Is it? Fundamentally, that is?
It is established, that if it possible, it is difficult. But you never actually showed this was a fundamentally intractable problem.
Excellent questions. I think it might well be a good idea to explore tracking as is done in Europe. We need to be very careful that people aren’t heedlessly tracked as “non-college material” based solely on SES (this happened to one of my best friends, who grew up poor with a single mom but aced standardised tests). And maybe the tracking should start later than is done in a lot of places. But by high school, that 80 percent you are talking about should not be the ball and chain dragging down the 20 percent.
Your testimonial makes me think of the sad story of Jonathan Levin, and the school named after him which has ironically been labelled as “failing” and was tabbed to be shut down earlier this year (to his credit, the–hopefully–next mayor, Bill De Blasio, is quoted in that article as highly critical of the knee-jerk tendency to shut down so-called “failing” schools).
I think the burden of proof is on those who claim it is not intractable (“tractable”–is that a word?) since it has so far stubbornly acted like it is indeed quite intractable, at least given any realistic level of political and societal will. (Whether it is theoretically solvable in some world we will never remotely see in our lifetimes seems irrelevant.)
Well, that’s a different kettle of fish and not a fundamental problem.
And, no, the burden of proof that it is fundamentally intractable doesn’t lie on this side of the debate.
To be honest, I have no clue if it is intractable or not. But I do know the burden of proof is generally on the side that wishes to prove a positive and not to make others disprove a negative. And I know that burden of proof hasn’t yet been met.
Now, if you want to back down a bit from that and say it is a politically or socially intractable problem rather than a fundamental one - go right ahead. You may be right, actually, if this was actually your argument. But that’s not what you’ve argued in the past, where you claim the students themselves are essentially incapable of doing better by virtue of inherent ability.
And that’s precisely the problem your argument runs into. On the one hand, you’d like to conclude the students themselves aren’t capable of more. On the other, you state that one problem may be that we don’t have the political or social will to do what is necessary to prove once and for all whether or not this is true. You can’t logically conclude the first if the second is still hanging over you.
Sure, maybe we conclude that it’s not worth it politically, socially, or economically to educate them. But it’s a lot easier morally to make that choice if you can hand-wave away the students’ abilities. And I’m reasonably sure you understand the sort of moral dilemma it provides if their inherent abilities aren’t as bad as you make them out to be, yet we still cut them loose.
The risk/reward table is also skewed.
If you are correct, we’re not optimally allocating resources. That’s a bit of a problem, but we’re not really having a big problem with innovation or educating enough people to run things in the future. So, there’s a cost, but not a huge one if you are correct if we maintain the status quo or try to improve the state of affairs.
But if you are incorrect, we’re giving up on a lot of potential economic and technological innovation. And that’s a massive potential risk.
It’s easy to raise your arms and say “this is impossible”. It’s difficult to (1) prove it and (2) even if it’s merely a hard instead of impossible problem to prove the effort isn’t worth it in the end.
Worse, it goes against a lot of fundamental American principles. One, in particular, is the idea of American stick-to-it-iveness and ingenuity in overcoming seemingly (note “seemingly”) intractable problems.
Yes–see the Ravitch quotes upthread. If a basketball coach is given a bunch of short, uncoordinated kids to work with, do we call him or her a failure if the team doesn’t post a winning season? Or do we decide whether the coach is getting the best out of those kids that we can reasonably expect?
But that’s a big “if”. Again, look at Ravitch, who used to advocate charters and has studied them as closely as anyone. The ones who seem to do well are cherrypicking the best kids and families. Any school would do well under those conditions. If you just make all schools charter schools, that advantage disappears and they show no evidence of doing any better than conventional schools.
That’s only if you assume the fault lies primarily with the schools rather than with the students and their families. And I don’t think that assumption is warranted. Do we call Tennessee Tech a “failing university” because it produces fewer Nobel laureates than MIT? (I am taking this as a given–if this is wrong, I will be suitably shocked.) Or do we just take it for granted that MIT has a better grade of students and so of course will produce more notable scientists? I think people expect MIT probably has better facilities and educators, but I don’t believe most people consider that the primary factor–that if you just traded student bodies between the two schools, it would flip the ultimate outcomes. So why is it so different for public schools?
Again, you never established this.
Where, exactly, is your evidence the kids are fundamentally incapable?
