I think one undervalued progressive push to eliminate gifted classes, admissions criteria, etc, is that teachers know they can’t close the achievement gap, but also know they can’t admit this without ending their careers. In San Francisco, a BoE member was asked why black children didn’t perform as well as white children. She said that her observation was that black parents don’t prioritize education as much, and they needed help on how to help their children perform better.
Our most prominent newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, said that the statement met their official criteria for racist statements (they do have a clearly articulated one), and described it as such every time they mentioned the controversy. They anti-endorsed her, and she lost her next election.
The fact that her statement was true, and she offered a compassionate solution, didn’t factor at all.
Some charter schools have better educational outcomes. On average they are no better or worse than traditional public school despite the fact that many cherry pick students based on special ed eligibility and behavior, and that by definition charter school parents are more involved as they took the extra step to navigate the system and get their child enrolled in a Charter. Charters were originally designed to be a lab for innovation of sorts but now are siphoning off the less needy students in a system leaving public schools circling the drain.
Hi Matt and Matt's team -- I'm a long-time fan of Matt's work and this article in particular resonated. I wanted to post that I think you would find a lot of value in my book The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press). The book has gotten great reviews from some of the world's top economists, was a Next Big Idea Club nominee, and a "favorite parenting book of 2022" at Greater Good, and I've written about some of the arguments in The Atlantic and The Hill. I make a similar argument that we ask too much of our existing K12 school system, and I show what it would really take to address inequality of opportunity. The analogue of Social Security you describe -- i.e. a universal child tax credit -- wouldn't make nearly as big a difference as people hope. But the analogue of Medicare -- i.e. universal access to professional skill development services which we might call "Familycare" -- would make a huge difference. There I show it is really not overpromising to expect a radical shift toward economic equality by class AND by race. Familycare would cost around 2% of GDP -- same large New-Deal scale as Medicare and Social Security but much smaller. But feasible. I also talk about political feasibility and lay out ingredients of a strategy to make this utopian-sounding thing more realistic. I'd be honored if you gave the book a read -- the paperback is coming out in April and I'm trying to get the word out however I can. Thanks for your work. -- Nate (nathaniel.hilger@gmail.com, www.natehilger.com)
>Washington, D.C. implemented education reforms, and after the reforms took hold, test scores went up across the board. Yet rather than being celebrated as a success story, we got negative headlines in 2018 and 2020 about how achievement gaps weren’t closing. But it was because everyone was doing better!
I remain confused by your confusion with Freddie deBoer's stance on education reform[1], since...this is like his entire argument? No matter what you do, whether absolute test scores (or any metrics really) go up or down, you'll never close the ___________ gap because so much of it is outside the remit of schooling to begin with. And what really seems to drive second-order inequalities post-schooling is these kinds of ordinal, not cardinal, rankings. (Including 0 being so much more valuable than 1 for things like suspensions. Or Bryan Caplan's argument that the final year of schooling is considered so much more valuable than all those preceding - people care about degrees, not "Some College", even for large quantities of Some.) Employers, college admissions, etc. look for applicants that were Top Of The Class. What was the actual ability level for the cream of that crop? Doesn't matter nearly as much as that they were 90th percentile, and thus perfectly defensible choices.
Nor will switching to other metrics do much, because it's stratification all the way down...whether it's the SAT, Common Core tests, GPA[2], attendance, disciplinary incidents, or basically anything else, you get a picture of the same unequal outcomes readily observable in American society outside the Ivy-covered halls[3]. School just reflects these underlying conditions, and while it can ameliorate - or exacerbate - them somewhat on the margins, it's merely one piece of the systemic puzzle. Fixating relentlessly on gaps is therefore a subspecies of what you've previously called "tedious racial gap analysis": in an unequal society, basically every measurable outcome will show some type of racial gap, so it becomes a Fully General Counterargument against ever doing anything or admitting any progress. Plus at a certain point you'll exhaust all manner of specifically-boost-from-below, and then the only juice left to squeeze is going all Harrison Bergeron. That's...not really a road we want to go down! The mere __appearance__ of such a "socialist" woke dystopia is already paying ridiculous returns to Republicans and other assorted grifters, so God forbid we actually substantiate those fears.
(Of course, as you note, this means the correct response is to try and improve absolute outcomes across the board anyway. Good things are good, actually, even if they're unequally good! Not abandon the entire project of reform because the pie slices might be shaped differently. Which is itself a myopic focus on relative vs. absolute gaps. Coincidence?)
