It's beyond frustrating to watch SPS (and its supporters) be so completely unwilling to examine what is/isn't working, and to change course. For the most part they hand-wave, blaming "lack of revenue", or attempt to distract with culture-war stuff about GOP/red-state education. Meanwhile there are places improving outcomes (including for poor & minority kids) by focusing on basic academics, and doing so at a much lower cost per student.
The current approach feels almost religious, where policies & programs are treated as "articles of faith" and worse results don't change anyone's minds. SPS claims to care about reducing educational gaps and improving student outcomes, but then measure themselves via how many new roles are created, how many initiatives/programs have been launched, etc. It's like "vanity metrics" in tech.
Hopefully Shuldinger can re-focus SPS' programs and spending on outcomes, as he said in his last communication. But there are a LOT of institutional & political headwinds to getting there.
This is consistent with the City of Seattle and King County. And Sandeep is right - the press has been absolutely complicit in aiding this larceny of taxpayer dollars on programs that have set kids back.
Nothing, in the history of education, has ever "worked" in the way you suggest. Educational outcomes are dominantly the product of the individual academic talent of specific students, which itself is likely heavily genetically influenced.
If this is the case, as you clearly strongly believe it is, it's a strong argument we should go back to the basic & "let the chips fall where they may." Then there's no argument for spending double, triple or more than the national average. Unless you believe all the secondary and tertiary programs not focused on the core of educational subjects are the responsibility of the school district, which I strongly reject.
He’s a Marxist first and foremost — hereditarianism plays an important rhetorical role in his work by motivating redistributive policies rather than trying to eek out more egalitarian gains through meritocratic achievement. The idea is that some degree of inequality is baked into academic achievement via genetics. And it’s not obvious that this is the wrong interpretation of the genetics literature — intelligence is largely heritable. What’s still less clear is whether between-group differences can be explained by genetic differences. It would be surprising if they weren’t, because of so many other widespread genetic differences between ethnic populations due to varied levels of interbreeding with other hominid species and recent selective pressures. But the jury is still out until we get better genetic data from the global south.
I read his book a few years ago. You give an excellent summary. With Nathan Cofnas in the news, I was wondering if he shares Cofnas' views on between-group difference. I should have framed my question more directly.
Best not to argue with Freddie on educational insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting different, better, and never before seen results) and the minutiae of educating kids. He wrote the book on it, literally.
Good schooling works, overwhelming so. If you disproportionately apply resources to under-performers almost any gap can be addressed—google Blooms 2-Sigma effect. However, it would obviously be better to lift all ships, in a cost-effective manner, as opposed to fixating on closing gaps though.
Further, in the ideal world we would give everyone the highest possible standard of education, and in that world, yes there would still be ‘gaps,’ e.g., discrepancies between different populations’ statistical outcomes due to various effects both heritable and non-heritable.
The comment I was replying to remains dumb though.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. Thomas Sowell has provided abundant evidence against the idea that measured intellectual ability is fixed or determined solely by heredity. For example, IQ can change substantially within a population over a relatively short period. In Japan, average IQ rose about 7 points in one generation. Group IQ differences can change over time. Around World War I, Jewish IQ scores were reportedly below the U.S. average, but by roughly a decade later they were above average. Environment can substantially affect measured cognitive performance. Black children raised in white families have an average IQ of about 106, compared with about 85 for Black children generally. And then there is called the Flynn effect....the systematic rise in IQ-test scores across successive generations.
> But that they failed to deliver what they promised does not mean that they didn’t care.
Your last paragraph neglects what I think might be the most important lesson for future reformers: caring *isn’t enough*. The root error under this whole school of progressive pedagogical theory (and a lot of other progressive ideas) is the assumption that caring — or rather, Caring™️, as part of the Being A Good Person™️ package — is all that matters. If someone in the Good Person™️ club must admit that Seattle was a failure, the easiest path by far will be to chalk it up to “they must not have Cared™️ enough” and double down.
Yeah, I think there’s something to that. Caring certainly isn’t enough. And there has been a turn in a strain of latter day progressivism away from facts — somehow, fact-based reasoning is “whiteness” — towards subjective experience. My truth. The only thing that matters is feelings!
I think that’s the point. If you take as given that objective measures are not real or somehow bad or “whiteness,” you can ignore the results. The problem ceases to be that the kids cannot read! It’s that you “worship the written word” and reject “indigenous ways of knowing” or such dreck. It’s far worse than the bigotry of low expectations- at least there are some expectations there. This is just evil - cosplaying revolutionary while actively not teaching children basic skills. At that point, shut down the school and turn it into an Arby’s.
The irony is they failed at being a good person too. Because they believed that the means justify the ends. And that getting black students to thrive justified ignoring everybody else. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it becomes that when people think caring about one demographic makes it okay to be indifferent to the impact of other demographics. And in the end it didn't work out well for anybody including the demographic they revolved everything around.
They didn't care AT ALL. Caring means thinking. If you care about something you actually have to think deeply about the cause and how to further it, and time and time and again people on the left, don't actually care, don't actually do the work of thinking, instead they do what they feel, and feel self-righteous. It is abhorrent. These people did not care enough: they did not care at all.
Thank you Sandeep for such a thoughtful and well researched piece. The “race to the bottom” in the name of equity has become the bane of progressivism in every field these days. It’s a tragedy that this has happened to kids who should be inspired (and given an opportunity) to excel regardless of race or color. I hope the new superintendent and school board will reverse this downward trend.
What of the entire UC system in California which TO THIS DAY refuses to accept or consider SAT scores in deciding on admittance. The professors, instead of getting down and dirty with derivatives and integrals, are having to teach basic fractions, simple algebra, and factoring to students pulled from bottom of the barrel ("underrepresented" high schools). And UC won't make any changes until at least the 2028 school year, though 2029 is more likely. Janet Napolitano has much to answer for...
Don't blame Napolitano, she was being threatened by Newsom and the Democrats in the state legislature with massive budget cuts if she did not go along.
High-profile positions are about making the tough calls and suffering the consequences (and enjoying the successes). Napolitano didn't have the guts to buck the woke insanity and so subjected huge numbers of innocent students to unnecessary failure and unfulfilled promise.
