"And my position has always been that, instead of continuing to try to force square pegs into round holes, we should expand our definition of human value and shape the kind of society where everyone is given an opportunity to flourish according to their strengths."
Really channeling _The Bell Curve_ and Murray here.
I can almost picture an alternate reality where Murray was just a little more careful in his phrasing, and overzealous journalists and academics were just a bit less reactive in their reading.
"...the New Yorker profile compares the notion of Duolingo teaching poor people in Guatemala to the distribution of free tablets as an educational venture and calls the results of such efforts 'mixed.'"
I am sure that someone did very well out of that fiasco. They just didn't try hard enough, a few hundred million in funding for a few more years and we'd have had the problem licked!
Hey, I live in "he [sic] Ozarks" . . . and it is nothing like described as some sort of educational wasteland. While the Ozarks may be largely white, the residents and public school graduates are not cretin banjo pickers. Maybe the author is thinking of Appalachia or has been watching the Justin Bateman series "Ozark" as a documentary. But I do not think he, blessed and wise as he is in ever so many ways, has a clue about "he Ozarks."
Oh, yes, I understand and believe that . . . but The Ozarks encompasses a big area. So I would want to know what exactly was defined as "The Ozarks" for such study. I expect there might be some insulated communities in a narrow band of "The Ozarks" where it might be true . . . but that is painting with really broad brush "The Ozarks" which encompasses "a significant portion of northern Arkansas and most of the southern half of Missouri, extending from Interstate 40 in central Arkansas to Interstate 70 in central Missouri." And I can tell you from experience as a rural public school graduate, public school teacher (SW MO high school and regional state college) that public education in most of the area is quite good.
Well, if I were not so educationally limited by living in the Ozarks and if I were not so lazy, I would research the exact geographical region from which the educational research data was collected. But I think "Detroit" is a pretty clearly delimited location, while "The Ozarks" includes large sections of Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. Pretty fuzzy geographics on which to base generalizations.
I'm guessing the data Freddie is referencing is not very indicative of, say, a city like Springfield. Perhaps the dataset covers rural areas only, who knows. But I'm not sure him just relaying a general data point was some kind of 'dis' to the Ozarks like they are all Lothar of the Hill People.
I'm not exactly from there (KC), but spent a good chunk of my youth traipsing around various Twain forests and rivers. Even have a few very fond early memories of float trips down the Current and Eleven Point...such a beautiful pristine area.
But I would have to say that, even in my youth, I certainly noticed the difference in economics the further off the beaten path we went to into south/southeast Missourah. Economics is not exactly directly correlated to education of course, but I would say it's a decent indicator. I mean, what would a tiny town like Eminence be like without the canoe tourists? How good could the grade schools be when the local rural economy is so rough?
Generally, poor whites do better than non-poor blacks. I haven't looked specifically at the Ozarks (and NAEP doesn't work as a comparison). Be interesting to see if that stat holds.
Funny story. A recent immigrant, a queen mrowka (Polish for "ant") moved to the US, and someone told her about how incredible the public schools were - in Mississippi.
"I gotta move the ant colony to Mississippi so my little mrowka offspring can take advantage of these amazing Mississippi public schools!" the queen said.
"Um, you might want to slow your roll, there, little ant. We can argue later about the methodology of 'No Larva Left Behind' and all, but when the Mississippi schools score 49, 50 or 51 out of all 50 states and the District of Colombia, in every subject, every year from kindergarten through twelfth grade, then you're probably doing something wrong."
Not to mention that the person who praised the Mississippi public schools was demonstrably insane.
One of the worst possible things you can do if looking to relocate somewhere is ask a random assortment of people from across the country where has "good schools."
Locally speaking to their area, they might be able to report where the "best schools" are (in the completely false sense most people understand them) but they're not going to have one whit of idea when comparing different states or metro areas.
Based on this analysis, I have to wonder about the school choice movement. Do charter schools really “do school better” than traditional schools in any substantive way, or do they mainly provide a refuge for students and parents with similar educational goals?
The latter I suspect. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the primary drivers behind the school choice movement is inner city parents in districts where the locals schools are disasters.
Which I think supports my current opinion that the the best use of tax money for school choice to address the needs of urban school children is not privatized charter schools or private school vouchers but magnet schools.
What's the difference? At the end of the day you're segregating everyone that cares about education from everyone that doesn't. And private schools typically cost less.
Accountability and stewardship of public resources. Also, with regard to vouchers, most of what I’ve seen indicates that these are basically tax refunds for people already using private schools. They rarely are enough to pay the cost for private schools, so are not effective for helping lower income parents escape from bad local schools.
If the concern is for the tax payer why divert funds to a public school system where janitors can earn six figures? Not all private schools exist to serve the wealthy and there are plenty of examples where private alternatives exist with the specific purpose of serving impoverished communities. If they can do it cheaper than the public sector that is by definition good stewardship of public resources.
You still need a public school system for those kids that are not a good match for the private schools, whether because of special needs, ideological differences, or whatever. A magnet school set up can serve as part of an overall functional system. If you cut off the strong performing students and funding, I am skeptical that a functioning public school system can survive. Which of course is what some - not all - privatization advocates want.
"Not all private schools exist to serve the wealthy"
Well, charters pretty much killed the private schools that didn't exist to serve the wealthy.
And private schools can't do it cheaper than the public sector. The only people who think so are utterly clueless at the massive federal and state spending required for the kids that private schools and charters can reject.
Magnet schools don't divert public money into private or quasi-private entities. They also allow for different educational focuses, which can tailor themselves to the interest of the families, or later, the students (language immersion, arts focus, STEM-focus, etc.)
You can also have them either set up via lottery or test. Elite test-based magnets are high-performing due to selection bias, but I still feel like they perform an important role in big urban districts like NYC, keeping parents of high-performing students within city limits and within the school district.
From the perspective of somebody who's just trying to maximize the bang for the tax payer's buck I don't see the problem with contracting this out to the private sector.
Even if you don't hold the idea of public schools in high regard, the issue with just vouchering everyone who wants out is the selection bias will make the residual population in the public schools look worse, leading to a "doom spiral" whereby it becomes impossible to rehabilitate the reputation of the public school system.
Better to just set up the educational alternatives within the structure that already exists.
Given what we’ve seen happen with privatized prisons and migrant detention centers, I’m skeptical of forming another public fund teat for private companies to suckle at.
Actually, the elite test-based magnets are not the choice of all parents. They're primarily the choice of Asian immigrant parents, so it's kind of an open question why taxpayer dollars should be spent keeping them within city limits and within the school district.
Well, it's not an open question. It's done by state mandate. It's an open question whether NYC voters would support the funds spent.
But when you say "local schools are disasters" you are buying into the same misconceptions that Freddie describes. Local schools are "disasters" because they have a huge number of low skilled kids, a large number of whom are not engaged or particularly interested in playing the school game. Kids aren't "stuck" in "failing schools". They are, in fact, the material that makes the schools be considered a failure. Most of the kids who go off to charter schools and "improve" do so not by leaps and bounds but, when comparing like to like, are "significant' if you squint. Any really poor extremely bright black or Hispanic kid has a lot of private options and doesn't need charters. So most of the kids in those inner city charters are basically average kids whose parents want them to have a larger collection of acceptable peers. This is understandable. All of school selection for parents is about peer set. But the "failing school" has the acceptable peers. It just also has a bunch of loud, unengaged, often hard to discipline kids that can't be kicked out.
Charters aren't solving that problem.
The choice movement intended to start with the low hanging fruit and then move onto the suburbs, but that never worked out. And charters are unlikely to co-exist with vouchers.
