Glenn Reynolds on meeting violence with violence; Peter Gray on an adverse educational intervention; Lorenzo Warby on belief systems as social capital; Samo Burja on Mexican drug cartels
Peter Gray says that “63% of those in the control group were cared for just at home prior to kindergarten.” Pre-K is not just an educational intervention. It is worse than the Null Hypothesis because it takes very young children out of their homes when they badly need parental love, support and stability, and puts them into a destabilizing environment with good people who are paid to take care of them but can’t love them like a parent can.
Our daughter went to daycare and pre-k starting at age 2. She is doing just fine now at age 10. Same goes for all of the other kinds that were in her pre-k. She is loved and cared for and it’s not borderline child abuse (as you imply).
Sorry, but I’m giggling right now at your comment, which is clearly mood affiliation. Also, the fact that Arnold liked this comment is telling for him and how selective he is with his null hypothesis.
My son went to a morning pre-K at a church, 3 days a week. So not really pre-K in the usual sense, I guess. (You could do more, I think, but you had the option of less, which we took.)
He lucked out with his lady teachers, who very much liked boys and liked them to be playing outside, making worlds in the mud and so forth. The neat playground was right outside their door, so they got plenty of time outside instead of being trooped out for a short time. The teachers also encouraged them to get out all the toys and do with them whatever they wanted. The "lessons" as to alphabet or whatever were pretty pro-forma and I sensed that she supplied them under duress, having a very pro-play, pro-hands-on, no-worksheets attitude.
It was undoubtedly more fun than spending the morning alone with me.
Parenting (as economics) is all about trade-offs, budgets, schedules, etc. Caring parents like you should only be applauded for your efforts. That said, government interventions that unnecessarily take very young children out of homes that could be caring for them are misguided.
Thank you. I should have been more diplomatic and less of a jerk in my initial reply. My apologies.
That said, in my upper middle class neighborhood, the stay-at-home parent is a luxury good that is used primarily to signal status (aka a Veblen good). I’m seeing a lot of pickleball moms in lululemon skirts with eye lash extensions and pristine fingernails picking up their young children after school in the walker line. In other words, past a certain age, I think that there are probably diminishing marginal returns to staying at home to care for children as opposed to embracing the labor market. I also respect the many hardworking mothers that are able to juggle the complexity and stress of caring for children while working in compensatory occupation.
I'm glad your daughter is doing fine but Mr Lindsay, Mr Kling, and stu do have a point. Your daughter is likely doing fine because she has involved and attentive parents (I suspect plural) more than the fact she attended a pre-K program. I didn't follow the link to see if Gray describes the socio-economic status of families participating in the pre-K program but it's not uncommon for those programs to be targeted for kids deemed 'at risk' because of poor socio-economic conditions. The eventual negative outcome probably has more do with those family conditions which still proves Mr Kling's Null Hypothesis.
I would say there is quite a big benefit for very young children to be grouped and interact with each other all day long with just minimal adult intervention, or the adults literally playing with the children without regimenting too much of their daily activities.
I didn't have a day-care growing up from the late 1960s through to the mid 1980s, but I had large horde of cousins of a similar age the entire time- we were day-care unit unto ourselves with much more freedom than you get in the day-cares of today.
Childhood can look lots of different ways and it is chiefly "the institutional" that is the problem, seems to me. So: for mothers - and the reflexive worship of mothers - well, not all mothers are alike. I should mention that while the academic world is fond of judging daycare workers (who are essentially menials) - judging them is basically what the endless invocation of something called "high-quality daycare" is - those workers passed *some* judgment of the mothers. There was tacit judgment of the ones who were there promptly at 7 AM every day, and not there promptly at closing time. Ditto of the mothers who did not go off to work but instead went off to "work out" or shop or - in their imagining - laze around the house. (They were not especially catty and this only surfaced if you asked: oh, what sort of job has she?) Most often, though, you sensed it when the daycare would call the parents to say the baby or child was running a fever, or had diarrhea. There was often pushback on being called to pick up the child, and you could tell the daycare ladies felt they had the self-righteous upper hand there.
