An emerging extensi on of this work also is reviewed: How input effects are conditioned by the social rules of classrooms. Third, we illustrate how future work in the policy-mechanic tradition will be fruitless until cultural cond itions are taken into account. And the classroom culturalists may reac h a theoretical dead end until they can empirically link classroom pro cesses to alleged effects. We put forward a culturally situated model of school effectiveness-the implications of which are discussed for st udying ethnically diverse schools within the West. By bringing togethe r the strengths of these two intellectual camps, researchers can more carefully condition their search for school effects.