A review by yevolem
The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik deBoer

5.0

I have followed DeBoer's work for several years and have consistently appreciated it. My rating is based on how important it is to me.
This book has a conversational style, so much so that near the end it's closer to a blog rant rather than a typical nonfiction work, which is unfortunate.
Do note that this is a political work as well and there are ideas that will prickle people from all over the ideological spectrum, though some much more than others.
The review is broken into thematic sections with relevant passages from throughout the book for each. After each one I provide some thoughts.

ALL HAVE EQUAL MORAL VALUE

Nor do I accept the idea that efforts to improve the environments of our students are given moral force because people assume they lead to improvements in test scores or graduation rates. We should improve the environment of our students because it is our moral responsibility to do so. Giving underserved children better living conditions is an end, not a means.

We should strive for a world where all seeds grow in healthy, well-tended soil, out of a fundamental commitment to the equal moral value of all.

We of course should equalize the environment of all children by giving them safe, stable, happy homes in which to grow and learn. We should do so as an end, not as a means to achieving educational equality.

We must move to a vision of human equality based on the equal right of all people to the good life. We must leave the idea of “deserves” behind.

We should embrace the most basic humanistic value: that education is about training citizens and growing enriched, multifaceted people, rather than just training workers. And in so doing we should reward values other than being smart, given how many other important aspects of human beings there are.

We must leave behind reciprocity. We must achieve a world that rejects the notion that we must give as much as we receive, that we should apportion out the necessities and comforts of life only under the assumption that there will be some sort of equality in what is given and what is received.

These things may not combine to turn someone with an average IQ into someone with an extraordinary one. But they may very well make them an extraordinary human.

It may be more difficult to truly convince people to believe in this, let alone live the belief, than anything else in the book. Unfortunately, the primary consideration for most in the world is how much economic value they're able to create. Their moral value is not even considered or is entirely disregarded.


SELECTION BIAS

If academic performance tends to be so stable over the course of life, why do so many speak with great confidence about the power of good schooling? To a striking degree, our misapprehensions about the power of schooling to change the world stem from a simple but powerful kind of fallacy: the failure to recognize selection bias.

the worst-performing students don’t perform poorly because they are excluded from the best schools, but rather the best schools are considered so because they systematically exclude the worst-performing students.

This is why many charter systems, such as Success Academy, resist “backfill,” the process of enrolling new students into their schools to replace students who drop out or are expelled. Doing so undermines their carefully manicured student bodies.

Schools that use a screening mechanism specifically designed to exclude the students who are less likely to succeed can’t then turn around and assume that the strong outcomes of their students say something positive about the efficacy of their teaching.

Take the “immigrant advantage.” Immigrant students in American schools typically outperform their domestic peers
Selection bias is at play: those who can legally immigrate to the United States are generally those that enjoy social and economic privilege back home. Research suggests that these advantages explain most of the observed difference.

While school reformers beat their chests, a major caveat lurked in the actual text of the report: charters had “made modest progress in raising student performance in both reading and mathematics, caused in part by the closure of 8 percent of the charters.” Remarkable how you can achieve modest gains when 8 percent of your data, almost certainly drawn from the lowest-performing schools, drops out of your data set!

A report by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica showed that the alternative charter schools in Orlando, Florida—one of the ten largest districts in the country—essentially acted as warehouses for poorly performing students. By shuffling the hardest students out of their doors and off of their books, the schools created artificially inflated graduation numbers. Funny how that works.

This is a rather successful tactic because it seems accurate at face value. There is often little time or interest to determine where a soundbite or headline is an accurate summary of an article, let alone whatever the source may be. This is a very wide-ranging phenomenon with serious consequences.

LIMITATIONS

Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification of the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.

I was struck by the relentless repetition of a single message: that every student was constrained in their lives only by their will, that if they worked hard and never gave up on their dreams, they could do and have anything...That effort and commitment were the sole requirements for success in life

a child’s brain is not a widget. The basic analogy of treating schools like any other competitive enterprise in a market system is flawed. Teachers and administrators simply do not control student outcomes in the way that a factory manager controls the widgets that come out of his factory. Imagine saying to someone, “How well your widget performs will determine whether you will be allowed to keep your job and how much you will be paid. By the way, you will not get to choose the raw materials for your widget; your widget’s basic construction and early design will be controlled entirely by someone else; you will only have control over your widget for six hours out of the day, after which someone else may treat it roughly; and the conditions that you do not control will be vastly different from one widget to the next.” How could anyone work under those conditions, or see such a situation as a healthy environment in which to work?

