P****** Into the Wind

Association is not correlation.  Correlation is not causation.   The failure to understand these obvious statements has led to nearly universal misunderstanding of schools and education policy at all levels.

I have ranted about this for decades to broad resistance due to the strength of the ubiquitous conventional wisdom.  Undaunted, I shall piss into the wind once again.

The conventional wisdom is wrong for two broad reasons which I’ll try to explicate cogently within the narrow confines of a blog post.  

First, assessments of individuals, schools, school systems and institutions of higher learning are primarily based on performance or ability measurements derived from what Howard Gardner terms “IQ-type intelligence.”  Gardner deftly deconstructs the primacy of those metrics.  He and I argue that IQ-type intelligence is not a reliably comprehensive measure of what’s important.  But IQ-type intelligence has become the coin of the realm, even though neuroscientists and developmental psychologists describe a much richer way of viewing intelligence.

In fact, the role IQ-type intelligence plays in conventional understanding actually limits progress and potential by disproportionately favoring those traits when distributing opportunities and resources.

In recent decades there has been some attention given Gardner’s and others’ broader way of describing “intelligences,” but the attitudes are largely condescending or, more often, distortions of what is meant by “multiple intelligences.”  There are nods given to social and emotional learning, but only as poor stepchildren to the magnificence of intellectual brilliance as conventionally understood.   “S(he)’s so lovely and imaginative!” but just not Ivy league material.

In many of Gardner’s books, or mine own linked below, you can find good arguments for the fallibility of IQ-type intelligence and the neurobiological indications that other ways of being “intelligent” can be more crucial in discovery, understanding and creation.  Further, the various aspects of human cognitive function are overlapping and integrated.  Each of the human senses contributes material that informs understanding and assembles what we call knowledge.

Moving to the second realm: A Bret Stephens column in the New York Times rekindled my irritation.  (Most of his columns have that effect!)  He waxed enthusiastically about Brooklyn Tech and the other specialized high schools in NYC.  “How wonderful!” he and most readers exclaimed.  “Why can’t they be models for all the lousy public schools?”  “Why are we dumbing down standards in America?”  I was waiting for George W. Bush to jump out of my computer and preach about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Of course, W is the poster child for another American metric masquerading as worth; portfolio balance.

Nearly everyone who commented on the column seemed beholden to the conventional wisdom described above.

Everyone but yours truly. 

I wrote:

New York's "elite" public and private schools select on the basis of these (standardized entrance) tests and then declare their own merit by pointing out how good their students are at these same things.  It's like choosing students by having them run 100 meters, taking the winners, and then bragging that you produce great runners.  As a violinist, I frequently point out that Juilliard doesn't teach anyone to play the violin - they only take the ones who can already play brilliantly and then, if the student is lucky, she is not ruined.  

Stuyvesant et al are not particularly great schools.  I know students and teachers who can testify to dull pedagogy, damaging pressure and corrosive competition.  

The same is true of "elite" colleges, where students who already "run fast" are offered as evidence of the schools' superior quality, when in fact the undergraduate teaching is less than superb, often delivered by graduate assistants.  

I am annually irked by the U.S. News and World Report (and others) college rankings.  They are based, in large part, on selectivity, standardized test scores, grade point averages and numbers of AP courses taken.  “What,” I ask in my annual irk, “do those things have to do with the quality of the institution?”  

Does it make a school better to have shattered the dreams of a higher percentage of applicants?  Is a school “better” for having been complicit in ruining more childhoods and creating a near epidemic of anxiety and depression? 

Do we applaud the institutions whose competitive expectations lead to half or more of their students seeking mental health treatment?  Are these the things we value?  

These institutional rankings are based almost entirely on things that happen before a student steps into a classroom!

This idiocy trickles down on all of education.  “Elite”pre-schools select students based on the likelihood that their kids will get into the special elementary school whose "graduates” get into the most selective public or private middle schools, where those who survive get into a highly competitive high school, to be further ground, sifted and sorted into the winners and losers so that Harvard and Yale can brag about their ranking metrics.

I expect readers will tell me I’m all wet. I’m used to it.  It happens when you keep pissing into the wind.