It definitely occurred to me that some children might well be better off with these women who seemed to have a natural maternal instinct, without any self-consciousness or embarrassment about it.
Kids need to socialize with other kids and get out of the house. I don't recommend 10 hour daycare, but I would definitely enroll a kid in half day preschool.
That's a little confusing. 37% in the control group were in a daycare setting but then didn't go to pre-K and instead continued with daycare? Or suddenly didn't do daycare at all in that last year before kindergarten?
Subbing in my child's elementary school, I for a period occasionally filled in in a daycare set up therein by the school district, a sought-after school district so presumably by no means a *bad* daycare (women kind, rather young, high-school-educated, mostly with children of their own and the usual messy personal lives) - although having no "curriculum" and none of the bells and whistles of the blue city's premier daycare for its liberal elite, which daycare raised money as though it were Harvard, and even offered scholarships so as to curate just the right ethnic balance for its lefty clientele - I observed that daycare was hard for little boys especially. Tedious and apt to make them very cranky and whiny. (Some selection effect, possibly; I recall also that the school wanted to "balance" its classes on gender but found it hard when boys were preponderantly the ones dropped off.) Whenever I think of why this might be, I recur to the idea of it being like a box, to remain 90% of the day within 4 walls, with little new to stimulate and too much of a certain kind of stimulation perhaps, flourescent lights and too much "other children" and *too much* response from the adults to that whining or acting out - but also no real way to feel comfortable.
It sounds ridiculous, I know: well, how bad is that? No - not horrible, just more of - a nullity. Null hypothesis indeed. It was a shame too, as the building had been a separate one for the kindergarten, where the teachers had plenty of room for kindergarten activities; but the desire to monetize, or to offer teachers a place for their own little ones, resulted in giving it over to the daycare, and the kindergarteners were placed in the main building, in a much more crowded classroom space.
I would expect kids who had been in daycare to get the least out of pre-K, perhaps, if it seemed less a novelty where you learn and get to interact with other kids. They've been doing a version of that, some of them, since before they were a year old.
I attended a morning only pre-K at the Baptist school where I would attend kindergarten (also, I think, morning only).
I didn't like it very much. Mrs. Connatser was mean. ("Did she actually wear connatsers?" my husband asked when I complained about this long ago when you tell your new spouse the boring story of your life.) I was a brat though, so probably Mrs. C. was in the right. I declined the red drink that was served with the animal crackers each day and I think she took that ill. Once another child said I had taken his crayon or something, and I said "I swear I didn't". So I had to sit outside the door, in the hall, in shame. (Baptist: no swearing.) What was funny was they were too cheap to buy us crayons, instead supplying us with these big sticks consisting of all the colors mashed together, which I recall made coloring frustrating, nigh useless. It's about all I recall.
"Pushback works. That’s the lesson of the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, and the reaction to them."
Not that Reynolds is wrong, but the situation is not that simple. I don't think most decent people on the right or in the center are inclined toward the idea of joining a mob to fight another mob. The first reason being simply "WTF do I pay taxes for if not to avoid having to do stuff like this?" the second one being that you probably don't want to be in a mob with the kind of people who are likely to form one in the first place, and thirdly you've got to consider there's a strong possibility of a reputational penalty to pay, because certain progressive media are immediately going to start shrieking about brownshirted fascists running amok the moment any actual violence occurs (perhaps not without some reason).
Indeed. To rephrase the invaluable Steve Sailer's remarks, one big reason pushback worked with pro-Hamas protests was because the establishment got a bad case of "superhero and two buttons" [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/daily-struggle-two-buttons#fnr6]. Prestige press could barely even bring themselves to say that the violent counterprotesters assaulting pro-Hamas encampments seemed to have been Jewish. It just did not compute.
"There are people who will not be able to converse in the language of intersectionality, privilege, and gender fluidity because it is costly to attend the institutions where that language is taught."