Having had kids attending SPS and a spouse working at SPS over the past 20 years I can attest to the accuracy of this article. A key point that is skipped over though is the complicity of a loud cohort of teachers in the turn towards intolerant, identity based instruction. The current union president who is on leave for abusive behavior is among that group. The recent union meetings began with insane levels of indoctrination, with a land acknowledgment that required several slides to get through, followed by self flagellation that is timed to match how long George Floyd was pinned to the ground, followed by shouting down any union members that ask questions. The upcoming vote on the union contract has been timed to coincide with Rosh Hashanah as an FU to a recall campaign against the union president that is being managed by a jewish educator. It is unfortunate that the insane wing of SPS educators managed to grab the wheel at this particular moment in time. Fortunately the bargaining committee has not been overrun, but for the health of SPS the president recall campaign must succeed asap.
Most of my kids’ instruction was fine, but at one middle school just after the pandemic, the teacher-led indoctrination was shocking. The kids were made to watch George Floyd’s murder. They were also shown an image of a parent and child who died trying to cross the Rio Grande. At one point, the teacher implied the kids weren’t showing sufficient emotion and then left the room crying. One kid was made to recite land acknowledgements at the beginning of every history class and developed the feeling that her grade was dependent on the respect she showed for Native Americans.
I wonder how much of this mess can be blamed on the decline of local newspapers and local news more broadly.
Even 20 years ago, local newspaper editorials held significant sway in public opinion and front page headlines covering controversy resulted in local leaders backtracking from extreme positions significantly, due to public outcry. There's an undertone in this article that unless a Seattleite was a parent, they might not have known about the dysfunction in the district and falling educational standards.
We might all have recording studios and broadcast towers in our smartphones now, but we know less about what's happening in our local government than we have in decades, if not longer. I refuse to believe that a homeless encampment would be allowed to operate on elementary school land if the public was universally aware of it.
Integrated schools (late 1960s busing) and the consequent "rising tide of mediocrity" ("A Nation at Risk" 1983) has been around for much longer than 20 years.
I don't think we can blame the allowing of non-white children to attend class next to white children for a school board deciding to allow a homeless encampment on elementary school property, actually.
You tie "this mess" to the decline of local newspapers/news some 20 years ago. I point out that the decisions and policies causing "this mess" were instituted long before your newspapers ceased reporting (or caring) about it.
My daughters were both in APP/HCC program, Garfield HS classes of '08 and '11.
My experience with the kids and parents in APP/HCC program which is not fully taken into account is that many of these kids are not only smart but also socially awkward and have difficulty relating and fitting in. Many APP/HCC parents, especially those in elementary age, state that their kids needed the nurturing environment that the APP/HCC cohort provided. It wasn't exclusively the academics of learning above grade level, but it was also acceptance of frankly being a little bit socially different. I heard a lot of parents saying how their child thrived because for the first time their child had kids that were like them at school. Parents were highly protective of that environment.
The APP/HCC parents were self-aware of the unfairness of the system. It takes privilege to be able to send your kids by bus across town every day to Lowell, Washington, and Garfield. It takes privilege to be able to participate in the after-hours extra-curricular activities at those schools. Within those schools, there was effort by the parent volunteers and teaching staff to acknowledge the diversity within the school and to create opportunity. As an example, Washington Middle School's music program included African drumming in addition to its acclaimed jazz and symphonic orchestra programs.
I heard Juneau speak about her goals when she visited Boeing. She came across as someone who seemed to believe that one had to push one group down to elevate another group up. She was divisive and did not understand the implied contract with parents in making an exceptional school. The consequences can be readily seen as parents did what they said they said they would do when academic rigor was lowered and took kids out of Washington Middle School elsewhere, thus driving down its student attendance numbers and causing cancellation of its acclaimed music program.
As to solutions to the problems of SPS integration and outcomes, maybe it is just doing the simple things like early intervention to get kids reading at grade level. My physician daughter was an after school reading tutor in the Team Read program during high school who worked one on one with kids struggling with reading. We talked a lot at the time about methods to get her student motivated to read books. She traveled south from our place in Ravenna down to attend Garfield and if she hadn’t been in the APP/HCC cohort she would not have been working as a tutor in the Central District to inner city kids.
In my view so much of the achievement gap can be attributed to the failure of educators to make accommodations for parents who don’t know how the system works or who have challenges in their work or home life. Parent Teacher conferences are scheduled assuming parents have evenings free. Some may be working. Communication with parents assumes that they are fluent in English. One high school principal that I know said that when the student is responsible for translating for the family that he knows that the messages are not being understood and acknowledged.
Juneau should have done that outreach instead. It should have been let’s find the kids that we are missing and develop programs that work for them, rather than shaming APP/HCC parents for the District’s integration problems.
Neither of my kids were in the APP/HCC program until middle school. My eldest was recommended by her 5th grade elementary teacher. My second was placed into Spectrum first after she became bored and stuck a hair clip into a wall socket during circle time. We tested her into APP/HCC after a horrendous year at Eckstein, partly so that she could join her sister for high school at Garfield. As it was, she graduated from Garfield with a perfect 4.0 GPA, one of 14 valedictorians that year IIRC. Neither had the socialization issues that I mention above.
Both were troubled by the socio-economic/racial divide at Washington and Garfield. They have both become strong advocates at addressing economic and racial disparities. While in her medical fellowship, the eldest has conducted medical research looking how instruments are biased by being calibrated on lighter skin tones. Youngest worked for five years in Kenya, some of that in refugee camps.
I believe that both students and society is worse off when 25% of Seattle's students self-segregate into private schools that have no contact with kids that are poor or immigrant or racial minority. SPS's misguided policies create that segregated, quasi-separate but equal outcome by making parents decide whether or not to accept lower academic rigor.
Good piece. Declaring the world remade in the interests of "equity" always ends in disaster. Always. Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" lays out the vanity in stark terms. Kaushik's velvet glove fails, as it should, to hide the iron fist of totalitarianism in Seattle's public school system administration. Oh, and the new school leader will also fail. Pigs cannot be made to fly.
