Environmental does not necessarily mean malleable.

An excellent piece on our delusional expectations of the education establishment given all our data for the past hundred years - Education Doesn't Work by Freddie deBoer.  He has one major conclusion with which I disagree, or perhaps misunderstand, and there are lots of minor points to dispute but in aggregate, his key points map to those with which I concur.

One point of deviance, and mostly it is definitional and wording, is that of the key predictors of life outcomes.  I use Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Motivation, Capability (luck of the draw birthrights such as IQ, health, etc.), Personality.  

Capability, particularly IQ, is hugely predictive despite the desires of blank slaters.

Culture (values, behaviors and motivation) are the second most predictive.  

Path dependent elements such as Knowledge, Experience and Skills are important at the margin and in the short term.

Where deBoer and I agree is that IQ, substantially a heritable and genetically determined trait, is a powerful constraint/multiplier.  We have for decades expected schools to raise IQs.  There is little that they can do in that regard but they can have a beneficial effect on some of the other elements (Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, perhaps Motivation, perhaps Personality.)

For blank slatists, this is heresy because it argues that there is inherent variance among individuals and difference in outcomes is to be expected and cannot be expunged by government programs.  The consequences can be ameliorated sometimes, but the variance cannot eliminated.  

My conclusion from all this has been at least two-fold.

We need to quit wasting money and creating false expectations about what doesn't work and invest in what can be shown to work.

We need to resurrect the old Christian/Age of Enlightenment respect for work.  If life outcomes are materially determined by forces beyond our control, we need a more accommodating view of what constitutes individual worth.

Among meritocrats, individual worth is usually, though rarely explicitly, a function of education attainment, income, and status.  Anyone not achieving these things must have failed to pursue education, or income or status.  If you are not equal in outcome, then it is either your fault or society's.

For Christians/Age of Enlightenment people, we are all god's children with equal endowments of grace and equal natural rights.  Even though some achieve and some do not, there is a baseline of mutual respect based on those equalities.  One particular aspect is a focus on effort over outcome.  

As long as you willing to try, you are deserving of respect and support.  You may never understand calculus but that is no determinant of your worth.  You may not have the goals, values and behaviors which facilitate wealth accumulation but that is no determinant of your worth.  

But if you are able and willing to make the effort, you earn respect even if you cannot generate all that much productivity.

As we have become more obsessed with and focused on meritocracy (which favors the gifted) over the past fifty years, we have lost some of the humanity and generosity of Christianity/Age of Enlightenment behaviors to the great loss of the poorest and most distressed.  And I use Christianity as a placeholder for any religion which fosters respect and natural equality for others.

Some of deBoer's key points (in my view).

This point is both totally banal and yet potentially revelatory given our educational policy conversations: mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. Students sort themselves into an ability hierarchy at a very early age and tend to stay in their position in that hierarchy for the remainder of their lives, to a remarkable degree. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded with economic gain by our society.

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What I am here to argue today is not about a genetic influence on academic outcomes. I am here to argue that regardless of the mechanism producing this effect, most students stay in the same relative academic performance band throughout life, defying all manner of life changes and schooling and policy interventions. People like Joseph need to provide an accounting of this fact, and they need to do so without falling into endorsing the naïve environmentalism that is demonstrably false. And people in education and politics, particularly the liberals who insist education will save us, need to start acknowledging this simple fact. Right now they’re wasting their time.

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Kids learn at school all the time. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen year olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So what’s the issue?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. That is, people don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals, but everybody can learn. People think they care about this absolute learning. But what they actually care about, in general, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people. 

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 Of course, changes to relative learning for any individual or subgroup requires changes in absolute learning somewhere - you learn more than peers or less in an absolute sense and your relative position improves or declines. But in a fundamental sense it’s key to understand that, for example, the pharmacy school graduates who emerged into a world where they suddenly had vastly more labor market competition didn’t know less than those who had the good fortune to graduate a decade earlier. They probably knew more. But that absolute learning was not relevant from a career perspective; their relative position next to thousands of other new graduates was5.

Unfortunately, a large amount of education discourse in our media fails to understand this distinction. More unfortunately, while we can reliably prompt absolute learning gains in our students, we cannot reliably change their relative placement in the distribution, as I will demonstrate.

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We can express the staticity of relative educational outcomes quantitatively, in a variety of ways. The simplest is to observe that by far the most consistently effective predictor of future academic performance is prior performance. Academic skills assessed the summer after kindergarten offer useful predictive information about academic outcomes throughout K-12 schooling and even into college. At essentially any point along a given student’s educational journey you can take their outcomes relative to peers and have strong predictive ability about their performance at later stages. (Past performance predicts future performance so well that it seems most education researchers don’t think of it as a predictor at all.) I could pull out reams of data demonstrating this. If you’d like to go short-term, student performance in third grade predicts student performance in fifth grade very well, as you would imagine. Long term, third grade reading group, a very coarsely gradated predictor, provides useful information about how well a student will be doing at the end of high school. The kids in the top reading group at age 8 are probably going to college. The kids in the bottom reading group probably aren’t. This offends people’s sense of freedom and justice, but it is the reality that we live in.

