The root of the problem (or at least the fixable part of the problem) is probably schools. Rich people arrange for their kids to go to good schools, and poor kids end up stuck in bad schools. So maybe the best way to narrow the gap is to make the worst schools better. That would be a good thing to do regardless.
Most of the achievement gap actually comes from parenting, not schools. And of the portion of the gap that comes from schools, most of it comes from the differences within individual schools, rather than the differences between schools. (In other words, a kid taking high-level classes in a low-income school is probably getting a better education than a kid on the bottom track of a high-SES school.)
While I'd like to believe that startups could help, I find it fairly unlikely. Most entrepreneurs I see in the education space don't seem to be experts in education theory/research, so most of the time their products seem to be only making things worse. And if the general public were well-educated enough to tell the difference, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem to begin with.
reviews a lot of research studies from a lot of countries and suggests that that view, although it is conventional wisdom, grossly underestimates the importance of schools. I agree with you, because the data agree with you, that the most stark differences in school performance are among different teachers in the same school rather than between one school and another, but throughout the Western world, students with tough home conditions tend to get the lousiest teachers and the most underperforming curricula.
Other writers who have important points to make about how to help learners with the worst home environments by improving schools include the collaborators from Teach for America who have put together the book and website Teaching as Leadership
There is a lot yet to be done that is very feasible (well, except for politically feasible in most states of the United States) to improve the education of the most disadvantaged learners and to help them reach significantly higher levels of academic achievement.
Good points, all of which I agree with, and I'll check out those sources. The book I snapped the pic from was Equality and Achievement, which is similar to the book you're linking to.
"reviews a lot of research studies from a lot of countries and suggests that that view, although it is conventional wisdom, grossly underestimates the importance of schools. "
I do think it's important to note though that you can believe that the achievement gap is mostly coming from home factors, while also not underestimating the importance of school. That is, you can believe that all kids are basically receiving an equally crappy education. You're certainly right though about the kids from the worst home conditions getting stuck with the worst teachers within schools.
It may be that parenting is more important (though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion), but I don't see how that refutes the point. "Parenting" is not something subject to public policy, in the general case. School is. We can pass laws to make schools better. If it works (even partially), then we should. No?
"though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion"
In terms of data, here is the graph showing how SES effects achievement for school kids:
It's a little difficult to read, but basically what you can see is that poor kids and rich kids learn roughly the same amount in school. The reason there is such a big gap is because A) there is a large gap that already exists when they get to Kindergarten and B) while rich kids are learn over the summer and get smarter, the poor kids are actually forgetting what they've learned the previous year.
If you want to learn about why there is already a 2 year gap before the kids get to kindergarten, you should read the book Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experience of Young American Children.
The finding about within school differences vs. between school differences comes from the Coleman report, which is one of the largest social surveys ever conducted, and still one of the most important to date. I also have a blog post here explaining a bit about why within school differences are important:
If I remember correctly efficacy of preschool is mixed, and it depends a lot on the type of preschool. However, even the best preschools can never be as effective as good parenting at imparting language schools, for reasons that the Meaningful Difference book explains. (However, preschools may be good for other reasons.)
Can I beg we avoid the term "good parenting" as it is
semantically very poor in this context. For example a kid from a loving and conscientious poor and illiterate parent may receive better parenting than a more perfunctory well-off parent - and yet the latter will undoubtedly be ahead by the time they reach kindergarten. The issue is not so much, I believe, in the "goodness" of the parenting, rather, it is in the richness of the environment.
You're right about good parenting being a bad term. However, it is the qualities (value neutral) of the parenting that determines outcome rather than the richness of the environment. To quote Paul Tough, who gives a good summary of the research:
"The disadvantages that poverty imposes on children aren't primarily about material goods. True, every poor child would benefit from having more books in his home and more nutritious food to eat (and money certainly makes it easier to carry out a program of concerted cultivation). But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents; and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite; but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society."
> For example a kid from a loving and conscientious poor and illiterate parent may receive better parenting than a more perfunctory well-off parent - and yet the latter will undoubtedly be ahead by the time they reach kindergarten.
Undoubtedly?
> The issue is not so much, I believe, in the "goodness" of the parenting, rather, it is in the richness of the environment.
In the US at least, there are free yet rich environments. If you're poor, you do have to get out of the house and seek them out.
So, what definition of "better parenting" are you using?
Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (regardless of socioeconomic background) are the kind of parents who give their kids the skills needed to succeed later in life. There are tons of confounding variables when it comes to stuff like this, so the jump from "preschool is a good predictor of life success" to "we should invest more in preschools" isn't necessarily a logical one. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.