This was therapeutic to read. As a community organizer and a parent of three kids in the Tacoma Public Schools system, I and many other parents have been making these same arguments in Tacoma for years. And it is often black and brown parents who value educational attainment and high standards as much as anyone who decry the inequitable results of lowering academic standards, only to be told that all that matters is the graduation rate, not whether students learn to read, do math, and think critically. TPS has also had large declines as parents flee in search of actual education. I have some hope that we’re nearly ready to turn things around. It won’t be easy because how do we build accountability and standards that take equity into account? I don’t think anyone knows but it’s worth the effort.
I went to Bush in the 80s and 90s, when it was singularly obsessed with the delusional notion that every student was just as capable as any other and that there was no intellectual pecking order. I can’t imagine how much worse it would’ve been to have been held back by the current public school system’s sharp pivot away from letting smart, motivated kids get ahead in their studies. It sounds like an abject nightmare.
Well, in Washington we can't trust the elections any further than we can throw the Space Needle, but my instinct is that parents understand the situation much better than non-parents. This puts them ahead of the curve when it comes to dealing with it (mostly through dropping out or moving all together.)
So am I. But that doesn't change the general calculus. Simply by participating in the conversation you're probably better informed about Seattle politics than 95% of the city.
Incredible zoom out and connecting of the dots. As a San Francisco product of public schools and a member of the SF School Board recall efforts, I feel what you all are going through there. My earlier substack work chronicled some of the dysfunction in San Francisco schools right before and during the recall days. Now we are in a slightly better place here and we have much to do. I'm a School Board candidate this November and still see many things that need fixing- from building trust, to having student outcomes improve, to having good neighborhood schools, to having spending tie to helping students.
Good luck with your race. The way that parents, the Asian community and a fed up public came together in SF to recall those three board members was amazing to watch. Meanwhile, during that period my frustration here with the dysfunction and performative posturing I was seeing from the Seattle school board was making my head explode.
It's a general pattern across America, as seen in the Stanford Educational Data Archive, for cities with lots of smart white kids and their liberal parents to have huge white-black test score. I wrote in 2016:
T he single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California. ...
So, much of the reason for Berkeley’s immense racial gap (4.6 grade levels between whites and blacks) is because its white students, who tend to be the children of professors, Pixar employees, or the idle rich, score well. But Berkeley’s blacks do poorly, even by the standards of blacks in general, averaging below African-Americans in Chicago and Philadelphia.
One exacerbating factor might be that Berkeley’s schools have traditionally been run according to progressive education fads insisted upon by white leftists. For example, the Gates Foundation gave a million dollars to Bill Ayers' brother Rick Ayers, another 60s radical ex-fugitive, to work his "small learning communities” voodoo upon Berkeley High School, with an unsurprisingly disastrous impact on math test scores.
Frustrated black parents in Berkeley have at times organized protests in favor of “back to basics” education for their children.
Out of 2121 school districts with enough blacks and whites to generate fairly reliable results, the second-worst race disparity is in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, the home of the University of North Carolina. ... The third-biggest white-black gap is in Shaker Heights, the famously liberal suburb of Cleveland. ...
Fourth worst for racial inequality is liberal Asheville, N.C., the arts and crafts capital of America, which attracts gays and polite white-flight types.
The fifth-most severe race gap is in Evanston, Ill. (home of Northwestern U.), which voted 86.5% for Obama in 2012. Evanston’s chasm is 1.49 standard deviations, putting its average black student at the 7th percentile among its white students.
Other liberal college towns with massive white-black gaps include Madison (U. of Wisconsin), Iowa City (U. of Iowa), Charlottesville (U. of Virginia), Austin (U. of Texas), Bernie Sanders' Burlington (U. of Vermont), Durham (Duke U.), and Ann Arbor (U. of Michigan). ...
Besides college towns, the largest race gaps tend to be found in liberal big cities.
The sixth-worst racial inequality out of 2,121 districts is in the black-ruled District of Columbia, which voted 91 to 7 for Obama. Eighth worst is in black-ruled Atlanta (middle-class blacks prefer Atlanta’s suburbs). Other big cities with extreme white-black gaps include Oakland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.
And to hit home the obvious root cause issue, I will present a statement that I don’t think anyone in their right mind would disagree with:
Parental/family involvement is a huge, if not most important, factor in a child’s educational success.
It all starts at home. I think the next best thing we can do is to help fill the gaps with after school programs - I think this would be a viable path to raising the floor, albeit admittedly a budget-blind statement.
As a future parent, how do we throw our support for Shuldiner? I would love for him to be here multiple decades. As crazy as it may be to say given the recent and extended degradation of the public school system, I would prefer my child to experience public school over private as I think it brings a better perspective of the world. That said, we cannot and will not sacrifice academic standards.
Say you agree/believe in him publicly. To parents on the playground. To your state rep. Letter to the editor. At a school board meeting.
He needs that public acceptance so that he knows that he has the backing of the Board and many parents. Is he going to make mistakes? Sure but he is also a guy who I think believes in the long game.
I agree to an extent but there are very interesting counterexamples. For example I strongly doubt Gauss's family involvement was the critical factor in his success. His mother was illiterate. His father was a rough man but respectable and upstanding. He was noticed by the teachers though. A similar story with Newton where a relative noticed him. My point of that is a good culture with right values you actually do get others who help. And the culture Itself helps. But this isn't the case now because the culture is broken. So the parents are all we have got.
Here's a nut who disagrees. "Parental/family involvement" is neither necessary nor sufficient for academic success. Academic ability (school smarts) trumps all. Always has, likely always will. Read Freddie.
I've been a public education activist for a quarter century (Sandeep mentions me in his wonderful piece and links to my blog). If you don't believe that family involvement doesn't help, you are wrong. Success for children has many facets to it. It's not just a test score.
I get what you folks BELIEVE. Problem is, it isn't so. Beat a mule with a stick or tempt him with carrots all day long. He ain't never gonna beat a thoroughbred horse in a race.
P.S. Redefining success is the last vestige of failed teachers the world over.
So the fact that Asian parents are heavily involved in their childrens education and their kids do well and the fact that with blacks it's the opposite is all just coincidence.
The fact that African immigrants like the Igbo do well in school and their parents are heavily involved in their education is more confidence. The fact that my kid can read and he not yet two has nothing at all to do with anything I personally did (videos, flash cards, games) even though I directly had that goal in mind.
