As the world is becoming more familiar with neurodiversity (neurodiversities) I trust there will be more research into what works better, say, for those of us with aphantasia. It was all phonics for my generation and I learned to read swiftly and early. Was it phonics or the combination of visual and aural that phonics involves?
I have written explaining that part many times, if you click around. Everyone getting better does not improve labor market conditions for the poorly performing, which is explicitly what gives education debates exigency under present conditions; the whole school reform debate is motivated primarily by the claim that improving learning will reduce poverty and inequality, particularly among the Black underclass. But no such improvement can happen when the vehicle is a meritocratic rewards system that hands out said rewards based on relative performance. Every kind of kid is actually getting smarter all the time relative to their demographic analogs from decades past, but it hasn't closed any economic gaps for this exact reason.
I, personally, am a big "learning for learning's sake" person. But I didn't set the terms of the debate.
Is anyone else having issues with posting today. The reply button is unpushable for me if I write more than a few lines. Just smooshes into the ellipsis below.
I had the issue on both Chrome and Edge on a desktop. I was able to use the Tab key to move the focus to the Reply button and then push the Enter key to get it to take.
I'm really not sure it's _entirely_ a zero-sum game, in which those with relative advantages get _all_ the benefits and those on the wrong side of the curve have nothing to gain from a slightly better education. Knowing how to read is a relatively low bar, but it makes a huge difference in what opportunities one might have.
My greater fear is the march of automation, which continues to raise the bar of how much talent/intelligence/education is required to be substantially contribute economic value. Laborers with shovels got replaced with machines. Low-skill manufacturers got replaced by machines. Low-end information workers (bank tellers, travel agents, real estate agents) got replaced by machines. Now copywriters and artists are getting replaced by machines. Eventually automobile drivers will be replaced -- the legions of truck and delivery van drivers. We will have created a permanent underclass of people with no economic opportunity. I am a lifelong believer in free markets and meritocracy, and yet I can't see how we save ourselves from this dystopian future. What will we do when the underclass outnumbers the techno-elite?
Skilled labor, like the plumber who came and fixed our hot water heater, or the guy who fixed our car, or the electrician who wired us for a mini-split heat pump.
Apprenticeships and a willingness to work. Somethings aren't easy to outsource or assign to machines.
You have to be able to read complex mechanical documentation and be able to do a fair amount of math to be in a skilled trade. People think the trades are for lower academic performers, and that’s not the case. Plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and appliance repair people have to be really smart—not only fluent readers and able to do fairly complex calculations (estimating materials needed accurately is the difference between making or losing money on a project), they have to have strong spatial reasoning ability-the ability to read a complex set of installation instructions and specs and then apply that to an installation or repair of tangible physical equipment. In some ways it’s actually harder than say, being a lawyer, because you have the spatial aspect to consider.
From an economic standpoint, I think this point is incorrect. If better education (meaning, substantively, not just credentials) increases productivity, then output increases and incomes grow. Inequality doesn't change, but incomes are higher.
This is succinctly put. But it clashes with Freddy’s left wing ideology: if you think the only way to reduce poverty is through redistribution, then education doesn’t reduce poverty. If you believe you can reduce poverty by growing the size of the pie, a smarter, more capable society helps.
Think about it this way: arguably our most dominant period in terms of economics, military, science, and technology was in the late 1960s/early 1970s. That was also the period when the first rigorous international education comparisons were happening. You know where the US ranked then? Last!
Does the measure of collective productivity include negative inputs caused by poor decision making? I work with people who get financially exploited due to their illiteracy, with a recent estimate setting a dollar figure of $18 billion lost each year in the US. The cascading impacts would likely dwarf that number.
I mean, at a certain point, you have to take it on faith that a more capable, more literate, more numerate population is going to create a more prosperous society.
I think a big part of the problem with pedagogy discourse at the moment is that this isn't actually a coherent assumption about how our economy or our culture work. A more capable, more literate population creates prosperity in a society if that society values constructive improvement and improved outcomes. But the United States at the moment isn't functioning like this at all. We call more and more work "gigs" and "hustles" now because nobody believes they're creating anything of value. To the contrary, our brain power is mainly dedicated to schemes that help us get by on the bare minimum without necessarily being useful to hardly anyone.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by improving educational outcomes, whether such improvements are equitable or not. In a way it actually makes the problem worse. Some parents are involved and attentive in their children's educational lives, but others simply expect the school to do all the work for them. I don't think this is because they're bad people so much as because our culture actively pushes this idea of how everything should be left to the experts and a high school dropout single mom working two jobs isn't going to have the energy or the confidence to dig into why her kid isn't learning.
This is also how whole language learning gets labeled as "woke" to Freddie's confusion here. The pedagogical innovation just had the bad timing to become common at the exact same time these kinds of rhetorical arguments became a common way to tell people to shut up on grounds of not being qualified to discuss the subject instead of addressing the actual merits of the claim. It's most commonly invoked to call people racist or sexist but we can, and do, increasingly use it on nearly every subject with disastrous results including but certainly not limited to the elections of President Donald Trump.
There's clearly a societal benefit to moving from "only an elite, expensively educated literate class can read" to "almost everyone can read." And similarly for other skills--it's a better world when the guy hanging drywall can read the instructions and do arithmetic and geometry to work out how short to cut the drywall sheet and such. It's a better world overall when most people have learned enough about their bodies and minds to have some idea when a call to a doctor is in order. And so on.
To the extent better reading instruction moves us to a world where the apprentice plumber and drywall hanger and janitor can more often read the instructions and the warnings[1], it's a net benefit for mankind.
But yeah, that doesn't help with social inequality. It makes the pie bigger, but doesn't necessarily give Jose the drywall hanger or George the janitor a bigger slice of the pie.
[1] Imagining that anyone gave a damn about writing safety warnings to be understandable by people who aren't educated or smart, instead of having them written by lawyers.
I’ve read your book and your other articles and I am surprised you don’t in this article use the word “equity” to describe the unattainable goal of narrowing educational performance gaps.
But your argument that relative performance (which is essentially fixed) is all that matters in the competitive workplace and that will never go away may one day be undermined by AI — which may be more threatening to the cognitive workforce than the workforce that relies on other skills.
I think part of the reason this finding is so inconvenient for the left is that if certain jobs require certain academic skills, and certain academic skills are hereditary, it's very hard/impossible to avoid ending up with a class society where certain families work certain jobs and other families work other jobs, even if technically any young person can get any job. Even if we decrease the wage differences between different jobs, I still think that leaves us with a class society, and a/the core committment of the left has been the abolition of class society.
As someone who would like to someday abolish class society, but also finds your and Kathryn Paige Harden's arguments persuasive, I'm not sure how to square that circle.
Sometimes life is complicated, which sucks, but we still have to contend with it to the best of our values and morality.
I’m not a critiquing your statement—it’s just the thing that political partisans don’t like to contend with, so end up usually just saying the inconvenient truths don’t exist.
I’m reminded of a lot of local debates in the SF Bay Area, especially around education. For certain inconvenient stuff like removing calculus, removing “tracking” programs, etc. I’ve weirdly found (after it became unpopular), some of the people here to just say, “It never happened at all.” But… there are major news publications that say it did. And, uh, it did. I personally am ok with either argument—there’s tradeoffs either way, but find it frustrating that the existence of tradeoffs are routinely denied.
