The last sentence of your piece is so powerful! In staff meetings and PDs, I want to stand on the table and scream. Our school in New York City is so concerned with ADDING phonics and phonemic awareness, but they’re removing science periods to do it. All kids aren’t the same and can’t be held to the same generic standard of achievement, but we can use the science to unlock and develop every child’s potential! Teachers aren’t miracle workers in the sense they can’t turn all students into geniuses, but they can use methods that work to help every student become productive, curious lifelong learners. The only way is to build knowledge so they’re not spending their lives googling and relying on everything they consume, not trusting themselves, and unable to synthesize information because they’re so busy looking up all the vocabulary they need to comprehend something. It seems like common sense. I’m not sure why it’s so hard for school leaders to get on board with!
Shouldn’t we consider the validity of the NAEP reading assessment in light of the results of the recent study Wexler describes? What does it ask students to do . . . read excerpts about ideas they most likely know not much about? Time for a paradigm change in assessment.
You bet we should consider that. I've written previously about the fact that all standardized reading comprehension tests, including the NAEP, are misleading because they purport to separate background knowledge from comprehension, and that's impossible. As Dan Willingham has said, these tests are really "knowledge tests in disguise." But when students get low scores, the usual diagnosis is that they need more work on comprehension skills.
I'm not saying that tests like the NAEP are useless. They've uncovered a lot of inequality in the system that might otherwise have remained hidden. But they're not meant to be guides to instruction, and they shouldn't be used to measure incremental progress. What they can tell us is that some students, or groups of students, have less academic knowledge and vocabulary than others. They don't necessarily tell us what to do about that.
There's an astounding book called "Marketing Warfare". It teaches reformers to stop foolishly thinking about how righteous their cause is, and to instead start focusing on what sort of strategy one must practice in order to win wars. It divides combatants and their respective enemies into four groups:
* Market leaders practice defense against large competitors.
* Large competitors practice offense against market leaders.
* Small competitors avoid direct confrontation by practicing flanking against large competitors and market leaders.
* Tiny factions avoid direct confrontation by practicing local guerilla warfare against everyone.
Like it or not, you and all the school reformers put together are a tiny faction. You are up against a behemoth that has $100 billion per year to spend. In this battle you are not even analogous to an ant fighting an elephant. The public schools don't even need to bother spend their pocket change to crush you; their adherents and associations can do it in their free time. In fact, all of us put together are so small that they don't even have to bother noticing us.
Your strategy, like most reformers I presume, is to stoke outrage so that the public schools will have to respond to you. But the public schools' most effective strategy will be to pretend you don't even exist, no matter how loud you get. That strategy has worked for the public schools for the past 80 years, and there's no reason to believe that it's going to stop working now.
Your only option for battle is guerilla warfare. This means:
* You don't waste your resources in a head-to-head battle to reform the public schools.
* Instead you succeed by convincing parents to subvert the public schools entirely.
In short: you cannot reform the public schools; you can only sidestep them. You must get people to bypass them. The schools do not yet have the power to force our children into them. The schools cannot stop you from teaching your own children to read. They cannot gender-transition your child if your child is not attending them. At least not yet. With leaders like our current ones at the helm of our government, we may soon see a day when sending children to public school is not an option, and teaching your own child to read is a crime.
If you want a nice summary of the 80-year-long failed battle to get the schools to teach decoding, and a recommentation of what parents can do to circumvent the schools entirely, check out: http://mychildwillread.org/
I don't read Yglesias as endorsing the death of education reform. Rather, I think he's describing how the major political parties have effectively given up on education reform. In other articles, he endorses several things that improve learning outcomes (including things not directly related to teaching or curricula, such as quality school lunches and air conditioning), as well as the idea that public school districts should be implementing practices from charter schools that are demonstrably effective, and that charter schools that improve students outcomes should be allowed to expand.