1) You think that Black families don't care about children's education? Nope. That they don't embrace steps that other families take for their children's education may be an issue.
2) Your second point is interesting because when Seattle Schools started its "Black Male Achievement" initiative, they initially wanted ONLY Black American-born boys. They recognized that those boys from immigrant families might have a different outlook.
3) Buddy, if you think that your efforts with your kid mean nothing and your child is just "bright," then why bother? Hmmm
1) "Care"? Who GAFs what parents care about? It's what they DO that counts.
2) African-Americans possess white admixture of about 20% on average. Africans in other South/Central American and Caribbean areas have quite different admixtures and ancestral sources.
3) Not nothing (nothing is nothing), but not much of anything. Compare educational and athletic prowess. Lotsa dads with fervent hopes and dreams about their kids, especially sons, making the "big leagues"—it's a time-worn trope. Why there, where "natural" ability is so well understood to be THE determinant and yet somehow, oddly, incredibly not in academics? Because books aren't that heavy and everyone can push a pencil...?
His arguments are dumb. If you have a car with a broken transmission you could argue that pressing the accelerator on cars doesn't make them go faster because you tried it on the car with the broken transmission and nothing happened.
Schools and teachers control less than 10% of the variation in test scores or grades. You can shout "accountability" all you want but you can't change that reality.
As a wise writer once said, education cannot meaningfully reshuffle the relative distribution of ability and achievement, but it can raise the absolute performance of most students.
Once you reject the idea that the priority of the education system is to reshuffle the relative distribution and accept that the goal is to meet kids where they are at, a world of possibilities opens up. Does a ten-year-old in the 99.9th percentile of math aptitude benefit more from basic arithmetic or from algebra? Does a seven-year-old in the 30th percentile in reading aptitude benefit more from phonics or from balanced literacy? So on, so forth.
We don't want schools to work miracles. We want them to test students and to teach them where they're at. The goal is to effectively raise the absolute performance of students in domains we care about, meeting them at their levels with effective pedagogy rather than making impossible promises and inevitably failing to meet them.
I have a kid in SPS. I agree that there is a lot that goes on at home and that inherited traits and frankly just having money makes a lot of difference. Our neighborhood school pats itself on the back for high test scores but we all know it’s mostly due to the population it serves. That said, SPS can be infuriating. Half the school could be able to do math at 1-2 grade levels above and they absolutely will not accommodate this. Is school supposed to just be a holding pen until you reach adulthood or are you actually supposed to be able to receive some level of instruction that matches your potential? There are kids who act out in class and disrupt the other kids and sometimes it’s because they are bored! They are not allowed to access more advanced material.
And yeah, there is some “woke indoctrination” which I mostly ignore but irritates me when it gets in the way of actual class work.
If you want the argument Freddie has written extensively about it, as have plenty of others. If the empirical claims are sound — and they’ve been pretty thoroughly pressed, given the consequences — we need to focus on leveling up, not leveling down.
Freddie doesn't really know much about education and doesn't care to know much. He wants to look at test scores and conclude something. Fine.
But the American system of education is insane. People outside the US are very aware of this. And it's been like this for a very long time (the insanity begins in the 1930s). There are multiple people that have written about this. Liping Ma, Andrei Toome for example in math.
So its no real surprise what you see to any foreigner that comes here. What Freddie is doing is a bit like trying to understand a car by only looking at cars with broken transmissions.
The question of leveling up vs leaving down is irrelevant if you believe Freddie. Because schools and teachers don't matter. It doesn't matter for example that Thomas Jefferson teaches complex analysis because it doesn't really improve test scores that don't test for it. So it must not matter right. That's the vaunted empirical evidence you claim supports Freddie's point. This type of empiricism is worthless.
Von Neuman learning advanced math at 16 from professors and being carefully tutored in a very classical education didn't matter in the slightest. He would have still been the same if he was taught in a ghetto American school where he was beaten up everyday. The fact that America has never produced Von Neuman while a tiny country like Hungary produced numerous geniuses is not because of better schooling according to Freddie. It's literally just something magical about Hungarians.
That's what Freddie believes.
Now Freddies point of view makes sense because he really doesn't care about what happens in schools. For him the only thingb that matters is achieving equality. And since he has correctly (imo) concluded schools can't do that he views everything schools do as unimportant. This is what comes from viewing everything through the lens of a singular political vision, in this case a Communist one.
I know you claim to have spent time in the classroom...can you clarify how long you actually were an educator before heading off to grad school to share all your hard-won wisdom?
Wow. All of this. Instead of raising the standards for everyone to become more empowered to choose their destiny, the focus was on lowering the bar in the interest of equity. The interest on that bill grows to "loan shark" levels when our kids can't compete in the world. I'm not confident that Seattle has hit rock bottom with its policies both city-wide and SPS (I know SPS is not under city control). I had hoped with the election of Lurie in SF that voters here would reject Wilson. I was wrong and here we are.
It's beyond frustrating to watch SPS (and its supporters) be so completely unwilling to examine what is/isn't working, and to change course. For the most part they hand-wave, blaming "lack of revenue", or attempt to distract with culture-war stuff about GOP/red-state education. Meanwhile there are places improving outcomes (including for poor & minority kids) by focusing on basic academics, and doing so at a much lower cost per student.
The current approach feels almost religious, where policies & programs are treated as "articles of faith" and worse results don't change anyone's minds. SPS claims to care about reducing educational gaps and improving student outcomes, but then measure themselves via how many new roles are created, how many initiatives/programs have been launched, etc. It's like "vanity metrics" in tech.
Hopefully Shuldinger can re-focus SPS' programs and spending on outcomes, as he said in his last communication. But there are a LOT of institutional & political headwinds to getting there.
This is consistent with the City of Seattle and King County. And Sandeep is right - the press has been absolutely complicit in aiding this larceny of taxpayer dollars on programs that have set kids back.
Much easier to teach kids that they're victims rather than teaching them to read.
Nothing, in the history of education, has ever "worked" in the way you suggest. Educational outcomes are dominantly the product of the individual academic talent of specific students, which itself is likely heavily genetically influenced.