Or, almost anyone could learn how to converse this way for free on, you know, the internet. The reigning ideology is your native language.
I mean, Bryan Caplan call your office! It turns out even the dumbest students actually do learn new ideas they didn't know before in college, of the sort that have great personal value at least in terms of ability to play the status game in actual interactions and with more than just paper credentials, and that not only do they also retain them long after they get their diplomas, but furthermore the only way to learn them is by spending lots of tuition money, because the colleges have successfully locked up this esoteric secret society knowledge and kept it offline and unavailable to those who won't pay better than Elsevier ever could.
Ha ha, just kidding. Sorry to disturb you Dr. Caplan, your best book is still rock solid.
People, picking up the tenets and expressing zealous fidelity to the dominant religion is not costly! The Romans wouldn't throw you to the lions for worshipping Jupiter! It's not just free, it's almost all upside if you are a member of one of the religion's chosen people identity groups, it's like a princess shouting in favor of blood aristocracy.
An actual "costly signal" is more like MS-13 insisting you publicly signal your loyalty and commitment to MS-13 by covering your face in MS-13 tattoos. Public, conspicuous, permanent, guaranteed exclusion from polite society, rationally constant and intense attention from the police, targeting by rival gangs, and with pretty much zero other options in life besides whatever one can do within MS-13. Whoever got fired for talking too woke? It's the other way around.
The people who don't get with the program are - get this - the kind of people targeted by the program for denigration and negative discrimination. A white man who didn't attend college isn't in the situation of wanting to learn how to use intersectional language properly but he can't because it's just too difficult and expensive for him.
He is in the situation of knowing all about it whether he wants to or not, and not wanting to use it, because it makes him into public enemy #1 and there is zero upside for him. Meanwhile, plenty of people who didn't attend college but who are members of at least one of the chosen identity groups can parrot all day with "implicit structural whateverarchy" without having spent a single day in a university classroom. After all, the beauty of woke argumentation is that the intelligence threshold is very low and you don't need to be clever when no one is going to hold it against you when what you are saying doesn't make any sense. Just keep shouting more passionately!
I don't feel that describing one-legged folks self-excluding themselves from the ass-kicking convention as "social costs exclude folk" improves our understanding of phenomena.
If by that question you are trying to imply that any time anyone rejects an idea or refuses to adopt the weighted-phrasing of an ideological framework because harmful to one's own interests is an occasion that is fairly characterized as being due to a "social cost that excludes" then you are moving the goalposts not by yards but by miles.
"I oppose the proposal to increase the tax on petrol, because as a taxi driver, petrol is a major expense for the way I earn a living, and an increase in prices could force me out of business." - "Well dear, we're certainly not going to get invited to the anti-gasoline club's annual banquet with that kind of talk!" Pitch perfect for a Monty Python skit.
“The motivated core are like a religious cult.” This case is made explicit in “The Queering of the American Mind.” I usually roll my eyes at “it’s a cult!” denunciations (I’m LDS), but in this case it’s pretty convincing on queer theory.
Re: "The motivated core are like a religious cult. Note Warby’s definition of luxury beliefs, which implicitly uses the theory of costly signaling. There are people who will not be able to converse in the language of intersectionality, privilege, and gender fluidity because it is costly to attend the institutions where that language is taught."
Some persons who (a) lack elite 'education' and (b) have religious anxiety will interpret the commitment of "the motivated core" as evidence that the seemingly inscrutable dogma might be true.
The psychology: If smart people have religious fervor to live by this inscrutable social theory, then maybe their dogma is the true one.
Might this mechanism might help to explain why luxury beliefs gain broad followings, beyond the educated elite?
Addendum: This psychological mechanism is one of many ways in which a person might decide what to believe by deciding whom to believe. ('Social epistemology.') Specifically, a person in the street might deem people in 'the motivated core' credible because they exhibit inscrutable prestige, commitment, investment. Recall that education has become a sort of religion.
