291 Comments

The problem is always going to be mixed level classes.

Phonics is absolutely critical to becoming a good reader, but once a certain level is achieved, it then becomes about structure and base knowledge.

The problem is different kids master phonics at different speeds. Some very fast. Some very slow.

A kid who has mastered it is then being held back if sitting in a class with nothing but phonics.

A kid who hasn’t mastered phonics is lost without it.

Of course separating classes is problematic so teachers are meant to provide differentiated instruction. Which basically means half assing everything.

Everything above goes for math.

Expand full comment

I have a suspicion that teacher's dislike of phonics is that they were part of the lucky majority who picked up phonics easily and have memories of being bored being drilled in skills and knowledge they already had. As a result the large minority who actually need slow careful instruction in the code were deprived of the basic bottom rungs of the reading ladder. And if you can't learn to read you're in serious life long trouble - even more so in todays world. It's an enormous risk factor for all sorts of nasty social/emotional/mental health problems too.

Expand full comment

Exactly... I was going to write about his, but you beat me to it.

People who pick stuff up easily can't comprehend how people cant pick things up easily.

Expand full comment

As a teacher who loved and enjoyed reading, running up against the roadblock of the hatred of reading was really difficult for me. And I really floundered in getting students who hated reading to actually read. I had a friend who had struggled in school as a student (somewhat--he never flunked anything) who was one of the best teachers I've ever seen. He anticipated so many issues from the "difficult" students and motivated them to do better. I left the profession, he has excelled in it and his patience and empathy with students is legendary.

We often pick people who excel as students to be teachers but the skills are so different. My friend wasn't great at one but incredible at the other but it is difficult to see until the person actually gets in the field.

Expand full comment

My best math teacher had struggled with math. He had 3-4 ways to explain every concept.

Expand full comment

Education degree majors have the lowest average SAT/ACT scores entering college across all degree majors. I'm not saying your idea isn't correct, but learning phonics quickly and low standardized test scores don't seem to inherently go together.

Expand full comment

Only 50% of an age group enter college. They're not absolutely the top 50%, but they're pretty close to being. That is anyone who went to college is above median in elementary school.

Expand full comment

Most people don't go to college at all, and education majors have substatially higher SAT scores than the cohort of people who don't go to college

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Only because I was really interested in this .... BLS has 3.6M registered nurses (91% with bachelors degree) vs. ~2M elementary education teachers + 1M for high school so nursing seems like the most commonly held job that requires a college degree.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I think this is exactly correct; people who learn slowly early on don't often speed up (there are "late bloomers", but they are a minority), and teacher qualification requires above median academic achievement.

Expand full comment

Isn't this going to be a problem for all teachers, in all subjects, at all levels?

One would hope that everywhere below the doctoral level, classes are taught by people who are smarter than the median student in the class. Being aware of that and allowing for it is one of the most basic skills that educators need to develop.

Expand full comment

Even at the doctoral level, only a fraction of students complete the PhD and a fraction of those get academic jobs. There might be some subjects where there are enough higher prestige jobs that the academics aren’t the most successful PhD graduates, but in all the fields where they are, the professors were above median students.

Expand full comment

I don't have a PhD but I'm sure that's true. Still, the experience of realizing "this guy/girl is much more intelligent than I am" must be more common among academics working with doctoral candidates than among high school teachers, even though they'll occasionally have it too.

Expand full comment

I doubt that, actually - very few high school teachers were never top percentile themselves, but they have to teach top percentile students.

Academics teaching doctoral candidates are more likely to be top percentile themselves. I suspect there are a lot of doctoral candidates for whom the first person they ever met who was obviously much more intelligent than themselves was their PhD supervisor. Indeed, I knew a few for whom that was literally the case - several of my TAs were supervised by Abdus Salam (Nobel, 1979) and the one I got to know fairly well related exactly that experience with Prof. Salam.

The median student is a different story, obviously the median PhD is much brighter than the median high school graduate.

Expand full comment

I think this is right.

Expand full comment

True Jeff, but I feel that being drilled in vital but low level skills is particularly tedious. I'm a retired school psychologist who mainly worked in elementary schools and occasionaly came across students who were fluent decoders before they entered grade one. They were still exposed to phonics instruction. That said my career was based around students at the other end of the scale and it frustrated me to see them given shallow and ineffectual instruction in phonics when they really needed intensive systematic instruction FOR AS LONG AS IT TAKES!. Reading is more than decoding but if you can't decode you will never have a chance to read adequately. In years 4+ they were being taught as though they could read. It was like putting cripples on the football team!

