In the UK the ‘gap’ was between white working class children and white middle class children (since we do not have the same racial demographics or history as USA). The villain was ‘poverty’. So despite education being free to all at the point of delivery and both working class and middle class attending the same State-run, ‘mixed-ability’ schools, ‘poverty’ just HAD to be the explanation, because children from ‘poor’ families did worse overall than children from ‘better off’ families - and correlation is a wonderful thing isn’t it?
The solution was to make exams easier, lower grade marking and fix it so 50% of school leavers went to university to study soft subjects like history of lesbian dance.
Now instead of leaving school at 16 and getting on the employment ladder working in a hamburger restaurant, young people leave ‘uni’ age 24 and get on the employment ladder working in a hamburger restaurant.
It has been an unqualified success however as the ‘gap’ has virtually been eliminated - ‘better off’ children now are just as dumb as ‘poor’ children. Result!
Three comments: All those metrics about falling behind in school are about being less adapted to school. They are about students who have had a long break from the 'school' environment not being as shaped by it. They have nothing to do with any hypothesis about performance outside the school environment.
Second: Becoming an administrator is about having a broader and less personal reach and is generally considered a promotion from teaching. The most talented organizational climbers and the most ambitious ideologues climb the fastest away from the work of personal engagement.
Third: I have zero faith in a global federal audit agency function. The audit agency will be more open to regulatory capture than almost any other. At best it will be a powerless shrill voice like many other agencies given that kind of function: OPM on the topic of workforce management, for example. More likely, it will become an advocate for the worst practices as personnel move back and forth. At worst it will become a group of party commissars and its own inquisition for a new, shadow government. A true balance of power requires greater separation, stronger motivation, and a greater distinction in the fundamental logic of the operations.
For what it's worth, I was referring to everyone in the education business, and especially to ed school people, since that was in the C. Bradley Thompson quote in Keeping Up with the FITS, 5/20. The full statement:
"Without question, the principal transmission belt delivering Critical Race Theory directly into the bloodstream of America’s K-12 schools is through America’s teacher-training institutions."
How come? My guess, having been a public school teacher for many years:
People in the education business think that it is disproportionately responsible for what is good in America. In particular, it is the primary agent of upward mobility. They are very proud of that.
Because of that, they are also very aware of "the gap"--the fact that black students do substantially worse than white students. For more than 60 years, people in the ed schools have been coming up with ways to reduce or eliminate "the gap". But nothing has worked! It is pretty much as big now as it was then.
I cannot exaggerate how galling, how frustrating that is to people in the business. There is a desperate search for explanation--with only one constraint on any possible explanation. It must not "blame the victim". It must not "punch down".
But like "interstate commerce" in Constitutional Law, these turn out to include just about anything that involves black behavior. If you say black people could do things differently to close the gap, you are blaming them for present behavior, and since blacks are victims, that is a forbidden thought.
There is only one possibility left. It is whitey's fault. Even if there is no explicit or conscious racism, there must be such an overpowering system of white privilege that black students are condemned to do poorly in school. Only if that privilege is completely removed will schools be able to assume their natural and proper role as the great agent of upward mobility.
A lot of people in the business don't want to believe that, and some actually don't. But as long as any "blame the victim" explanation is taboo and "blame the victim" is interpreted strictly, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY CHOICE. You have to be some variety of "woke". I think one difference between today and, say, 40 years ago, is that people in the business are more sensitive to what might be considered "punching down" or "blaming the victim" and more concerned to not do it.
Which means that they cannot accept Glenn Loury or John McWhorter or Tom Sowell. They are color-blind when it comes to rejecting ideas that are outside their moral Overton Window.
It is "nice" to not blame the victim. It is "nice" to not punch down. But as long as you try to be nice that way, you are forced into a hateful ideology that requires racial discrimination to undo all that white privilege. Most teachers want to be nice.
(For logical completeness, one could consider a third possibility. Someone could believe that "the gap" is natural, because black students as a group are substantially less smart than white students. It won't go away any more than the gap between male and female basketball players will. But that is even more taboo.)
I think the best way to police secrecy in the government is to regularly draft a few hundred taxpayers (with some reasonable limits on mental competence) annually to serve one year terms on several super-jury-inquisitor-inspector teams with complete and unquestionable investigational police power over the federal bureaucracy. Maybe each state can contribute some like the Senate.
Kinda like the audit agency Kling proposes but even more powerful and without permanent staff.
