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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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  1. DeBoer is not "a member of the educational establishment". He is a first a journalist, then blogger, then guy who writes on education policy. Most of his writing is about random topics of interest to him and readers. He is currently looking for work as a ghostwriter. The educational establishment mostly dislikes him for saying all of the things they do are stupid.

  2. Even if he were, that doesn't refute his arguments. Since almost all reasoning is somewhat motivated, plenty of motivated reasoning is correct. Isn't it curious how chemists think chemistry has important economic applications, ML researchers believe ML has important applications, historians of literature believe that literature enriches the spirit ... yet they're arguably correct! He makes many well-composed and strong arguments that stand on their own.

  3. Black and low-iq kids who go to great schools still get low test scores. Regressed-to-the-mean 115 iq kids in high school who do a lot of test prep still score lower than 130 iq kids from middle-class families.

  4. I agree that public schools are suboptimal. But they're suboptimal in similar ways for white and black kids. Even at preppy good mostly-white schools, there are still a ton of bad teachers, and a ton of students who do poorly in good classes. Bad schools and good schools are, really, pretty similar, and the surrounding economy (giving opportunities to people who are smart but didn't fit well in school) compensates for a lot of what schools miss out on.

Your quote is about phonics versus 'rich literary experience'. And phonics was better for black kids. But the thing is, the high IQ kids, and to a 50x lesser extent the white kids, did fine with non-phonics. The entire premise of the phonics debate is that many kids do fine with both methods of instruction, but that some group of kids does better with phonics (although still not as well as the group who it doesn't matter for). And - the needs-phonics group is disproportionately black. Why is that?

Even if he were, that doesn't refute his arguments.

I kind of feel like it does. At the very least it significantly undermines them. It's not enough to just propose a new theory, the new theory has to both account for everything the old theory did, and produce better predictions. If DeBoer is correct that education doesn't matter, how does he explain the fact that scores were going up before the change in policy?

Edit to Add: You and DeBoer are trying to argue statistical distributions, and "regression to the mean", but I'm still stuck on the part where we stopped trying to teach kids how to read.

If DeBoer is correct that education doesn't matter, how does he explain the fact that scores were going up before the change in policy

I don't know what to tell you. If you had read the post I linked, you'd have read (note: this is from Education Doesn't Work v1, the post i linked is v2, which has a rephrased version of this):

The title of this post is, I acknowledge, something of a troll. Kids learn at school all the time. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen year olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So what’s the issue?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. That is, people don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals, but everybody can learn. **People think they care about this absolute learning. But what they actually care about, in general, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people. **

Culture and education have improved dramatically, but, like everything, it has limits, you can only take it so far before you have to try something new to keep getting results. And no matter what we try, even if it raises both white and blacks, the gap isn't closed.

Edit to Add: You and DeBoer are trying to argue statistical distributions, and "regression to the mean", but I'm still stuck on the part where we stopped trying to teach kids how to read.

Yet somehow, black test scores are still massively better than they were five decades ago. The gap still isn't closing. Including in schools with phonics. Including in schools with top 10% blacks and top 10% whites, and phonics.

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