There was a recent story on Philadelphia where a successful charter was quite literally cherry picking students, especially from white/Asian neighborhoods.
Adjusting for SES, Charters do no better than public schools, suburban schools do no better than urban schools, and elite test-based magnets do no better than neighborhood schools.
There is really no evidence that "school quality" exists, except perhaps at the extreme low end (like how the pandemic resulted in learning losses for all children, since everyone was relegated to extremely ineffective online schooling).
For what must seem like just repeatedly banging your head against the wall, rest assured that there are those of us out there who greatly appreciate it.
It remains remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, the degree to which Seymour Papert, the first researcher to use the computer as a pedagogical tool, foresaw the limitations that the hype-driven press blunders into again and again every few years.
"Technocentrism refers to the tendency to give a [centrality] to a technical object -- for example computers or LOGO. This tendency shows up in questions like "what is the effect of the computer on cognitive development?" or "does LOGO work?" ... Such turns of phrase often betray a tendency to think of "computers" and of "LOGO" as agents that act directly on thinking and learning; they betray a tendency to reduce what are really the most important components of educational situations -- people and cultures -- to a secondary, facilitating role.
The context for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology. In the presence of computers, cultures might change and with them people's ways of learning and thinking. But if you want to understand (or influence) the change, you have to center your attention on the culture -- not on the computer."
Papert, "Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking"
Clifford Stoll got ripped to pieces after he published "Silicon Snake Oil," and rereading it nearly three decades after publication he certainly did get some things embarrassingly wrong - but he got a whole lot more right. Technocentrism is a beguiling illusion, which everyone periodically loves to embrace.
Bullet point 1 "There is no “educational crisis” in the United States." - I've often wondered about that.
I've been paying a little bit of attention to 'education' since about the early 90s (not an expert by any means, just noticing trends), and it has always seemed like it is true that on average, our kids are educated well enough, but we have some pockets of really poorly performing students that make everything look worse than it is.
1. Object to the very concept of a distribution of performance, which means there's no excellence and which frankly just gives us no achievable goal.
2. Try to engineer a given distribution - like proportional racial or gender representation. Which, even if you achieved, wouldn't change the fact that there would still be a bottom of the distribution and a bunch of social consequences for those who are there.
If the concern is the size of the disparity between the worst performing students versus the median then I wonder if the issue isn't really poverty, cultural dysfunction, etc. rather than the educational system itself.
Yeah, at this point I think the right thing for society to do as a whole is step back and question if the current approach to fighting poverty is really doing anything.
We certainly have anecdotal examples of people educating themselves out of poverty. But that still seems to me to be situations where for whatever reason, the impoverished person already recognized the opportunity and took advantage of it. Maybe I’m wrong but this idea of teachers being able to inspire kids out of a mindset that is indifferent or even hostile mindset towards school seems mostly to be a romantic myth.
There will always be brilliant kids born to not-so-smart parents, and vice versa. It's just the luck of the draw when it comes to gene-environment interactions.
I think we can lift occasional, exceptional people out of poverty, but in aggregate we need to address these poor pockets of the country and figure out how to help people live worthwhile lives there. The current *best case* scenario in a poor Appalachian town with an abandoned coal mine in it is that some smart kid becomes a tech wizard, moves to Silicon Valley, and is never heard from again. That's great for him, but what about the rest of the town? How can we set some of these kids up to succeed in Appalachia (or Detroit, etc), building up local businesses and institutions and connections? I refuse to accept that the best answer is "they should all move to the city except for a couple lumberjacks and backpacking guides." But I'll be darned if I know what it is.
Instead of investing in education in hopes it will increase class mobility for low-income people like 20 years from now, I think it's far more efficient to just give money directly to low-income people. The parents will be less poor, and there's actually been studies finding that cash payments to parents boost child performance.
Not to mention things like genuine lead remediation in contaminated areas would net huge positive effects. it would be expensive, but it's something that's been essentially proven to work - it has already resulted in increases in test scores that are measurable and systematic in counties where remediation has taken place.
Would someone please point me to sources that back up the claim that "only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers"? I had a few years ago, but for the life of me, I can't locate them now, and searching for them on Google and ERIC yields nothing but "of all school factors, teacher and curriculum quality have the greatest impact on student achievement." The impact of factors outside school receives no attention.
Well, there's the article itself. But there's also my linked post where I include I think like 50 citations to the effect that student outcomes are static across multiple and major intervention. And your last sentence is true; you just have to reflect on why it's true.
When I raised the point that schools and teachers account for roughly 10% to 15% of student academic achievement in a study group at my neighborhood high school, my colleagues chuckled and said they'd like to see the research making that claim. I assumed they understood why our union, the CTU, routinely emphasizes community investment in childcare, jobs programs, and housing, all of which they completely support.
The academic intervention we're currently pursuing at my neighborhood high school is Anti-Racism. We're reading and discussing Glenn Singleton's Courageous Conversations about Race, and like corporate education reformers, Singleton quickly places external factors out of bounds. He argues that blaming "social, economic, or political factors external to the school and unrelated to the quality of curriculum and instruction . . . [are] insufficient at best and destructive at worst when trying to address racial achievement disparities" (15). Being against racism is good in and of itself, but arguing that being against racism in the schools, while ignoring all external factors, will close the achievement gap between black and white students is a fool's errand.
I don't think the average person knows the degree to which educators have internalized the assumptions and logic of education reform movements. They're dug in.
Hell yes. To each their own (I don’t care about Beri Weiss), but this is the good shit & why I pay for the Substack. I live in the ed world & it is great getting a contrary, yet not contrarian, pov.
It speaks so well to Freddie’s piece that there are things I adamantly disagree with (“If the goal is for most everyone to gradually get smarter over time, congratulations, that’s been happening for at least a century and is almost certainly because of better living conditions and the endowments of modernity rather than pedagogical improvements” - come on, man. Hattie! Pedagogy has increased by leaps and bounds from rote memorization of the Gettysburg Address in a one room school house) but that is to cavil over what is a terrific piece. There is a lot here that would get someone immediately disqualified were they to articulate it in an interview, yet which is quietly agreed upon behind closed doors. I salute you, DeBoer.
*yawn* Humans are endlessly bouncing from nostrum to nostrum in an effort to Fix Our Failing Schools. We Need High Tech Solutions, then its We Need To Go Back To Basics, sometimes it's Good Old Fashioned Discipline, other times if's a more hippyish approach, then its School Uniforms or Charter Schools or some other attempt at a magic bullet. The minds of educational consultants and academics are endlessly fertile and creative, as shown by the studies that they crank out.
None of it ever works. Or rather, some of it always works, mostly it works when applied to the same set of people. And I'm not necessarily referring to tenure prospects or the consultants' bank accounts.
Fact is, nobody ever really teaches a human kitten anything. Rather, the most that can be done is to put the kitten in a position where they can learn, that is, teach themselves from the environment, situation and materials made available. (This is sort of how I learned to catch fill-grown rats, which many cats will not mess with, but I was hungry.)
With that in mind, the most successful students are the ones who are motivated. They will learn in any environment, they will jump through whatever hoops are put in front of them. This, of course begs the question of how one motivates a human kitten. More often than not, the answer to that question is "because that kid has parents that ride him every day like Momsie was determined to win the Preakness on his back."
In my case, I was hungry. The problem in the case of human attitudes is that: 1. it can't be fixed by some nostrum; 2. it takes work; and 3. the work is in the attitude of the parents and is unremunerated. This is very different to paying some coordinator or other jobsworth.