Expand full comment

My _very_ limited experience (TA for 3 semesters of a discrete math class) is I recall one student (in another TA's section) who struggled on that particular class, but also made the time to come to my office hours (I think they were more convenient than his TA's) and ask for help. Most students didn't come to office hours at all, so a combo of

1) Students at that point(mostly juniors in college) are probably better equipped to see where they are struggling and have the tools to address that.

2) It's much easier to provide extra instruction to the struggling students when the professor has TA's to help with that.

(I loved TA-ing that class, a highlight of my college/master's experience to be sure)

Expand full comment

The gap is going to shrink as people advance through school

Expand full comment

Yes! And, more broadly, as I've posted before, my short take on education policy is this: Kids should be able to learn and achieve their full potential at their best pace, in the settings and with the methods that work best for them.

Expand full comment

This is why pushes against assessments are so incredibly pernicious. Effective education is all about presenting each student with material appropriate to them. The only way to do that is to effectively assess what they already know.

Expand full comment

I’m generally unclear why I need a huge one time test to do that since I’m assessing all the damned time. I’ve only very seldom been surprised by any of this data. I assess learning all the time.

Having a one time standardized test be the decider instead of 170 class days is making policy around the losers.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

You clearly can't have a 6 year old who can't read sit down and fill out an SAT style standardized test. You need appropriate ways to assess their knowledge level. And especially with young kids you need capacity to support kids learning at differing paces, because kids who might have the ability but not the practice need an opportunity to catch up with kids who had an earlier start with their parents or whoever.

Expand full comment

Testing high school kids sometimes has similar issues: when state testing rolls around in the spring, I always suspect that we are measuring students' "give a shit" rather than their academic skill per se. Fortunately, "give a shit" and academic skills seem to be correlated.

Expand full comment

And math is the new reading. There was a great piece over the summer on Noah Smith’s Substack about how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math. I’ve made this point elsewhere but the US education system overall does a poor job of meeting gifted kids where they are at and an equally poor job of meeting non gifted kids where they are at.

Great piece Matt!

Expand full comment

Oh boy, when I told my mom about some of the equity in education arguments being made out there, she got so angry--and she's normally one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. She was always frustrated about me being held back by the pace of the class, and how so happy she was when I tested into GATE and could be challenged better.

Expand full comment

My daughter recently graduated from high school in a big city west coast school district with a strong equity focus and a non traditional grading system (I am not the custodial parent, it was not my idea). My daughter is also academically gifted (she skipped 2nd grade) and like a lot of gifted kids, lacks both humility about her talents and self discipline to see her through when her talents are not enough.

In my opinion, the lack tracking in middle school and honors/AP courses in high school did her a great disservice not just just in terms of meritocratic competition (I have a dumb Email job and I’m satisfied with my life, if my kid also has a dumb Email job it’s no great loss) but in terms of building character. My daughter never had a class where she had to develop self discipline to succeed, and she never had a class where she wasn’t aware she was one of the smartest kids in the room. For all the “woke” posturing of her school, she came out thinking of herself as one of the natural aristocrats, which is one of my greatest disappointments.

An AP calculus class where she was routinely average would not just made her a better student, but a better person.

Expand full comment

Total bummer. I can't think back to my behavior in high school with enough self awareness to compare but I vividly remember getting my ass totally kicked in freshman year engineering and having a real come-to-Jesus moment my second semester about my level of effort, commitment, skipping classes, etc. Really turned around after that. Just saying ... college might provide that for her.

Expand full comment

From your mouth to Gods ear. I remember a lot of entry level jobs I did in my twenties that put me shoulder to shoulder with people with spent their whole lives showering after work and basically getting my ass kicked at those jobs and having to really adjust my thinking and really realizing just how important that experience was in making me the man I am.

Expand full comment

I do think so much of this comes down to competition. The earlier you can get reps competing the better. For me, there was nothing more humbling than getting completely outclassed on a wrestling mat. No one to blame. All on you. Either get better or don't. 20 years later -- same thing, everyday at work.

Expand full comment

The way things are going it’s becoming less likely unfortunately

Expand full comment

When our kids were in high school they got a new principal who tried to eliminate honors classes, and undermined efforts to add new AP classes. My husband remarked that he probably wanted all of the graduates of that school to be as mediocre as he was.

Expand full comment

It’s maddening to me in a country where we desperately need more people who are good at STEM subjects that we are actively holding kids back who are good at it because it promotes equity. This is not like Ancient Greek languages for Shakespeare or some other oddball class. This is basic core math.

Expand full comment

"La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu."

