"Nowhere are the pathologies of our education discourse more apparent than in the school/education reform movement."
Education reform is a constant search for magic bullets, for easy solutions that instantly fox everything, along with cardboard cutout villains. Anything other "you need parents who will ride their kids like ponies". i.e..self-reform.
Anyway, American education doesn't perform so badly because of the influence of high performing immigrants, whose parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness.
This is what I did to one of my kids. It worked. It takes a lot of time, effort, and patience. The other child did not have the ability, nor the desire. I knew this about both of them by 1st grade. So, I chose to work with my other child on life skills. That also worked. Not all kids are meant to be the same. Parents need to learn to be comfortable with this and help them in whatever way benefits them. In my humble opinion.
So what we need are parents willing to damage their relationship with their child by nagging them constantly? Not worth it.
In fact it's so not worth it that I think schools should actively try to sabotage parents who do it. In my ideal world, homework would be banned, even for high schoolers, so that parents won't have as much school stuff to nag their kids about. There should probably also be some sort of legal recourse kids can seek out so they can punish parents who try to find ways to ride their kids anyway.
"American education doesn't perform so badly because of the influence of high performing immigrants, whose parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness."
That has nothing to do with it. American education results are skewed because a) we are highly diverse racially, and races have different achievement norms and b) we educate everyone, instead of tracking. Controlled for race, each American group does very well compared to countries of that race.
"Controlled for race, each American group does very well compared to countries of that race." What? What country are you comparing white students to? What would it prove, in terms of race, if a random group of 100 white students performed better or worse compared to a random group of 100 white students from Poland or Denmark or Sweden?
To state the obvious, wouldn't the education system and social norms and conditions of Poland/Denmark/Sweden account more for the results than some racial component?
Thanks for this piece. One other question which I always have which everyone in the ‘school reform’ debate always seems to ignore is ‘what do we actually want our schools to do?’. Are we trying to make every child ‘meet their potential’, are we trying to grade children on their proficiency level, or are we trying to impart on them key knowledge and skills which are necessary for performing certain functions in society? I usually veer towards the latter, but regardless of your thoughts, you answer is going to *radically* change your approach to how education, assessment etc is conducted. Yet I have never once even heard anyone mention any view on this question, with things instead just seeming to fit into the usual muddle of vague ideas with no actual clear direction.
"Should the best teachers teach the best students"... we have collectively answered that for athletics and music, and probably the rest of the arts, the answer is a resounding "yes." But somehow for mathematics it's not considered obvious that the best math students might thrive under the best math teachers.
I don't know if we can blame the 2000-2016 school reform movement for that. The anti-tracking impulse of leftists and liberals predated it and continues to this day. It's absolutely awful, I agree, but there you have it. What's really annoying about it is that there isn't any reason that it should be part of left or liberal ideology. It certainly doesn't come from any sort of coherent Marxist thought; the USSR was never dumb enough to try something like that (and China certainly doesn't). The only other government that ever sought to practice anything like it is Pol Pot's Cambodia (which was ended by other communists from Vietnam), the implications of that fact are really frightening.
But I mean there's a lot to unpack there, right - if nothing else, the school reform movement adamantly insisted that the core mission in public schooling was to drag kids at the bottom up. And if you have conventional views on teacher quality, that would mean you should stock those classrooms with the best teachers.
Either way, my point is that this is all undertheorized.
I agree that this is undertheorized, I guess I just don't have conventional views on teacher quality. In my view, the best teacher for a calculus class is probably not also the best teacher for a class on basic arithmetic. The latter should have a few qualities like patience and attention to individual students who are having trouble that it might be fine for the Calc teacher to lack.
In college I had a basic physics and chemistry class designed for future teachers. It was taught by an older woman with a master's degree. It was a fantastic class full of useful demonstrations and experiments. We loved it and learned a lot. The class before us was taught by someone with a doctorate and I'm sure was a better physicist or chemist. Everyone coming out the the classroom was frowning and hated it. Good teachers don't always have to be the best and the brightest in their field...they need to be good teachers.
Obviously, if you can't master the subject, you have no business teaching it.
I've experienced this myself: 50 minutes of a professor's lecture that my have well as been Swahili to me all made very clear by 15 minutes with a TA during office hours.
Your framing is off. Part of the point is that the range and variety of student and teacher performance, effected so profoundly by inherent ability and experience, skews comparative results and renders superlatives suspect. Have you asked yourself how well the ‘best’ students would perform anyway? How much less they’d learn under ‘average’ instruction? You’re predicating your assumptions on notions of productivity that don’t square well with the reality of productive teacher performance, which entails significant tension between prescribed content and conventional approaches and the demands of communicating effectively with students whose ability, attention and readiness are collectively all over the place, even in tracked classes in the upper reaches of K-12. I taught for 35 years in 7 different schools, including inner-city , suburban and rural settings. My 6 years teaching in the very small town where I grew up in rural Nebraska drove it home. I taught a single section of 12th grade English each year. The classes were small; I was the second-string/ alternate senior English teacher. The school demographic was predominantly white, small-town middle class. Each year’s group was notably different in terms of personalities, ability, interests, and ACT performance ranged widely among them over the years. Schooling looks much different from the ground than it does from a satellite. That’s not something you can maneuver around without distorting your take.
Part of Freddie's point, that I emphatically agree with, is that amongst students, superlatives are not suspect. Everyone knows who the smartest students are because it's clear by kindergarten and rarely changes. Just like everyone knows who the best athletes are.
But one thing that's also clear is that inherent ability, while necessary, is far from sufficient for ultimate success. The work on "expert performance" shows that students need extensive "deliberate practice" to truly master a field, to reach the point where they can then push the field in new directions. This is borne out in biographies of elite performers (Richard Feynman, say, or Michael Jordan) who were relentless in practice.
So a starting point for "best teacher" would be a teacher who can guide the best students through deliberate practice.
What if the best students had average instruction? They'd be bored and their skills would remain underdeveloped. Some might find their own challenges, some might give up entirely. Maybe we want to cut down the tall poppies in some sort of pursuit of egalitarianism. Maybe we want athletic coaches to spend their time trying to get the unathletic kids into shape, while the basketball team figures things out on its own. But the point is, for athletics and for music especially, we don't.
