You speak the truth. If only you could get the evidence in front of every progressive policy maker in North America (although I have to doubt what difference it would make).
Demanding "the highest quality" is a predictable form of lawmaker incompetence. Who wants to be accused of "not supporting high-quality schools" in attack ads? They could demand certain minimal standards of competence be met and have a chance of success, but they are rewarded for promising the moon and failing.
I also agree with the conclusion that pre-K is more about day-care than education. I don't know if Pre-K improves educational outcomes. Apart from metrics like "reading skill at age 7", I doubt it will do much. And the studies you point out suggest it doesn't do much for educational outcomes. Yet it is still a good thing to have.
I'm a biologist with no educational policy background, so this is definitely spitballing based on anecdotal stuff from other friends in humanities higher ed.
I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability.
I have a friend who teaches in a remote-learning Education Masters program that helps high school English teachers get a Masters degree so that they can teach AP classes. The students--current high school English teachers--do not like to read. They do not believe students should be made to read anything difficult. They basically refuse to read assigned texts unless all the characters are "relatable". In short, they should not be teaching the subject, much less at the AP level.
I have a background in genetics, so far be it from me to discount genetic effects on educational attainment, but I would like to know whether school effects are so miniscule in countries with highly paid, well educated teachers...the Nordic countries, for example. I guess I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Given the astounding cost and the likelihood that the education establishment will just use the additional years to stuff more woke nonsense in the little muffin heads of the youngsters, anything less than scientific consensus on there being profound net positive benefits should warrant scrapping this one more expensive social service idea to the scrap heap.
My kid attends a pricey Montessori preschool. We just received his first progress report, and it’s 17 pages. They are tracking so many things. For example, he has improved in the area of “plant polishing.” I didn’t even know you were supposed to polish plants.
I am willing to believe pre-K makes no difference in longterm education outcomes. Most research that claims effects is plagued by selection bias, and the few with random assignment aren’t promising. But I do find value in the experience he’s having this year, just as a 4-year-old, verses what he’d be doing in daycare. They’re paying so much attention to his development, working with him on social skills (key for an only child) and providing a huge variety of indoor and outdoor activities for him to explore. Plus there is a ton of communication with parents on how he’s doing.
It has value beyond the impact on his future grades, or his future anything. I’m glad he’s having a good experience this year because that matters to me all by itself. So I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families, because all of the false or inflated claims just lead us further into fantasyland where school solves social and economic problems.
Anyway, it looks like the pre-K funding in BBB had been gutted (source: Matt Bruenig’s Twitter). Same with childcare funding. So not much will change.
1. What lots of people really mean when they talk about this is it should be easier to fire teachers and harder for teachers to unionize and get fair wages and protection against unfair dismissal and stuff. Needless to say, I don't support that.
2. I'm with Freddie that kids have natural limits (as someone who went to a school for intellectually disabled children this is the most bloody obvious thing in the world) and no kind of superstar teacher can push them above that. I think however there is an effect where teacher quality can make a difference in getting kids up to that limit.
Take for example a maths lesson on the power law, that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen. What I would call a "good teacher" is someone who understands the law they're teaching well enough (or at least reviews it before the lesson on it) that they don't write out the wrong one on the blackboard while explaining it to the class, get an annoying kid like me put their hand up "Sir isn't it x+y", tell me to shut up because they're the teacher and know their stuff, come back next lesson and apologize and explain it's x+y after all please cross out what we did last week, and then get it wrong again next week. Then when the class answers pretty much at random on the test, he gives 0 marks for the ones who wrote xy anyway, and when someone complains "but that's what you said" he simply shrugs "that's not what the sample solution to the test says" (both the test and the sample solution come from a third-party, the equivalent of Pearson in our country). Yes, that's a real story.
There will be kids who will never learn the power law however hard you try, and kids who never need to learn it and still have a successful life, and there'll be kids like me who know it already and just ignore the teacher - but then there's the others in the middle where a teacher who actually knows his stuff might have got them to not be hopelessly confused, rather than just convincing them that maths is hard and illogical and not even teachers are good at it.
(I don't necessarily want to blame the teacher either - in a culture where teachers had better working conditions and enough time for professional development, the same teacher might have managed to not mess up the lesson.)
No less a hardass than Charles Murray pointed out that preschool would be a great way to help poor kids stay in a warm, safe, place and should be funded on that basis. Or, as I put it:
"Maybe we’d stop holding preschool responsible for long-term academic outcomes and ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe."