If this is the case, as you clearly strongly believe it is, it's a strong argument we should go back to the basic & "let the chips fall where they may." Then there's no argument for spending double, triple or more than the national average. Unless you believe all the secondary and tertiary programs not focused on the core of educational subjects are the responsibility of the school district, which I strongly reject.
This is an honest question based on your response: Are you a hereditarian? Do you agree with the theses of researchers like Charles Murray?
He’s a Marxist first and foremost — hereditarianism plays an important rhetorical role in his work by motivating redistributive policies rather than trying to eek out more egalitarian gains through meritocratic achievement. The idea is that some degree of inequality is baked into academic achievement via genetics. And it’s not obvious that this is the wrong interpretation of the genetics literature — intelligence is largely heritable. What’s still less clear is whether between-group differences can be explained by genetic differences. It would be surprising if they weren’t, because of so many other widespread genetic differences between ethnic populations due to varied levels of interbreeding with other hominid species and recent selective pressures. But the jury is still out until we get better genetic data from the global south.
I read his book a few years ago. You give an excellent summary. With Nathan Cofnas in the news, I was wondering if he shares Cofnas' views on between-group difference. I should have framed my question more directly.
Best not to argue with Freddie on educational insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting different, better, and never before seen results) and the minutiae of educating kids. He wrote the book on it, literally.
Incredibly strange to imply that writing a book on a topic makes one an unquestionable authority.
Pretty dumb take. Obviously school policy has an enormous impact.
The "gap" remains, no matter what.
Good schooling works, overwhelming so. If you disproportionately apply resources to under-performers almost any gap can be addressed—google Blooms 2-Sigma effect. However, it would obviously be better to lift all ships, in a cost-effective manner, as opposed to fixating on closing gaps though.
Further, in the ideal world we would give everyone the highest possible standard of education, and in that world, yes there would still be ‘gaps,’ e.g., discrepancies between different populations’ statistical outcomes due to various effects both heritable and non-heritable.
The comment I was replying to remains dumb though.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. Thomas Sowell has provided abundant evidence against the idea that measured intellectual ability is fixed or determined solely by heredity. For example, IQ can change substantially within a population over a relatively short period. In Japan, average IQ rose about 7 points in one generation. Group IQ differences can change over time. Around World War I, Jewish IQ scores were reportedly below the U.S. average, but by roughly a decade later they were above average. Environment can substantially affect measured cognitive performance. Black children raised in white families have an average IQ of about 106, compared with about 85 for Black children generally. And then there is called the Flynn effect....the systematic rise in IQ-test scores across successive generations.
Oh my
The crusade must go on!!! Wadarya, some kinda saracen??
> But that they failed to deliver what they promised does not mean that they didn’t care.
Your last paragraph neglects what I think might be the most important lesson for future reformers: caring *isn’t enough*. The root error under this whole school of progressive pedagogical theory (and a lot of other progressive ideas) is the assumption that caring — or rather, Caring™️, as part of the Being A Good Person™️ package — is all that matters. If someone in the Good Person™️ club must admit that Seattle was a failure, the easiest path by far will be to chalk it up to “they must not have Cared™️ enough” and double down.
Yeah, I think there’s something to that. Caring certainly isn’t enough. And there has been a turn in a strain of latter day progressivism away from facts — somehow, fact-based reasoning is “whiteness” — towards subjective experience. My truth. The only thing that matters is feelings!
I think that’s the point. If you take as given that objective measures are not real or somehow bad or “whiteness,” you can ignore the results. The problem ceases to be that the kids cannot read! It’s that you “worship the written word” and reject “indigenous ways of knowing” or such dreck. It’s far worse than the bigotry of low expectations- at least there are some expectations there. This is just evil - cosplaying revolutionary while actively not teaching children basic skills. At that point, shut down the school and turn it into an Arby’s.
The irony is they failed at being a good person too. Because they believed that the means justify the ends. And that getting black students to thrive justified ignoring everybody else. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it becomes that when people think caring about one demographic makes it okay to be indifferent to the impact of other demographics. And in the end it didn't work out well for anybody including the demographic they revolved everything around.
They didn't care AT ALL. Caring means thinking. If you care about something you actually have to think deeply about the cause and how to further it, and time and time and again people on the left, don't actually care, don't actually do the work of thinking, instead they do what they feel, and feel self-righteous. It is abhorrent. These people did not care enough: they did not care at all.
This rings sooo true
Thank you Sandeep for such a thoughtful and well researched piece. The “race to the bottom” in the name of equity has become the bane of progressivism in every field these days. It’s a tragedy that this has happened to kids who should be inspired (and given an opportunity) to excel regardless of race or color. I hope the new superintendent and school board will reverse this downward trend.
What of the entire UC system in California which TO THIS DAY refuses to accept or consider SAT scores in deciding on admittance. The professors, instead of getting down and dirty with derivatives and integrals, are having to teach basic fractions, simple algebra, and factoring to students pulled from bottom of the barrel ("underrepresented" high schools). And UC won't make any changes until at least the 2028 school year, though 2029 is more likely. Janet Napolitano has much to answer for...
Don't blame Napolitano, she was being threatened by Newsom and the Democrats in the state legislature with massive budget cuts if she did not go along.
High-profile positions are about making the tough calls and suffering the consequences (and enjoying the successes). Napolitano didn't have the guts to buck the woke insanity and so subjected huge numbers of innocent students to unnecessary failure and unfulfilled promise.
Having had kids attending SPS and a spouse working at SPS over the past 20 years I can attest to the accuracy of this article. A key point that is skipped over though is the complicity of a loud cohort of teachers in the turn towards intolerant, identity based instruction. The current union president who is on leave for abusive behavior is among that group. The recent union meetings began with insane levels of indoctrination, with a land acknowledgment that required several slides to get through, followed by self flagellation that is timed to match how long George Floyd was pinned to the ground, followed by shouting down any union members that ask questions. The upcoming vote on the union contract has been timed to coincide with Rosh Hashanah as an FU to a recall campaign against the union president that is being managed by a jewish educator. It is unfortunate that the insane wing of SPS educators managed to grab the wheel at this particular moment in time. Fortunately the bargaining committee has not been overrun, but for the health of SPS the president recall campaign must succeed asap.
