I haven't read the book (some Ed authors I know hate it though!)... but I haven't seen him in all his writings on Ed here and elsewhere make any case like that. I've seen him say mostly "give up and give them government benefits." He's wrong about helping teachers be more effective and have an impact, and wrong about the improvement you can see when kids switch to higher quality schools. It might not show up in a meta analysis of 80 papers across 30 years and 15 countries [ eyeroll ] but kids absolutely can go from struggling and adrift to being better students who know more about the world.
I agree that we prize education too much, but the reason for income inequality is not some abstract concept we've all, presumably subconsciously, adopted. Most of it is simple supply and demand. If it's a task that just about anyone can do with minimal training, wages will remain low because substitute labor can be readily found if one attempts to charge more. If the guy that mows your yard tells you you shouldn't punish him for not going to college by only paying him $40 and tries to raise his price to $200, you'll tell him to pound sand and hire the kid down the block to do it. Just is what it is.
No argument from me. I think student loan debt forgiveness is ridiculous on numerous levels, with its regressiveness only being one. I was merely responding to the suggestion that low wages were the result of some abstract value system, rather than a function of supply and demand.
But to nevertheless attempt to answer your question, my cynical answer is because disguntled and debt riddled college graduates are a core constituency of the Democrats and they are offering this as a "get out the vote" plan ahead of the midterms.
I think your explanation is certainly part of the equation. But in addition to that when an overwhelming majority of the decision makers at all levels of government from local to state to federal are college graduates is it really surprising that a kind of class myopia would cloud their decision making?
For example, Thomas Frank wrote about "innovation funds" that subsidized the creation of tech and pharmaceutical companies in places like Boston. Are there corresponding programs to fund the creation of construction or trucking ventures? Does it sound weird to even consider such a thing?
Or how about the immense gap between federal funding for higher education for four year programs versus the pittance spent on vocational/tech colleges?
Or how about discrepancy between the number of manufacturing jobs in the US versus peers like Germany or Japan? I suspect you could make an argument that the federal government was simply indifferent, at best, to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs ("Why do we even need a semiconductor industry?") Contrast that to the efforts that countries like Germany and Japan have undertaken to protect their industrial sector.
I assume the reason people think there needs to be public funding for tech and pharma companies is that they are doing something akin to basic research — it won’t get done if you don’t provide the seed money, but if you do, you get an enormous economic multiplier. Whereas construction and trucking are much more likely to happen anyway, because they need is obvious and there’s no research hump to get over.
(If there’s a flaw in that reasoning, it’s that many tech and pharma companies are NOT doing basic research, but are instead focused on the kind of R&D that the market would reward anyway. So the leveraging of seed money isn’t as helpful as one would hope.)
Forty percent of the low SES high school students I've taught have gone on to college, and forty percent of those graduate from college. If we're going to forgive anyone's student loan debt, it should be the students who have the debt but not the degree.
"I'm a student from a low-income family at XYZ College, and I'm not doing so great in my courses. I can't expect to get a high-paying job once I graduate, and I've racked up a lot of student debt.
My choices: push through to graduate and be stuck with a ton of debt *and* likely no good job, or bail, drop out, and still have trouble finding a job, but at least I won't have all that pesky student debt!"
Basically, I'm worried that you'd be incentivizing marginal/low-performing college students to drop out in order to get rid of their student debt.
Despite being a policy change directly aligned with my self-interest, as a thrice-dropout no-credential poor debtor...I'll take the money, but damnit, I won't feel good about it. The decade post-college for me has been spent on paying that debt down, to the exclusion of so many other potential life avenues. So much time and capital locked up...and for what? To just have it be magicked away by politically convenient fiat, using Someone Else's Money, in order to excuse my own personal failures in school. That's Just Not Right.
College isn't for everyone, and it definitely wasn't for me, but I *could* have passed if I'd cared to. I just didn't, and took on more and more debt as the system kept barely failing to evict me wholesale. That debt is owed to the United States Department of Education, and by extension, every other taxpayer. They have zero responsibility of recompense for my intellectual insouciance.
It's been particularly annoying during covid, what with student loan payments being paused...and the deadline for that being kicked down the road over and over. This seemed reasonable when the pandemic was expected to be over Real Soon Now(tm), but it's been 2.5 years now. Lot of time for my hard-earned money to sit around not earning much dividends or interest, unsure whether or when it'll ever be needed to service educational debt again.
If the goal is to simply help the poor, parsing out deserving student loan debt to forgive seems like a convoluted means-test. Let's cut out the middleman and just expand the EITC again or whatever. Another round of stimulant checks, on the House and Senate!*
A lot of the labor market is heavily regulated and corrupt. The number of doctors and plumbers and a whole bunch of other professions are kept artificially low by school and licensing agreements. All sorts of transactions that shouldn't actually require a lawyer or a broker or a whatever actually do. There are some jobs that operate as a pure market, like retail at the low end or coding at the high end. But many don't.
This is no doubt true and does skew the labor pool. The relative merits of these barriers to entry can certainly be debated depending on the profession. I personally like rigorous barriers to entry for things like, say, my anesthesiologist. Conversely, I suspect my hair dresser is likely over-regulated.
And, importantly, the teacher labor market has done itself in by attacking alternative certification pathways (do an academic paper search on Teach for America!) and throwing up every barrier to entry for the last 30-40 years in order to protect their increases in pay and benefits including retirement. Now the pipeline is bone dry and union leaders are crying "look what the GOP did to us!"
We should be structuring school so a solid work ethic and attentiveness/focus is as easy as possible for all kids. Today we make them as noisy and frenetic and hectic as possible and then are surprised, like Freddie is, that only the high achieving self starters come out on top.
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.
But at the end of the day you are paid for what you do. If you don't like what you are making, change it.
I went into the military after HS because I didn't feel like going to college. The military sucked. After the military I found plenty of grit to go to college. It's better to study your ass off, then spend weeks sweating in the GA swamp with no showers.
They are different. But if you have the grit and the willingness to put off consumption you can still get ahead.
One, you can just work more hours. For example, for a while my wife was working her 40 hours a week, then working weekends as a waitress. While I worked as waiter then went to school.
Of course you can only work so many hours in the day. So you can cut expenses instead.
For example, my wife and I moved in with my parents for several years to save up to buy a house.
I had a friend whose family was immigrants. 4 families got together bought one house, all lived there. When that was paid off, they bought a 2nd house RENTED that one out, while they all still lived in one house, then bought a 3rd house, and finally a 4th. Finally when all 4 houses were paid off, they all moved into their own homes.
Getting ahead is all about putting off current consumption for future wealth. Whether that's studying or working a 2nd job, instead of recreational activities, or just living WAY below your means. It's possible to get ahead.
Yes, I agree with this. People have intrinsic levels not only of conscientiousness, but also of all the Big Five traits, and they all affect academic performance. Highly agreeable people do well in group work and get along with authorities. Highly neurotic people may have trouble responding to criticism. Our education system, with its group projects and noisy, crowded learning spaces, favors extroverts. Etc.
When my kids were in school, there was a big push to implement Carol Dweck's ideas about the growth mindset, and I felt that it was so unfair, because some kids (like my son) come pre-equipped with that mindset, while others (like my daughter) really don't, and no amount of exhortation would change that.
Although personality traits are moderately stable by the preschool years, they are not so stable that they do not change. They change in terms of both rank-order stability (which Freddie makes a strong case is critical), and in terms of mean-level stability. People can change their traits to some degree through both individual efforts and through therapy. And interventions with kids can change their traits, too. I just got back from an international developmental psychology conference, and in several different presentations, researchers demonstrated that working with parents leads to changes in their kids self-control, negative emotionality, and shyness. Personality development is my area of research, in fact!
