Abstract
Professor Adam Gamoran is the president of the William T. Grant Foundation (http://wtgrantfoundation.org/whoweare). He came to the Foundation from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he held the John D. MacArthur Chair in Sociology and Educational Policy Studies. In a research career spanning three decades, Adam conducted a wide range of studies focusing on inequality in education and school reform. Among his major works were a series of studies on tracking and ability grouping that identified consequences for student achievement and revealed the mechanisms through which those consequences occurred. Subsequent studies examined interventions to improve performance and reduce learning gaps, assessed through large-scale cluster-randomized trials. He was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was twice appointed by President Obama to serve on the National Board for Education Sciences. As president of the William T. Grant Foundation, Professor Gamoran has prioritized supporting research to deepen our understanding of the programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and to understand and improve the use of research evidence in decisions that affect young people. In 2013, Professor Gamoran received the Spencer Foundation Award for contributions to research on education policy from the Association for Public Policy and Management, and in 2014 he was honored with the award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education from the American Educational Research Association. In May 2015, he was a key-note speaker at the conference “School tracking: diverse mechanisms, effects and policy responses” that took place at the Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague. His presence in Prague was a valuable opportunity to discuss approaches to tracking, school choice and educational policy in general and ask him many questions from the perspective of a small educational researchers’ community in Central Europe with its limited research funding and rather heated debate about equity and tracking. Nevertheless, we believe that Professor Adam Gamoran’s deep insight might be an eye-opening experience and an inspiring reading also for many other readers of our journal. (The second part of the interview about the research-policy relationships and research funding in the United States will be published in some of the next issues of our journal.) The questions were asked by David Greger (DG) and Jaroslava Simonova (JS).
Highlights
90 researchers’ community in Central Europe with its limited research funding and rather heated debate about equity and tracking
We believe that Professor Adam Gamoran’s deep insight might be an eye-opening experience and an inspiring reading for many other readers of our journal. (The second part of the interview about the research-policy relationships and research funding in the United States will be published in some of the issues of our journal.) The questions were asked by David Greger (DG) and Jaroslava Simonová (JS)
DG: In the first part of this interview, we would like to learn more about the recent trends and issues in educational policy in the United States
Summary
DG: And is it a big problem, the inequality between states? If you consider that, for example, many students finish their tracks within the system because the tuitions are lower in the states, I guess, at state universities? So what’s the main deal there?. No Child Left Behind caught them in the end, because even a state like the one I lived in for thirty years − Wisconsin − where they set a low threshold, for example, in Wisconsin about 80% of the students were judged to be proficient on the Wisconsin assessment, but if you look at NAEP − the national assessment and testing − only 40% were proficient. Because No Child Left Behind set the impossible standards of a 100% proficient. When I read about the NCLB and about the 100% proficiency, I think many researchers were against it from the beginning, said it was too ambitious. How could it happen, or how do you explain that fact − they didn’t listen to researchers, or...?. No school EVER has made the kind of progress that the AVERAGE school has to make!” I kept giving that talk over and over again and I was waiting for someone to show me a school that did make that kind of progress, so I could say “only one school or only three schools have ever made that progress”, but I’ve never found one
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