I don't think the precepts of socialism require that there not be certain occupations that are prestigious and/or only available to a talented few. It's more that people with those talents don't have control over the means of production as a class - and that they not be paid appreciably more.
I actually find the argument for socialism to be stronger with a hereditarian understanding - or at the very least, stronger than for liberalism. After all, if people succeed or fail academically and professionally largely due to inborn (or, at least, intractable) internal characteristics, then what do the incentives within capitalism do? The rewards essentially provide money and power to people who would be successful regardless* - while the punishments don't actually force anyone to man up, but are just cruel to those who cannot perform much better than already.
* I'm amenable to the argument that there are socialist systems which disincentivize the desire of the truly capable to do hard work. Eastern Bloc science simply didn’t keep up with the west. That said, it’s pretty clear social democracy does not (doctors and lawyers make way less in say Sweden, but the same sort of people become doctors and lawyers, and there’s no notable drop in productivity). Not to mention if you’re looking at the real “star power” in terms of aptitude, they don’t tend to chase the millionaire/billionaire lifestyle. I think the challenge for anyone who wants to see a post-capitalist future is to envision what sort of prestige/recognition could take the place of monetary compensation.
"It's more that people with those talents don't have control over the means of production as a class - and that they not be paid appreciably more."
I agree with this. However, I think the jobs that end up controlling the means of productions - business leaders, political leaders, technocratics of all stripes - end up all coming from academic high achievers. So maybe to put a finer point on it, the challange of socialism is to create avenues to leadership that do not require academic high achievement. It is true that labor leadership provides an avenue, as neither O'Brien or Fain has a college degree.
"create avenues to leadership that do not require academic high achievement"
It pretty much follows that people of higher academic achievement, who've read The Great Works, read voraciously, and think deeply are the people you want as leaders.
You want your leadership to consist of people who can think.
When people do well academically all go to the same few schools, live in the same few cities, and work the same few jobs, it creates a strong groupthink and myopia. Freddie has done an excellent job over the years documenting that groupthink and myopia.
I somewhat disagree, Eastern Bloc science maintained an excellent standard as far as the talent and quality of work done by the humans. However science also depends on the material economy which hamstrung them. But in terms of producing excellent scientists, this was not a problem.
"As someone who would like to someday abolish class society..."
You won't. You can ameliorate the effects of class, but there will always be humans who are smarter, humans who will be better-looking, humans who are better at one sort or another, etc..
Even the military, where everyone starts off as an interchangeable cog in a machine, has better and worse soldiers.
I think we're arguing separate things. Obviously talents vary.
It's hard to define exactly what is a class society. But I think based on your past comments you would agree that today's class societies where the leaders in business, politics, academics and media live in separate neighborhoods, send their kids to separate schools, and live in a different world than the most of the people who are affected by the decisions they make is not ideal.
Perhaps we're arguing semanitcs at this point but I don't think the amount of class stratification in society is a constant throughout history, and it is quite possible for future societies to have less class stratification, and perhaps significantly less.
I don't think its crazy that if we could create a society where there was less permanent advantage to be granted from winning, and success was more about the satisfaction of victory itself that we would see fewer parents trying to rig the game to put their children into the highest and most competitive brackets and generally they would be more willing to see their children function at whatever level they seem to thrive at, and this would be beneficial for everyone.
Yeah, you and I are using class in the classical, aristocratic sense, where it means "sorted by excellence." And other people (including Freddie) are using class in the economic sense that has become more colloquial. I think its important not to conflate the two, but almost everyone does because the word can have either meaning. So we are talking about the decoupling of class (classical sense) from class (economic sense).
Some people got a good roll of the dice, some got a shitty roll. That will inevitably lead to different outcomes--the smart, healthy, tall, good-looking people will mostly end up better off than the dumb, unhealthy, short, ugly ones.
But we can and should blunt those differences in outcome.
I think we want two things:
a. Let Alice have more wealth and status than Bob, fine--that creates the right incentives for Alice. But tax her enough that Bob gets a decent life. Neither Alice nor Bob *deserve* their IQ--that's just winning or losing the genetic lottery.
b. Don't let Alice stack the deck so that her kids get to be hereditary brain surgeons forever and Bob's kids must forever be janitors. We do this pretty well via public education and college and such, though we could definitely do better.
Neither of these requires denying the ability differences between Alice and Bob, or denying Alice some benefits from those differences--it just requires blunting the outcome differences so that Bob isn't too badly shafted by the bad roll of the genetic dice he got, by taxing away some of the windfall that Alice got from her good roll. And then trying to build a meritocracy in education and careers that minimizes the ability of elite parents to buy their kids a place in the elite. (I think a lot of the push to eliminate standardized tests was driven by the desire for elite parents to be able to spend money and time getting their kids into elite schools despite regression to the mean.)
I'm onboard with all of that, although I think its worth pointing out that Freddie in his heart of hearts wants something more radical, which is the decommodification/decapitalization of society write large, so that "wealth" would become an oxymoronic concept. Not saying he thinks that's a thing that will happen anytime soon, but its important to be honest about the far-far-left project. That would leave us only dealing with status, which we would just have to let people have in whatever way that manifests in a post-wealth society.
Maybe one day we'll all live in the Culture or something, but in the forseeable future, it seems like there will be differences in social status and well-being from different genetic endowments.
Has there ever been a functional society where surgeons didn't end up with higher status and more rewards than janitors?
Again, I'm specifically talking about wealth. I don't disagree with you that high-performing people will always benefit in a number of ways, in who they end up dating, in how many people want to hang out with them, in whether they get their face on a lot of posters. They will probably generally be happier people. And as long as we live in a capitalist society, they will make more money as well.
I'm just saying, we could at least think about what would happen if we took away the money part of the equation entirely. Everyone gets their material needs met at the same level regardless of whether they are a surgeon or a janitor. Does that mean people will stop trying to become surgeons? I don't know for sure but I doubt it. Every time we have an Olympics, people show up from all over the world to compete at the highest level, and a lot of them do it for love of the game and the status of it as much as the money. I know winning a gold medal can also be financially rewarding, but it seems that plenty of people go to the Olympics without thinking financial success is on the table for them, they just want to take part in a sport they love and be celebrated as a hero for it. Presumably we would still have surgeons who really loved doing surgery for similar reasons.
Its also very stressful for the ambitious high-achieving left, because genetics will sometimes lead to average kids of rather smart parents, and those parents are desperate to know how to make their average kid as high achieving as themselves.
I think you messed up a step and it screwed up your conclusion. It might be the case that some amount of academic aptitude is transferrable from generation to generation, but you will also have a certain number of outliers and a lot of regression to the mean. So the fewer nepotistic mechanisms there are (and capitalism contains quite a few) the more likely you are to see randomness in each new generation of academically talented people.
The public school education model sucks not so much because it inherently sucks, but because it is a 150-year old model overlaid by modernity where the pace of change and the flow of information is through a fire-hose... and the public education system gives the kids all the same straw to drink from.
And then the stupid debate is "which STANDARD method do we change or keep?"
This is a stupid question because of what we know... what we have always known... that the learning needs for each and every human is different. Put a hundred students in a room where an honest assessment is done and you will end up with 100 different personality profiles. Now, maybe you can categorize into some lower granularity of groups, but it would absolutely not work to say that all of these 100 students can be well served with a single profile.
Understand that education standards are not designed for the students... they are designed primarily for the employees of the education system to make their jobs easier.