Having read a lot of Freddie DeBoer's writing on education, I ask myself some questions when reading your writing (which I find very persuasive and inspiring!):
Even if the curricula you endorse decrease the test score gap, is there strong evidence that this would also decrease the gap in longer-term life outcomes? This is where I think DeBoer's point about the relevance of relative performance vs. absolute performance comes into play. It seems at least plausible to me that relative performance is what is valued in the marketplace, and so the relatively low performing may not benefit from their absolute performance improving.
Related: It seems pretty likely to me that, even if everyone where taught the same background knowledge needed to reach some level of reading comprehension, there will still be students who are just not good at academics, and I worry that, in the current climate in which college is seen as the only pathway to success, we are overlooking other educational pathways that would give the non-academically gifted a more viable set of skills. I don't think this is an argument against knowledge-building curricula, but I would want to factor this concern in if I were designing a k-12 program that worked for most students. The current system massively privileges academic skills over other skills, such as skilled manual labor.
EDIT: Just to be clear, these questions are not intended to refute any of your arguments, which I find persuasive. Were I in charge of a school or district, I would implement something like the Core Knowledge curriculum. But I think there are questions about what we expect out of our educational system that should factor into how and what we teach.
Thanks for the kind words, and you make some good points.
First, on Yglesias: I wouldn't say he's "endorsing" the death of education reform, and he's right that the major political parties seem to have given up on it--along with some philanthropists, etc. But I do think that he's overlooking the fact that there are a LOT of changes happening on the ground that don't fit the political definition of "reform" that he's apparently using.
He's written about the movement for better phonics instruction, but apparently he doesn't see that as "reform." And of course, I would love it if he would also consider whether the growing trend toward knowledge-building curriculum counts as "reform." Maybe he would decide it doesn't, for some reason, but it would be nice if he would at least address the question!
As for deBoer: I don't believe knowledge-building curricula can eliminate ALL gaps in performance, either between groups or individuals. I was really surprised that the Colorado study found that income-based gaps on state tests were actually "eliminated," at least through grade 8. Would that continue through high school--let alone AFTER high school? I don't know.
But I do think that, as that study suggests, schools can do a lot more to narrow gaps than they're currently doing. And I do think that would have an impact on longer-term life outcomes. Unfortunately, I can't point you to "strong evidence," except maybe in other countries that have better education systems and less inequality. Still, I don't see why the lack of such evidence should prevent us from giving all students access to a meaningful education.
I don't think that everyone needs to go to college, and I agree we should do far more than we're currently doing to equip students for the kinds of jobs that pay decently and don't require a college degree. But the education we're currently providing to many students doesn't equip them to, e.g., read and understand an on-the-job instruction manual.
I think the push for everyone to go to college has a lot to do with the fact that a high school diploma doesn't signify much to employers anymore--because we're doing such a lousy job with K-12 education. That leads to a lot of students enrolling in college (often community college) who aren't prepared to do college-level work. We just keep kicking the can down the road.
In my ideal education system, we would actually have fewer students going on to college, because they would have gotten a pretty good "liberal arts" education by the time they graduated from high school. (I wrote about that once, a long time ago.) And even more ideally, whether or not a student goes on to college would depend less on their socioeconomic status than on their interests and inclinations.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, and for the very important work you are doing!
I am persuaded by your response. I could imagine that, with a well-structured curriculum, students would be equipped with the baseline knowledge and academic skills we expect pretty much everyone to have by high school, and high school would have many more vocational options.
I think you are misrepresenting what Freddie deBoer is saying. Making a statement such as "deBoer’s premise that there’s not much schools can do to alter an individual’s intelligence because it’s largely determined by genes." is not an accurate or fair description of his claims.
First, deBoer does not think that it's impossible to improve schools or education. He has repeatedly argued otherwise, and has pointed out that in fact all students learn much more than they did 30 years ago. He has also explicitly discussed the fact that students who were locked out of school suffered learning loss, so he clearly thinks that schools can make a difference.