Speaking as a highly intelligent but a slacker student, I disagree. I didn't learn because I wanted to, I learn because it's relatively easy for me. As an adult I've changed course but as a kid I really didn't care, I just listened and took in information, no extra work needed.
That worked for me all through public school. Then I got to college. I studied for my final in freshman anthropology 20 minutes before the final and I aced the exam.
Unfortunately my major was physics. There's just no comparison.
Yeah I didn't take any hard sciences in college as a political science major so I was able to skate by on my usual low effort. The working world has been different than school though.
I was a moderately intelligent slacker student who didn’t kick it into gear until college. For some dumb reason I hated being required to take classes but then thrived when I got to choose a major and pick what courses to take.
Part of my bias in some of the school choice / privatization discussion is the lack of emphasis given to extracurriculars and the need to lock phasers on “the 4 Rs.” If it hadn’t been for band, theatre, model UN, etc, I would have been absolutely miserable the entire time.
They tend to lean into those that can accommodate smaller groups like debate, cross country, etc. Which is fine. But not the same experience as something like marching band.
If the issue is size there are plenty of public schools that graduate less than a hundred students a year and also lack the amenities associated with larger schools.
This worked for me in k-12, and then worked even better in college. College professors were even more accommodating than high school. I could ask for a 2 or 3 day extension on a paper and they would give it, I didn't even have to give a reason. If I needed a reason, I could just say "i'm going through some stuff right now" (which was true) and be in like Flynn.
It's just funny because every grade level threatens higher stakes and less leway as you move up k-12, but this never actually materializes.
I actually majored in engineering physics in college so I was in the school of engineering. The favored term for the arts and sciences college was "the school of arts and parties".
I got my degree in History. Frankly speaking, it was easy as shit. Then I would talk to a friend of mine in engineering and it's like he was taking classes on a different planet.
I never had an independent desire for good grades or to "excel" in school. The only times I really put in elbow grease was figuring out how to get the maximum grade for minimum effort. My school gave out laptops thinking it would change the game, I just got really good at alt-tabbing out of Medieval 2 total war. Cheesing grades was the only way I really felt "in control" of being in school. Otherwise I felt I had no agency and was effectively "forced" into a college track. I didn't have some innate desire to go to college, but my HS was so focused on getting everyone they could accepted into college that I knew no other way forward. So I went to college out of the fear of not going to college. Now I work a job that I definitely didn't need college for, and probably didn't even need high school for. But I have a piece of paper on my wall!
Yeah, that's the tragedy of the college for everyone bullshit. It would at least be harmless if the degree wasn't increasingly the requirement for a decent job.
A great essay dealing with your core wheelhouse. A few comments though.
1. Crude level eugenics for intelligence have been taking place for many decades now, when you look at the admittedly still-niche sperm/egg bank market. Donors who have advanced degrees are heavily favored, which shows that despite what the professional class publicly says about the lack of heritability of intelligence, they are unwilling to just let some rando's sperm impregnate them with the knowledge that their superior nurturing will even it all out.
2. While I don't think it has large-scale effects, I do still think that a comprehensive look at peer effects may be able to boost performance in lower-performing groups. There's been ample studies suggesting, for example, if inner-city youth are found in low frequencies in a "high-performing" school, they tend to adapt to peer norms involving study, though if it gets past a certain level they become ghettoized within the school district and there's essentially no improvement. It seems to suggest that some level of comprehensive "bussing" actually would be most likely to have positive impacts, provided students could be spread far and wide enough.
3. While maybe not the case for something like Candy Crush (which always struck me as more of an old person game) in general I think the wide popularity of computer and video games showcases there is a lot of unmet need for cognitive stimulation - that people are capable of a lot more than what life throws at them. I say this because games are, while fun, also mental work. Ultimately games are a form of organized problem solving, with logical puzzles that need to be teased out, and provide you with semi-concrete "rewards" as you progress.
You completely miss the elephant in the room. We sort kids by IQ, then we put the highest IQs together in coed for 4-6 years during their prime mating age. Since IQ is highly heritable (up to 80% of the variance at a later age) and we highly reward IQ with high incomes, we are breeding a high IQ group in society. This is definition of a eugenics policy and much more effective than sperm banks.
Yes, assortative mating has become much stronger in recent generations, as educated men stopped the practice of "trophy wives" and instead sought women with similar educational background as themselves. However, considering how low the total fertility rate is for women with graduate degrees, I'm not sure the practice as a whole could be defined as eugenic in nature.
We don't reward high IQ. Interestingly, mensa members aren't typically high earners.
Instead, as Paul Graham writes (PaulGraham.com) capitalism rewards smart people who get things done. A significant number of the top managers at the high tech companies don't have college degrees.
True, there is a change going on. Men are highly discriminated against in the educational system. Feminisation, and in its wake the racial animus, also demanded a large number of unscientific studies further devalued by significant grade inflation. So it is true you find more and more smart men that justly avoid college and I think this will only increase. If you dive into the details then the way today's young men are treated by an almost completely feminised education system is beyond the pale. If there was a patriarchy, it would be up in arms.
Mensa members are not typical people, anybody interested in that is always a bit scary. High IQ is however, strongly related to high SES.
That said, the system could work its eugenics during the second half of the 20th century. Once you see the mechanism, it is hard not to see how we have created a new heritable aristocracy based on IQ. My only hope is actually on those smart men that avoid college.
It's pretty clear that every point your IQ rises up to about 125 matters in terms of earnings, but it's not really clear that's the case beyond that.
Basically having an IQ in the top 10% is predictive of being wealthy, but there's no solid association that having in IQ in the top 3% means you'll end up even wealthier.
Admittedly part of this may just come down to a lot of people at the extreme right end of the bell curve just not being particularly interested in accumulating wealth, instead prioritizing other concerns.
"Admittedly part of this may just come down to a lot of people at the extreme right end of the bell curve just not being particularly interested in accumulating wealth, instead prioritizing other concerns."
And thank God for that! I WANT those people to make groundbreaking advances in human knowledge rather than simply concerning themselves with personal enrichment.
Freddie, I love this article, but I have two objections, one major and one minor. The minor one is that I wince every time you use the phrase 'learning styles.' Although in plain English learning styles means something that exists, that each student approaches things in a distinct if not unique fashion, in teacher cant learning styles are a thoroughly debunked theory that normal everyday people bring up all the time. So I just want to lay out to the commentariat, unrelated to your thesis, that things like 'auditory learner' and 'kinesthetic learner' are bullshit, plain and simple. More related to Freddie's argument, each subject does seem to have a 'best way' to teach it, regardless of learning styles. You simply cannot learn to become literate without guided reading and phonics, for example, nor can you learn to throw a football in a spiral or to perform a choreographed dance without literally doing it yourself. So while the idea of an approach that makes all students equal is Harrison Bergeron nonsense, the idea of an ideal way of teaching any given subject isn't.
More significantly, I think your talk of school quality being bunk is pretty arguable. Certainly current ideas about what a good school is, based on how many kids they send to Harvard or whatever, turn out to be pretty wrong when you adjust for student background, wealth, the selectiveness of the school, etc. However, that's not really an indictment of the idea so much as our practice of the idea. I recognize that this sounds a lot like saying 'true Communism has never been attempted' but certainly quality teachers exist, and there is a difference between a skilled and unskilled educator. These differences can be tricky to notice in the moment, and unfortunately don't map to how trained they are because so much of pedagogy as a science is bullshit, but they exist. Even if you dismiss 'great' teachers as hype, pretty much everyone can look back on at least one teacher and say 'wow, that lady SUCKED' so some qualitative difference must exist. A whole school of teachers that don't suck is obviously going to be of higher quality than one where that is not the case, all things being equal.
