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Notes -
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.
The idea that different teaching methods have zero impact strikes me as just as implausible as the blank slate position. Yes, a lot of it is selection effects, but not 100%.
I think it's very plausible that, there's zero impact of, in most courses, switching between the kinds of teaching methods that are at least somewhat popular and capable of being implemented by existing schools and teachers. Being 1-on-1 tutored by Einstein will definitely teach a dumb kid math or physics a bit better than lectures + homework, and the teaching method of 'here's a textbook, go nuts, i'm going fishing' will be less effective, but between the bounds of 'student intelligence and interest' and 'teachers not being that smart and teaching methods not being that smart' there isn't that much room for impact
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