On some level, as a parent and a citizen, I find the basic conclusion of this piece hopeful, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine why it isn’t seen as hopeful to more people. I like knowing that there isn’t some special method that could optimize my children at a very young age for success if I or the government or some researcher could only find out what it was. It’s liberating to believe that if I keep my children physically safe, give them adequate nutrition, give them enough attention so that they can socialize with others, and don’t do traumatizing things, that I’m actually doing a good enough job as a parent, and that more effort than that has rapidly diminishing returns. Parenting otherwise would be far more terrifying.
I loved attending Head Start, and while this shouldn't affect how anyone views the actual research (my n=1 experience should not sway people's opinions), I always credited Head Start with having a huge positive impact on my life. Did I get an "educational advantage"? I doubt it. I was a bright kid and would have been fine with school tasks either way. But what did I get?
* A predictable routine
* Comfortable surroundings
* Fun activities (I remember crafts, playing organized games outside etc., and don't actually remember any of the academic stuff)
* Kind, predictable adults who engaged with me -- this one cannot be overstated: I think the only such adult I'd been exposed to before this was Mr. Rogers. (Being that young, I believed he was actually speaking to me through the TV and telling me lots of kind, uplifting things. I also credit him with having a huge positive influence on my life -- but that's a totally different story.)
* Food
I frickin' loved Head Start -- so I really want it to be "a good thing" and for other kids to have access to it. However, maybe in light of the data I'm wrong about it -- not wrong that it was great for me, because it was, but wrong that it's generally beneficial.
But a lot of the discussion seem to be on the academic performance, and I never saw the academics as what benefitted me. I liked being in a nice place with nice people and food.
I've heard that Head Start kids are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college (I did), but who knows if that's true either.
I've often wondered if your closing point can't be how we actually reach a consensus on this. We frame schooling equality less around academic outcomes and more as a baseline of childcare in the early years, and a safe, productive environment for socializing in later years. Not to say the teaching doesn't matter, but then we can allow the chips to land where they may as far as test scores go, and instead focus on trying to make schools safe, positive, nurturing places.
We will of course hit many similar roadblocks. Children from chaotic backgrounds will, all else being equal, be more likely to bring chaos with them than kids from Mayberry. The same will go for schools in high-crime areas. But this all seems much more attainable and much less vulnerable to the geennetic factor that our country simply cannot and will not be honest about. You will simply not get the federal bureaucracy, or any mainstream politician with a handle on federal education policy, to acknowledge the issue.
Of course, this is all moot to an extent because once the kid turns 18 and is out in the world, it's still an economy where a Bachelor's is the most reliable ticket to financial security. But that's another bridge to cross.
Pretty much in agreement here. Childcare with caring adults other than the immediate family is hugely important, perhaps even more so for working poor and lower to middle class families. I see no reason to continue spinning the wheels on the impact pre-K care/teaching may have on future test scores or achievement gaps unless the sample size is large enough to matter. And clearly government funded childcare for some socioeconomic demographics (again, poor, etc.) would be a bigger benefit than it would be to others (obviously those with already easily available/affordable childcare).
I'm new to the genetics aspect of this 'debate' though. As such, I have questions that stem from ignorance, including whether there is any case being made for (or against) pharmaceutical or dietary interventions when speaking of genetics. Also, how are a person's genes traceable to IQ when certain gene pools are subject to differing social environmental conditions like poverty, hunger and toxic chemicals in any meaningful way? Say someone's parents genes are recorded along with lower IQ tests (themselves possibly inherently biased) and their offspring is then predicted to have lower achievement results. What about putting a kid on supplements or amphetamines? I've got friends who were horrible students, couldn't keep their train of thought long enough to even complete a test, but were then put on adderall or given certain over the counter supplements and completely turned around and became very successful. Maybe I'm getting into too many topics at once here. Does anyone have any suggested reading material on this genetics angle to achievement so that I can educate myself before asking any more questions?
I love the idea of "childcare" vs. "pre-K." Children should be able to play, scribble and have story book time, cognitively age appropriate activities. They can learn new vocabulary contextually through stories and play. I cannot stand the amped up focus on literacy for the K and below K crowd, seeing the Handwriting Without Tears program applied to 3 and 4 year olds. It's not developmentally appropriate.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about some child rearing policies: People in the know are pushing them for reasons other than they profess.
