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An article featured on Edweek this week by Jeffrey Henig and S. Paul Reville, “Why Attention Will Return to Non-School Factors” provides a great summary of issues surrounding education that public school advocates have been trying to direct attention to for years. However, the optimism that the public will inevitably invest in these issues may be overly rosy—though I certainly hope their prediction pans out.

The authors point out that “when thinking about their own families, parents take it as a given that non-school factors . . . affect whether their children will thrive.” Likewise, analysts studying patterns of education achievement “take it as a given that socioeconomic status, concentrations of poverty, and school and residential mobility are dominating predictors that must be statistically controlled for before one can accurately register weaker and less reliable effects of teachers and schools.” The authors add: “[t]hat there are exceptions to the rule—that children and schools in poor neighborhoods succeed against all odds—does not gainsay the core reality that the odds are steep.”

Despite these realities that indicate people certainly consider non-school factors to be greatly significant, the authors point out that often times in education reform circles, many fear “[a]ttention to non-school factors . . . as an excuse to let bad schools and teachers off the hook” and others see an emphasis on these factors as requiring infeasible increase in spending in our current fiscally-wrought era.

The authors, however, are optimistic that in the future the nation will recognize that we cannot achieve the goal of having all students at a proficient level of knowledge without addressing non-school factors. Henig and Reville make clear they do not come to this conclusion out of idealistic hopes, but rather feel “a broad shift in public sentiment” will occur “as an outgrowth of the same hard-nosed, pragmatic, evidence-based orientation that for the moment is supporting the unlikely claim that schools can do it alone.”

They then offer three specific points about why this shift will take place.

The first reiterates that “a growing focus on outcomes and evidence will reveal the limitations of the schools-only approach.” They argue that while many have said that social reform efforts of the 1960s and 1970s did not improve student achievement (even though they irrefutably increased educational access and attainment), the counter-reaction from the 1980s on of “no-excuse accountability approaches . . . have had a longer time in the field and similarly have come up short when it comes to simultaneously ratcheting up achievement levels and substantially shaving achievement gaps.”

Their second point holds that the major focus on spending and return on investment will be expanded beyond the current narrow bureaucratic parameters to evaluate the “critical spillovers among schools, social service agencies, health care, and other policy venues.” Such evaluation will show that when the mutual causality of school empowerment and social investment is realized and enabled, payoffs  extend beyond school performance to a variety of core social issues like economic competitiveness, better functioning of multiculturalism, mitigating “costly social byproducts of poverty,” and producing more informed citizens. Among the examples they provide here is a recent Century Foundation analysis of positive school effects from an inclusionary housing program in Montgomery County, MD. The authors conclude that “when these cross-sector effects are left out of cost-benefit analyses, the so-called bottom line can easily underestimate the return on public investments.”

In their third point, they predict that major shifts in information technology—which allows for better tracking of data—and in education-governance—which increasingly brings in broader audiences to note school outcomes—will aid this broader framing and analysis of school outcomes with social factors.  However, the authors concede that while current governance integrates local, state, and federal parties, dialogue among these groups is not enough to effect change. They have observed that these entities come together to “express and genuinely share all their good intentions, but then everyone goes back into bureaucratic silos where that energy gets rechanneled, distracted, or otherwise tamped down. In order to get people to buy the theory, it’s important both to build capacity and to demonstrate that the strategy works.”

Indeed, the authors conclude that “the universe of things we might want to do to improve society is so large that people are afraid to open the door.” They recognize that all of these requires “a new conception of education as encompassing a broader idea of child development”—a paradigm shift that they argue needs to be coupled with “a process that combines reform experimentation with careful [data-based] monitoring of near-term progress.”

However, I am skeptical that this shift will come organically, as the authors suggest. Governments continue to make cuts to many social programs (like Medicare and Medicaid) as well as to education funding. Recently the US House of Representatives proposed a bill (that passed out of committee) to cut programs like Reading is Fundamental for childhood literacy in impoverished communities, Mental Health Integration in Schools, and Even Start. Indeed, the general current political climate—a la the Tea Party and other anti-spending enthusiasts—largely makes social investment into a scapegoat for the nation’s problems. Still, I hope that the authors are right—maybe calculated rationalism of data, bottom lines, and methodical monitoring will provide the safety net many crave to allow for a more progressive vision of educational and social equity.