"You know my take on why: those schools and programs that appear to have “the good stuff” are so perceived because the students within those schools and programs have been nonrandomly selected into them and are systematically inclined to perform well. "
Because their parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness on their kids' backs.
Great topic. My bias - i live in boston and my daughter attended Boston Latin, the only one of the three here that even approaches the bottom of NYC's eight. With the change in admission policy after 2020 my well off neighborhood was blocked from entry. So be it. What I don't grasp among commentators on the topic is that they miss that these are merely the AP classes for big messy cities with a majority disadvantaged population and they tend to match up demographically with those Scarsdale or Wellesley AP classes. Remember, unlike in suburbia, those of us of some means choose to live in the city in spite of the school system (overall size and percent in poverty not easy to overcome). I have read all the studies but they seem to have been conducted by those with bias or unfamiliarity with how they work. The real study would be to find high performing students who choose an open enrollment school in a city like Boston. Or to note that the last kids provided entry do underperform at an exam school like Boston Latin because the range from top to bottom so vast. In NYC the top.3 are so challenging to earn admission that there might not be this range. Yet the studies don't tend to capture the near misses because they attend #4-8 rather than an open entollment school.
“unlike in suburbia, those of us of some means choose to live in the city in spite of the school system”. Exactly. People who aren’t part of these districts don’t understand them. There are some upper/middle class people who live in cities. The ONLY way to get them to participate in the school systems is to provide options like gifted and talented schools or GT programs within the schools. Otherwise they opt out and go to private or charter schools. And keeping upper middle class people in a school district actually is highly beneficial for the districts. For that reason, keep GT programs.
The best part of these G&T schools or magnet schools in general is that it allows bright and motivated students to get away from disruptive students for parents who can't afford private school or can't afford to move to good public school zones.
My local high school is the highest rated general public school in our state. The teachers are OK, but the parents are highly motivated to move to the area.
We don't have a lot of private schools nearby and only a few charters, as most people would prefer their kids would go to our high school.
We do have some excellent magnet schools in our district. Anyone who acts up gets kicked out, so there are no behavior issues. If my kids didn't go to this high school, we would enroll them in the magnet academy.
School resources are wasted trying to eliminate the achievement gap. Better to bring back alternative high schools for bad behavior students. Wish we could cut all funding of chapters, but I get why parents make that choice.
All good points but studies show that these magnet schools have no statistical advantage ! And that is Freddie’s point, that we are wasting money on this system and presumably we should use the money to improve schools that are poorly funded.
It goes to my response that I linked for me, but this is what I wrote:
“Ok - last time this came up I did a quasi deep dive into the Fryerr paper on these exam school issues.
In the discussion of that paper, the authors discuss these two significant problems with their study:
1) They were using the cutoffs for each of the NYC exam schools. So they use the Stuyvesant cutoff, the Bronx Science cutoff and the Brooklyn Tech cutoff. The problem is that, for those first two cutoffs, a lot of the kids will go to Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech if they don't make it into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science (or they prefer one of the schools over others). So actually a significant proportion of your population is between the exam schools, so for this group you are comparing the effect of Stuyvesant vs. Science vs. Tech which I would guess would be expected to show almost no difference in the grand scheme of things.
2) Let's take the population who didn't make it into any of these exam schools. The authors straight up don't know what happened to these students and whether they stayed in the public school system. Are you now comparing exam school goers versus a large chunk of parochial and private school students? Probably.
So, basically, I'm not sure these studies are comparing people who just failed to get into exam schools but stayed in the urban public schools versus people in exam schools.
I went back to look at the Fryer paper - here's the quote from their intro:
"For example, nearly 40 percent of students just ineligible for Stuyvesant attend Bronx Science, with another 20 percent leaving the NYC public school system altogether. Thus, our estimates may be less about the impact of attending an exam school per se, than about the impact of attending a school with higher-achieving peers more generally."”
I think their point is supposed to be that students who just didn’t make the exam schools and stayed in regular public school ended up fine, which is often the claim assigned to this paper and others like it. But that’s largely not what they ended up measuring.
The only advantage is better school discipline. The refusal to discipline kids creates the demand for magnet and charter schools, as well as private schools.
So let's say we accept the position that these selective schools don't actually help, and neither do charter schools or Mississippi-Miracle-reading-approaches or anything else. Is there a good explanation Freddie has written as to why we should do school at all or what we should want our schools to be like? Like the natural conclusion seems to be that we should either spend as little as possible on schools since spending more won't help (because there's nothing effective to spend it on) or we should like convert schools to fun daycares where kids just play videogames or whatever (since they can't be effective, they might as well be fun).
His point is they don't help with relative gains (and thus improving social equality) though, not that schools fail to educate per se. It's more, you can't magically change a low-ability student to a high-ability student and vice versa.
Oh ok. But these schools could help kids without improving equality - like if they helped the smartest 5th graders read at a 9th grade level instead of a 7th grade level, that would actually be bad for equality. So does he independently think that schools can't improve equality but also happen not to harm equality by accelerating the advantage of the smartest kids?
Also, is there some article or book with his like positive case of what education should be, if he were in charge?
tl;dr schools are a societal mirror, asking them to fix "inequality" without going full Harrison Bergerson is a fool's errand, it's crucial to distinguish absolute learning from relative learning, "good at school" ability is very probably not a blank-slate quality, and also Selection Cutoff Rules Everything Around Me (SCREAM): https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education .