For example, individuals might push for pre-K because they think it gets children with a bad family situation out of the home for a period everyday, or can provide children with a heated building or food if they aren't getting those resources at home. It has nothing to do with cognitive or social development, however, they can't run the importance of a program as a supplement to family functioning because that would be offensive. So they push this other narrative.
I am lost. Sigh....so when i read paragraph below, Are we saying that having 2 parents isn't significant to outcomes? Because I understand that one-parent families are now typical of lower wage earners, whereas high income tend to stay married. And this, I understand, has significant effect on children. (I think of single parent births by income and race....)
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called “shared environment,” the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called “unshared environment,” which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more; and c) there are likely ceiling effects at play here - that is, yes, moving a child from true neglect to a nurturing and supportive learning environment could have major positive effects, but once children enjoy a basic minimal level of safety and comfort the returns from improved environments likely diminish."
Are you familiar with the High Scope Perry study in the 1950s? It found that, a few years later, poor black students who went to pre-school weren't doing any better than the control group that didn't go to pre-school. But 40 yrs later, those who went to pre-school were more likely to have a college degree, own a home, etc. It was a small study but seems like an important consideration --WHEN is the outcome measured?
Also interesting is a bunch of stuff about the ways in which socioeconomic factors impact academic achievement in ch 5 of the book Clash: 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are
You speak the truth. If only you could get the evidence in front of every progressive policy maker in North America (although I have to doubt what difference it would make).
Demanding "the highest quality" is a predictable form of lawmaker incompetence. Who wants to be accused of "not supporting high-quality schools" in attack ads? They could demand certain minimal standards of competence be met and have a chance of success, but they are rewarded for promising the moon and failing.
I also agree with the conclusion that pre-K is more about day-care than education. I don't know if Pre-K improves educational outcomes. Apart from metrics like "reading skill at age 7", I doubt it will do much. And the studies you point out suggest it doesn't do much for educational outcomes. Yet it is still a good thing to have.
I'm a biologist with no educational policy background, so this is definitely spitballing based on anecdotal stuff from other friends in humanities higher ed.
I wonder whether one of the unacknowledged background problems with all these American studies is the almost universal poor quality of our teachers. It seems to be taken as a given that we'll be staffing public schools with education majors, who happen to be from the subject area with students with the lowest IQ in the studies I've seen...add to the lowest IQ the uselessness and deranged ideological bent of many education curricula, and you get some pretty bad teachers...now fast forward this 20-30 years now and you get a new generation of teachers who were taught by these un-gifted, poorly educated teachers, and you get something like a ratchet effect--I'm coming from biology, so I'm thinking of something like "Muller's ratchet" in which deleterious effects simply compound over time until you get a sort of "meltdown" into inviability.
I have a friend who teaches in a remote-learning Education Masters program that helps high school English teachers get a Masters degree so that they can teach AP classes. The students--current high school English teachers--do not like to read. They do not believe students should be made to read anything difficult. They basically refuse to read assigned texts unless all the characters are "relatable". In short, they should not be teaching the subject, much less at the AP level.
I have a background in genetics, so far be it from me to discount genetic effects on educational attainment, but I would like to know whether school effects are so miniscule in countries with highly paid, well educated teachers...the Nordic countries, for example. I guess I wouldn't be surprised either way.
Given the astounding cost and the likelihood that the education establishment will just use the additional years to stuff more woke nonsense in the little muffin heads of the youngsters, anything less than scientific consensus on there being profound net positive benefits should warrant scrapping this one more expensive social service idea to the scrap heap.
My kid attends a pricey Montessori preschool. We just received his first progress report, and it’s 17 pages. They are tracking so many things. For example, he has improved in the area of “plant polishing.” I didn’t even know you were supposed to polish plants.
I am willing to believe pre-K makes no difference in longterm education outcomes. Most research that claims effects is plagued by selection bias, and the few with random assignment aren’t promising. But I do find value in the experience he’s having this year, just as a 4-year-old, verses what he’d be doing in daycare. They’re paying so much attention to his development, working with him on social skills (key for an only child) and providing a huge variety of indoor and outdoor activities for him to explore. Plus there is a ton of communication with parents on how he’s doing.
It has value beyond the impact on his future grades, or his future anything. I’m glad he’s having a good experience this year because that matters to me all by itself. So I’ll never say that we shouldn’t bother with pre-K just because it doesn’t improve future scores. (Not that Freddie is saying that.) I’m glad it exists.