Each education method available is simply a bunch of tools in a toolbox... all of which should be wielded by educators in a high-differentiation education service delivery model based on the specific needs of the single student. Technology is needed to help the students, parents and educators manage this more complex service delivery model. But it will require a level of business sophistication within the industry of education that runs counter to the public sector ethos of focusing on the job of the unionized government employee over the welfare of the student.
But the public school standard and the charter school standard and the private school standard are one and the same pedagogically. This is really important: it's not like charter school teachers go to different training programs or teach systematically different material. It's all the same stuff.
No argument there. Most of the charter school attempts are constrained by the local politics that are still influenced by the public employee unions that contribute time and money to political campaigns. We don't fix the education system to work for our modern needs until and unless the entire mess of public employee influence in the political game is fixed.
Why in the world of best-practice employee development and customer service have we adopted the principles of high differentiation but not so in the education best-practice world? It is a more difficult management task to support high differentiation. The tendency for lazy people is to push for standards.
Obligatory serious demands that I remind people that the only lesson The Atlantic has to teach us about "how to survive in modern media" is for very rich moguls to either buy media properties outright (Shoon-Siong, Bezos), or leave a fortune to their exes (Steve Jobs) to do it.
Laurene Jobs-Powell does not need to worry about how much money she spends, earns, or loses publishing stupid boilerplate by Acela Corridor midwits like Jon Chait or Yascha Mounk. And judging by what is shared on Twitter, the most heterodox opinion that seems to make it in there for a reliable PMC, blue no matter who, readership is a post-election day confession that, ok, maybe the American left went a little overboard with woke politics. Whoopsie! We meant well!
I don't think there's serious lesson on the actual real world business of media that The Atlantic can impart to any serious observer beyond "billionaires can keep animating the husk of the corpse of the neoliberal media until they either run out of money or get sick of it"
But then again, this also may have been Freddie's point to begin with (confirm? deny?)
1. "As I’ve explained before, education research is uniquely challenging and has produced a raft of findings that were considered ironclad before that confidence was gradually chipped away."
Did not Dick Armey teach the masses thusly: "You tell me who did the study, and I'll tell you what results they got."
That goes double for political and politicized topics such as education.
2. Even if raising educational outcomes for everyone simply means that we have more cluesome dunces as well as more culeful achievers, is that a bad thing?
If you see the goal of education as to teach its subject how to think, a more thoughtful median human ought to be to be desired.
The rock on which educational reformism crashes, time and time again, the thing no education pundit wants to admit to himself: some kids are just dumb.
There also are different kinds of smart. I know a very skilled professional pilot who was only able to pass ground school with a lot of outside help. The person who taught him ground school was preeternaturally intelligent in a "book smart" sense, but had no situational awareness.
I know which I'd prefer in the cockpit when the panel lights up red.
Not quite what you note, but there is absolutely something we could do which would make learning to read much easier - reforming English spelling to align better with pronunciation.
We have several real-world examples to show the complexity of a written language hurts early adoption in reading. For example, the average age of literacy dropped considerably in Turkey when the Ataturk-era reforms changed the written language from Arabic (which was poorly suited for Turkish) to a modified Roman alphabet. And in China, even though the overall number of characters has been reduced in the modern era, students typically take a few years longer than in the U.S. to achieve full literacy (and even some adults have what we'd call "limited literacy" - in the sense there are many rare characters they cannot read).
Of course, this would never happen, given the sunk-cost fallacy of the existing system, but just dropping silent letters, adding diacritics to distinguish long and short vowels, dropping useless letters (we don't really need a letter c, since an s or k always suffice) and adding back in things like the old English thorn for the TH sound would do wonders.
Agree with Freddie's longstanding point that expecting public schools to correct economic disparities is foolish. But I don't think relative academic performance is the only perspective that matters. I'd argue that improving basic reading and math proficiency for the bottom ~50% of students would have positive social impacts, even if all of those students remain in the bottom 50%.
This perspective is not expecting schools to make low performing kids "smarter" but rather pushing/supporting those students to perform closer to their own individual potential.
I’ve read your book and appreciate your argument about relative academic performance being what counts in a meritocracy.
But I think absolute learning matters more than you’re acknowledging, especially in basic literacy, and schools are actually better at teaching all students to read—or can be with the right approaches.
The reading wars are actually pretty productive, and I think we are converging on a coherent set of right answers that will stand the test of time. Phonics, yes, but also knowledge-building curriculum.
Student outcomes will continue to vary based on natural talent and a variety of factors schools can’t control, but we CAN control whether most students graduate able to read and do basic math.
Absolute learning matters a lot for the quality of democratic institutions. It's not for nothing that Reaganite official Roger Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite!"
This is about the burning human desire for advancement. Not the children's advancement over their peers, not the teacher's advancement of their class outperforming that of their peers, but instead the burning desire of advancement amongst educational professors against their peers—the desire to achieve the Department Chair of Education at a prestigious university.
There are those who watch things happen; those who make things happen; and those who wonder what happened.
We're stuck here wondering what happened ... If you are a grad-student with a great mentor, you're directing your studies to promote you to Department Chair of Education at XYZ.edu. How do you accomplish this?—you need a ladder, a ladder which extends from grad school to department chair. The first rung is you develop a new method of learning. You write a book on how to teach your new method of learning. You promote your new method of learning by engaging philanthropic journalism—hiring writers of semi-prestigious publications to write puff-pieces extoling the great benefits of the groundbreaking research discovery in YOUR NEW METHOD of learning which will teach all failing children to become wildly achieving academic successes. You hire PR firms. You get invited to the right daytime TV shows so all the mommies can see you and be wowed by your wildly successful method. You pump your book on why anyone who disagrees with you is a Neanderthal. You get brought in as a speaker to educational conferences, and if you're successful, you are invited to become Department Chair of Education somewhere nice.
You guys haven't spent enough time in Corporate America ... you've not lived this.
This 100%. It's never been about the kids. You'll have to forgive the general population for being swayed, even the professors talk themselves into the goodness of their actions.
You need regular bruising contact with reality, or your field will spiral off into being a branch of philosophy or literature or science fiction or something. Most academic fields (hell, plenty of commercial fields) don't really have much of this, and so they can and often do expensively and self-confidently produce piles of nonsense.
"You guys haven't spent enough time in Corporate America ... you've not lived this."
Perhaps the reason is most people still think the education world is an institution primarily based on learning, merit, and public service, instead of an industry based on student markets, profit margins, and perceived status.
I could be wrong, but I feel like education in general was more public service oriented, and a lot less 'corporate' back in the olden days of the 20th century. Education used to be something that you get and give as a matter of course...at least until college that is. Now it feels like something that you are either buying or selling. People moving to a different zip code to get a better school for their kids is basically the same as 'buying' a better education for them, is it not?
In relation to the last sentence of your comment, there are some interesting developments involving people moving into my neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia, allegedly so that they can send their kids to the excellent school just down the hill from my place.
This sort of dynamic might explain a lot of what's been going on in Expertland lately. Freddie's been on the inside of a big university at least a couple times and I'd be interested to see him weigh in on this.
Unfortunately, this is inevitable. Look at say how the Labour Party was hollowed out. The children of socialist trade unionist leaders took advantage of the new meritocratic educational systems to get professional degrees (often in law) which resulted in the party losing almost the entirety of its working-class leadership class. I could point to many domestic examples too - multi-generational labor families where the kids (even if they take rank-and-file jobs) first end up going to top-tier schools.