An issue that should be at the core of our discussions of education is what I will refer to as plasticity of outcomes. By that I mean how easily and to what degree student academic outcomes can be changed over time.

Pioneering research from 1978 starkly demonstrated the persistence of academic ability. The academic histories of a cohort of over 1,500 people who were known to have graduated or dropped out of high school were analyzed. The results:
...Although prediction was less accurate for dropouts than for graduates, 6 or 7 of every 10 later school failures were correctly classified by characteristics exhibited in the third grade.

Third grade was also soon enough to make strong predictions of high school achievement in a 2011 study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, this time based solely on reading proficiency.

As a paper looking back on the history of college entrance exams states, “Irrespective of the quality or type of school attended, cumulative grade point average (GPA) in academic subjects in high school has proved to be the best overall predictor of student performance in college.” Can we make the chain longer and expect a predictive relationship between undergraduate GPA and performance in grad school? Yes.

Test prep doesn’t work. We know that from data collected as part of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. We know it from College Board survey data from 1995. We know it from a study on MCAT test prep from 2010. We know it from admissions testing for medical school in Australia.

A high-quality meta-analysis was published in 2017 that compared various interventions and their impacts on students from poorer homes.
A majority of the studies examined showed no significant effect on student achievement at all.
But there were a few interventions that seemed to offer some limited advantages. Chief among them was individual or small-group tutoring.

Accepting limitations is also very difficult to believe. For many it evokes despair that nothing can be changed and all is futile. This is a pernicious cultural belief. It's very important know what our limitations are, if only to avoid minimize risk and potential harm. Sadly, unfounded confidence is all too common these days. I have no doubt that some would call this a slave or drone mentality, because they will never be satisfied until they have everything and are everything.

GENETICS

As a general rule of thumb, meta-analyses of kinship studies suggest heritability of around .4 or .5 for most behavioral traits, with the home environment and parenting playing a much smaller role

I turn to the behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer, who in 2000 defined the Three Laws of Behavioral Genetics. They are as follows:
All human behavioral traits are heritable.
The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

The behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden explains it succinctly:
Nearly everyone, even people who think that they are radical egalitarians who reject racism and white supremacy and eugenic ideology in all its forms, has internalized this “genes = inherent superiority” equation so completely that it’s nearly impossible to have any conversation about genetic research that’s not tainted by it. On both the right and the left, people assume that if you say, “Gene sequence differences between people statistically account for variation in abstract reasoning ability,” what you really mean is “Some people are inherently superior to other people.”

This is why 23andMe is able to provide a report on expected behavioral characteristics. A lot of people seem to think that they are apart from their body, as if it has little to do with them. Others are too reductive and think genetics are literally the only thing that matter. Hopefully we'll eventually be able to accurate assess ourselves for that which we are. This comes back to accepting limitations and not inherently valuing one person or another more based on genetics.

WHAT CAN BE DONE

For much of our history, girls and women were casually assumed to be inherently less intelligent than boys and men
In 1970, men earned almost 60 percent of all degrees conferred by colleges and universities; by 2015, they earned less than 40 percent
But the remarkable growth in the performance of women in school should be an object lesson when considering the racial achievement gap: socioeconomic and cultural changes can engender remarkable changes in educational outcomes. Crucially, this is an example of structural societal changes producing changes in the classroom, not the other way around. Far too many people in the education policy world expect to solve the racial achievement gap in education and in doing so help end socioeconomic inequalities. Far more likely is that it will take ending socioeconomic gaps to begin closing educational gaps.

Training people in vocational skills is often endorsed as a vague means to improve the lives of those without college educations. The problem is that there’s very little in the way of empirical evidence to suggest that this will actually work.

UBI...is simple: the government sends a check to every adult, with the funding sufficient to raise everyone above the poverty line. In this way society establishes an effective income floor. This has the salutary effect of not only preventing some of the deep hardships caused by poverty, but also of freeing creative and ambitious people to pursue interests that would be beneficial to society but which would not be sufficiently remunerative to be practical without a guaranteed income.

A jobs guarantee program...would ensure that everyone who wants a job can get one...through the creation of jobs that are sufficiently remunerative to stave off poverty but that might not be economically feasible without the government’s support.

Neither a universal basic income nor a jobs guarantee comes without problems and complications.

I'm much more in favor of UBI over a jobs guarantee. DeBoer is much more in favor of complete societal change, but will take what he can get, as most anyone must. I was reminded at times of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, particularly its ending proclamation and its thoughts on "deserves". Unfortunately, I often feel that science fiction is simply a fantasy of eternal progress, and mostly technological at that rather than social. May it not be so.