We just moved into a lovely little mini-neighborhood just a few blocks south of downtown Saint Paul. It seems like a perfect place for a rich community to develop.
The problem is that it won’t be a multi-generational community because the public schools in Saint Paul are “pretty bad” compared to the rich (and white-dominated) burbs, so no one would move into this area without sending their kids to private school, and it’s not that kind of neighborhood.
If you remove outright racism from the picture but accept that this statement remains somewhat true, then my entire vision for making American education better boils down to “not that.”
Or to put it another way, a given student’s chance for educational success should not be school-dependent.
I think this mostly traces back to the liberal bromide that we'll somehow solve inequality via education without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic structure of society, which is absurd on the face of it. If you handed every student in America a PhD in a STEM field, there'd be nowhere for most of them to go. There are only so many of those positions to go around, and no amount of schooling will change that. It's all pure neoliberal ideology, maybe with a human face, but neoliberal ideology just the same.
The better solution would be to change society so you could live a perfectly comfortable life just doing lower level jobs. I got a literature degree the first time around in college, and I never tire of pointing out that if college was less expensive and wages were higher it would be totally fine to just learn about things you liked and enjoyed. What a wonderful world that would be. Instead, with tuition and employment prospects being what they are, every single aspect of the education system is tailored towards making sure you have the best chances to get one of the dwindling number of high income positions available. Everyone loves talking about education reform, but you can't consider education on its own. It is absolutely a product of society on the whole and has all the same problems. Gyorgy Luckas had that whole thing about how the most defining aspect of the Marxist perspective was looking at society as a totality, on the whole. How all the different parts functioned as part of a larger system, and that's applicable here.
One can look around at society and see people who are highly intelligent and who have degrees from elite schools—so on paper the best of what the US can do in terms of education—but who have such a narrow “education” that they are actively making things worse. Rep. Elise Stefanik is to me the platonic form of such a person. Doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and has absolutely no ethical framework. If this is what Harvard is churning out these days, no thank you.
Maybe if we made education about more than getting through algebra as early as possible so as to cram more math into adolescent skulls we’d have people who have broader skill sets and more developed moral and ethical compasses. I don’t want to rehash the mostly discredited mush about “learning styles,” but kids who are good at building and manipulating physical objects but not so good at abstract problems have a lot to contribute to this world, even if their math scores are slightly below average.
Thanks for the article on education and the stratification that exists. Reading this, however, makes clear that those who wrote so passionately about the state of education in past decades are unknown to newer generations. We could start with Upton Sinclair's "The Goosestep," followed by Jonanthan Kozol's several works, and those of John Holt. For those who want to understand even more about this topic, and the longstanding criticisms that have been written, you could do no worse than taking a look at these books and authors.
I often wonder how much would people care about education if we closed the achievement gap. I don’t think the public is concerned about low wages, necessarily. Poverty wages keep prices down. But we seem to expect education to solve the social problems associated with poverty: crime, family instability, disability, etc.
Unfortunately, education seems to be a terrible solution for those problems. At best, it occasionally helps a smart kid to escape.
Posts like this are why I am a paid subscriber. The Devil's Dictionary defines admiration as "our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." Here, Freddie deBoer is elegantly summarizing what I have been maintaining since I was a high school student in the early 1960s, and it has been astonishing to me that education and educational policy have tried to pretend that differences in educational achievement were to be explained by differences in expenditures, etc. The problem with current educational thinking and policy is that the system is now supposed to be able to educate everyone, something it has never done. Or, better yet, explain education as a soft drink that needs to be made appealing enough so that everyone will desire to drink it, and then all our problems will be solved. This simply is not happening. But the system keeps spouting more of the same nonsense.
I've thought about this same concept often, but how it plays out in the workforce, versus in school.
One of my frustrations has always been that you can start with five new hires, with similar job experience, and give them the same training, the same tasks, the same pay, and the same opportunities, and inevitably some will do a really good job, some will do an average job, and some will do a poor job. You can put a lot of effort into helping the poor performers improve, even at the expense of ignoring the average and good workers, and often (most of the time?) you just can't help them. And it's not your fault.