I would argue that for students having the most difficulty, emotional problems can be a huge factor. I was always far above average, yet in first and second grade I found it almost impossible to concentrate in class and get work done, due to emotional issues related to my parents divorce and custody battle. Luckily, I had a teacher keep me after class and avoid repeating a grade.
I can only imagine what it is like for a child dealing with a worse social situation (crime, bullying, bad influences, disruptive classmates, etc.) - especially if also having less talent to start with.
Success in the work place is dependent upon so much more than reading and math ability - social skills, emotional stability, work habits, etc. I would argue that reducing crime and bullying would do more to help troubled kids, although I have anecdotal evidence that some kids really do not learn to read well without phonics (not my personal experience - to me phonics was just extra busy work).
In terms of making sure those at the bottom earn enough, I think education is not where the problem lies. As a society, trade policies, regulation, and bargaining power of workers plays a bigger role in keeping wages high, and workers prosperous- both in relative and abdolute terms. Also, unions alone can't do it - if we have free trade with nations having slave labor, union workers just end up losing their jobs. Keeping unemployment low is key to giving workers bargaining power, and livable wages. Keeping supply side healthy is key to broad prosperity.
I am with you on the fact that variability in academic aptitude is real. I am also with you on the need for a social-democratic society that enables people with a range of skills (due to talent or other factors) to thrive. I think you (and Kathryn Paige Harden) deserve a lot of credit for making that argument in the public sphere. But I also found your conclusion that differences in pedagogy (and school reform more broadly) therefore don't matter to be quite baffling, in a way that I'm not sure is helping you win friends to your principal cause.
I don't think your conclusion holds up logically, either. (OK, I'm new to your arguments on education so perhaps you address my objection in your book or other blog posts, but I don't think you address it here.)
Let's look at this statement of yours more closely: "If all students received phonics instruction, the absolute learning gains might (might) be higher for everyone, but the more talented kids would still learn to read with ease and the less talented kids would still struggle". What does "at ease" and "struggle" mean in this sentence? Psychologically speaking, the experience of "coasting" or "struggling" seems to have two components: one relative and one absolute. On the relative component (i.e. comparing ourselves to others) you are right, shifting the distribution rightwards due to some new teaching method doesn't change the subjective experience of coasting or struggling because (talent). But there's also the absolute component: some things in life require a certain level of skill to do so and that level is fixed, so with better teaching methods, more students will be able to do these things. And in that sense they will *not* struggle as much.
Now, how much the experience of success or failure in life depends on the relative and the absolute component is something we can ALSO regulate on the societal level. You know this as a social democrat, don't you? In a country like America, pretty much everything (from actual access to goods and services to cultural norms) sends you a signal to feel miserable if you are economically less successful. In less inequal societies, everyone with a certain absolute level of income (earned or redistributed) can enjoy a pretty nice life because more wealth doesn't necessarily give you access to better public services and the overall culture looks down on public manifestations of wealth. It's the same with schools: if your argument was about schools in China or Korea, which are relentless in ranking students against each other and making sure that only the top 5 % (or whatever) can get into the best universities and companies (sorry for oversimplifying here), perhaps I'd agree with you because those school systems emphasize the relative aspect of success, so "lifting all boats" doesn't change students' experience of success or failure. But we can de-emphasize grades, tests and rankings or track students over a certain age by academic interest/ability (take that, progressives.) That doesn't quite nullify the relative component to the sense of succeess / failure (because students aren't stupid and they can broadly see for themselves how they do relative to others) but it reduces the salience of that component and brings to the fore the absolute component -- being able to do interesting things -- and then shifting the skill distribution rightwards does have the potential to meaningfully improve people's experience.
This should be clear enough, but in case it's not, let me take a mirror-image version of your argument: It doesn't matter if we now require people to swim with weights on their hands and legs because there is biological variability in people's talent for smimming. I suspect that premise (talent for swimming) is true, but the conclusion ("it doesn't matter....") might (might) be true for competitive smimming, in which your relative position to others is (most of) what matters, but it's clearly not true for the general population. With weights on their hands and legs even talented swimmers will struggle to swim (and less talented swimmers will fail to learn to swim altogether.) So wouldn't it matter to let people swim without weights?
I think it's the same with reading. Learning to read at a certain level gives you access to aspects of the human experience that are desirable either as means to something else (e.g., understanding the tax instructions and getting a larger refund) or for their own sake (being able to read a novel.)
Judging pedagogy and education reform solely by its ability to "close achievement gaps" is such an American thing. (Especially an American progressive thing.) I may agree with you that this is very hard to do without tackling the underlying social problems (and even then there will be a natural variability in educational outcomes, though hopefully not based on factors such as race or class.) But aren't you basically adapting that perspective (education reform is not worth it if it doesn't close achievement gaps), and merely changing the conclusion (it can't close achievement gaps, so it's not worth it)?
I'm an older dad of 7-year-old identical twin girls who go to the same "good" public school I went to in the late 60s-early 70s. (Thank you, rent-stabilization) In 2nd grade I was ripping through 5th grade books and, per policy at the time, I skipped 3rd and was promoted straight to 4th grade. I was a gifted learner but other issues - family, environment, eventually anxiety/depression/substance abuse resulted in my dropping out of high school and getting a GED. In my late 20s, I got sober and managed to build a film/TV career. I recently found myself in a TV writers room featuring two Yale Drama grads, two Julliard grads and realized I, with a 10th grade, public education was making no less of a contribution to the show.
Today, my 2nd grade girls are reading behind the class median level. We read to them every night from the time they were infants. When their reading issues presented themselves in K-1st grade, we panicked and assaulted them with a barrage of evaluations, extreme eye tests, tutors, highly touted reading "systems," etc. It all just made them miserable and hate reading. Shame-filled and guilt-ridden we searched for answers. Was it my antique reproductive material? The donor eggs? Something in the IVF bath? Interestingly, though they share DNA and environment, one is a bit ahead of the other. I finally just accepted my daughters are not me. Thank god. They're generally happy kids. Probably mentally healthier. They certainly have a more stable and nurturing home life than I did. They will be able to read well enough to function in society. We contribute to a college fund, but will they use it? Will it matter? Who knows?
This may just be normal variation. My older two kids learned to read very young. My daughter took longer, but once she *got* reading she very quickly caught up and now reads constantly. Also, my three kids learned to read in three very different ways--one by pretty-much straight phonics, one by asking me how to write each word he wanted to know as a way of learning it, one by apparently memorizing what the words looked like. That last strategy meant that my daughter took longer to reach whatever threshold was needed, but then she just took off reading, starting with the first Harry Potter book.
As the world is becoming more familiar with neurodiversity (neurodiversities) I trust there will be more research into what works better, say, for those of us with aphantasia. It was all phonics for my generation and I learned to read swiftly and early. Was it phonics or the combination of visual and aural that phonics involves?
“Everything old is new again” might be the dominant cliche of education theory.
Why the focus on narrowing the gap between the best and worst students? Isn’t it worthwhile to have everyone be better readers?
I have written explaining that part many times, if you click around. Everyone getting better does not improve labor market conditions for the poorly performing, which is explicitly what gives education debates exigency under present conditions; the whole school reform debate is motivated primarily by the claim that improving learning will reduce poverty and inequality, particularly among the Black underclass. But no such improvement can happen when the vehicle is a meritocratic rewards system that hands out said rewards based on relative performance. Every kind of kid is actually getting smarter all the time relative to their demographic analogs from decades past, but it hasn't closed any economic gaps for this exact reason.
