Freddie deBoer has written a lot about education, so much that it wouldn't be reasonable to include links to all of it in a single post, but I think you can get a pretty good idea of what he's about from just the following three pieces:
My good comrade, I like to help but honestly I'm not interested in reading so much said about a guy that says that education doesn't work, which is obviously false, could be that the american model of education does not work, which I would tend to agree, but if you look at China for instance you'll see much more evidence that education has a profound effect on a society. So I'll make you an offer, give me a summary of what you understand as the point of this guy to be, and I'll say what I think about that. Does that look good to you?
To me, his most interesting assertions are the following:
- some kids are just smarter than others
- kids separate out into different levels of academic performance pretty early, like age 7-10, and then generally stay there into adulthood
- it's not possible for teachers or schools to "equalize" smart kids and less-smart kids, or privileged kids and unprivileged kids, but equality-minded liberals and leftists expect them to be able to do that
- the American public education system generally does okay given what's asked of it. Not great, but okay. A lot of the criticism it gets is undeserved.
- Allocating more money to schools probably would not lead to kids being any smarter or performing any better. Increased school funding only leads to better student performance up to a certain point, and the US is well past that point.
- the SATs and ACTs are fairly good assessments of who's smarter than whom, and of who is more likely to succeed in a four-year university
- the criticism that they are biased in favor of affluent/white students is off the mark, or, at least, the alternatives to SATs/ACTs (like GPA and extracurriculars) are even more biased in that way
- related to this, conventional IQ tests are fairly good at testing general intelligence, and left-leaning people are wrong to dismiss them
- the idea that there are huge disparities in school funding between white/rich areas and nonwhite/poor areas is incorrect. Yes, local school funding comes from property taxes and therefore will be variable between different localities, but state-level and federal-level school funding is redistributive enough that it overcomes that issue
- the achievement gap between white and black students (including the gap in standardized test scores) is not because of anything that's being done particularly wrong by our education system
- only 5-10% of variation in student performance is attributable to in-school factors; the other 90-95% is due to outside-of-school cultural/social/environmental factors, and/or is just endogenous to the students themselves
- he sometimes makes an even stronger version of this claim, and asserts that even the environmental and cultural factors can be more or less set aside, and the real reason for differences in student performance is genes. But he's also backed away from that at times and said that "whether it's environment or genetics, my point still stands".
- there's no such thing as "good schools" or "bad schools", just schools with good students and schools with bad students
- the idea that American students are "falling behind" other countries is wrong. The reality is that American students kind of always were behind. US students have performed kind of mediocre in international comparisons with other rich countries for basically as long as these tests have been conducted; it's not a new problem. This was even the case in the 1950s-1970s, but it didn't stop the US from being the scientific & industrial leader of the world in that time. We still were curing polio, and landing on the moon, and leading the way in computers, and generally kicking ass.
There is a lot to unpack here. I'd first reiterate my first assessments, I think that they mostly hold true. Furthermore the guy does some weird stuff, when he mentions there is no good schools only good students, it is quite strange, if you look at research projects and other kinds of outputs such as patents and other kinds of production, I think that there is something to be said about good schools. If you only look at standardized scores, could be that the scores measure things that don't show the whole picture.
When he talks about separating the smart kids from the not so smart kids, I get confused, because how the hell he has any idea of the percentage of the smarter kids, at the same time that there is no way of separating them? And to that point if the problem is that there is not enough staff or enough rooms to teach separated classes(assuming that that would be preferable) then the point that spending more in schools is only true if you say that this is not one way of spending the money in the schools.
Again about what he says about spending more money wouldn't fix much, that is quite debatable, it depends a lot of what do you want out of the education system, and quite importantly where the money goes what is done with it.
Another point that I think he misses, is that he does not show evidences from other countries that spending more in education does not work, and it might as well do, and investigate why it works elsewhere and not the US(which I suspect to be true).
I do agree that external factors are expressively responsible for the difference in performance of the students. And I would urge him to delve deep into that, and probably the state should invest in what can be done to handle those things, and I believe that quite a lot of them are related with parents having time to spend with their kids in formative years, and that is quite a discussion about workers rights, wages and working hours, and maybe that would have a lot of impact over education, and that is one point I can stay behind.
Overall my take of the guy is that he for one reason or another is against government spending more money on schools and kinda believes that some people are inherently better than other people, which I think are quite concerning points, because through all the faults education is a pillar of any nation, and a better education must be a priority and investing in an education system is a good thing, having a superior education that comes with debt shackles for the rest of one's life is not, and so forth, I think that a lot of the issues he points are endemic to the USA, and probably would benefit from a thorough reform of the whole system top to bottom.