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.
Also anecdotal-ish, but in Philadelphia we saw twice as many mid-year resignations across the district as usual and something like 20% turnover in the central district office. As always with education, though, it's feast for some and famine for others: my mother's middle-class Washington State district had more resignations than usual, too, but is still getting bushels of candidates for every opening.
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’.
Every time someone claims that something in education has terrific results, there is some undiscovered selection effect at play. Every. Time. Those kids are getting sorted into that school nonrandomly and that is creating the perceived effect.
I think the other thing that is often missed when looking at examples like this is that academic ability/intelligence is not strictly speaking a function of socioeconomic status (I know, there’s a lot more to said there, but to generalize). Thus kids who are in lower socioeconomic strata, and wouldn’t necessarily excel in school due to certain socio-cultural factors (local school quality, familial support and understanding of education, &c.) but are in fact quite intelligent genetically, are placed into these rigorous and high achieving academic environments where their full intellectual potential can be realized, and we then point to that and say “look we made poor, dumb kids smart and now they’re going to an elite university—education works!”, when what really happened is that a kid who was always intelligent now has the outlet and resources to compete with other smart, rich kids. We love to point at these examples as “proof” that education makes people smarter, because it makes everyone feel better about it. But it’s a misattribution because, as it often does, money obscures the truth (i.e. some have it making it either easier to achieve their full potential OR easier to cover up their stupidity).
(Which you do address frequently, Freddie, but just to clarify for the commenter above.)
Russell, what is your theory here? This is the problem with all of these claims: if someone had finally cracked the problem of education after 150 years of education research, do you think other schools, districts, countries wouldn't try the same thing? There are innumerable public and charter schools that try strict discipline as the special sauce, and it never works. What would be so different about this program that it would produce results where so many others have failed, and why would no one else be replicating that success right now?
One factor: they don't tolerate disruption. Disruptive students are removed. Disruptive students are almost always low achievers. That's two birds killed with one stone: your classroom isn't disrupted, and you've got a low achiever off your books.
This is not a criticism of the Michaela model, which delivers what it promises: a very structured environment for motivated learners to learn. But by definition that selects for a group that is going to succeed more than the average: they are motivated.
I believe though that pupils generally fit in. So if disruption is the norm they may easily become disruptive themselves. If disruption has immediate consequences they don't disrupt. There may be exceptions but generally pupils can be socialised and it is to their huge advantaged.
I agree that expectations and environment can make a difference to attitude. I further agree that this is ultimately to the advantage of the student.
But "generally" is a very, very loose word here. It doesn't matter if it works 29 times out of 30; if you remove that one massively disruptive influence, the one in thirty, while a state school does not (or cannot, as the case often is), you've immediately boosted your average outcome by a measurable level.
You multiply that by the many, many other factors at play here. The biggest one: the kind of parent who gets their kid into a school like this is *definitionally* more engaged with schooling than those who do not. I know it doesn't cost money, but it costs research, diligence, form-filling ability etc. to get them in. These aren't trivially easy for people in the lowest achievement bands. In fact, this engagement - this conscientiousness, this stick-to-it-iveness to navigate bureaucracy to get your kid into a certain school - is *in itself* an indicator of the kind of educational outcomes that could be expected of the parents themselves, and consequently (knowing that biological parenting is by far the greatest predictor of a child's intelligence) that of the student.
Again, I am all for the Michaela approach. I would make most schools work like this if I had a magic wand. But I would do so knowing that it's not going to move the needle as far as *educational outcomes among groups* go. That's not what it's designed to do. (As for the students I exclude because they can't hack the zero-tolerance to disruption rule, they're someone else's problem.)
On the parents self selecting I think this may become true over time but remember that Michaela started with no reputation at all. And allocation is done by the local authority based I believe on proximity though you do actually have to mark it as a choice. Given the make up of the kids I don’t think it is the case that they have somehow magicked up boat loads of committed parents.
It doesn't matter. They still defy the odds. And the school is very different. It has a laser focus on content knowledge and effective teaching and positive, productive student and teacher dispositions to learning and education. It also gives all the students a great feeling of purpose and belonging. They are in it together, they support one another, they put in effort and do really well. Their parents love the school too. Immigrant parents. That part is important, because in America the Ed professoriate and their political allies insist on making schools the opposite of what poor and immigrant parents actually want.
They defy the odds because they kick the disruptive kids out (or so I assume; if that's wrong, if it's impossible to be kicked out, please do correct me). So now you have to tell me what happens to the kids kicked out, and include them in the assessment of the school's results.
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.
I've recently learned about the sudbury schooling method, where kids create their own curriculum and participate in running the school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
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 also vaguely recall Thomas Sowell looking at post-WW2 adoptions, which showed no racial differences in adopted children, indicating a cultural rather than genetic explanation. I can't remember the details though.
I also recall reading an article that I found quite persuasive about black first generation students in college thinking they had to do it all by themselves (a sort of lone genius theory of learning), whereas Asian students already had background cultural knowledge about study groups, tutoring, etc.
This would also seem to fit with Freddie’s chart above showing small group tutoring to be an effective needle-mover.
Again, this indicates a cultural rather than genetic explanation to me. If Asians have a genetic advantage, seems like studying more would be a waste of time.
Right. I think that’s a very plausible view. McWhorter has a particularly sophisticated theory that black cultural is more focused on oral skills, which is not what our “IQ”-style tests measure. (He also recommends phonics as a proven winner in improving outcomes.)
But, of course, cultural and interest-based explanations could ALSO apply to everybody else. Perhaps many people in our lower-performing brackets, of all races, find schooling irrelevant or culturally baffling. Doesn’t mean the effect isn’t particularly strong in the black community. But in the absence of a strong explanation rooted in a specific environment that affects blacks differently from everyone else, I think it’s either “environments matter for everyone, we just don’t understand them,” or we surrender to the genetic determinists on all counts.
Well, I think the point is that the things we do in the classroom don't change things much. If we locked up every underperforming household and did some forced assimilation policy to make them care about academics, I think that would change things. But that's a lot different from the policies we're actually pursuing.
McWhorter and Sowell aren't simply wrong, they are famous for their stupid explanations because they preach what the right side of the policy folks want to believe.
A distinction widely ignored is between ultimate and proximate causes. Race, poverty, SES, etc. are ultimate causes whose relative weighting is widely discussed. However, we can't easily, if at all, intervene to change these factors the day before an exam.
However, the proximate cause of a student failing an specific exam is heavily related to how much they studied and when, if they studied the right way, if they saw the professor to discuss what they got stuck on, if they had a solid math background, etc. This is obvious to all and where the teacher can hope to help.
What is seldom discussed is how we can intervene to change the connections between a particular student's ultimate causes and their proximate causes. This is where one could hope to make scalable interventions. Unfortunately, this is where too seldom are explicit links / opportunities mapped, tested, or discussed.
On the small scale I can hope to help some individuals improve here but the interventions discussed for wide scale don't seem to be explicit enough about how to change these ultimate to proximate cause pathways...
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.
Well, a “better outcome” can include “succeeding at carpentry rather than failing at calculus,” right? If a student could be sent to one of two schools, one of which can succeed at training her for a job that she can be good at, and the other would fail at training her for a job she can’t be good at — isn’t tracking her into the former school a better academic outcome, in that she learns something rather than nothing?
I think there’s been a miscommunication. I did not say that “students who are bad at math are somehow good at carpentry.” Nor did I say the trades are “easy.” But INTELLECTUALLY, a trade school curriculum is easier than a rigorous college math class. I was giving an example of someone who is bright enough to do carpentry (including the math it entails), but not bright enough to do well in an advanced math class. In other words, someone in the big fat zone of “smart enough,” with the intelligence to succeed in some educational environments, but not others.