Expand full comment

A that’s partly do to stupidity of the powers that be, but mostly it’s class warfare (with racist tinges). Rich (mostly) white parents with mediocre kids don’t want talented hard working poor (mostly Asian) kids to compete with them so they force “equity” on public schools and dismantle gifted programs, all while sending their kids to the private sectors, and relying on legacy admissions if that’s insufficient (cf. the demolishing of the sat).

Expand full comment

True and then it’s twisted into some argument about how it’s helping black and brown students when it’s really not. Math more than almost any other subject needs to be tracked because when it’s not it’s a huge disservice to all students; those who are gifted are bored, those who struggle fall so far behind they cannot catch up and those who are average get lost in the shuffle.

Expand full comment

My guess is that's not really what's happening, but where do you get the impression that that is the typical situation in a district where gifted programs are being dismantled? These things primarily seem driven by DEI people / people with advanced degrees in education. Most districts outside of NY, NJ and California don't really have enough Asian kids for that to be a significant part of it and class is seldom a binary and more often a bell curve distribution where the rich end does't have that kind of power or that stupid of kids.

Expand full comment

I don’t know about the typical program, but I have the strong impression that this is happening at public magnet schools. If you look at what happened at TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School, a magnet school in northern Virginia), the people who opposed changing the admissions standards were all Asian. Maybe the white parents didn’t introduce those changes, but they certainly weren’t acting like they thought the “equity” changes were bad for them. And at TJ/magnet schools generally, there are definitely enough Asians that they seem like a threat to the white parents.

Expand full comment

Yeah, and I guess I'm coming to the conclusion that this is kind of a niche thing. How many cities even have a magnet school with 10%+ Asian students, and then furthermore see it supporters / detractors cleanly cleaving among ethnic lines? My guess is not too many - I live in decent sized city and the public school system has none of the above as far as I'm aware, and far more college-bound students go to suburban districts.

Expand full comment

Surely some of what THPacis claims is happening, but he paints with very broad, very cynical brush strokes. Not all PMC white parents are as machiavellian as he describes, nor as aware of the system-gaming possibilities of "equity" (though surely some are). Moreover, a fair number of European-descent children in the United States are actually intelligent and hardworking, and are driven by tiger parents every bit as demanding as the popular stereotype of Asian mums and dads.

Believe it or not some parents (of all colours) exist who just want their kids to have the richest possible education experience, and this includes honours classes, programs for the gifted, and the like.

Expand full comment

"how in some districts you can’t take Algebra until 9th grade because we need equity in math"

Algebra seems to be one of those things that really derails people. I'm surprised that there isn't more of a summer school industry to intensively teach kids who didn't take Algebra in 8th grade.

Expand full comment

yup, and if you try to crack the "mixed level class" problem by letting some kids advance at a different rate, there are some people who will get very angry... :(

Expand full comment

This seems like a problem that should be solvable with computer instruction. Computers can easily present an endless number of problems to work on very narrow math topics, and can pace students individually.

Expand full comment

You're right, but there's also a colossal difference between reading and math (and everything else) that no coverage of this subject seems to mention - Reading is not just a skill but a habit. Learning the basic skills of reading is great, but it doesn't get you all that far without a habit of reading. True literacy & highly skilled comprehension are achieved not through classroom lessons but through consistent long-term independent reading of a wide range of materials.

To your point, the problem you illustrate is pretty much entirely solved by letting more advanced kids read more advanced material independently. They already know how to ride the bike, and teaching them more "bike skills" is of pretty minimal value in getting better at it compared to sheer time spent riding.

The ability of schools to inculcate a habit of reading is pretty limited compared to parental influence. Parents who read habitually will probably raise children who read habitually whether they intend to or not. Kids want to do what their parents are doing - kids with parents who read habitually will leaf through books even before they can read much of anything. At first it's just for the pictures and then they slowly become able to glean letters, words and meanings to add to the pictures.

My inclination is that decreasing reading scores probably correlate entirely with decreasing habitual reading among parents in favor of phone-scrolling. Bad news for society, but great news for parents concerned about their child's positional relationship to other children in reading skill - just demonstrate a habit of reading to your kids and they'll almost certainly be excellent readers, and they'll leave most other kids in the dust whether they have phonics tutors or not.

Expand full comment

Why is separating classes “problematic”? As you noted in a mixed setting just about everyone loses out.

Expand full comment

I was being facetious.

Expand full comment

What you are really describing is a labor problem, more than a mixing problem. In order to allow students to proceed at a personalized level, or even just at a bunch of levels, you would need considerably more teachers than we are willing to pay for at present.

Expand full comment

Unless of course, if their are at least three or four different classes (like 95% of schools in America) that have mixed level abilities in the class. In which case... and I am no genius... it seems like you could use those three or four teachers... resort the classes, and have same ability classes.... with zero change in labor!