The persistence of relative academic performance is remarkable. Standardized test scores collected at the age of thirteen are strong predictors of not just future high school and college educational performance but adult outcomes like academic career milestones and economic position, even after adjusting for parental income

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There is no evidentiary basis for the conventional wisdom that schooling can change the performance of students relative to their peers, with any consistency at anything like scale - and it is change at scale that would be required to “fix our education system.” Wonks should perhaps ask themselves why they believe otherwise.

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You see how almost everything is clustered right around zero? Most things we try in education simply don’t do anything. This is reality. Why have vast expenditures in classroom technology so often had disappointing results? Why does randomly distributing computers for children to use at home make so little educational difference? There are so many cases where interventions that seem intuitively plausible turn out to have no or little effect in the real world. If you believe the standard liberal story of children as undifferentiated academic masses whose outcomes could be easily improved with a little want-to and ingenuity, this is perplexing. If you listen to research, experience, and common sense, you’d recognize that it’s precisely what you’d expect in a world where everyone is not equal in academic potential.

You might say “but that’s absolute learning, not relative.” But consistent absolute learning for the academically disadvantaged is the only tool through which relative changes could be achieved at scale, right? The poorly-performing students need to make academic gains that the higher-performing students don’t. The problem is that if you found such a tool - if any of this worked - it would be hard to imagine that parents of high-performing kids would accept not allowing their children to take advantage of it too. (If you want to close the Black-white achievement gap, the most reliable way would be to outlaw white students from going to school for several generations.)

If environment dictates everything, then school quality would be immensely consequential. If school quality is a real, stable, and meaningful property, and the environmentalists are right about educational outcomes, then switching schools should have a dramatic effect on how a student performs in the classroom. But what parents typically find is that their child slots into the distribution just about where they were at the old school. The research record provides a great deal of evidence in this direction too.

For example, winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago makes no difference on educational outcomes. In New York? Makes no difference. What determines college completion rates, high school quality? No, that makes no difference; what matters is “preentry ability.” How about private vs. public schools? Corrected for underlying demographic differences, it makes no difference. Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference. The kids who just missed the cut score and the kids who just beat it have very similar underlying ability and so it should not surprise us in the least that they have very similar outcomes, despite going to very different schools. (The perception that these schools matter is based on exactly the same bad logic that Harvard benefits from.) Similarly, highly sought-after government schools in Kenya make no difference. Winning the lottery to choose your middle school in China? Makes no difference. All of this confirms anecdotal experiences. Did kids you know go from failures to whiz kids when they moved to a different state, a drastic change in environment? No, of course not. Because they’re the same kid.

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The lack of a class size effect is one of many dogs that don’t bark, intuitive explanations of academic outcomes that don’t actually work out. 

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An analysis considering segregation, neighborhood effects, and the SES of schoolmates still left 90% of the racial achievement gap unexplained, suggesting that these factors have limited salience for any population of students.

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Is my claim here that environmental factors don’t contribute to educational outcomes? No. There are consistent and demonstrable impacts from all manner of influences that might be considered environmental. For example, premature and low birth weight babies frequently go on to struggle academically as older children. The negative cognitive effects of lead have perhaps been somewhat overstated but are nonetheless real. The issue is that these factors are often real but very small. Access to legal marijuana does negatively impact the academic performance of college students - by less than a tenth of a standard deviation. Still, the aggregate of many small environmental influences can be very meaningful. I’ve already said that I believe the racial achievement gap is the product of the profoundly different environments Black children live in on average, and these environmental changes are far more complex and multivariate than the SES differences that do not adequately explain the achievement gap. The problem is that it is far harder for policy to change a vast number of tiny influences than to change one big influence. Nor is there any guarantee any given environmental influence can be changed. . . . Environmental does not necessarily mean malleable.

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All of this is consistent with the simple observation we all had when we were kids, which is that some of our peers were better at school and others were worse, and that their relative placement within performance band didn’t change much. Admit it: you thought there were “the smart kids” in school, whether you classified yourself among them or not, and that classification was justified by performance again and again until you graduated from high school. Did one or two of them fall down the rankings because their parents got divorced or they started doing drugs? Sure. But as a class, they stayed the smart kids the whole time. Because to a large degree when it comes to school we are who we are. If you think I’m disparaging everybody else, well. I wrote a whole book about why we should care much less about who’s smart.

Read the whole thing.  He shows the data.  He links to sources. He leaves room for interpretation and disagreement.  But it is hard to argue that at least on the diagnosis side of things he is wrong.  School can do many things but it cannot undo reality.