If we want to credential a wide variety of people for good jobs, we can try to push that middle bracket (which is most people, if intelligence is distributed in a bell curve) into college, but that will either mean pushing them to do work they can’t do (see, eg, Richard Sander’s work on college mismatch) or dumbing down “college” so that many more people can say they “got a degree,” even though they can’t do rigorous intellectual work. OR we can recognize that there’s a lot of valid work in this world that involves some smarts but doesn’t necessarily require high levels of abstract reasoning ability, and we can train our big middle-intelligence cluster for those jobs instead of having them play “college.”
Of course there will also be lots of people who can’t do either the trades or intellectual work, and we should have appropriate paths to dignified, remunerative work for them, too.
"recognize that there's a lot of valid work in this world that involves some smarts but doesn't necessarily require high levels of abstract reasoning ability"
Yes. This is the important point. The man who fixes my tractor has years of learned experience and is great at what he does, but says he isn't very smart and didn't do well in school.
Most people don't have the innate ability to succeed at calculus. What makes you think most people have the ability to succeed at carpentry? High skilled trades are by definition high skilled, meaning most people are gonna be average at them. It's kind of insulting to these professions to assume that the people who aren't good at academic school are gonna be good at them.
I think this was merely offered as a suggestion and the point was that the current “one size fits all” approach where everyone is encouraged to attend a 4 year college isn’t optimum. It would be better is we had a pathway for people who show interest and aptitude in things like carpentry.
Why would it be an insult to a profession if someone who can't do calculus succeeds in it? Highly skilled or not, trades remove abstraction, which might be the hurdle preventing someone from succeeding at calculus.
You are assuming that just because someone is bad at school, they are unintelligent. Tracking and vocation schools allow educators and students find out what they are good at/interested in and help them maximize those skills. Which would give them the best chance to succeed. It is way more efficient to maximize what you are already have an aptitude for instead of trying to force a student to get skilled at a subject or class they don't have an aptitude for.
Hey that's kind of what I was getting at. Like the idea is that people who are bad academics should be good at other stuff. Some people are good at math, and some are good at athletics. But some are good at both and a lot are good at neither. It might just be more just world stuff.
It's possible that people who are naturally good at trades are a different group than people who are naturally good at math. Either way, not being good at math doesn't mean you can hack carpentry. There's still gonna be a large group of people who are bad at both.
I agree with you and understand that. There still needs to be an attempt to maximize the most skills for the most students. Just because yes, there are people who are always going to be unskilled/not very smart, doesn't mean we should abandon trying to help the students who would succeed in a more technical job as opposed to an office/STEM field. I have many family members in the trades, specifically HVAC and electrician's unions. They say there are huge shortages of young people going into those fields. I don't think this is because everybody is stupid except college kids. I think it because there is a large aspect of the national student body whose skills are being ignored and allowed to wither.
I also think, and I'm not saying you Murat, that college grads try to give ourselves too much credit about their intellect. Let's not pretend we are all savants because we can put together a well-constructed email or make a pivot table in excel.
I don’t think I said that MOST people who aren’t good at academic school are necessarily going to be good at the trades. Clearly many will not. Some people may only be able to stock shelves or pump gas. Others may be intellectually incapable of working in any meaningful way at all.
And of course the trades are skilled jobs that require training. No one said they weren’t.
But, to the extent IQ is meaningful at all, it means that only a few people can do the very hardest things, and that there are more people who can do (at least the intellectual portion of) carpentry and other trades than can do (at least the intellectual portion of) being a fluid dynamics engineer or whatever. So, yes — tracking people by ability group will enable you to appropriately train people who have enough smarts to be good at carpentry but not enough to be good at engineering.
I guess if you want to say there is no such thing as a generic intellectual ability, though, I’m open to it. I sometimes flirt with being a g skeptic myself.
No more what I'm saying is that skilled trades require a high g too, it's not like a solution to the problem of half the people with below average IQ's needing to make a decent living.
I have never really been very good at "studying." There are some things that I learned very easily and thought were interesting, which lead to me sticking to it and improving over time. There were other things that I was pretty bad at the first time I tried and didn't get much better at with the application of minimal effort, and so gave up pretty quickly.
It just so happens that the things I had an aptitude for were things that our school system prizes. I had extremely poor study habits, and yet managed to be an A student. But if success in school were defined by how well I did in subjects like gym or shop, I'd likely be considered rather stupid. No matter how much my mother played sports with me as a kid, I still kept getting beaned in the face by the ball. No matter how many times my dad has explained things about fixing my bike, I am basically limited to pumping air in my tires.
Conversely, my uncles growing up always had an aptitude for fixing things (or alternatively, blowing things up in a controlled manner) and playing sports. But they were both solid C- students throughout their schooling. They left school and went into the trades and excelled at their jobs, and their ability to fix basically anything seems miraculous to me.
I'm in the same boat. Straight A student on most topics at school, based on an interest in learning and the sheer terror of getting in trouble for being bad at stuff. But I'm useless at more practical stuff. My cousin, who is a similar age, left school as soon as it was legally possible, with pretty much no qualifications. However, he's always been super capable with engines etc., and runs a successful business fixing HGVs/tractors etc. For both of us, the things we suck at aren't for a lack of trying, it's just like our brains are wired differently. It's a shame schools don't accept that more, rather than forcing teens who could be inspired and creative in other ways to sit through boring lessons they will never make use of.
I'm also a teacher. Some people do much better when they learn by doing. The operative word is doing, not study.
I have a son who academically shouldn't have been able to be a computer programmer, but he is. He got into the job market when a person could show competence instead of a degree. He learns by doing.
I wouldn't like to see a tracked system that's too rigid and locks people out, but there should be options besides the academics of 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"
I get that sense too. They imagine struggling kids as them, but poor, rather than as different people with different interests and desires.
As a teacher, I also wish we could bring in stronger, European-style tracking and apprenticeship systems. The problem is, I wonder if our local economies have been so degraded and de-skilled, and the remaining trades have put up such high barriers to entry, that there simply aren't enough apprenticeships to go around. We don't have a lot of factories and machine shops around in North Philadelphia like we did eighty years ago, but there's no shortage of gas stations and liquor stores.
Oren Cass has made the point that survey data shows that tracking is not in fact controversial with a large majority of our country; it's just controversial within the pundit class.
There's so much of a narrative of opportunity in the US. A system like that in Germany, of telling a 12 y o "you're not going to college" and sending them to a school which *won't allow them to go to college because its diplomas don't count for university entry*: I don't think that would fly. Everyone has this fantasy that a failing kid will turn things around at 17 and make it to college.
Any tracking system should have flexibility for the few individuals who want to make changes later in life. Our community college systems do this quite well. They have vocational programs, but also academic as well.
They're also a way to whittle down the cost of university and provide opportunities for kids who don't fit into regular high school.
Based on their personal experience, elite policy makers also tend to implicitly endorse the fallacy of composition. As in, "educational achievement put me in the elite, so if everyone else achieved the same in school, everyone would be elite."
OTOH, it also occurs to me that there are ways that the elite seem to **ignore** their own personal experiences with school. For example, they have to remember that they actually had to learn material **on their own** by comprehending the information in their textbooks, and thinking through problems, etc. Yet, now they endorse a top-down model of "teaching," in which some silver bullet technique will just pour understanding into a kid's brain without him doing the work at his end of actually "learning."