Expand full comment

There is an enormous difference between kids at the 66th percentile and kids at the 98th percentile, and in a school with three teachers, that is literally what you are talking about combining. At that point, you are right back where you started: teachers providing differentiated instruction. I think your assessment is based on a lot of assumptions that don't actually hold very well in the complexity of the real world of instruction.

That's kind of the whole argument of Matt's column: this one weird trick is not going to solve education.

Expand full comment

There is less difference between kids at the 66th percentile and 98th percentile and the 15th percentile and the 98th percentile.

My assumption is based on raising 9-kids with different abilities in multiple states across multiple school districts.

I've seen it all. I know what works and what sucks.

Expand full comment

I mean, my assumptions are based on a twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer.

I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids.

Hard problems are hard. You are a smart person. If I offered the level of experience you are describing as evidence of my suitability to provide root-cause analysis of another, similarly complex phenomenon, you wouldn't take me seriously.

Expand full comment

I’ve met plenty of terrible 20-year teachers. You might be good. You might be bad.

Whole subject is predicated on some schools and teachers are sub-optimal.

As a yea her would you prefer to have a class with kids with similar abilities or a wide range.

Not what you can “handle”... what is optimal?

Expand full comment

Even a teacher for every decile wouldn't be enough -- there are differences between the 91% kid and the 99% kid. Obviously we need a 1:1 teacher:student ratio or this isn't even worth trying. :)

Expand full comment

Haha--fair. I should probably put it more like: I think sorting is less of a problem than your labor pool problems. I think teaching doesn't pay enough or carry enough cultural cache to create sufficiently deep labor pools to overcome other kinds of challenges that sorting might actually exacerbate. So I think that you're only going to be able to reap the advantages of a sorting approach if you put in enough money to overcome the downside risks; otherwise you are just robbing Peter to pay Paul, as it were.

Expand full comment

That's fair, but you also often have high-performing kids who can make a lot of progress with less teacher time. For example I had a wonderful third grade teacher who let me do the math program at my own pace & just proctored tests for me. At our local school there is a similar option for kids to just do 8th grade math at their own pace online while also doing 7th grade math, to get into Algebra in 8th grade.

Expand full comment

So you taught yourself?

Expand full comment

yeah I mean you just read the textbook & all the info is there... ask a question in the rare case where you get confused. easy-peasy. I also probably asked my parents questions at times - I know they were tracking my work fairly closely.

Expand full comment

You don't get same-ability classes, but you get closer-to-same ability classes. I was in a "setted" school with four sets (two classes per set) and there was still an obvious and notable range of abilities in each set. Also remember that the sorting process is imperfect, and that students' abilities change over time (but moving them around too much harms their education too as it breaks their ties with their friends), and also vary by subject (some practical subjects, like PE, you're still teaching a mixed-ability class)

Expand full comment

Actually, in the UK, we'd call that "streamed", we make a distinction between streaming (dividing on general academic ability) and setting (dividing on subject-specific academic ability). In that school we did both.

So, to pick an example: we had eight classes of 30 in the whole school; students were divided up into four streams based on their academic ability reported from primary school at the beginning of what you'd call sixth grade and we'd call first form (now "year seven").

We were restreamed for seventh grade ("second form" / "year eight") and ninth grade ("fourth form" / "year ten"), ie students would be moved up and down based on academic performance. Not many were actually moved - you had to be a long way above or below the line for it to make sense to move you. Generally, students would only be moved if it was a two-stream move, not a single stream.

In sixth grade, you were taught as a class of 30, but as you moved up and the school got a better sense of your academic abilities, the subjects would start "setting". As an example, ninth grade math was taught in three sets per stream, so the top 20 of the 60 in each stream were in one classroom, then the middle 20, then the bottom 20. This was based largely on your performance in eighth grade math. The top set in the three lower streams would usually end up somewhere between the middle and bottom set of the stream above. This is why moving a student up one stream was pointless; the top set of their current stream wasn't much different from the middle set of the one above (if they were good enough for the top set of the stream above, they were probably good enough for the middle set two streams up, and that was when they did get moved). Students would be separately setted for English, so you could be top set for maths and middle set for English (or vice versa). Subjects where the streams didn't work (practical subjects like art or music or physical education or shop class) tended to be taught as streams in what were effectively mixed-ability classes. Physical education was sex-segregated, so they segregated the streams, giving groups of 30.

The classes continued to exist as administrative divisions, even as teaching was increasingly done by stream (ie a group of 60) or set, rather than by class.