Instead, deBoer argues that what is really important is a student's position *relative* to others. Suppose Taylor is outscoring Bob by 30 points. If we have an educational intervention that boosts Bob's score by 30 points, that's great! But that same educational intervention also tends to boost Taylor's scores by 30 points as well, so the relative difference between the two of them stays the same. deBoer also argues that the relative ranking is what's really important, because ultimately we're in a competitive marketplace for things like jobs or college admissions.
So deBoer doesn't really disagree with you that it's possible to improve the quality of education. He might even enthusiastically endorse a knowledge-based curriculum (I can't speak for him, obviously, but there's nothing in his statements that would necessarily contradict that. Where he does differ with you is that we can close the gap between low- and high-achieving students by education.
Of course, you're welcome to disagree with deBoer's claim. Perhaps he is just wrong. But you do have a responsibility to accurately state what his claim is, and you haven't done that here.
Thanks for your comment. I'll admit that I haven't read everything deBoer has written, including his book, but I have carefully read several pieces he's written on education, and the points you're attributing to him don't come through in those pieces. I invite you to look at the piece I've linked to in my post and judge for yourself whether he's making the argument that you say he's made elsewhere--i.e., that schools can improve intelligence but not narrow gaps between students. Not that every piece an author writes has to make EVERY point in his overall argument, of course, but I do think something as important as that point should be stated somewhere in this piece or the other two or three I've read.
But to take the argument you say deBoer is actually making: it's not quite as egregious as saying schools can't alter intelligence, but in my view it suffers from a similar flaw--i.e., that deBoer is looking at what's been tried, has seen that it hasn't worked to narrow gaps (although in fact racial gaps have narrowed over the past several decades while income-based gaps have remained wide or expanded, depending on who you ask), and has concluded that nothing will work to do that. He leaves out the possibility that there are other things that haven't been tried, at least not on a large scale, that WOULD narrow gaps.
Case in point: a recent study showing that a knowledge-building curriculum eliminated income-based test-score gaps after students had been exposed to it for at least four years. I wrote about that here:
It occurs to me, Mr. Whitfield, that my previous comment didn't adequately address what you say deBoer's argument actually is, so I'll just add a few more words.
I noted above that a recent study showed a knowledge-building curriculum could eliminate income-based test-score gaps between students. But, if I understand your characterization of deBoer's argument correctly, he would respond with something like: Sure, but if the higher-income students got the same curriculum, THEIR scores would rise just as much as the lower-income ones, and so the gap between those two groups of students would remain the same. (I know he's talking about individual intelligence, not group intelligence, but needless to say, these groups are composed of individuals.)
But no, actually. The positive effect of the curriculum on low-income kids was far GREATER than its effect on middle- and higher-income students. The overall effect size--for all 9 schools, including the 8 that served middle- and higher-income students--was 0.445. At the one school serving low-income students, the effect size was about three times as much: 1.299.
I am well aware of this study, because I subscribe to your Substack and check in every day, eagerly hoping for a new post. I read your article about the Colorado study, and it's intriguing. Of course, it's only ONE school that shows such a dramatic effect, and it's in ONE study that has not been replicated (in fact, it hasn't even been formally published yet, as far as I can tell). We both know that the educational research literature is filled with small pilot studies that seem promising but don't manage to scale very well, so perhaps we shouldn't get too excited by this finding right away. But I agree that it's certainly an intriguing result, and worthy of follow-up.
When you make this argument, you are saying that deBoer is incorrect. That's perfectly fine, and it might well be the case -- there are lots of things that deBoer says that seem to me to be just flat-out wrong (not just in education). That's different from my objection, which is that you didn't accurately characterize what his position is. But you also seem to be making a good-faith effort to address that.
In the fourth paragraph, starting with "The essential argument of the book . . .", deBoer says,
"When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment."
So, yes, in the fourth paragraph deBoer explicitly makes the point that he is concerned with relative performance.