I, personally, am a big "learning for learning's sake" person. But I didn't set the terms of the debate.
Ack, meant to reply directly here, not restack.
Is anyone else having issues with posting today. The reply button is unpushable for me if I write more than a few lines. Just smooshes into the ellipsis below.
That happened to me recently as well. I was on mobile and rotating the screen fixed it.
I had the issue on both Chrome and Edge on a desktop. I was able to use the Tab key to move the focus to the Reply button and then push the Enter key to get it to take.
ugh yes and, just between you and me, a Substack staffer got hacked and sent a lot of us spam
I'm really not sure it's _entirely_ a zero-sum game, in which those with relative advantages get _all_ the benefits and those on the wrong side of the curve have nothing to gain from a slightly better education. Knowing how to read is a relatively low bar, but it makes a huge difference in what opportunities one might have.
My greater fear is the march of automation, which continues to raise the bar of how much talent/intelligence/education is required to be substantially contribute economic value. Laborers with shovels got replaced with machines. Low-skill manufacturers got replaced by machines. Low-end information workers (bank tellers, travel agents, real estate agents) got replaced by machines. Now copywriters and artists are getting replaced by machines. Eventually automobile drivers will be replaced -- the legions of truck and delivery van drivers. We will have created a permanent underclass of people with no economic opportunity. I am a lifelong believer in free markets and meritocracy, and yet I can't see how we save ourselves from this dystopian future. What will we do when the underclass outnumbers the techno-elite?
Skilled labor, like the plumber who came and fixed our hot water heater, or the guy who fixed our car, or the electrician who wired us for a mini-split heat pump.
Apprenticeships and a willingness to work. Somethings aren't easy to outsource or assign to machines.
You have to be able to read complex mechanical documentation and be able to do a fair amount of math to be in a skilled trade. People think the trades are for lower academic performers, and that’s not the case. Plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and appliance repair people have to be really smart—not only fluent readers and able to do fairly complex calculations (estimating materials needed accurately is the difference between making or losing money on a project), they have to have strong spatial reasoning ability-the ability to read a complex set of installation instructions and specs and then apply that to an installation or repair of tangible physical equipment. In some ways it’s actually harder than say, being a lawyer, because you have the spatial aspect to consider.
From an economic standpoint, I think this point is incorrect. If better education (meaning, substantively, not just credentials) increases productivity, then output increases and incomes grow. Inequality doesn't change, but incomes are higher.
This is succinctly put. But it clashes with Freddy’s left wing ideology: if you think the only way to reduce poverty is through redistribution, then education doesn’t reduce poverty. If you believe you can reduce poverty by growing the size of the pie, a smarter, more capable society helps.
Think about it this way: arguably our most dominant period in terms of economics, military, science, and technology was in the late 1960s/early 1970s. That was also the period when the first rigorous international education comparisons were happening. You know where the US ranked then? Last!
But human capital is just one factor of production; physical capital also matters and we'd mostly destroyed our competitors in WW2.
I think your argument here isn't strong, though it's also not crucial to your other arguments regarding education.
Does the measure of collective productivity include negative inputs caused by poor decision making? I work with people who get financially exploited due to their illiteracy, with a recent estimate setting a dollar figure of $18 billion lost each year in the US. The cascading impacts would likely dwarf that number.
I mean, at a certain point, you have to take it on faith that a more capable, more literate, more numerate population is going to create a more prosperous society.
I think a big part of the problem with pedagogy discourse at the moment is that this isn't actually a coherent assumption about how our economy or our culture work. A more capable, more literate population creates prosperity in a society if that society values constructive improvement and improved outcomes. But the United States at the moment isn't functioning like this at all. We call more and more work "gigs" and "hustles" now because nobody believes they're creating anything of value. To the contrary, our brain power is mainly dedicated to schemes that help us get by on the bare minimum without necessarily being useful to hardly anyone.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by improving educational outcomes, whether such improvements are equitable or not. In a way it actually makes the problem worse. Some parents are involved and attentive in their children's educational lives, but others simply expect the school to do all the work for them. I don't think this is because they're bad people so much as because our culture actively pushes this idea of how everything should be left to the experts and a high school dropout single mom working two jobs isn't going to have the energy or the confidence to dig into why her kid isn't learning.
This is also how whole language learning gets labeled as "woke" to Freddie's confusion here. The pedagogical innovation just had the bad timing to become common at the exact same time these kinds of rhetorical arguments became a common way to tell people to shut up on grounds of not being qualified to discuss the subject instead of addressing the actual merits of the claim. It's most commonly invoked to call people racist or sexist but we can, and do, increasingly use it on nearly every subject with disastrous results including but certainly not limited to the elections of President Donald Trump.
There's clearly a societal benefit to moving from "only an elite, expensively educated literate class can read" to "almost everyone can read." And similarly for other skills--it's a better world when the guy hanging drywall can read the instructions and do arithmetic and geometry to work out how short to cut the drywall sheet and such. It's a better world overall when most people have learned enough about their bodies and minds to have some idea when a call to a doctor is in order. And so on.
To the extent better reading instruction moves us to a world where the apprentice plumber and drywall hanger and janitor can more often read the instructions and the warnings[1], it's a net benefit for mankind.
But yeah, that doesn't help with social inequality. It makes the pie bigger, but doesn't necessarily give Jose the drywall hanger or George the janitor a bigger slice of the pie.
[1] Imagining that anyone gave a damn about writing safety warnings to be understandable by people who aren't educated or smart, instead of having them written by lawyers.
I’ve read your book and your other articles and I am surprised you don’t in this article use the word “equity” to describe the unattainable goal of narrowing educational performance gaps.
But your argument that relative performance (which is essentially fixed) is all that matters in the competitive workplace and that will never go away may one day be undermined by AI — which may be more threatening to the cognitive workforce than the workforce that relies on other skills.
I think part of the reason this finding is so inconvenient for the left is that if certain jobs require certain academic skills, and certain academic skills are hereditary, it's very hard/impossible to avoid ending up with a class society where certain families work certain jobs and other families work other jobs, even if technically any young person can get any job. Even if we decrease the wage differences between different jobs, I still think that leaves us with a class society, and a/the core committment of the left has been the abolition of class society.
As someone who would like to someday abolish class society, but also finds your and Kathryn Paige Harden's arguments persuasive, I'm not sure how to square that circle.
Sometimes life is complicated, which sucks, but we still have to contend with it to the best of our values and morality.
I’m not a critiquing your statement—it’s just the thing that political partisans don’t like to contend with, so end up usually just saying the inconvenient truths don’t exist.
I’m reminded of a lot of local debates in the SF Bay Area, especially around education. For certain inconvenient stuff like removing calculus, removing “tracking” programs, etc. I’ve weirdly found (after it became unpopular), some of the people here to just say, “It never happened at all.” But… there are major news publications that say it did. And, uh, it did. I personally am ok with either argument—there’s tradeoffs either way, but find it frustrating that the existence of tradeoffs are routinely denied.
I don't think the precepts of socialism require that there not be certain occupations that are prestigious and/or only available to a talented few. It's more that people with those talents don't have control over the means of production as a class - and that they not be paid appreciably more.