As Freddy says, there are many external factors that contribute to performance that you as an employer have no control over. To pretend that you can ignore these factors is not helpful to anyone.
I agree fully that the point should be improving the material conditions of people's lives regardless of educational outcomes. To go beyond that, I'll take a stab at defining one component of "educational success" for the 21st century by way of analogy to the (often platitudinous) idea that mass literacy is a prerequisite for a democratic society. I think we should aim our target at the idea of "mass numeracy." Our problems are very complex, and some facility with the quantitative methods used to get a grip on them is the only way to make sure we're not delegating all decision-making power to a bunch of economists who unjustly monopolize the technocratic jargon used to justify the priorities of capital.
Alan Kay likes to point out that, back when Roman numerals were still used, you basically had to be a mathematical genius to multiply numbers, but the switchover to Arabic/Indian numerals made the operation elementary enough to be taught in primary school ("point of view is worth 80 IQ points"). For me, it doesn't matter as much if you have to be a one-in-a-million genius to invent something like decimal notation, as long as there's social infrastructure in place that allows for many people throughout society to benefit from the power of the new idea. I personally think that there's an inherent tension between building that infrastructure and a highly competitive ranking process designed to sort and reward the "best and the brightest" with prestige and membership in exclusive professions or clubs. If mass numeracy is the goal, we can't lock knowledge in the ivory tower.
Freddie writes: "The top 10% of the world’s electrical engineers are compensated extremely well. If that top 10% were taken by the Rapture tomorrow, the next 10% would get the compensation that went to the now-disappeared 10%."
This is something of a pointless quibble, and I'm sure Freddie knows it, but because technically correct is the best kind of correct, I think that statement is partially true and partially not.
The best 10% of the world's electrical engineers are more productive than the next 10% - on average, they solve problems better and faster, their documentation is better, and they otherwise are better at things we want electrical engineers to do. So if we Raptured them, and replaced them with new, less good engineers, the new top 10% wouldn't be as productive, and wouldn't get paid as much for two reasons. (1) Generally, a firm's maximum payment to an employee is going to be capped at the employee's expected productivity - if you're paying an employee more than they produce, you're usually better off letting them go and hiring someone you can pay less. (2) Because there's less total stuff in the world now that the former top 10% has been replaced by a bunch of new engineers from school, there is less to pay everyone, including the new top 10%.
Freddie's essential point that making everyone smarter wouldn't reduce income equality in a capitalist system is completely right. But it would make all of us better off materially, by increasing the amount and quality of goods and services and the amount of leisure we consume. But again, that doesn't take anything away from Freddie's point. :)
The perspective on ed. data provides an excellent and clarifying tonic. But it’s a kind of strategic and philosophical overview and doesn’t zoom-in much. We need it but schooling per se requires a strong tactical game, and that’s a major weakness in the very places where low scores are a persistent problem. Does poverty correlate with relatively low scores? Don’t pat yourself on the back for recognizing something that’s old news. As pointed out, absolute performance has actually improved; but so it has elsewhere, thus progress seems elusive. I am two months from retiring after teaching for 35 years. I spent 22 of them in some of the poorest neighborhoods in LA. I don’t deserve a medal and was no one’s white savior. I did cross paths with a lot of great people doing good, effective work. But problems with the starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans and play calling are stumbling blocks in many places where problems are magnified by the issues attendant to inner city education. The same crew might be fine elsewhere but don’t have quite enough game to gain and hold the toughest ground. My experience may be far from typical. But I’m not as hopeful for relative improvement as I once was.
"The problem with American students is not a problem with the median student, who could certainly do better but does pretty good. (They do very badly relative to the amount that we pay, but since past a certain point there is no relationship between school expenditures and student performance, it’s not like we should expect more for our money.) "
This is turn raises the question of why we spend as much as we do, if, beyond a certain point, more money results in drastically diminishing returns.