That's really helpful. But as Freddie's post notes, it is very possible to improve absolute learning under Freddie's theory. But every time I see Freddie discuss a way to do that (elite schools, charter schools, Mississippi miracle), he thinks it doesn't work - even though that potential absolute improvement is something totally independent from the Cult of Smart idea.
The reason I think this matters is that I only care about absolute learning - I understand many people want schools to do the other thing but I don't care about that. If Freddie were only talking about relative improvements, I would agree with him. But, even though the theory is about relative, he seems equally skeptical of even the idea of absolute progress whenever there's a proposal as to how it might happen.
I sometimes suspect that this is because Freddie would oppose absolute improvement that was not relative improvement - like if I made the top 1% of kids twice as smart, he would be against that. But because that's a difficult argument to make, he tries to stop people from trying by denying the efficacy of all such attempts, without a real theoretical basis.
I also just kind of think it's insane to say "Education Doesn't Work" because it doesn't improve relative outcomes, when I would wager that a majority of people think the "work" that education should do relates to absolute outcomes.
My understanding is that Freddie is long on elite schools, charter schools, and elite charter schools mostly or entirely being a result of the statistical mirage discussed briefly in this post + at great length ad nauseum in many others. The research record genuinely is damning here, in a way that the media tends to be ignorant and/or selectively forgetful about. If we want to stick to the realm of empirical findings, then we must go to the data, not a collection of lived experience anecdotes: you'll get absolute learning most anywhere, the premium for paying premium prices is not much better (or nonexistent and sometimes even negative! many charters are actively bad!), and anyway the structure of society is such that we genuinely do mostly care about and reward relative rather than absolute learning. Cf. Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education". A straight C+ Ivy grad is still pretty smart, smart enough on an absolute level, but try selling that in an interview; they'll go and hire the 4.20 GPA A+ grad nine times out of ten, and pay ten times more for the privilege too.
It's difficult to separate out gains from inherent academic aptitude + reduced behavioural problems + better network effects (basically, a superior student body) from the gains granted *by the school itself*. Here again the general consensus seems to be that there just isn't really a "secret sauce" of superlative instruction that one only finds at hallowed halls like Harvard. The methods of instruction, teaching materials, textbooks, quality of lectures, etc are overall not too much different from what you'd get at a good state school. One can also look at the graveyard of boondoggles in edtech for other skulls lining the road. Turns out you can bring a horse to computers in every classroom, but you can't make him think!
The Mississippi Miracle on Ice is a little more complicated. Here I think Freddie is pattern matching to previous incidents where schools were said to have made a breakthrough (he gives the example of The Texas Miracle), but upon further investigation, it's revealed to largely be smoke and mirrors. For example, that average test scores went up not because of any meaningful changes in instruction, but because poorly-performing students were dropped from the data via expulsion, not taking the tests in the first place, etc. Such scandals really did happen! But we're not certain that's what's happening in Mississippi, won't know for at least a few more years as longitudinal cohort data trickles in, and I think it's fair to say Freddie's maybe been overconfident in dismissing it out of hand. But I wouldn't ascribe this to malice or secretly wanting the top 1% dumbed down (this is covered pretty well in his book) - it mostly seems a product of cynicism, of years spent in the ed research mines and watching every promising intervention turn to dust in your hands again and again and again. One could be forgiven for knee-jerk skeptical reactions.
I really appreciate that thorough and thoughtful response. I guess I still find it really counterintuitive that there wouldn't be teaching approaches that improve absolute outcomes. Like I'm the kind of kid who did great in school, and I guess I would have done pretty well regardless of what my school did, but it really seems like I learned more from some teachers, and other kids agreed that those teachers were better. The idea that that's not a real thing seems implausible to me, even if it is hard to find in studies.
I would intuitively think it would be uncontroversial that there are better and worse ways to teach like chess or clarinet. But maybe that would also fall out in statistics?
I think Freddie is saying here that they don't help with even absolute performance, much less relative. I'll include a relevant quote from the article below.
I'd note that if Freddie were only talking about lack of narrowing of the achievement gap between high performing students and low performing one, there would be a case to be made for the magnet schools -- why *not* allow the most talented kids to operate to their potential. Otherwise, it would be like closing down music schools and technical schools because they help the most musically or technically inclined kids increase their performance relative to the rest of us. If these schools really make the best mathematicians and neuroscientists *better* than they otherwise would be, wouldn't that be good even if it increased the gap between them and the worst mathematicians and neuroscientists?
Instead, Freddie is arguing that they will be equally good if they attend a randomly chosen public school or a magnet school, which raises the question of should we be sending them to school at all. Here's a relevant quote - there are several in his article.
"I can tell you that there’s no responsible summary of 'research' that suggests that attending these schools matter for either high school performance, college attendance, or later economic outcomes. This makes perfect sense if you assume, as is sensible, that educational outcomes are dominantly the product of student-side factors rather than school side factors, as Douglas Detterman explained a decade ago. Winter talks about the emotional, affective problems faced by overqualified students stuck in slower-moving classrooms and asserts future negative academic consequences. But there simply is no responsible evidence that suggesting that this dynamic exists. Instead, what we see is that students gravitate to a particular level of performance consistent with their individual talent, situation, and support system regardless of where they go to school, succeeding or failing at the same rates regardless of whether they attend a high school with a long list of distinguished alumni. As usual, 'school quality' just doesn’t have much effect, if any."
