"Education Doesn't Work"... So What?

Evidence suggests teachers and schools make less of a difference than we might like to think.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education.

The quote above comes from a paper referenced in Freddie DeBoer's essay "Education Doesn't Work." I've been thinking about his argument on and off since I first read it. It's a little scary to grapple with, but the evidence he presents is compelling.

The Argument

First I want to try to articulate DeBoer's argument. I see four parts:

Most things we try in education don't work. The education research literature is full of things we've tried that either didn't work at all, or made such a small difference as to be mostly inconsequential. From educational technology to class sizes to school placement, lots of things we spend lots of money on don't seem to help very much.

Most students' position in the spectrum of achievement does not change over the course of their education. In general, students who are high achievers in elementary school will be high achievers in high school and college, and the same for low achievers. All sorts of educational outcomes early in education predict outcomes later in life, and those predictions grow stronger as time goes on. There are outliers and exceptions, but they are rare and their rarity reinforces the strength of the relationship.

Learning is real. Kids learn things in school every day There is good evidence that kids today know more than kids fifty years ago. The heart of DeBoer’s argument is that relative achievement is hard to change. Absolute learning gains exist, though they have happened slower than we might like to think. The argument is not that school is pointless, it's simply that education can't solve the many social problems that it has been charged with solving — even as we get smarter, there will always be people on the lower end of the achievement spectrum. We can’t wish that away.

Education credentials are sold in a marketplace. It is not absolute learning that matters, it is the relative position compared with your peers that determines one's access to opportunity. Here DeBoer suggests that we need social policies which acknowledge that more education isn't the solution to inequality.

I think this is an important argument to grapple with because it contradicts many of our intuitions and a lot of the rhetoric I see in schools. Do I believe that teachers and schools matter? Absolutely. But I also believe that DeBoer’s argument is largely true, and worth considering.

Implications

Here are what I see as the implications of DeBoer’s argument for teachers:

Turn down the pressure. The era of standardized testing has turned many schools into pressure cookers. I'm not saying school should be all parties or movies or whatever. Students come to school to learn, and teachers come to school to teach. But I think we should put more value on creating a place that students are happy to go every morning, where students enjoy what they're doing. When I have two different ideas for a lesson and I'm not sure which to go with, maybe I should pick the one I think students will enjoy more. When I have two different ideas for how to structure quizzes this year, maybe I should pick the one that's easiest to grade and saves me time. Lots of dumb policies are justified by the need to raise test scores. DeBoer is arguing that test scores are really really really hard to budge, beyond fraud, changes in the students at the school or statistical aberrations that are out of our control. Any time someone says "these students really need..." and argues for more of whatever to raise test scores, I should probably ignore it and focus on creating a space where students want to be.

Stay humble. Teaching is really hard. Teachers are driven out of teaching because they work hard day after day but don't see students learning any more and feel like what they’re doing every day is worthless. Learning is complex, it's challenging to predict, and it's messy. It's reasonable to feel like a failure. Smart people have tried lots of smart ways to help students learn more and most of it didn't work. Anyone who says they've figured it out is lying or selling something. I've worked at charter, private, and public schools and I've always been frustrated by how many students didn't learn what I wanted them to learn. If we can help more teachers understand how hard this is and quit with the savior narratives we might create more realistic expectations for our profession.

Learning does matter, outliers do matter. DeBoer’s argument isn't that learning is meaningless. While people love to complain about "kids these days," the average kid today is better educated than 50 years ago. The reasons for that probably have more to do with environmental factors than teachers, but teaching is doing something here. DeBoer’s argument is about averages. The average student doesn't move very much in the achievement spectrum during their education. The reality is, of all the students I've taught in the last 12 years, I haven't made some huge difference for the vast majority of them. But teachers know that there are outliers, there are kids where we can move the needle and make a positive change in their education, and maybe a change in their lives. Those outliers matter. They might not be as frequent as we'd like to think, but that's not nothing.

Optimism for the future of education. DeBoer assembles an impressive array of evidence for his argument. But like any argument based on evidence, that evidence is all gathered in the past. Education is an immature science. Sure, there's plenty that we know, and valuable research we can draw on. But there's way more that we have yet to learn, and even what we know now isn't used very well by typical schools. There's lot of pseudoscience and tradition and intuition out there masquerading as evidence. I can't see it happening anytime soon, but I'd love to imagine that by the end of my career we will have an education system that has found more ways to move the needle, more things that work, more practices that scale. That’s a goal worth working toward.

I think “Education Doesn’t Work” is worth reading for every teacher. The big takeaway isn't that education is a waste that or teachers don't matter. It's humbling, definitely. That's part of the point. I would love for schools to turn down the pressure and be a bit more humble about what's possible and what's not. It might lead to more teachers sticking around and a more humane experience for students. But this argument is fundamentally about policy, about what happens when you zoom out and take a 10,000 foot view. I generally agree with the argument but the policy stuff is way over my head. I'm down on the ground, and I've got 26 7th graders coming in first period and I need to teach them about proportions. My biggest takeaway is that teaching is one of the most complex acts humans have invented. If my students still have a hard time with proportions at the end of this unit that's ok. That's normal. I'll still do my best. Proportions are worth learning, and worth teaching well. We’re not going to watch a movie and give up; students tend to enjoy classes that are well-planned and well-taught anyway and that’s what I’ll try to do. But I won’t be too hard on myself when I come up short, and I’ll try to make sure we have a decent time along the way. I’ve been blogging for almost ten years now because I think teaching is worth doing well, worth getting better at. I’ll keep doing that. I hope we can work to create schools that do a little better in the future. But all that rhetoric about every student this and test scores that, it’s not consistent with the evidence and it’s not helping.