In a static, well-ordered setting marked by deliberate and reliable process and procedure, with well controlled inputs and consistent quality control mechanisms - in other words, a well-designed and run factory - your conception would be most fitting. But there are few, if any, schools that actually fit that description closely enough to merit pride of place atop the educational heap. Re-read FdB a bit more closely and I think you’ll also notice skepticism about the comprehensiveness and universality of ed. research. Which is an underlying point of emphasis here, as witnessed by a teacher. Yes, good students benefit from good teaching. And some students and teachers are exceptionally capable. Personally, as a teacher it was always my goal to make a strong effort on behalf of my students in every aspect of my teaching, and, having gotten started in inner-city LA, one famous role model was Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant who almost single-handedly transformed a large barrio high school into an academic powerhouse. (Watch “Stand and Deliver” if you don’t know the story; for a more nuanced and detailed version there are great print sources.) But Escalante’s story also implies that the appearance of normality in schools can be deceiving, and of course it partially supports your point that exceptional teachers can be difference-makers. It also dramatically underscores the point that the beneficiaries of such excellence may not be well-identified - perhaps hardly even identifiable, except in the loosest way - before their response is evident. The overcrowded jr. high where I first worked was in a very impoverished neighborhood. Many of the students were Immigrants. The ESL % was very high. Many kids had had very spotty school experiences, including small town schools in remote parts of Mexico and Central America. And yet from this bunch, which wouldn’t have merited much optimism regarding their long-term prospects, came a strong representation of high achievers, people who succeeded in a variety of careers. A number got graduate degrees. It’s anecdotal, of course; I didn’t conduct a long-term study. But my point is that the true measure of their potential had never been taken, because the mechanisms for doing so were not in place until they showed-up at Edison Junior High, where they were wide-eyed, struggling to communicate with the powers-that-be, and subject to all the stresses and strains that came with that environment, including poverty and gang-bangin’ juvenile misbehavior that would scare the shit out of you or me. Years later I taught a few miles away at Jordan HS, aka Watts High. It’s been around for awhile, though always in a neighborhood that could most generously be described as ‘modest’, though ‘poor’ would be equally fitting. But Jordan has some distinction among its grads. They include Glen Seaborg, a Nobel-winning chemist, Florence Griffith-Joyner, an Olympic track star, and Charles Mingus, a jazz great. The potential of these individuals was obviously inherent and exceptional. Doubtless that they each had great learning and practice experiences. And also that their high school launching pad was never going to be counted among their advantages. But all we can ever learn about them and their accomplishments must come from a close consideration of factors that may have, at different times and in different places, gone undetected.
I know, I read the book. The Hollywood version played that down, of course. He spent years teaching lower level math before getting a chance to teach calculus. That’s exactly why he knew it was worth a try. The tracking that was already in place was selling students short. He was an outlier because he saw past it.
How do you define the "best teacher"? Teachers have their own styles and, assuming equal levels of enthusiasm and diligence, won't their effectiveness depend on the student and how they like to learn?
"But somehow for mathematics it's not considered obvious that the best math students might thrive under the best math teachers."
"the best math students" aren't easy to define, so let me know when you have it.
And I guarantee you that "the best math teacher" varies for strong students and weak students, so rest assured we aren't "wasting" a great math teacher on low achieving students.
11 hrs ago·edited 7 hrs agoLiked by Freddie deBoer
"You don’t have to turn everyone into an A student to fight poverty, promote equality, and improve mobility."
Furthermore, even if you could and did turn everyone into an A student, in our current system, none of those measures would improve much, that's the real tragedy. Land values would rise as a result of increased productivity and the higher rents would eat into all the wage increases enough that the bottom tier of your A students (the A- kids) would still end up in poverty. In the end, most of the gains from your reforms would end up in the pockets of landlords. Yes, I'm going to say it, Georgism is correct and LVT would solve this.
It's good, durable, and easily repairable flooring that comes in many different attractive styles at reasonable prices. Widespread adoption would solve many social problems. Just make sure to pick a product with a wear layer thick enough for your particular application, don't try to save a few bucks by using a tile with a thin wear layer in a high traffic area, it's not worth it.
Just in case you're not joking: Land Value Taxation.
Also, make sure to use the recommended self-leveling products for your substrate and selected tile. The manufacturer rep of your tile should be able to point you in the right direction.
I agree with many points here. The comparison of US vs. almost any country is moot simply because of the size and diversity within the US. It's like comparing the performance of a massive public high to a high school in a tiny idyllic suburban town.
Also, as you said (and I'm not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson)...more money does not produce better outcomes where we need them (inner cities, etc.). Getting inner city performance to an even minimum acceptable level has proven impossible despite how many Georgetown grads head into Harlem through teach for America, or how many billionaires make the LA school district their pet project.
Neither funding nor teachers nor policy will matter if kids aren't (1) well behaved, (2) ready to learn, and (3) have accountability from their parents to keep them on track. The dispersion of student outcomes within school districts, as you said, shows the importance of stable homelife.
I think the schools are generally fine for anyone that wants an education, or demands their child gets an education. Reforms recently (speaking for a family member that's been a public school teacher for 20 years) is that now (1) there is no more discipline for poor behavior. Those kids are have to stay in the class and teachers must work around their incredibly disruptive behavior. (2) Teachers are expected to be the emotional and psychological supporters for all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with core educational goals. These factors prevent a lot of teaching and learning.
Charter school cherry picking is obvious but I have no problem with it. The real tragedy is the wasted potential of gifted or even would-be mediocre kids languishing in disruptive and dysfunctional inner city schools. If we can just get the top 30 or 40% of kids in these areas into a semi-functional educational environment and away from their peers that's a huge win.
As stated in the post, the problem is not limited to student languishing at inner city schools. Having grown up in a very white, very rural school district, the same problems exist, but there is no other school to go to even if that was a choice parents wanted to make.
I should have caveated the "parents can will a good education regardless of school district" with the reality that it probably isn't possible in the worst of the worst situations. However I don't blame the teachers or school administrators for that reality, but the actual communities themselves. The peers (neighbors, classmates, etc.) seem to create a culture that is so destructive inside and outside the classroom that makes it impossible to sometimes avoid a pretty sad life, let alone get an education. But I will make two other points about that...
First, this is again where Charter Schools can help. If 70% of a community is probably not going to be capable of minimum educational achievement and will also bring down the 30% of the students with potential--those students should have a viable alternative.
Second, I often wonder where the top 40% of students graduating classes from the worst of the worst inner city or rural public districts do after graduation. Are they going to college? What happens to the top 20% of the class as the worst public school in Philadelphia or Appalachia? If college is still a path for graduates of the school system then it becomes a question of how to get your son or daughter to the top 20 or 40%...which again comes down to parenting. I think we all know parenting is largely absent from 90% of these cases.
Again, charter schools don't work for underperforming rural schools, since there are not sufficient student numbers to support a charter school. The only potential option is to improve the performance of the public school.
Also, I don't think there is any school in the country where "70% of a community is probably not going to be capable of minimum educational achievement." There may not be dozens of ivy league students from a particular community, but minimum educational achievement has to be the baseline.
As for your final question, I did not go to school that would be considered part of the worst public school districts. But only a small percentage of my graduating class went to college. Of that group, many of us have been really successful, with graduate degrees and impressive careers. A certain percentage of students will succeed no matter what.
Performance in rural school districts account for 20% of all students. I honestly haven't given it much though and you may be right.
I actually do believe there are plenty of high schools in the country that meet that sad reality. The "baseline" for a public school in a functioning community is likely it the top 5% of a dysfunctional community. The national average is hardly ever relevant to any single school.
So it seems college is possible in even the worst school districts. Of the kids that didn't go to college..did they want to but couldn't get in? Did they care about school and work hard at it? Was it truly the school that failed them, or something else?
I'd guess that there are significantly more students in under-performing rural schools than under-performing "inner-city" schools, since only 30% of schools are considered urban and I'd bet at least 1/2 of those are doing fine.
At my rural high school, almost all of the kids who didn't go to college, which was more than 80% of my class, grew up in families where no one went to college and, usually, in real poverty. So college wasn't even a consideration.
"More money does not produce better outcomes where we need them (inner cities, etc.)." That's not necessarily true, more money after a certain point doesn't produce better outcomes. There are still places where we don't meet that minimum standard.
Actually, many of them aren't in major cities but in outlying rural areas or impoverished outlying areas like East St. Louis. In these places, we are talking about fixing leaky roofs, getting heat and AC, cleaning up lead and asbestos, etc. If all the money that went to BS curricula consultants just went to bringing the physical plant to some minimal standard we might see some improvement, though it would top out pretty quickly.