I have a question about your Null Hypothesis: What is the baseline? Like, is it, "interventions as compared to the state of schooling in 1995" or "interventions as compared to no schooling at all"?
For example, are negative interventions subject to the Null Hypothesis? For example, we recently had an intervention where students were taught remotely as opposed to in-person. Is that going to make a measurable difference? A similar intervention might be universities turning a blind eye to the rampant cheating going on. Is that an intervention with an effect, or does it not change anything?
1) interventions as compared with the state of schooling today, which in terms of student achievement is about the same as 2010 or 1995.
2) When he originally defined it, Arnold was solely concerned with interventions that try to make things better, and his assertion was that there is nothing scalable that has substantial lasting positive effects. I feel fairly sure he would agree that some things could make student achievement worse. Say completely shutting down public schools for a year. "Remote learning" (like so much in the ed biz, it is not so much a description as a hope) does seem to have had a substantial negative effect. We will see whether the effect is lasting, and whether it only affects certain groups. For example, do smart kids get back on track fairly quickly?
Related. In a study we published decades ago "Does High School Economics Help?" we gave intro students a 19-question exam on the first day of class and then included it as part of the final exam. Those with high school did noticeably better on the pretest. They also did worse (but not statistically significantly worse) as I recall, on the post test. Our hypothesis was that they didn't study as hard because they thought they knew the material already. Probably of little relevance for the pre-K study, now that I think about it.
I'm glad I read Gray's piece before commenting. I don't doubt certain types of academic training could cause harm but would be very surprised if all types did. Also very surprised if some types didn't help. We have evidence that exposure to language and socialization have immense benefit.
Sounds like we need better understanding of what works and what doesn't. That may prove difficult to obtain at the desired level of detail but improvement should be pursued.
Peter Gray says that “63% of those in the control group were cared for just at home prior to kindergarten.” Pre-K is not just an educational intervention. It is worse than the Null Hypothesis because it takes very young children out of their homes when they badly need parental love, support and stability, and puts them into a destabilizing environment with good people who are paid to take care of them but can’t love them like a parent can.
Our daughter went to daycare and pre-k starting at age 2. She is doing just fine now at age 10. Same goes for all of the other kinds that were in her pre-k. She is loved and cared for and it’s not borderline child abuse (as you imply).
Sorry, but I’m giggling right now at your comment, which is clearly mood affiliation. Also, the fact that Arnold liked this comment is telling for him and how selective he is with his null hypothesis.
I’m thinking of writing up my findings for the distinguished *Journal of Folk Economics*.
Working title: “How Our Child Survived Daycare & Lived to Tell.”
Working Subtitle: An n=1 story that is shared by millions throughout the land.
My son went to a morning pre-K at a church, 3 days a week. So not really pre-K in the usual sense, I guess. (You could do more, I think, but you had the option of less, which we took.)
He lucked out with his lady teachers, who very much liked boys and liked them to be playing outside, making worlds in the mud and so forth. The neat playground was right outside their door, so they got plenty of time outside instead of being trooped out for a short time. The teachers also encouraged them to get out all the toys and do with them whatever they wanted. The "lessons" as to alphabet or whatever were pretty pro-forma and I sensed that she supplied them under duress, having a very pro-play, pro-hands-on, no-worksheets attitude.
It was undoubtedly more fun than spending the morning alone with me.
Parenting (as economics) is all about trade-offs, budgets, schedules, etc. Caring parents like you should only be applauded for your efforts. That said, government interventions that unnecessarily take very young children out of homes that could be caring for them are misguided.
Thank you. I should have been more diplomatic and less of a jerk in my initial reply. My apologies.
That said, in my upper middle class neighborhood, the stay-at-home parent is a luxury good that is used primarily to signal status (aka a Veblen good). I’m seeing a lot of pickleball moms in lululemon skirts with eye lash extensions and pristine fingernails picking up their young children after school in the walker line. In other words, past a certain age, I think that there are probably diminishing marginal returns to staying at home to care for children as opposed to embracing the labor market. I also respect the many hardworking mothers that are able to juggle the complexity and stress of caring for children while working in compensatory occupation.