Your MIT vs Tennessee Tech is fundamentally flawed. The process of applying to college and selecting students from that applicant pool is fundamentally different than that of sorting which child goes to which public school. And neither do those institutions have the same funding levels or the same mission (MIT is dedicated to research while a state school necessarily is more heavily focused on education), while all public schools have more or less the same goal.
Not that they are incapable of doing better, at all. But that:
(1) they are incapable of doing as well as NCLB, the media, and popular culture expects, and that these expectations are extremely unfair to hard-working professionals like my wife;
(2) as Ravitch says, schools are already doing a commendable job for the most part, and restructuring, reorganising, firing the old and hiring the new, are not going to improve things;
and
(3) even if we omnisciently knew what the perfect form and structure of education was, and massively increased funding so that each underperforming student sat surrounded by Ph.D.-bearing private tutors, plus eminent psychologists and counsellors and nutritionists, in some kind of top-of-the-line boarding school like a futuristic billionaire might design, it still would make only an incremental difference, and would likely not get most of these kids up to grade level, despite costing more than the Apollo program to scale up to the nationwide need.
You might disagree with number 3 and think that level of intervention would do more than I think it would. But is that really relevant? We don’t have the resources to do it; and even a scaled-down system–that was still massively more expensive than what we have now, yet technically affordable given our society’s wealth–is still a pipe dream so what’s the point of this mental masturbation?
We might get at most a 25 or at the outside 50 percent increase (wildly optimistic but hey) increase in funding for Title I schools in our lifetime. Why not simply use it to decrease class size, increase teacher pay (while increasing professional standards), and provide better facilities, electronic aids, and textbooks? Then just see how it goes and don’t continue to insist on arbitrarily high improvements in scores that may just never happen (though if they do, great).
Actually, now I’m kicking myself, because I just remembered “Freakonomics”. Chapter 5 described a study looking at kids adopted by people at a higher socio-economic class than their biological parents.
The results showed that while they didn’t perform as well before college (sure, nature does make a difference - nobody claimed it had 0 effect), that performance difference disappeared after college.
Basically, they showed nurture DOES have an impact.
You can claim this is not politically feasible for all students, but continuing to claim it’s an intractable and inherent problem with the kids themselves is disproved every day.
Is it? Is there not a system that is simply more efficient. You would simply have us give up by claiming it’s “too hard”. That’s yet another claim you merely assert.
If you wish to claim it’s not worth the effort of finding out, that’s your prerogative and subject to debate, as it’s subjective.
But when you start making stronger claims about the fundamental viability of the results, the burden of proof gets correspondingly heavier as that’s a more objective claim and one you haven’t established.
I really don’t think that’s true, but to whatever extent it is, that’s a big problem right there. Puts me to mind of Bill and Melinda Gates going on Charlie Rose and saying their foundation was working to make it so in the future every American will go to college. I facepalmed so hard I think the mark might still be there.
Again, the Stephen Pinkers of the world totally cop to a 40-60 percent impact of nurture. It is the other side that is the radicals, who insist on 100 percent nurture, or close to it.
There was a French adoption study that found that SES did matter, but only in part. When babies from high-SES families were adopted by low-SES families, they did worse on IQ tests than kids raised by their biological high-SES parents. But they did better than kids raised by their biological low-SES parents.
Similarly, there’s the graph in the other thread that showed that when you move up in SES, your IQ is higher–within each ethnic group studied. But the high-SES blacks still scored lower than the low-SES Asians and whites.
Sometimes, you’ll see people on the “nurture” side point to studies that show that in extremely impoverished environments, “nature” doesn’t help individuals excel. Well, ok…sure. And if you are raised in a cave with no artificial lighting, the eyes you evolved won’t do you any good either. So what?
Trillions have not been spent on the War on Poverty; it ended with LBJ’s presidency, and the Vietnam War sapped most of the funding.
Well, ok, but again, so what?
You still haven’t provided the evidence these kids aren’t capable of achieving even minimal standards. What point is there in simply re-stating the same point over and over again in different forms and not producing one iota of direct evidence?
You are asking me to prove a negative, which is unreasonable. I’m saying that if there is a way to do it, no one has yet come up with it and the reasonable assumption until shown otherwise is that it is not feasible.
Can I prove that it would be impossible to go to Peru and train a group of athletes to be good enough at basketball to challenge an NBA All-Star team? No, but it is certainly the reasonable assumption until someone provides evidence to the contrary.