Amen to redirecting money away from BS curricula consultants to things that matter. Even my idyllic suburban school district has every flavor of the month SEL curriculum shoved down our throats each year on curriculum night because it "had traction in the Houston school district" lol.
I'm skeptical that improving physical structures will make a difference. There have been plenty of new schools built in poor districts that don't make a meaningful change because we haven't addressed the **buzzword alert** ROOT CAUSES of communities that substantially deviate from basic societal norms and behaviors that encourage upward mobility. If you take a drug addict living in a mold infested den and move them into a trendy studio...it will be a mold infested den in a year. The underlying behavior didn't change.
I've worked with some kids who have a troubled home life in my church group. I'd like to think I help them a bit, but really what I've seen helps them is just the bare minimum of not being cold, having a place that's not disgusting to go to the bathroom and shower, and knowing that 3 square meals a day are coming to them. Fortunately, a lot of them do get some of this from us and some from their school. I hope it's enough.
I kind of realized something about these kids that was eye-opening. As a kid, I hated school, I thought the academics were boring and the social dynamics were uncomfortable and sometimes painful. These kids though, hate going home. School is an environment that at the very least isn't a dangerous, insane, and crumbling madhouse. I can't wrap my head around dreading weekends, but these kids are afraid of Saturdays with same sort of dread (to a much higher degree) that I had going to school when I thought I might get my ass kicked that day.
I feel for those kids but the purpose of public education is to educate school children. Making education policies about solving social problems for the worst family dynamics is very unlikely to be helpful in meaningfully solving those social problems, or presents a large opportunity cost to everyone else in the public school system regardless of their social situation.
We aren't talking using the schools to administer major social programs. A decent building and free breakfast and lunch is basically it. I really think that we spend way too much on actually trying to solve complex problems and really neglect basic stuff like that which could help much more.
I live in a major city where the schools are... actually almost mediocre. I really think the whole city would we be worse if we didn't cover those basics (which we do). Of course, on top of that we then spend a bunch of money on bloated admin and assorted bullshit of the week, which I wish we would stop.
In general, I think we could actually help the working poor among us a lot more by just prioritizing basic things like street maintenance, sanitation, transit etc. rather than invasive social welfare programs. This has the nice bonus of also helping almost everyone else.
I think it's fine to do all those things rather than pay conflicted bureaucrats. I just see this as a separate issue and somewhat minimally helpful in closing education gaps for these vulnerable children.
". The real tragedy is the wasted potential of gifted or even would-be mediocre kids languishing in disruptive and dysfunctional inner city schools. "
There's very little evidence that gifted kids are overlooked. If you're smart, you're being found. There are probably average intellect kids with low engagement who aren't maxing out, but we get more of them than you'd think.
"Charter school cherry picking is obvious but I have no problem with it"
You should. CHarter schools make education more expensive with no improvement in outcomes.
"In recent decades our school system has been purported to be the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality, tasks which schooling was never designed to accomplish."
This.
I have a lot of complaints about education in general, but putting this burden on schooling seems to be unrealistic, and it is unfair to judge our education system by how well they do this.
Freddie, do you have a couple examples of schools that you think are doing the closest to what you would advocate for education?
I'm sympathetic to the argument that schools can't do much about the relative distribution of academic talent any more than sports programs can do much about the relative distribution of athletic talent, so we should make schools that nurture kids and encourage them to excel. Bryan Caplan makes a similar argument about parenting, and it fits in with the people in the nerd sphere who call schools "child jails" and are basically opposed to them.
That said, I like to see experiments, so the way I'd be inclined to test your recommendation would be to (a) find (or found) a few schools in the DeBoer model, (b) try to tease out the impact of that model on the kids, and then (c) if we like the impact, see if it can scale.
When discussing the death of the school reform movement, I noticed that you didn't mention the Every Student Succeeds Act, which rescinded parts of No Child Left Behind and was widely seen as elites admitting that NCLB had failed. That happened under Obama before Trump ever came into office and that passage was bipartisan.
I strongly agree with everything Freddie wrote here. But to the other parents reading: are you actually ok with the consequences of what he suggests? Are you REALLY ok with YOUR child being at the bottom of the distribution, and this being recognized explicitly and publicly throughout their childhood?
A “feature” of the education system is that it allows us to delay final judgement of a child’s ability until they are 17. Parents want this. It’s hypocritical and dumb, and seems to be most pronounced among the educated elite who are most active in these debates.
Isn't this already happening? Other than the overt publication of a child's test scores and grades, I see this occurring for my kids in school through which classes they are assigned to from year to year. That process started very early with identifying the kids who would participate in the Gifted/Talented program and others who were assigned individual teacher aids and went to the "resource room" where kids with behavioral issues spend some/all of the day. By middle school, explicit tracking into upper/middle/lower classes for some classes occurs, and almost all classes, other than gym etc, use that sorting mechanism in high school.
My only objection to this, is that school performance is a combination of motivation and ability, and I think kids work through a lot of motivation issues and development through the school years. I speak from experience. Both my husband and I underperformed at certain points in school (me in elementary school, my husband in high school), largely because we were bored and unchallenged. If our abilities had been capped at those points, the world would have written us off. Both of us have done quite well for ourselves subsequently. So, I guess I'm just a little reluctant to cap opportunities for kids, when they could (on a personal level) be working through and developing other skills, not just academic capability.
I'm not sure how normal it is worldwide but at least in the UK you are grouped into "sets" from a fairly young age (somewhere between 8 and 11) based on ability and this is explicitly communicated (top set, bottom set, etc) to the kids. They generally all function so you can climb your way up until you start studying for end of compulsory education qualifications (around 14) at which point you're locked in but it doesn't seem to create that idea that your child has been unfairly put in the bottom of the distribution. Partly because the sets are determined through testing. At least in my experience (some years ago now) I was able to climb out of bottom set French into top and a few of my friends climbed out of middle set for other subjects into top but the sets were fairly static. Bottom set kids would normally remain so and top set would stay the same.
I would argue that we just shouldn't care what the parents think about it. You want to homeschool then do so. If you can afford private school, fine. Otherwise, since we're educating your kids for free in an attempt to preserve a somewhat functional and advanced society, we're perfectly entitled to collectively decide how best to do so.
Quite true. Schools do consider parents customers, but in fact the taxpayers fund schools, not parents, and if they aren't satisfied they should pay to go elsewhere.
I would support making private school and child care tax deductible, but not give anything to homeschoolers or stay at home moms.
Most parents who participate in policy discussions don't have this problem, because their children aren't at the bottom of the distribution (for genetic and environmental reasons). The idea of a distribution of ability, within groups, isn't a threat to them.
From what I see, most of the controversy is because of the achievement gaps by race and class. We will never accept "kids just have different abilities" as long as the kids at the bottom are disproportionately Black. Arguably, schools can't fix it -- like Freddie says, inequality in society is the biggest issue -- but there's pressure for someone to fix it, and there always will be as long as the gap remains. So we're back to where we started, trying to improve outcomes for kids at the bottom.
Yes, absolutely. If my child is at the bottom I want to find out as soon as possible so I can hekp her figure out ways for her to live a good life with whatever level of talent she possesses. I definitely don't want to waste 17 years on false hope.
At what age or grade does the impetus behind education switch from learning things because they are just things everyone should know, to learning things because it is vital for your career or job? Is it after high school? Or maybe junior high?
