Freddie deBoer
Writer with a PhD in English who taught writing for years, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Argues that academic ability is unevenly distributed and that schools cannot close the gaps they are blamed for.
Freddie deBoer did not write this page.
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Their wordsSimply creating artificial separation between different students is not a strategy for “educational excellence.” It’s just segregation.
↗When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids"freddiedeboer.substack.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsYou can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.
↗When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids"freddiedeboer.substack.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsEducation is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.
↗When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids"freddiedeboer.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 days earlier
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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.
↗What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Everfreddiedeboer.substack.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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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.
↗What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Everfreddiedeboer.substack.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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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.
↗What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Everfreddiedeboer.substack.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 months earlier
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Their wordsWe have never, ever done well in international educational comparisons.
↗Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and Nofreddiedeboer.substack.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsLearning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
↗Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and Nofreddiedeboer.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 8 weeks earlier
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Their wordsThat’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.
↗There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsOnce again, the composition of the student body is always more powerful a predictor than any identifiable pedagogical, school, or teacher variable.
↗There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsAcademic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable.
↗There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThat makes perfect sense when you consider that schools control 10% or less of the variance in student academic outputs.
↗There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsBecause some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBut with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse.
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Our reading
Education can raise how much everyone knows, but it almost never changes who is ahead of whom.
Their wordsDecades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThe brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling.
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 4th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBut in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsWhat we need, ultimately, is a return to a holistic, humanistic vision of what school is for, and we need a robust social safety net to protect those who are not lucky enough to be naturally academically talented.
↗Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com 6th of 6 in this piece