"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. . . 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."
So in this short passage he uses the word "relative" three times. He also makes an appeal to the concept of a percentile, which is a relative measure.
From the same article, here's deBoer on the effectiveness of education:
"Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?
The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. . . 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. . . The absolute learning . . . is not the relevant criterion. The relevant criterion is the position of the student in the hierarchy, their relative performance.
But here's what all of that makes me think: No one is saying education makes NO difference -- just as deBoer is not saying that. The whole debate, including the Coleman Report, etc., IS about whether it can make a RELATIVE difference.
True, I cited research showing that education can raise IQ, and that could be read to imply that deBoer was making the argument that it can't. Clearly, that's not what he's saying.
But what he IS saying is that gaps in intelligence between individuals will always stay pretty much the same, no matter what schools do. And that argument could be used to justify all sorts of things--things that deBoer himself might not be advocating. E.g., it could be used to justify not trying to improve schools that serve lots of low-achieving kids. That worries me.
As for that Colorado study, and the suggestion that we really should wait for more data: It took 14 years for that study's data to come out. The kids who were in kindergarten when it started are now 19. I know of no other such long-term studies in the pipeline--and given how expensive this kind of study is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are none. Even if there are, do we want to wait another 14 years before acting on these findings?
That's an awful lot of children whose futures may be stunted--and whose intelligence may never be fully revealed--while we're waiting.
I'm not suggesting that we should wait for more long-term studies. I'm simply pointing out that the results of the Colorado are intriguing but are hardly definitive. For the record, I'm an enthusiastic supporter of a knowledge-rich curriculum, so I think we are both in agreement on that point.
By the way, the original deBoer article was titled "Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias". Perhaps there is a little optimism bias with the Colorado study?
The last sentence of your piece is so powerful! In staff meetings and PDs, I want to stand on the table and scream. Our school in New York City is so concerned with ADDING phonics and phonemic awareness, but they’re removing science periods to do it. All kids aren’t the same and can’t be held to the same generic standard of achievement, but we can use the science to unlock and develop every child’s potential! Teachers aren’t miracle workers in the sense they can’t turn all students into geniuses, but they can use methods that work to help every student become productive, curious lifelong learners. The only way is to build knowledge so they’re not spending their lives googling and relying on everything they consume, not trusting themselves, and unable to synthesize information because they’re so busy looking up all the vocabulary they need to comprehend something. It seems like common sense. I’m not sure why it’s so hard for school leaders to get on board with!
Shouldn’t we consider the validity of the NAEP reading assessment in light of the results of the recent study Wexler describes? What does it ask students to do . . . read excerpts about ideas they most likely know not much about? Time for a paradigm change in assessment.
You bet we should consider that. I've written previously about the fact that all standardized reading comprehension tests, including the NAEP, are misleading because they purport to separate background knowledge from comprehension, and that's impossible. As Dan Willingham has said, these tests are really "knowledge tests in disguise." But when students get low scores, the usual diagnosis is that they need more work on comprehension skills.
I'm not saying that tests like the NAEP are useless. They've uncovered a lot of inequality in the system that might otherwise have remained hidden. But they're not meant to be guides to instruction, and they shouldn't be used to measure incremental progress. What they can tell us is that some students, or groups of students, have less academic knowledge and vocabulary than others. They don't necessarily tell us what to do about that.
There's an astounding book called "Marketing Warfare". It teaches reformers to stop foolishly thinking about how righteous their cause is, and to instead start focusing on what sort of strategy one must practice in order to win wars. It divides combatants and their respective enemies into four groups:
* Market leaders practice defense against large competitors.
* Large competitors practice offense against market leaders.
* Small competitors avoid direct confrontation by practicing flanking against large competitors and market leaders.
* Tiny factions avoid direct confrontation by practicing local guerilla warfare against everyone.