Aside: my primary school had no setting/streaming because it was one class per year. Very few UK primary schools, even in urban areas, are more than two-class entry (ie more than 60 per year). This is generally to ensure that the schools are within walking distance of the students' homes. Even in (what you'd call) kindergarten, my mother walked me to school, no school buses involved. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I was walking there and back myself. These days, there are "walking buses" where a volunteer adult (usually a parent) will lead a group of children to school, picking each one up as they pass their house on the way. The walking bus will include children of all ages (ie from 5-11) so the older ones can help keep an eye on the youngest. Obviously, some parents still drive their kids, but there are deliberate efforts to discourage them, including banning parking near to school entrances.

Expand full comment

I would dispute that. Even without electronics, teachers have always been able to divide classes and focus on smaller groups. The key is allowing and expecting kids to self direct while they aren't in the group working with the teacher.

Expand full comment

Yeah; I agree. I think that good teachers are often "good" because they are good at that kind of juggling. I was partly a lousy middle school teacher because I was so bad at that particular skill.

What I probably should have written is that I think you could actually get a lot of what Rory wants with either more teachers or with much more skilled teachers. But that comes back to what I said about it being a labor problem. I kind of think that it amounts to the same thing in terms of cost: you will either need to spend more money hiring more teachers or you will spend more money to pay the kind of wages that attract those superstar people with the individualized instruction skills to teaching and retain them long-term because the money is so good.

I'm skeptical that the existing labor situation is so awesome that high-quality individualized instruction is not lacking in a lot of classrooms. I feel like a lot of schools are doing what the school I worked for did: hiring people (like me at 22) with little or no experience because the labor pool just isn't deep enough to be highly competitive, given the wages on offer. And I think that if you had pooled the students in my school and then given me a less widely mixed group of students that I probably still would not have been equipped to deliver good instruction. I guess maybe you could have covered my flaws by giving me a bunch of high-performers who could progress without me, but that would have done those kids a disservice. Maybe I would have grown into a good instructor, given time, but the wages I made were not enticing enough for me to stick it out when I could take relatively little acquired teaching experience and jump to a corporate job that paid more with easier working conditions.

Expand full comment

It's not just phonics, they also need to teach content

https://nataliewexler.substack.com/p/to-make-progress-in-reading-we-need

Expand full comment

Thats what I was talking about in my original post.

First comes phonics, then comes the other stuff like content.

Expand full comment

Agreed

Expand full comment

Kids master everything at different speeds. Whatever your method of reading instruction, there are going to be kids at different levels. I think early elementary school reading is an area where we actually have the best solutions to having kids at different levels in the same class -- some class-wide instruction, leveled reading groups, and, when all else fails, you just let the advanced kids read their own books. Whereas as they get older, that doesn't work anymore.

Expand full comment

I agree that this can be a problem, but I'd be skeptical of pointing to one thing as "the" problem.

Expand full comment

"I'd be skeptical of pointing to one thing as "the" problem."

I disagree. There is always one thing that is *the* problem, and it's always the same: it's monocausal explanation. Monocausal explanation is *the* problem.

Expand full comment

I would normally agree with your snark... but having raised 9-kids... almost all problems in schools stem from teachers having to do to much. Even a subpar curriculum works better when teachers aren't having to provide multiple levels of instruction and discipline to 30-odd kids with different levels of ability.

Therefore, I will stick with my "The problem is..."

Because even if their isn't a monocausal explanation... sometimes there is a root problem.

Expand full comment

It seems to me that this all or nothing approach to reading is missing the point. Kids need three things to read fluently: phonic awareness, vocabulary, and context. In order to enjoy reading at all, they have to be fluent in reading. Phonics is the foundation--learning the letters and how they sound, learning the combinations ("ST", "SH", etc....), learning how vowel sounds "glue" the consonant sounds together. A kid with a limited vocabulary can decode words but struggle to understand the meaning of what they are reading, so cuing using pictures or the other words in a sentence can really help. Cuing is a really useful skill--it only got a bad rap because the whole language school tended to jump over the "sound it out" step before going to the cuing steps.

The final skill is context-does the kid have a frame of reference for the content she is reading? Kids whose parents read to them a lot have seen stories about farms, about oceans, about caterpillars who are Very Hungry, etc. They may have visited places that have people who live differently or look differently than they do. Kids who have never read about or even seen a farm may struggle to form a mental model of what they are reading about, so their comprehension of the text is going to be limited by that. Again, this is an area where something that is seen as a Bad Thing can be really helpful-some amount of quality screen time. A kid who watches Finding Nemo will understand some basics about sea life and be able to enjoy a picture book about an adventurous fish.