And I'm not a libertarian or a tax protester or whatever.
Minor quibble: I think if the bottom moves closer to the median, the mean (but not the median) will move. The great advantage of using medians over means is the median is the middle of the distribution, not the expected value. So if you bring the bottom 20% up to just a tiny bit below the median, the median stays the same, but the mean (average) rises significantly. Which is why focusing on the median can be helpful sometimes (and sometimes we care about the mean and sometimes we care about the shape of the distribution, etc.)
Broader comment: perhaps success ought to be defined in a way that allows people opportunities to do lots of different things and helping them figure out which of those things enables them to have a good life. Not everyone wants to be (fill in the blank) and making a society where people can have good lives in a wide range of occupations, some requiring lots of formal education and some requiring experience in other ways to be successful would be a good goal. School is just one way to get to good outcomes; it's probably a significant part of most paths but the amount of schooling and the patterns of schooling we have now are likely not optimal for many people and we need more different pathways for people to good lives.
I got a lot out of this—much to think about and recalibrate. I also think that of the many factors that influence “success,” an important one is not measurable but may do as much as any other quantifiable factor: a relationship. A person can and very well may ultimately succeed if they are seen and heard by a caring teacher, encouraged in a way that any “systemically sound” approach never could. Being recognized for having inherent value (within a “decent” Ed environment — not the worst) is of incalculable value. I think investing in teachers in a way that gives them the emotional bandwidth (ie stops draining them at the very least) so they can do just that, really know their students, would be a lot of bang for our buck—however unquantifiable. What we are asking of teachers is absurd.
We just moved into a lovely little mini-neighborhood just a few blocks south of downtown Saint Paul. It seems like a perfect place for a rich community to develop.
The problem is that it won’t be a multi-generational community because the public schools in Saint Paul are “pretty bad” compared to the rich (and white-dominated) burbs, so no one would move into this area without sending their kids to private school, and it’s not that kind of neighborhood.
If you remove outright racism from the picture but accept that this statement remains somewhat true, then my entire vision for making American education better boils down to “not that.”
Or to put it another way, a given student’s chance for educational success should not be school-dependent.
However one gets there.
I think this mostly traces back to the liberal bromide that we'll somehow solve inequality via education without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic structure of society, which is absurd on the face of it. If you handed every student in America a PhD in a STEM field, there'd be nowhere for most of them to go. There are only so many of those positions to go around, and no amount of schooling will change that. It's all pure neoliberal ideology, maybe with a human face, but neoliberal ideology just the same.
The better solution would be to change society so you could live a perfectly comfortable life just doing lower level jobs. I got a literature degree the first time around in college, and I never tire of pointing out that if college was less expensive and wages were higher it would be totally fine to just learn about things you liked and enjoyed. What a wonderful world that would be. Instead, with tuition and employment prospects being what they are, every single aspect of the education system is tailored towards making sure you have the best chances to get one of the dwindling number of high income positions available. Everyone loves talking about education reform, but you can't consider education on its own. It is absolutely a product of society on the whole and has all the same problems. Gyorgy Luckas had that whole thing about how the most defining aspect of the Marxist perspective was looking at society as a totality, on the whole. How all the different parts functioned as part of a larger system, and that's applicable here.
What a brilliant and informative column.
One can look around at society and see people who are highly intelligent and who have degrees from elite schools—so on paper the best of what the US can do in terms of education—but who have such a narrow “education” that they are actively making things worse. Rep. Elise Stefanik is to me the platonic form of such a person. Doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and has absolutely no ethical framework. If this is what Harvard is churning out these days, no thank you.
Maybe if we made education about more than getting through algebra as early as possible so as to cram more math into adolescent skulls we’d have people who have broader skill sets and more developed moral and ethical compasses. I don’t want to rehash the mostly discredited mush about “learning styles,” but kids who are good at building and manipulating physical objects but not so good at abstract problems have a lot to contribute to this world, even if their math scores are slightly below average.
