Is the School System Trying to do the Impossible?
University of Chicago economist James Heckman (via a hat tip from Kevin Drum of Mother Jones) says the chart below tells you most of what you need to know about educating our kids:
Children of mothers with less than a high school education score about half a standard deviation below the mean by the time they’re three, and that never changes…
Roughly speaking, nothing we do after age three has much effect:
[These] gaps arise early and persist. Schools do little to budge these gaps even though the quality of schooling attended varies greatly across social classes. Much evidence tells the same story as Figure 1. Gaps in test scores classified by social and economic status of the family emerge at early ages, before schooling starts, and they persist. Similar gaps emerge and persist in indices of soft skills classified by social and economic status. Again, schooling does little to widen or narrow these gaps.
Depressing.
Ken, it’s only depressing if you want everyone’s line to be the same.
Maybe like yesterday’s obesity post, genes account for this high achievers producing high achievers, not the environment.
It’s a sobering graph, that’s for sure.
Isn’t there a verse in Exodus about… “The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son a thousand times?” Maybe the verse should have said mother. Children are impacted by decisions made by their
mothers – including performing poorly if their mother performed poorly. This can apparently persist for generations.
Naturally, over at Mother Jones, this is evidence of the need for even earlier, more intensive intervention. It is simply the result of a normal bell-curve shaped distribution of heritable intelligence.
Mother J thinks this means schools do nothing. That’s not true. For example, they teach many kids to read. What they don’t do is make all people the same.
The graphic is both stunning and depressing.
New business idea: pay college grads to raise kids until age 3?
The worst part is the suggestion that schools are harmful to everyone but moms with a college degree. In other words, they seem designed to harm the kids that most need help from school because they won’t get it at home.
US children test as among the most school ready in the world at school entry and do pretty well until grade 3. Then the wheels come off.
Test scores peaked in 1967. Want to fix the schools? Roll back the clock on classrooms, curriculum, and the school day. Unless you have a child in school and are old enough to remember school in the 1960s, you have absolutely no idea just how bad even the supposedly better US schools are.
Also, wind the clock back to the days when almost all kids of all racial/ethnic groups (widowhood excepted) lived with their married parents. The parents, even if poor and even during segregation, provided a stable environment, socialized their kids appropriately for school entry and demanded appropriate behavior and effort once in school. My mostly-poor small-town school was like that. Of course, the school population was stable, which is a big advantage.