> Employers, college admissions, etc. look for applicants that were Top Of The Class.
Random aside - I often get uncomfortable that so many places ask us to place candidates in a decile or some other numerical ranking when submitting letters of recommendation. There are lots of students who aren't "top 10%" but are still plenty good! But then I worry if I am hurting their chances despite being plenty good enough because every place chases the same select few.
Well, we could bring back actual direct competence tests of ability instead of using college degrees/letters of recommendation/whatever as noisy proxies, but...that's a whole other argument I'm not touching, for obvious CW reasons. Even if one isn't a devotee of the God of the Gaps, it's easy to see there are some positives to the tradeoffs we chose to make by moving towards more percentile rounding-off and such vs. precise comparison of absolutes. It's just actually hard to humanely reckon with the existence of low-[metric] people - whether that's statistical artifacts arising from percentile rank, or low on an absolute scale. Universalist "basic floor of dignity for everyone, judge a society on its least well-off" seems to have gone out of vogue. But there's still some underlying appetite for it, which is I think part of what Kendi and others of that persuasion tap into. The foundation is noble, even if the details of implementation are really backwardsly wrong...
Integration can cut the achievement gap in half! This gets poo-pooed as not eliminating the achievement gap, but a 50% reduction is huge! Bring back forced bussing! Boo-yah!
First, I want to say, I’ve been a fan of yours ever since I became a casual reader of Vox and noticed that the articles by this Yglesias guy consistently make more sense than anything else I read on the internet. Now I read your newsletter almost every morning, and I find that I judge your work by a higher standard than other commentary. As a result, I notice mistakes that I might let pass among lesser writers.
You make the point that even Hannah-Jones, an integration optimist, only expects integration to close the achievement gap by half, so we can conclude that the quality of the education isn’t the only factor behind the achievement gap. I’m not familiar with her work outside of the TAL episode you cite (which I remember listening to when it came out). But it seems to me, from reading that transcript now, that she wanted us to think of that 50% improvement as merely a *lower bound* to what integration could achieve. Specifically, during the period when integration was being implemented, the achievement gap (according to “standardized reading tests”—cherry-picked evidence, one suspects, but that’s beside the point) halved, and this trend reversed only when integration was curtailed in the 80s. (That’s very weak evidence for causation, of course, but that’s also beside the point.)
The point is that I think you misrepresented her claim in a way that’s relevant to your overall argument. Basically, she made a (sloppily-argued) claim that integration may be all we need to close the achievement gap (the thesis, as I recall, of the whole two-part episode). And you’re representing her has claiming that integration only gets us halfway there, implying that serious research suggests that half of the achievement gap persists in integrated schools. In fact, that’s not the claim, and the implication is doubly misleading since the TAL episode doesn't cite any serious research anyway.
I happen to think that your conclusion—that the gap persists even among students at the same school—is very likely true. But I'm just a recently-laid-off software engineer with too much time on his hands. I suspect that this question has been studied by real social scientists, so it would have been nice if you cited some relevant research.
I know you’re not trying to write a scientific paper here. But I value your ability to harness diverse sources of information in an intellectually honest way. So when I notice little cheats here and there, they stand out to me.
IMO one of the primary issues is that virtually all pre-college teaching isn't actually designed to teach anything but sitting still and following directions.
Part of this is just the failure of the educational system to adapt to the fact that rote memorization just really isn't particularly useful anymore. Why the hell would you memorize the quadratic formula or integration rules when you can pull up a solver on your phone or Wikipedia.
But a more fundamental problem is that we have this weird idea that any reasonably smart student who puts in the work should be able to do well in the class. But if you want to teach for understanding that's just not true. To generate real understanding you need to ask students conceptual questions that challenge them to speculate and hypothesis to get the answer. But that means that a student who is (for example) totally math phobic and finds thinking about math to be torture can't just put in enough hours memorizing things or learning rules to succeed. Conceptual understanding really requires some degree of enjoying the puzzle and trying to work it out.
As long as we seem to be unwilling to design classes that don't always allow success by grinding (for at least the dedicate intelligent students) I don't see how to fix this.
For instance, almost all math taught pre-college (and quite a bit of that) is totally useless. No one needs to memorize the quadratic formula and most lawyers I've met can barely remember how to solve a single linear equation much less a system of multiple equations. Yet the way the math is taught offers no understanding or useful skill they can take with them.
