The promise and peril of tracking

Plus Milei's early successes, America's best moments, and angry billionaires

I like to read the local news when I’m away from home, and I was struck by this story in the Bangor Daily News about a wharf repair project in Stonington.

Stonington, which is close to my house, is on the coast and has a lot of scenic views and gets plenty of summer people and tourists. But it also has a real working waterfront, with lobstermen and other fishers. For the upgrades, they’re getting money from a state grant program that makes funds available for wharfs on condition of adopting a special Working Waterfront Covenant that prohibits the land from ever being converted to any use other than as a working waterfront.

As a longtime Stonington-appreciator, I sort of get the appeal. The town is nice to visit in part because it isn’t just a town that people visit, it’s a town with a working waterfront. That’s a win for the fishers who use it, but also, in a way, a win for the tourists and other visitors. You feel like you are seeing a “real” slice of coastal Maine.

And yet, I worry about the proliferation of various entailments and covenants and easements. David Schleicher and Roderick Hills published a good paper in February about how traditionally, US and British property law differed in precisely this way. In Britain, land was commonly encumbered by all kinds of weird rules, many of which served as plot devices for 19th-century novels, while the American legal system strongly preferred simple property rights — you either own something or you don’t. The authors make a strong case that the British system was grounded in aristocratic values, and that America was well-served by its more commerce-centric system, but that since 1970, we’ve slid back into more of a gentry model.

It’s obviously a long way from a landowning British aristocrat to a Stonington lobsterman, but there is a common thread there and I don’t know that it’s a good idea to keep walking down this road.

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lwdlyndale: Online personality TracingWoodgrains has been going on a tear recently attacking the idea of “detracking” in education. Your thoughts on this? (And as someone who went to fancy pants k-12 school how did they deal with kids with different ability groups in the same age cohort? Anything to learn from that?)

I’ve written about this a couple of times. I think detracking is bad, and there are some pretty straightforward ways to address the main concerns people have with the way districts have operated tracking programs.

This isn’t how the most strident online voices frame this, but in my experience, parents are extremely sensitive to exactly how differentiation is characterized. Nobody wants their kid to be labeled dumb, and if you create a special status of “gifted,” then people are going to be mad if their kid is left out. On the other hand, parents of kids who are slower to read absolutely want their kids to get extra attention and instruction so that they learn to read. Help and consideration for those who need additional support is always welcome. Being characterized as stuck on a “low” track is not.

The current fad in ed school circles, though, is to say that each child needs individualized instruction, with the teacher providing differentiated instruction to everyone in a way that makes ability grouping unnecessary. That’s fine as a regulative ideal.

But in practice, if we’re asking a teacher to teach 25 different kids, it is a lot easier to do that if “meeting them where they are” means meeting them in different parts of the same state rather than meeting them scattered across five continents. It’s unfortunate that so many stakeholders in the education system have gotten so left-wing that this basic goal of trying to give teachers a feasible job has become a kind of right-wing hot take. Every non-school form of instruction that I’m familiar with — youth sports, music lessons, chess club — employs a mix of age-banding (for social reasons) and ability grouping (so that coaches and teachers can do their jobs). It seems obvious that schools should function the same way.

Mtracy84: Whitney Young High School in Chicago just had 23 students get a perfect score on the ACT test. Any thoughts?

My thought is that while it’s perfectly appropriate to group students by ability, it’s important to keep in mind that selection effects tend to dominate treatments in education policy.

Whitney Young is a selective admissions magnet school located in a big city, so you’d expect it to have some pretty impressive results (or “results”), even if the quality of the instruction was mediocre. This is something that I think the anti-anti-tracking people need to talk about more squarely. One possible equilibrium for American education is a world in which the quality of the teaching and learning is low across the board, but we do a good job of ruthlessly sorting the students such that high-SES parents’ kids are mostly enrolled in schools that are “good” in the sense that the students are all pretty smart.

I think that would be bad. And the desire to upset that kind of equilibrium was the initial impetus for No Child Left Behind and other equity-focused initiatives that asked whether schools were actually teaching their weaker students.

The blunt truth, of course, is that if you do a good job of educating every student, that still doesn’t mean you’ll get an equitable outcome. What you’ll get is an outcome where everyone learns to read and do basic math, but where there is a large right-hand tail of differential outcomes. Overpromising on the idea of closing the “achievement gap” was a mistake, and an obsessive focus on leveling outcomes just leads to the idea of making school bad for everyone. But it’s still true that there’s a difference between sorting in order to set the stage for quality instruction and relying on sorting as an alternative to actually teaching.

Matt Schiavenza: How do you immerse yourself in political media so much, including via the cesspool that is X, and maintain your equanimity? I’m genuinely curious to understand how you avoid being emotionally overwhelmed by this stuff, given your exposure to it — not to mention the occasionally nasty things you receive from critics.

I’m glad you think that I maintain my equanimity, because I think those who know me well can tell you that I’m actually not a particularly even-keeled person by temperament.