I don't know much about SCORE, the teacher group that swept the recent SEA elections. But yeah, the situation with the new SEA prez is pretty wild.
Most of my kids’ instruction was fine, but at one middle school just after the pandemic, the teacher-led indoctrination was shocking. The kids were made to watch George Floyd’s murder. They were also shown an image of a parent and child who died trying to cross the Rio Grande. At one point, the teacher implied the kids weren’t showing sufficient emotion and then left the room crying. One kid was made to recite land acknowledgements at the beginning of every history class and developed the feeling that her grade was dependent on the respect she showed for Native Americans.
I wonder how much of this mess can be blamed on the decline of local newspapers and local news more broadly.
Even 20 years ago, local newspaper editorials held significant sway in public opinion and front page headlines covering controversy resulted in local leaders backtracking from extreme positions significantly, due to public outcry. There's an undertone in this article that unless a Seattleite was a parent, they might not have known about the dysfunction in the district and falling educational standards.
We might all have recording studios and broadcast towers in our smartphones now, but we know less about what's happening in our local government than we have in decades, if not longer. I refuse to believe that a homeless encampment would be allowed to operate on elementary school land if the public was universally aware of it.
Integrated schools (late 1960s busing) and the consequent "rising tide of mediocrity" ("A Nation at Risk" 1983) has been around for much longer than 20 years.
I don't think we can blame the allowing of non-white children to attend class next to white children for a school board deciding to allow a homeless encampment on elementary school property, actually.
Forced busing was pretty distinct from merely allowing nonwhite children to attend formerly whites-only schools.
"Merely allowing" is not what the Supreme Court demanded of schools in Brown.
You tie "this mess" to the decline of local newspapers/news some 20 years ago. I point out that the decisions and policies causing "this mess" were instituted long before your newspapers ceased reporting (or caring) about it.
My daughters were both in APP/HCC program, Garfield HS classes of '08 and '11.
My experience with the kids and parents in APP/HCC program which is not fully taken into account is that many of these kids are not only smart but also socially awkward and have difficulty relating and fitting in. Many APP/HCC parents, especially those in elementary age, state that their kids needed the nurturing environment that the APP/HCC cohort provided. It wasn't exclusively the academics of learning above grade level, but it was also acceptance of frankly being a little bit socially different. I heard a lot of parents saying how their child thrived because for the first time their child had kids that were like them at school. Parents were highly protective of that environment.
The APP/HCC parents were self-aware of the unfairness of the system. It takes privilege to be able to send your kids by bus across town every day to Lowell, Washington, and Garfield. It takes privilege to be able to participate in the after-hours extra-curricular activities at those schools. Within those schools, there was effort by the parent volunteers and teaching staff to acknowledge the diversity within the school and to create opportunity. As an example, Washington Middle School's music program included African drumming in addition to its acclaimed jazz and symphonic orchestra programs.
I heard Juneau speak about her goals when she visited Boeing. She came across as someone who seemed to believe that one had to push one group down to elevate another group up. She was divisive and did not understand the implied contract with parents in making an exceptional school. The consequences can be readily seen as parents did what they said they said they would do when academic rigor was lowered and took kids out of Washington Middle School elsewhere, thus driving down its student attendance numbers and causing cancellation of its acclaimed music program.
As to solutions to the problems of SPS integration and outcomes, maybe it is just doing the simple things like early intervention to get kids reading at grade level. My physician daughter was an after school reading tutor in the Team Read program during high school who worked one on one with kids struggling with reading. We talked a lot at the time about methods to get her student motivated to read books. She traveled south from our place in Ravenna down to attend Garfield and if she hadn’t been in the APP/HCC cohort she would not have been working as a tutor in the Central District to inner city kids.
In my view so much of the achievement gap can be attributed to the failure of educators to make accommodations for parents who don’t know how the system works or who have challenges in their work or home life. Parent Teacher conferences are scheduled assuming parents have evenings free. Some may be working. Communication with parents assumes that they are fluent in English. One high school principal that I know said that when the student is responsible for translating for the family that he knows that the messages are not being understood and acknowledged.
Juneau should have done that outreach instead. It should have been let’s find the kids that we are missing and develop programs that work for them, rather than shaming APP/HCC parents for the District’s integration problems.
As well, Garfield parents used PTSA dollars to fund afterschool tutoring (or at least they did many years ago).
You're part of the problem. Let's hope your brainy daughters, at least, are part of the solution.
Neither of my kids were in the APP/HCC program until middle school. My eldest was recommended by her 5th grade elementary teacher. My second was placed into Spectrum first after she became bored and stuck a hair clip into a wall socket during circle time. We tested her into APP/HCC after a horrendous year at Eckstein, partly so that she could join her sister for high school at Garfield. As it was, she graduated from Garfield with a perfect 4.0 GPA, one of 14 valedictorians that year IIRC. Neither had the socialization issues that I mention above.
Both were troubled by the socio-economic/racial divide at Washington and Garfield. They have both become strong advocates at addressing economic and racial disparities. While in her medical fellowship, the eldest has conducted medical research looking how instruments are biased by being calibrated on lighter skin tones. Youngest worked for five years in Kenya, some of that in refugee camps.
I believe that both students and society is worse off when 25% of Seattle's students self-segregate into private schools that have no contact with kids that are poor or immigrant or racial minority. SPS's misguided policies create that segregated, quasi-separate but equal outcome by making parents decide whether or not to accept lower academic rigor.
Alas, looks like the girls are also part of the problem. Well, at least there's hope for them...
Good piece. Declaring the world remade in the interests of "equity" always ends in disaster. Always. Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" lays out the vanity in stark terms. Kaushik's velvet glove fails, as it should, to hide the iron fist of totalitarianism in Seattle's public school system administration. Oh, and the new school leader will also fail. Pigs cannot be made to fly.
This was therapeutic to read. As a community organizer and a parent of three kids in the Tacoma Public Schools system, I and many other parents have been making these same arguments in Tacoma for years. And it is often black and brown parents who value educational attainment and high standards as much as anyone who decry the inequitable results of lowering academic standards, only to be told that all that matters is the graduation rate, not whether students learn to read, do math, and think critically. TPS has also had large declines as parents flee in search of actual education. I have some hope that we’re nearly ready to turn things around. It won’t be easy because how do we build accountability and standards that take equity into account? I don’t think anyone knows but it’s worth the effort.
