Gritty reality

I just came across this article from May arguing that grit research is over-hyped.  Essentially, the claims are that (1) the effect of grit is sometimes exaggerated, (2) a lot of other known variables (e.g. the much-maligned standardized tests) are more predictive, and (3) grit is not nearly as novel as Duckworth claims.  It was mentioned in the comments on this article, where the author worries that if grit is the key to success then advantaged kids are more likely to be in environments that emphasize it.  The problem is that advantaged kids are, by definition, the ones with the greatest access to the secret sauce of success, whatever you think that secret sauce may be.  Also, whether we respond to [insert latest success fad here] by seeking to help the poor get access to it or by blaming the poor for not having it depends not on our theory of success but our theory of the poor.  If we see them as victims through no fault of their own then compassion will move us to help them develop [grit, growth mindset, whatever the latest trendy thing is].  If we see them as people of low character then we will blame them for not possessing our trait.  We don't need a humane theory of success, we need a humane theory of poverty.  I've said this before.

As an aside, Duckworth spent some time at McKinsey early in her career.  Those people are everywhere.

So much for the latest panacea

In a recent interview, psychologist Carol Dweck reminds everyone that "growth mindset", while a valid and important concept, is not the be-all-and-end-all of success, and is hardly a panacea.  I mention this because I've heard quite a few progressive-minded people tell me that "growth mindset" is what REALLY matters for success, more than anything else.  I'm glad that she's adding some nuance.  It seems to be the destiny of every Great Big Educational Theory to go through a cycle of discovery, promotion, hype that exceeds the original intent of the founder, and an eventual disclaimer by the founder.  This pattern goes back at least as far as Dewey, according to Hofstadter, and is probably even older than that.

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

What is measured improves, but nothing else does

Oh, good!

A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance. So other states are watching these districts as a potential model. But the race to test for so-called social-emotional skills has raised alarms even among the biggest proponents of teaching them, who warn that the definitions are unclear and the tests faulty.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the tests but in the stakes.  Go ahead and create the world's most perfect, reliable, valid, accurate, and all-around good measure of grit, or growth mindset, or whatever.  Administer it in a setting where nobody has been primed to answer disingenuously and nobody has any real reason to deceive.  You'll get results that tell you something meaningful.  Now attach stakes to it.  And watch as the teachers start feeding students slogans about grit and growth mindset, and students start giving answers that sound good rather than answers that accurately tell you something about their actions outside of the testing situation.

Fortunately, a few of the people interviewed in the article agree:

In their paper published in May, Dr. Duckworth and David Yeager argued that even if students do not fake their answers, the tests provide incentive for “superficial parroting” rather than real changes in mind-set. 

“You think test scores are easy to game?” said Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is working with the districts in California. “They’re relatively hard to game when you compare them to a self-report survey.”

I actually don't fault the entire idea of measuring non-academic things.  The very fact that people will try to game measures is actually an argument for measuring more things rather than fewer.  The more things you measure the harder it is to game all of them at once.  Still, it's better to make more of those measures be about things that are harder to game.  As opposed to this.

This concludes our monthly feature titled "Something actually interesting in the NYT education section."

First thoughts on "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon"

The first couple chapters set the stage by talking about the Western infatuation with Chinese education and the history of the Imperial exams.  Apparently there is nothing new about Westerners proclaiming that we need to emulate Chinese education.  Jesuit missionaries were impressed by the effort that went into the Imperial Exam system centuries ago.  Zhao, born and raised in China before pursuing an academic career in the US, makes a historical case that our infatuation with China is misplaced, noting (among other things) that the Industrial Revolution passed China by because of an authoritarian education system that emphasized Confucian teachings over science and technology.  This resulted in China's humiliations at the hands of foreign powers in the 19th century.

The basic historical survey seems consistent with everything else I've seen, as far as the facts go, and well-argued as far as the analysis goes.  Nonetheless, I want to quibble with the author on two points where I think he's not pushing as far as he could with the implications of certain assumptions.

First, in the introduction, Zhao argues that we are mistaken to emulate China's exultation of effort over all else.  He says that it's an unrealistic expectation that carries the implication that if the poor fail it's their own fault for being lazy.  Certainly that is one way to apply such an attitude, and we often see the poor in the US castigated for alleged laziness.  However, I'm not convinced that the problem is our attitude towards effort, but rather a combination of (1) our attitude towards the poor and (2) elevating a theory of education to a theory of everything.

In the trenches of higher ed, the notion that failure comes from lack of effort has a brighter, shinier twin that says that anyone can succeed if they try.  This brighter, shinier twin eschews many traditional metrics of success and ability in favor of concepts like "growth mindset" and "grit" and argues for democratizing access to advanced study and elite institutions.  Maybe you share their perspective, or maybe you don't.  (For my own part, I believe that success is mostly effort but not solely effort, so I'm in a mushy middle.)  Regardless of your own view, the attitude that equates success with effort is one that can be harnessed in the service of progressive causes just as easily as it can be used to attack the poor.  Indeed, in the modern American context, those who argue that academic success has a strong connection to innate abilities are seen as playing on a slippery slope that equates academic failure with biological traits, traits that the less savory in our society then argue are more common in certain groups.

My point is that if you have a theory of what causes academic success or failure, you can, if you wish, use that theory to argue that the poor are lazy, or genetically inferior, or less virtuous, or whatever other trait you correlate with failure.  Likewise, you can use that theory to propose ways of uplifting the poor and disadvantaged, or at least ways of making their situation less bad than it currently is.  Some of those proposals may be more patronizing than others, but the point is that once  you have a theory of success and a theory of failure, how you apply it to the poor and disadvantaged depends on additional factors in how you view the poor and disadvantaged.  The problem is not your theory of education, it's your theory of the poor.

Of course, elevating a theory of education to a social and economic "theory of everything" is not a new thing in American society, as Hofstadter noted.  Our colonial predecessors wanted to use education to produce better Christians, the people of the Founding era saw education as the key to republican* virtue, social reformers from the 20th century to today have viewed education as the solution to social and economic inequality, and business and the defense establishment see it as the key to technological superiority.  Education solves all ills, we believe.  How you apply that notion to the poor depends on your attitude toward them, not your preferred educational theory.

Also, Zhao argues that the Chinese education system kept China from participating in the Industrial Revolution.  To a large extent that's true--certainly they did little to train a class of scientists and engineers.  However, all great technological advances ultimately require an enterprising business class with the flexibility, ambition, and fearless, stupid, naive over-confidence to go out and risk everything on that.  Imperial China didn't have an MIT or even a Tsinghua, but Cambridge and Oxford were scientific backwaters during the Industrial Revolution.  The UK nonetheless enjoyed the fruits of the Industrial Revolution because their society made room for entrepreneurship.  Perhaps China's real weakness was not its schools but rather a rigid social structure that allowed less room for technological and economic innovation?  Indeed, to this day, while America has some fine engineering schools that produce great entrepreneurs, most American entrepreneurship (at least outside the high-tech realm) does not come from universities.  In fact, most entrepreneurship cannot and should not come from the academic world.  The function of most academic disciplines is a conservative one, and the key to a healthy society is to maintain that important conservative function without building all of society around it.

*In the sense of a Republic, not a political party.