Oddly, my own two objections here are about to conflict, because one of the things I think makes a teacher quality is differentiation. Gaps can absolutely be closed when you start teaching a student correctly for them, meeting their needs; this correction isn't catering to their learning style so much as knowing they've got a disorder or disability like Dyslexia and accounting for it, though. The problem is that while poverty and racism can certainly be approached in terms of public health with some success, an individual teacher simply can't differentiate for those things. So AS A SOLUTION TO RACISM I really don't think better ed policy is a banger.
I mean, look at the merit pay literature - teachers would rather the best one year, the worst the next; they'd be the best for their first period class, the worst for the third; etc.
Sure but that could very easily be an indictment of how we measure skill as a teacher (which is immediate, often measured DURING the school year, as opposed to looking at outcomes in the next year).
I've taught students who were taught by people who, for one reason or another, served them poorly. I've also taught students who got good foundations from the person the year earlier. The difference is certainly measurable; one group knew what a metaphor was and the other group didn't. That specific example isn't perfect since by the time I was done with them they all knew what a metaphor was, so yes it all came out in the wash, but there are a lot of places where the next guy wouldn't teach them either, or the next guy, etc. And especially with early literacy and grammar, there comes a point where schoolteachers aren't telling kids how to identify run-on sentences or whatever anymore, there's no phonics education, they're focused on other things. The kids who didn't get it earlier now have to get it independently or not at all.
I'm not denying that the 'teacher of the year' measurements are all bunk. It just doesn't necessarily follow that there isn't an actual teacher of the year, though, only our metrics for identifying them are hot garbage.
No way, dude. Look at all the kids who are illiterate because they were taught wrong, according to a bad educational model. Look at the genuine advancements in educational outcomes (not equity) since the 1960s. Look at the wide range of outcomes for homeschooled kids, from truly outstanding to nightmarishly poor. It's very clear that teaching has a measurable, obvious impact.
I dunno, it depends on why. I had a teacher who, when she was done teaching an Algebraic formula, would ask 'any questions?' to the room. If you had a question, she would say 'you should have been paying attention" and refuse to explain. I am confident that this is a worthwhile criticism of her teaching. I worked with a man who called the kids 'little shits' in the teacher's lounge, complained bitterly about how they just wouldn't listen to his lessons, and who completely failed to actually get any buy-in from a pretty garden-variety group of middle schoolers, difficulty wise. I'm confident he was bad at his job, and the kids who will remember him as their worst teacher ever are pretty likely to be right.
"You simply cannot learn to become literate without guided reading and phonics"
Yes, you can. Most kids will learn to read regardless of method. However, kids who *can't* manage on their own need phonics.
"More related to Freddie's argument, each subject does seem to have a 'best way' to teach it, regardless of learning styles. "
Not true. Also, while I agree that 'learning styles' have no support, there's likewise zero support that using learning styles worsens results, so people should stop obsessing about correcting people who mention learning styles.
"Gaps can absolutely be closed when you start teaching a student correctly for them, meeting their needs;"
No, they can't. There is literally nothing that has closed the racial category gaps.
Also, while people undoubtedly think that some teachers SUCK and others are GREAT you'll quickly find that a) people don't agree on which ones sucked and which ones were great, and b) the outcomes weren't, as a rule, all that different.
It is potentially true, I think, that certain teacher methods are best for certain student groups, but there's no research done on what those methods are because it would require acknowledging that low IQ students might do better with different methods than high or medium IQ students.
Most kids, historically, have failed to become literate. So that's obviously not true. If you don't actually do reading you will fail to learn to read, inevitably.
Also there are multiple small studies that suggest that learning styles lead to worse outcomes, although they don't have statistically significant results. That said, people believing in, spending money and time on, and proselytizing about nonsense that does not work is always harmful in and of itself. Waste is harm.
As far as gaps go, I didn't say that RACIAL gaps were closed. If you read more carefully you'd notice I was talking about learning disabilities. Also it's very very easy to close racial gaps; just teach the black kids and don't teach the white kids. Works perfectly.
Most kids historically, were not exposed to the written word. I agree that's requiredl.
"Also there are multiple small studies that suggest that learning styles lead to worse outcomes, although they don't have statistically significant results."
Which contradicts my comment not at all.
"As far as gaps go, I didn't say that RACIAL gaps were closed. ""
That is literally the only gap that education policy is concerned with, so apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Education is a field that seems especially susceptible to confusing the tools with the task.
I was at ComicCon years ago, attending the annual Jack Kirby Memorial Panel. John Romita was a member that year, and he told a story about the first time he met Kirby. Romita was just starting out, and Kirby was already a legend. Romita didn't know what to say to this giant, but he thought, "I'm an artist too - I can talk shop a little." So he asked Kirby, who was famous for his beautiful, intricate pencil drawings, what kind of pencil he used, thinking that the King would say some imported pencil made from rare Italian hardwood that cost fifty dollars a box or something like that. Kirby looked blank for a second, and then pulled a yellow pencil out of his pocket, the kind you can buy in any drugstore. "A number two," he said. Kirby saw that this was not the kind of answer Romita was expecting. And then, Romita said, Kirby said something that "changed my life as an artist."
"John," he said, "you don't draw with a pencil."
I think about that story every time I sit in a curriculum meeting, or have to give my two cents about whether my school needs to buy the newest education tech or toy. The tools are important, but nowhere nearly as much as the student and the teacher - but every classroom already has those. The other stuff can be sold to you, whether it's any good or not.
Freddie: You say that if a new educational technique is introduced, the gap remains as everyone improves by the same amount. This is normally not true in any area of human endeavour. The first tranche of improvement generally comes easier than later ones. If a new educational method is introduced, some of the less able might improve considerably. The smarter ones may not. How much smarter can anyone get? Take physical abilities. Someone who has never run before can improve greatly. Another who can run a four minute mile cannot improve but by tiny increments.
And what's the reductio for that process. Let's say you're right and there are replicable processes that improve only people on the bottom and not ahead on the top. What is the long run effect of that process?
This mainly matters if the benefits of improvements increase at the same rate as the improvement itself. But for most things we care about that isn't true. No one cares if someone with a 15s 100m improves by 10%. But a 5% improvement of a sub 10s 100m takes you from decent to being world famous.
The same is true with academic abilities. Make an average kid a bit smarter and who cares. Take an already very smart kid and make them smarter and you might have a real effect on the future of humanity.
"And my position has always been that, instead of continuing to try to force square pegs into round holes, we should expand our definition of human value and shape the kind of society where everyone is given an opportunity to flourish according to their strengths."
Really channeling _The Bell Curve_ and Murray here.
I can almost picture an alternate reality where Murray was just a little more careful in his phrasing, and overzealous journalists and academics were just a bit less reactive in their reading.
It would be a better reality for sure.
Nope.
This article is why I subscribe to this Substack. Really really smart guy talking about a complicated topic in a really really smart way.
"...the New Yorker profile compares the notion of Duolingo teaching poor people in Guatemala to the distribution of free tablets as an educational venture and calls the results of such efforts 'mixed.'"
Anybody else remember the OLPC fiasco?
The hype around it was insane, to the point of hysteria. Kind of like bitcoin. And now we have AI.
I am sure that someone did very well out of that fiasco. They just didn't try hard enough, a few hundred million in funding for a few more years and we'd have had the problem licked!
"I was *this close*!"
