What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever

Freddie deBoer · 12 Mar 2026 · freddiedeboer.substack.com ↗

3 korrents from this piece

Freddie deBoer did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Opening school to everybody necessarily made average measured performance look worse, because the students who used to be excluded are now in the data.

Their wordsBut if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.

Interesting
Our reading
The educational crisis narrative is downstream of the labour market: we destroyed the jobs that did not need a degree and then ordered schools to make everybody degree-ready.

Their wordsEverybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.

Interesting
Our reading
The golden age of American schooling that reformers want to return to never existed anywhere.

Their wordsBut please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.

Interesting