It's really sad to me that "experts" dig in and either defend or demonize an instructional method. When my kids were in school, it was math wars---traditional instruction vs. "applied math" where kids were given practical problems to solve and less emphasis on memorizing formulas. As a highly verbal kid who had trouble with rote memorization, I would have thrived with the applied math program, vs. struggling and giving up because memorizing algebraic and geometric formulas was overwhelming, and nobody at the time recognized that I had problems with complex memorization---I suspect this would have been picked up on had I attended school a generation later.

Rather than taking the position that teaching phonics has to replace whole language, or applied math has to replace traditional math, schools should recognize that these instructional methods complement each other and both are necessary for a kid to master a subject.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Aug 31, 2023
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

You mean those schools that provide early education for a fee thus ensuring you only get well off kids and engaged parents has studies showing they do better?

Not impressed by them. They are a prime example of why schools go to inquiry learning and whole language because .... if it works for upper middle class.... it will work for everyone.

Expand full comment

I've heard Montessori kids tend to be underprepared in certain areas. Math is most notable

Expand full comment

Here's a lesson in humility for me as someone who has never taught in elementary schools:

The UK "... incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons...."

Three years of phonics lessons daily, hour-long. Wow.

I was no prodigy as a kid -- I learned to read around kindergarten some time. My guess is that most of the readers of this blog learned to read by first grade, and some of you smarties learned much sooner.

But the idea that there could be kids who have daily, hour-long lessons in cat pat sat mat and after two years of that still don't get it -- that's kind of mind-blowing to me. And a good reminder that elementary school teachers have to work with kids at every level, all at once. I don't think I have a good grasp of how challenging that would be, and I suspect it's easy for other substack readers not to get it, either.

Expand full comment

The kind of people who write these pieces and most of those commenting don’t have a real grasp of what it’s like to move through the world with an IQ at average or below. It’s almost a foreign mode of existence and I think extrapolation from personal experience is difficult, tricky.

Expand full comment

You’re not wrong, but please remember that different kids develop at different paces +some learning challenges can arise due to certian conditions (eg dyslexia) so that being slower to learn to read in elementary schools doesn’t necessarily mean being an adult with below average iq or vice versa

Expand full comment

+1

Over the course of my wanderlust-fueled career, I have been a classroom instructor for middle school, high school, college undergrads, grad students, and adults (as a corporate trainer).

Being a classroom teacher in middle school was the hardest teaching job by leaps and bounds. It's not even close. I can't even imagine keeping up with a class of second graders.

Expand full comment

I don't mean to be curt, but weren't you telling someone earlier this week that you're one of the 100 or so people on planet Earth who's an expert on 19th century Chinese history or something? So you've had all these jobs and then became a world authority on a niche topic later on? Just curious. I meet so many world-leading authorities here on the Internet :)

Edit: further down the thread you wrote this. But claiming to be a world authority on Chinese history is still up from Monday. So you did all these things in your career? Huh!

"twenty-year teaching career at every level of education, from middle-school classroom teacher (IN ENGLISH / LANGUAGE ARTS, as it was then called) to corporate trainer. I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."

Expand full comment

The answer is right there in the claim. My Ph.D. was in history; my subfield specialties included global health. And that helps you understand my expertise in teaching--I'm not sure what you think a "PhD historian" does, but the answer is that most of us teach, at least for a portion of our careers. If you buy what I said earlier this week about being an academic (feel free to check my credentials; they're legit), then it shouldn't surprise you that I claim to be a teacher. I can see why you raise your eyebrows at the middle school part, but like I said: wanderlust. I have done a lot--I mean A LOT--of different jobs. Hilariously, my wife agrees with you that this is all very sketchy, and she is hoping that my latest job (finishing nursing school this week!) is going to stick. And before you ask, I usually get good performance reviews and only got fired once, but I was a lousy middle school teacher. I was 22 and fresh out of college and oof. I think I would do it better today, but oof.

So re: our discussion earlier this week, how many people in the world do you actually think did a Ph.D. with a subfield in global health history? It can't be that many. I was the only one in my particular program; I had to literally do a DIY thing where I assembled different people to handle different specialty topics and reading lists, which sounds very fancy but is actually not that unusual in graduate training. How many of those folks did nineteenth and early twentieth century stuff? It has to be an even smaller number. So maybe "100" is correct, and maybe it isn't, but I doubt that it is, I don't know, 500 people well positioned to talk the Venn diagram of Opium Wars and modern drug policy. I must know or have met at least ten percent of them; it's not like the annual meetings for those professional societies are that ginormously large.

That said, you are actually correctly onto my game: if you have read a lot of my comments on this site, you know that I consistently down-weight expertise in favor of a claim that the world is extremely complicated in ways that tend to confound "expert" analysis. I also say that about "meritocracy." It's the subject of a whole ongoing thread on Ivy League and selective universities I have with THPacis, who is a lovely person who finds me a bit tiresome on this subject.