I went to Bush in the 80s and 90s, when it was singularly obsessed with the delusional notion that every student was just as capable as any other and that there was no intellectual pecking order. I can’t imagine how much worse it would’ve been to have been held back by the current public school system’s sharp pivot away from letting smart, motivated kids get ahead in their studies. It sounds like an abject nightmare.
Incredibly well written! Re-stacked!
Seattle's been circling the drain for a while now, and even blue-city parents have their limits.
But do they? I wonder after last year's Mayoral, City Attorney and City Council election results.
Well, in Washington we can't trust the elections any further than we can throw the Space Needle, but my instinct is that parents understand the situation much better than non-parents. This puts them ahead of the curve when it comes to dealing with it (mostly through dropping out or moving all together.)
What if I told you that I'm a non-parent?
So am I. But that doesn't change the general calculus. Simply by participating in the conversation you're probably better informed about Seattle politics than 95% of the city.
Incredible zoom out and connecting of the dots. As a San Francisco product of public schools and a member of the SF School Board recall efforts, I feel what you all are going through there. My earlier substack work chronicled some of the dysfunction in San Francisco schools right before and during the recall days. Now we are in a slightly better place here and we have much to do. I'm a School Board candidate this November and still see many things that need fixing- from building trust, to having student outcomes improve, to having good neighborhood schools, to having spending tie to helping students.
Good luck with your race. The way that parents, the Asian community and a fed up public came together in SF to recall those three board members was amazing to watch. Meanwhile, during that period my frustration here with the dysfunction and performative posturing I was seeing from the Seattle school board was making my head explode.
It's a general pattern across America, as seen in the Stanford Educational Data Archive, for cities with lots of smart white kids and their liberal parents to have huge white-black test score. I wrote in 2016:
T he single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California. ...
So, much of the reason for Berkeley’s immense racial gap (4.6 grade levels between whites and blacks) is because its white students, who tend to be the children of professors, Pixar employees, or the idle rich, score well. But Berkeley’s blacks do poorly, even by the standards of blacks in general, averaging below African-Americans in Chicago and Philadelphia.
One exacerbating factor might be that Berkeley’s schools have traditionally been run according to progressive education fads insisted upon by white leftists. For example, the Gates Foundation gave a million dollars to Bill Ayers' brother Rick Ayers, another 60s radical ex-fugitive, to work his "small learning communities” voodoo upon Berkeley High School, with an unsurprisingly disastrous impact on math test scores.
Frustrated black parents in Berkeley have at times organized protests in favor of “back to basics” education for their children.
Out of 2121 school districts with enough blacks and whites to generate fairly reliable results, the second-worst race disparity is in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, the home of the University of North Carolina. ... The third-biggest white-black gap is in Shaker Heights, the famously liberal suburb of Cleveland. ...
Fourth worst for racial inequality is liberal Asheville, N.C., the arts and crafts capital of America, which attracts gays and polite white-flight types.
The fifth-most severe race gap is in Evanston, Ill. (home of Northwestern U.), which voted 86.5% for Obama in 2012. Evanston’s chasm is 1.49 standard deviations, putting its average black student at the 7th percentile among its white students.
Other liberal college towns with massive white-black gaps include Madison (U. of Wisconsin), Iowa City (U. of Iowa), Charlottesville (U. of Virginia), Austin (U. of Texas), Bernie Sanders' Burlington (U. of Vermont), Durham (Duke U.), and Ann Arbor (U. of Michigan). ...
Besides college towns, the largest race gaps tend to be found in liberal big cities.
The sixth-worst racial inequality out of 2,121 districts is in the black-ruled District of Columbia, which voted 91 to 7 for Obama. Eighth worst is in black-ruled Atlanta (middle-class blacks prefer Atlanta’s suburbs). Other big cities with extreme white-black gaps include Oakland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.
For the full article:
https://www.takimag.com/article/crevasses_in_the_classroom_steve_sailer/
Is there a more current data analysis?
The data doesn't change. And if it does, it's not data anymore.
Wow.
There is a common theme here of obviousness.
And to hit home the obvious root cause issue, I will present a statement that I don’t think anyone in their right mind would disagree with:
Parental/family involvement is a huge, if not most important, factor in a child’s educational success.
It all starts at home. I think the next best thing we can do is to help fill the gaps with after school programs - I think this would be a viable path to raising the floor, albeit admittedly a budget-blind statement.
As a future parent, how do we throw our support for Shuldiner? I would love for him to be here multiple decades. As crazy as it may be to say given the recent and extended degradation of the public school system, I would prefer my child to experience public school over private as I think it brings a better perspective of the world. That said, we cannot and will not sacrifice academic standards.
stay engaged in local politics, and show up to support in public meetings/gatherings!
Say you agree/believe in him publicly. To parents on the playground. To your state rep. Letter to the editor. At a school board meeting.
He needs that public acceptance so that he knows that he has the backing of the Board and many parents. Is he going to make mistakes? Sure but he is also a guy who I think believes in the long game.
I agree to an extent but there are very interesting counterexamples. For example I strongly doubt Gauss's family involvement was the critical factor in his success. His mother was illiterate. His father was a rough man but respectable and upstanding. He was noticed by the teachers though. A similar story with Newton where a relative noticed him. My point of that is a good culture with right values you actually do get others who help. And the culture Itself helps. But this isn't the case now because the culture is broken. So the parents are all we have got.
I should have said “on average” of course there will be outliers.
Here's a nut who disagrees. "Parental/family involvement" is neither necessary nor sufficient for academic success. Academic ability (school smarts) trumps all. Always has, likely always will. Read Freddie.
Two kids of same book smarts.
Kid A: parents encourage the kid and make sure they do their homework
Kid B: parents don’t care
You think the outcome is the same on average?
Now think of the difference between the two, this is a gap…a gap that can be made up for in different ways…including levels of book smarts.
Even if you don’t agree that it’s the most important thing, we can agree parental involvement is a big factor, yes?
Your initial assumption is the one that counts. And the one that is missing whenever and wherever educational "achievement gaps" exist and persist.