I've often thought it strange that we treat early education as this basic universal standard of being a knowledgeable and informed human being, and higher ed almost strictly for job purposes. Has that dichotomy always existed, or is it a component of modern economic realities?
It hasn't always existed, vocational education in High Schools used to be very widespread. Shop and Auto Repair classes were taken somewhat seriously. I think that an important part of a democratic society though, was that this took place in the same school as the more academic classes.
I agree that the move to separate vocational schools had a negative impact on school districts. I'd love my college-track kids to take shop classes, but those are no longer located at the High School. The vocational and college tracks are an either/or choice.
Hell it's not even that many schools separated vocational and academic tracks into different schools. It's that, in many districts, vocational ed was just dropped. It means that many kids, who aren't entirely suited for academic education, are told they are dumb when they could be great carpenters, electricians, etc.
Not only that, some of those kids who seem to be vocational ed suited in high school just aren't mature enough yet for academic education but could enter that world later through junior colleges. Instead of learning some structure and useful skills in the meantime, they are just ignored as not worth anyone's time and effort, turning them off from school entirely. I don't think I'm being paranoid in finding a real misandrist impulse behind gutting vocational programs.
Vocational classes have often been supported by industry, including direct financial support, as well as by hiring graduates at high salaries. Such as tool and die, CNC machining, etc.
Much of that industry has been outsourced to China. As someone who has worked in Manufacturing for many decades, I can tell you that when having injection molded tooling made, it was just a formality getting tooling quoted by US suppliers, because our high quality Chinese suppliers were half the price.
Without the Chinese undercutting wages and jobs, there would be more domestic demand for trained workers, and supply of trained workers would eventually follow.
Demand for trained workers, drives the supply of schools - as it should. In fact, if demand is high enough for trained workers, business owners may be willing to train workers themselves, although this is admittedly not always feasible, as you end up training workers for your competitors.
Domestic demand is reduced in direct proportion to the trade deficit (x-m term in the equation for aggregate demand).
A high demand economy cures a lot of societal ills, including excessive inequality, as shortages of workers drives wages up. Up to a point (where inflation becomes excessive), this is a good thing IMO.
Government policy aimed at increasing demand (up to a point, and while also facilitating increased supply) is IMO better policy than government redistribution - which, if excessive, absolutely removes necessary incentives. What constitutes "excessive" is of course up for debate, but the lower the level of social cohesion of a nation or state, I would argue that the workable level of government redistribution becomes lower.
Back to education, I would agree with the statement that education is not necessarily the best way to decrease excessive inequality.
"Demand for trained workers, drives the supply of schools."
True, but since we're, in theory, pursuing industrial policy now, we have to also try to move the needle the other way. A trained work force can bring in manufacturers. (This also needs to be combine with a good-sized dose of protectionism, joint venture tech-transfer, industrial espionage, research support, etc.).
In addition, training more tradies could bring construction prices down or at the very least, replace all the retirements that are about to happen, which is needed whether manufacturers are coming back or not.
One of the reasons why I largely disagree with FdB’s dismissive attitude towards school choice is that while I agree that school choice is unlikely to materially change overall academic performance, as measured by standardized tests, I think school choice is really the only way to move from our current anti-tracking system to a system where schools can be allowed to accentuate different goals, whether that goal is vocational training (while still ensuring the student is literate and numerate to the level of, say, basic algebra), art and design, etc. or schools that focus on socialization for troubled kids or instilling discipline/work habits for kids with terrible ones. I do think lots of parents recognize when their child is not getting something out of an academic focused education, is just faking their way through school, or is in danger of dropping out.
Thanks as always for trying to make the public understand what education IS, not what we want it to be. That's a hard lesson, and too many people don't want to learn it.
As a former teacher, I think I understand why a little bit. I remember having the "Waiting for Superman" model drilled into me when I was getting my education degree, filling students' heads with knowledge. That and the entertainment counterpart: You MUST keep their attention, keep them entertained; that's essential.
I thought both models had problems, but I wanted to graduate. But after a couple of years of teaching, a different model occurred to me. In my third year, I opened each class, after taking roll, with silence. I stepped in front of my desk, and just looked at the students. This was high school sophomores, and after a bit they giggled and fidgeted a bit, but that did get their attention.
Then I pulled out my wallet (still silent), took out a five dollar bill and laid it on my desk. Then I stepped aside a bit. More giggling and fidgeting, and "what the helling?" but definitely more attention.
Next I said, "Anyone who wants that can take it."
A lot of "Is he serious?" looking at one another, some actual laughing and looking at me quizzically.
I told them I meant it. Anyone could take it.
There was a little more curiousity, and then a brave student or two got up. In some classes is was just one, the other classes had a couple who raced up to get it. In all cases they looked at me one more time to silently ask, "Really?" I nodded and they went back to their desks.
Now everyone wanted to know what was up.
I said, "That's my philosophy of teaching. It's not exactly something I give to you, it's something I offer. But you have to take it. I'll be placing five dollar bills, and tens and hundreds and thousands up here all year long, making them available to you. But unless you take them, unless you make the effort to make them your own, you'll be leaving money on the table. You may not be able to tell at first how what I'm offering you will be helpful in your life, and maybe it won't. But what I'm doing here has been the kind of thing that made millions and millions of people better than if no one had offered it."
I've sure I've cleaned up that speech over time, but it's the model I still think is right. You're also right that a lot of kids won't be able to understand what that means, or will mock it defensively. I did have students like that, who I worked harder with. But it did help instill the notion that education isn't a passive idea, it's an active one on my part and on theirs.
The end of the story is what I'm sure you'd expect. My first day was talked about among the students, it got back to the administration, and I was called in. "You can't be giving students money in class," I was told sternly. I explained the motive, but of course the bottom line was that it would make other students unhappy, there would be complaints, it wasn't teaching them the right lesson, etc.
So it was a one-time experiment, and I didn't try it again. A few years later I left teaching for other battles with administrators -- I was too young to have learned myself how to deal with bureaucracies, and went in another direction with my life.
But teaching is still the most valuable job to society that I've ever had -- well worth the much, much higher salaries I had later in life. And it's still something I discuss with other teachers I encounter. Most seem to agree that it is a more helpful model for kids to understand -- that they're not passive players in education, they're its primary actors. I think kids need more of that.
It's a lesson I wish I could teach to many adults in the education system, particularly administrators.
Have you written anything about gifted programs (e.g. about their effectiveness, the implications for the system at large etc.)? I've searched and haven't been able to find anything online and I'm curious what you think.
"Nowhere are the pathologies of our education discourse more apparent than in the school/education reform movement."
Education reform is a constant search for magic bullets, for easy solutions that instantly fox everything, along with cardboard cutout villains. Anything other "you need parents who will ride their kids like ponies". i.e..self-reform.
Anyway, American education doesn't perform so badly because of the influence of high performing immigrants, whose parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness.
This is what I did to one of my kids. It worked. It takes a lot of time, effort, and patience. The other child did not have the ability, nor the desire. I knew this about both of them by 1st grade. So, I chose to work with my other child on life skills. That also worked. Not all kids are meant to be the same. Parents need to learn to be comfortable with this and help them in whatever way benefits them. In my humble opinion.
So what we need are parents willing to damage their relationship with their child by nagging them constantly? Not worth it.
In fact it's so not worth it that I think schools should actively try to sabotage parents who do it. In my ideal world, homework would be banned, even for high schoolers, so that parents won't have as much school stuff to nag their kids about. There should probably also be some sort of legal recourse kids can seek out so they can punish parents who try to find ways to ride their kids anyway.