It's hard to study this sort, of thing, sure, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been studied. Probably the most famous is the Perry Preschool Project in the 60s, which randomly assigned students to a control versus preschool group and followed the students until they were 40, finding significant differences in life outcomes (earnings, arrests, teen pregnancies, etc) between the two groups.
A lot of this is based on assumptions, but unless the study was somehow able to seperate "parenting" from pre-school attendence as an intervening variable, I don't necessarily think it's counter to his assertion.
I would argue that pre-school attendance could be a very strong indicator of parenting quality, if we can even try to quantify such a thing.
On the other hand, lack of pre-school could indicate a parent taking the pre-schooling responsibility upon themselves and providing a rather spectacular "home pre-school" environment.
Education and schooling are not synonymous. I don't think that entrepreneurs can help schooling but they can certainly help education. To be honest, most 'education' startups are really about 'schooling'. The problem that for the most part schooling is designed to educate people for manufacturing jobs in the industrial revolution and service in the military. That kind of education (aka. schooling) is completely inappropriate in the information age where ingenuity and critical thinking are far more important than blind rule following. We're not building nations anymore, we're building individuals. To paraphrase Wilde we're producing "people who know the answer to everything, but the meaning of nothing"
I think Khan Academy is honestly about education more so than schooling.
The general public can tell the difference which is why choice in education is a no-go, and the compulsory system remains in place.
I agree with your point on education vs. schooling. If you want to focus on building individuals then you really have to think about education in terms of being a part of the larger psychospiritual development process, rather than just an ongoing series academic content. Although people in the west like to make fun of gurus, and often rightly, I think there is good reason to reconceptualize education in a way that's more connected to the various life stages a person goes through, a la the four life stages of hinduism.
That's the problem I have with Khan academy. That is, the lessons are factually correct, but they have no soul, and at the end of the day I think that's bad pedagogy.
I think Feynman captures the essence of what I meant by "the answer to everything but the meaning of nothing". In his teachings in Brazil IIRC Feynman talks about Physics students who knew the refactory index of water but couldn't tell you why the ocean sparkled in the sun.
Could you explain how to measure the various concepts you are describing in your post? It would help the rest of us understand what you are talking about.
I.e., if we "reconceptualize education" to connect it to hinduism's 4 life stages [1], what outcomes will change? How can we measure the "soul" of a lesson, and what happens when a lesson lacks "soul"?
[1] As far as I know this is only a meaningful concept for Brahmin and Kshatriya men. But I guess since they are the highest castes, they are the ones who's mysticism we should adopt.
"How can we measure the 'soul' of a lesson, and what happens when a lesson lacks 'soul'?"
A good proxy would be just looking at whether something was made by an artist, or a committee. E.g. Feynman's lectures were those of an artist, whereas most textbooks are created by a committee. (And then they get someone with a PhD to add their name as the author after the fact.) It's clear to me that Kahn's lessons are more in the style of the typical textbook, rather than in the style of someone like Feynman. You can't measure it, that's the point. If you could measure it then that's the first sign that something is wrong.
"But I guess since they are the highest castes, they are the ones who's mysticism we should adopt."
I'm not advocating the hindu model per se, only using them as an example of a society where schooling is framed in terms of a larger model... In their case one that includes work, marriage, wisdom seeking, preparation for death, etc. It's not clear to me that this is the right approach for western society, but I do think it's worth looking at for inspiration.
If you could measure it then that's the first sign that something is wrong.
In that case, I can tell you that you are very wrong. Khan's lessons have lots of soul. Not only soul, but also invisible dragons that breath the fire of knowledge!
I think Sagan's rant is cute, but ultimately wrong. And besides, when I talk about soul in this context, I'm obviously not talking about anything metaphysical. I'm just saying that his lessons are rather prosaic.
Most of the credentialed "experts" in education theory or research that I've encountered have been the last people I'd want designing or administering an educational program.
I'm sure this isn't universally true, but just like many other fields, expertise in technology should let new people disrupt the field. Education, being highly regulated, lacking real feedback mechanisms, government funded, etc., is perfect to disrupt.
David Brooks wrote once "the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them" And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family are treated as if they were positively un-American.
Education isn't a race. If rich children perform better that doesn't worsen the plight of poor children. Rather, a better educated populace increases the wealth of society enabling us to spend more on programs for the poor.