Thanks for the article on education and the stratification that exists. Reading this, however, makes clear that those who wrote so passionately about the state of education in past decades are unknown to newer generations. We could start with Upton Sinclair's "The Goosestep," followed by Jonanthan Kozol's several works, and those of John Holt. For those who want to understand even more about this topic, and the longstanding criticisms that have been written, you could do no worse than taking a look at these books and authors.
I often wonder how much would people care about education if we closed the achievement gap. I don’t think the public is concerned about low wages, necessarily. Poverty wages keep prices down. But we seem to expect education to solve the social problems associated with poverty: crime, family instability, disability, etc.
Unfortunately, education seems to be a terrible solution for those problems. At best, it occasionally helps a smart kid to escape.
Posts like this are why I am a paid subscriber. The Devil's Dictionary defines admiration as "our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." Here, Freddie deBoer is elegantly summarizing what I have been maintaining since I was a high school student in the early 1960s, and it has been astonishing to me that education and educational policy have tried to pretend that differences in educational achievement were to be explained by differences in expenditures, etc. The problem with current educational thinking and policy is that the system is now supposed to be able to educate everyone, something it has never done. Or, better yet, explain education as a soft drink that needs to be made appealing enough so that everyone will desire to drink it, and then all our problems will be solved. This simply is not happening. But the system keeps spouting more of the same nonsense.
This is why I subscribe. Excellent piece.
I've thought about this same concept often, but how it plays out in the workforce, versus in school.
One of my frustrations has always been that you can start with five new hires, with similar job experience, and give them the same training, the same tasks, the same pay, and the same opportunities, and inevitably some will do a really good job, some will do an average job, and some will do a poor job. You can put a lot of effort into helping the poor performers improve, even at the expense of ignoring the average and good workers, and often (most of the time?) you just can't help them. And it's not your fault.
As Freddy says, there are many external factors that contribute to performance that you as an employer have no control over. To pretend that you can ignore these factors is not helpful to anyone.
I agree fully that the point should be improving the material conditions of people's lives regardless of educational outcomes. To go beyond that, I'll take a stab at defining one component of "educational success" for the 21st century by way of analogy to the (often platitudinous) idea that mass literacy is a prerequisite for a democratic society. I think we should aim our target at the idea of "mass numeracy." Our problems are very complex, and some facility with the quantitative methods used to get a grip on them is the only way to make sure we're not delegating all decision-making power to a bunch of economists who unjustly monopolize the technocratic jargon used to justify the priorities of capital.
Alan Kay likes to point out that, back when Roman numerals were still used, you basically had to be a mathematical genius to multiply numbers, but the switchover to Arabic/Indian numerals made the operation elementary enough to be taught in primary school ("point of view is worth 80 IQ points"). For me, it doesn't matter as much if you have to be a one-in-a-million genius to invent something like decimal notation, as long as there's social infrastructure in place that allows for many people throughout society to benefit from the power of the new idea. I personally think that there's an inherent tension between building that infrastructure and a highly competitive ranking process designed to sort and reward the "best and the brightest" with prestige and membership in exclusive professions or clubs. If mass numeracy is the goal, we can't lock knowledge in the ivory tower.
Freddie writes: "The top 10% of the world’s electrical engineers are compensated extremely well. If that top 10% were taken by the Rapture tomorrow, the next 10% would get the compensation that went to the now-disappeared 10%."
This is something of a pointless quibble, and I'm sure Freddie knows it, but because technically correct is the best kind of correct, I think that statement is partially true and partially not.
The best 10% of the world's electrical engineers are more productive than the next 10% - on average, they solve problems better and faster, their documentation is better, and they otherwise are better at things we want electrical engineers to do. So if we Raptured them, and replaced them with new, less good engineers, the new top 10% wouldn't be as productive, and wouldn't get paid as much for two reasons. (1) Generally, a firm's maximum payment to an employee is going to be capped at the employee's expected productivity - if you're paying an employee more than they produce, you're usually better off letting them go and hiring someone you can pay less. (2) Because there's less total stuff in the world now that the former top 10% has been replaced by a bunch of new engineers from school, there is less to pay everyone, including the new top 10%.