"American education doesn't perform so badly because of the influence of high performing immigrants, whose parents ride them like they were trying to win the Preakness."
That has nothing to do with it. American education results are skewed because a) we are highly diverse racially, and races have different achievement norms and b) we educate everyone, instead of tracking. Controlled for race, each American group does very well compared to countries of that race.
"Controlled for race, each American group does very well compared to countries of that race." What? What country are you comparing white students to? What would it prove, in terms of race, if a random group of 100 white students performed better or worse compared to a random group of 100 white students from Poland or Denmark or Sweden?
To state the obvious, wouldn't the education system and social norms and conditions of Poland/Denmark/Sweden account more for the results than some racial component?
"What country are you comparing white students to? "
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732087511327908128/photo/1
US Asians are second, US Whites are seventh (ranked above Korea, in fact).
US Hispanics place ahead of every spanish speaking country except Spain, and US Blacks place ahead of Greece and most Hispanic countries.
"wouldn't the education system and social norms and conditions of Poland/Denmark/Sweden account more for the results than some racial component?"
Not so's you'd notice.
Thanks for this piece. One other question which I always have which everyone in the ‘school reform’ debate always seems to ignore is ‘what do we actually want our schools to do?’. Are we trying to make every child ‘meet their potential’, are we trying to grade children on their proficiency level, or are we trying to impart on them key knowledge and skills which are necessary for performing certain functions in society? I usually veer towards the latter, but regardless of your thoughts, you answer is going to *radically* change your approach to how education, assessment etc is conducted. Yet I have never once even heard anyone mention any view on this question, with things instead just seeming to fit into the usual muddle of vague ideas with no actual clear direction.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I think your core question is a powerful place to start.
Me too - only I used more words. What do we want education to do? What would a good system be like?
"Should the best teachers teach the best students"... we have collectively answered that for athletics and music, and probably the rest of the arts, the answer is a resounding "yes." But somehow for mathematics it's not considered obvious that the best math students might thrive under the best math teachers.
I don't know if we can blame the 2000-2016 school reform movement for that. The anti-tracking impulse of leftists and liberals predated it and continues to this day. It's absolutely awful, I agree, but there you have it. What's really annoying about it is that there isn't any reason that it should be part of left or liberal ideology. It certainly doesn't come from any sort of coherent Marxist thought; the USSR was never dumb enough to try something like that (and China certainly doesn't). The only other government that ever sought to practice anything like it is Pol Pot's Cambodia (which was ended by other communists from Vietnam), the implications of that fact are really frightening.
But I mean there's a lot to unpack there, right - if nothing else, the school reform movement adamantly insisted that the core mission in public schooling was to drag kids at the bottom up. And if you have conventional views on teacher quality, that would mean you should stock those classrooms with the best teachers.
Either way, my point is that this is all undertheorized.
I agree that this is undertheorized, I guess I just don't have conventional views on teacher quality. In my view, the best teacher for a calculus class is probably not also the best teacher for a class on basic arithmetic. The latter should have a few qualities like patience and attention to individual students who are having trouble that it might be fine for the Calc teacher to lack.
In college I had a basic physics and chemistry class designed for future teachers. It was taught by an older woman with a master's degree. It was a fantastic class full of useful demonstrations and experiments. We loved it and learned a lot. The class before us was taught by someone with a doctorate and I'm sure was a better physicist or chemist. Everyone coming out the the classroom was frowning and hated it. Good teachers don't always have to be the best and the brightest in their field...they need to be good teachers.
Obviously, if you can't master the subject, you have no business teaching it.
I've experienced this myself: 50 minutes of a professor's lecture that my have well as been Swahili to me all made very clear by 15 minutes with a TA during office hours.
Your framing is off. Part of the point is that the range and variety of student and teacher performance, effected so profoundly by inherent ability and experience, skews comparative results and renders superlatives suspect. Have you asked yourself how well the ‘best’ students would perform anyway? How much less they’d learn under ‘average’ instruction? You’re predicating your assumptions on notions of productivity that don’t square well with the reality of productive teacher performance, which entails significant tension between prescribed content and conventional approaches and the demands of communicating effectively with students whose ability, attention and readiness are collectively all over the place, even in tracked classes in the upper reaches of K-12. I taught for 35 years in 7 different schools, including inner-city , suburban and rural settings. My 6 years teaching in the very small town where I grew up in rural Nebraska drove it home. I taught a single section of 12th grade English each year. The classes were small; I was the second-string/ alternate senior English teacher. The school demographic was predominantly white, small-town middle class. Each year’s group was notably different in terms of personalities, ability, interests, and ACT performance ranged widely among them over the years. Schooling looks much different from the ground than it does from a satellite. That’s not something you can maneuver around without distorting your take.
Part of Freddie's point, that I emphatically agree with, is that amongst students, superlatives are not suspect. Everyone knows who the smartest students are because it's clear by kindergarten and rarely changes. Just like everyone knows who the best athletes are.
But one thing that's also clear is that inherent ability, while necessary, is far from sufficient for ultimate success. The work on "expert performance" shows that students need extensive "deliberate practice" to truly master a field, to reach the point where they can then push the field in new directions. This is borne out in biographies of elite performers (Richard Feynman, say, or Michael Jordan) who were relentless in practice.
So a starting point for "best teacher" would be a teacher who can guide the best students through deliberate practice.
What if the best students had average instruction? They'd be bored and their skills would remain underdeveloped. Some might find their own challenges, some might give up entirely. Maybe we want to cut down the tall poppies in some sort of pursuit of egalitarianism. Maybe we want athletic coaches to spend their time trying to get the unathletic kids into shape, while the basketball team figures things out on its own. But the point is, for athletics and for music especially, we don't.
In a static, well-ordered setting marked by deliberate and reliable process and procedure, with well controlled inputs and consistent quality control mechanisms - in other words, a well-designed and run factory - your conception would be most fitting. But there are few, if any, schools that actually fit that description closely enough to merit pride of place atop the educational heap. Re-read FdB a bit more closely and I think you’ll also notice skepticism about the comprehensiveness and universality of ed. research. Which is an underlying point of emphasis here, as witnessed by a teacher. Yes, good students benefit from good teaching. And some students and teachers are exceptionally capable. Personally, as a teacher it was always my goal to make a strong effort on behalf of my students in every aspect of my teaching, and, having gotten started in inner-city LA, one famous role model was Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian immigrant who almost single-handedly transformed a large barrio high school into an academic powerhouse. (Watch “Stand and Deliver” if you don’t know the story; for a more nuanced and detailed version there are great print sources.) But Escalante’s story also implies that the appearance of normality in schools can be deceiving, and of course it partially supports your point that exceptional teachers can be difference-makers. It also dramatically underscores the point that the beneficiaries of such excellence may not be well-identified - perhaps hardly even identifiable, except in the loosest way - before their response is evident. The overcrowded jr. high where I first worked was in a very impoverished neighborhood. Many of the students were Immigrants. The ESL % was very high. Many kids had had very spotty school experiences, including small town schools in remote parts of Mexico and Central America. And yet from this bunch, which wouldn’t have merited much optimism regarding their long-term prospects, came a strong representation of high achievers, people who succeeded in a variety of careers. A number got graduate degrees. It’s anecdotal, of course; I didn’t conduct a long-term study. But my point is that the true measure of their potential had never been taken, because the mechanisms for doing so were not in place until they showed-up at Edison Junior High, where they were wide-eyed, struggling to communicate with the powers-that-be, and subject to all the stresses and strains that came with that environment, including poverty and gang-bangin’ juvenile misbehavior that would scare the shit out of you or me. Years later I taught a few miles away at Jordan HS, aka Watts High. It’s been around for awhile, though always in a neighborhood that could most generously be described as ‘modest’, though ‘poor’ would be equally fitting. But Jordan has some distinction among its grads. They include Glen Seaborg, a Nobel-winning chemist, Florence Griffith-Joyner, an Olympic track star, and Charles Mingus, a jazz great. The potential of these individuals was obviously inherent and exceptional. Doubtless that they each had great learning and practice experiences. And also that their high school launching pad was never going to be counted among their advantages. But all we can ever learn about them and their accomplishments must come from a close consideration of factors that may have, at different times and in different places, gone undetected.
