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Last year I was dating a girl who worked for this public policy research organisation. She was telling me about a study she was writing, which argued that private secondary schools use different methods for teaching students than public schools do, which explained why private students do better academically and professionally than public students.
I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.
I dunno. I feel like to work in this space you're essentially required to have drunk the blank slate Kool-Aid. Hearing her talk about how, if public school teachers just adopted this One Neat Trick then we'd end up with a generation of working-class astrophysicists - I dunno, it's a similar feeling to when an otherwise intelligent person wants to read your horoscope.
I'd agree if we were indeed talking about turning kids into astrophysicists, but this is just about teaching them to read.
I absolutely agree that some methods of teaching kids to read are vastly more effective than others, and the idea that teachers would deliberately choose an ineffective method just because it's more "fun" (for the teacher!) fills me with a sort of furious disgust.
I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?
Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential. Some children will never be neurosurgeons no matter how much they are taught, by whom and using which method.
This does not imply that all teaching methods are equal. You can't change children's relative educational attainment, but you can change their absolute educational attainment. The fact that some children will never be neurosurgeons doesn't mean they can never be taught to read. If you take a child who is near the bottom of an IQ distribution, you will never mould him into a neurosurgeon, but teaching him basic literacy will improve his quality of life. Some methods are demonstrably more effective for improving literacy than others, teachers should be choosing the best methods available for teaching children, and knowingly using a subpar method for teaching literacy just because you find it more enjoyable than a better available method is a massive dereliction of duty.
The worldview that I find objectionable is the blank-slate idea that everyone's educational attainment potential is identical, and that the only reason that working-class children attending public schools tend to have poorer educational outcomes than middle- and upper-class children attending private schools is because private schools have better teachers/better teaching methods/better teaching resources etc.. The former group tend to have poorer educational outcomes: they don't have no educational outcomes. I'm quite confident that almost every child who graduates public school knows a few things they didn't know when they started public school, as a direct result of their schooling. But if you were to take a single town which has Public School A and Private School B, track the educational attainment of a cohort of first-year children in each school from the year they enter to the year they leave, I predict that you would find:
Most of the highest-performing children are attending the private school
Most of the lowest-performing children are attending the public school
The relative positions of each child are mostly unchanged by the time they finish school: students who were high-performing at the outset will be high-performing when they leave
The deBoer article linked above contains a wealth of data backing up this highly intuitive assertion.
And that doesn't change my point. You seem to be engaged in a certain sort of strategic equivocation here, treating "potential" and "manifested ability" as equivalent when they are not. Similarly there's an obvious motte and bailey going on here. some qualities are inherited by children from their parents is the motte, where the motte is 100% bio-determinism where environment, discipline, are all meaningless distractions is the bailey.
You're complaint is essentially that I am refusing to grant you the bailey.
I'm not sure if I understand which position is the motte and which is the bailey in this framing. I don't believe in pure biodeterminism.
The Motte is that genetics exists, the Bailey is that everything is reducible to genetics, and that all other factors can be discarded as inconsequential.
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My answer would be: because reading is not a terminal value.
Our methods of measuring outcomes are good insofar as outcomes are trivially measurable. Teaching methodology does virtually nothing to break through the genetics-defined limit for literacy, IQ or SAT or educational attainment. That's not all there is to life. These «creative» teachers have an inkling of the right idea; they're just deluded on account of them being midwitted women endowed with state-approved legitimacy and parental authority knockoff. They self-servingly imagine the dichotomy between rote learning and acquisition of some ineffable property one could call «genuine understanding» (that their gimmicks ostensibly further). You do the same with regard to LLMs, by the way. Still, this property exists.
I agree that abilities are overwhelmingly genetic; a kid who can learn to read, eventually will, and a kid who can't, will acquire a worthless facsimile of the skill. But my hypothesis is, it matters a great deal whether you start reading at 4 or at 9 or at 12. The brain changes meaningfully and deterministically with age; the plasticity and open-endedness available to a child never come back. The scale of possible change shrinks with every month.
If you begin working with information early on, it may not affect your g, or actual neural substrate of intelligence, or your highest achieved diploma (that is, anyway, a matter of dominant socioeconomic practices), or really much of what can be called «specs». But it'll give you time to integrate this information on a deep level, generalize it, crystallize your knowledge to actually know things better and in time become wise before you become obstinate and mired in sunk costs fallacies. In this framework, building a foundation for general-purpose reasoning – which is not the same thing as solving cognitively loaded puzzles in known contexts – is a race against time.
This is why elites are so serious about the maintenance of their private education traditions. It doesn't make them smarter (they are smarter by default), it doesn't make them score higher on SAT or IQ than they otherwise would. It makes them more like elites, in that they fucking understand what's happening and can act accordingly. On the lowest level, this requires beginning to read early in life.
I admit this narrative can be countered with any number of other just-so stories and particularly by the objection to assuming text as privileged modality of information. In my defense, I say that large-enough mixed-modal ML systems robustly improve in other modalities from adding text tokens during training, and indeed pure-language models easily acquire competence in non-text domains, but nothing else – for now – is shown to improve performance on pure text. Well, there's synergy with speech, but humans learn speech naturally anyway.
With the changing rate of generalization ability through life, it stands to reason that loading on text early on is a desirable strategy.
Are graduates of posh private schools learned and knowledgeable? Do they understand what is happening in the world, do they know accurate facts about the world that normies lack?
To ask this question is to answer it.
"Huh? What is Shiite Islam?"
"Someone help me! They never taught me about it in Kinkaid School Phillips Academy and Yale University!"
Maybe the purpose and the secret sauce of expensive private education is making connections with other elites, learning to know people who know people who matter?
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Really? If actually teaching kids to read is not the terminal value of "teaching kids to read" what is?
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Ability to read is clearly not genetic; unlike spoken language, (almost) nobody picks up written language without instruction. Ability to learn to read may be genetic, but if so it's genetic in the same way height is -- if you don't feed a kid something like the right things, he ain't going to reach his potential height, and if you don't teach a kid he ain't going to be able to read.
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