Respect for hard-working mothers is something we can agree on with no that saying needed.
I'm glad your daughter is doing fine but Mr Lindsay, Mr Kling, and stu do have a point. Your daughter is likely doing fine because she has involved and attentive parents (I suspect plural) more than the fact she attended a pre-K program. I didn't follow the link to see if Gray describes the socio-economic status of families participating in the pre-K program but it's not uncommon for those programs to be targeted for kids deemed 'at risk' because of poor socio-economic conditions. The eventual negative outcome probably has more do with those family conditions which still proves Mr Kling's Null Hypothesis.
I would say there is quite a big benefit for very young children to be grouped and interact with each other all day long with just minimal adult intervention, or the adults literally playing with the children without regimenting too much of their daily activities.
I didn't have a day-care growing up from the late 1960s through to the mid 1980s, but I had large horde of cousins of a similar age the entire time- we were day-care unit unto ourselves with much more freedom than you get in the day-cares of today.
Childhood can look lots of different ways and it is chiefly "the institutional" that is the problem, seems to me. So: for mothers - and the reflexive worship of mothers - well, not all mothers are alike. I should mention that while the academic world is fond of judging daycare workers (who are essentially menials) - judging them is basically what the endless invocation of something called "high-quality daycare" is - those workers passed *some* judgment of the mothers. There was tacit judgment of the ones who were there promptly at 7 AM every day, and not there promptly at closing time. Ditto of the mothers who did not go off to work but instead went off to "work out" or shop or - in their imagining - laze around the house. (They were not especially catty and this only surfaced if you asked: oh, what sort of job has she?) Most often, though, you sensed it when the daycare would call the parents to say the baby or child was running a fever, or had diarrhea. There was often pushback on being called to pick up the child, and you could tell the daycare ladies felt they had the self-righteous upper hand there.
It definitely occurred to me that some children might well be better off with these women who seemed to have a natural maternal instinct, without any self-consciousness or embarrassment about it.
Kids need to socialize with other kids and get out of the house. I don't recommend 10 hour daycare, but I would definitely enroll a kid in half day preschool.
That's a little confusing. 37% in the control group were in a daycare setting but then didn't go to pre-K and instead continued with daycare? Or suddenly didn't do daycare at all in that last year before kindergarten?
Subbing in my child's elementary school, I for a period occasionally filled in in a daycare set up therein by the school district, a sought-after school district so presumably by no means a *bad* daycare (women kind, rather young, high-school-educated, mostly with children of their own and the usual messy personal lives) - although having no "curriculum" and none of the bells and whistles of the blue city's premier daycare for its liberal elite, which daycare raised money as though it were Harvard, and even offered scholarships so as to curate just the right ethnic balance for its lefty clientele - I observed that daycare was hard for little boys especially. Tedious and apt to make them very cranky and whiny. (Some selection effect, possibly; I recall also that the school wanted to "balance" its classes on gender but found it hard when boys were preponderantly the ones dropped off.) Whenever I think of why this might be, I recur to the idea of it being like a box, to remain 90% of the day within 4 walls, with little new to stimulate and too much of a certain kind of stimulation perhaps, flourescent lights and too much "other children" and *too much* response from the adults to that whining or acting out - but also no real way to feel comfortable.
It sounds ridiculous, I know: well, how bad is that? No - not horrible, just more of - a nullity. Null hypothesis indeed. It was a shame too, as the building had been a separate one for the kindergarten, where the teachers had plenty of room for kindergarten activities; but the desire to monetize, or to offer teachers a place for their own little ones, resulted in giving it over to the daycare, and the kindergarteners were placed in the main building, in a much more crowded classroom space.
I would expect kids who had been in daycare to get the least out of pre-K, perhaps, if it seemed less a novelty where you learn and get to interact with other kids. They've been doing a version of that, some of them, since before they were a year old.
I attended a morning only pre-K at the Baptist school where I would attend kindergarten (also, I think, morning only).
