How schools really matter: why our assumption about schools and inequality is mostly wrong

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Why We Shouldn't Be Blaming Schools So Much -- Chapter 1: The Forgotten 87 Percent -- Herbert Walberg's outrageous claim -- Trying to understand how schools matter when you have an eight-hundred-pound gorilla problem -- Chapter 2: Chickens, Eggs, and Achievement Gaps -- When do achievement gaps emerge? -- Scaling matters -- Why the early years are so important -- Relative deprivation matters too -- Conclusion -- Chapter 3: One Very Surprising Pattern about Schools -- Soccer coaches and schools -- Trying to understand how schools matter -- Seasonal comparisons -- What do we learn from the few studies that have collected data seasonally? -- Conclusion -- Chapter 4: And Now a Second, Even More Surprising Pattern -- School achievement, growth, and impact -- Objections -- Conclusion -- Part II: A New Way to Think about Schools and Inequality -- Chapter 5: More Like Reflectors than Generators -- Schools generating inequality -- Two examples of schools reflecting broader society -- What about those high-flying schools? -- Underestimating early childhood -- Conclusion: A diminished role for schools, an enhanced role for early childhood -- Chapter 6: As Helping More than Hurting -- Schools as compensatory: The weak form -- Schools as compensatory: The strong form -- Conclusion -- Chapter 7: A Frida Sofia Problem -- Schools and inequality: Stuck within the traditional framing -- Our value for limited government -- Fear of "blaming the victim" -- Gender and the vulnerability of schools -- Conclusion -- Chapter 8: The Costly Assumption -- Rich guys trying to reduce achievement gaps -- The never-ending quest to reform schools -- The great distractor -- So what should we do? -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix A: The Early Childhood Longitudinal Datasets (ECLS- K:1998 and ECLS- K:2010).