I am the product of G&T programs. I spent years in semi-exclusive private schools. Dropped out at 16, got a GED and started college in a math/physics direction with a goal to be doing particle physics. Didn't quite work out that way though. Schooling had little to do with how my life panned out. I spent 30-odd years doing computer stuff - circuit design, chip design, software and eventually network engineering before ageism reared it's ugly head. Finished my work-life as a general contractor doing residential remodel and handyman work. Schooling as a competitive meritocracy was simple, but it had no impact on the trajectory of my life.
Inherently (I believe), I have a built-in capability to see problems in a holistic way. Doesn't matter if it is a math problem, an electronic circuit, a software problem or how to fit a bunch of kitchen cabinets into place. The skill I have isn't one that any school taught me nor that any school encouraged or gave me a taste for. Nowadays my problem-solving skill is involved in running a small water system for a tiny community in the Colorado Rockies. I knew nothing of this task, but the ability to learn and the ability to step back and SEE the big picture and how things fit together in a sort of holographic/holistic way is something that no one taught me or, from my experience with the educational system (BS, two MS's) is capable of teaching.
I firmly believe that there are inherent talents that we are all born with. I can't draw a picture to save my life. I can't play guitar either, despite 56 years of trying. Yet I can easily (relatively) figure out the maths involved in various particle interactions, analog circuit design and various software algorithms - to say nothing of the structural engineering involved in designing a large addition to your house. I suck at so much else. These are skills no school could teach me because I was basically unteachable. I learned on my own in the directions my personality and interests took me.
An educational system HAS to recognize that we are not all the same. We are not equal and the outcomes of an education cannot be we are all equally qualified or equally "worth" the same in a job market. We should deal with people as individuals with individual skills and proclivities. My best friend growing up could ski like a Olympian and play guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix, can do woodworking like an old master, but the dude couldn't add three and two or find the square root of 4. We all have different talents ingrained genetically I believe. Freddie is great at wordsmithing. I'm not that far behind except I don't think people give a shit what I have to say. My recently deceased sister (adopted) was the queen of color matching and figuring out what stuff matched artfully, but to me, it was worse than Greek - it was African Bushman speak.
We all have our innate skills and abilities and until the educational system recognizes that and finds a way to cater to that, we have no educational system. I could've been the next Feynmann or Oppenheimer but.... that wasn't where I wanted to go. I was lucky, I got to do things in this life that gave me purpose and fulfillment. Some folks find fulfillment in making a damn good cup of coffee or laying a row of brick perfectly. We all need to find some place where what we do gives us that feeling of expressing ourselves to the perfection of our self.
A one-size-fits-all educational system doesn't do that.
Good story! But I think that you did not specifically benefit from the so called elite schools despite your intelectual talent. Probably these schools are better for people with more traditional math and language skills but not everyone will flourish there.
Oh, I definitely did benefit - I got calculus and other advanced maths and access to college level classes while in high school. Language skills... well I started reading at age 3. Obviously not everyone has those skills inherent. I struggled with other things - artistically and socially in particular. I still, at age 66, struggle with social interaction. I have no filter and say what I think and unfortunately that frequently comes off as unkind or unaware of the impact of my words. That impacted my social and professional life.
Ok - last time this came up I did a quasi deep dive into the Fryerr paper on these exam school issues.
In the discussion of that paper, the authors discuss these two significant problems with their study:
1) They were using the cutoffs for each of the NYC exam schools. So they use the Stuyvesant cutoff, the Bronx Science cutoff and the Brooklyn Tech cutoff. The problem is that, for those first two cutoffs, a lot of the kids will go to Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech if they don't make it into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science (or they prefer one of the schools over others). So actually a significant proportion of your population is between the exam schools, so for this group you are comparing the effect of Stuyvesant vs. Science vs. Tech which I would guess would be expected to show almost no difference in the grand scheme of things.
2) Let's take the population who didn't make it into any of these exam schools. The authors straight up don't know what happened to these students and whether they stayed in the public school system. Are you now comparing exam school goers versus a large chunk of parochial and private school students? Probably.
So, basically, I'm not sure these studies are comparing people who just failed to get into exam schools but stayed in the urban public schools versus people in exam schools.
I went back to look at the Fryer paper - here's the quote from their intro:
"For example, nearly 40 percent of students just ineligible for Stuyvesant attend Bronx Science, with another 20 percent leaving the NYC public school system altogether. Thus, our estimates may be less about the impact of attending an exam school per se, than about the impact of attending a school with higher-achieving peers more generally."
:::Waving hand madly::: Graduate of a NY G&T high school here! Hunter High School, which, back when I went there, was an all-girls high school that went from eighth to twelfth grade. Entrance _did_ depend upon acing an entrance exam, & I still remember the mnemonics I used to remember the spelling words my impoverished single mother rightly guessed would be on the test. ("Knowledge isn't privilege 'cause you have to climb over an extra D! Dessert has a double helping of yummy s's!!!" Etc etc)
The exam was the very familiar reading comprehension & multiple choice arithmetic questions. After I read Mr. deB's essay, I tried—and failed—to picture what kinds of entrance exams they might administer to identify gifted & talented five-year-olds, so I skimmed Winters' "New Yorker" article—okay, they use IQ-like tests. I'd have to agree: IQ tests are problematic.
But for older kids... I mean, my struggling Mom was trying to support herself and me on a secretary's salary back in the "Mad Man" era. She wanted a school where music, art, physics, and languages were part of the curriculum—a private school, in other words. Only private schools, even back in the Jurassic, cost more than twice her yearly salary.
