One thing I would add is that grit seems highly correlated with conscientiousness, one of the five personality factors. Conscientiousness is correlated with job performance and academic outcomes, but it's not as strong as IQ. Still, it's long been known that you can barely budge your personality, although conscientiousness slowly rises as one ages while openness to experience falls. It's not surprising then that "grit" is also hard to change, since it's mostly a personality trait.
This is a useful update to the original, which I also enjoyed! The data is not actually clear right now about teacher attrition in 2022, but it sure seems like a lot of my colleagues are leaving---25 out of 110 left at the end of this in my largeish urban public high school, and only 1 was a retirement. In a decade of teaching, I’ve never seen kids more burnt out on school as quickly as this group was. When we were mostly hybrid, they missed it, but the reality of it coming back was...mostly disappointing to them, and mostly disappointing to teachers? The insistence on how far behind we all were all the time was probably a big factor in this.
I’m confused by this. In the UK we don’t have Charter schools we have Free schools which I think are much the same thing. The only one I know much about is Michaela. It was a start up and in the beginning it stuuggled to get much buy in locally. It was in a deprived London neighbourhood. Selection was done by the local authority who allocated from the catchment area.
It has a reputation for being the strictest school in Britain. I think that is nonsense but there are rules like no talking as you move between classes, consequences for not bringing eg a pencil or for any minor misdemeanour.
The results are terrific and more than that the kids are properly socialised to function in the adult world. They make a strong point of tracing gratitude.
As I say the academic results are stellar with a lot of the children now getting offers from Cambridge and Oxford.
So my feeling is that kids from a poor part of London are getting into the UK’s top universities and getting life chances that simply weren’t there before. If I were a pupil there or a parent of a pupil there I’d consider that my education had ‘worked’.
This is slightly orthogonal, but I'm curious if anyone knows if certain school environments impact kid's personalities. Montessori education (to pick an example) seems appealing to me because it makes kids more independent, and makes school more enjoyable, not because I think it would make kids smarter.
Your take on the reigning shibboleths is quite apt and bracing.(Loved the book, btw.) As a longtime teacher I’ve seen the evidence on the ground. A bit about the variability of outcomes and the long term historical context would be a welcome addition. We’re still living with it. So how much difference does it make to have schools? Literacy was more common in the ancient world than most realize - graffiti in Pompei being a great bit of evidence - but the relative lack of compulsory ed. must have been a huge contributing factor in stunting the advance of civilization back then. What say you maestro? I always think of two great American autodidacts: A.Lincoln and Malcolm X. What do such outliers have to tell us about who has the biggest upside?
“I’ve said many times that I believe the racial achievement gap is likely the product of the profoundly different environments Black children live in on average, and these environmental changes are far more complex and multivariate than the SES differences that do not adequately explain the achievement gap.”
Why do you believe this about black kids as a population but not about underperforming kids as a population? If you’re screening out, for the most part, the things that people complain about when we talk about racial environment differences, like SES gaps, peers, class size, facilities, teacher quality, etc.— and I’ll throw another, racism-specific theory on the pile: stereotype threat, which seemed like a promising explanation but which has apparently not held up — if you’re saying all that stuff doesn’t matter, then… what does? Is it all just lead and low birth weights? Or if it’s all just “multi-variate” and “complex” — I mean, isn’t that always true of everybody’s environment?
I guess I don’t see why, if black kids and underperforming kids in general both have highly heritable performance lags, and the typical proffered explanations don’t pan out, but you think in the case of the racial gap it can be attributed to a multi-variate, complex set of as-yet-not-fully-understood environmental factors… why wouldn’t you think the same about the underperforming group as a whole?
(To use your jumping analogy — if you’re assuming that one group is stuck with as-yet-unseen weight belts and that’s why they don’t jump as high as everyone else, why don’t you assume that as-yet-unseen weight belts are the cause of ALL differences? It seems like the answer is that you think it’s obvious that there are fixed genetic differences in jumping ability. But isn’t that just assuming the thing we’re trying to prove?)