Hey, I live in "he [sic] Ozarks" . . . and it is nothing like described as some sort of educational wasteland. While the Ozarks may be largely white, the residents and public school graduates are not cretin banjo pickers. Maybe the author is thinking of Appalachia or has been watching the Justin Bateman series "Ozark" as a documentary. But I do not think he, blessed and wise as he is in ever so many ways, has a clue about "he Ozarks."
Would you believe that there is in fact such a thing as regional educational data that's collected about regions
Oh, yes, I understand and believe that . . . but The Ozarks encompasses a big area. So I would want to know what exactly was defined as "The Ozarks" for such study. I expect there might be some insulated communities in a narrow band of "The Ozarks" where it might be true . . . but that is painting with really broad brush "The Ozarks" which encompasses "a significant portion of northern Arkansas and most of the southern half of Missouri, extending from Interstate 40 in central Arkansas to Interstate 70 in central Missouri." And I can tell you from experience as a rural public school graduate, public school teacher (SW MO high school and regional state college) that public education in most of the area is quite good.
I'm sure it is! And there's a lot of students who do great in Detroit too. The point is that there are concentrations of poor performance.
Well, if I were not so educationally limited by living in the Ozarks and if I were not so lazy, I would research the exact geographical region from which the educational research data was collected. But I think "Detroit" is a pretty clearly delimited location, while "The Ozarks" includes large sections of Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. Pretty fuzzy geographics on which to base generalizations.
I'm guessing the data Freddie is referencing is not very indicative of, say, a city like Springfield. Perhaps the dataset covers rural areas only, who knows. But I'm not sure him just relaying a general data point was some kind of 'dis' to the Ozarks like they are all Lothar of the Hill People.
I'm not exactly from there (KC), but spent a good chunk of my youth traipsing around various Twain forests and rivers. Even have a few very fond early memories of float trips down the Current and Eleven Point...such a beautiful pristine area.
But I would have to say that, even in my youth, I certainly noticed the difference in economics the further off the beaten path we went to into south/southeast Missourah. Economics is not exactly directly correlated to education of course, but I would say it's a decent indicator. I mean, what would a tiny town like Eminence be like without the canoe tourists? How good could the grade schools be when the local rural economy is so rough?
Generally, poor whites do better than non-poor blacks. I haven't looked specifically at the Ozarks (and NAEP doesn't work as a comparison). Be interesting to see if that stat holds.
Let it go ... people in urban areas have a great need to look down their noses at their country cousins.
And plenty of those country cousins certainly make their judgements about those city slickers.
Funny story. A recent immigrant, a queen mrowka (Polish for "ant") moved to the US, and someone told her about how incredible the public schools were - in Mississippi.
"I gotta move the ant colony to Mississippi so my little mrowka offspring can take advantage of these amazing Mississippi public schools!" the queen said.
"Um, you might want to slow your roll, there, little ant. We can argue later about the methodology of 'No Larva Left Behind' and all, but when the Mississippi schools score 49, 50 or 51 out of all 50 states and the District of Colombia, in every subject, every year from kindergarten through twelfth grade, then you're probably doing something wrong."
Not to mention that the person who praised the Mississippi public schools was demonstrably insane.
One of the worst possible things you can do if looking to relocate somewhere is ask a random assortment of people from across the country where has "good schools."
Locally speaking to their area, they might be able to report where the "best schools" are (in the completely false sense most people understand them) but they're not going to have one whit of idea when comparing different states or metro areas.
I am pretty sure it would basically be the same article, but would love to see you tackle the “science of reading” drama.
Based on this analysis, I have to wonder about the school choice movement. Do charter schools really “do school better” than traditional schools in any substantive way, or do they mainly provide a refuge for students and parents with similar educational goals?
The latter I suspect. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the primary drivers behind the school choice movement is inner city parents in districts where the locals schools are disasters.
Which I think supports my current opinion that the the best use of tax money for school choice to address the needs of urban school children is not privatized charter schools or private school vouchers but magnet schools.
What's the difference? At the end of the day you're segregating everyone that cares about education from everyone that doesn't. And private schools typically cost less.
Accountability and stewardship of public resources. Also, with regard to vouchers, most of what I’ve seen indicates that these are basically tax refunds for people already using private schools. They rarely are enough to pay the cost for private schools, so are not effective for helping lower income parents escape from bad local schools.
If the concern is for the tax payer why divert funds to a public school system where janitors can earn six figures? Not all private schools exist to serve the wealthy and there are plenty of examples where private alternatives exist with the specific purpose of serving impoverished communities. If they can do it cheaper than the public sector that is by definition good stewardship of public resources.
You still need a public school system for those kids that are not a good match for the private schools, whether because of special needs, ideological differences, or whatever. A magnet school set up can serve as part of an overall functional system. If you cut off the strong performing students and funding, I am skeptical that a functioning public school system can survive. Which of course is what some - not all - privatization advocates want.
"Not all private schools exist to serve the wealthy"
Well, charters pretty much killed the private schools that didn't exist to serve the wealthy.
And private schools can't do it cheaper than the public sector. The only people who think so are utterly clueless at the massive federal and state spending required for the kids that private schools and charters can reject.
Magnet schools don't divert public money into private or quasi-private entities. They also allow for different educational focuses, which can tailor themselves to the interest of the families, or later, the students (language immersion, arts focus, STEM-focus, etc.)
You can also have them either set up via lottery or test. Elite test-based magnets are high-performing due to selection bias, but I still feel like they perform an important role in big urban districts like NYC, keeping parents of high-performing students within city limits and within the school district.
From the perspective of somebody who's just trying to maximize the bang for the tax payer's buck I don't see the problem with contracting this out to the private sector.
Even if you don't hold the idea of public schools in high regard, the issue with just vouchering everyone who wants out is the selection bias will make the residual population in the public schools look worse, leading to a "doom spiral" whereby it becomes impossible to rehabilitate the reputation of the public school system.
Better to just set up the educational alternatives within the structure that already exists.
Given what we’ve seen happen with privatized prisons and migrant detention centers, I’m skeptical of forming another public fund teat for private companies to suckle at.
Actually, the elite test-based magnets are not the choice of all parents. They're primarily the choice of Asian immigrant parents, so it's kind of an open question why taxpayer dollars should be spent keeping them within city limits and within the school district.
Well, it's not an open question. It's done by state mandate. It's an open question whether NYC voters would support the funds spent.
Magnet schools are charter schools. They are functionally private schools paid for by public dollars.
They’re operated by the school district and subject to the same regulations as other public schools. How are they functionally private?
You don't have a right to attend a magnet school.
You don’t have a right to attend a high school in your district you’re not zoned for. It’s still a public school.
But when you say "local schools are disasters" you are buying into the same misconceptions that Freddie describes. Local schools are "disasters" because they have a huge number of low skilled kids, a large number of whom are not engaged or particularly interested in playing the school game. Kids aren't "stuck" in "failing schools". They are, in fact, the material that makes the schools be considered a failure. Most of the kids who go off to charter schools and "improve" do so not by leaps and bounds but, when comparing like to like, are "significant' if you squint. Any really poor extremely bright black or Hispanic kid has a lot of private options and doesn't need charters. So most of the kids in those inner city charters are basically average kids whose parents want them to have a larger collection of acceptable peers. This is understandable. All of school selection for parents is about peer set. But the "failing school" has the acceptable peers. It just also has a bunch of loud, unengaged, often hard to discipline kids that can't be kicked out.
Charters aren't solving that problem.
The choice movement intended to start with the low hanging fruit and then move onto the suburbs, but that never worked out. And charters are unlikely to co-exist with vouchers.
I suspect without firm evidence that charter schools represent a self-selecting sample.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/charter-school-lotteries-are-a-black
So you're saying that it's more cherry picking than a self-selecting sample? Or both?
