The dragon of failure
After watching the quasi-illicit documentary Trader on Paul Tudor Jones (I feel like I’ve been talking about him non-stop lately on this blog), I did some more reading online and found a link to this interesting speech he gave to a high school class. An interesting follow-up is contained in the speech to something just hinted at in the documentary, where we see Tudor Jones at the beginning of his charitable work with inner-city students:
In 1986, I adopted a class of Bedford Stuyvesant 6th graders and promised them if they graduated from high school, I would pay for their college. For those of you who don’t know, Bed-Stuy is one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Even the rats are scared to go there at night. Statistically about 8% of the class I adopted would graduate from high school, so my intervention was designed to get them all into college. For the next six years, I did everything I could for them. I spent about $5,000 annually per student taking them on ski trips, taking them to Africa, taking them to my home in Virginia on the weekends, having report card night, hiring a counselor to help coordinate afternoon activities and doing my heartfelt best to get them ready for college.
Six years later, a researcher from Harvard contacted me and asked if he could study my kids as part of an overall assessment of what then was called the “I Have a Dream” Program. I said sure. He came back to me a few months later and shared some really disturbing statistics. 86 kids that I had poured my heart and soul into for six years were statistically no different than kids from a nearby school that did not have the services our afterschool program provided. There was no difference in graduation rates, dropout rates, academic scores, teenage pregnancies, and the list went on. The only thing that we managed to do was get three times as many of our kids into college because we were offering scholarships whereas the other schools were not. But in terms of preparing these kids for college, we completely and totally failed. Boy, did this open my eyes. That was the first real-time example for me of how intellectual capital will always trump financial capital. In other words, I had the money to help these kids, but it was useless because I didn’t have the brains to help them. I had tried to succeed with sheer force of will and energy and financial resources. I learned that this was not enough. What I needed were better defined goals, better metrics, and most importantly, more efficient technologies that would enable me to achieve those goals.
What that whole experience taught me was that starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late. An afterschool program was actually putting a band-aid on a much deeper structural issue, and that was that our public education system was failing us. So in 2000, along with the greatest educator I knew, a young man named Norman Atkins, we started the Excellence Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant for boys. We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city. Now that was an ambitious goal but last year in 2008, Excellence ranked #1 out of 543 public schools in New York City for reading and math proficiency for any third and fourth grade cohort, and our school was 98% African American boys. We never would have done that had I not failed almost 15 years earlier.
Great, except … who gets those teachers is a zero-sum game. They took them from other schools, which means that the other school’s students will now do worse.
There’s no question that great teachers can propel student achievement – but until someone figures out how to manufacture great teachers and implement it on wide-scale, all you’ve done is scalped good teachers from other schools, good for you.
There is a pervasive error in thinking about education in the U.S., in large part because it’s intertwined with racial disparities in outcomes. The point isn’t whether people can make a “disadvantaged” group’s outcome better – the question is whether the resources being allocated to schooling are creating the best overall outcome. Maybe those teachers could do a lot more with other students? Who knows – the question rarely seems to enter the picture. Regardless, the author doesn’t even mention that now some students are probably doing significantly worse because of his actions …
I’d agree with you if the number of teachers remained constant, but I imagine there are ways to increase the teacher pool, by drawing smart, energetic people from other professions that may not be as fundamentally important to the long term health of society, sort of like how some ex-quants have returned to doing science that’s unrelated to maximizing profit potential. Now, you might again say that this is zero-sum, because you’re trying to attract the best and brightest from other (potential) professions, but that’s a philosophical stance that I don’t really agree with. Societally, we just don’t put enough monetary emphasis on teaching, so we’re stuck with the results. I don’t know the details of Tudor Jones’ current initiatives in this area, but I know the superintendent of DC schools, Michelle Rhee, is on that track, in terms of teacher recruitment, although not everyone loves her methods.
Right – if Mr. Jones’ initiative were literally creating new, excellent teachers who otherwise wouldn’t have gone into teaching – or training existing mediocre teachers to become great or providing an environment where they could have a significantly greater impact – then yes, it wouldn’t be zero-sum.
That doesn’t sound like what they’re doing here, at least not for the most part. “We set the explicit goal of hiring the best teachers with the greatest set of skills to be the top performing school in the city.”
I think it’s the opposite – we put *too much* monetary emphasis on teachers. Homeschooling is one example of this – parents are paid $0 to homeschool their kids (or, -$x, where x is the amount of their taxes going to public schools), but those kids outperform kids from normal schools (adjusted for income and education levels of the parents). Similarly, D.C. has one of the highest expenditures per pupil for public schools, and one of the worst ave. outcomes. (Are kids in Utah or Idaho which spend $5-6K per pupil getting worse public educations than kids in D.C. or New York which spend $13-14K? http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/the-highest-per-pupil-spending-in-the-us/ )
It’s interesting to see approaches to African-American students like “starting with kids at age 12 was 12 years too late,” as Jones advocates. That is pretty much the reasoning behind pulling First Nations peoples out of their communities and putting them in boarding schools in Canada, or similar approaches in Australia to Aboriginal peoples there, back in the day.
The costs for educating kids are not large. You need a room and a few books. You don’t even need a teacher, just an environment where they can learn with some guidance. The problem here isn’t monetary resources.
I see your point with regard to homeschooling, although I suspect this isn’t a tenable solution for the entire world, since homeschooling is inherently self-selecting in that only the most motivated people would generally attempt it. In the absence of this kind of motivation, we’re left primarily with monetary incentives. How would you propose scaling your homeschooling option to something that could educate entire populations? Or would you advocate a mix of homeschooling and public education?
As well, homeschooling comes with other issues, including a lack of peer interaction — say what you will about the “hell of public school”, but it does breed a certain awareness of the worst and best of human nature. That’s generally not something as easily to inculcate in a homeschool environment.
I agree with you that homeschooling isn’t a good solution for everyone. I would say maybe 20-30% in places like Canada of the U.S., probably not a majority.
I was just using homeschooling as an example, but historically mass compulsory public schooling for long durations (12 or 13 years) is an aberration.
I should also point out that the counterfactual cost of homeschooling (what a parent could earn if not homeschooling) might be very high. The point is that it’s not about money.
(Regarding the social point, the study I’ve seen on this indicates homeschooled children on average have better or equivalent social skills compared to normally schooled children (except for athletic skills involving team sports, I believe).
“Homeschooling” is something of a misnomer, as many homeschooled kids spend more time outside of the home or school doing things than publicly schooled kids.)
(The social effects of going to school in a typical public school in Washington, D.C., I am guessing are highly negative, though.)
What’s more important is what children are learning. Many children intuitively understand they’re being given busy-work in school. It’s useless, watered-down, knowledge for the most part.
For what’s really important, such as teaching someone to read, for example, it takes about 50 contact hours according to John Taylor Gatto, who was Teacher of the Year for New York City twice, and Teacher of the Year for NY state once, if the pupil wants to learn to read. That’s about a week.
So if you’re asking me what options there are to explore for increasing the quality of education, there is: homeschooling, apprenticeships, starting their own businesses (sometimes, homeschooling kids do this), learning trades, and so on. There’s little reason to keep kids in boxes for 12 or 13 of the best years of their life, forcing them to learn things that are useless. It breeds nihilism and disillusionment.
I think we’re just going to have to disagree here. I would agree that forced education beyond a certain minimum standard, like the constantly increasing requirement to have a university degree, or a master’s degree, etc, out of misguided view that all organized education is good no matter what and that the more of it you have the better, is stupid, but saying that kids are being kept in “boxes for 12 or 13 of the best years of their life” implies that all attempts at organized education are complete failures. There are plenty of examples of good quality methods that have all of the good aspects of homeschooling without resorting to having individual parents do the teaching. The question is how we could bring those to a larger audience?
As well, dropping in mention of “apprenticeships” and “learning trades” is well and good, but typically children don’t just jump into those areas these days — what do they do in the meantime, before they reach the age of 18 or whatever age keeps them from being considered child labourers? Those years from 5-18 are going to be occupied somehow, and I suspect the homeschooling option wouldn’t be viable except for a portion of that group. Starting a business sounds nice, too, but again, not every kid is a natural-born entrepreneur. There is definitely going to be a fairly significant portion of children who aren’t able to be homeschooled, but don’t have the option or inclination toward those other options. This is the area where organized education is still required, I think.
I think apprenticeship programs and trade programs can be organized by the state (although I don’t really favour that approach). Germany is a good example of this, where streams separate relatively early into academic and trade programs. Why people would bother with getting the state involved is another question.
“typically children don’t just jump into those areas these days”
Two questions:
1. Just because children typically don’t learn useful things in education nowadays in places like Canada and the U.S., is that really an argument that they *shouldn’t*?
2. What do adults do with their spare time? There are lots and lots of interesting and useful things to learn or do.
(It seems pretty straightforwardly true that most kids are kept in boxes, vis-a-vis schooling, for 12 or 13 of the best years of their life. I don’t think that all attempts at “organized” education are “complete failures,” though. I agree, however, that most schooling is a big waste. The primary reason it continues is because parents like the free baby-sitting.)
I think your question should be more “what do kids typically do in their spare time?”, especially if they don’t have parents who are gifted teachers. My own experience of “organized education” certainly gave me a lot of direction my parents weren’t able to provide and that my teachers were.
I think we’re talking past each other a bit here. I’m not arguing against organized education, at least on some definition of that term. I’m arguing that most schooling as it is currently practiced in Canada or the U.S. is pretty useless. You can have a highly organized educational structure that is radically different from what we currently have …
When asking “what do adults do with their spare time,” I meant as far as learning and education goes. Adults learn lots of things, but they are tailored to their interests and abilities …
Sure, then we agree somewhat — I think there’s a lot of work to be done, but I don’t think you can just say “oh, children are in a box for 12-13 years being taught things they aren’t interested in”. Sure, 12-13 years might be a bit much, but I think there’s definitely a strong argument for a foundational curriculum, a base standard in math, literacy, science, economics, history, geography, etc, that is a lot better taught in a systematic fashion than just hoping a child will naturally pick up everything just due to natural interest. I don’t know if we live in a society now that can be supported just by letting kids learn what they feel like at any given moment and hoping their parents can guide them, which would make more sense at an agrarian or hunter-gatherer level.