I skipped the "admittedly clickbait" headline and modified the subtitle. Here's a pull quote: There are a lot of charts from educational studies in the article, and they seem plausible but I...
I skipped the "admittedly clickbait" headline and modified the subtitle. Here's a pull quote:
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.
Teacher quality perhaps exists but likely exerts far less influence than generally believed. There is no such entity as “school quality.” (I have addressed the charter school shell game at considerable length here.) There is the underlying ability of the students in a school that produces metrics that we then pretend say something of meaning about the school itself. That’s it. Zoning doesn’t make kids perform poorly by keeping them out of the best schools. Zoning creates the impression of the “best schools” by keeping out the kids destined to perform poorly.
There are a lot of charts from educational studies in the article, and they seem plausible but I certainly don't know enough to say more than that.
I find it interesting the arguments brought up by the author. They seem to go against the grain of what is commonly mentioned in culture and media; decrease classroom sizes, bring forward equal...
I find it interesting the arguments brought up by the author. They seem to go against the grain of what is commonly mentioned in culture and media; decrease classroom sizes, bring forward equal chances of opportunity.
One of many similar excerpts in the article the author mentioned:
Now it seems to me that the most likely, most parsimonious explanation for all of this is genes. I’m not going to try and summarize the entire field of behavioral genetics/social genomics, nor am I qualified to argue in its defense. But there is a very large body of research that lends credence to that idea. (And, as I have said, a very large body of criticism against it.) Again, I consistently find it hard to understand how genetics, which influences absolutely every other part of who we are as organisms, would have literally no impact on cognition and the mind. That this idea is not just prevalent but rigidly enforced as a matter of social dogma is baffling to me.
They obviously go into more detail with why they hypothesize this, and I find the article a very interesting read.
An easy way to go around the gene complication (and its uncomfortable resemblance to eugenics) would be to argue that the entire educational and economic systems were built to favor certain...
An easy way to go around the gene complication (and its uncomfortable resemblance to eugenics) would be to argue that the entire educational and economic systems were built to favor certain genetic traits.
I have no idea if such argument would be true though.
I skipped the "admittedly clickbait" headline and modified the subtitle. Here's a pull quote:
There are a lot of charts from educational studies in the article, and they seem plausible but I certainly don't know enough to say more than that.
I find it interesting the arguments brought up by the author. They seem to go against the grain of what is commonly mentioned in culture and media; decrease classroom sizes, bring forward equal chances of opportunity.
One of many similar excerpts in the article the author mentioned:
They obviously go into more detail with why they hypothesize this, and I find the article a very interesting read.
An easy way to go around the gene complication (and its uncomfortable resemblance to eugenics) would be to argue that the entire educational and economic systems were built to favor certain genetic traits.
I have no idea if such argument would be true though.