Ethnic Studies Shows Huge Impact in San Francisco
By Anthony Cody.
In San Francisco a recently implemented Ethnic Studies course has been startlingly successful in boosting student attendance, GPA, and earned credits. That is the conclusion of a Stanford University study, done by Emily Penner and Thomas Dee. I wrote about these courses back in 2014, when the San Francisco school board voted to approve them. Last year, the California legislature approved a law tasking the state superintendent with developing a plan to make such courses available statewide. Unfortunately, Governor Jerry Brown refused to sign this into law.
The results in San Francisco should encourage Governor Brown to take a second look. While we know there are no silver bullets in education, this research shows effects too large to ignore. The report states:
We find that ES [Ethnic Studies] participation had large, positive effects on each of our student outcomes. Specifically, ES participation increased student attendance (i.e., reduced unexcused absences) by 21 percentage points, cumulative ninth-grade GPA by 1.4 grade points, and credits earned by 23 credits.3 These GPA gains were larger for boys than for girls as well as higher in math and science than in ELA. We find that these surprisingly large effects are robust to a variety of model specifications as well as checks for possible confounds related to the treatment contrast we study (e.g., unobserved teacher effects, the possibly independent effects of an at-risk designation, “heaping” of the assignmentEthnic Studies Shows Huge Impact in San Francisco - Living in Dialogue: