More Freddie quotes

1)  Pages 79-80:

It's important to understand that the "blame teachers first" school of thought arises not from chance, or even convenience, but from absolute necessity. If we are to preserve the blank-slate myth and all that goes with it--the long climb up the academic ladder, the preeminence of pluck and determination, the righteousness of the academic sorting system, and the rewards if offers to those who succeed within it, the entire meritocratic edifice--then blame has to go somewhere other than natural talent.
...
If we've assumed away the possibility of inherent differences in natural ability, who else could we blame but teachers? We might immediately indict the parents, but there's a problem there too: we have precious few policy levers that can affect parenting. With the (thankfully) rare exceptions of criminal negligence or abuse, government officials don't grade how well parents are doing. We don't have state-run facilities where inadequate parents are sent to brush up on their parenting skills. Nobody is proposing standardized tests of parenting. Diving into the educational research archives, you can find yourself wondering how such an intuitively big piece of the puzzle could be so little discussed, but this is why. There is no policy mechanism to utilize, and thus no interest from the policy minded. Instead of looking in the dark where we dropped the keys, we are looking where the light is.

(There is a similar quote about why people focus on schools rather than parents on page 89, but the relevant language comes from a Rand corporation analyst, not Freddie's own words.)

I agree with what he said about how shocking it is about parents being ignored as key variables. Later, though, when discussing the role of genes in educational outcomes, Freddie claims that parenting has little influence. I don't quite believe this. I can believe that most parents cross some threshold of decent parenting so that the marginal effect of small differences in parenting will have little effect. And I can believe that the insane lengths to which elite parents go don't actually matter nearly as much as they think. That's not quite the same as saying that parenting doesn't matter. Indeed, Freddie agrees that plenty of social variables can negatively affect performance, so why wouldn't really shitty parenting have an effect? I think the only conclusion we can actually draw is that as long as parenting is reasonably decent by the standards of the wider social situation the kid is in (and most conscientious people will cross that threshold), marginal changes in parenting approach will not produce statistically significant changes in outcomes.

Also, I admit that I kind of support some form of the meritocracy. Or, more specifically, I support a meritocracy among many meritocracies. There should be many paths in society, and for each of those paths there should be some meritocracy. If you want to be an educated professional you should pursue a path that you can do well in, not a path that you'll flounder in. If you want to be a skilled manual laborer you'd better do well at that manual skill. If you want to sell you'd better be a good salesman. And so forth. Education is a reasonable and appropriate path into some pursuits, but a less useful filter for other pursuits. And there should be a safety net for those who just aren't doing well on their path through no fault of their own. But this is very different from a 1-dimensional meritocracy.

2) Page 81, regarding why people fear dystopian outcomes from acknowledging that some kids are smarter than others:

Even if we had perfect knowledge at conception about a given child's academic potential, there is no reason that we would be forced to act on this knowledge in an authoritarian way.

Well, not forced, but the darker side of human nature is a thing... Nonetheless, I agree that there's no reason why we must structure society so that book learning is the only way to be treated well. I love book learning. A lot. I think it's a crucial thing for most leaders. That doesn't mean it should be crucial to human dignity.

3) Page 114, regarding the obsession with fixing society and the economy via education:

Far more likely is that it will take ending socioeconomic gaps to begin closing educational gaps.

I've said this here many times before. Nonetheless, we have to believe that everything else will get better if we just "teach a man to fish." Conservatives like the idea of making the fisherman self-reliant, and liberals like the idea of giving the fisherman a certificate documenting that he is a fully-qualified member of the Fishing Profession, trained in Best Practices for Safe, Sustainable, Equitable, and Inclusive Fishing Boat Management. All of which is great, except they want to make everyone a fisherman, even though we also need boat repair technicians, net manufacturers, retail fish sellers, sushi chefs, oceanographers (STEM! STEM! STEM!), truckers to take the fish to market, etc. In other words, they tend to get myopic about what we should train people for.

4) Pages 120-121, regarding research finding that the only intervention shown to have much of an effect on performance gaps is individual or small-group tutoring:

As someone who spends a great deal of his time in the world of education policy and politics, I don't hear tutoring mentioned that often, certainly less often than I hear about gamifying the classroom, flipping the classroom, how technology will solve all of our problems, and so on. Why? Well, for one thing, high-quality tutoring is expensive; you have to train the tutors and you have to pay them. But I suspect the more important reason is that there's nothing sexy about tutoring. Tutoring isn't some new breakthrough, it doesn't lend itself to hype, and it has no major corporation pushing for its adoption, unlike ed-tech boondoggles like the Los Angeles school system's $1.3 billion iPad fiasco. In the world of education policy, attention--and, more importantly, dollars--flows to those programs that most flatter the policy world's obsession with "disruption."

