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A line from one of the old pieces I linked to here that I should have lifted - mobility is necessarily antagonistic to equality.

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Mar 29, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer

We should educate people to their abilities and provide for their material needs as a society.

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founding

Terrific post.

Consistent with your views, the 2021 Child Tax Credit was exactly where we should be headed as a poverty fighting tool as opposed to more educational spending. It was a tragedy that it lasted only one year.

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"Fads come and go." They sure do. I am a product of the California public education system of the 60's and 70's, which means that (despite some excellent teachers) it's a miracle I can read or write at all. For example, I lost my entire fourth grade year. Why? Was I laid up in bed with polio? Nah. I was in an "open classroom" where students were encouraged to chart their own course, let their natural love of learning be the real teacher blah blah blah. I fell so far behind in math that year that it took me until college to catch up, but I did listen to a helluva lot of Cheech and Chong at the "listening center." That fad was thankfully short lived, but what it cost me was real.

My question is why is education so subject to fads as opposed to other fields? I assume that aren't any fads in aeronautical engineering or farming - not the way there are in education, anyway. Why?

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Thank you so much for this.

As a High School Librarian in the public school system for over 25 years your writing is the most an accurate assessment of our educational system today, so refreshing.

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There is a lot to respond to in this piece (much of which I agree with) but I will focus on one point: "Fund Schools to Fund Them."

I think I disagree somewhat with FdB about whether additional education funding will improve outcomes — FdB is skeptical; my view is that the research that has been conducted in this area only shows to demonstrate that when schools are egregiously underfunded, marginal improvements make little difference.

That said, I agree 100% with FdB that public schools should be better funded regardless of outcomes because children should have safe, comfortable, and pleasant schools. John Kenneth Galbraith remarked 50+ years ago that the USA underfunds its public goods relative to its wealth — "private opulence and public squalor" — and if you ever have occasion to look in on an urban public school you will see that. Ancient, unventilated buildings with lead water pipes, terrible food, athletic facilities that have not been updated in decades, etc. They need not be palaces, but could they be as pleasant as Class B shopping malls?

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I seriously recommend going into Freddie's archives and reading all his old stuff, even back to the very first available piece. It's generally excellent.

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I’m shocked by how many people think all kids are equal when they also know they aren’t.

For example you can’t be a doctor or an engineer with an IQ below 100. You need at least one standard deviation higher. IQ is highly heritable. If you have a town full of doctors and engineers their children will also have IQs roughly one standard deviation above 100.

At the other extreme one major cause of poverty is low ability. With an IQ below 85 earning enough to get by becomes increasingly difficult. If you have a town populated by folks with an IQ a standard deviation below 100 their kids will also tend to have IQs one standard deviation below 100.

But when the school A is performing very well and school B is performing poorly it’s the fault of the school.

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Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023

I'd love to hear more thoughts about the changes that led to the drastic improvements in academic performance by girls/women and if there is anything from that success that is applicable to other underperforming groups. It seems the changes that triggered the massive shift were access to education paired with improved social conditions followed by raising expectations over time as opportunities increased.

I think of Title IX as primarily impacting sports these days, but it mandated equal access in lots of other ways. That seems like a success story for a top down approach to improving education results for a specific group.

Are there similar structural barriers impacting access to education for under performing groups that could be addressed in a similar way? My instinct is to agree with Freddie and to address the impact of poverty on kids' academic performance not through education reform but by economic assistance to improve their day-to-day lives.

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Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 30, 2023

"For example, Asian students whose parents make between $30k-$40k score similarly on the SAT Math to white students whose parents make $70K and up."

How many of those Asian kids are immigrants or children of immigrants? I suspect an outsized proportion, relative to the US human population at large.

Which merely shows again that not nostrums but attitude is the single most salient factor. Give those children of immigrants nothing but a chalkboard and they would still outperform, because their parents ride their children's asses like they were trying to win the Kentucky Derby.

The overachiever straight A first generation immigrant Stanford grad of unremarkable raw intellect and no real curiosity is pretty much a trope, as is the slacker genius.

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Mar 29, 2023·edited Mar 29, 2023

Thanks for this round-up, I ultimately end up in a different place, focusing more on absolute gains and criterion tests. I do think education will tend to lead to higher median incomes and that education has been a great *international* leveler even if it has not been a great leveler within nations. But I think you rightly hammer our tendency to see education as a cure for relative difference.

I really appreciate this post and will make note of it as reference for when discussing these issues in the future (and I'll mention that people should check out your book for more details).

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Maybe "The Cult of Smart" was ahead of it's time--I think its moment is still to come.

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I think this post is really well done. I had some significant reservations about the piece on optimism bias. I came to it with positive expectations, but I was disappointed to find what I thought were some poor arguments and data distortions.

So I came to this longer piece with some negative expectations. But it seems to me to repair the weaker arguments (chiefly by more cogently distinguishing the issues of individual talent differentials from cohort performance), and it does not rely on the data I thought were questionably interpreted (which pertained to the magnitude of increased direct investments in schools). I'm impressed with the coherence and cogency of this more ambitious post.

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My elementary school back in the late 60's sorted students into three groups I'm assuming based on academic ability. Part of the day all groups worked together, other parts of the day the lessons were separate. Junior high and High schools were similar having different obvious tracks. I'm guessing these things are no longer done, is that true? Although I know my sister in Manhattan has quite a bit of flexibility on school choice and had two daughters, one academically gifted. My sister sent them to different schools based on their abilities and interests. Can a Manhattan-like system carry over everywhere?

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I am curios what we know about the effects of the various programs that put money in the hands of adults with kids? Some of these programs are quite longstanding -- have they helped kids whose school success capability suffers from the myriad factors that are out of government control? Can we calibrate how much and to who according to learning somehow? And what might be the unintended consequences of more transfer payments to adults with children? Just curious what the literature is says. Thank you for this thorough and excellent post, Freddie!

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This a great article, paired with the previous one.

Giving money to parents without strings also seems to improve non-academic outcomes as well. Canada made a lot of strides from 2000 to 2017 along this vein. Unfortunately, the lessons from that success weren't learned.

More recently, rather than putting money in the hands of families, the current government fixed prices through subsidies, effectively nationalizing the pre-school industry at the federal level. This destroyed a lot of spots, especially high quality ones. The result is higher costs without improving outcomes. And now the entrenched interests will be nearly impossible to dislodge.

Given that industrialization turned children into liabilities, it's really not surprising that shifting resources from those without children to those with children has a broad impact on children. It's too bad though that so often we feel the need to insert an industry in between the resources and those who could make the best use of it.

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