I was a weird kid. I loved learning! I loved school! At PS 87, I was getting picked on because I loved school. Had I not gotten into Hunter, it is very likely that protective mimicry would have persuaded me to stop loving school.
So, I basically think G&T schools should be the template for every school in NYC.
What do you mean "a school where music, art, physics and languages were part of the curriculum"?
Surely a state curriculum requires them all to be available, which even private schools must abide by. So are you referring to only one of music or art being required to graduate from high school rather than both?
Former non-magnet, non G&T Chicago Public Schools teacher here. What happens or doesn't happen at home is, as always, the best determinant of any individual student's tragectory. For low-income urban families, getting one's kid into a magnet school is a huge achievement.
The NYT and their ilk just can't DEIGN to acknowledge that regular public high schools schools in cities like NY and Chicago have some *serious* unresolved and ongoing issues - such as gangs. Yes - gangs still exist. And many students who are parents themselves. And many many students who enter 9th grade reading at a 4th grade level. And many many students who arrive and depart school each day with nothing but themselves and their phones - no books, no spiral notebooks, no laptop, no tablet, no writing implements.
The people just to the left of the G&T cutoffs don't end up going to those schools either. Which is part of the issue with the research FdB cites. There isn't just a continuum of test scores. There's also a continuum of schools.
Agreed re the continuum of schools - but a fair amount of students who don't make it into a magnet - at least in Chicago - DO attend regular neighborhood schools. They wind up in a self-contained IB program or something similar.
Even assuming the programs don't ultimately affect educational outcomes, aren't parents who can't afford private schools also obsessed with their students gaining admission to them so they can get their kids away from the crime and mayhem in many gen ed public schools? If you make schools afraid, or make it illegal, to suspend or expel disruptive or even violent students, you increase the demand for schools like the G&T ones that exclude those types of students via the test requirement.
The Mayor and his progressive allies have a fundamental problem: they oppose school discipline, they oppose segmenting students by ability, and they oppose public charter schools, let alone publicly funded private school scholarships. This will force non-wealthy NYC parents either to put their kids in public schools the parents believe to be dangerous, or to flee the city for a less progressive jurisdiction. Many will do what the progressive plutocrats are now doing in California, faced with a possible wealth tax: flee to Florida and elsewhere as Zuck has just done and the Google guys are doing.
The schools are also an achievement badge that makes getting the next rung easier. Parents probably want them for both reasons. If someone gets into Hunter, stays there four years and gets good grades, that's a screen for the next level.
It's tough for teachers at schools in deprived areas though because the perception above (though false) means that parents with higher-achieving kids tend ot remove them from such schools when they can and enroll them in private education or schools with ''better'' postcodes.
What Freddie said definitely chimes with my experience as a teacher, though. I've been surprised at the ability of some students to focus, learn and achieve very well on tests even when subjected to classes with many disruptive students and myriad cover teachers.
As someone who tested into a state magnet school and managed to get out of my tiny rural town of 500 people by doing so, I believe that such schools do provide a significant benefit for some of their students.
I'm more doubtful that moving from one school in NYC to another school in NYC is similarly impactful.
The schools need to offer classes at the level of the student. Students come to school with a wide variety in preparation and capability. Those who are more capable are going to learn faster - or at least be able to learn faster. By the time they exit 5th grade you are going to have students who are reading at a 12th grade reading level, many of whom are ready for algebra, and others who are barely literate and having difficulties with arithmetic. Subjecting such students to the same material is educational malpractice - and I do not care if that is the way it has been done.
My grandfather had problems with the schools in his day over this issue - and that was well over a century ago. And most students at the time did not graduate high school then.
My kids and grandkids had and are having the same issues with the schools.
In the end I supplementing / driving my kids education. My youngest daughter dropped out of high school after 10th grade to do early admissions and an engineering degree. My son did the college in high school route - but I had had to drive his math education so that he was ready for calculus in what would have been 11th grade. The schools were not helpful - but in the end got out of my way and my kids way.
I only know me, but boy did I need that G&T. My mom camped out all night to get me into a magnet school for elementary in my inner city system. In middle school, I was able to do math at my own pace and went very far. Would I be an engineer now without that? Maybe? Later, I was kicked out of multiple basic suburban high school classes for already knowing the material (was made to run office messages). I could have gotten more from high school. Giving me enriching material and peers that were on my level in those early years was huge for me, and I don't see where that hurts other students.
Do the regular NYC high schools offer AP/IB classes for any motivated student who wants them or are the G&T schools the only places that offer them? In the Portland, Oregon areas almost all the schools offer AP/IB classes for any student who wants to take them. Any TAG program only goes through 8th grade. The AP/IB classes have a mix of regular students and kids coming out of TAG middle school programs. Both groups of kids do fine overall in the advanced classes.
"You know my take on why: those schools and programs that appear to have “the good stuff” are so perceived because the students within those schools and programs have been nonrandomly selected into them and are systematically inclined to perform well. "
Because their parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness on their kids' backs.
Happy to discuss my experience as a non-riding parent and introduce you to others.