Indeed. We know that one-on-one or small group attention works. We know this because Oxford and Cambridge have been doing it for a thousand years via tutorials, and it works. Yes, there are problems with measuring educational quality, especially since top schools only take top students. Still, given the chance, everyone always goes for individualized attention from an expert. It's how people have always learned best. It's why office hours are better than class time, even if that class time is spent with students sitting in circles and talking to each other. The teacher is smarter and more knowledgeable and more useful. We know this. Everyone knows this. It's why rich people pay for tutors and send their kids to schools with small classes.

Doctors, arguably our most elite profession, know this. It's why, after the large introductory lectures on physiology and whatnot, they get the rest of their training in small groups in the clinic. There's a senior doctor and then residents of varying levels of seniority and then students, and the group is small. Progressive kool-aid drinkers would focus on the hands-on aspect, but if scale were feasible then one doctor would supervise a whole ward of trainees. But they don't do that because it wouldn't work. Patients would die and residents would remain clueless. So instead they train in very small groups with intense supervision and instruction. And it works well enough that the rest of us trust them with our lives. It's expensive as all hell, but it works so well that people learn how to do insanely complicated things like take apart the most vital organs in the body and put them back together again, or how to diagnose a subtle and deadly illness successfully, and not kill the patient while trying things along the way.

Everyone in higher education knows this, hence PhD dissertations are done in that model. Again, it's expensive (the opportunity costs for everyone involved are astronomical), but it works.

In the less prestigious trenches, people apprentice for trades, and it works well enough that we can drive across bridges.

So everyone knows that intensive one-on-one or small-group instruction works, but it requires paying an expert to spend time. And nobody will get an innovation award for something that we've been doing since a caveman gave a kid one-on-one instruction on how to properly sharpen a stone.

Next book: The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer

I haven't felt like blogging much lately, but my latest read, The Cult of Smart by Freddie deBoer, has some choice quotes that I want to blog so I won't forget. Freddie argues simultaneously that education isn't and shouldn't be everything, AND that it's OK to recognize that some kids are smarter than others, some kids will benefit from being in more advanced tracks in school, etc. We don't need to push college on everyone, but we can recognize that some kids are probably better cut out for it than others, and that's OK.  Some key quotes:

1) On page 7:

For decades our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you'd like--poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozard Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what's more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.

Freddie goes on to argue that so much policy is aimed at getting everyone to the same target, which is insane.

2) On page 12, regarding the idea that effort is everything (which he has encountered in many teaching jobs):

The cruelty of that idea--that we are all so equal in ability that only effort and character can keep us from success--was apparent. The evidence was sitting at a desk in front of me, weeping real tears.

I've said repeatedly that a theory of success needn't be a theory of failure, but certainly they go together closely. Saying why people succeed says nothing about why people don't do what is required for success--maybe a cruel society has discouraged them from trying. Nonetheless, there's a strong implication that if they disregard a cruel society they'll succeed, and however well-intentioned that belief might be, it won't really help a kid who just isn't cut out for something.

3) Page 17, regarding "weed-out" intro courses in science and engineering:

And I grew to think that rather than representing a failure of educators to do their jobs, these classes that screened out students performed a necessary if unfortunate function for institutions dedicated to training young people for their futures.

There's nothing wrong with saying to people that if this is hard the next thing will be even harder, so the time to make a good decision is now, when changing course is still easy.

4) On page 20, an interesting indictment of "positive thinking" and related notions:

Everywhere I turned as a teacher I seemed to find the same empty talk of excellence (without the necessary corollary of failure), innovation (without any sense of what we should be innovating toward), and positive thinking (even while its acolytes accused everyone else of having failed).

The negativity and implicit judgmentalism of the "positive thinking" types is an important point. He's also getting at The Restlessness that I often talk about here. We need to be constantly innovating toward, um, something. The achievement of an impossible goal, I guess.

5) On page 64:

We of course should equalize the environment of all children by giving them safe, stable, happy homes in which to grow and learn. We should do so as an end, not as a means to achieving educational equality.

Amen to that. Children deserve good childhoods because they are people, and particularly vulnerable people at that. While we shouldn't be short-sighted, we also shouldn't subordinate everything to super-long-term planning either. Something can be good in the moment because this moment has value and a person deserves good.