I didn't like it very much. Mrs. Connatser was mean. ("Did she actually wear connatsers?" my husband asked when I complained about this long ago when you tell your new spouse the boring story of your life.) I was a brat though, so probably Mrs. C. was in the right. I declined the red drink that was served with the animal crackers each day and I think she took that ill. Once another child said I had taken his crayon or something, and I said "I swear I didn't". So I had to sit outside the door, in the hall, in shame. (Baptist: no swearing.) What was funny was they were too cheap to buy us crayons, instead supplying us with these big sticks consisting of all the colors mashed together, which I recall made coloring frustrating, nigh useless. It's about all I recall.
Good point. The failure may have nothing to do with academic training but instead by whom (not family) and where (institutional setting).
"Pushback works. That’s the lesson of the pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, and the reaction to them."
Not that Reynolds is wrong, but the situation is not that simple. I don't think most decent people on the right or in the center are inclined toward the idea of joining a mob to fight another mob. The first reason being simply "WTF do I pay taxes for if not to avoid having to do stuff like this?" the second one being that you probably don't want to be in a mob with the kind of people who are likely to form one in the first place, and thirdly you've got to consider there's a strong possibility of a reputational penalty to pay, because certain progressive media are immediately going to start shrieking about brownshirted fascists running amok the moment any actual violence occurs (perhaps not without some reason).
Indeed. To rephrase the invaluable Steve Sailer's remarks, one big reason pushback worked with pro-Hamas protests was because the establishment got a bad case of "superhero and two buttons" [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/daily-struggle-two-buttons#fnr6]. Prestige press could barely even bring themselves to say that the violent counterprotesters assaulting pro-Hamas encampments seemed to have been Jewish. It just did not compute.
"There are people who will not be able to converse in the language of intersectionality, privilege, and gender fluidity because it is costly to attend the institutions where that language is taught."
Or, almost anyone could learn how to converse this way for free on, you know, the internet. The reigning ideology is your native language.
I mean, Bryan Caplan call your office! It turns out even the dumbest students actually do learn new ideas they didn't know before in college, of the sort that have great personal value at least in terms of ability to play the status game in actual interactions and with more than just paper credentials, and that not only do they also retain them long after they get their diplomas, but furthermore the only way to learn them is by spending lots of tuition money, because the colleges have successfully locked up this esoteric secret society knowledge and kept it offline and unavailable to those who won't pay better than Elsevier ever could.
Ha ha, just kidding. Sorry to disturb you Dr. Caplan, your best book is still rock solid.
People, picking up the tenets and expressing zealous fidelity to the dominant religion is not costly! The Romans wouldn't throw you to the lions for worshipping Jupiter! It's not just free, it's almost all upside if you are a member of one of the religion's chosen people identity groups, it's like a princess shouting in favor of blood aristocracy.
An actual "costly signal" is more like MS-13 insisting you publicly signal your loyalty and commitment to MS-13 by covering your face in MS-13 tattoos. Public, conspicuous, permanent, guaranteed exclusion from polite society, rationally constant and intense attention from the police, targeting by rival gangs, and with pretty much zero other options in life besides whatever one can do within MS-13. Whoever got fired for talking too woke? It's the other way around.
The people who don't get with the program are - get this - the kind of people targeted by the program for denigration and negative discrimination. A white man who didn't attend college isn't in the situation of wanting to learn how to use intersectional language properly but he can't because it's just too difficult and expensive for him.
He is in the situation of knowing all about it whether he wants to or not, and not wanting to use it, because it makes him into public enemy #1 and there is zero upside for him. Meanwhile, plenty of people who didn't attend college but who are members of at least one of the chosen identity groups can parrot all day with "implicit structural whateverarchy" without having spent a single day in a university classroom. After all, the beauty of woke argumentation is that the intelligence threshold is very low and you don't need to be clever when no one is going to hold it against you when what you are saying doesn't make any sense. Just keep shouting more passionately!