The Null Hypothesis states that all of our marginal improvements on education in the modern era (say post universal nutrition and basic K-12 education) is subject to massive diminishing marginal returns.
It doesn't state that suddenly closing schools and having kids play on their phones while locked in their house for two years won't have an effect.
Re: "So, if you’re a teacher and you can’t close the gap and you refuse to blame genes or culture within the black population, you have to blame the culture at large. Hence you embrace CRT."
An alternative for teachers:
Blame the culture at large, especially the culture of race on the brain. Strive to treat every pupil as an individual: Who are you? What makes you tick? What will help you stand on your own two feet? Take the MLK train to the end of the line.
An alternative for teenagers/families/policy-makers:
Blame the one-size-fits-all curriculum and the lack of competition on the supply side of education. Advocate radical vouchers redeemable also for apprenticeships, training programs, internships at firms/orgs.
In the 1980s/1990s it was still acceptable to "Blame the Victim". This didn't close the gap.
People stopped blaming the victim because it doesn't work. If simply being tough on blacks would raise their IQ we would do it. Instilling discipline and civility is a separate issue.
In fact, it's pretty cruel to blame the victim if they truly can't achieve the objective you demand they achieve. All it results in is a lot of unnecessary misery on the part of the person unable to achieve and the people trying to help them achieve.
The real issue is that society can't admit that most people just aren't that necessary anymore. The Bell Curve is still depressing even if you take out the chapter on race. Not only will all those laid off manufacturing workers not be able to learn to code, neither will their children.
My broad comment is that you don't have to believe that education is useless to think that marginal education dollars are wasted. Notwithstanding the problems of government run schools, they clearly expose most students to vastly more math and reading than they would get without school. Taking that away isn't a marginal intervention. Relatedly, the summer slide, where kids forget much of what they've learned, is well documented. That's another non-marginal intervention.
So can we have a weak, semi-strong, and strong versions of the (Kling) null hypothesis?
Weak: increasing learning on the margin is possible, but only for very expensive and extensive interventions.
Semi-strong: scaled educational interventions on the margin do not increase learning.
Strong: scaled educational interventions do not increase average learning.
There is no solution other than going back to the "spoils system" where the incoming President can fire everyone in the executive branch. It is the only way to truly make the administrative state responsive to the voters.
In the UK the ‘gap’ was between white working class children and white middle class children (since we do not have the same racial demographics or history as USA). The villain was ‘poverty’. So despite education being free to all at the point of delivery and both working class and middle class attending the same State-run, ‘mixed-ability’ schools, ‘poverty’ just HAD to be the explanation, because children from ‘poor’ families did worse overall than children from ‘better off’ families - and correlation is a wonderful thing isn’t it?
The solution was to make exams easier, lower grade marking and fix it so 50% of school leavers went to university to study soft subjects like history of lesbian dance.
Now instead of leaving school at 16 and getting on the employment ladder working in a hamburger restaurant, young people leave ‘uni’ age 24 and get on the employment ladder working in a hamburger restaurant.
It has been an unqualified success however as the ‘gap’ has virtually been eliminated - ‘better off’ children now are just as dumb as ‘poor’ children. Result!
Three comments: All those metrics about falling behind in school are about being less adapted to school. They are about students who have had a long break from the 'school' environment not being as shaped by it. They have nothing to do with any hypothesis about performance outside the school environment.
Second: Becoming an administrator is about having a broader and less personal reach and is generally considered a promotion from teaching. The most talented organizational climbers and the most ambitious ideologues climb the fastest away from the work of personal engagement.
Third: I have zero faith in a global federal audit agency function. The audit agency will be more open to regulatory capture than almost any other. At best it will be a powerless shrill voice like many other agencies given that kind of function: OPM on the topic of workforce management, for example. More likely, it will become an advocate for the worst practices as personnel move back and forth. At worst it will become a group of party commissars and its own inquisition for a new, shadow government. A true balance of power requires greater separation, stronger motivation, and a greater distinction in the fundamental logic of the operations.
For what it's worth, I was referring to everyone in the education business, and especially to ed school people, since that was in the C. Bradley Thompson quote in Keeping Up with the FITS, 5/20. The full statement:
"Without question, the principal transmission belt delivering Critical Race Theory directly into the bloodstream of America’s K-12 schools is through America’s teacher-training institutions."
How come? My guess, having been a public school teacher for many years:
People in the education business think that it is disproportionately responsible for what is good in America. In particular, it is the primary agent of upward mobility. They are very proud of that.