Furthermore, the game may be rigged against poor students, but it isn't rigged by the rich. It's rigged by the teachers unions. Some schools that serve poor children have the highest per-student budgets in the nation (see: DC). But they still perform abysmally. Rich parents have the free time to browbeat administrators of low-performing schools until things change. Poor parents are too busy trying to make ends meet. Their children are stuck with whatever the bureaucracy gives them.
This is why school choice programs have displayed promising performance in many low-income areas. They allow students to escape quagmires of union-driven mediocrity. It's interesting that you would want to get rid of the best chance for poor children to get a good education! The DC opportunity scholarship fund increased high school graduation rates by 20% by sending poor kids to private schools. That's a big deal - having a high school diploma substantially increases lifetime earnings.
True to form, the unions killed the DC Opportunity Scholarship fund after only a few years of operation. It's hard to make change for the benefit of the poor! But fortunately, the house Republicans brought the program back with their electoral sweep in 2010, so we will get to continue to monitor its results.
I was explicitly told in school that it was. Sure, getting an education is important; but the race aspect - specifically, against repeating a year - was hammered home.
Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students.
So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for.
Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have.
Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court.
It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Or at least can't as effectively.
The rich can run for office much easier than the middle and lower classes.
The rich can monopolize new markets by simply undercutting new entrants.
I'm sure there's many more examples than this of how by concentrating vast wealth to a few people you cut out opportunities for everyone else.
which predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy.
In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority of inadequately educated Americans struggling to find time for political participation while making ends meet has less voice in the process than a vocal minority of wealthy people whining about "class warfare," and also less voice than a minority of people employed by publicly funded schools who are not held accountable for results.
There are also outliers, about which it interesting to ask "why?" This [1] example of poor kids in a good school was recently reported in Australian media. The Albert Street School [2] in Johannesburg is run by Zimbabwean refugees for Zimbabwean refugees. Recently, it's been achieving results comparable to the best African private schools.
Don't discount the value of family connections, whether to family-run businesses or through friends. I turned down three jobs (two family firms and one using friends in the oil industry) because I did not feel I wanted a life beholden to that system.
Most of our productivity comes from what we learn at our jobs, especially when our jobs (as you say) include a good portion of "school". Helping your children land good jobs is a very good way of passing on skills.
What if it is the students who make the schools a "worst school". Nobody seems to ever put any blame on the students. From 6th to 12th grade, I attended one of these very bad schools and largely the students were the problem.
The KIPP program seems to work very well. I believe it's because it creates a cult-like environment, and I mean this in the best and most impressed way. It keeps poor opportunity kids (chosen by lottery) in school from very early to very late as many days as it can, loads them with homework, promotes group cohesiveness, and generally drills in the schools messages. Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick.
"Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick."
...As measured by standardized testing, on a good day, and when you analyze the data the right way. And who knows what sorts of longterm problems KIPP could be causing in these kids and within their communities.
The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children, so I think KIPP is really just a hail mary attempt to try to buy some time before the whole system collapses.
The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children...
This is an exaggeration. At most, programs like KIPP show that our lowest performing households no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children.
"I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend?"
There's very little data, which is the main problem. In terms of books about KIPP, the one I've read is Whatever It Takes, which is about Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children's Zone. I'm not sure if this school is technically affiliated with KIPP proper, but it used the KIPP model.
It's very difficult to explain the problems with KIPP. Basically you need to take a really good look at how the kids are actually spending their days, and then compare it with what we know about child development, educational research, best practices in various fields, research data on student achievement, etc. I don't think there is any way to understand it without having a solid background in education theory, education research, cognitive development, psychology, early childhood education, history, and even things like organization behavior and management theory, etc. The problem of what makes a good school and a good classroom is insanely complicated, which is why we've been using basically the same model since WWI.
Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way?
Forget the theory. The theory might tell me why some measurable effect occurs and generate a complicated model of how it occurs. But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be. E.g., "KIPP students will have 10% lower math scores in year 2-4 of college," or something like that.
"Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way?"
There isn't enough data to say.
"But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be."
Cognitively, I'd be most concerned about whether the program would be harming their executive function and their intrinsic motivation. I don't see any value of trying to predict specific metrics though, beyond identifying specific metrics to look at once more data exists.
I'd also worry that such a program might reduce the ability of kids to function independently and instead reinforce the ideas that large government institutions should displace the family as a means of childrearing.
Basically: they have prerequisites for parental involvement (i.e. your parents have to be willing to work at your schooling too), and a high attrition rate (i.e. they throw out the underperformers). That's not a random sample, it's self-selected for people who do well in it.
This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, or that it doesn't work. But it means you have to be very careful about pronouncing it "working well."
Startups may be able to help: http://imaginek12.com