In primary school I liked a more integrated approach. I didn't divide my kids into ability based reading groups. I did provide a lot of opportunities for every child to read at their own pace. I did a lot of individual assessment and did some flexible groupings if there was a common problem. My higher level kids did tend to do more together because they finished the assignments sooner and I gave them additional problems/projects...or let them have constructive free time which they could do together.
Most of these things were the result of the war, or rather, the west's response to that war.
But it's not as if Trump adopted a different Ukrainian policy to his predecessor, nor did Biden take a markedly more reckless line than Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, etc.. In other words, the war would have happened regardless.
As far as "the border" goes. The Wall ain't never gonna get built, and Trump wasn't particularly serious about the thing after he got elected.
I think the war and inflation are actually interrelated. First off inflation is not Putin's fault, it was well on its way last year long before the invasion of Ukraine. There was always going to be some inflationary pressure from Trump's massive stimulus packages. The insanity was compounding that inflation with a set of additional packages that pumped trillions of additional dollars into the economy at a time when labor force participation had fallen off of a cliff.
A while back pundits were asking why Putin chose to invade while Biden was in office rather than Trump. Was Trump really so bellicose that Putin dared not provoke him?
Maybe. But maybe Putin just looked at the inflation numbers coming out of the West and understood that the US and Europe had really screwed the pooch and were especially vulnerable. All of those sanctions Biden has "unleashed" have large left Putin unscathed while devastating his opponents. There is going to be a substantial amount of pain in Europe this winter, for example, due to heating oil costs. And inflation has essentially crippled Biden domestically and paralyzed the United States.
I'm going to explore this in more detail in a newsletter article but if you are Putin you probably want to wait for Trump to be re-elected in 2024 before culminating the invasion. $40 billion in US aid is enough to allow the Ukrainians to lose slowly but not enough to win. Trump is the guy who nickel and dimed Boeing over the cost of Air Force 1 and he approaches foreign policy with a businessman's eye towards return on investment. He is unlikely to view billions of US dollars in military and foreign aid as a good investment if it just delays Russian expansion into Ukraine and the US will be uniquely well positioned to apply leverage to the Ukrainians to extract a negotiated settlement.
Yves Smith, among others, has written about why the invasion happened when it did.
I would agree with your analysis regarding inflation, but the West's response to the invasion has only exacerbated existing inflationary pressures.
Ernest Hemingway wrote thusly:
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
—Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, Sept. 1935..
The United States, with its typical extravagance, has done both.
“ 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.
The trick is that there is a bell curve of ability. If everyone had the exact same intellectual potential then eliminating environmental factors that degrade performance would conceivably get everyone to the exact IQ score.
But that's not the way that populations work. Individuals fall on a curve of intellectual ability. It sure looks like eliminating environmental barriers may allow an individual to reach his personal potential, but that cap could still easily place him in the bottom 20% of the country.
The rest of the industrialized world is busily removing environmental barriers as well. I suggest that if that's really the path to world domination that the US should look into poisoning the drinking water of competitors like Canada.
"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 irony is, the educational establishment’s deterrence of blue collar professions may be what leads to a rise in wages. The world needs electricians and plumbers. As fewer go into these professions because all their counselors told them to go to college instead, the value of those services will only increase.
I have encouraged my children to get into a trade instead of pushing college and I have way too many college degrees. One son is interested in becoming a fireman, which would be a good fit for him and give him a good life.
I have family working various trades and they can make serious money as heavy equipment operators and union construction workers.
In Westchester County, NY there is enough self-segregation along these educational and socioeconomic lines that plumbers, electricians, builders, and even landscapers make tons of money. None of my neighbors here can so much as unclog a drain without professional help.
"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."
This is BS. Wages are set by the market. If there is high demand, and low supply wages are high. Lower demand and higher supply wages are low.
Moreover, and this is super important, wages are income to you, but a cost to someone else. So if those wages get to high, those jobs disappear.
In a purely market driven economy, yes. But unfortunately a) there is no purely free market economy anywhere on the planet and b) there is such a thing as regulatory capture. Look at the salary of medical professionals in the United States for example. If your concern is that physicians fees are eating up an inordinate amount of gross domestic product then you might well believe that simple economics (supply versus demand) would suggest that importing more doctors and nurses from abroad should work to alleviate the problem.
But that collides with the reality that the AMA and other professional medical associations have thrown up numerous roadblocks to easy certification of foreign doctors, roadblocks that are enshrined in law. It's the same mindset that requires years of trade school to work as a cosmetologist because "they work with dangerous chemicals". My guess is that it's rooted in both protectionism as well as an underlying cultural belief that schooling as a requirement for work is a necessary good. As opposed to just letting somebody read the instructions on the back of that box of hair dye.
If your argument is that we should reduce regulations that stifle market competition I'm all for that,
But that won't fix the bottom side of the market. For example, my mom was a janitor. She got paid low wages. That's pretty much always going to be the case.
It's more than just regulations. Look at the creep of credential requirements. Back in the 1950's somebody could get a middle class job as a secretary with a high school diploma and a typing class.
Flash forward to the present day and to get the same job you need a college degree. That explains the paradox of why a college diploma can increasing your personal earnings even as the rise in the number of college degree holders has no effect on aggregate measures such as GDP: a secretary is still a secretary. The only difference now is that to unlock a secretary's earning potential you need a college diploma, along with the attendant college debt.
Or look at illegal immigration. Different classes of immigrants put wage pressure on different segments of the economy. Manual laborers who enter the country illegally primary impact workers with only a high school diploma or less. If there was a flood of medical doctors running shady clinics without any type of government oversight would Democratic elites be so blasé about illegal immigration? I doubt it. Conveniently illegals do not compete for jobs against the professional class even as they make services like house cleaning, landscaping, construction, child care, etc. cheaper. Neat how that works out.
Since absolute learning has changed over decades, one has to keep up with that just to maintain the same place in the hierarchy, or otherwise will be entirely left out. So we might say that all of these educational interventions don't matter or won't change a child's rank, but don't all kids have to run to stay in the same place?
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.
Can you please explain your reasoning for thinking it is not racist? I am genuinely curious.
I haven't read the book (some Ed authors I know hate it though!)... but I haven't seen him in all his writings on Ed here and elsewhere make any case like that. I've seen him say mostly "give up and give them government benefits." He's wrong about helping teachers be more effective and have an impact, and wrong about the improvement you can see when kids switch to higher quality schools. It might not show up in a meta analysis of 80 papers across 30 years and 15 countries [ eyeroll ] but kids absolutely can go from struggling and adrift to being better students who know more about the world.
Read his book, your library can access it or get a used copy on-line. It is well worth reading especially if you aren't a socialist, like myself.
I agree that we prize education too much, but the reason for income inequality is not some abstract concept we've all, presumably subconsciously, adopted. Most of it is simple supply and demand. If it's a task that just about anyone can do with minimal training, wages will remain low because substitute labor can be readily found if one attempts to charge more. If the guy that mows your yard tells you you shouldn't punish him for not going to college by only paying him $40 and tries to raise his price to $200, you'll tell him to pound sand and hire the kid down the block to do it. Just is what it is.
So why are we asking high school graduates to subsidize the higher earnings of college grads by forgiving tuition debt?
No argument from me. I think student loan debt forgiveness is ridiculous on numerous levels, with its regressiveness only being one. I was merely responding to the suggestion that low wages were the result of some abstract value system, rather than a function of supply and demand.
But to nevertheless attempt to answer your question, my cynical answer is because disguntled and debt riddled college graduates are a core constituency of the Democrats and they are offering this as a "get out the vote" plan ahead of the midterms.
I think your explanation is certainly part of the equation. But in addition to that when an overwhelming majority of the decision makers at all levels of government from local to state to federal are college graduates is it really surprising that a kind of class myopia would cloud their decision making?