Like it or not, you and all the school reformers put together are a tiny faction. You are up against a behemoth that has $100 billion per year to spend. In this battle you are not even analogous to an ant fighting an elephant. The public schools don't even need to bother spend their pocket change to crush you; their adherents and associations can do it in their free time. In fact, all of us put together are so small that they don't even have to bother noticing us.
Your strategy, like most reformers I presume, is to stoke outrage so that the public schools will have to respond to you. But the public schools' most effective strategy will be to pretend you don't even exist, no matter how loud you get. That strategy has worked for the public schools for the past 80 years, and there's no reason to believe that it's going to stop working now.
Your only option for battle is guerilla warfare. This means:
* You don't waste your resources in a head-to-head battle to reform the public schools.
* Instead you succeed by convincing parents to subvert the public schools entirely.
In short: you cannot reform the public schools; you can only sidestep them. You must get people to bypass them. The schools do not yet have the power to force our children into them. The schools cannot stop you from teaching your own children to read. They cannot gender-transition your child if your child is not attending them. At least not yet. With leaders like our current ones at the helm of our government, we may soon see a day when sending children to public school is not an option, and teaching your own child to read is a crime.
If you want a nice summary of the 80-year-long failed battle to get the schools to teach decoding, and a recommentation of what parents can do to circumvent the schools entirely, check out: http://mychildwillread.org/
I don't read Yglesias as endorsing the death of education reform. Rather, I think he's describing how the major political parties have effectively given up on education reform. In other articles, he endorses several things that improve learning outcomes (including things not directly related to teaching or curricula, such as quality school lunches and air conditioning), as well as the idea that public school districts should be implementing practices from charter schools that are demonstrably effective, and that charter schools that improve students outcomes should be allowed to expand.
Having read a lot of Freddie DeBoer's writing on education, I ask myself some questions when reading your writing (which I find very persuasive and inspiring!):
Even if the curricula you endorse decrease the test score gap, is there strong evidence that this would also decrease the gap in longer-term life outcomes? This is where I think DeBoer's point about the relevance of relative performance vs. absolute performance comes into play. It seems at least plausible to me that relative performance is what is valued in the marketplace, and so the relatively low performing may not benefit from their absolute performance improving.
Related: It seems pretty likely to me that, even if everyone where taught the same background knowledge needed to reach some level of reading comprehension, there will still be students who are just not good at academics, and I worry that, in the current climate in which college is seen as the only pathway to success, we are overlooking other educational pathways that would give the non-academically gifted a more viable set of skills. I don't think this is an argument against knowledge-building curricula, but I would want to factor this concern in if I were designing a k-12 program that worked for most students. The current system massively privileges academic skills over other skills, such as skilled manual labor.
EDIT: Just to be clear, these questions are not intended to refute any of your arguments, which I find persuasive. Were I in charge of a school or district, I would implement something like the Core Knowledge curriculum. But I think there are questions about what we expect out of our educational system that should factor into how and what we teach.
Thanks for the kind words, and you make some good points.
First, on Yglesias: I wouldn't say he's "endorsing" the death of education reform, and he's right that the major political parties seem to have given up on it--along with some philanthropists, etc. But I do think that he's overlooking the fact that there are a LOT of changes happening on the ground that don't fit the political definition of "reform" that he's apparently using.
He's written about the movement for better phonics instruction, but apparently he doesn't see that as "reform." And of course, I would love it if he would also consider whether the growing trend toward knowledge-building curriculum counts as "reform." Maybe he would decide it doesn't, for some reason, but it would be nice if he would at least address the question!
As for deBoer: I don't believe knowledge-building curricula can eliminate ALL gaps in performance, either between groups or individuals. I was really surprised that the Colorado study found that income-based gaps on state tests were actually "eliminated," at least through grade 8. Would that continue through high school--let alone AFTER high school? I don't know.