There was a recent story on Philadelphia where a successful charter was quite literally cherry picking students, especially from white/Asian neighborhoods.
I'm saying that the mechanisms through which charter schools select students are completely opaque and that this is no coincidence.
Adjusting for SES, Charters do no better than public schools, suburban schools do no better than urban schools, and elite test-based magnets do no better than neighborhood schools.
There is really no evidence that "school quality" exists, except perhaps at the extreme low end (like how the pandemic resulted in learning losses for all children, since everyone was relegated to extremely ineffective online schooling).
For what must seem like just repeatedly banging your head against the wall, rest assured that there are those of us out there who greatly appreciate it.
It remains remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, the degree to which Seymour Papert, the first researcher to use the computer as a pedagogical tool, foresaw the limitations that the hype-driven press blunders into again and again every few years.
"Technocentrism refers to the tendency to give a [centrality] to a technical object -- for example computers or LOGO. This tendency shows up in questions like "what is the effect of the computer on cognitive development?" or "does LOGO work?" ... Such turns of phrase often betray a tendency to think of "computers" and of "LOGO" as agents that act directly on thinking and learning; they betray a tendency to reduce what are really the most important components of educational situations -- people and cultures -- to a secondary, facilitating role.
The context for human development is always a culture, never an isolated technology. In the presence of computers, cultures might change and with them people's ways of learning and thinking. But if you want to understand (or influence) the change, you have to center your attention on the culture -- not on the computer."
Papert, "Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking"
https://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Papert,%20technocentric%20thinking.pdf
Clifford Stoll got ripped to pieces after he published "Silicon Snake Oil," and rereading it nearly three decades after publication he certainly did get some things embarrassingly wrong - but he got a whole lot more right. Technocentrism is a beguiling illusion, which everyone periodically loves to embrace.
Bullet point 1 "There is no “educational crisis” in the United States." - I've often wondered about that.
I've been paying a little bit of attention to 'education' since about the early 90s (not an expert by any means, just noticing trends), and it has always seemed like it is true that on average, our kids are educated well enough, but we have some pockets of really poorly performing students that make everything look worse than it is.
Can we 'fix' education if we accept this reality?
Or is it still hopeless?
The available options are
1. Object to the very concept of a distribution of performance, which means there's no excellence and which frankly just gives us no achievable goal.
2. Try to engineer a given distribution - like proportional racial or gender representation. Which, even if you achieved, wouldn't change the fact that there would still be a bottom of the distribution and a bunch of social consequences for those who are there.
If the concern is the size of the disparity between the worst performing students versus the median then I wonder if the issue isn't really poverty, cultural dysfunction, etc. rather than the educational system itself.
I think that's where I'm headed.
Are we asking too much of the education system?
Can education really lift people out of poverty, or do people have to be lifted out of poverty first, before they can get educated?
Yeah, at this point I think the right thing for society to do as a whole is step back and question if the current approach to fighting poverty is really doing anything.
We certainly have anecdotal examples of people educating themselves out of poverty. But that still seems to me to be situations where for whatever reason, the impoverished person already recognized the opportunity and took advantage of it. Maybe I’m wrong but this idea of teachers being able to inspire kids out of a mindset that is indifferent or even hostile mindset towards school seems mostly to be a romantic myth.
There will always be brilliant kids born to not-so-smart parents, and vice versa. It's just the luck of the draw when it comes to gene-environment interactions.
I think we can lift occasional, exceptional people out of poverty, but in aggregate we need to address these poor pockets of the country and figure out how to help people live worthwhile lives there. The current *best case* scenario in a poor Appalachian town with an abandoned coal mine in it is that some smart kid becomes a tech wizard, moves to Silicon Valley, and is never heard from again. That's great for him, but what about the rest of the town? How can we set some of these kids up to succeed in Appalachia (or Detroit, etc), building up local businesses and institutions and connections? I refuse to accept that the best answer is "they should all move to the city except for a couple lumberjacks and backpacking guides." But I'll be darned if I know what it is.
Instead of investing in education in hopes it will increase class mobility for low-income people like 20 years from now, I think it's far more efficient to just give money directly to low-income people. The parents will be less poor, and there's actually been studies finding that cash payments to parents boost child performance.
Not to mention things like genuine lead remediation in contaminated areas would net huge positive effects. it would be expensive, but it's something that's been essentially proven to work - it has already resulted in increases in test scores that are measurable and systematic in counties where remediation has taken place.
Would someone please point me to sources that back up the claim that "only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers"? I had a few years ago, but for the life of me, I can't locate them now, and searching for them on Google and ERIC yields nothing but "of all school factors, teacher and curriculum quality have the greatest impact on student achievement." The impact of factors outside school receives no attention.
Well, there's the article itself. But there's also my linked post where I include I think like 50 citations to the effect that student outcomes are static across multiple and major intervention. And your last sentence is true; you just have to reflect on why it's true.
When I raised the point that schools and teachers account for roughly 10% to 15% of student academic achievement in a study group at my neighborhood high school, my colleagues chuckled and said they'd like to see the research making that claim. I assumed they understood why our union, the CTU, routinely emphasizes community investment in childcare, jobs programs, and housing, all of which they completely support.
The academic intervention we're currently pursuing at my neighborhood high school is Anti-Racism. We're reading and discussing Glenn Singleton's Courageous Conversations about Race, and like corporate education reformers, Singleton quickly places external factors out of bounds. He argues that blaming "social, economic, or political factors external to the school and unrelated to the quality of curriculum and instruction . . . [are] insufficient at best and destructive at worst when trying to address racial achievement disparities" (15). Being against racism is good in and of itself, but arguing that being against racism in the schools, while ignoring all external factors, will close the achievement gap between black and white students is a fool's errand.
I don't think the average person knows the degree to which educators have internalized the assumptions and logic of education reform movements. They're dug in.
Hell yes. To each their own (I don’t care about Beri Weiss), but this is the good shit & why I pay for the Substack. I live in the ed world & it is great getting a contrary, yet not contrarian, pov.
It speaks so well to Freddie’s piece that there are things I adamantly disagree with (“If the goal is for most everyone to gradually get smarter over time, congratulations, that’s been happening for at least a century and is almost certainly because of better living conditions and the endowments of modernity rather than pedagogical improvements” - come on, man. Hattie! Pedagogy has increased by leaps and bounds from rote memorization of the Gettysburg Address in a one room school house) but that is to cavil over what is a terrific piece. There is a lot here that would get someone immediately disqualified were they to articulate it in an interview, yet which is quietly agreed upon behind closed doors. I salute you, DeBoer.
*yawn* Humans are endlessly bouncing from nostrum to nostrum in an effort to Fix Our Failing Schools. We Need High Tech Solutions, then its We Need To Go Back To Basics, sometimes it's Good Old Fashioned Discipline, other times if's a more hippyish approach, then its School Uniforms or Charter Schools or some other attempt at a magic bullet. The minds of educational consultants and academics are endlessly fertile and creative, as shown by the studies that they crank out.
None of it ever works. Or rather, some of it always works, mostly it works when applied to the same set of people. And I'm not necessarily referring to tenure prospects or the consultants' bank accounts.
Fact is, nobody ever really teaches a human kitten anything. Rather, the most that can be done is to put the kitten in a position where they can learn, that is, teach themselves from the environment, situation and materials made available. (This is sort of how I learned to catch fill-grown rats, which many cats will not mess with, but I was hungry.)
With that in mind, the most successful students are the ones who are motivated. They will learn in any environment, they will jump through whatever hoops are put in front of them. This, of course begs the question of how one motivates a human kitten. More often than not, the answer to that question is "because that kid has parents that ride him every day like Momsie was determined to win the Preakness on his back."