Not true. 😀
Great topic. My bias - i live in boston and my daughter attended Boston Latin, the only one of the three here that even approaches the bottom of NYC's eight. With the change in admission policy after 2020 my well off neighborhood was blocked from entry. So be it. What I don't grasp among commentators on the topic is that they miss that these are merely the AP classes for big messy cities with a majority disadvantaged population and they tend to match up demographically with those Scarsdale or Wellesley AP classes. Remember, unlike in suburbia, those of us of some means choose to live in the city in spite of the school system (overall size and percent in poverty not easy to overcome). I have read all the studies but they seem to have been conducted by those with bias or unfamiliarity with how they work. The real study would be to find high performing students who choose an open enrollment school in a city like Boston. Or to note that the last kids provided entry do underperform at an exam school like Boston Latin because the range from top to bottom so vast. In NYC the top.3 are so challenging to earn admission that there might not be this range. Yet the studies don't tend to capture the near misses because they attend #4-8 rather than an open entollment school.
“unlike in suburbia, those of us of some means choose to live in the city in spite of the school system”. Exactly. People who aren’t part of these districts don’t understand them. There are some upper/middle class people who live in cities. The ONLY way to get them to participate in the school systems is to provide options like gifted and talented schools or GT programs within the schools. Otherwise they opt out and go to private or charter schools. And keeping upper middle class people in a school district actually is highly beneficial for the districts. For that reason, keep GT programs.
That’s a good reason to keep them despite the fact that they provide no statistical benefit 😎
> so are a mountain of recent opinion pieces like this comprehensively misleading one published today in the NYT
Link looks broken, definitely not to a recent NYT opinion piece
The best part of these G&T schools or magnet schools in general is that it allows bright and motivated students to get away from disruptive students for parents who can't afford private school or can't afford to move to good public school zones.
My local high school is the highest rated general public school in our state. The teachers are OK, but the parents are highly motivated to move to the area.
We don't have a lot of private schools nearby and only a few charters, as most people would prefer their kids would go to our high school.
We do have some excellent magnet schools in our district. Anyone who acts up gets kicked out, so there are no behavior issues. If my kids didn't go to this high school, we would enroll them in the magnet academy.
School resources are wasted trying to eliminate the achievement gap. Better to bring back alternative high schools for bad behavior students. Wish we could cut all funding of chapters, but I get why parents make that choice.
This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say. Being around disruptive behavior gets exhausting.
All good points but studies show that these magnet schools have no statistical advantage ! And that is Freddie’s point, that we are wasting money on this system and presumably we should use the money to improve schools that are poorly funded.
Check out some of the problems acknowledged by the studies themselves:
https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/no-thats-not-what-the-research-says?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=215931892
I think you pasted the wrong link. I would like to read what you intended to share.
It goes to my response that I linked for me, but this is what I wrote:
“Ok - last time this came up I did a quasi deep dive into the Fryerr paper on these exam school issues.
In the discussion of that paper, the authors discuss these two significant problems with their study:
1) They were using the cutoffs for each of the NYC exam schools. So they use the Stuyvesant cutoff, the Bronx Science cutoff and the Brooklyn Tech cutoff. The problem is that, for those first two cutoffs, a lot of the kids will go to Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech if they don't make it into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science (or they prefer one of the schools over others). So actually a significant proportion of your population is between the exam schools, so for this group you are comparing the effect of Stuyvesant vs. Science vs. Tech which I would guess would be expected to show almost no difference in the grand scheme of things.
2) Let's take the population who didn't make it into any of these exam schools. The authors straight up don't know what happened to these students and whether they stayed in the public school system. Are you now comparing exam school goers versus a large chunk of parochial and private school students? Probably.
So, basically, I'm not sure these studies are comparing people who just failed to get into exam schools but stayed in the urban public schools versus people in exam schools.
I went back to look at the Fryer paper - here's the quote from their intro:
"For example, nearly 40 percent of students just ineligible for Stuyvesant attend Bronx Science, with another 20 percent leaving the NYC public school system altogether. Thus, our estimates may be less about the impact of attending an exam school per se, than about the impact of attending a school with higher-achieving peers more generally."”
So according to the quote you reference, the authors would say that their conclusion apply to the schools which are the point of this article.
You can disagree with them but you seem to be implying that the authors wouldn’t endorse this post, which isn’t correct based on what you offered here
I think their point is supposed to be that students who just didn’t make the exam schools and stayed in regular public school ended up fine, which is often the claim assigned to this paper and others like it. But that’s largely not what they ended up measuring.
The only advantage is better school discipline. The refusal to discipline kids creates the demand for magnet and charter schools, as well as private schools.
So let's say we accept the position that these selective schools don't actually help, and neither do charter schools or Mississippi-Miracle-reading-approaches or anything else. Is there a good explanation Freddie has written as to why we should do school at all or what we should want our schools to be like? Like the natural conclusion seems to be that we should either spend as little as possible on schools since spending more won't help (because there's nothing effective to spend it on) or we should like convert schools to fun daycares where kids just play videogames or whatever (since they can't be effective, they might as well be fun).
His point is they don't help with relative gains (and thus improving social equality) though, not that schools fail to educate per se. It's more, you can't magically change a low-ability student to a high-ability student and vice versa.
Oh ok. But these schools could help kids without improving equality - like if they helped the smartest 5th graders read at a 9th grade level instead of a 7th grade level, that would actually be bad for equality. So does he independently think that schools can't improve equality but also happen not to harm equality by accelerating the advantage of the smartest kids?
Also, is there some article or book with his like positive case of what education should be, if he were in charge?