Escalante tracked like crazy.
I know, I read the book. The Hollywood version played that down, of course. He spent years teaching lower level math before getting a chance to teach calculus. That’s exactly why he knew it was worth a try. The tracking that was already in place was selling students short. He was an outlier because he saw past it.
How do you define the "best teacher"? Teachers have their own styles and, assuming equal levels of enthusiasm and diligence, won't their effectiveness depend on the student and how they like to learn?
"But somehow for mathematics it's not considered obvious that the best math students might thrive under the best math teachers."
"the best math students" aren't easy to define, so let me know when you have it.
And I guarantee you that "the best math teacher" varies for strong students and weak students, so rest assured we aren't "wasting" a great math teacher on low achieving students.
You can’t fix stupid.
"You don’t have to turn everyone into an A student to fight poverty, promote equality, and improve mobility."
Furthermore, even if you could and did turn everyone into an A student, in our current system, none of those measures would improve much, that's the real tragedy. Land values would rise as a result of increased productivity and the higher rents would eat into all the wage increases enough that the bottom tier of your A students (the A- kids) would still end up in poverty. In the end, most of the gains from your reforms would end up in the pockets of landlords. Yes, I'm going to say it, Georgism is correct and LVT would solve this.
What does Luxury Vinyl Tile have to do with it?
It's good, durable, and easily repairable flooring that comes in many different attractive styles at reasonable prices. Widespread adoption would solve many social problems. Just make sure to pick a product with a wear layer thick enough for your particular application, don't try to save a few bucks by using a tile with a thin wear layer in a high traffic area, it's not worth it.
Just in case you're not joking: Land Value Taxation.
lol. I was sold on the tile.
Also, make sure to use the recommended self-leveling products for your substrate and selected tile. The manufacturer rep of your tile should be able to point you in the right direction.
I agree with many points here. The comparison of US vs. almost any country is moot simply because of the size and diversity within the US. It's like comparing the performance of a massive public high to a high school in a tiny idyllic suburban town.
Also, as you said (and I'm not sure how many times we need to learn this lesson)...more money does not produce better outcomes where we need them (inner cities, etc.). Getting inner city performance to an even minimum acceptable level has proven impossible despite how many Georgetown grads head into Harlem through teach for America, or how many billionaires make the LA school district their pet project.
Neither funding nor teachers nor policy will matter if kids aren't (1) well behaved, (2) ready to learn, and (3) have accountability from their parents to keep them on track. The dispersion of student outcomes within school districts, as you said, shows the importance of stable homelife.
I think the schools are generally fine for anyone that wants an education, or demands their child gets an education. Reforms recently (speaking for a family member that's been a public school teacher for 20 years) is that now (1) there is no more discipline for poor behavior. Those kids are have to stay in the class and teachers must work around their incredibly disruptive behavior. (2) Teachers are expected to be the emotional and psychological supporters for all sorts of issues that have nothing to do with core educational goals. These factors prevent a lot of teaching and learning.
Charter school cherry picking is obvious but I have no problem with it. The real tragedy is the wasted potential of gifted or even would-be mediocre kids languishing in disruptive and dysfunctional inner city schools. If we can just get the top 30 or 40% of kids in these areas into a semi-functional educational environment and away from their peers that's a huge win.
As stated in the post, the problem is not limited to student languishing at inner city schools. Having grown up in a very white, very rural school district, the same problems exist, but there is no other school to go to even if that was a choice parents wanted to make.
I should have caveated the "parents can will a good education regardless of school district" with the reality that it probably isn't possible in the worst of the worst situations. However I don't blame the teachers or school administrators for that reality, but the actual communities themselves. The peers (neighbors, classmates, etc.) seem to create a culture that is so destructive inside and outside the classroom that makes it impossible to sometimes avoid a pretty sad life, let alone get an education. But I will make two other points about that...
First, this is again where Charter Schools can help. If 70% of a community is probably not going to be capable of minimum educational achievement and will also bring down the 30% of the students with potential--those students should have a viable alternative.
Second, I often wonder where the top 40% of students graduating classes from the worst of the worst inner city or rural public districts do after graduation. Are they going to college? What happens to the top 20% of the class as the worst public school in Philadelphia or Appalachia? If college is still a path for graduates of the school system then it becomes a question of how to get your son or daughter to the top 20 or 40%...which again comes down to parenting. I think we all know parenting is largely absent from 90% of these cases.
Again, charter schools don't work for underperforming rural schools, since there are not sufficient student numbers to support a charter school. The only potential option is to improve the performance of the public school.
Also, I don't think there is any school in the country where "70% of a community is probably not going to be capable of minimum educational achievement." There may not be dozens of ivy league students from a particular community, but minimum educational achievement has to be the baseline.
As for your final question, I did not go to school that would be considered part of the worst public school districts. But only a small percentage of my graduating class went to college. Of that group, many of us have been really successful, with graduate degrees and impressive careers. A certain percentage of students will succeed no matter what.
Performance in rural school districts account for 20% of all students. I honestly haven't given it much though and you may be right.
I actually do believe there are plenty of high schools in the country that meet that sad reality. The "baseline" for a public school in a functioning community is likely it the top 5% of a dysfunctional community. The national average is hardly ever relevant to any single school.
So it seems college is possible in even the worst school districts. Of the kids that didn't go to college..did they want to but couldn't get in? Did they care about school and work hard at it? Was it truly the school that failed them, or something else?
I'd guess that there are significantly more students in under-performing rural schools than under-performing "inner-city" schools, since only 30% of schools are considered urban and I'd bet at least 1/2 of those are doing fine.
At my rural high school, almost all of the kids who didn't go to college, which was more than 80% of my class, grew up in families where no one went to college and, usually, in real poverty. So college wasn't even a consideration.
Sounds like the school system was providing a decent education for those that wanted it.
" Are they going to college?"
Haven't you read all the articles about kids in college who can't read?
How many kids go to college that can't read lol? What colleges are letting them in?
If that's a serious question, then you need to learn a lot more about this subject.
"More money does not produce better outcomes where we need them (inner cities, etc.)." That's not necessarily true, more money after a certain point doesn't produce better outcomes. There are still places where we don't meet that minimum standard.
Actually, many of them aren't in major cities but in outlying rural areas or impoverished outlying areas like East St. Louis. In these places, we are talking about fixing leaky roofs, getting heat and AC, cleaning up lead and asbestos, etc. If all the money that went to BS curricula consultants just went to bringing the physical plant to some minimal standard we might see some improvement, though it would top out pretty quickly.