For example, Thomas Frank wrote about "innovation funds" that subsidized the creation of tech and pharmaceutical companies in places like Boston. Are there corresponding programs to fund the creation of construction or trucking ventures? Does it sound weird to even consider such a thing?
Or how about the immense gap between federal funding for higher education for four year programs versus the pittance spent on vocational/tech colleges?
Or how about discrepancy between the number of manufacturing jobs in the US versus peers like Germany or Japan? I suspect you could make an argument that the federal government was simply indifferent, at best, to the offshoring of manufacturing jobs ("Why do we even need a semiconductor industry?") Contrast that to the efforts that countries like Germany and Japan have undertaken to protect their industrial sector.
All valid points.
I assume the reason people think there needs to be public funding for tech and pharma companies is that they are doing something akin to basic research — it won’t get done if you don’t provide the seed money, but if you do, you get an enormous economic multiplier. Whereas construction and trucking are much more likely to happen anyway, because they need is obvious and there’s no research hump to get over.
(If there’s a flaw in that reasoning, it’s that many tech and pharma companies are NOT doing basic research, but are instead focused on the kind of R&D that the market would reward anyway. So the leveraging of seed money isn’t as helpful as one would hope.)
Forty percent of the low SES high school students I've taught have gone on to college, and forty percent of those graduate from college. If we're going to forgive anyone's student loan debt, it should be the students who have the debt but not the degree.
"If we're going to forgive anyone's student loan debt, it should be the students who have the debt but not the degree."
I understand your reasoning, but it screams "perverse incentive" to me.
And what would that perverse incentive be?
"I'm a student from a low-income family at XYZ College, and I'm not doing so great in my courses. I can't expect to get a high-paying job once I graduate, and I've racked up a lot of student debt.
My choices: push through to graduate and be stuck with a ton of debt *and* likely no good job, or bail, drop out, and still have trouble finding a job, but at least I won't have all that pesky student debt!"
Basically, I'm worried that you'd be incentivizing marginal/low-performing college students to drop out in order to get rid of their student debt.
Despite being a policy change directly aligned with my self-interest, as a thrice-dropout no-credential poor debtor...I'll take the money, but damnit, I won't feel good about it. The decade post-college for me has been spent on paying that debt down, to the exclusion of so many other potential life avenues. So much time and capital locked up...and for what? To just have it be magicked away by politically convenient fiat, using Someone Else's Money, in order to excuse my own personal failures in school. That's Just Not Right.
College isn't for everyone, and it definitely wasn't for me, but I *could* have passed if I'd cared to. I just didn't, and took on more and more debt as the system kept barely failing to evict me wholesale. That debt is owed to the United States Department of Education, and by extension, every other taxpayer. They have zero responsibility of recompense for my intellectual insouciance.
It's been particularly annoying during covid, what with student loan payments being paused...and the deadline for that being kicked down the road over and over. This seemed reasonable when the pandemic was expected to be over Real Soon Now(tm), but it's been 2.5 years now. Lot of time for my hard-earned money to sit around not earning much dividends or interest, unsure whether or when it'll ever be needed to service educational debt again.
If the goal is to simply help the poor, parsing out deserving student loan debt to forgive seems like a convoluted means-test. Let's cut out the middleman and just expand the EITC again or whatever. Another round of stimulant checks, on the House and Senate!*
*except inflation, lol
A lot of the labor market is heavily regulated and corrupt. The number of doctors and plumbers and a whole bunch of other professions are kept artificially low by school and licensing agreements. All sorts of transactions that shouldn't actually require a lawyer or a broker or a whatever actually do. There are some jobs that operate as a pure market, like retail at the low end or coding at the high end. But many don't.
This is no doubt true and does skew the labor pool. The relative merits of these barriers to entry can certainly be debated depending on the profession. I personally like rigorous barriers to entry for things like, say, my anesthesiologist. Conversely, I suspect my hair dresser is likely over-regulated.
And, importantly, the teacher labor market has done itself in by attacking alternative certification pathways (do an academic paper search on Teach for America!) and throwing up every barrier to entry for the last 30-40 years in order to protect their increases in pay and benefits including retirement. Now the pipeline is bone dry and union leaders are crying "look what the GOP did to us!"
We should be structuring school so a solid work ethic and attentiveness/focus is as easy as possible for all kids. Today we make them as noisy and frenetic and hectic as possible and then are surprised, like Freddie is, that only the high achieving self starters come out on top.
Smart yes, diligence no. We can all turn up or down how hard we work and an increase in slacker-ness helps no one.
Common sense/wisdom can't be taught but it can be gutted out of individuals; as seen by the US education system.
Huh? You seem to think people pay far more attention in school than they actually do.
Most people ignore school. The ones hustling to get into Harvard or MIT are not most people however.
I was approaching it solely on a theoretical basis. 🍺
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.
Pay them more.
But at the end of the day you are paid for what you do. If you don't like what you are making, change it.
I went into the military after HS because I didn't feel like going to college. The military sucked. After the military I found plenty of grit to go to college. It's better to study your ass off, then spend weeks sweating in the GA swamp with no showers.
Then nothing, if you are unwilling to do the work, I don't feel sorry for you at all.
They are different. But if you have the grit and the willingness to put off consumption you can still get ahead.
One, you can just work more hours. For example, for a while my wife was working her 40 hours a week, then working weekends as a waitress. While I worked as waiter then went to school.
Of course you can only work so many hours in the day. So you can cut expenses instead.
For example, my wife and I moved in with my parents for several years to save up to buy a house.
I had a friend whose family was immigrants. 4 families got together bought one house, all lived there. When that was paid off, they bought a 2nd house RENTED that one out, while they all still lived in one house, then bought a 3rd house, and finally a 4th. Finally when all 4 houses were paid off, they all moved into their own homes.
Getting ahead is all about putting off current consumption for future wealth. Whether that's studying or working a 2nd job, instead of recreational activities, or just living WAY below your means. It's possible to get ahead.
Yes, I agree with this. People have intrinsic levels not only of conscientiousness, but also of all the Big Five traits, and they all affect academic performance. Highly agreeable people do well in group work and get along with authorities. Highly neurotic people may have trouble responding to criticism. Our education system, with its group projects and noisy, crowded learning spaces, favors extroverts. Etc.
When my kids were in school, there was a big push to implement Carol Dweck's ideas about the growth mindset, and I felt that it was so unfair, because some kids (like my son) come pre-equipped with that mindset, while others (like my daughter) really don't, and no amount of exhortation would change that.
Although personality traits are moderately stable by the preschool years, they are not so stable that they do not change. They change in terms of both rank-order stability (which Freddie makes a strong case is critical), and in terms of mean-level stability. People can change their traits to some degree through both individual efforts and through therapy. And interventions with kids can change their traits, too. I just got back from an international developmental psychology conference, and in several different presentations, researchers demonstrated that working with parents leads to changes in their kids self-control, negative emotionality, and shyness. Personality development is my area of research, in fact!
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.
Also anecdotal-ish, but in Philadelphia we saw twice as many mid-year resignations across the district as usual and something like 20% turnover in the central district office. As always with education, though, it's feast for some and famine for others: my mother's middle-class Washington State district had more resignations than usual, too, but is still getting bushels of candidates for every opening.
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’.