So you think the outcome would be the same is what you’re saying
I've been a public education activist for a quarter century (Sandeep mentions me in his wonderful piece and links to my blog). If you don't believe that family involvement doesn't help, you are wrong. Success for children has many facets to it. It's not just a test score.
I get what you folks BELIEVE. Problem is, it isn't so. Beat a mule with a stick or tempt him with carrots all day long. He ain't never gonna beat a thoroughbred horse in a race.
P.S. Redefining success is the last vestige of failed teachers the world over.
So the fact that Asian parents are heavily involved in their childrens education and their kids do well and the fact that with blacks it's the opposite is all just coincidence.
The fact that African immigrants like the Igbo do well in school and their parents are heavily involved in their education is more confidence. The fact that my kid can read and he not yet two has nothing at all to do with anything I personally did (videos, flash cards, games) even though I directly had that goal in mind.
1) You think that Black families don't care about children's education? Nope. That they don't embrace steps that other families take for their children's education may be an issue.
2) Your second point is interesting because when Seattle Schools started its "Black Male Achievement" initiative, they initially wanted ONLY Black American-born boys. They recognized that those boys from immigrant families might have a different outlook.
3) Buddy, if you think that your efforts with your kid mean nothing and your child is just "bright," then why bother? Hmmm
1) "Care"? Who GAFs what parents care about? It's what they DO that counts.
2) African-Americans possess white admixture of about 20% on average. Africans in other South/Central American and Caribbean areas have quite different admixtures and ancestral sources.
3) Not nothing (nothing is nothing), but not much of anything. Compare educational and athletic prowess. Lotsa dads with fervent hopes and dreams about their kids, especially sons, making the "big leagues"—it's a time-worn trope. Why there, where "natural" ability is so well understood to be THE determinant and yet somehow, oddly, incredibly not in academics? Because books aren't that heavy and everyone can push a pencil...?
I don't think that. I'm arguing with the comment I responded to. That is what he is saying and I'm pointing out how ridiculous it is
Read Freddie. "Culture of Smart"
His arguments are dumb. If you have a car with a broken transmission you could argue that pressing the accelerator on cars doesn't make them go faster because you tried it on the car with the broken transmission and nothing happened.
Of course nothing will happen.
Fantastic piece. This is why we pulled our kids from public school. If equity is your only value, excellence disappears.
Thx, Nick! I had been meaning to send this to you, so glad to see you found it convincing.
Schools and teachers control less than 10% of the variation in test scores or grades. You can shout "accountability" all you want but you can't change that reality.
As a wise writer once said, education cannot meaningfully reshuffle the relative distribution of ability and achievement, but it can raise the absolute performance of most students.
Once you reject the idea that the priority of the education system is to reshuffle the relative distribution and accept that the goal is to meet kids where they are at, a world of possibilities opens up. Does a ten-year-old in the 99.9th percentile of math aptitude benefit more from basic arithmetic or from algebra? Does a seven-year-old in the 30th percentile in reading aptitude benefit more from phonics or from balanced literacy? So on, so forth.
We don't want schools to work miracles. We want them to test students and to teach them where they're at. The goal is to effectively raise the absolute performance of students in domains we care about, meeting them at their levels with effective pedagogy rather than making impossible promises and inevitably failing to meet them.
I have a kid in SPS. I agree that there is a lot that goes on at home and that inherited traits and frankly just having money makes a lot of difference. Our neighborhood school pats itself on the back for high test scores but we all know it’s mostly due to the population it serves. That said, SPS can be infuriating. Half the school could be able to do math at 1-2 grade levels above and they absolutely will not accommodate this. Is school supposed to just be a holding pen until you reach adulthood or are you actually supposed to be able to receive some level of instruction that matches your potential? There are kids who act out in class and disrupt the other kids and sometimes it’s because they are bored! They are not allowed to access more advanced material.
And yeah, there is some “woke indoctrination” which I mostly ignore but irritates me when it gets in the way of actual class work.
That isn't an argument. It's a declaration
If you want the argument Freddie has written extensively about it, as have plenty of others. If the empirical claims are sound — and they’ve been pretty thoroughly pressed, given the consequences — we need to focus on leveling up, not leveling down.
Freddie doesn't really know much about education and doesn't care to know much. He wants to look at test scores and conclude something. Fine.
But the American system of education is insane. People outside the US are very aware of this. And it's been like this for a very long time (the insanity begins in the 1930s). There are multiple people that have written about this. Liping Ma, Andrei Toome for example in math.
So its no real surprise what you see to any foreigner that comes here. What Freddie is doing is a bit like trying to understand a car by only looking at cars with broken transmissions.
The question of leveling up vs leaving down is irrelevant if you believe Freddie. Because schools and teachers don't matter. It doesn't matter for example that Thomas Jefferson teaches complex analysis because it doesn't really improve test scores that don't test for it. So it must not matter right. That's the vaunted empirical evidence you claim supports Freddie's point. This type of empiricism is worthless.
Von Neuman learning advanced math at 16 from professors and being carefully tutored in a very classical education didn't matter in the slightest. He would have still been the same if he was taught in a ghetto American school where he was beaten up everyday. The fact that America has never produced Von Neuman while a tiny country like Hungary produced numerous geniuses is not because of better schooling according to Freddie. It's literally just something magical about Hungarians.
That's what Freddie believes.
Now Freddies point of view makes sense because he really doesn't care about what happens in schools. For him the only thingb that matters is achieving equality. And since he has correctly (imo) concluded schools can't do that he views everything schools do as unimportant. This is what comes from viewing everything through the lens of a singular political vision, in this case a Communist one.
If that's what he thinks, then he's here because....?
I know you claim to have spent time in the classroom...can you clarify how long you actually were an educator before heading off to grad school to share all your hard-won wisdom?
And what makes up the rest of the 90%?
Other stuff, but don't even THINK about guessing what...
Wow. All of this. Instead of raising the standards for everyone to become more empowered to choose their destiny, the focus was on lowering the bar in the interest of equity. The interest on that bill grows to "loan shark" levels when our kids can't compete in the world. I'm not confident that Seattle has hit rock bottom with its policies both city-wide and SPS (I know SPS is not under city control). I had hoped with the election of Lurie in SF that voters here would reject Wilson. I was wrong and here we are.