Amen to redirecting money away from BS curricula consultants to things that matter. Even my idyllic suburban school district has every flavor of the month SEL curriculum shoved down our throats each year on curriculum night because it "had traction in the Houston school district" lol.
I'm skeptical that improving physical structures will make a difference. There have been plenty of new schools built in poor districts that don't make a meaningful change because we haven't addressed the **buzzword alert** ROOT CAUSES of communities that substantially deviate from basic societal norms and behaviors that encourage upward mobility. If you take a drug addict living in a mold infested den and move them into a trendy studio...it will be a mold infested den in a year. The underlying behavior didn't change.
I've worked with some kids who have a troubled home life in my church group. I'd like to think I help them a bit, but really what I've seen helps them is just the bare minimum of not being cold, having a place that's not disgusting to go to the bathroom and shower, and knowing that 3 square meals a day are coming to them. Fortunately, a lot of them do get some of this from us and some from their school. I hope it's enough.
I kind of realized something about these kids that was eye-opening. As a kid, I hated school, I thought the academics were boring and the social dynamics were uncomfortable and sometimes painful. These kids though, hate going home. School is an environment that at the very least isn't a dangerous, insane, and crumbling madhouse. I can't wrap my head around dreading weekends, but these kids are afraid of Saturdays with same sort of dread (to a much higher degree) that I had going to school when I thought I might get my ass kicked that day.
I feel for those kids but the purpose of public education is to educate school children. Making education policies about solving social problems for the worst family dynamics is very unlikely to be helpful in meaningfully solving those social problems, or presents a large opportunity cost to everyone else in the public school system regardless of their social situation.
We aren't talking using the schools to administer major social programs. A decent building and free breakfast and lunch is basically it. I really think that we spend way too much on actually trying to solve complex problems and really neglect basic stuff like that which could help much more.
I live in a major city where the schools are... actually almost mediocre. I really think the whole city would we be worse if we didn't cover those basics (which we do). Of course, on top of that we then spend a bunch of money on bloated admin and assorted bullshit of the week, which I wish we would stop.
In general, I think we could actually help the working poor among us a lot more by just prioritizing basic things like street maintenance, sanitation, transit etc. rather than invasive social welfare programs. This has the nice bonus of also helping almost everyone else.
I think it's fine to do all those things rather than pay conflicted bureaucrats. I just see this as a separate issue and somewhat minimally helpful in closing education gaps for these vulnerable children.
Free breakfast and lunch are already provided and they are a massive waste of money. Better to give coupons and park food trucks outside the school.
". The real tragedy is the wasted potential of gifted or even would-be mediocre kids languishing in disruptive and dysfunctional inner city schools. "
There's very little evidence that gifted kids are overlooked. If you're smart, you're being found. There are probably average intellect kids with low engagement who aren't maxing out, but we get more of them than you'd think.
"Charter school cherry picking is obvious but I have no problem with it"
You should. CHarter schools make education more expensive with no improvement in outcomes.
"In recent decades our school system has been purported to be the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality, tasks which schooling was never designed to accomplish."
This.
I have a lot of complaints about education in general, but putting this burden on schooling seems to be unrealistic, and it is unfair to judge our education system by how well they do this.
Freddie, do you have a couple examples of schools that you think are doing the closest to what you would advocate for education?
I'm sympathetic to the argument that schools can't do much about the relative distribution of academic talent any more than sports programs can do much about the relative distribution of athletic talent, so we should make schools that nurture kids and encourage them to excel. Bryan Caplan makes a similar argument about parenting, and it fits in with the people in the nerd sphere who call schools "child jails" and are basically opposed to them.
That said, I like to see experiments, so the way I'd be inclined to test your recommendation would be to (a) find (or found) a few schools in the DeBoer model, (b) try to tease out the impact of that model on the kids, and then (c) if we like the impact, see if it can scale.
When discussing the death of the school reform movement, I noticed that you didn't mention the Every Student Succeeds Act, which rescinded parts of No Child Left Behind and was widely seen as elites admitting that NCLB had failed. That happened under Obama before Trump ever came into office and that passage was bipartisan.
That's true, and I wrote a whole series on how it happened.
But it's also true that education reform was being polarized before Trump.
A minor issue is that education refomers were full on Never Trump and most were left completely out in the cold after he was elected.
I strongly agree with everything Freddie wrote here. But to the other parents reading: are you actually ok with the consequences of what he suggests? Are you REALLY ok with YOUR child being at the bottom of the distribution, and this being recognized explicitly and publicly throughout their childhood?
A “feature” of the education system is that it allows us to delay final judgement of a child’s ability until they are 17. Parents want this. It’s hypocritical and dumb, and seems to be most pronounced among the educated elite who are most active in these debates.
Isn't this already happening? Other than the overt publication of a child's test scores and grades, I see this occurring for my kids in school through which classes they are assigned to from year to year. That process started very early with identifying the kids who would participate in the Gifted/Talented program and others who were assigned individual teacher aids and went to the "resource room" where kids with behavioral issues spend some/all of the day. By middle school, explicit tracking into upper/middle/lower classes for some classes occurs, and almost all classes, other than gym etc, use that sorting mechanism in high school.
My only objection to this, is that school performance is a combination of motivation and ability, and I think kids work through a lot of motivation issues and development through the school years. I speak from experience. Both my husband and I underperformed at certain points in school (me in elementary school, my husband in high school), largely because we were bored and unchallenged. If our abilities had been capped at those points, the world would have written us off. Both of us have done quite well for ourselves subsequently. So, I guess I'm just a little reluctant to cap opportunities for kids, when they could (on a personal level) be working through and developing other skills, not just academic capability.
I'm not sure how normal it is worldwide but at least in the UK you are grouped into "sets" from a fairly young age (somewhere between 8 and 11) based on ability and this is explicitly communicated (top set, bottom set, etc) to the kids. They generally all function so you can climb your way up until you start studying for end of compulsory education qualifications (around 14) at which point you're locked in but it doesn't seem to create that idea that your child has been unfairly put in the bottom of the distribution. Partly because the sets are determined through testing. At least in my experience (some years ago now) I was able to climb out of bottom set French into top and a few of my friends climbed out of middle set for other subjects into top but the sets were fairly static. Bottom set kids would normally remain so and top set would stay the same.
US has been sued out of doing that repeatedly. It still happens in majority white or Asian school districts. And by majority I mean 80-90%.
I would argue that we just shouldn't care what the parents think about it. You want to homeschool then do so. If you can afford private school, fine. Otherwise, since we're educating your kids for free in an attempt to preserve a somewhat functional and advanced society, we're perfectly entitled to collectively decide how best to do so.
Quite true. Schools do consider parents customers, but in fact the taxpayers fund schools, not parents, and if they aren't satisfied they should pay to go elsewhere.
I would support making private school and child care tax deductible, but not give anything to homeschoolers or stay at home moms.
Good luck with the politics of that!
Never going to happen. Notice conservatives never think of tax deductions becuase they *want* the money coming out of the school budgets.
It wouldn't be quite so easy for conservatives to pull off if liberals and leftists didn't explicitly try to fight the culture wars in the classroom.
Whatever you think is happening is greatly exaggerated. Most teachers aren't progressive. They're left of center, but not woke.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/political-opinions-k-12-teachers-results-nationally-representative-survey
Most parents who participate in policy discussions don't have this problem, because their children aren't at the bottom of the distribution (for genetic and environmental reasons). The idea of a distribution of ability, within groups, isn't a threat to them.