But I do think that, as that study suggests, schools can do a lot more to narrow gaps than they're currently doing. And I do think that would have an impact on longer-term life outcomes. Unfortunately, I can't point you to "strong evidence," except maybe in other countries that have better education systems and less inequality. Still, I don't see why the lack of such evidence should prevent us from giving all students access to a meaningful education.
I don't think that everyone needs to go to college, and I agree we should do far more than we're currently doing to equip students for the kinds of jobs that pay decently and don't require a college degree. But the education we're currently providing to many students doesn't equip them to, e.g., read and understand an on-the-job instruction manual.
I think the push for everyone to go to college has a lot to do with the fact that a high school diploma doesn't signify much to employers anymore--because we're doing such a lousy job with K-12 education. That leads to a lot of students enrolling in college (often community college) who aren't prepared to do college-level work. We just keep kicking the can down the road.
In my ideal education system, we would actually have fewer students going on to college, because they would have gotten a pretty good "liberal arts" education by the time they graduated from high school. (I wrote about that once, a long time ago.) And even more ideally, whether or not a student goes on to college would depend less on their socioeconomic status than on their interests and inclinations.
Thank you for the thoughtful response, and for the very important work you are doing!
I am persuaded by your response. I could imagine that, with a well-structured curriculum, students would be equipped with the baseline knowledge and academic skills we expect pretty much everyone to have by high school, and high school would have many more vocational options.
I think you are misrepresenting what Freddie deBoer is saying. Making a statement such as "deBoer’s premise that there’s not much schools can do to alter an individual’s intelligence because it’s largely determined by genes." is not an accurate or fair description of his claims.
First, deBoer does not think that it's impossible to improve schools or education. He has repeatedly argued otherwise, and has pointed out that in fact all students learn much more than they did 30 years ago. He has also explicitly discussed the fact that students who were locked out of school suffered learning loss, so he clearly thinks that schools can make a difference.
Instead, deBoer argues that what is really important is a student's position *relative* to others. Suppose Taylor is outscoring Bob by 30 points. If we have an educational intervention that boosts Bob's score by 30 points, that's great! But that same educational intervention also tends to boost Taylor's scores by 30 points as well, so the relative difference between the two of them stays the same. deBoer also argues that the relative ranking is what's really important, because ultimately we're in a competitive marketplace for things like jobs or college admissions.
So deBoer doesn't really disagree with you that it's possible to improve the quality of education. He might even enthusiastically endorse a knowledge-based curriculum (I can't speak for him, obviously, but there's nothing in his statements that would necessarily contradict that. Where he does differ with you is that we can close the gap between low- and high-achieving students by education.
Of course, you're welcome to disagree with deBoer's claim. Perhaps he is just wrong. But you do have a responsibility to accurately state what his claim is, and you haven't done that here.
Thanks for your comment. I'll admit that I haven't read everything deBoer has written, including his book, but I have carefully read several pieces he's written on education, and the points you're attributing to him don't come through in those pieces. I invite you to look at the piece I've linked to in my post and judge for yourself whether he's making the argument that you say he's made elsewhere--i.e., that schools can improve intelligence but not narrow gaps between students. Not that every piece an author writes has to make EVERY point in his overall argument, of course, but I do think something as important as that point should be stated somewhere in this piece or the other two or three I've read.
But to take the argument you say deBoer is actually making: it's not quite as egregious as saying schools can't alter intelligence, but in my view it suffers from a similar flaw--i.e., that deBoer is looking at what's been tried, has seen that it hasn't worked to narrow gaps (although in fact racial gaps have narrowed over the past several decades while income-based gaps have remained wide or expanded, depending on who you ask), and has concluded that nothing will work to do that. He leaves out the possibility that there are other things that haven't been tried, at least not on a large scale, that WOULD narrow gaps.
Case in point: a recent study showing that a knowledge-building curriculum eliminated income-based test-score gaps after students had been exposed to it for at least four years. I wrote about that here:
https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/dramatic-new-evidence-that-building
It occurs to me, Mr. Whitfield, that my previous comment didn't adequately address what you say deBoer's argument actually is, so I'll just add a few more words.