So yeah, I actually think you are correct about the problem of world-leading authorities, but not in the way you think, i.e. people becoming "experts" on the internet. I'm genuinely very skeptical of "world-leading" authority, because I think it has such sharp limits and can be defined so easily in a world where academics--like me--have these very, very niche areas of study. It's not actually that hard to be the guy who happens to have read more on a topic than 99% of the population. There are a lot of topics, and then you combine, periodize, or slice them, and suddenly, boom, you are an "expert."

For precisely this reason, you will see me pretty consistently argue the limits of claims, rather than making my own expansive ones. I'm sure you can find some counter-examples; I'm a pretty bombastic guy who thinks he knows lots of stuff about lots of stuff and is surely wrong about lots of it. But I mostly know that and try to let that knowledge inflect my analysis, and I think you will see that if you consistently read my comments on this site. (Although I might be wrong! You could probably conduct an experiment over the next month to check the claim.)

This is also why you will see me lay out my expertise in certain ways; you can actually find most or all of the evidence if you look down through my CV and across the other stuff on my website, which covers my academic history (link on my bio page on this site, I think).

There is an interesting side question, which is how much time do you need in a thing to be an "expert"? Like, I worked for the Texas Historical Commission and wrote a travel brochure for them on African American history in Texas (long, very stupid story with a hilarious ending). I do not feel like an expert on Texas Black history. But on the other hand, I literally wrote the f-ing brochure. I clearly had to do a lot of research and develop a pretty deep understanding of some stuff. But it's way outside what I would describe as my normal bailiwick. So am I an expert? Maybe? This is back to my feeling that expertise is actually a very slippery concept.

And that is where you circle back to my claims about my own expertise. And this is where I will write a thing that maybe I shouldn't write: precisely BECAUSE I try to hold myself to claims that are strictly true, I consider describing my claims of expertise to be maybe one step removed from a form of trolling. Like, I think they matter a lot more to the counter-party in most of these discussions than they matter to me. The thread you are citing is a good example. As you probably noticed, my whole thing in that discussion had nothing to do with arguing interpretation of the actual "expert thing" at issue. I literally argued that expertise in the Opium Wars and early twentieth century Chinese history was irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

I showed up, flagged my expertise as similar to the poster's, and argued that our shared expertise was not all that relevant.

If you go read through my exchange elsewhere in the comments on this article, you should be able to identify a similar kind of dynamic. You will also find that I think, as a person who has a very weird and shaggy set of work / life experiences, that I also think experience is often a lousy basis for analysis.

In a sense, this is probably an ugly and unfair argumentative tactic. I basically show up and say, "I have this relevant training or set of experiences, and as someone with those things, I think your expansive analytical claims are pretty weak." And for someone claiming expertise or experience, they are stuck with either agreeing with me that expertise and experience is not that useful in this particular way, or they need to argue that my expertise or experience is very meaningful, in which case the fact that I disagree on the analysis is a genuine strike on the analysis. That might come over nihilistically, but believe me when I say that I don't actually mean it that way. I just genuinely believe that hard problems are hard, and that "experts" and people with "experience" often struggle the MOST with the complexity of the world, precisely because it feels like admitting that undercuts us.

I actually think that feeling is wrong; I think expertise and experience salted with a generous helping of humility is your best bet for tackling hard problems. But it doesn't feel as good as being the "expert: BOOM, I know stuff!"

Expand full comment

Full disclosure- I certainly didn't read all this. But your CV says your dissertation was 'The Development of Radiation Therapy, 1895-1925'. Bit of a stretch to the Opium Wars, nah? Or, arguably, there's really no connection at all and you were caught lying?

I wouldn't personally care about gross exaggerations of expertise if you were just kinda less of a jerk about it, to David and to Rory in the comments section here.

"I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one" The whole comments section from Monday..... Then, "I've seen considerably more of teaching than you have, with your "class" of nine kids."

Maybe just dial it down a bit? A lot? You sound really arrogant, and then it turns out your supposed expertise is mostly fake.... A little humility could go a long way, is all I'm saying

Expand full comment

Being a pompous jerk is his thing, though. "By the way, have I told you I'm a PhD historian lately?"

Expand full comment

> just kinda less of a jerk about it, to David and to Rory in the comments section here.

Kind of a jerk is his thing. I already ignore his comments.

I tried to express empathy for his situation once and he trashed me for it instead: https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-5df/comment/18027237

Expand full comment

Totally bizarre. What a jerk

Expand full comment

Probably the right move, TBH. "Don't read the comments" is an internet meme for a reason.