The post: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-30
The book: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/cult-of-smart/
tl;dr schools are a societal mirror, asking them to fix "inequality" without going full Harrison Bergerson is a fool's errand, it's crucial to distinguish absolute learning from relative learning, "good at school" ability is very probably not a blank-slate quality, and also Selection Cutoff Rules Everything Around Me (SCREAM): https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education .
That's really helpful. But as Freddie's post notes, it is very possible to improve absolute learning under Freddie's theory. But every time I see Freddie discuss a way to do that (elite schools, charter schools, Mississippi miracle), he thinks it doesn't work - even though that potential absolute improvement is something totally independent from the Cult of Smart idea.
The reason I think this matters is that I only care about absolute learning - I understand many people want schools to do the other thing but I don't care about that. If Freddie were only talking about relative improvements, I would agree with him. But, even though the theory is about relative, he seems equally skeptical of even the idea of absolute progress whenever there's a proposal as to how it might happen.
I sometimes suspect that this is because Freddie would oppose absolute improvement that was not relative improvement - like if I made the top 1% of kids twice as smart, he would be against that. But because that's a difficult argument to make, he tries to stop people from trying by denying the efficacy of all such attempts, without a real theoretical basis.
I also just kind of think it's insane to say "Education Doesn't Work" because it doesn't improve relative outcomes, when I would wager that a majority of people think the "work" that education should do relates to absolute outcomes.
My understanding is that Freddie is long on elite schools, charter schools, and elite charter schools mostly or entirely being a result of the statistical mirage discussed briefly in this post + at great length ad nauseum in many others. The research record genuinely is damning here, in a way that the media tends to be ignorant and/or selectively forgetful about. If we want to stick to the realm of empirical findings, then we must go to the data, not a collection of lived experience anecdotes: you'll get absolute learning most anywhere, the premium for paying premium prices is not much better (or nonexistent and sometimes even negative! many charters are actively bad!), and anyway the structure of society is such that we genuinely do mostly care about and reward relative rather than absolute learning. Cf. Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education". A straight C+ Ivy grad is still pretty smart, smart enough on an absolute level, but try selling that in an interview; they'll go and hire the 4.20 GPA A+ grad nine times out of ten, and pay ten times more for the privilege too.
It's difficult to separate out gains from inherent academic aptitude + reduced behavioural problems + better network effects (basically, a superior student body) from the gains granted *by the school itself*. Here again the general consensus seems to be that there just isn't really a "secret sauce" of superlative instruction that one only finds at hallowed halls like Harvard. The methods of instruction, teaching materials, textbooks, quality of lectures, etc are overall not too much different from what you'd get at a good state school. One can also look at the graveyard of boondoggles in edtech for other skulls lining the road. Turns out you can bring a horse to computers in every classroom, but you can't make him think!
The Mississippi Miracle on Ice is a little more complicated. Here I think Freddie is pattern matching to previous incidents where schools were said to have made a breakthrough (he gives the example of The Texas Miracle), but upon further investigation, it's revealed to largely be smoke and mirrors. For example, that average test scores went up not because of any meaningful changes in instruction, but because poorly-performing students were dropped from the data via expulsion, not taking the tests in the first place, etc. Such scandals really did happen! But we're not certain that's what's happening in Mississippi, won't know for at least a few more years as longitudinal cohort data trickles in, and I think it's fair to say Freddie's maybe been overconfident in dismissing it out of hand. But I wouldn't ascribe this to malice or secretly wanting the top 1% dumbed down (this is covered pretty well in his book) - it mostly seems a product of cynicism, of years spent in the ed research mines and watching every promising intervention turn to dust in your hands again and again and again. One could be forgiven for knee-jerk skeptical reactions.
I really appreciate that thorough and thoughtful response. I guess I still find it really counterintuitive that there wouldn't be teaching approaches that improve absolute outcomes. Like I'm the kind of kid who did great in school, and I guess I would have done pretty well regardless of what my school did, but it really seems like I learned more from some teachers, and other kids agreed that those teachers were better. The idea that that's not a real thing seems implausible to me, even if it is hard to find in studies.
I would intuitively think it would be uncontroversial that there are better and worse ways to teach like chess or clarinet. But maybe that would also fall out in statistics?
I think Freddie is saying here that they don't help with even absolute performance, much less relative. I'll include a relevant quote from the article below.
I'd note that if Freddie were only talking about lack of narrowing of the achievement gap between high performing students and low performing one, there would be a case to be made for the magnet schools -- why *not* allow the most talented kids to operate to their potential. Otherwise, it would be like closing down music schools and technical schools because they help the most musically or technically inclined kids increase their performance relative to the rest of us. If these schools really make the best mathematicians and neuroscientists *better* than they otherwise would be, wouldn't that be good even if it increased the gap between them and the worst mathematicians and neuroscientists?
Instead, Freddie is arguing that they will be equally good if they attend a randomly chosen public school or a magnet school, which raises the question of should we be sending them to school at all. Here's a relevant quote - there are several in his article.
"I can tell you that there’s no responsible summary of 'research' that suggests that attending these schools matter for either high school performance, college attendance, or later economic outcomes. This makes perfect sense if you assume, as is sensible, that educational outcomes are dominantly the product of student-side factors rather than school side factors, as Douglas Detterman explained a decade ago. Winter talks about the emotional, affective problems faced by overqualified students stuck in slower-moving classrooms and asserts future negative academic consequences. But there simply is no responsible evidence that suggesting that this dynamic exists. Instead, what we see is that students gravitate to a particular level of performance consistent with their individual talent, situation, and support system regardless of where they go to school, succeeding or failing at the same rates regardless of whether they attend a high school with a long list of distinguished alumni. As usual, 'school quality' just doesn’t have much effect, if any."
