The Matthew Principle: A West Virginia Replication?.

This study extends and interprets a regression technique used to examine the possible role that socioeconomic status may have in regulating the effects of school and district size on student achievement. The original study (Friedkin & Necochea, 1988), with data from California, confirmed an interaction between size and SES such that large schools benefitted affluent students, whereas small schools benefitted impoverished students. This replication applies the model to a very different state, West Virginia. Results are similar, except that the pattern of effects is shown to derive in part from the fact that in West Virginia impoverished students were shown actually to attend small schools in 1990. Small schools are shown to disrupt the usual negative relationship between socioeconomic status and student achievement. These results would be cause for celebration except that since 1988 West Virginia has, under a successful consolidation scheme facilitated by the state, closed nearly 20 percent of its schools, most of them small schools that had served rural communities in this mostly rural state. The discussion interprets findings with respect to this context and interprets the practical significance of studying structural variables such as those used in the study. The Matthew Principle: A West Virginia Replication? For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. (Matthew, 13:12) This epigraph, revealed two thousand years ago, captures something of how the world works, the social world certainly, but perhaps also the natural world. For instance, Jesus's remarks may allude to the principles related to iterative processes that are now understood to account for much that natural science previously found obscure. In these "chaotic" processes small differences in initial states lead to great differences in final states. But when the differences in initial social states are great, it should come as no surprise that differences in final social states can be dramatic. After two millennia, we can say with more certainty than ever that it takes money to make money, and also, that in this chaotic process of making money, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Schooling plays a part in postindustrial societies. As Christopher Jencks and others have noted, education has become the route through which the affluent bequeath their advantages to their children; education mostly bestows its advantages on the advantaged (cf. Jencks et al., 1979). This article derives from doctoral research in which the findings tend to confirm both the wisdom of the Gospel and the wisdom of common sense. The inferential statistics reported here (regression analysis), however, are conventional, straightforward, and solidly based on the literature about two key structural variables related to schooling: socioeconomic status (a most salient contextual variable) and school size (a most salient institutional variable). The analysis replicates a widely cited California study (Friedkin & Necochea, 1988), which, curiously, has not been replicated until now. Its findings may have been too disturbing, or its methodology may have been a little obscure. The original study found that socioeconomic status systematically influences the effects of school and district size on aggregate student achievement. Large schools and districts (in California) benefit affluent students moderately, whereas small schools and districts benefit impoverished students to an even greater extent than the large schools benefit the affluent. The