I actually find the argument for socialism to be stronger with a hereditarian understanding - or at the very least, stronger than for liberalism. After all, if people succeed or fail academically and professionally largely due to inborn (or, at least, intractable) internal characteristics, then what do the incentives within capitalism do? The rewards essentially provide money and power to people who would be successful regardless* - while the punishments don't actually force anyone to man up, but are just cruel to those who cannot perform much better than already.
* I'm amenable to the argument that there are socialist systems which disincentivize the desire of the truly capable to do hard work. Eastern Bloc science simply didn’t keep up with the west. That said, it’s pretty clear social democracy does not (doctors and lawyers make way less in say Sweden, but the same sort of people become doctors and lawyers, and there’s no notable drop in productivity). Not to mention if you’re looking at the real “star power” in terms of aptitude, they don’t tend to chase the millionaire/billionaire lifestyle. I think the challenge for anyone who wants to see a post-capitalist future is to envision what sort of prestige/recognition could take the place of monetary compensation.
"It's more that people with those talents don't have control over the means of production as a class - and that they not be paid appreciably more."
I agree with this. However, I think the jobs that end up controlling the means of productions - business leaders, political leaders, technocratics of all stripes - end up all coming from academic high achievers. So maybe to put a finer point on it, the challange of socialism is to create avenues to leadership that do not require academic high achievement. It is true that labor leadership provides an avenue, as neither O'Brien or Fain has a college degree.
"create avenues to leadership that do not require academic high achievement"
It pretty much follows that people of higher academic achievement, who've read The Great Works, read voraciously, and think deeply are the people you want as leaders.
You want your leadership to consist of people who can think.
Yes, but...
When people do well academically all go to the same few schools, live in the same few cities, and work the same few jobs, it creates a strong groupthink and myopia. Freddie has done an excellent job over the years documenting that groupthink and myopia.
I somewhat disagree, Eastern Bloc science maintained an excellent standard as far as the talent and quality of work done by the humans. However science also depends on the material economy which hamstrung them. But in terms of producing excellent scientists, this was not a problem.
"As someone who would like to someday abolish class society..."
You won't. You can ameliorate the effects of class, but there will always be humans who are smarter, humans who will be better-looking, humans who are better at one sort or another, etc..
Even the military, where everyone starts off as an interchangeable cog in a machine, has better and worse soldiers.
I think we're arguing separate things. Obviously talents vary.
It's hard to define exactly what is a class society. But I think based on your past comments you would agree that today's class societies where the leaders in business, politics, academics and media live in separate neighborhoods, send their kids to separate schools, and live in a different world than the most of the people who are affected by the decisions they make is not ideal.
Humans still will sort themselves into classes, and of course the winners will seek to transmit whatever advantages they can to their offspring.
Axtually, sort of like the military, where you have the officers and the ranks.
Perhaps we're arguing semanitcs at this point but I don't think the amount of class stratification in society is a constant throughout history, and it is quite possible for future societies to have less class stratification, and perhaps significantly less.
That might be. As I said, the goal is to at least ameliorate class and its the effects, not cement them.
I don't think its crazy that if we could create a society where there was less permanent advantage to be granted from winning, and success was more about the satisfaction of victory itself that we would see fewer parents trying to rig the game to put their children into the highest and most competitive brackets and generally they would be more willing to see their children function at whatever level they seem to thrive at, and this would be beneficial for everyone.
That, to me, sounds like the amerlioration of class effects.
Yeah, you and I are using class in the classical, aristocratic sense, where it means "sorted by excellence." And other people (including Freddie) are using class in the economic sense that has become more colloquial. I think its important not to conflate the two, but almost everyone does because the word can have either meaning. So we are talking about the decoupling of class (classical sense) from class (economic sense).
I think both are inevitable.
Some people got a good roll of the dice, some got a shitty roll. That will inevitably lead to different outcomes--the smart, healthy, tall, good-looking people will mostly end up better off than the dumb, unhealthy, short, ugly ones.
But we can and should blunt those differences in outcome.
I think we want two things:
a. Let Alice have more wealth and status than Bob, fine--that creates the right incentives for Alice. But tax her enough that Bob gets a decent life. Neither Alice nor Bob *deserve* their IQ--that's just winning or losing the genetic lottery.
b. Don't let Alice stack the deck so that her kids get to be hereditary brain surgeons forever and Bob's kids must forever be janitors. We do this pretty well via public education and college and such, though we could definitely do better.
Neither of these requires denying the ability differences between Alice and Bob, or denying Alice some benefits from those differences--it just requires blunting the outcome differences so that Bob isn't too badly shafted by the bad roll of the genetic dice he got, by taxing away some of the windfall that Alice got from her good roll. And then trying to build a meritocracy in education and careers that minimizes the ability of elite parents to buy their kids a place in the elite. (I think a lot of the push to eliminate standardized tests was driven by the desire for elite parents to be able to spend money and time getting their kids into elite schools despite regression to the mean.)
I'm onboard with all of that, although I think its worth pointing out that Freddie in his heart of hearts wants something more radical, which is the decommodification/decapitalization of society write large, so that "wealth" would become an oxymoronic concept. Not saying he thinks that's a thing that will happen anytime soon, but its important to be honest about the far-far-left project. That would leave us only dealing with status, which we would just have to let people have in whatever way that manifests in a post-wealth society.
Maybe one day we'll all live in the Culture or something, but in the forseeable future, it seems like there will be differences in social status and well-being from different genetic endowments.
Has there ever been a functional society where surgeons didn't end up with higher status and more rewards than janitors?
Again, I'm specifically talking about wealth. I don't disagree with you that high-performing people will always benefit in a number of ways, in who they end up dating, in how many people want to hang out with them, in whether they get their face on a lot of posters. They will probably generally be happier people. And as long as we live in a capitalist society, they will make more money as well.
I'm just saying, we could at least think about what would happen if we took away the money part of the equation entirely. Everyone gets their material needs met at the same level regardless of whether they are a surgeon or a janitor. Does that mean people will stop trying to become surgeons? I don't know for sure but I doubt it. Every time we have an Olympics, people show up from all over the world to compete at the highest level, and a lot of them do it for love of the game and the status of it as much as the money. I know winning a gold medal can also be financially rewarding, but it seems that plenty of people go to the Olympics without thinking financial success is on the table for them, they just want to take part in a sport they love and be celebrated as a hero for it. Presumably we would still have surgeons who really loved doing surgery for similar reasons.
Its also very stressful for the ambitious high-achieving left, because genetics will sometimes lead to average kids of rather smart parents, and those parents are desperate to know how to make their average kid as high achieving as themselves.
I think you messed up a step and it screwed up your conclusion. It might be the case that some amount of academic aptitude is transferrable from generation to generation, but you will also have a certain number of outliers and a lot of regression to the mean. So the fewer nepotistic mechanisms there are (and capitalism contains quite a few) the more likely you are to see randomness in each new generation of academically talented people.
The public school education model sucks not so much because it inherently sucks, but because it is a 150-year old model overlaid by modernity where the pace of change and the flow of information is through a fire-hose... and the public education system gives the kids all the same straw to drink from.
And then the stupid debate is "which STANDARD method do we change or keep?"
This is a stupid question because of what we know... what we have always known... that the learning needs for each and every human is different. Put a hundred students in a room where an honest assessment is done and you will end up with 100 different personality profiles. Now, maybe you can categorize into some lower granularity of groups, but it would absolutely not work to say that all of these 100 students can be well served with a single profile.
