If we tweak (or totally revamp) education, can we turn lackluster students into excellent students? Freddie DeBoer claims that, with some exceptions, no. The answer to this question bears substantially and harshly on many public policy issues. First, an excerpt from DeBoer’s essay, “Education Doesn’t Work 2.0: a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps”:
The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society.
This phenomenon is relevant to the question of genetic influence on intelligence, but this post is not about that. The evidence of such influence appears strong to me, and opposition to it seems to rely on a kind of Cartesian dualism. However, one need not believe in genetic influence on academic outcomes to recognize the phenomenon I’m describing today. Entirely separate from the debate about genetic influences on academic performance, we cannot dismiss the summative reality of limited educational plasticity and its potentially immense social repercussions. What I’m here to argue today is not about a genetic influence on academic outcomes. I’m here to argue that regardless of the reasons why, most students stay in the same relative academic performance band throughout life, defying all manner of life changes and schooling and policy interventions. We need to work to provide an accounting of this fact, and we need to do so without falling into endorsing a naïve environmentalism that is demonstrably false. And people in education and politics, particularly those who insist education will save us, need to start acknowledging this simple reality. Without communal acceptance that there is such a thing as an individual’s natural level of ability, we cannot have sensible educational policy. . .
People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning – performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people. . . .
When parents read their child’s state standardized test score results, are they doing so alongside a copy of the test or a detailed description of what the specific tested content was? No, because they don’t care. They care about how their kid performed compared to the other kids . . . Unfortunately, much of the educational discourse in our media fails to reflect this distinction.. . . While my great preference would be to use the term “educational mobility” to refer to the phenomenon I’m describing (the movement of any given student within an academic distribution or hierarchy), that term already belongs to the relationship between a child’s educational outcomes and that of their parents, or intergenerational mobility.
DeBoer points to studies showing that educational mobility highly stable across the years of compulsory schooling from primary through the conclusion of formal education. Third grade reading fairly well predicts reading level at the end of high school. Early school measure even predict career success. The best measure of how high school seniors will perform as college seniors. And, again, student can get better in absolute learning terms (learning particular skills some or many domains) but stay in place in relative terms. DeBoer’s essay challenges the conventional wisdom that “schooling can change the performance of students relative to their peers.” He is cognizant that the data-driven reality will be resisted by many people. “This offends people’s sense of freedom and justice, but it is the reality in which we live.” These findings are also a challenge to claims of “school quality,” which DeBoer describes as “illusory and intangible.” It’s a stubborn reality that when a student goes to a new school, it does not have a meaningful effect on how a student performs in the new classroom.
There are many, many other cases where interventions that seem intuitively powerful turn out to have no or little effect in the real world. If you believe the standard liberal story of children as undifferentiated academic masses whose outcomes could be easily improved with a little want-to and ingenuity, this is perplexing.
How important is it to get your child into the best school possible? Not much.
Winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago makes no difference for educational outcomes. In New York? Makes no difference. What determines college completion rates, high school quality? No, that makes no difference; what matters is “pre-entry ability.” How about private vs. public schools? Corrected for underlying demographic differences, it makes no difference.
No matter what school your child attends, “they’re the same kids. . . . There is no such entity as “school quality.” The concept is an illusion.” Can class size change the equation? Studies say no.
Should we have smaller class sizes? I believe you can make a strong argument for that, yes. But the argument is that we should have smaller class sizes for the comfort of students and parents and superior working conditions for teachers, not because of uncertain benefits in quantitative metrics.
Same problem with “peer effects,” attending school alongside higher achieving students. Same problem with “grit,” higher quality Pre-K and family wealth. DeBoer suggests very limited effects on educational inequality, as measured later in life. None of these make significant differences in intergenerational educational mobility.
In some studies, IQ is considered, but the results are frustrating for those who believe in plasticity: IQ is highly correlated with school performance. Other factors make a difference, for instance, whether the student was a low birth weight baby.
DeBoer comments on the racial educational achievement gap:
I’ve said many times that I believe the racial achievement gap is likely the product of the profoundly different environments Black children live in on average, and these environmental changes are far more complex and multivariate than the SES differences that do not adequately explain the achievement gap.The problem is that it’s far harder for policy to change a vast number of tiny influences than to change one big influence.
DeBoer reminds us that formal education, in and of itself, offers
durable and real improvements to intelligence. (The child care function of public schooling has also been transformative and progressive.) . . . The trouble is that most everybody goes to school and enjoys those benefits, so the power of schooling to establish durable changes in relative position on the ability spectrum is limited.
What works for moving students who underachieve from the bottom to the top? DeBoer concludes “nothing.”