In my case, I was hungry. The problem in the case of human attitudes is that: 1. it can't be fixed by some nostrum; 2. it takes work; and 3. the work is in the attitude of the parents and is unremunerated. This is very different to paying some coordinator or other jobsworth.
Speaking as a highly intelligent but a slacker student, I disagree. I didn't learn because I wanted to, I learn because it's relatively easy for me. As an adult I've changed course but as a kid I really didn't care, I just listened and took in information, no extra work needed.
That worked for me all through public school. Then I got to college. I studied for my final in freshman anthropology 20 minutes before the final and I aced the exam.
Unfortunately my major was physics. There's just no comparison.
Yeah I didn't take any hard sciences in college as a political science major so I was able to skate by on my usual low effort. The working world has been different than school though.
I was a moderately intelligent slacker student who didn’t kick it into gear until college. For some dumb reason I hated being required to take classes but then thrived when I got to choose a major and pick what courses to take.
Part of my bias in some of the school choice / privatization discussion is the lack of emphasis given to extracurriculars and the need to lock phasers on “the 4 Rs.” If it hadn’t been for band, theatre, model UN, etc, I would have been absolutely miserable the entire time.
I am pretty sure private school students get the same range of extracurricular activities.
They tend to lean into those that can accommodate smaller groups like debate, cross country, etc. Which is fine. But not the same experience as something like marching band.
If the issue is size there are plenty of public schools that graduate less than a hundred students a year and also lack the amenities associated with larger schools.
This worked for me in k-12, and then worked even better in college. College professors were even more accommodating than high school. I could ask for a 2 or 3 day extension on a paper and they would give it, I didn't even have to give a reason. If I needed a reason, I could just say "i'm going through some stuff right now" (which was true) and be in like Flynn.
It's just funny because every grade level threatens higher stakes and less leway as you move up k-12, but this never actually materializes.
I actually majored in engineering physics in college so I was in the school of engineering. The favored term for the arts and sciences college was "the school of arts and parties".
Some subjects are just harder than others.
I got my degree in History. Frankly speaking, it was easy as shit. Then I would talk to a friend of mine in engineering and it's like he was taking classes on a different planet.
I never had an independent desire for good grades or to "excel" in school. The only times I really put in elbow grease was figuring out how to get the maximum grade for minimum effort. My school gave out laptops thinking it would change the game, I just got really good at alt-tabbing out of Medieval 2 total war. Cheesing grades was the only way I really felt "in control" of being in school. Otherwise I felt I had no agency and was effectively "forced" into a college track. I didn't have some innate desire to go to college, but my HS was so focused on getting everyone they could accepted into college that I knew no other way forward. So I went to college out of the fear of not going to college. Now I work a job that I definitely didn't need college for, and probably didn't even need high school for. But I have a piece of paper on my wall!
Yeah, that's the tragedy of the college for everyone bullshit. It would at least be harmless if the degree wasn't increasingly the requirement for a decent job.
Some cats and also humans are like that. Some will learn because it's easy and/or fun.
But we're talking masses of humans here.
A great essay dealing with your core wheelhouse. A few comments though.
1. Crude level eugenics for intelligence have been taking place for many decades now, when you look at the admittedly still-niche sperm/egg bank market. Donors who have advanced degrees are heavily favored, which shows that despite what the professional class publicly says about the lack of heritability of intelligence, they are unwilling to just let some rando's sperm impregnate them with the knowledge that their superior nurturing will even it all out.
2. While I don't think it has large-scale effects, I do still think that a comprehensive look at peer effects may be able to boost performance in lower-performing groups. There's been ample studies suggesting, for example, if inner-city youth are found in low frequencies in a "high-performing" school, they tend to adapt to peer norms involving study, though if it gets past a certain level they become ghettoized within the school district and there's essentially no improvement. It seems to suggest that some level of comprehensive "bussing" actually would be most likely to have positive impacts, provided students could be spread far and wide enough.
3. While maybe not the case for something like Candy Crush (which always struck me as more of an old person game) in general I think the wide popularity of computer and video games showcases there is a lot of unmet need for cognitive stimulation - that people are capable of a lot more than what life throws at them. I say this because games are, while fun, also mental work. Ultimately games are a form of organized problem solving, with logical puzzles that need to be teased out, and provide you with semi-concrete "rewards" as you progress.
You completely miss the elephant in the room. We sort kids by IQ, then we put the highest IQs together in coed for 4-6 years during their prime mating age. Since IQ is highly heritable (up to 80% of the variance at a later age) and we highly reward IQ with high incomes, we are breeding a high IQ group in society. This is definition of a eugenics policy and much more effective than sperm banks.
Yes, assortative mating has become much stronger in recent generations, as educated men stopped the practice of "trophy wives" and instead sought women with similar educational background as themselves. However, considering how low the total fertility rate is for women with graduate degrees, I'm not sure the practice as a whole could be defined as eugenic in nature.
We don't reward high IQ. Interestingly, mensa members aren't typically high earners.
Instead, as Paul Graham writes (PaulGraham.com) capitalism rewards smart people who get things done. A significant number of the top managers at the high tech companies don't have college degrees.
True, there is a change going on. Men are highly discriminated against in the educational system. Feminisation, and in its wake the racial animus, also demanded a large number of unscientific studies further devalued by significant grade inflation. So it is true you find more and more smart men that justly avoid college and I think this will only increase. If you dive into the details then the way today's young men are treated by an almost completely feminised education system is beyond the pale. If there was a patriarchy, it would be up in arms.
Mensa members are not typical people, anybody interested in that is always a bit scary. High IQ is however, strongly related to high SES.
That said, the system could work its eugenics during the second half of the 20th century. Once you see the mechanism, it is hard not to see how we have created a new heritable aristocracy based on IQ. My only hope is actually on those smart men that avoid college.
"Men are highly discriminated against in the educational system"
This is nonsense.
“ We don't reward high IQ. ”
There are just as many folks earning $100k year with IQs below 100 as above 100?
It's pretty clear that every point your IQ rises up to about 125 matters in terms of earnings, but it's not really clear that's the case beyond that.
Basically having an IQ in the top 10% is predictive of being wealthy, but there's no solid association that having in IQ in the top 3% means you'll end up even wealthier.
Admittedly part of this may just come down to a lot of people at the extreme right end of the bell curve just not being particularly interested in accumulating wealth, instead prioritizing other concerns.
"Admittedly part of this may just come down to a lot of people at the extreme right end of the bell curve just not being particularly interested in accumulating wealth, instead prioritizing other concerns."
And thank God for that! I WANT those people to make groundbreaking advances in human knowledge rather than simply concerning themselves with personal enrichment.
Freddie, I love this article, but I have two objections, one major and one minor. The minor one is that I wince every time you use the phrase 'learning styles.' Although in plain English learning styles means something that exists, that each student approaches things in a distinct if not unique fashion, in teacher cant learning styles are a thoroughly debunked theory that normal everyday people bring up all the time. So I just want to lay out to the commentariat, unrelated to your thesis, that things like 'auditory learner' and 'kinesthetic learner' are bullshit, plain and simple. More related to Freddie's argument, each subject does seem to have a 'best way' to teach it, regardless of learning styles. You simply cannot learn to become literate without guided reading and phonics, for example, nor can you learn to throw a football in a spiral or to perform a choreographed dance without literally doing it yourself. So while the idea of an approach that makes all students equal is Harrison Bergeron nonsense, the idea of an ideal way of teaching any given subject isn't.