Understand that education standards are not designed for the students... they are designed primarily for the employees of the education system to make their jobs easier.
Each education method available is simply a bunch of tools in a toolbox... all of which should be wielded by educators in a high-differentiation education service delivery model based on the specific needs of the single student. Technology is needed to help the students, parents and educators manage this more complex service delivery model. But it will require a level of business sophistication within the industry of education that runs counter to the public sector ethos of focusing on the job of the unionized government employee over the welfare of the student.
But the public school standard and the charter school standard and the private school standard are one and the same pedagogically. This is really important: it's not like charter school teachers go to different training programs or teach systematically different material. It's all the same stuff.
No argument there. Most of the charter school attempts are constrained by the local politics that are still influenced by the public employee unions that contribute time and money to political campaigns. We don't fix the education system to work for our modern needs until and unless the entire mess of public employee influence in the political game is fixed.
Why in the world of best-practice employee development and customer service have we adopted the principles of high differentiation but not so in the education best-practice world? It is a more difficult management task to support high differentiation. The tendency for lazy people is to push for standards.
Obligatory serious demands that I remind people that the only lesson The Atlantic has to teach us about "how to survive in modern media" is for very rich moguls to either buy media properties outright (Shoon-Siong, Bezos), or leave a fortune to their exes (Steve Jobs) to do it.
Laurene Jobs-Powell does not need to worry about how much money she spends, earns, or loses publishing stupid boilerplate by Acela Corridor midwits like Jon Chait or Yascha Mounk. And judging by what is shared on Twitter, the most heterodox opinion that seems to make it in there for a reliable PMC, blue no matter who, readership is a post-election day confession that, ok, maybe the American left went a little overboard with woke politics. Whoopsie! We meant well!
I don't think there's serious lesson on the actual real world business of media that The Atlantic can impart to any serious observer beyond "billionaires can keep animating the husk of the corpse of the neoliberal media until they either run out of money or get sick of it"
But then again, this also may have been Freddie's point to begin with (confirm? deny?)
1. "As I’ve explained before, education research is uniquely challenging and has produced a raft of findings that were considered ironclad before that confidence was gradually chipped away."
Did not Dick Armey teach the masses thusly: "You tell me who did the study, and I'll tell you what results they got."
That goes double for political and politicized topics such as education.
2. Even if raising educational outcomes for everyone simply means that we have more cluesome dunces as well as more culeful achievers, is that a bad thing?
If you see the goal of education as to teach its subject how to think, a more thoughtful median human ought to be to be desired.
The rock on which educational reformism crashes, time and time again, the thing no education pundit wants to admit to himself: some kids are just dumb.
And the related rock: some kids are smart. Another: some kids do well in the existing structure, but others, including smart kids, do poorly.
There also are different kinds of smart. I know a very skilled professional pilot who was only able to pass ground school with a lot of outside help. The person who taught him ground school was preeternaturally intelligent in a "book smart" sense, but had no situational awareness.
I know which I'd prefer in the cockpit when the panel lights up red.
Not quite what you note, but there is absolutely something we could do which would make learning to read much easier - reforming English spelling to align better with pronunciation.
We have several real-world examples to show the complexity of a written language hurts early adoption in reading. For example, the average age of literacy dropped considerably in Turkey when the Ataturk-era reforms changed the written language from Arabic (which was poorly suited for Turkish) to a modified Roman alphabet. And in China, even though the overall number of characters has been reduced in the modern era, students typically take a few years longer than in the U.S. to achieve full literacy (and even some adults have what we'd call "limited literacy" - in the sense there are many rare characters they cannot read).
Of course, this would never happen, given the sunk-cost fallacy of the existing system, but just dropping silent letters, adding diacritics to distinguish long and short vowels, dropping useless letters (we don't really need a letter c, since an s or k always suffice) and adding back in things like the old English thorn for the TH sound would do wonders.
Agree with Freddie's longstanding point that expecting public schools to correct economic disparities is foolish. But I don't think relative academic performance is the only perspective that matters. I'd argue that improving basic reading and math proficiency for the bottom ~50% of students would have positive social impacts, even if all of those students remain in the bottom 50%.
This perspective is not expecting schools to make low performing kids "smarter" but rather pushing/supporting those students to perform closer to their own individual potential.
If there's one thing that the pandemic proved, it's that schools do much to improve the proficiency of the lowest 50%.
If you want to argue that they could still do more, well, sure. But the debate needs to start by acknowledging right now they do quite a bit.
I’ve read your book and appreciate your argument about relative academic performance being what counts in a meritocracy.
But I think absolute learning matters more than you’re acknowledging, especially in basic literacy, and schools are actually better at teaching all students to read—or can be with the right approaches.
The reading wars are actually pretty productive, and I think we are converging on a coherent set of right answers that will stand the test of time. Phonics, yes, but also knowledge-building curriculum.
Student outcomes will continue to vary based on natural talent and a variety of factors schools can’t control, but we CAN control whether most students graduate able to read and do basic math.
Absolute learning matters a lot for the quality of democratic institutions. It's not for nothing that Reaganite official Roger Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite!"
The very fact that you think there is a set of right answers is evidence that you didn't quite get the point of the book.
And it may come as a shock to you, but in fact most students do graduate able to read and do basic math.
I think you're missing the big picture here:
This is about the burning human desire for advancement. Not the children's advancement over their peers, not the teacher's advancement of their class outperforming that of their peers, but instead the burning desire of advancement amongst educational professors against their peers—the desire to achieve the Department Chair of Education at a prestigious university.
There are those who watch things happen; those who make things happen; and those who wonder what happened.
We're stuck here wondering what happened ... If you are a grad-student with a great mentor, you're directing your studies to promote you to Department Chair of Education at XYZ.edu. How do you accomplish this?—you need a ladder, a ladder which extends from grad school to department chair. The first rung is you develop a new method of learning. You write a book on how to teach your new method of learning. You promote your new method of learning by engaging philanthropic journalism—hiring writers of semi-prestigious publications to write puff-pieces extoling the great benefits of the groundbreaking research discovery in YOUR NEW METHOD of learning which will teach all failing children to become wildly achieving academic successes. You hire PR firms. You get invited to the right daytime TV shows so all the mommies can see you and be wowed by your wildly successful method. You pump your book on why anyone who disagrees with you is a Neanderthal. You get brought in as a speaker to educational conferences, and if you're successful, you are invited to become Department Chair of Education somewhere nice.
You guys haven't spent enough time in Corporate America ... you've not lived this.
This 100%. It's never been about the kids. You'll have to forgive the general population for being swayed, even the professors talk themselves into the goodness of their actions.
You need regular bruising contact with reality, or your field will spiral off into being a branch of philosophy or literature or science fiction or something. Most academic fields (hell, plenty of commercial fields) don't really have much of this, and so they can and often do expensively and self-confidently produce piles of nonsense.
"You guys haven't spent enough time in Corporate America ... you've not lived this."
Perhaps the reason is most people still think the education world is an institution primarily based on learning, merit, and public service, instead of an industry based on student markets, profit margins, and perceived status.
I could be wrong, but I feel like education in general was more public service oriented, and a lot less 'corporate' back in the olden days of the 20th century. Education used to be something that you get and give as a matter of course...at least until college that is. Now it feels like something that you are either buying or selling. People moving to a different zip code to get a better school for their kids is basically the same as 'buying' a better education for them, is it not?