Ideally, all parents should have the option of preschool or daycare, and both should be free.
It’s frustrating that we need to claim effects on future test scores to justify funding for families, because all of the false or inflated claims just lead us further into fantasyland where school solves social and economic problems.
Anyway, it looks like the pre-K funding in BBB had been gutted (source: Matt Bruenig’s Twitter). Same with childcare funding. So not much will change.
My feeling on the good/bad teachers debate is:
1. What lots of people really mean when they talk about this is it should be easier to fire teachers and harder for teachers to unionize and get fair wages and protection against unfair dismissal and stuff. Needless to say, I don't support that.
2. I'm with Freddie that kids have natural limits (as someone who went to a school for intellectually disabled children this is the most bloody obvious thing in the world) and no kind of superstar teacher can push them above that. I think however there is an effect where teacher quality can make a difference in getting kids up to that limit.
Take for example a maths lesson on the power law, that thing in algebra where a^x * a^y = a^(x+y), and not a^(xy) as is often seen. What I would call a "good teacher" is someone who understands the law they're teaching well enough (or at least reviews it before the lesson on it) that they don't write out the wrong one on the blackboard while explaining it to the class, get an annoying kid like me put their hand up "Sir isn't it x+y", tell me to shut up because they're the teacher and know their stuff, come back next lesson and apologize and explain it's x+y after all please cross out what we did last week, and then get it wrong again next week. Then when the class answers pretty much at random on the test, he gives 0 marks for the ones who wrote xy anyway, and when someone complains "but that's what you said" he simply shrugs "that's not what the sample solution to the test says" (both the test and the sample solution come from a third-party, the equivalent of Pearson in our country). Yes, that's a real story.
There will be kids who will never learn the power law however hard you try, and kids who never need to learn it and still have a successful life, and there'll be kids like me who know it already and just ignore the teacher - but then there's the others in the middle where a teacher who actually knows his stuff might have got them to not be hopelessly confused, rather than just convincing them that maths is hard and illogical and not even teachers are good at it.
(I don't necessarily want to blame the teacher either - in a culture where teachers had better working conditions and enough time for professional development, the same teacher might have managed to not mess up the lesson.)
No less a hardass than Charles Murray pointed out that preschool would be a great way to help poor kids stay in a warm, safe, place and should be funded on that basis. Or, as I put it:
"Maybe we’d stop holding preschool responsible for long-term academic outcomes and ask instead how it helps poor kids with unstable home environments and parents with varying degrees of competency, convincing these kids that their country and community cares about them and wants them to be safe."
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/philip-dick-preschool-and-schrodingers-cat/
I quote from your long piece: "Maybe we should give people money instead."
No maybes about it, that would be a much better thing to do.
On some level, as a parent and a citizen, I find the basic conclusion of this piece hopeful, and sometimes it’s hard to imagine why it isn’t seen as hopeful to more people. I like knowing that there isn’t some special method that could optimize my children at a very young age for success if I or the government or some researcher could only find out what it was. It’s liberating to believe that if I keep my children physically safe, give them adequate nutrition, give them enough attention so that they can socialize with others, and don’t do traumatizing things, that I’m actually doing a good enough job as a parent, and that more effort than that has rapidly diminishing returns. Parenting otherwise would be far more terrifying.
I loved attending Head Start, and while this shouldn't affect how anyone views the actual research (my n=1 experience should not sway people's opinions), I always credited Head Start with having a huge positive impact on my life. Did I get an "educational advantage"? I doubt it. I was a bright kid and would have been fine with school tasks either way. But what did I get?
* A predictable routine
* Comfortable surroundings
* Fun activities (I remember crafts, playing organized games outside etc., and don't actually remember any of the academic stuff)
* Kind, predictable adults who engaged with me -- this one cannot be overstated: I think the only such adult I'd been exposed to before this was Mr. Rogers. (Being that young, I believed he was actually speaking to me through the TV and telling me lots of kind, uplifting things. I also credit him with having a huge positive influence on my life -- but that's a totally different story.)
* Food
I frickin' loved Head Start -- so I really want it to be "a good thing" and for other kids to have access to it. However, maybe in light of the data I'm wrong about it -- not wrong that it was great for me, because it was, but wrong that it's generally beneficial.
But a lot of the discussion seem to be on the academic performance, and I never saw the academics as what benefitted me. I liked being in a nice place with nice people and food.
