Chapter 1
DeBoer starts Chapter 1 by laying out the way that education impacts our economic system: wages for people with bachelor’s degrees are higher than for people with high school diplomas, and wages for people with postgraduate degrees are higher still. Not only that, but people’s education increasingly determines their social circle and romantic partners. Assortive mating, the practice wherein people self-select partners and friends with similar educational backgrounds, has caused an increasing bifurcation of our society along educational lines.
College-educated people marry each other, get high-paying jobs, and ensure that their children attend college as well so that they can retain the advantages that their parents have amassed. Meanwhile, they bemoan the achievement gap they see between their children’s schools and the schools in poor urban and rural areas. If only those students had better teachers, education reformers cry, they’d be able to interrupt the cycle of poverty by going to college and joining the ranks of the affluent educated.
As a member of the social and economic class that deBoer is critiquing, I am always happy to read a scorching takedown of myself and my peers. But while this part of the chapter is enjoyable, it’s not exactly groundbreaking. It’s the latter part of the chapter where deBoer’s argument gets more interesting.
He lays out in stark terms the logical flaw at the heart of this entire worldview. As deBoer says, “we say we care about absolute learning, but what we really care about is relative learning”.
Absolute learning, of course, measures how much new knowledge is acquired by students. If a student figures out how to find the area of a triangle, they have learned something they didn’t know before. Relative learning, on the other hand, measures how a student has learned as compared to their peers. Class rankings, GPAs, and standardized tests all measure relative learning. So does the US News and World Report college ranking.
When people bemoan the state of modern education, they typically leave out an important part of the story: we are doing a much better job educating children than we were 30 or 50 years ago. As deBoer lays out:
Between 1909 and 2013, IQs improved by almost two full standard deviations, an enormous leap. All kinds of people are getting smarter all the time. Students today handily outperform those of similar ages from decades past; for example, on the 2018 NAEP math tests, black and Hispanic 9-year-olds performed at the level of black and Hispanic 13-year-olds from 1978, and contemporary 13-year-olds do as well as 17-year-olds did in 1978
Also, the percentage of people seeking and completing college degrees and postgraduate degrees has risen markedly in the past several decades. So why is all the coverage of modern education so gloomy?
Because we don’t actually care about absolute learning, deBoer claims. We care about how specific groups are doing relative to each other. Americans do poorly on international tests as compared to other nations (and we always have, by the way), and of course many categories of students (poor students, black students, Hispanic students) do poorly as compared to their wealthier, whiter peers.
If the education reformers were correct, then simply increasing the educational outcomes of students would lead to a decrease in poverty. And we have tried exactly this approach! DeBoer quotes Matt Bruenig, who runs the thinktank People’s Policy Project:
Between 1991 and 2014, we steadily reduced the share of adults in the “less than highs chool” and “high school” bins and increased the share of adults in every other bin. By 2014, the share of adults in the “less than high school” bin declined by 9 points from 20.6% to 11.6%. The share of adults in the “high school” bin declined by 6.5 points from 36& to 29.5%. Meanwhile, the share of adults with an Associate degree went up 3.9 points, the share with a Bachelor’s degree went up 8.3 points, and the share with a post-Bachelor’s degree went up 4.8 points.
If the poverty rates for each educational bin remained the same, then the upward redistribution of adults from the lower bins to the higher bins would have led to lower overall poverty. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, the poverty rate for each educational bin went up over this time and overall poverty didn’t decline at all. In fact it went up.
My Reaction
Man, did I love the back half of this chapter. I find that I think best when I find a useful framework to help me understand and connect different ideas, and this comparison of absolute and relative learning does just that. Our society benefits from gains in absolute learning, but our economic system is built around, and depends on, stark measures of relative learning.
Think of it this way: If every high schooler learned how to code as part of their typical high school education, would they all be offered jobs at Silicon Valley companies with starting salaries of $75,000? Of course not. What you’d have is millions of young adults with the ability to code, but not the opportunity to do so. Accordingly, the average salary for coders would drop as companies capitalized on the increased supply of qualified applicants for their coding jobs.
Of course, society as a whole would be better off. We’d get more useful applications, easier user interfaces, and all sorts of technological improvements. But the financial rewards for these improvements would not be broadly shared among all our new coders. Instead, they’ll be mostly sucked up by a small set of people who start new tech companies, and of course the already-wealthy people who are fortunate enough to invest in them.
Or think of literacy: as a larger percentage of our society learned to read and write, the wage premium for literacy went increasingly lower and lower. Now we have a baseline expectation that everyone, even a minimum wage employee, can read and understand instructions.
Does this mean that I am advocating against literacy? Of course not! Literacy is a positive good on its own terms. We shouldn’t teach people to read and write for economic reasons, we should teach people to read and write because those skills allow them to flourish as people.
I care about absolute learning, not relative learning; I want people to learn math because math is beautiful and useful and makes you sharper as a thinker, not because it helps you beat out your classmates for a job opening.
My point is, education is structurally incapable of being the mechanism by which we end poverty in America. It can not, in and of itself, change the structure of our economy so that every job pays a living wage. But I am not opposed to education! I want to be clear: Education is valuable on its own terms, not because of its (extremely limited) effects on alleviating poverty.
From the Comments
Rachel H made a comment on the Introduction post that really resonated with me. Here’s the heart of it:
More to the point, he seemed to me to have taken as a premise that it is unrealistic to expect that most people could learn a great deal more than they currently do. (Maybe that’s not true? Again, I didn’t finish the book.) I don’t think I agree with that. I think that overlooks factors that we know can improve the quality of education: more experienced teachers (that staying thing), better curricula, healthier school buildings, even adjacent issues like programs that alleviate child poverty. Those things matter a lot! I think I can agree, to a point, that we can’t rely solely on education to eliminate poverty. But to me that means adding additional programs while also believing kids can learn more and that we have an obligation to help them do just that. Maybe we can’t all be engineers. But are we really even close to developing/realizing the potential in every kid who could be one? If not, aren’t discussions about what to do about the “wash-outs” premature?
I am really glad she posted this, as I think it’s a tension that all educators live with. We know that two things are true: not everyone is suited for every career or every subject, and yet our students are capable of far more than we currently see from them.
In fact, this is the main premise of Nathan J Robinson’s critique of deBoer’s book. I think Robinson takes this critique to sort of absurd lengths, but that’s not to dismiss his argument.
I want to sit with that tension as we keep reading the book. There is a big difference between saying that, as a society, not everyone is well suited for college and saying to a 12 year old that they, specifically, are not suited for college. How do we manage to maintain our belief in every student while acknowledging the structural issues with the “anybody can do anything, no excuses!” mantra of modern education?