I am the product of G&T programs. I spent years in semi-exclusive private schools. Dropped out at 16, got a GED and started college in a math/physics direction with a goal to be doing particle physics. Didn't quite work out that way though. Schooling had little to do with how my life panned out. I spent 30-odd years doing computer stuff - circuit design, chip design, software and eventually network engineering before ageism reared it's ugly head. Finished my work-life as a general contractor doing residential remodel and handyman work. Schooling as a competitive meritocracy was simple, but it had no impact on the trajectory of my life.
Inherently (I believe), I have a built-in capability to see problems in a holistic way. Doesn't matter if it is a math problem, an electronic circuit, a software problem or how to fit a bunch of kitchen cabinets into place. The skill I have isn't one that any school taught me nor that any school encouraged or gave me a taste for. Nowadays my problem-solving skill is involved in running a small water system for a tiny community in the Colorado Rockies. I knew nothing of this task, but the ability to learn and the ability to step back and SEE the big picture and how things fit together in a sort of holographic/holistic way is something that no one taught me or, from my experience with the educational system (BS, two MS's) is capable of teaching.
I firmly believe that there are inherent talents that we are all born with. I can't draw a picture to save my life. I can't play guitar either, despite 56 years of trying. Yet I can easily (relatively) figure out the maths involved in various particle interactions, analog circuit design and various software algorithms - to say nothing of the structural engineering involved in designing a large addition to your house. I suck at so much else. These are skills no school could teach me because I was basically unteachable. I learned on my own in the directions my personality and interests took me.
An educational system HAS to recognize that we are not all the same. We are not equal and the outcomes of an education cannot be we are all equally qualified or equally "worth" the same in a job market. We should deal with people as individuals with individual skills and proclivities. My best friend growing up could ski like a Olympian and play guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn or Jimi Hendrix, can do woodworking like an old master, but the dude couldn't add three and two or find the square root of 4. We all have different talents ingrained genetically I believe. Freddie is great at wordsmithing. I'm not that far behind except I don't think people give a shit what I have to say. My recently deceased sister (adopted) was the queen of color matching and figuring out what stuff matched artfully, but to me, it was worse than Greek - it was African Bushman speak.
We all have our innate skills and abilities and until the educational system recognizes that and finds a way to cater to that, we have no educational system. I could've been the next Feynmann or Oppenheimer but.... that wasn't where I wanted to go. I was lucky, I got to do things in this life that gave me purpose and fulfillment. Some folks find fulfillment in making a damn good cup of coffee or laying a row of brick perfectly. We all need to find some place where what we do gives us that feeling of expressing ourselves to the perfection of our self.
A one-size-fits-all educational system doesn't do that.
Great comment. I'm a teacher and I wish the education sector recognised what you wisely write here.
Good story! But I think that you did not specifically benefit from the so called elite schools despite your intelectual talent. Probably these schools are better for people with more traditional math and language skills but not everyone will flourish there.
Oh, I definitely did benefit - I got calculus and other advanced maths and access to college level classes while in high school. Language skills... well I started reading at age 3. Obviously not everyone has those skills inherent. I struggled with other things - artistically and socially in particular. I still, at age 66, struggle with social interaction. I have no filter and say what I think and unfortunately that frequently comes off as unkind or unaware of the impact of my words. That impacted my social and professional life.
Ok - last time this came up I did a quasi deep dive into the Fryerr paper on these exam school issues.
In the discussion of that paper, the authors discuss these two significant problems with their study:
1) They were using the cutoffs for each of the NYC exam schools. So they use the Stuyvesant cutoff, the Bronx Science cutoff and the Brooklyn Tech cutoff. The problem is that, for those first two cutoffs, a lot of the kids will go to Bronx Science or Brooklyn Tech if they don't make it into Stuyvesant or Bronx Science (or they prefer one of the schools over others). So actually a significant proportion of your population is between the exam schools, so for this group you are comparing the effect of Stuyvesant vs. Science vs. Tech which I would guess would be expected to show almost no difference in the grand scheme of things.
2) Let's take the population who didn't make it into any of these exam schools. The authors straight up don't know what happened to these students and whether they stayed in the public school system. Are you now comparing exam school goers versus a large chunk of parochial and private school students? Probably.
So, basically, I'm not sure these studies are comparing people who just failed to get into exam schools but stayed in the urban public schools versus people in exam schools.
I went back to look at the Fryer paper - here's the quote from their intro:
"For example, nearly 40 percent of students just ineligible for Stuyvesant attend Bronx Science, with another 20 percent leaving the NYC public school system altogether. Thus, our estimates may be less about the impact of attending an exam school per se, than about the impact of attending a school with higher-achieving peers more generally."
:::Waving hand madly::: Graduate of a NY G&T high school here! Hunter High School, which, back when I went there, was an all-girls high school that went from eighth to twelfth grade. Entrance _did_ depend upon acing an entrance exam, & I still remember the mnemonics I used to remember the spelling words my impoverished single mother rightly guessed would be on the test. ("Knowledge isn't privilege 'cause you have to climb over an extra D! Dessert has a double helping of yummy s's!!!" Etc etc)
The exam was the very familiar reading comprehension & multiple choice arithmetic questions. After I read Mr. deB's essay, I tried—and failed—to picture what kinds of entrance exams they might administer to identify gifted & talented five-year-olds, so I skimmed Winters' "New Yorker" article—okay, they use IQ-like tests. I'd have to agree: IQ tests are problematic.