In relation to the last sentence of your comment, there are some interesting developments involving people moving into my neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia, allegedly so that they can send their kids to the excellent school just down the hill from my place.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/queensland/as-it-happened-brisbane-on-wednesday-october-16-20241015-p5kigb.html?post=p57q4r
This sort of dynamic might explain a lot of what's been going on in Expertland lately. Freddie's been on the inside of a big university at least a couple times and I'd be interested to see him weigh in on this.
Unfortunately, this is inevitable. Look at say how the Labour Party was hollowed out. The children of socialist trade unionist leaders took advantage of the new meritocratic educational systems to get professional degrees (often in law) which resulted in the party losing almost the entirety of its working-class leadership class. I could point to many domestic examples too - multi-generational labor families where the kids (even if they take rank-and-file jobs) first end up going to top-tier schools.
I would argue that for students having the most difficulty, emotional problems can be a huge factor. I was always far above average, yet in first and second grade I found it almost impossible to concentrate in class and get work done, due to emotional issues related to my parents divorce and custody battle. Luckily, I had a teacher keep me after class and avoid repeating a grade.
I can only imagine what it is like for a child dealing with a worse social situation (crime, bullying, bad influences, disruptive classmates, etc.) - especially if also having less talent to start with.
Success in the work place is dependent upon so much more than reading and math ability - social skills, emotional stability, work habits, etc. I would argue that reducing crime and bullying would do more to help troubled kids, although I have anecdotal evidence that some kids really do not learn to read well without phonics (not my personal experience - to me phonics was just extra busy work).
In terms of making sure those at the bottom earn enough, I think education is not where the problem lies. As a society, trade policies, regulation, and bargaining power of workers plays a bigger role in keeping wages high, and workers prosperous- both in relative and abdolute terms. Also, unions alone can't do it - if we have free trade with nations having slave labor, union workers just end up losing their jobs. Keeping unemployment low is key to giving workers bargaining power, and livable wages. Keeping supply side healthy is key to broad prosperity.
I am with you on the fact that variability in academic aptitude is real. I am also with you on the need for a social-democratic society that enables people with a range of skills (due to talent or other factors) to thrive. I think you (and Kathryn Paige Harden) deserve a lot of credit for making that argument in the public sphere. But I also found your conclusion that differences in pedagogy (and school reform more broadly) therefore don't matter to be quite baffling, in a way that I'm not sure is helping you win friends to your principal cause.
I don't think your conclusion holds up logically, either. (OK, I'm new to your arguments on education so perhaps you address my objection in your book or other blog posts, but I don't think you address it here.)
Let's look at this statement of yours more closely: "If all students received phonics instruction, the absolute learning gains might (might) be higher for everyone, but the more talented kids would still learn to read with ease and the less talented kids would still struggle". What does "at ease" and "struggle" mean in this sentence? Psychologically speaking, the experience of "coasting" or "struggling" seems to have two components: one relative and one absolute. On the relative component (i.e. comparing ourselves to others) you are right, shifting the distribution rightwards due to some new teaching method doesn't change the subjective experience of coasting or struggling because (talent). But there's also the absolute component: some things in life require a certain level of skill to do so and that level is fixed, so with better teaching methods, more students will be able to do these things. And in that sense they will *not* struggle as much.
Now, how much the experience of success or failure in life depends on the relative and the absolute component is something we can ALSO regulate on the societal level. You know this as a social democrat, don't you? In a country like America, pretty much everything (from actual access to goods and services to cultural norms) sends you a signal to feel miserable if you are economically less successful. In less inequal societies, everyone with a certain absolute level of income (earned or redistributed) can enjoy a pretty nice life because more wealth doesn't necessarily give you access to better public services and the overall culture looks down on public manifestations of wealth. It's the same with schools: if your argument was about schools in China or Korea, which are relentless in ranking students against each other and making sure that only the top 5 % (or whatever) can get into the best universities and companies (sorry for oversimplifying here), perhaps I'd agree with you because those school systems emphasize the relative aspect of success, so "lifting all boats" doesn't change students' experience of success or failure. But we can de-emphasize grades, tests and rankings or track students over a certain age by academic interest/ability (take that, progressives.) That doesn't quite nullify the relative component to the sense of succeess / failure (because students aren't stupid and they can broadly see for themselves how they do relative to others) but it reduces the salience of that component and brings to the fore the absolute component -- being able to do interesting things -- and then shifting the skill distribution rightwards does have the potential to meaningfully improve people's experience.
This should be clear enough, but in case it's not, let me take a mirror-image version of your argument: It doesn't matter if we now require people to swim with weights on their hands and legs because there is biological variability in people's talent for smimming. I suspect that premise (talent for swimming) is true, but the conclusion ("it doesn't matter....") might (might) be true for competitive smimming, in which your relative position to others is (most of) what matters, but it's clearly not true for the general population. With weights on their hands and legs even talented swimmers will struggle to swim (and less talented swimmers will fail to learn to swim altogether.) So wouldn't it matter to let people swim without weights?
I think it's the same with reading. Learning to read at a certain level gives you access to aspects of the human experience that are desirable either as means to something else (e.g., understanding the tax instructions and getting a larger refund) or for their own sake (being able to read a novel.)
Judging pedagogy and education reform solely by its ability to "close achievement gaps" is such an American thing. (Especially an American progressive thing.) I may agree with you that this is very hard to do without tackling the underlying social problems (and even then there will be a natural variability in educational outcomes, though hopefully not based on factors such as race or class.) But aren't you basically adapting that perspective (education reform is not worth it if it doesn't close achievement gaps), and merely changing the conclusion (it can't close achievement gaps, so it's not worth it)?
I'm an older dad of 7-year-old identical twin girls who go to the same "good" public school I went to in the late 60s-early 70s. (Thank you, rent-stabilization) In 2nd grade I was ripping through 5th grade books and, per policy at the time, I skipped 3rd and was promoted straight to 4th grade. I was a gifted learner but other issues - family, environment, eventually anxiety/depression/substance abuse resulted in my dropping out of high school and getting a GED. In my late 20s, I got sober and managed to build a film/TV career. I recently found myself in a TV writers room featuring two Yale Drama grads, two Julliard grads and realized I, with a 10th grade, public education was making no less of a contribution to the show.
Today, my 2nd grade girls are reading behind the class median level. We read to them every night from the time they were infants. When their reading issues presented themselves in K-1st grade, we panicked and assaulted them with a barrage of evaluations, extreme eye tests, tutors, highly touted reading "systems," etc. It all just made them miserable and hate reading. Shame-filled and guilt-ridden we searched for answers. Was it my antique reproductive material? The donor eggs? Something in the IVF bath? Interestingly, though they share DNA and environment, one is a bit ahead of the other. I finally just accepted my daughters are not me. Thank god. They're generally happy kids. Probably mentally healthier. They certainly have a more stable and nurturing home life than I did. They will be able to read well enough to function in society. We contribute to a college fund, but will they use it? Will it matter? Who knows?
This may just be normal variation. My older two kids learned to read very young. My daughter took longer, but once she *got* reading she very quickly caught up and now reads constantly. Also, my three kids learned to read in three very different ways--one by pretty-much straight phonics, one by asking me how to write each word he wanted to know as a way of learning it, one by apparently memorizing what the words looked like. That last strategy meant that my daughter took longer to reach whatever threshold was needed, but then she just took off reading, starting with the first Harry Potter book.