Lee Valerie E, Ready Douglas D
University of Michigan, USA.
Future Child. 2009 Spring;19(1):135-56. doi: 10.1353/foc.0.0028.
Valerie Lee and Douglas Ready explore the influences of the high school curriculum on student learning and the equitable distribution of that learning by race and socioeconomic status. They begin by tracing the historical development of the U.S. comprehensive high school and then examine the curricular reforms of the past three decades. During the first half of the twentieth century, the authors say, public high schools typically organized students into rigid curricular "tracks" based largely on students' past academic performance and future occupational and educational plans. During the middle of the century, however, high schools began to provide students with a choice among courses that varied in both content and academic rigor. Although the standards movement of the 1980s limited these curricular options somewhat, comprehensive curricula remained, with minority and low-income students less often completing college-prep courses. During the 1990s, say the authors, researchers who examined the associations between course-taking and student learning reported that students completing more advanced coursework learned more, regardless of their social or academic backgrounds. Based largely on this emerging research consensus favoring college-prep curriculum, in 1997 public high schools in Chicago began offering exclusively college-prep courses. To address the needs of the city's many low-performing ninth graders, schools added extra coursework in subjects in which their performance was deficient. A recent study of this reform, however, found that these approaches made little difference in student achievement. Lee and Ready hypothesize that "selection bias" may explain the divergent conclusions reached by the Chicago study and previous research. Earlier studies rarely considered the unmeasured characteristics of students who completed college-prep courses-characteristics such as motivation, access to academic supports, and better teachers-that are also positively related to student learning. Although the Chicago evaluation is only one study of one city, its findings raise the worrisome possibility that the recent push for "college-prep for all" may not generate the improvements for which researchers and policy makers had hoped.
瓦莱丽·李和道格拉斯·雷迪探讨了高中课程对学生学习的影响，以及这种学习在种族和社会经济地位方面的公平分配情况。他们首先追溯了美国综合高中的历史发展，然后考察了过去三十年的课程改革。作者称，在20世纪上半叶，公立高中通常主要根据学生过去的学业成绩以及未来的职业和教育规划，将学生分成严格的课程“轨道”。然而，在本世纪中叶，高中开始为学生提供在内容和学术难度上都有所不同的课程选择。尽管20世纪80年代的标准运动在一定程度上限制了这些课程选择，但综合课程仍然存在，少数族裔和低收入学生完成大学预科课程的情况较少。作者说，在20世纪90年代，研究课程修习与学生学习之间关联的研究人员报告称，无论社会或学术背景如何，完成更高级课程作业的学生学到的更多。主要基于这种支持大学预科课程的新出现的研究共识，1997年芝加哥的公立高中开始只提供大学预科课程。为了满足该市许多成绩不佳的九年级学生的需求，学校在他们成绩较差的学科上增加了额外的课程作业。然而，最近一项关于这项改革的研究发现，这些方法对学生成绩几乎没有影响。李和雷迪推测，“选择偏差”可能解释了芝加哥研究与先前研究得出的不同结论。早期研究很少考虑完成大学预科课程的学生的未测量特征——比如动机、获得学术支持的机会以及更好的教师等特征——这些特征也与学生学习呈正相关。尽管芝加哥的评估只是对一个城市的一项研究，但其结果引发了一个令人担忧的可能性，即最近对“全民大学预科”的推动可能无法产生研究人员和政策制定者所期望的改进。