But for older kids... I mean, my struggling Mom was trying to support herself and me on a secretary's salary back in the "Mad Man" era. She wanted a school where music, art, physics, and languages were part of the curriculum—a private school, in other words. Only private schools, even back in the Jurassic, cost more than twice her yearly salary.
I was a weird kid. I loved learning! I loved school! At PS 87, I was getting picked on because I loved school. Had I not gotten into Hunter, it is very likely that protective mimicry would have persuaded me to stop loving school.
So, I basically think G&T schools should be the template for every school in NYC.
What do you mean "a school where music, art, physics and languages were part of the curriculum"?
Surely a state curriculum requires them all to be available, which even private schools must abide by. So are you referring to only one of music or art being required to graduate from high school rather than both?
Former non-magnet, non G&T Chicago Public Schools teacher here. What happens or doesn't happen at home is, as always, the best determinant of any individual student's tragectory. For low-income urban families, getting one's kid into a magnet school is a huge achievement.
The NYT and their ilk just can't DEIGN to acknowledge that regular public high schools schools in cities like NY and Chicago have some *serious* unresolved and ongoing issues - such as gangs. Yes - gangs still exist. And many students who are parents themselves. And many many students who enter 9th grade reading at a 4th grade level. And many many students who arrive and depart school each day with nothing but themselves and their phones - no books, no spiral notebooks, no laptop, no tablet, no writing implements.
The people just to the left of the G&T cutoffs don't end up going to those schools either. Which is part of the issue with the research FdB cites. There isn't just a continuum of test scores. There's also a continuum of schools.
Agreed re the continuum of schools - but a fair amount of students who don't make it into a magnet - at least in Chicago - DO attend regular neighborhood schools. They wind up in a self-contained IB program or something similar.
Even assuming the programs don't ultimately affect educational outcomes, aren't parents who can't afford private schools also obsessed with their students gaining admission to them so they can get their kids away from the crime and mayhem in many gen ed public schools? If you make schools afraid, or make it illegal, to suspend or expel disruptive or even violent students, you increase the demand for schools like the G&T ones that exclude those types of students via the test requirement.
The Mayor and his progressive allies have a fundamental problem: they oppose school discipline, they oppose segmenting students by ability, and they oppose public charter schools, let alone publicly funded private school scholarships. This will force non-wealthy NYC parents either to put their kids in public schools the parents believe to be dangerous, or to flee the city for a less progressive jurisdiction. Many will do what the progressive plutocrats are now doing in California, faced with a possible wealth tax: flee to Florida and elsewhere as Zuck has just done and the Google guys are doing.
The schools are also an achievement badge that makes getting the next rung easier. Parents probably want them for both reasons. If someone gets into Hunter, stays there four years and gets good grades, that's a screen for the next level.
It's tough for teachers at schools in deprived areas though because the perception above (though false) means that parents with higher-achieving kids tend ot remove them from such schools when they can and enroll them in private education or schools with ''better'' postcodes.
What Freddie said definitely chimes with my experience as a teacher, though. I've been surprised at the ability of some students to focus, learn and achieve very well on tests even when subjected to classes with many disruptive students and myriad cover teachers.
As someone who tested into a state magnet school and managed to get out of my tiny rural town of 500 people by doing so, I believe that such schools do provide a significant benefit for some of their students.
I'm more doubtful that moving from one school in NYC to another school in NYC is similarly impactful.
The schools need to offer classes at the level of the student. Students come to school with a wide variety in preparation and capability. Those who are more capable are going to learn faster - or at least be able to learn faster. By the time they exit 5th grade you are going to have students who are reading at a 12th grade reading level, many of whom are ready for algebra, and others who are barely literate and having difficulties with arithmetic. Subjecting such students to the same material is educational malpractice - and I do not care if that is the way it has been done.
My grandfather had problems with the schools in his day over this issue - and that was well over a century ago. And most students at the time did not graduate high school then.
My kids and grandkids had and are having the same issues with the schools.
In the end I supplementing / driving my kids education. My youngest daughter dropped out of high school after 10th grade to do early admissions and an engineering degree. My son did the college in high school route - but I had had to drive his math education so that he was ready for calculus in what would have been 11th grade. The schools were not helpful - but in the end got out of my way and my kids way.
I only know me, but boy did I need that G&T. My mom camped out all night to get me into a magnet school for elementary in my inner city system. In middle school, I was able to do math at my own pace and went very far. Would I be an engineer now without that? Maybe? Later, I was kicked out of multiple basic suburban high school classes for already knowing the material (was made to run office messages). I could have gotten more from high school. Giving me enriching material and peers that were on my level in those early years was huge for me, and I don't see where that hurts other students.
excellent piece. I teach stats in a master's program and your explanation of RDD studies is refreshingly clear!
Do the regular NYC high schools offer AP/IB classes for any motivated student who wants them or are the G&T schools the only places that offer them? In the Portland, Oregon areas almost all the schools offer AP/IB classes for any student who wants to take them. Any TAG program only goes through 8th grade. The AP/IB classes have a mix of regular students and kids coming out of TAG middle school programs. Both groups of kids do fine overall in the advanced classes.