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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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 Freddie would argue that different teaching methods might have some impact on absolute educational outcomes, but not on relative educational outcomes.

That is to say, Method A for teaching children to read might make children 5% more literate than Method B. But neither method will have any impact on the distribution by educational attainment of children in a cohort: at the end of the intervention, the children near the top will be the same children who were near the top at the beginning of the intervention. Likewise for middle and bottom children.

I think this may be true if we start out with all children learning via Method A, then switch to all children learning via Method B. But due to sorting effects, in the real world the kids near the top are already learning via Method B and the kids near the bottom are learning via Method A. So if we switch everyone to Method B the gap may well close to some degree.

I would also argue that switching to better methods that make learning easier may tend to close gaps simply because smart kids are more able to learn via any method, whereas less intelligent kids will struggle more with suboptimal methods. If you take a cohort of kids with different intrinsic skiing abilities and have them start on a black diamond (difficult slope) then you will see a big delta in performance between kids. The weakest skiers will fail and give up quickly, the strongest skiers will figure it out and get better. If you start them all on the bunny slope, you'll see less of a delta between the best and worst skiers since the worst skiers are at least able to make progress.

But due to sorting effects, in the real world the kids near the top are already learning via Method B and the kids near the bottom are learning via Method A.

Do you mean the private schools are using Method B and the public schools are using Method A?

Yes, from what I understand private schools and "better" public schools (i.e. the ones in more affluent areas) tend to use phonics more.

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