Despite being a mathematician I favor replacing most pre-college math w/ cs bc I think it's at least harder to remove the playful problem solving element there and at least we won't be training even more ppl to hate math.
I fear there is a huge incentive to ignore the achievement gap because it reveals a fundamental tension in the interests of mostly progressive elites.
Problem is that tracking of some kind really is critical to the high achieving kids to get a good education but it really does impose a cost (though much less of one) on those kids who are tracked down (relative to a school that slowed everyone down to the lowest track...not necessarily relative to a school that split the difference).
But no one wants to admit that, while they want to close the achievement gap, they don't want to close it at the expense of denying their higher performing kids a good and challenging school environment.
As some of the comments indicate, better instruction in phonics, basic arithmetic helps. This should definitely be done.
But this is not an answer to black/white achievement gap. This gap persists everywhere in US in all SES backgrounds at different levels of per pupil funding, whether schools are integrated or not. It persists even with black and white students in the same schools.
So while improving instruction is all to the good for everyone, we need to face overwhelming likelihood that white and Asian students will benefit from the improvement more than the Black and Hispanics will.
Maybe the solution is developing more and better educational and post ed paths for below average students of all races and stop trying in effect, to.decree that all children will be above average.
Also, Kendi is an idiot and is someone NO ONE should be listening to..
Nope. He's basically saying if you tried really really hard with underachieving black kids they'd do better.
But even assuming his ideas were sustainable and scalable and produced results that were durable (they aren't and they don't) what would the results be if you made similar inputs across the board?
All our experience with this points to fact that whatever worked at all with black students would work even more with white and Asian students. Everyone would get better but gap would persist.
Matt is basically saying this in his post..
We should think therefore of across the board improvements, not narrowing the racial achievement gap.
I haven't read the comments yet, so maybe someone has brought it up already, but:
I am utterly flabbergasted by the concept of letting a student advance to the next grade without, you know, learning the content of the current grade level. Then you get things like "a 7th-grade student reading at 4th-grade level" or some such. My immediate question is, if this student reads at 4th grade level, how in the name of Cthulhu were they allowed to advance to 6th, and 7th grade? This would never fly in my native country (Poland). In Poland, you have to repeat a grade if you haven't learned the content, period.
Now, of course, you could argue that if Black children perform less well than white children, then Black children will be disproportionately more likely to have to repeat a grade, and this will make the school look Racist. My answer is: do we as a society care more about not looking Racist or about having children learn? Holding a child back isn't punishment; it's ultimately a kindness, giving them a second chance to learn what they didn't learn the first time through.
At the risk of being pelted with fruit, Kendi's right about the resources question. Equalizing resources (probably state-by-state) should be the first step in any education reform plan, with some some minor adjustments based on local economy.
What would that do and what would it look like? It seems like parenting is the clear #1 resource and school funding is way farther down the list, in which case equalizing resources across states can't really happen in a meaningful way.
I worded that poorly; my bad. Within a state is what I was trying to say. Each high school in, say, Nebraska, should have the same relative resources. Not just money, but time, attention, infrastructure, equipment, etc. We don't want to give each child an identical education, and we can't ensure an equal education, but we should be committed to giving each kid as good an education as the next kid, regardless of district wealth or size. If we tackle that, we should also have a clearer, more accurate picture of any achievement gaps.
That's never going to happen though.. we don't try to equalize inputs for anything else in society and people won't tolerate chasing the rainbow here either.
You cant stop parents from spending more and doing more on education any more than you can for anything else they do.
But I mean there's lots of literature on the race gap even within the same school and in the same social economic class. That is strongly suggestive that the problem.is not about inputs.
Besides...we've raised per capita spending dramatically over last 50 years. Even places that spend a lot per student get poor outcomes..
I think you have to start training more kids much sooner for work in trades or other jobs that are not going to require a college degree but nevertheless can provide a pathway to a decent life.
The college for all pathway is not working for most kids.
I think a major reason why we do not push more vocational training is that the trainees would be disproportionately black and hispanic, but those kids often wind up struggling more than they should as a result
I mean, if I had faith that Conor and Hope wouldn't still end up at Party College U, while Maria and Jamal wouldn't be pushed toward voco classes, even when they could go to college, I'd be all for it.