I noted above that a recent study showed a knowledge-building curriculum could eliminate income-based test-score gaps between students. But, if I understand your characterization of deBoer's argument correctly, he would respond with something like: Sure, but if the higher-income students got the same curriculum, THEIR scores would rise just as much as the lower-income ones, and so the gap between those two groups of students would remain the same. (I know he's talking about individual intelligence, not group intelligence, but needless to say, these groups are composed of individuals.)
But no, actually. The positive effect of the curriculum on low-income kids was far GREATER than its effect on middle- and higher-income students. The overall effect size--for all 9 schools, including the 8 that served middle- and higher-income students--was 0.445. At the one school serving low-income students, the effect size was about three times as much: 1.299.
I am well aware of this study, because I subscribe to your Substack and check in every day, eagerly hoping for a new post. I read your article about the Colorado study, and it's intriguing. Of course, it's only ONE school that shows such a dramatic effect, and it's in ONE study that has not been replicated (in fact, it hasn't even been formally published yet, as far as I can tell). We both know that the educational research literature is filled with small pilot studies that seem promising but don't manage to scale very well, so perhaps we shouldn't get too excited by this finding right away. But I agree that it's certainly an intriguing result, and worthy of follow-up.
When you make this argument, you are saying that deBoer is incorrect. That's perfectly fine, and it might well be the case -- there are lots of things that deBoer says that seem to me to be just flat-out wrong (not just in education). That's different from my objection, which is that you didn't accurately characterize what his position is. But you also seem to be making a good-faith effort to address that.
The paper that you linked to was from March 19, 2023, and is titled "Education Bias is Dominated by Optimism Bias". Here's the link:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated?
In the fourth paragraph, starting with "The essential argument of the book . . .", deBoer says,
"When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment."
So, yes, in the fourth paragraph deBoer explicitly makes the point that he is concerned with relative performance.
In that quote, when deBoer says "I make that case at considerable length here", he links to this article:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
From the third paragraph:
"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. . . 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."
So in this short passage he uses the word "relative" three times. He also makes an appeal to the concept of a percentile, which is a relative measure.
From the same article, here's deBoer on the effectiveness of education:
"Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?
The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. . . 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. . . The absolute learning . . . is not the relevant criterion. The relevant criterion is the position of the student in the hierarchy, their relative performance.
Thanks for all of those quotations!
But here's what all of that makes me think: No one is saying education makes NO difference -- just as deBoer is not saying that. The whole debate, including the Coleman Report, etc., IS about whether it can make a RELATIVE difference.
True, I cited research showing that education can raise IQ, and that could be read to imply that deBoer was making the argument that it can't. Clearly, that's not what he's saying.
But what he IS saying is that gaps in intelligence between individuals will always stay pretty much the same, no matter what schools do. And that argument could be used to justify all sorts of things--things that deBoer himself might not be advocating. E.g., it could be used to justify not trying to improve schools that serve lots of low-achieving kids. That worries me.
As for that Colorado study, and the suggestion that we really should wait for more data: It took 14 years for that study's data to come out. The kids who were in kindergarten when it started are now 19. I know of no other such long-term studies in the pipeline--and given how expensive this kind of study is, I wouldn't be surprised if there are none. Even if there are, do we want to wait another 14 years before acting on these findings?
That's an awful lot of children whose futures may be stunted--and whose intelligence may never be fully revealed--while we're waiting.
I'm not suggesting that we should wait for more long-term studies. I'm simply pointing out that the results of the Colorado are intriguing but are hardly definitive. For the record, I'm an enthusiastic supporter of a knowledge-rich curriculum, so I think we are both in agreement on that point.
By the way, the original deBoer article was titled "Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias". Perhaps there is a little optimism bias with the Colorado study?