When reality is too harsh for some ideologies to accept.

An excellent and pretty comprehensive piece from Education Doesn't Work 2.0 by Freddie deBoer.  the subheading is A comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps.  It is a resource in that he mentions and links to a lot of the most compelling evidence supporting his contention.

Click through to the tweet and you’ll see in the thread that learning to play an instrument, learning a second language, and playing sports have no cognitive or educational advantages either. (The professor behind the thread rightly notes that these things are good in and of themselves, which I’ve been sure to stress in the past myself.) Because of fundamental difficulties in researching education, correlation is constantly mistaken for cause - that is, students who are strong or weak in educational metrics will also non-randomly be associated with things we might want to study as causative, such as learning to play chess. When we get high-quality randomized research, we very often see results like the above, that the association is not causative and that the variable has no effect. I have been saying this for ten years, and it’s a dominant theme of my first book: in education research, if you just keep betting on the null, you’ll never go broke. Put more simply and sadly, nothing in education works.

The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. 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 economically and socially in our society.

I have made the same argument as well, though far less robustly.  We have seventy years of research where we have wanted to find that approaches to education can close gaps between groups (whether income, or race, or religion, or class.)  Seventy years and billions of dollars and we have not found anything that closes gaps at scale.  

This is about relative gaps, not absolute learning.  Absolute learning can be improved to a small but measurable extent but the approaches most productive of such results, such as direct learning, are also those least supported by the education establishment.

What I’m here to argue today is not about a genetic influence on academic outcomes. I’m here to argue that regardless of the reasons why, most students stay in the same relative academic performance band throughout life, defying all manner of life changes and schooling and policy interventions. We need to work to provide an accounting of this fact, and we need to do so without falling into endorsing a naïve environmentalism that is demonstrably false. And people in education and politics, particularly those who insist education will save us, need to start acknowledging this simple reality. Without communal acceptance that there is such a thing as an individual’s natural level of ability, we cannot have sensible educational policy.

Kids do learn at school. 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 how can I deny that education works?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. 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 that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, 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.

This is analogous to the income inequality gap which so bothers utopian leftists.  In the entirety of history, the only thing which improves income inequality is war, famine, plague, and civilizational collapse.  Otherwise, every economy has inequality and the inequalities increase as the productivity of the economy  improves.  

Which makes sense.  If you are better utilizing all the contributions of everyone, then those making the most contribution to the greatest increases in productivity are usually going to receive a disproportionate portion of the benefit.  Though, crucially, everyone benefits.  

The poorest people in a positive productivity economy are always materially better off than poor people in egalitarian economies.  

That is the hard bargain of the free market system.  Everyone is better off but the most gifted in human capital are also the most rewarded.  

In education, the smartest kids achieve the most (on average) and there is no known educational intervention which changes ordinal ranking of capability from start to finish of education.  In absolute education you might get up to a half a standard deviation improvement through improved education techniques, but it is true for everyone.  Everyone notches up a little but there is no change in relative rankings.

Instead of acknowledging these economic and educational realities, we keep beating our heads against the wall to come up with government interventions which might work.  And we never do, wasting time and resources in the hapless pursuit of a utopian chimera.

There are two other areas which impinge on lifetime outcomes which rarely get any educational research because they are even more troubling.  1) What are the cultural attributes (goal setting) which contribute to good life outcomes.  2) What are the personal behaviors (goal achievement) which contribute to good life outcomes.

If educational ranking is largely set from the start, are there things we can do in terms of shaping personal cultures and personal behaviors which might improve life outcomes?  Almost certainly the answer is yes but those strategies transgress even more shibboleths than does simply acknowledging that there are inherent differences between individuals that have life outcome implications.

The head banging continues.