I say this as a white kid, but one who was born in a poverty to lower middle class family depending on the year, and could easily have seen myself being pushed in such a situation in a different life.
I think it was Oren Cass who has written extensively on the problem of college...that only about 1/5 kids who go to college, graduate and end up in a job pertaining to their major. Many BAs who do graduate end up anyway in jobs that shouldn't require a degree at all...lots of assistant managers of Starbucks or retail chains and Lyft drivers.
But lots of skilled trades and health care jobs could begin training people in high school.
I mean, the owner of this Substack got a philsophy degree, I believe. Is it bad he's currently a small business owner? Hell, I went for college for poli sci an history, and currently I'm working for a big tech company doing work with maps. Should I be upset over that?
I don't get this weird obsession that if you get an English degree, it's a failure if they're say, working in an office job where you aren't really using your degree much.
The reason why there were a lot of English majors in 2010 working at Starbucks is a massive unemployment problem, not because they should've been all working as plumbers of whatever. That doesn't even get into the part that there's a lot of people who'd rather make 30k at Starbucks than 60k as a plumber, even if you try to push them toward the latter.
There isn't an unemployment problem. The unemployment rates are at historic lows. There's a mismatch between preparation we are giving people and the jobs that actually exist.
Who would go to college to end up as a barista/ assistant manager when you could climb the ladder at Starbucks such as it is right out of high school?
I think.the number of people who went to college with the goal of working at Starbucks is to a first approximation zero.
Another example of how progressives steered the ship away from the reformers’ goal of equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes. If you don’t talk about quality of pipeline you can focus the war on DEI quotas.
It's true, rarely is the question asked these days, is our children learning? The achievement gap is better than current discourses because achievement is at least up there in the name, but I wonder if the most rational approach might be to worry less about the gap. How about we focus on learning? Identify students, regardless of race, who underperform in math and try to make them better at math. Then, since a few racial groups are overrepresented in the group of students underperformed in math, they would get a larger slice of the benefit of such a policy.
I think one undervalued progressive push to eliminate gifted classes, admissions criteria, etc, is that teachers know they can’t close the achievement gap, but also know they can’t admit this without ending their careers. In San Francisco, a BoE member was asked why black children didn’t perform as well as white children. She said that her observation was that black parents don’t prioritize education as much, and they needed help on how to help their children perform better.
Our most prominent newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, said that the statement met their official criteria for racist statements (they do have a clearly articulated one), and described it as such every time they mentioned the controversy. They anti-endorsed her, and she lost her next election.
The fact that her statement was true, and she offered a compassionate solution, didn’t factor at all.
" This is too bad, because the achievement gap continues to be a noteworthy feature of American society. "
As opposed to the societies where people of all races score the same on standardized tests such as ....???
Some charter schools have better educational outcomes. On average they are no better or worse than traditional public school despite the fact that many cherry pick students based on special ed eligibility and behavior, and that by definition charter school parents are more involved as they took the extra step to navigate the system and get their child enrolled in a Charter. Charters were originally designed to be a lab for innovation of sorts but now are siphoning off the less needy students in a system leaving public schools circling the drain.
Hi Matt and Matt's team -- I'm a long-time fan of Matt's work and this article in particular resonated. I wanted to post that I think you would find a lot of value in my book The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (MIT Press). The book has gotten great reviews from some of the world's top economists, was a Next Big Idea Club nominee, and a "favorite parenting book of 2022" at Greater Good, and I've written about some of the arguments in The Atlantic and The Hill. I make a similar argument that we ask too much of our existing K12 school system, and I show what it would really take to address inequality of opportunity. The analogue of Social Security you describe -- i.e. a universal child tax credit -- wouldn't make nearly as big a difference as people hope. But the analogue of Medicare -- i.e. universal access to professional skill development services which we might call "Familycare" -- would make a huge difference. There I show it is really not overpromising to expect a radical shift toward economic equality by class AND by race. Familycare would cost around 2% of GDP -- same large New-Deal scale as Medicare and Social Security but much smaller. But feasible. I also talk about political feasibility and lay out ingredients of a strategy to make this utopian-sounding thing more realistic. I'd be honored if you gave the book a read -- the paperback is coming out in April and I'm trying to get the word out however I can. Thanks for your work. -- Nate (nathaniel.hilger@gmail.com, www.natehilger.com)
The Economist's Lexington column has picked up the subject of education reform: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/03/16/why-did-americas-leaders-stop-caring-about-schools
>Washington, D.C. implemented education reforms, and after the reforms took hold, test scores went up across the board. Yet rather than being celebrated as a success story, we got negative headlines in 2018 and 2020 about how achievement gaps weren’t closing. But it was because everyone was doing better!
