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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 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.

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

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.

Freddie is right about relative differences in learning ability being attributable to IQ, but a major selling point of expensive private schools is not the learning aspect but the social one. I think also private schools may have better curriculum too. If some kids are being disruptive or doing drugs in public school without any disciplinary action, I cannot imagine how that would be conducive to learning, all else being equal.

Fair point.

Remember what Scott wrote about "beware the man of one study". Has anyone turned up other studies with results different from the ones DeBoer quoted? Especially when he points to narrow results such as public versus private schools--I can easily believe that school quality in general doesn't matter, but that there may be quality differences between public and private schools which do matter.

beware the man of one study

deBoer's article cites a lot more than one study.

Two is literally more than one, true. He cites two studies for the specific claim about public versus private, which is what you're quoting him for. He does cite many studies for interventions in general not mattering, but it's possible for interventions in general to not matter while public versus private does.

You’ve left out the entertaining part! What was that girl’s reaction to your apostasy?

Pure disbelief. At least she wasn't outraged or accused me of being a eugenecist.

There's some cream skimming by private schools but there really is a billion dollars on the sidewalk here that nobody will pick up because it would ruin teachers' self image.

Direct instruction is meaningfully better than other methods: https://psych.athabascau.ca/open/engelmann/direct-evid.php

Being able to fire teachers also makes a difference: https://www.econtalk.org/terry-moe-on-educational-reform-katrina-and-hidden-power/

I agree.

Being able to discipline students and maintain that discipline also makes a big difference. And IIRC at least if it’s specifically catholic schools the difference remains if you control for social class.

See also the selection effect of having parents that care enough about their kid's education to get involved, but I'm sure someone will be a long in a bit to go aKsHuAlY that just proves that "it's all genetics".

Inclination to parental investment absolutely has genetic roots. We can see this at a glance in animal species without much in the way of culture to speak of.

The idea that different human populations didn't stabilize at different equilibria is flatly absurd. Now, how great the differences are is something I'd like to see more research into. Not holding my breath.

But if your girlfriend is correct and public schools are not teaching kids to read, they're teaching them "look at the picture and guess the word", while private schools are going "yeah no, we have to satisfy parents so we have to teach the kids to actually read", then using "teach the kids to read the words" method would be better.

I agree that if you take two schools that are both using the same methods, and one is rich kids and one is not, you are not going to get the same outcomes for a multitude of reasons. But if you send the rich kid to a school where they don't learn to read, then you will see a change in educational outcomes - up to the point when the parents yank the kid out of that school and get them a tutor or send them someplace better.

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.

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.

Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential.

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.

Okay. I don't think all other factors outside of genetics can be discarded as inconsequential. Probably if you transferred some of the students from the public school to the private school you would, in some cases, see modest improvements in educational and socialization outcomes. Go back prior to they started school, and you'll probably find that the private school kids had better early childhood nutrition and lower incidence of e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome relative to the public school kids, which is bound to have a knock-on effect on their intelligence and educational outcomes.

But the girl I was dating at the time seemed to be denying that genetics plays any role in intelligence or educational outcomes, and that these are entirely attributable to the environment. I know this might seem like a bravery debate, but the blank-slate enviro-determinist worldview espoused by the girl I was dating seems far more widespread and influential than mine (it implicitly underpins virtually all modern education policy and every argument in favour of affirmative action in education, for instance), so I think it needs to be pushed back upon far more aggressively than the biodeterminist worldview.

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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.

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.

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?

My answer would be: because reading is not a terminal value.

Really? If actually teaching kids to read is not the terminal value of "teaching kids to read" what is?

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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