The problem is, this is turned exactly backwards and it is assumed, taken as a given, that it should absolutely be possible and even feasible under current circumstances to raise all these schools’ test scores to a 95% proficient level. This despite the fact that no one has come close to achieving this! But it is a priori seen as not just feasible, but what schools’ staffs should be routinely achieving just to demonstrate the basic level of competency required to keep their jobs. Madness.
Puts me to mind of Stalin or Robespierre ordering the execution of underlings who did not achieve the desired results, no matter how unrealistic. But you can’t just lop off heads, literally or metaphorically, to force achievement of arbitrary goals. You just end up with a pile of heads, no closer to your goal than before–to the contrary, probably further.
You mean the fanfare and pomp from all the illustriously vacuous promises eventually wore off and we were left to pay for the remnants with no measurable success to show for it?
I consider it an unequivocal failure, if the goal was to reduce poverty. Governments don’t eradicate poverty.
…which is why we need to improve our education system, rather than follow the same failed narrative put forth by LBJ: throw more money at the problem and it will solve itself.
Completely agree. I think it’s messed up that teachers are sometimes seen as the main reason for students low test scores. The teachers in public schools have to put up with a lot of shit. Over sized classrooms, trying to calm down a rowdy class of kids, many of whom have no sense of discipline or respect for their elders, etc. And if the parents don’t make sure their kids are doing their homework, or are studying enough, of course test scores are going to fall.
Of course private schools are going to have higher test scores because the parents are paying for their kids education so they make sure their money is not being wasted. They make sure their kids do their homework, or they get them tutors.
We’ve had these discussions many times before. IMO the bottom line is that cohort of kids coming out of impoverished households in bad neighborhoods are probably not going going to be top or even mediocre performers regardless of the amount of resources you throw at them for the time they are in school. Beyond this it’s entirely plausible there is a genetic component in these struggles if they are the kids of the worst underclass under-performers.
Hypothetically gedanken experiment wise if you wanted to maximize their opportunities you could stick them in middle class or better intellectual and economic households, but the resources to do this, even if it were possible socially, are orders of magnitude beyond what school budgets can muster.
In the end it’s far more about parents and households than the limited time the school has them. There’s a lot of magical thinking about the power of the schools to make students perform better when in reality 90% or better of a kids ability to succeed resides in the context and attitudes they bring with them from their familial environments.
Holding the back end of the school system fully accountable for under performing kids that come from impoverished, under performing families is an insane boondoggle but it’s easier than facing the facts that a population who comes to school intellectually crippled is not going to be magically transformed by super-teachers and the power of hope.
Do you have a way to improve the education system without throwing money at it?
This, this, this.
I don’t see any purpose in even discussing failing schools and bad teachers without bringing up the true reason these kids are failing - their parents. If the parents are on drugs, or illiterate or just lazy horrible people, then the kids are doomed.
We cannot pay for a system where every kid who is lacking at home is somehow saved by their school - those kinds of success stories usually involve some kind of mentor, like a relative, who gets close to them and teaches them that life can be better. We cannot supply a mentor for every kid - it’s impossible, since not only does the ratio need to be 1-1, but there needs to be an honest emotional attachment between the parties which can’t be forced.
There is no solution, really, unless people who are not equipped in the most basic way to reproduce stop reproducing. And that’s not to say its just inner city blacks or poor whites in Appilachia or any other eugenics-type idea. It’s just how it is. Since we can’t force birth control on every American child from age 12-18 (although I would love to see it in every school in the country) I don’t know how to make it happen.
Our generation is finding that college is in some ways a Big Lie. We were told that if we go to college and do well, we’ll have plenty of money and jobs. But it wasn’t true - we ended up with bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees and $100k in debt, and no job. One thing I think would help is if we stop pretending that every kid can go to college and become a wildly successful white collar guy, and bring back intensive trade school programs to our high schools. That is one way to spark interest in kids who aren’t interested in looking at 4-8 more years of book work, but rather can look forward to 5th hour, when they can get their hands dirty and do something. There is nothing sad or “less” about loving to fix engines or diagnose HVAC issues.
But we cannot “fix” these kids through our schools. And it’s not the teachers or the admin or NCLB - it’s the parents. It’s an impossible problem.
That’s kind of a non sequitur. If the OP is correct, nothing will improve the education system - therefore we might as well not waste the money.
Regards,
Shodan
The OP is wrong on the facts, but even if he were right that people in inner city schools had lower IQs, it wouldn’t follow that they’re doing as well as they can do.