I remain confused by your confusion with Freddie deBoer's stance on education reform[1], since...this is like his entire argument? No matter what you do, whether absolute test scores (or any metrics really) go up or down, you'll never close the ___________ gap because so much of it is outside the remit of schooling to begin with. And what really seems to drive second-order inequalities post-schooling is these kinds of ordinal, not cardinal, rankings. (Including 0 being so much more valuable than 1 for things like suspensions. Or Bryan Caplan's argument that the final year of schooling is considered so much more valuable than all those preceding - people care about degrees, not "Some College", even for large quantities of Some.) Employers, college admissions, etc. look for applicants that were Top Of The Class. What was the actual ability level for the cream of that crop? Doesn't matter nearly as much as that they were 90th percentile, and thus perfectly defensible choices.
Nor will switching to other metrics do much, because it's stratification all the way down...whether it's the SAT, Common Core tests, GPA[2], attendance, disciplinary incidents, or basically anything else, you get a picture of the same unequal outcomes readily observable in American society outside the Ivy-covered halls[3]. School just reflects these underlying conditions, and while it can ameliorate - or exacerbate - them somewhat on the margins, it's merely one piece of the systemic puzzle. Fixating relentlessly on gaps is therefore a subspecies of what you've previously called "tedious racial gap analysis": in an unequal society, basically every measurable outcome will show some type of racial gap, so it becomes a Fully General Counterargument against ever doing anything or admitting any progress. Plus at a certain point you'll exhaust all manner of specifically-boost-from-below, and then the only juice left to squeeze is going all Harrison Bergeron. That's...not really a road we want to go down! The mere __appearance__ of such a "socialist" woke dystopia is already paying ridiculous returns to Republicans and other assorted grifters, so God forbid we actually substantiate those fears.
(Of course, as you note, this means the correct response is to try and improve absolute outcomes across the board anyway. Good things are good, actually, even if they're unequally good! Not abandon the entire project of reform because the pie slices might be shaped differently. Which is itself a myopic focus on relative vs. absolute gaps. Coincidence?)
Obligatory bibliography:
[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
[2] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-cannot-stress-enough-that-grade
[3] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/11/black-people-less-likely/
> Employers, college admissions, etc. look for applicants that were Top Of The Class.
Random aside - I often get uncomfortable that so many places ask us to place candidates in a decile or some other numerical ranking when submitting letters of recommendation. There are lots of students who aren't "top 10%" but are still plenty good! But then I worry if I am hurting their chances despite being plenty good enough because every place chases the same select few.
Well, we could bring back actual direct competence tests of ability instead of using college degrees/letters of recommendation/whatever as noisy proxies, but...that's a whole other argument I'm not touching, for obvious CW reasons. Even if one isn't a devotee of the God of the Gaps, it's easy to see there are some positives to the tradeoffs we chose to make by moving towards more percentile rounding-off and such vs. precise comparison of absolutes. It's just actually hard to humanely reckon with the existence of low-[metric] people - whether that's statistical artifacts arising from percentile rank, or low on an absolute scale. Universalist "basic floor of dignity for everyone, judge a society on its least well-off" seems to have gone out of vogue. But there's still some underlying appetite for it, which is I think part of what Kendi and others of that persuasion tap into. The foundation is noble, even if the details of implementation are really backwardsly wrong...
Integration can cut the achievement gap in half! This gets poo-pooed as not eliminating the achievement gap, but a 50% reduction is huge! Bring back forced bussing! Boo-yah!
First, I want to say, I’ve been a fan of yours ever since I became a casual reader of Vox and noticed that the articles by this Yglesias guy consistently make more sense than anything else I read on the internet. Now I read your newsletter almost every morning, and I find that I judge your work by a higher standard than other commentary. As a result, I notice mistakes that I might let pass among lesser writers.
