Amen, I say unto you, the edufad hucksters will always be among you

Not much time to say anything substantive about it, but I appreciate this article on the self-esteem fad of the eighties and nineties. It bears more than a passing resemblance to grit, growth mindset, and even values affirmation interventions.

Salerno said that these ideas totally transformed education in many parts of the country. It wasn’t just Koosh balls and cheesy mirror exercises — in many schools, prevailing assumptions about academic rigor and feedback changed too. The thinking went, “Don’t make kids feel bad about everything, because if they feel bad they’ll perform poorly,” as Salerno put it. Self-esteem also became centered in the long-running national conversation about societal inequality. “There was this sense of the inner city falling behind — specifically black kids in the inner city are not performing as well as other kids,” said Salerno. “And there was this assumption that it was because they lacked self-esteem.” If you can boost your self-esteem, you can close the achievement gap. The nice thing about this theory, Salerno noted, is it doesn’t require much of a fundamental reworking of the educational system — it’s something of an easy way out. In many cases, advocates focused on self-esteem “rather than hiring better teachers, spending more money on actual schools and instruction. It became a surrogate for the stuff that might actually have done some good.”

Yep.

Blank slates to the left of me, blank slates to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with truth

There's a nice essay on the concept of a "blank slate" in Quillette.

The basic idea of a blank slate is that all humans are equal in capacity.  It's a foolish notion, but it's a nice one, and it's usually a notion associated with the left:  The left recognizes that the world is not a place of equal opportunity, that people are saddled with all sorts of disadvantages by nurture rather than nature, and that all too often people try to wrongly shift the blame from the cruelty of man (nurture) to the cruelty of unequal genetic endowment (nature).  Some even go farther and (wrongly!) ascribe the disadvantages of entire groups not to the cruelty of man (nurture) but rather genes (nature).  Consequently, people on the left tend to be suspicious of genetic explanations of human behavior.  To the extent that this suspicion is merely skepticism of hypotheses that are difficult to prove and often wielded to evil ends, it is an intellectually healthy suspicion.  To the extent that it is a rejection of neurobiological inquiries into human behavior it is an unhealthy suspicion.

The author in Quillette points out that the right has its own version of a blank slate:  They argue that not only are people born equal in natural endowment, they remain equal in practical capacities even in the face of unequal nurturing, and hence unequal outcomes are primarily the consequence of bad choices, or moral failings.  It is as absurd as rejecting the idea that individuals' brains differ in part because of genetic variability among humans.  If the left is insisting that the slate was blank at birth, the right is insisting that the slate has NOT been vandalized even after years or decades of unequal conditions in a cruel world, or that the marks are at least easily erased.

Of course, the left has its own moral analysis as well:  While recognizing that it is absurd to expect the disadvantaged to simply shrug it all off and succeed equally, some do insist that college professors would obtain equal outcomes if we merely gave enough chances, and were enlightened enough in our evaluations.  If we just followed "best practices" then we would see gaps shrink substantially, and the persistence of gaps thus follows from our choice to abstain from "best practices."  It shifts the moral responsibility from the vandal who made the mark to the professor who was unable to erase it.

Like all seductive lies, it's partly true:  Some people will, if given a chance and some support, defy the odds and rise to the occasion.  To structure educational programs as Darwinian competitions with one chance and no more is both foolish and unethical.  (I will note that my grading formula rewards improvement and provides some forgiveness for initial failures.)  But it is important to recognize that working to remedy inequity in this way is costly and risky.  It won't always work, and it will cost more than simply giving one chance and moving on.  If you nonetheless value opportunity then you will accept costs and risks.  If you don't actually value opportunity then you will deny that it has a cost (because that which is without value is without cost) and insist that the only problem is a failure to identify the "right" criteria, the "right" measures.

I remark on this because, as I have noted before, our theories of success and failure can be double-edged swords.  A theory that success that success is rooted in "grit" or "growth mindset" is the key to success (rather than evil standardized tests) can be shiny and progressive if it is used to undermine evil standardized tests, but it can also be turned around and used to blame the poor and disadvantaged for lacking the moral virtues of grit and growth mindset.  A moral theory that says we are all equal in capacity can be used to blame a cruel world for failure, but it can also be used to blame failure on choices by people of presumably equal capacity.  The fact that the left and right go in such different directions from ostensibly similar assumptions means that there are additional embedded assumptions that people aren't always articulating openly.

For me, I will be disappointingly wishy-washy and say that EVERYTHING matters for success and failure.  Some kids really ARE born smarter than others.  Sorry, but it's true.  On the other hand, unequal conditions in life will ALSO leave their marks.  Some of those marks CAN be erased.  Others are much harder to erase.  Some people will surprise you and outperform expectations.  Some won't.  It's worth it to give people a chance.  It's ill-advised to keep pouring in resources as the returns diminish.  Some people really do fall on bad choices or rise on good choices.  Some people are stuck.  Abandoning personal responsibility in your moral calculus is ill-advised, but so is treating personal responsibility as the only variable.  It's complicated and we have to muddle through.

I wish I had some sort of magical solution, but I don't.

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.

Gritty sand in the gears of "reform"

Every so often the New York Times Education section publishes something interesting.  Most recently, they published an op-ed by Angela Lee Duckworth, in which she argued that "grit" (a psychological concept that she has been a leader in studying) should not be measured in the classroom with the goal of attaching high stakes.  As soon as something goes from the lab to the world of high stakes, all sorts of other behaviors come into play.  Kudos to her for recognizing this.  She's making the same point that I made in my responses to Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy:  As soon as you go beyond This One Special Situation to a world of competition and financial incentives, people will try to game your lovely research construct.

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.