Expand full comment

Is the idea that you need to write a book about something to be an expert in it?

I mean, either I did study global health, or I didn't. I taught those classes: do you think I just lied about my expertise and they didn't check my transcripts?

Okay, full disclosure: not every school where I ever taught has asked to see my transcripts, but Penn did. They decided that I had the expertise I claimed to have, based on the coursework I completed (and on in-person interviews where they asked me some questions and concluded that I knew what I was talking about).

You can see a bunch of course reading lists on my website; either you think they suck and indicate a poor understanding or you don't. But presumably I think they are pretty good, or I wouldn't, you know, put them on my website.

Like I said: I actually do think that expertise is sharply circumscribed. There's a lot of things to know in the world and a lot of books to read. Honestly, one thing writing a book about radiation therapy has convinced me of is that expertise is highly overrated--like, am I an expert in the history of radiation therapy? There is so much stuff I don't know, and especially some questions that I still think are very poorly answered in the book, but I'm not convinced that anyone else knows the answers to those questions, either. And I'm also not at all convinced that the last 10% of my specialist knowledge on that subject is worth as much, in terms of my "expert-ness," as the first 90%; I think I quite possibly learned more of use for policy questions in the first year of my research than in the last two.

So I think your core problem is that you and I actually deeply disagree about what constitutes expertise and about the limits or value of that kind of knowledge. You think I'm a charlatan, but it is because you want to ascribe a value to a theoretical non-charlatan something that I'm not actually convinced is warranted even in the areas where you would concede that I belong.

I'm literally the guy who sounds really arrogant to you saying, "I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis." And I feel like if I said that to you in a bar, you would nod sagely and agree before taking another sip of your beer. So why does it bother you when I say, "I am an expert, and I think problems are hard and the complexity of reality defies easy analysis"? And why does it bother you so much that you need to go over my CV looking for evidence that I don't have the expertise I claim to have?

The acid test of expertise is whether someone writes something dumb about a subject on which they should be smart. So it's easy to prove my non-expertise: go forth, my friend, and point out the subject on which I have something really dumb where I should be smart, based on my supposed expertise. I post way too much on this site. I must have left my butt hanging out stupidly somewhere.

Expand full comment

You: "Expertise is highly overrated"

Also you, on Monday: "I'm an actual, honest-to-god historian with a Ph.D. and specific training in this area, which falls within my various areas of specialty training. I'm one of the hundred or so people on the planet with the specific expertise to discuss this issue at length and in detail. As you probably guessed from me doing that much wind-up, I'm sorry, but you really are wrong on this one."

Which one is it Jeffrey?

Expand full comment

For what it's worth, his substack profile has an easy way to get to his CV.

Expand full comment

But the point is not that they are doing three years of hour-long phonics lessons and still not learning to read. The point is that they are doing all those phonics lessons unnecessarily. The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, and they should be spending the time on other things.

Expand full comment

"The kids have learned enough phonics, they know how to read, ..."

Maybe? I don't think that is clear from the snippet that Matt gave us, and I have not read the full report.

If each one of these kids is a fully competent reader and is still being forced to do elementary phonics, then that's a different problem. I thought the problem was that some have mastered it and some have not.

Expand full comment

It seems pretty clear to me. :

"...in the U.K. they are currently in a backlash phase, based on the finding that British schools spent too much time on phonics instruction and not enough time on developing more advanced reading comprehension..."

[...]

“'There’s no question that phonics instruction is important,' Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University of College London, told Vox. 'But let’s be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You’re wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension.'”

Expand full comment

Is the third year of phonics still doing mat cat sat or is it doing through rough dough?

Expand full comment

"...still doing mat cat sat or is it doing through rough dough?"

Though, if your training in mat cat sat was thorough enough, you can probably just plough through rough dough.

(I don't actually believe that, I just wanted to see how many "-ough" words I could get in there.)

Expand full comment

[cough! cough!] you missed one!

Expand full comment

SMBC kinda beat you to the punch on this one a few days ago https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce

Expand full comment

And 3 days later XKCD joined the fun (https://xkcd.com/2819/)

Expand full comment

Tough, man. Deal with it.

Expand full comment

Gough, Hough, Kough, and Pough listened to the sough as they sat on a bough above the wough along the lough fed by the Yough.

Expand full comment

To be fair, I had to look several of those up, although "BOUGH" is my go-to fourth pick for Wordle if I can't solve it in three or fewer guesses (starting with MERCH, PLAID, STONY).

Expand full comment

CARES, POINT, BULKY are my first three if I just completely strike out on getting any letters.

Expand full comment