You make the point that even Hannah-Jones, an integration optimist, only expects integration to close the achievement gap by half, so we can conclude that the quality of the education isn’t the only factor behind the achievement gap. I’m not familiar with her work outside of the TAL episode you cite (which I remember listening to when it came out). But it seems to me, from reading that transcript now, that she wanted us to think of that 50% improvement as merely a *lower bound* to what integration could achieve. Specifically, during the period when integration was being implemented, the achievement gap (according to “standardized reading tests”—cherry-picked evidence, one suspects, but that’s beside the point) halved, and this trend reversed only when integration was curtailed in the 80s. (That’s very weak evidence for causation, of course, but that’s also beside the point.)
The point is that I think you misrepresented her claim in a way that’s relevant to your overall argument. Basically, she made a (sloppily-argued) claim that integration may be all we need to close the achievement gap (the thesis, as I recall, of the whole two-part episode). And you’re representing her has claiming that integration only gets us halfway there, implying that serious research suggests that half of the achievement gap persists in integrated schools. In fact, that’s not the claim, and the implication is doubly misleading since the TAL episode doesn't cite any serious research anyway.
I happen to think that your conclusion—that the gap persists even among students at the same school—is very likely true. But I'm just a recently-laid-off software engineer with too much time on his hands. I suspect that this question has been studied by real social scientists, so it would have been nice if you cited some relevant research.
I know you’re not trying to write a scientific paper here. But I value your ability to harness diverse sources of information in an intellectually honest way. So when I notice little cheats here and there, they stand out to me.
IMO one of the primary issues is that virtually all pre-college teaching isn't actually designed to teach anything but sitting still and following directions.
Part of this is just the failure of the educational system to adapt to the fact that rote memorization just really isn't particularly useful anymore. Why the hell would you memorize the quadratic formula or integration rules when you can pull up a solver on your phone or Wikipedia.
But a more fundamental problem is that we have this weird idea that any reasonably smart student who puts in the work should be able to do well in the class. But if you want to teach for understanding that's just not true. To generate real understanding you need to ask students conceptual questions that challenge them to speculate and hypothesis to get the answer. But that means that a student who is (for example) totally math phobic and finds thinking about math to be torture can't just put in enough hours memorizing things or learning rules to succeed. Conceptual understanding really requires some degree of enjoying the puzzle and trying to work it out.
As long as we seem to be unwilling to design classes that don't always allow success by grinding (for at least the dedicate intelligent students) I don't see how to fix this.
For instance, almost all math taught pre-college (and quite a bit of that) is totally useless. No one needs to memorize the quadratic formula and most lawyers I've met can barely remember how to solve a single linear equation much less a system of multiple equations. Yet the way the math is taught offers no understanding or useful skill they can take with them.
Despite being a mathematician I favor replacing most pre-college math w/ cs bc I think it's at least harder to remove the playful problem solving element there and at least we won't be training even more ppl to hate math.
I fear there is a huge incentive to ignore the achievement gap because it reveals a fundamental tension in the interests of mostly progressive elites.
Problem is that tracking of some kind really is critical to the high achieving kids to get a good education but it really does impose a cost (though much less of one) on those kids who are tracked down (relative to a school that slowed everyone down to the lowest track...not necessarily relative to a school that split the difference).
But no one wants to admit that, while they want to close the achievement gap, they don't want to close it at the expense of denying their higher performing kids a good and challenging school environment.
As some of the comments indicate, better instruction in phonics, basic arithmetic helps. This should definitely be done.
But this is not an answer to black/white achievement gap. This gap persists everywhere in US in all SES backgrounds at different levels of per pupil funding, whether schools are integrated or not. It persists even with black and white students in the same schools.
So while improving instruction is all to the good for everyone, we need to face overwhelming likelihood that white and Asian students will benefit from the improvement more than the Black and Hispanics will.
Maybe the solution is developing more and better educational and post ed paths for below average students of all races and stop trying in effect, to.decree that all children will be above average.
Also, Kendi is an idiot and is someone NO ONE should be listening to..
Roland Fryer showed that its possible to turn these failing schools around.
https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/
But people care more about politics than kids
Nope. He's basically saying if you tried really really hard with underachieving black kids they'd do better.
But even assuming his ideas were sustainable and scalable and produced results that were durable (they aren't and they don't) what would the results be if you made similar inputs across the board?
All our experience with this points to fact that whatever worked at all with black students would work even more with white and Asian students. Everyone would get better but gap would persist.
Matt is basically saying this in his post..
We should think therefore of across the board improvements, not narrowing the racial achievement gap.