Every time someone claims that something in education has terrific results, there is some undiscovered selection effect at play. Every. Time. Those kids are getting sorted into that school nonrandomly and that is creating the perceived effect.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education
I think the other thing that is often missed when looking at examples like this is that academic ability/intelligence is not strictly speaking a function of socioeconomic status (I know, there’s a lot more to said there, but to generalize). Thus kids who are in lower socioeconomic strata, and wouldn’t necessarily excel in school due to certain socio-cultural factors (local school quality, familial support and understanding of education, &c.) but are in fact quite intelligent genetically, are placed into these rigorous and high achieving academic environments where their full intellectual potential can be realized, and we then point to that and say “look we made poor, dumb kids smart and now they’re going to an elite university—education works!”, when what really happened is that a kid who was always intelligent now has the outlet and resources to compete with other smart, rich kids. We love to point at these examples as “proof” that education makes people smarter, because it makes everyone feel better about it. But it’s a misattribution because, as it often does, money obscures the truth (i.e. some have it making it either easier to achieve their full potential OR easier to cover up their stupidity).
(Which you do address frequently, Freddie, but just to clarify for the commenter above.)
I just don't think this can be what is going on. I could imagine it would be after a while (the school gets a good reputation so attracts applicants) but at the start nobody knew them from Adam. But more to the point nobody in the Wembley area of London was going to Oxford or Cambridge before they showed up. So given the kids are all from the borough . . . And the results in the school are among the best in the country. Where were these hiding in Wembley before Michaela? https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/22/controversial-michaela-free-school-delights-in-gcse-success#:~:text=Compared%20with%20other%20non%2Dselective,the%20national%20average%20of%2022%25.
Russell, what is your theory here? This is the problem with all of these claims: if someone had finally cracked the problem of education after 150 years of education research, do you think other schools, districts, countries wouldn't try the same thing? There are innumerable public and charter schools that try strict discipline as the special sauce, and it never works. What would be so different about this program that it would produce results where so many others have failed, and why would no one else be replicating that success right now?
Democrats and union leadership get these schools shut down or otherwise make sure they get starved to death.
One factor: they don't tolerate disruption. Disruptive students are removed. Disruptive students are almost always low achievers. That's two birds killed with one stone: your classroom isn't disrupted, and you've got a low achiever off your books.
This is not a criticism of the Michaela model, which delivers what it promises: a very structured environment for motivated learners to learn. But by definition that selects for a group that is going to succeed more than the average: they are motivated.
I believe though that pupils generally fit in. So if disruption is the norm they may easily become disruptive themselves. If disruption has immediate consequences they don't disrupt. There may be exceptions but generally pupils can be socialised and it is to their huge advantaged.
I agree that expectations and environment can make a difference to attitude. I further agree that this is ultimately to the advantage of the student.
But "generally" is a very, very loose word here. It doesn't matter if it works 29 times out of 30; if you remove that one massively disruptive influence, the one in thirty, while a state school does not (or cannot, as the case often is), you've immediately boosted your average outcome by a measurable level.
You multiply that by the many, many other factors at play here. The biggest one: the kind of parent who gets their kid into a school like this is *definitionally* more engaged with schooling than those who do not. I know it doesn't cost money, but it costs research, diligence, form-filling ability etc. to get them in. These aren't trivially easy for people in the lowest achievement bands. In fact, this engagement - this conscientiousness, this stick-to-it-iveness to navigate bureaucracy to get your kid into a certain school - is *in itself* an indicator of the kind of educational outcomes that could be expected of the parents themselves, and consequently (knowing that biological parenting is by far the greatest predictor of a child's intelligence) that of the student.
Again, I am all for the Michaela approach. I would make most schools work like this if I had a magic wand. But I would do so knowing that it's not going to move the needle as far as *educational outcomes among groups* go. That's not what it's designed to do. (As for the students I exclude because they can't hack the zero-tolerance to disruption rule, they're someone else's problem.)
On the parents self selecting I think this may become true over time but remember that Michaela started with no reputation at all. And allocation is done by the local authority based I believe on proximity though you do actually have to mark it as a choice. Given the make up of the kids I don’t think it is the case that they have somehow magicked up boat loads of committed parents.
It doesn't matter. They still defy the odds. And the school is very different. It has a laser focus on content knowledge and effective teaching and positive, productive student and teacher dispositions to learning and education. It also gives all the students a great feeling of purpose and belonging. They are in it together, they support one another, they put in effort and do really well. Their parents love the school too. Immigrant parents. That part is important, because in America the Ed professoriate and their political allies insist on making schools the opposite of what poor and immigrant parents actually want.
They defy the odds because they kick the disruptive kids out (or so I assume; if that's wrong, if it's impossible to be kicked out, please do correct me). So now you have to tell me what happens to the kids kicked out, and include them in the assessment of the school's results.
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.
This is an under-appreciated aspect of schooling differences.
I've recently learned about the sudbury schooling method, where kids create their own curriculum and participate in running the school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
I could see that working very well for certain kids.
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?)
Many Black intellectuals e.g. McWhorter and Sowell attribute this to cultural differences and differences in interests.
Wilfred Reilly cited a study a while back that claimed that if you factor in afterschool tutoring the racial gap vanishes.
I also vaguely recall Thomas Sowell looking at post-WW2 adoptions, which showed no racial differences in adopted children, indicating a cultural rather than genetic explanation. I can't remember the details though.
“ I also vaguely recall Thomas Sowell looking at post-WW2 adoptions, which showed no racial differences in adopted children”
Essentially all of Freddie’s data says the opposite. Kids end up far more like their biological parents than their adoptive parents.
Thanks — I’ll look that up.
I also recall reading an article that I found quite persuasive about black first generation students in college thinking they had to do it all by themselves (a sort of lone genius theory of learning), whereas Asian students already had background cultural knowledge about study groups, tutoring, etc.
This would also seem to fit with Freddie’s chart above showing small group tutoring to be an effective needle-mover.
I mean, look at this: https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/fig1.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1
Again, this indicates a cultural rather than genetic explanation to me. If Asians have a genetic advantage, seems like studying more would be a waste of time.
Depends on if you need study to reach maximum genetic potential.
It’s like Popeye and spinach — the muscles are always latent within him, genetically, but something has to bring it out.
Right. I think that’s a very plausible view. McWhorter has a particularly sophisticated theory that black cultural is more focused on oral skills, which is not what our “IQ”-style tests measure. (He also recommends phonics as a proven winner in improving outcomes.)
But, of course, cultural and interest-based explanations could ALSO apply to everybody else. Perhaps many people in our lower-performing brackets, of all races, find schooling irrelevant or culturally baffling. Doesn’t mean the effect isn’t particularly strong in the black community. But in the absence of a strong explanation rooted in a specific environment that affects blacks differently from everyone else, I think it’s either “environments matter for everyone, we just don’t understand them,” or we surrender to the genetic determinists on all counts.
Well, I think the point is that the things we do in the classroom don't change things much. If we locked up every underperforming household and did some forced assimilation policy to make them care about academics, I think that would change things. But that's a lot different from the policies we're actually pursuing.
I like your proposal — sounds a lot like a job creator. Where do I vote?
But surely we can all agree that if the kids are stuck in a horrible school they might do poorly even if smart.
And there's a lot of horrible schools out there
McWhorter and Sowell aren't simply wrong, they are famous for their stupid explanations because they preach what the right side of the policy folks want to believe.
A distinction widely ignored is between ultimate and proximate causes. Race, poverty, SES, etc. are ultimate causes whose relative weighting is widely discussed. However, we can't easily, if at all, intervene to change these factors the day before an exam.
However, the proximate cause of a student failing an specific exam is heavily related to how much they studied and when, if they studied the right way, if they saw the professor to discuss what they got stuck on, if they had a solid math background, etc. This is obvious to all and where the teacher can hope to help.