Freddie's essential point that making everyone smarter wouldn't reduce income equality in a capitalist system is completely right. But it would make all of us better off materially, by increasing the amount and quality of goods and services and the amount of leisure we consume. But again, that doesn't take anything away from Freddie's point. :)
The perspective on ed. data provides an excellent and clarifying tonic. But it’s a kind of strategic and philosophical overview and doesn’t zoom-in much. We need it but schooling per se requires a strong tactical game, and that’s a major weakness in the very places where low scores are a persistent problem. Does poverty correlate with relatively low scores? Don’t pat yourself on the back for recognizing something that’s old news. As pointed out, absolute performance has actually improved; but so it has elsewhere, thus progress seems elusive. I am two months from retiring after teaching for 35 years. I spent 22 of them in some of the poorest neighborhoods in LA. I don’t deserve a medal and was no one’s white savior. I did cross paths with a lot of great people doing good, effective work. But problems with the starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans and play calling are stumbling blocks in many places where problems are magnified by the issues attendant to inner city education. The same crew might be fine elsewhere but don’t have quite enough game to gain and hold the toughest ground. My experience may be far from typical. But I’m not as hopeful for relative improvement as I once was.
"The problem with American students is not a problem with the median student, who could certainly do better but does pretty good. (They do very badly relative to the amount that we pay, but since past a certain point there is no relationship between school expenditures and student performance, it’s not like we should expect more for our money.) "
This is turn raises the question of why we spend as much as we do, if, beyond a certain point, more money results in drastically diminishing returns.
And I'm not a libertarian or a tax protester or whatever.
These are *exactly* the questions we should all be asking ourselves and each other. Great article.
1) What are our goals for our education system -- broadly?
2) What are our goals for various different specific levels of capability among our students?
3) How do we measure our progress effectively? (Hint: if we define 1 and 2 well, 3 either becomes obvious, or reveals that 1 and 2 are unachievable.)
Great post and very thought-provoking.
Minor quibble: I think if the bottom moves closer to the median, the mean (but not the median) will move. The great advantage of using medians over means is the median is the middle of the distribution, not the expected value. So if you bring the bottom 20% up to just a tiny bit below the median, the median stays the same, but the mean (average) rises significantly. Which is why focusing on the median can be helpful sometimes (and sometimes we care about the mean and sometimes we care about the shape of the distribution, etc.)
Broader comment: perhaps success ought to be defined in a way that allows people opportunities to do lots of different things and helping them figure out which of those things enables them to have a good life. Not everyone wants to be (fill in the blank) and making a society where people can have good lives in a wide range of occupations, some requiring lots of formal education and some requiring experience in other ways to be successful would be a good goal. School is just one way to get to good outcomes; it's probably a significant part of most paths but the amount of schooling and the patterns of schooling we have now are likely not optimal for many people and we need more different pathways for people to good lives.
I got a lot out of this—much to think about and recalibrate. I also think that of the many factors that influence “success,” an important one is not measurable but may do as much as any other quantifiable factor: a relationship. A person can and very well may ultimately succeed if they are seen and heard by a caring teacher, encouraged in a way that any “systemically sound” approach never could. Being recognized for having inherent value (within a “decent” Ed environment — not the worst) is of incalculable value. I think investing in teachers in a way that gives them the emotional bandwidth (ie stops draining them at the very least) so they can do just that, really know their students, would be a lot of bang for our buck—however unquantifiable. What we are asking of teachers is absurd.
America currently is based on offshoring and importing people. The technology offices I have seen are 95 percent foreign born
That’s the way employers seem to like it
Immigrants keep their head down and don’t complain
So mostly our education system is irrelevant ironically
You see American born tech people in the media but they are a small minority in my experience
lol