So, you mean there are social costs that exclude folk?
I don't feel that describing one-legged folks self-excluding themselves from the ass-kicking convention as "social costs exclude folk" improves our understanding of phenomena.
If by that question you are trying to imply that any time anyone rejects an idea or refuses to adopt the weighted-phrasing of an ideological framework because harmful to one's own interests is an occasion that is fairly characterized as being due to a "social cost that excludes" then you are moving the goalposts not by yards but by miles.
"I oppose the proposal to increase the tax on petrol, because as a taxi driver, petrol is a major expense for the way I earn a living, and an increase in prices could force me out of business." - "Well dear, we're certainly not going to get invited to the anti-gasoline club's annual banquet with that kind of talk!" Pitch perfect for a Monty Python skit.
If there is no exclusion, then it is not social cost that excludes.
“The motivated core are like a religious cult.” This case is made explicit in “The Queering of the American Mind.” I usually roll my eyes at “it’s a cult!” denunciations (I’m LDS), but in this case it’s pretty convincing on queer theory.
Do you mean "The Queering of the American Child: How a New School Religious Cult Poisons the Minds and Bodies of Normal Kids" (February 29, 2024)?
Yes, thank you. I got the title wrong.
Re: "The motivated core are like a religious cult. Note Warby’s definition of luxury beliefs, which implicitly uses the theory of costly signaling. There are people who will not be able to converse in the language of intersectionality, privilege, and gender fluidity because it is costly to attend the institutions where that language is taught."
Some persons who (a) lack elite 'education' and (b) have religious anxiety will interpret the commitment of "the motivated core" as evidence that the seemingly inscrutable dogma might be true.
The psychology: If smart people have religious fervor to live by this inscrutable social theory, then maybe their dogma is the true one.
Might this mechanism might help to explain why luxury beliefs gain broad followings, beyond the educated elite?
Addendum: This psychological mechanism is one of many ways in which a person might decide what to believe by deciding whom to believe. ('Social epistemology.') Specifically, a person in the street might deem people in 'the motivated core' credible because they exhibit inscrutable prestige, commitment, investment. Recall that education has become a sort of religion.
I have a question about your Null Hypothesis: What is the baseline? Like, is it, "interventions as compared to the state of schooling in 1995" or "interventions as compared to no schooling at all"?
For example, are negative interventions subject to the Null Hypothesis? For example, we recently had an intervention where students were taught remotely as opposed to in-person. Is that going to make a measurable difference? A similar intervention might be universities turning a blind eye to the rampant cheating going on. Is that an intervention with an effect, or does it not change anything?
1) interventions as compared with the state of schooling today, which in terms of student achievement is about the same as 2010 or 1995.
2) When he originally defined it, Arnold was solely concerned with interventions that try to make things better, and his assertion was that there is nothing scalable that has substantial lasting positive effects. I feel fairly sure he would agree that some things could make student achievement worse. Say completely shutting down public schools for a year. "Remote learning" (like so much in the ed biz, it is not so much a description as a hope) does seem to have had a substantial negative effect. We will see whether the effect is lasting, and whether it only affects certain groups. For example, do smart kids get back on track fairly quickly?
Related. In a study we published decades ago "Does High School Economics Help?" we gave intro students a 19-question exam on the first day of class and then included it as part of the final exam. Those with high school did noticeably better on the pretest. They also did worse (but not statistically significantly worse) as I recall, on the post test. Our hypothesis was that they didn't study as hard because they thought they knew the material already. Probably of little relevance for the pre-K study, now that I think about it.
You may enjoy my piece on my sons Minecraft addiction https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/parenting-cute-little-minecraft-addicts
I'm glad I read Gray's piece before commenting. I don't doubt certain types of academic training could cause harm but would be very surprised if all types did. Also very surprised if some types didn't help. We have evidence that exposure to language and socialization have immense benefit.
Sounds like we need better understanding of what works and what doesn't. That may prove difficult to obtain at the desired level of detail but improvement should be pursued.