What is seldom discussed is how we can intervene to change the connections between a particular student's ultimate causes and their proximate causes. This is where one could hope to make scalable interventions. Unfortunately, this is where too seldom are explicit links / opportunities mapped, tested, or discussed.
On the small scale I can hope to help some individuals improve here but the interventions discussed for wide scale don't seem to be explicit enough about how to change these ultimate to proximate cause pathways...
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.
Well, a “better outcome” can include “succeeding at carpentry rather than failing at calculus,” right? If a student could be sent to one of two schools, one of which can succeed at training her for a job that she can be good at, and the other would fail at training her for a job she can’t be good at — isn’t tracking her into the former school a better academic outcome, in that she learns something rather than nothing?
I think there’s been a miscommunication. I did not say that “students who are bad at math are somehow good at carpentry.” Nor did I say the trades are “easy.” But INTELLECTUALLY, a trade school curriculum is easier than a rigorous college math class. I was giving an example of someone who is bright enough to do carpentry (including the math it entails), but not bright enough to do well in an advanced math class. In other words, someone in the big fat zone of “smart enough,” with the intelligence to succeed in some educational environments, but not others.
If we want to credential a wide variety of people for good jobs, we can try to push that middle bracket (which is most people, if intelligence is distributed in a bell curve) into college, but that will either mean pushing them to do work they can’t do (see, eg, Richard Sander’s work on college mismatch) or dumbing down “college” so that many more people can say they “got a degree,” even though they can’t do rigorous intellectual work. OR we can recognize that there’s a lot of valid work in this world that involves some smarts but doesn’t necessarily require high levels of abstract reasoning ability, and we can train our big middle-intelligence cluster for those jobs instead of having them play “college.”
Of course there will also be lots of people who can’t do either the trades or intellectual work, and we should have appropriate paths to dignified, remunerative work for them, too.
"recognize that there's a lot of valid work in this world that involves some smarts but doesn't necessarily require high levels of abstract reasoning ability"
Yes. This is the important point. The man who fixes my tractor has years of learned experience and is great at what he does, but says he isn't very smart and didn't do well in school.
Most people don't have the innate ability to succeed at calculus. What makes you think most people have the ability to succeed at carpentry? High skilled trades are by definition high skilled, meaning most people are gonna be average at them. It's kind of insulting to these professions to assume that the people who aren't good at academic school are gonna be good at them.
I think this was merely offered as a suggestion and the point was that the current “one size fits all” approach where everyone is encouraged to attend a 4 year college isn’t optimum. It would be better is we had a pathway for people who show interest and aptitude in things like carpentry.
Why would it be an insult to a profession if someone who can't do calculus succeeds in it? Highly skilled or not, trades remove abstraction, which might be the hurdle preventing someone from succeeding at calculus.
It's the assumption that anyone can succeed at it that I think is wrong.
I didn't make that assumption because that wasn't what the commenter said.
You are assuming that just because someone is bad at school, they are unintelligent. Tracking and vocation schools allow educators and students find out what they are good at/interested in and help them maximize those skills. Which would give them the best chance to succeed. It is way more efficient to maximize what you are already have an aptitude for instead of trying to force a student to get skilled at a subject or class they don't have an aptitude for.
Hey that's kind of what I was getting at. Like the idea is that people who are bad academics should be good at other stuff. Some people are good at math, and some are good at athletics. But some are good at both and a lot are good at neither. It might just be more just world stuff.
It's possible that people who are naturally good at trades are a different group than people who are naturally good at math. Either way, not being good at math doesn't mean you can hack carpentry. There's still gonna be a large group of people who are bad at both.
I agree with you and understand that. There still needs to be an attempt to maximize the most skills for the most students. Just because yes, there are people who are always going to be unskilled/not very smart, doesn't mean we should abandon trying to help the students who would succeed in a more technical job as opposed to an office/STEM field. I have many family members in the trades, specifically HVAC and electrician's unions. They say there are huge shortages of young people going into those fields. I don't think this is because everybody is stupid except college kids. I think it because there is a large aspect of the national student body whose skills are being ignored and allowed to wither.
I also think, and I'm not saying you Murat, that college grads try to give ourselves too much credit about their intellect. Let's not pretend we are all savants because we can put together a well-constructed email or make a pivot table in excel.
"You are assuming that just because someone is bad at school, they are unintelligent."
Yes. As we have defined school for the past...30 years or so, if you do badly at school you are unintelligent.
In fact, we have the opposite problem: kids who have good grades but read at 8th grade level and don't understand algebra.
I don’t think I said that MOST people who aren’t good at academic school are necessarily going to be good at the trades. Clearly many will not. Some people may only be able to stock shelves or pump gas. Others may be intellectually incapable of working in any meaningful way at all.
And of course the trades are skilled jobs that require training. No one said they weren’t.
But, to the extent IQ is meaningful at all, it means that only a few people can do the very hardest things, and that there are more people who can do (at least the intellectual portion of) carpentry and other trades than can do (at least the intellectual portion of) being a fluid dynamics engineer or whatever. So, yes — tracking people by ability group will enable you to appropriately train people who have enough smarts to be good at carpentry but not enough to be good at engineering.
I guess if you want to say there is no such thing as a generic intellectual ability, though, I’m open to it. I sometimes flirt with being a g skeptic myself.
No more what I'm saying is that skilled trades require a high g too, it's not like a solution to the problem of half the people with below average IQ's needing to make a decent living.
I have never really been very good at "studying." There are some things that I learned very easily and thought were interesting, which lead to me sticking to it and improving over time. There were other things that I was pretty bad at the first time I tried and didn't get much better at with the application of minimal effort, and so gave up pretty quickly.
It just so happens that the things I had an aptitude for were things that our school system prizes. I had extremely poor study habits, and yet managed to be an A student. But if success in school were defined by how well I did in subjects like gym or shop, I'd likely be considered rather stupid. No matter how much my mother played sports with me as a kid, I still kept getting beaned in the face by the ball. No matter how many times my dad has explained things about fixing my bike, I am basically limited to pumping air in my tires.
Conversely, my uncles growing up always had an aptitude for fixing things (or alternatively, blowing things up in a controlled manner) and playing sports. But they were both solid C- students throughout their schooling. They left school and went into the trades and excelled at their jobs, and their ability to fix basically anything seems miraculous to me.
I'm in the same boat. Straight A student on most topics at school, based on an interest in learning and the sheer terror of getting in trouble for being bad at stuff. But I'm useless at more practical stuff. My cousin, who is a similar age, left school as soon as it was legally possible, with pretty much no qualifications. However, he's always been super capable with engines etc., and runs a successful business fixing HGVs/tractors etc. For both of us, the things we suck at aren't for a lack of trying, it's just like our brains are wired differently. It's a shame schools don't accept that more, rather than forcing teens who could be inspired and creative in other ways to sit through boring lessons they will never make use of.
I'm also a teacher. Some people do much better when they learn by doing. The operative word is doing, not study.
I have a son who academically shouldn't have been able to be a computer programmer, but he is. He got into the job market when a person could show competence instead of a degree. He learns by doing.
I wouldn't like to see a tracked system that's too rigid and locks people out, but there should be options besides the academics of 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"
I get that sense too. They imagine struggling kids as them, but poor, rather than as different people with different interests and desires.
As a teacher, I also wish we could bring in stronger, European-style tracking and apprenticeship systems. The problem is, I wonder if our local economies have been so degraded and de-skilled, and the remaining trades have put up such high barriers to entry, that there simply aren't enough apprenticeships to go around. We don't have a lot of factories and machine shops around in North Philadelphia like we did eighty years ago, but there's no shortage of gas stations and liquor stores.