Because of that, they are also very aware of "the gap"--the fact that black students do substantially worse than white students. For more than 60 years, people in the ed schools have been coming up with ways to reduce or eliminate "the gap". But nothing has worked! It is pretty much as big now as it was then.
I cannot exaggerate how galling, how frustrating that is to people in the business. There is a desperate search for explanation--with only one constraint on any possible explanation. It must not "blame the victim". It must not "punch down".
But like "interstate commerce" in Constitutional Law, these turn out to include just about anything that involves black behavior. If you say black people could do things differently to close the gap, you are blaming them for present behavior, and since blacks are victims, that is a forbidden thought.
There is only one possibility left. It is whitey's fault. Even if there is no explicit or conscious racism, there must be such an overpowering system of white privilege that black students are condemned to do poorly in school. Only if that privilege is completely removed will schools be able to assume their natural and proper role as the great agent of upward mobility.
A lot of people in the business don't want to believe that, and some actually don't. But as long as any "blame the victim" explanation is taboo and "blame the victim" is interpreted strictly, YOU DON'T HAVE ANY CHOICE. You have to be some variety of "woke". I think one difference between today and, say, 40 years ago, is that people in the business are more sensitive to what might be considered "punching down" or "blaming the victim" and more concerned to not do it.
Which means that they cannot accept Glenn Loury or John McWhorter or Tom Sowell. They are color-blind when it comes to rejecting ideas that are outside their moral Overton Window.
It is "nice" to not blame the victim. It is "nice" to not punch down. But as long as you try to be nice that way, you are forced into a hateful ideology that requires racial discrimination to undo all that white privilege. Most teachers want to be nice.
(For logical completeness, one could consider a third possibility. Someone could believe that "the gap" is natural, because black students as a group are substantially less smart than white students. It won't go away any more than the gap between male and female basketball players will. But that is even more taboo.)
I think the best way to police secrecy in the government is to regularly draft a few hundred taxpayers (with some reasonable limits on mental competence) annually to serve one year terms on several super-jury-inquisitor-inspector teams with complete and unquestionable investigational police power over the federal bureaucracy. Maybe each state can contribute some like the Senate.
Kinda like the audit agency Kling proposes but even more powerful and without permanent staff.
The Null Hypothesis states that all of our marginal improvements on education in the modern era (say post universal nutrition and basic K-12 education) is subject to massive diminishing marginal returns.
It doesn't state that suddenly closing schools and having kids play on their phones while locked in their house for two years won't have an effect.
Re: "So, if you’re a teacher and you can’t close the gap and you refuse to blame genes or culture within the black population, you have to blame the culture at large. Hence you embrace CRT."
An alternative for teachers:
Blame the culture at large, especially the culture of race on the brain. Strive to treat every pupil as an individual: Who are you? What makes you tick? What will help you stand on your own two feet? Take the MLK train to the end of the line.
An alternative for teenagers/families/policy-makers:
Blame the one-size-fits-all curriculum and the lack of competition on the supply side of education. Advocate radical vouchers redeemable also for apprenticeships, training programs, internships at firms/orgs.
In the 1980s/1990s it was still acceptable to "Blame the Victim". This didn't close the gap.
People stopped blaming the victim because it doesn't work. If simply being tough on blacks would raise their IQ we would do it. Instilling discipline and civility is a separate issue.
In fact, it's pretty cruel to blame the victim if they truly can't achieve the objective you demand they achieve. All it results in is a lot of unnecessary misery on the part of the person unable to achieve and the people trying to help them achieve.
The real issue is that society can't admit that most people just aren't that necessary anymore. The Bell Curve is still depressing even if you take out the chapter on race. Not only will all those laid off manufacturing workers not be able to learn to code, neither will their children.
My broad comment is that you don't have to believe that education is useless to think that marginal education dollars are wasted. Notwithstanding the problems of government run schools, they clearly expose most students to vastly more math and reading than they would get without school. Taking that away isn't a marginal intervention. Relatedly, the summer slide, where kids forget much of what they've learned, is well documented. That's another non-marginal intervention.
So can we have a weak, semi-strong, and strong versions of the (Kling) null hypothesis?
Weak: increasing learning on the margin is possible, but only for very expensive and extensive interventions.
Semi-strong: scaled educational interventions on the margin do not increase learning.
Strong: scaled educational interventions do not increase average learning.
On the audit agency:
There is no solution other than going back to the "spoils system" where the incoming President can fire everyone in the executive branch. It is the only way to truly make the administrative state responsive to the voters.