I agree strongly with this essay, based on my experiences growing up in a rural, working-class community, where I was one of the very few students whose parents had gone to college, let alone graduate school, and where only about a dozen students out of a graduating class of 650 went to selective colleges (more students went into the military than to college).
A significant problem with educational policy is that people who set the policies didn't attend public schools like mine. They tend to come from elite educational backgrounds and the professional managerial class, and very few of them have direct personal experience with people who are bad at and don't like school. So they think that all students will be like they were and will succeed at school, if we just have high expectations for kids and do this new and fashionable intervention (whatever it may be this time).
It doesn't work that way. I think we need a system like the have in Europe, and yes, I'm talking about tracking students into academic and vocational tracks. I'm old enough to have gone to school when tracking was still done, and it made a huge difference not just for me, but for students who struggled in school. Based on my experience, and pace claims from the experts that stronger students will buoy up the weaker ones by tutoring and challenging them, the weaker students didn't learn or enjoy the academic classes; instead they would pressure the stronger students to help them cheat, or would rely on the stronger students to do all the work in group projects. My high school allowed students to leave campus for classes at the local vocational school and to work at jobs, and the students who participated in these programs enjoyed them and got a lot more out of them than they did from the academic classes.
I believe that the most humane system allows every student to discover his or her interests and talents and receive an appropriate education for those interests and talents. I am grateful that this position has as eloquent and convincing an advocate as you, Freddie.
“ But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.”
While true, adding iodine to salt and removing lead from gasoline and paint did have a very significant impact. The next frontier might be vitamin D levels and their role in brain development.
"This is the prioritization of the relative over the absolute, and it is foundational to our education system and our labor market."
This, for me, is the crux of the issue. It doesn't matter if an individual gets a higher score on an IQ test compared to previous generations, what matters is where they place relative to their peers right now. Given two candidates for a high paying position in tech or finance who is going to get the job offer? The individual with an average IQ or the really bright one? Labor markets are competitive. In the end it doesn't matter how much an individual's educational attainment has improved if he is still relatively less qualified than the next guy in the interview.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sorting based on intellectual ability in the labor market. Who doesn't want a smarter doctor? But society goes off the rails when it sniffs in disdain at manual labor, dismissed it as "unworthy" and therefore implicitly condones condemning an entire segment of the population to a lifetime of drastically lower wages.
To be clear I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with physicians making more than fast food workers but there are extremes. When we talk about a country where the federal government pumps billions of dollars into higher education while leaving vocational and technical schools to starve we are talking about a country where the class of the college educated has seized the reins of power and are busily engaged in securing their economic advantage. Consider this: workers without a college degree live shorter lies and earn far less than the college educated. Why should they be the ones on the hook for forgiving college tuition debt?
The real kicker on this is how every improvement in our society - better goods, fairer cops, more accurate news story - rests on absolute improvements in the cognition of the people doing those tasks. So long as we allow a gradation of quality of widget makers, there will be better made widgets and worse made widgets.
And smarter people will figure out how to get in line for better made widgets.
One thing I’m also very interested in is how well early scores (e.g., kindergarten) predict adult scores and/or success. what’s the R-squared on that correlation? You show the correlation before and after college but that’s a fairly short time period and its from a sample of highly tested people (i.e., people who go to college) and people who have been selected for a lot of treatment. By then, I would expect a tighter correlation. Have you read anything you view as credible that gets at that? Thank you and really enjoy your newsletter.
Thank You for all the research, M. deBoer. Phenomenal. TYTY.
I wonder if the environmental differences that have the most impact are possibly found in the very first years. Then show up in K. Lack of benefit of Pre-K doesn't *necessarily* rule that out.
I also wonder if anyone knows whether curiosity can be taught. I've never heard-a it, but don't know much about the subject, so there is that.
Common sense/wisdom can't be taught but it can be gutted out of individuals; as seen by the US education system.
Love this!