I've heard that Head Start kids are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college (I did), but who knows if that's true either.
I'll have to look into the evidence some more.
I've often wondered if your closing point can't be how we actually reach a consensus on this. We frame schooling equality less around academic outcomes and more as a baseline of childcare in the early years, and a safe, productive environment for socializing in later years. Not to say the teaching doesn't matter, but then we can allow the chips to land where they may as far as test scores go, and instead focus on trying to make schools safe, positive, nurturing places.
We will of course hit many similar roadblocks. Children from chaotic backgrounds will, all else being equal, be more likely to bring chaos with them than kids from Mayberry. The same will go for schools in high-crime areas. But this all seems much more attainable and much less vulnerable to the geennetic factor that our country simply cannot and will not be honest about. You will simply not get the federal bureaucracy, or any mainstream politician with a handle on federal education policy, to acknowledge the issue.
Of course, this is all moot to an extent because once the kid turns 18 and is out in the world, it's still an economy where a Bachelor's is the most reliable ticket to financial security. But that's another bridge to cross.
Pretty much in agreement here. Childcare with caring adults other than the immediate family is hugely important, perhaps even more so for working poor and lower to middle class families. I see no reason to continue spinning the wheels on the impact pre-K care/teaching may have on future test scores or achievement gaps unless the sample size is large enough to matter. And clearly government funded childcare for some socioeconomic demographics (again, poor, etc.) would be a bigger benefit than it would be to others (obviously those with already easily available/affordable childcare).
I'm new to the genetics aspect of this 'debate' though. As such, I have questions that stem from ignorance, including whether there is any case being made for (or against) pharmaceutical or dietary interventions when speaking of genetics. Also, how are a person's genes traceable to IQ when certain gene pools are subject to differing social environmental conditions like poverty, hunger and toxic chemicals in any meaningful way? Say someone's parents genes are recorded along with lower IQ tests (themselves possibly inherently biased) and their offspring is then predicted to have lower achievement results. What about putting a kid on supplements or amphetamines? I've got friends who were horrible students, couldn't keep their train of thought long enough to even complete a test, but were then put on adderall or given certain over the counter supplements and completely turned around and became very successful. Maybe I'm getting into too many topics at once here. Does anyone have any suggested reading material on this genetics angle to achievement so that I can educate myself before asking any more questions?
I love the idea of "childcare" vs. "pre-K." Children should be able to play, scribble and have story book time, cognitively age appropriate activities. They can learn new vocabulary contextually through stories and play. I cannot stand the amped up focus on literacy for the K and below K crowd, seeing the Handwriting Without Tears program applied to 3 and 4 year olds. It's not developmentally appropriate.
I have a bit of a conspiracy theory about some child rearing policies: People in the know are pushing them for reasons other than they profess.
For example, individuals might push for pre-K because they think it gets children with a bad family situation out of the home for a period everyday, or can provide children with a heated building or food if they aren't getting those resources at home. It has nothing to do with cognitive or social development, however, they can't run the importance of a program as a supplement to family functioning because that would be offensive. So they push this other narrative.
I have a similar theory about breastfeeding.
I am lost. Sigh....so when i read paragraph below, Are we saying that having 2 parents isn't significant to outcomes? Because I understand that one-parent families are now typical of lower wage earners, whereas high income tend to stay married. And this, I understand, has significant effect on children. (I think of single parent births by income and race....)
"The point is not that environment doesn’t matter. The point is that a) the so-called “shared environment,” the behavioral genetics term that more or less refers to the family and parenting effects but also can refer to school effects, has consistently shown little influence on outcomes by adulthood; b) the so-called “unshared environment,” which more or less refers to all of the random things that influence a person that we can’t quantify, controls more; and c) there are likely ceiling effects at play here - that is, yes, moving a child from true neglect to a nurturing and supportive learning environment could have major positive effects, but once children enjoy a basic minimal level of safety and comfort the returns from improved environments likely diminish."
Are you familiar with the High Scope Perry study in the 1950s? It found that, a few years later, poor black students who went to pre-school weren't doing any better than the control group that didn't go to pre-school. But 40 yrs later, those who went to pre-school were more likely to have a college degree, own a home, etc. It was a small study but seems like an important consideration --WHEN is the outcome measured?
Also interesting is a bunch of stuff about the ways in which socioeconomic factors impact academic achievement in ch 5 of the book Clash: 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are