From what I see, most of the controversy is because of the achievement gaps by race and class. We will never accept "kids just have different abilities" as long as the kids at the bottom are disproportionately Black. Arguably, schools can't fix it -- like Freddie says, inequality in society is the biggest issue -- but there's pressure for someone to fix it, and there always will be as long as the gap remains. So we're back to where we started, trying to improve outcomes for kids at the bottom.
Yes, absolutely. If my child is at the bottom I want to find out as soon as possible so I can hekp her figure out ways for her to live a good life with whatever level of talent she possesses. I definitely don't want to waste 17 years on false hope.
I have a question.
At what age or grade does the impetus behind education switch from learning things because they are just things everyone should know, to learning things because it is vital for your career or job? Is it after high school? Or maybe junior high?
I've often thought it strange that we treat early education as this basic universal standard of being a knowledgeable and informed human being, and higher ed almost strictly for job purposes. Has that dichotomy always existed, or is it a component of modern economic realities?
It hasn't always existed, vocational education in High Schools used to be very widespread. Shop and Auto Repair classes were taken somewhat seriously. I think that an important part of a democratic society though, was that this took place in the same school as the more academic classes.
I agree that the move to separate vocational schools had a negative impact on school districts. I'd love my college-track kids to take shop classes, but those are no longer located at the High School. The vocational and college tracks are an either/or choice.
Hell it's not even that many schools separated vocational and academic tracks into different schools. It's that, in many districts, vocational ed was just dropped. It means that many kids, who aren't entirely suited for academic education, are told they are dumb when they could be great carpenters, electricians, etc.
Not only that, some of those kids who seem to be vocational ed suited in high school just aren't mature enough yet for academic education but could enter that world later through junior colleges. Instead of learning some structure and useful skills in the meantime, they are just ignored as not worth anyone's time and effort, turning them off from school entirely. I don't think I'm being paranoid in finding a real misandrist impulse behind gutting vocational programs.
Vocational classes have often been supported by industry, including direct financial support, as well as by hiring graduates at high salaries. Such as tool and die, CNC machining, etc.
Much of that industry has been outsourced to China. As someone who has worked in Manufacturing for many decades, I can tell you that when having injection molded tooling made, it was just a formality getting tooling quoted by US suppliers, because our high quality Chinese suppliers were half the price.
Without the Chinese undercutting wages and jobs, there would be more domestic demand for trained workers, and supply of trained workers would eventually follow.
Demand for trained workers, drives the supply of schools - as it should. In fact, if demand is high enough for trained workers, business owners may be willing to train workers themselves, although this is admittedly not always feasible, as you end up training workers for your competitors.
Domestic demand is reduced in direct proportion to the trade deficit (x-m term in the equation for aggregate demand).
A high demand economy cures a lot of societal ills, including excessive inequality, as shortages of workers drives wages up. Up to a point (where inflation becomes excessive), this is a good thing IMO.
Government policy aimed at increasing demand (up to a point, and while also facilitating increased supply) is IMO better policy than government redistribution - which, if excessive, absolutely removes necessary incentives. What constitutes "excessive" is of course up for debate, but the lower the level of social cohesion of a nation or state, I would argue that the workable level of government redistribution becomes lower.
Back to education, I would agree with the statement that education is not necessarily the best way to decrease excessive inequality.
"Demand for trained workers, drives the supply of schools."
True, but since we're, in theory, pursuing industrial policy now, we have to also try to move the needle the other way. A trained work force can bring in manufacturers. (This also needs to be combine with a good-sized dose of protectionism, joint venture tech-transfer, industrial espionage, research support, etc.).
In addition, training more tradies could bring construction prices down or at the very least, replace all the retirements that are about to happen, which is needed whether manufacturers are coming back or not.
One of the reasons why I largely disagree with FdB’s dismissive attitude towards school choice is that while I agree that school choice is unlikely to materially change overall academic performance, as measured by standardized tests, I think school choice is really the only way to move from our current anti-tracking system to a system where schools can be allowed to accentuate different goals, whether that goal is vocational training (while still ensuring the student is literate and numerate to the level of, say, basic algebra), art and design, etc. or schools that focus on socialization for troubled kids or instilling discipline/work habits for kids with terrible ones. I do think lots of parents recognize when their child is not getting something out of an academic focused education, is just faking their way through school, or is in danger of dropping out.
There’s a chain of charter schools in my city named after Paolo Freire and it’s really bizarre.
Edify us on this, please.
Thanks as always for trying to make the public understand what education IS, not what we want it to be. That's a hard lesson, and too many people don't want to learn it.
As a former teacher, I think I understand why a little bit. I remember having the "Waiting for Superman" model drilled into me when I was getting my education degree, filling students' heads with knowledge. That and the entertainment counterpart: You MUST keep their attention, keep them entertained; that's essential.
I thought both models had problems, but I wanted to graduate. But after a couple of years of teaching, a different model occurred to me. In my third year, I opened each class, after taking roll, with silence. I stepped in front of my desk, and just looked at the students. This was high school sophomores, and after a bit they giggled and fidgeted a bit, but that did get their attention.
Then I pulled out my wallet (still silent), took out a five dollar bill and laid it on my desk. Then I stepped aside a bit. More giggling and fidgeting, and "what the helling?" but definitely more attention.
Next I said, "Anyone who wants that can take it."
A lot of "Is he serious?" looking at one another, some actual laughing and looking at me quizzically.
I told them I meant it. Anyone could take it.
There was a little more curiousity, and then a brave student or two got up. In some classes is was just one, the other classes had a couple who raced up to get it. In all cases they looked at me one more time to silently ask, "Really?" I nodded and they went back to their desks.
Now everyone wanted to know what was up.
I said, "That's my philosophy of teaching. It's not exactly something I give to you, it's something I offer. But you have to take it. I'll be placing five dollar bills, and tens and hundreds and thousands up here all year long, making them available to you. But unless you take them, unless you make the effort to make them your own, you'll be leaving money on the table. You may not be able to tell at first how what I'm offering you will be helpful in your life, and maybe it won't. But what I'm doing here has been the kind of thing that made millions and millions of people better than if no one had offered it."
I've sure I've cleaned up that speech over time, but it's the model I still think is right. You're also right that a lot of kids won't be able to understand what that means, or will mock it defensively. I did have students like that, who I worked harder with. But it did help instill the notion that education isn't a passive idea, it's an active one on my part and on theirs.
The end of the story is what I'm sure you'd expect. My first day was talked about among the students, it got back to the administration, and I was called in. "You can't be giving students money in class," I was told sternly. I explained the motive, but of course the bottom line was that it would make other students unhappy, there would be complaints, it wasn't teaching them the right lesson, etc.
So it was a one-time experiment, and I didn't try it again. A few years later I left teaching for other battles with administrators -- I was too young to have learned myself how to deal with bureaucracies, and went in another direction with my life.
But teaching is still the most valuable job to society that I've ever had -- well worth the much, much higher salaries I had later in life. And it's still something I discuss with other teachers I encounter. Most seem to agree that it is a more helpful model for kids to understand -- that they're not passive players in education, they're its primary actors. I think kids need more of that.
It's a lesson I wish I could teach to many adults in the education system, particularly administrators.
“Causal” has been typo-ed into “casual” a bunch of times in this post, I think.
Interest in education reform may have lessened when hope became a luxury belief.
Have you written anything about gifted programs (e.g. about their effectiveness, the implications for the system at large etc.)? I've searched and haven't been able to find anything online and I'm curious what you think.