One thing I would add is that grit seems highly correlated with conscientiousness, one of the five personality factors. Conscientiousness is correlated with job performance and academic outcomes, but it's not as strong as IQ. Still, it's long been known that you can barely budge your personality, although conscientiousness slowly rises as one ages while openness to experience falls. It's not surprising then that "grit" is also hard to change, since it's mostly a personality trait.
This is a useful update to the original, which I also enjoyed! The data is not actually clear right now about teacher attrition in 2022, but it sure seems like a lot of my colleagues are leaving---25 out of 110 left at the end of this in my largeish urban public high school, and only 1 was a retirement. In a decade of teaching, I’ve never seen kids more burnt out on school as quickly as this group was. When we were mostly hybrid, they missed it, but the reality of it coming back was...mostly disappointing to them, and mostly disappointing to teachers? The insistence on how far behind we all were all the time was probably a big factor in this.
I’m confused by this. In the UK we don’t have Charter schools we have Free schools which I think are much the same thing. The only one I know much about is Michaela. It was a start up and in the beginning it stuuggled to get much buy in locally. It was in a deprived London neighbourhood. Selection was done by the local authority who allocated from the catchment area.
It has a reputation for being the strictest school in Britain. I think that is nonsense but there are rules like no talking as you move between classes, consequences for not bringing eg a pencil or for any minor misdemeanour.
The results are terrific and more than that the kids are properly socialised to function in the adult world. They make a strong point of tracing gratitude.
As I say the academic results are stellar with a lot of the children now getting offers from Cambridge and Oxford.
So my feeling is that kids from a poor part of London are getting into the UK’s top universities and getting life chances that simply weren’t there before. If I were a pupil there or a parent of a pupil there I’d consider that my education had ‘worked’.
This is slightly orthogonal, but I'm curious if anyone knows if certain school environments impact kid's personalities. Montessori education (to pick an example) seems appealing to me because it makes kids more independent, and makes school more enjoyable, not because I think it would make kids smarter.
Your take on the reigning shibboleths is quite apt and bracing.(Loved the book, btw.) As a longtime teacher I’ve seen the evidence on the ground. A bit about the variability of outcomes and the long term historical context would be a welcome addition. We’re still living with it. So how much difference does it make to have schools? Literacy was more common in the ancient world than most realize - graffiti in Pompei being a great bit of evidence - but the relative lack of compulsory ed. must have been a huge contributing factor in stunting the advance of civilization back then. What say you maestro? I always think of two great American autodidacts: A.Lincoln and Malcolm X. What do such outliers have to tell us about who has the biggest upside?
“I’ve said many times that I believe the racial achievement gap is likely the product of the profoundly different environments Black children live in on average, and these environmental changes are far more complex and multivariate than the SES differences that do not adequately explain the achievement gap.”
Why do you believe this about black kids as a population but not about underperforming kids as a population? If you’re screening out, for the most part, the things that people complain about when we talk about racial environment differences, like SES gaps, peers, class size, facilities, teacher quality, etc.— and I’ll throw another, racism-specific theory on the pile: stereotype threat, which seemed like a promising explanation but which has apparently not held up — if you’re saying all that stuff doesn’t matter, then… what does? Is it all just lead and low birth weights? Or if it’s all just “multi-variate” and “complex” — I mean, isn’t that always true of everybody’s environment?
I guess I don’t see why, if black kids and underperforming kids in general both have highly heritable performance lags, and the typical proffered explanations don’t pan out, but you think in the case of the racial gap it can be attributed to a multi-variate, complex set of as-yet-not-fully-understood environmental factors… why wouldn’t you think the same about the underperforming group as a whole?
(To use your jumping analogy — if you’re assuming that one group is stuck with as-yet-unseen weight belts and that’s why they don’t jump as high as everyone else, why don’t you assume that as-yet-unseen weight belts are the cause of ALL differences? It seems like the answer is that you think it’s obvious that there are fixed genetic differences in jumping ability. But isn’t that just assuming the thing we’re trying to prove?)
