No data correlates school success to life success. Literally. None.
The measurement for whether school is successful is — drumroll — if the kid does well in school. Think about it: You have never read research that says what kids do in school causes a person to have a good adult life. Neither the school or the teacher has long-term impact on outcomes. So we make up stories about why school is important. Based on no data. To make ourselves feel better.
Here’s an example of the circular logic that guides education research:
Children and adolescents spend a considerable amount of their time in school, and the school environment is therefore of importance for child outcomes. Research within the framework of “effective schools” has established that factors in the school environment play a part in pupil achievement.
Translated into normal English: “Kids are in school for a lot of their life so it must have some sort of impact on the child. Research shows that school environments correlate to school achievement.” Notice that these two sentences are unrelated. Because no one is showing that school achievement has an impact on the child’s long-term outcome.
We have long-term studies showing it does not have an impact (Harvard’s 75-year study, twin studies).
We ignore those studies because it’s inconvenient.
We have accepted this situation for decades. The pandemic laid bare why we accept that school has no long-term proven benefits: the short-term benefits to companies. The only way companies can pay low wages is to have children in school all day so parents don’t have to pay for child care. School is universal, government-subsidized child care.
If parents stayed home the care and education would be better, because it would be customized for each child instead of the factory-style system we have now. We almost did that experiment during lockdown. And moms didn’t want to leave their kids to go back to work. So they didn’t.
The jobs are terrible and the school option is becoming visibly terrible as well. Also, parents are finding that as long as they don’t have to be insanely stressed by balancing work and kids, taking care of kids is manageable including homeschooling them.
It turns out that school and low wages go together. School makes parents feel like they are not suitable teachers. And low wages make parents feel like they are not worth enough in society to be calm, stay-at-home parents. But if you give that same parent permission to be home with their kid and in charge of that kid’s education, the parent will finally feel calm and in control.
When I started homeschooling I’d post pictures of my kids doing workbooks. Or reading. Now I post pictures of the kids basking in attention, because I know things in childhood that make a long-term difference have everything to do with relationships and nothing to do with school.
So how can society support parents in their quest for calm families rather than juggling impossible roles. We need to remind ourselves over and over again, collectively, that we never had evidence that school accomplished anything beyond keeping kids safe while their parents were at work. We can raise the bar on ourselves now. We can accomplish so much more if we put families back together again.
Yup. Education research is a high-order scam. John Holt, after many books on the US educational “system” (How Children Fail was his breakout book), came to the same conclusion as you, supporting homeschooling: https://www.nheri.org/home-school-researcher-a-radical-ideology-for-home-education-the-journey-of-john-holt-from-school-critic-to-home-school.
Thanks for the link. I love John Holt. He gave me so much confidence when I doubted that I could do homeschooling.
Penelope
“never had evidence that school accomplished anything beyond keeping kids safe while their parents were at work”
Actually school never kept me safe. I was bullied mercilessly and school did jack about it. I ended up refusing to ever go back. The outcome for me was no education, I was too busy trying to survive.
That’s a good point. I don’t write a lot about bullying. I just discovered though, that two of my brothers were bullied incessantly. I was shocked that I didn’t know.
Penelope
I think the rest of the joke is that, whereas success in school isn’t closely correlated to success in life, failure in school predicts failure in life very well.
Also, the part of life that involves getting a good job is well correlated to success in school.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226103350.htm
“Spengler and her coauthors analyzed data collected by the American Institutes for Research from 346,660 U.S. high school students in 1960, along with follow-up data from 81,912 of those students 11 years later and 1,952 of them 50 years later…
Being a responsible student, showing an interest in school and having fewer problems with reading and writing were all significantly associated with greater educational attainment and finding a more prestigious job both 11 years and 50 years after high school.”
It’s a causation/correlation thing — most of the stuff that paper lists is directly a result of income. School is not a direct cause of those things.
A great example is “being a responsible student”. LA Unified schools has stopped penalizing kids for missing deadlines because missing school deadlines so closely correlates to family income. This is a great example of how school is set up to amplify the benefits of parental income, and then people point to success in school as an indicator of having good income as an adult.
Penelope
Less than most, per the study.
“Most effects remained even when researchers controlled for parental socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and other broad personality traits such as conscientiousness.”
It’s funny how much “most of that is a result of income” reminds me of how rich dumb kids benefit most from colleges axing the SATs, while poor smart kids are most harmed.
LAUSD stopping penalizing kids for missing deadlines is an example of the application of luxury beliefs. It’s nice to believe things like deadlines don’t matter, if you can afford to, but the students who attend LAUSD mostly can’t afford to believe that. The failure of the school system to take seriously poor kids’ need for a degree of structure their homes don’t provide harms them most in the long run.
Like axing the SATs, it’s covertly a gift to the rich kids who are going to be fine without them.
How will AI affect the future of education? I watched my husband have AI write all his employee evaluations for him while he just tidied up the overall presentation. And he is spearheading an AI initiative at work.
I feel like AI and education is something nobody is talking about but perhaps they should be??
Hm. Good idea for a topic. Of course I have a strong opinion:
Teach your kids to do all their assignments in ChatGPT. That’s what good college professors are doing, so your kids should learn early. If they are always using ChatGPT for assignments then they are never learning stuff that’s irrelevant and they’re always keeping up with technological changes.
Any teacher that assigns work that would be made useless with ChatGPT is assigning useless work.
Penelope