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I am fairly sure that even Bryan Caplan, when he makes his case against education, is not referring to primary education but to secondary (high school level) and post-secondary education. There is little doubt, IMO, that most people simply will not learn to read and write unless actually taught, and there are better (phonics) and worse (whole word) ways of teaching reading English. Same goes for arithmetic, though I suspect less so. Part of Freddie's "Education Doesn't Work 2.0" article is weaker than that; it is basically claiming education does work to larn you stuff but not to make you smarter, and thus doesn't change your relative position in society. Of course, even granting Freddie's thesis, this becomes false if Mississippi is doing the right thing and Illinois and Wisconsin are not; if that's true the Mississippi students will change position relative to Illinois and Wisconsin students.
Freddie does go on to say that no educational interventions work, and the Mississippi experience argues against that. But most of his evidence concerns older students. And it's quite likely the interventions he's referring to don't work. The reductio of the claim that educational interventions don't work is the claim that not teaching at all works as well as teaching, and that is clearly false -- but it does not mean that lesser claims are not true.
I’ve always read Caplan as mostly talking about college specifically, not really anything K-12. And I agree to a large measure, that the current model of
Is flawed for a number of reasons. It doesn’t work for those kids incapable of attaining the diploma. It encourages the dumbing down of educational standards to allow the stupid to get on the path toward a diploma, and allows banks and schools to get rich financing this. It creates a ratchet for the actual talent who now must get ever higher degrees to prove “no im not just here because I paid tuition I actually learned something worthwhile in school”. And it wastes lots of time that could be put to better use.
I argue that at this point higher education credentials are a fetish. They are not worth something for their intrinsic value, but because both the holder and the person reading about the diploma on a resume believe it means something. It doesn’t.
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To be fair to Freddie, I don't think he's claiming "education doesn't work". He's claiming "some kids are academically stronger, some kids are academically weaker, and all the interventions in the world are not going to magically give Susie a six point IQ leap up to the same level as Theophilus if she doesn't have that originally".
It's the push about "all kids must go to college" where experience at the coalface has shown him that some kids are not college material and would be better served being educated for a different path. But if the 'cure' for poverty or getting out of your original social class is being pushed as "more college! college for all!" then you are faced with (a) be honest and some kids won't get into college, any college at all (b) go along with what the government and everyone else is telling you, fudge the figures, lower standards, and graduate kids to go to college who will then drop out in their first year because they are not able for it.
I think Freddie sees (b) happening and thinks that is worse for everyone: schools, parents, the kids, society itself.
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