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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010
The importance of social capital in teaching quality is often ignored in current discussions of human capital in education.
Human capital – the skills and knowledge of individual teachers – has been a hot topic in recent debates about education reform. But the importance of social capital – the interactions among teachers in a school – is often overlooked in discussions of instructional quality. Research suggests that social capital thrives in an atmosphere of mutual trust and collective practice – and that it is a powerful predictor of student achievement.
Carrie Leana, a professor of organizational behavior and management at the University of Pittsburgh, has done significant research in public schools. She spoke to VUE guest editor Marla Ucelli-Kashyap about her perspectives and research on human and social capital in the education sector.
Let’s start by comparing human capital and the attention it gets in education to the corporate sector or health care or other kinds of organizations you study.
Leana: Education is the quintessential knowledge industry, and teachers are the quintessential knowledge workers. So when we talk about human capital – the ability, education, and training that people bring to a job – it’s at least as important in education as it is in other industries.
And I don’t think human capital gets short shrift in education. My
own view is that it is over-emphasized in education, as opposed to industry. I think there is far too much focus on teacher certification, advanced educational degrees, measuring teacher competence, and those kinds of things. It is hard to think of an industry where there is more ongoing professional development. I think human capital actually gets quite a bit of attention – arguably too much – and there is quite a bit of public policy action around things like mandated certification and mandated accreditation of teachers. The problem is that most of these approaches are unsuccessful.
The Relationship between Social Capital and Human Capital
What is social capital and how do you distinguish it from human capital?
Leana: What are those things that kids play with that have circles and you put the rods into them? TinkerToys! In TinkerToys you have two basic parts. First there are these nodes, which are the circles; we can use these to represent human capital. Then you have those rods or spokes that plug into the circle pieces and connect one node to another. Those connecting rods are the social capital.
And the reason I am using this TinkerToy analogy is that human capital, in and of itself, is not going to be a very effective building block for a school, much less a school system – just as you can’t build much of a foundation in TinkerToys if you only use the circle pieces. Instead, to build a sustainable school or system, you have to also have the connectors between the nodes – the social capital.
Human capital by itself may help in a particular classroom, but it is not going to make a good school. Rather, a focus on human capital alone almost invariably results in the kind of school where you have to worry about which teacher a student gets. To me, it’s always the sign of a bad school when there are, say, five fourth-grade teachers and you are hoping that you get Miss Monroe. There is something wrong with that system if Miss Monroe is the only good fourth-grade teacher. 
So,
I think that human capital itself can have a contained beneficial effect in one classroom. But you are not going to change a school or system that
way. Instead, you have to focus on the connections, too.
Another way to understand the distinction between human capital and social capital is to ask the question, “Why are some schools better than others?” A human capital answer would say that some schools are better because they have the best-trained teachers. A social capital answer would say there is something about the way those teachers are interacting that influences the school as a whole and results in a level of shared performance that you can’t get from individuals alone.
If you only have human capital without social capital, you have these good, smart teachers who come in and just work by themselves. The knowledge is very concentrated and people aren’t able to learn from one another in terms of becoming better at their work. Instead, all learning is individual trial and error, or book learning, or learning from experts. But it is not a group learning process. It is an individual learning process. Conversely, if you have lots of social capital in a school with no human capital, you get lots of information exchange, because everyone talks to everyone else. But the problem is that nobody knows anything, so the information that’s exchanged isn’t very helpful in terms of teachers getting better at their work. If we are all really bad at teaching math, we are not going to get any better at it by talking to one another a lot.
And if we have a situation where we have low human capital and low social capital – which, unfortunately, happens a lot in hard-to-staff schools – you don’t really have much knowledge to begin with and you have no capacity to enhance it. The ideal situation, of course, is a high-learning environment where you have both human capital and social capital. Then you’ve got teachers who know what they’re doing – at least, a critical mass of them – and you’ve got lots of information exchange among teachers around the actual subject and practice of teaching.
The Impact of Social Capital on Teaching Quality and Student Achievement
What are some of the key findings from your studies of social capital in school settings?
Leana: We have done lots of different studies [Pil & Leana 2006; Shevchuk, Leana & Mittal 2008]. For our first study in a public school system we wanted to be modest [laughs] and study all the schools in the district. We wanted our findings to apply to high schools, grade schools, you name it – we studied more than 90 percent of the schools in the district. What we learned about social capital was that it entailed having a trusting climate in the school – one where teachers talked to each other, shared the same norms, and had strong agreement in their descriptions of the culture of the school. That trusting climate was more important than teacher level of education, teacher certification, or other human capital measures in predicting student achievement scores. We frankly didn’t expect social capital to be as powerful as it was, and our findings led us to further explore why.
The second big study was in New York, where we studied all the elementary schools – over 200 – in four subdistricts in the New York City school system. In addition to the usual measures on education and certification, we assessed how well teachers taught math and how competent they felt teaching specific topics like fractions, division, and ratios. So those were our human capital measures, which we felt really captured an array of teacher knowledge, skills, and experiences. With our social capital measures, we asked teachers to report on the overall climate of the school, as we did in our earlier study. But we also asked them to report on who they talked to when they had questions or problems around particular subjects – literacy and math, in this case. So, if I’m a teacher and I have a kid in my class and he’s not getting it but I don’t understand why, or if I have a topic – fractions – and I don’t really know how to teach fractions, then where do I go to try to get that information? Who do I ask to help me solve day-to-day problems? We asked teachers to tell us who they go to, how often they talk to these others, and how close they felt to these others from whom they sought advice.
By two to one, when you ask teachers who they talk to when they have a problem or content question, they report that they talk to another teacher. They don’t talk to experts. They don’t talk to the coaches. They don’t talk to the principal. They don’t talk to the assistant principal. They don’t talk to the professional development consultants. They talk to one another. So, if I don’t know how to teach fractions, I am going to ask you, my peer, to help me. I am not going to ask the experts, or coaches, or principals. And again, this probably goes to the lack of trust in many school environments.
At the same time, this is where human capital becomes important, too, because if you, my trusted peer, don’t know anything about teaching fractions either, I am not going to get any better at teaching fractions myself. I might actually get worse by following your advice! So our research shows that human capital and social capital are inextricably intertwined. If you are going to have a good school, not just a good classroom, you must have both human and social capital, and one cannot substitute for the other.
Were there differences in the importance of social capital by grade level or subject?
Leana: We couldn’t answer that question entirely in our second study because our research design required participating teachers to cover a variety of subject areas, which meant elementary school teachers. In the first study, though, we included high school, middle school, and elementary school teachers, and their patterns were essentially the same. There was some variation, but it was not as great as we expected and it was not significant. Social capital was a significant predictor of school success across all types of schools and grade levels.