Oren Cass has made the point that survey data shows that tracking is not in fact controversial with a large majority of our country; it's just controversial within the pundit class.
There's so much of a narrative of opportunity in the US. A system like that in Germany, of telling a 12 y o "you're not going to college" and sending them to a school which *won't allow them to go to college because its diplomas don't count for university entry*: I don't think that would fly. Everyone has this fantasy that a failing kid will turn things around at 17 and make it to college.
Even if they didn't have that fantasy, imagine that you're telling kids this and most of them are black and Hispanic.
Any tracking system should have flexibility for the few individuals who want to make changes later in life. Our community college systems do this quite well. They have vocational programs, but also academic as well.
They're also a way to whittle down the cost of university and provide opportunities for kids who don't fit into regular high school.
"A significant problem with educational policy is that people who set the policies didn't attend public schools like mine."
You could take out the word "educational" and use that to explain just about anything, lately.
Based on their personal experience, elite policy makers also tend to implicitly endorse the fallacy of composition. As in, "educational achievement put me in the elite, so if everyone else achieved the same in school, everyone would be elite."
OTOH, it also occurs to me that there are ways that the elite seem to **ignore** their own personal experiences with school. For example, they have to remember that they actually had to learn material **on their own** by comprehending the information in their textbooks, and thinking through problems, etc. Yet, now they endorse a top-down model of "teaching," in which some silver bullet technique will just pour understanding into a kid's brain without him doing the work at his end of actually "learning."
In primary school I liked a more integrated approach. I didn't divide my kids into ability based reading groups. I did provide a lot of opportunities for every child to read at their own pace. I did a lot of individual assessment and did some flexible groupings if there was a common problem. My higher level kids did tend to do more together because they finished the assignments sooner and I gave them additional problems/projects...or let them have constructive free time which they could do together.
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.
Not sure that either Trump or Biden really changed all that much.
Most of these things were the result of the war, or rather, the west's response to that war.
But it's not as if Trump adopted a different Ukrainian policy to his predecessor, nor did Biden take a markedly more reckless line than Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, etc.. In other words, the war would have happened regardless.
As far as "the border" goes. The Wall ain't never gonna get built, and Trump wasn't particularly serious about the thing after he got elected.
I think the war and inflation are actually interrelated. First off inflation is not Putin's fault, it was well on its way last year long before the invasion of Ukraine. There was always going to be some inflationary pressure from Trump's massive stimulus packages. The insanity was compounding that inflation with a set of additional packages that pumped trillions of additional dollars into the economy at a time when labor force participation had fallen off of a cliff.
A while back pundits were asking why Putin chose to invade while Biden was in office rather than Trump. Was Trump really so bellicose that Putin dared not provoke him?
Maybe. But maybe Putin just looked at the inflation numbers coming out of the West and understood that the US and Europe had really screwed the pooch and were especially vulnerable. All of those sanctions Biden has "unleashed" have large left Putin unscathed while devastating his opponents. There is going to be a substantial amount of pain in Europe this winter, for example, due to heating oil costs. And inflation has essentially crippled Biden domestically and paralyzed the United States.
I'm going to explore this in more detail in a newsletter article but if you are Putin you probably want to wait for Trump to be re-elected in 2024 before culminating the invasion. $40 billion in US aid is enough to allow the Ukrainians to lose slowly but not enough to win. Trump is the guy who nickel and dimed Boeing over the cost of Air Force 1 and he approaches foreign policy with a businessman's eye towards return on investment. He is unlikely to view billions of US dollars in military and foreign aid as a good investment if it just delays Russian expansion into Ukraine and the US will be uniquely well positioned to apply leverage to the Ukrainians to extract a negotiated settlement.
Yves Smith, among others, has written about why the invasion happened when it did.
I would agree with your analysis regarding inflation, but the West's response to the invasion has only exacerbated existing inflationary pressures.
Ernest Hemingway wrote thusly:
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
—Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter,” Esquire, Sept. 1935..
The United States, with its typical extravagance, has done both.
“ 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.
The trick is that there is a bell curve of ability. If everyone had the exact same intellectual potential then eliminating environmental factors that degrade performance would conceivably get everyone to the exact IQ score.
But that's not the way that populations work. Individuals fall on a curve of intellectual ability. It sure looks like eliminating environmental barriers may allow an individual to reach his personal potential, but that cap could still easily place him in the bottom 20% of the country.
Right but a country that has an mean IQ that’s 10 points higher than the G7 median would be a richer country than it currently is.
The rest of the industrialized world is busily removing environmental barriers as well. I suggest that if that's really the path to world domination that the US should look into poisoning the drinking water of competitors like Canada.
"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 irony is, the educational establishment’s deterrence of blue collar professions may be what leads to a rise in wages. The world needs electricians and plumbers. As fewer go into these professions because all their counselors told them to go to college instead, the value of those services will only increase.
I have encouraged my children to get into a trade instead of pushing college and I have way too many college degrees. One son is interested in becoming a fireman, which would be a good fit for him and give him a good life.
I have family working various trades and they can make serious money as heavy equipment operators and union construction workers.
In Westchester County, NY there is enough self-segregation along these educational and socioeconomic lines that plumbers, electricians, builders, and even landscapers make tons of money. None of my neighbors here can so much as unclog a drain without professional help.
"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."
This is BS. Wages are set by the market. If there is high demand, and low supply wages are high. Lower demand and higher supply wages are low.
Moreover, and this is super important, wages are income to you, but a cost to someone else. So if those wages get to high, those jobs disappear.
In a purely market driven economy, yes. But unfortunately a) there is no purely free market economy anywhere on the planet and b) there is such a thing as regulatory capture. Look at the salary of medical professionals in the United States for example. If your concern is that physicians fees are eating up an inordinate amount of gross domestic product then you might well believe that simple economics (supply versus demand) would suggest that importing more doctors and nurses from abroad should work to alleviate the problem.
But that collides with the reality that the AMA and other professional medical associations have thrown up numerous roadblocks to easy certification of foreign doctors, roadblocks that are enshrined in law. It's the same mindset that requires years of trade school to work as a cosmetologist because "they work with dangerous chemicals". My guess is that it's rooted in both protectionism as well as an underlying cultural belief that schooling as a requirement for work is a necessary good. As opposed to just letting somebody read the instructions on the back of that box of hair dye.
If your argument is that we should reduce regulations that stifle market competition I'm all for that,
But that won't fix the bottom side of the market. For example, my mom was a janitor. She got paid low wages. That's pretty much always going to be the case.
It's more than just regulations. Look at the creep of credential requirements. Back in the 1950's somebody could get a middle class job as a secretary with a high school diploma and a typing class.
Flash forward to the present day and to get the same job you need a college degree. That explains the paradox of why a college diploma can increasing your personal earnings even as the rise in the number of college degree holders has no effect on aggregate measures such as GDP: a secretary is still a secretary. The only difference now is that to unlock a secretary's earning potential you need a college diploma, along with the attendant college debt.
Or look at illegal immigration. Different classes of immigrants put wage pressure on different segments of the economy. Manual laborers who enter the country illegally primary impact workers with only a high school diploma or less. If there was a flood of medical doctors running shady clinics without any type of government oversight would Democratic elites be so blasé about illegal immigration? I doubt it. Conveniently illegals do not compete for jobs against the professional class even as they make services like house cleaning, landscaping, construction, child care, etc. cheaper. Neat how that works out.
Isn't there a Red Queen problem here?
Since absolute learning has changed over decades, one has to keep up with that just to maintain the same place in the hierarchy, or otherwise will be entirely left out. So we might say that all of these educational interventions don't matter or won't change a child's rank, but don't all kids have to run to stay in the same place?
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.