I agree strongly with this essay, based on my experiences growing up in a rural, working-class community, where I was one of the very few students whose parents had gone to college, let alone graduate school, and where only about a dozen students out of a graduating class of 650 went to selective colleges (more students went into the military than to college).
A significant problem with educational policy is that people who set the policies didn't attend public schools like mine. They tend to come from elite educational backgrounds and the professional managerial class, and very few of them have direct personal experience with people who are bad at and don't like school. So they think that all students will be like they were and will succeed at school, if we just have high expectations for kids and do this new and fashionable intervention (whatever it may be this time).
It doesn't work that way. I think we need a system like the have in Europe, and yes, I'm talking about tracking students into academic and vocational tracks. I'm old enough to have gone to school when tracking was still done, and it made a huge difference not just for me, but for students who struggled in school. Based on my experience, and pace claims from the experts that stronger students will buoy up the weaker ones by tutoring and challenging them, the weaker students didn't learn or enjoy the academic classes; instead they would pressure the stronger students to help them cheat, or would rely on the stronger students to do all the work in group projects. My high school allowed students to leave campus for classes at the local vocational school and to work at jobs, and the students who participated in these programs enjoyed them and got a lot more out of them than they did from the academic classes.
I believe that the most humane system allows every student to discover his or her interests and talents and receive an appropriate education for those interests and talents. I am grateful that this position has as eloquent and convincing an advocate as you, Freddie.
1. Ever read John Taylor Gatto?
2. I thought it was fairly well established thst any change to an underperforming system delivers positive outcomes, at least on a temporary basis.
“ But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.”
While true, adding iodine to salt and removing lead from gasoline and paint did have a very significant impact. The next frontier might be vitamin D levels and their role in brain development.
"This is the prioritization of the relative over the absolute, and it is foundational to our education system and our labor market."
This, for me, is the crux of the issue. It doesn't matter if an individual gets a higher score on an IQ test compared to previous generations, what matters is where they place relative to their peers right now. Given two candidates for a high paying position in tech or finance who is going to get the job offer? The individual with an average IQ or the really bright one? Labor markets are competitive. In the end it doesn't matter how much an individual's educational attainment has improved if he is still relatively less qualified than the next guy in the interview.
There is nothing inherently wrong with sorting based on intellectual ability in the labor market. Who doesn't want a smarter doctor? But society goes off the rails when it sniffs in disdain at manual labor, dismissed it as "unworthy" and therefore implicitly condones condemning an entire segment of the population to a lifetime of drastically lower wages.
To be clear I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with physicians making more than fast food workers but there are extremes. When we talk about a country where the federal government pumps billions of dollars into higher education while leaving vocational and technical schools to starve we are talking about a country where the class of the college educated has seized the reins of power and are busily engaged in securing their economic advantage. Consider this: workers without a college degree live shorter lies and earn far less than the college educated. Why should they be the ones on the hook for forgiving college tuition debt?
The real kicker on this is how every improvement in our society - better goods, fairer cops, more accurate news story - rests on absolute improvements in the cognition of the people doing those tasks. So long as we allow a gradation of quality of widget makers, there will be better made widgets and worse made widgets.
And smarter people will figure out how to get in line for better made widgets.
Inequality is baked into the world.
Hi Freddie,
One thing I’m also very interested in is how well early scores (e.g., kindergarten) predict adult scores and/or success. what’s the R-squared on that correlation? You show the correlation before and after college but that’s a fairly short time period and its from a sample of highly tested people (i.e., people who go to college) and people who have been selected for a lot of treatment. By then, I would expect a tighter correlation. Have you read anything you view as credible that gets at that? Thank you and really enjoy your newsletter.
Steve
Thank You for all the research, M. deBoer. Phenomenal. TYTY.
I wonder if the environmental differences that have the most impact are possibly found in the very first years. Then show up in K. Lack of benefit of Pre-K doesn't *necessarily* rule that out.
I also wonder if anyone knows whether curiosity can be taught. I've never heard-a it, but don't know much about the subject, so there is that.