I haven't read the comments yet, so maybe someone has brought it up already, but:
I am utterly flabbergasted by the concept of letting a student advance to the next grade without, you know, learning the content of the current grade level. Then you get things like "a 7th-grade student reading at 4th-grade level" or some such. My immediate question is, if this student reads at 4th grade level, how in the name of Cthulhu were they allowed to advance to 6th, and 7th grade? This would never fly in my native country (Poland). In Poland, you have to repeat a grade if you haven't learned the content, period.
Now, of course, you could argue that if Black children perform less well than white children, then Black children will be disproportionately more likely to have to repeat a grade, and this will make the school look Racist. My answer is: do we as a society care more about not looking Racist or about having children learn? Holding a child back isn't punishment; it's ultimately a kindness, giving them a second chance to learn what they didn't learn the first time through.
At the risk of being pelted with fruit, Kendi's right about the resources question. Equalizing resources (probably state-by-state) should be the first step in any education reform plan, with some some minor adjustments based on local economy.
What would that do and what would it look like? It seems like parenting is the clear #1 resource and school funding is way farther down the list, in which case equalizing resources across states can't really happen in a meaningful way.
I worded that poorly; my bad. Within a state is what I was trying to say. Each high school in, say, Nebraska, should have the same relative resources. Not just money, but time, attention, infrastructure, equipment, etc. We don't want to give each child an identical education, and we can't ensure an equal education, but we should be committed to giving each kid as good an education as the next kid, regardless of district wealth or size. If we tackle that, we should also have a clearer, more accurate picture of any achievement gaps.
That's never going to happen though.. we don't try to equalize inputs for anything else in society and people won't tolerate chasing the rainbow here either.
You cant stop parents from spending more and doing more on education any more than you can for anything else they do.
But I mean there's lots of literature on the race gap even within the same school and in the same social economic class. That is strongly suggestive that the problem.is not about inputs.
Besides...we've raised per capita spending dramatically over last 50 years. Even places that spend a lot per student get poor outcomes..
I think you have to start training more kids much sooner for work in trades or other jobs that are not going to require a college degree but nevertheless can provide a pathway to a decent life.
The college for all pathway is not working for most kids.
I think a major reason why we do not push more vocational training is that the trainees would be disproportionately black and hispanic, but those kids often wind up struggling more than they should as a result
I mean, if I had faith that Conor and Hope wouldn't still end up at Party College U, while Maria and Jamal wouldn't be pushed toward voco classes, even when they could go to college, I'd be all for it.
I say this as a white kid, but one who was born in a poverty to lower middle class family depending on the year, and could easily have seen myself being pushed in such a situation in a different life.
I think it was Oren Cass who has written extensively on the problem of college...that only about 1/5 kids who go to college, graduate and end up in a job pertaining to their major. Many BAs who do graduate end up anyway in jobs that shouldn't require a degree at all...lots of assistant managers of Starbucks or retail chains and Lyft drivers.
But lots of skilled trades and health care jobs could begin training people in high school.
I mean, the owner of this Substack got a philsophy degree, I believe. Is it bad he's currently a small business owner? Hell, I went for college for poli sci an history, and currently I'm working for a big tech company doing work with maps. Should I be upset over that?
I don't get this weird obsession that if you get an English degree, it's a failure if they're say, working in an office job where you aren't really using your degree much.
The reason why there were a lot of English majors in 2010 working at Starbucks is a massive unemployment problem, not because they should've been all working as plumbers of whatever. That doesn't even get into the part that there's a lot of people who'd rather make 30k at Starbucks than 60k as a plumber, even if you try to push them toward the latter.
There isn't an unemployment problem. The unemployment rates are at historic lows. There's a mismatch between preparation we are giving people and the jobs that actually exist.
Who would go to college to end up as a barista/ assistant manager when you could climb the ladder at Starbucks such as it is right out of high school?
I think.the number of people who went to college with the goal of working at Starbucks is to a first approximation zero.
Here's a rotten tomato coming at you.
Another example of how progressives steered the ship away from the reformers’ goal of equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes. If you don’t talk about quality of pipeline you can focus the war on DEI quotas.
It's true, rarely is the question asked these days, is our children learning? The achievement gap is better than current discourses because achievement is at least up there in the name, but I wonder if the most rational approach might be to worry less about the gap. How about we focus on learning? Identify students, regardless of race, who underperform in math and try to make them better at math. Then, since a few racial groups are overrepresented in the group of students underperformed in math, they would get a larger slice of the benefit of such a policy.