More significantly, I think your talk of school quality being bunk is pretty arguable. Certainly current ideas about what a good school is, based on how many kids they send to Harvard or whatever, turn out to be pretty wrong when you adjust for student background, wealth, the selectiveness of the school, etc. However, that's not really an indictment of the idea so much as our practice of the idea. I recognize that this sounds a lot like saying 'true Communism has never been attempted' but certainly quality teachers exist, and there is a difference between a skilled and unskilled educator. These differences can be tricky to notice in the moment, and unfortunately don't map to how trained they are because so much of pedagogy as a science is bullshit, but they exist. Even if you dismiss 'great' teachers as hype, pretty much everyone can look back on at least one teacher and say 'wow, that lady SUCKED' so some qualitative difference must exist. A whole school of teachers that don't suck is obviously going to be of higher quality than one where that is not the case, all things being equal.
Oddly, my own two objections here are about to conflict, because one of the things I think makes a teacher quality is differentiation. Gaps can absolutely be closed when you start teaching a student correctly for them, meeting their needs; this correction isn't catering to their learning style so much as knowing they've got a disorder or disability like Dyslexia and accounting for it, though. The problem is that while poverty and racism can certainly be approached in terms of public health with some success, an individual teacher simply can't differentiate for those things. So AS A SOLUTION TO RACISM I really don't think better ed policy is a banger.
"pretty much everyone can look back on at least one teacher and say 'wow, that lady SUCKED' so some qualitative difference must exist"
This is certainly true, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it's essentially meaningless in terms of educational outcomes.
I mean, look at the merit pay literature - teachers would rather the best one year, the worst the next; they'd be the best for their first period class, the worst for the third; etc.
Sure but that could very easily be an indictment of how we measure skill as a teacher (which is immediate, often measured DURING the school year, as opposed to looking at outcomes in the next year).
I've taught students who were taught by people who, for one reason or another, served them poorly. I've also taught students who got good foundations from the person the year earlier. The difference is certainly measurable; one group knew what a metaphor was and the other group didn't. That specific example isn't perfect since by the time I was done with them they all knew what a metaphor was, so yes it all came out in the wash, but there are a lot of places where the next guy wouldn't teach them either, or the next guy, etc. And especially with early literacy and grammar, there comes a point where schoolteachers aren't telling kids how to identify run-on sentences or whatever anymore, there's no phonics education, they're focused on other things. The kids who didn't get it earlier now have to get it independently or not at all.
I'm not denying that the 'teacher of the year' measurements are all bunk. It just doesn't necessarily follow that there isn't an actual teacher of the year, though, only our metrics for identifying them are hot garbage.
No way, dude. Look at all the kids who are illiterate because they were taught wrong, according to a bad educational model. Look at the genuine advancements in educational outcomes (not equity) since the 1960s. Look at the wide range of outcomes for homeschooled kids, from truly outstanding to nightmarishly poor. It's very clear that teaching has a measurable, obvious impact.
Eh, I'm not saying teaching itself has no impact, I'm just saying that our personal impressions of which teachers sucked probably isn't worth much.
I dunno, it depends on why. I had a teacher who, when she was done teaching an Algebraic formula, would ask 'any questions?' to the room. If you had a question, she would say 'you should have been paying attention" and refuse to explain. I am confident that this is a worthwhile criticism of her teaching. I worked with a man who called the kids 'little shits' in the teacher's lounge, complained bitterly about how they just wouldn't listen to his lessons, and who completely failed to actually get any buy-in from a pretty garden-variety group of middle schoolers, difficulty wise. I'm confident he was bad at his job, and the kids who will remember him as their worst teacher ever are pretty likely to be right.
What is it with all these people and their feeeeeeelings about school?
"You simply cannot learn to become literate without guided reading and phonics"
Yes, you can. Most kids will learn to read regardless of method. However, kids who *can't* manage on their own need phonics.
"More related to Freddie's argument, each subject does seem to have a 'best way' to teach it, regardless of learning styles. "
Not true. Also, while I agree that 'learning styles' have no support, there's likewise zero support that using learning styles worsens results, so people should stop obsessing about correcting people who mention learning styles.
"Gaps can absolutely be closed when you start teaching a student correctly for them, meeting their needs;"
No, they can't. There is literally nothing that has closed the racial category gaps.
Also, while people undoubtedly think that some teachers SUCK and others are GREAT you'll quickly find that a) people don't agree on which ones sucked and which ones were great, and b) the outcomes weren't, as a rule, all that different.
It is potentially true, I think, that certain teacher methods are best for certain student groups, but there's no research done on what those methods are because it would require acknowledging that low IQ students might do better with different methods than high or medium IQ students.
Most kids, historically, have failed to become literate. So that's obviously not true. If you don't actually do reading you will fail to learn to read, inevitably.
Also there are multiple small studies that suggest that learning styles lead to worse outcomes, although they don't have statistically significant results. That said, people believing in, spending money and time on, and proselytizing about nonsense that does not work is always harmful in and of itself. Waste is harm.
As far as gaps go, I didn't say that RACIAL gaps were closed. If you read more carefully you'd notice I was talking about learning disabilities. Also it's very very easy to close racial gaps; just teach the black kids and don't teach the white kids. Works perfectly.
Most kids historically, were not exposed to the written word. I agree that's requiredl.
"Also there are multiple small studies that suggest that learning styles lead to worse outcomes, although they don't have statistically significant results."
Which contradicts my comment not at all.
"As far as gaps go, I didn't say that RACIAL gaps were closed. ""
That is literally the only gap that education policy is concerned with, so apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Education is a field that seems especially susceptible to confusing the tools with the task.
I was at ComicCon years ago, attending the annual Jack Kirby Memorial Panel. John Romita was a member that year, and he told a story about the first time he met Kirby. Romita was just starting out, and Kirby was already a legend. Romita didn't know what to say to this giant, but he thought, "I'm an artist too - I can talk shop a little." So he asked Kirby, who was famous for his beautiful, intricate pencil drawings, what kind of pencil he used, thinking that the King would say some imported pencil made from rare Italian hardwood that cost fifty dollars a box or something like that. Kirby looked blank for a second, and then pulled a yellow pencil out of his pocket, the kind you can buy in any drugstore. "A number two," he said. Kirby saw that this was not the kind of answer Romita was expecting. And then, Romita said, Kirby said something that "changed my life as an artist."
"John," he said, "you don't draw with a pencil."
I think about that story every time I sit in a curriculum meeting, or have to give my two cents about whether my school needs to buy the newest education tech or toy. The tools are important, but nowhere nearly as much as the student and the teacher - but every classroom already has those. The other stuff can be sold to you, whether it's any good or not.
Freddie: You say that if a new educational technique is introduced, the gap remains as everyone improves by the same amount. This is normally not true in any area of human endeavour. The first tranche of improvement generally comes easier than later ones. If a new educational method is introduced, some of the less able might improve considerably. The smarter ones may not. How much smarter can anyone get? Take physical abilities. Someone who has never run before can improve greatly. Another who can run a four minute mile cannot improve but by tiny increments.
And what's the reductio for that process. Let's say you're right and there are replicable processes that improve only people on the bottom and not ahead on the top. What is the long run effect of that process?
This mainly matters if the benefits of improvements increase at the same rate as the improvement itself. But for most things we care about that isn't true. No one cares if someone with a 15s 100m improves by 10%. But a 5% improvement of a sub 10s 100m takes you from decent to being world famous.
The same is true with academic abilities. Make an average kid a bit smarter and who cares. Take an already very smart kid and make them smarter and you might have a real effect on the future of humanity.