Khan writes,

a few years ago the president of Harvard declared that the institution was all about inclusion. On the face of it that is just a bald-faced lie, and everyone knows it. Harvard is about exclusion, selection, and curation. “Inclusion” actually meant that there are certain views and backgrounds that Harvard is going to curate and encourage. Which is fine. But an institution which excludes >95% of those who apply for admission is by definition not inclusive and open.

Pointer from a commenter.

Note that we take it for granted that a “selective” college chooses the students who are easiest to teach. One can imagine different criteria. You could auction slots to the highest bidder, regardless of ability. You can then try to prove that you know something about teaching. Or you could select low-ability and disadvantaged students only, since they need the most help. Or you could take a large initial random sample of applicants, retaining only those who do well in their first semester.

Anyway, the paragraph above, although well said in my opinion, is not Khan’s main point. His main point is this:

Harvard educates the American ruling class. And it wants to continue to educate the American ruling class. As such, it is self-conscious of the fact that it, therefore, can’t have the demographic profile of Cal-Tech.

Khan is inclined to predict that Harvard’s admissions policies will not really change, even if it loses in court. If they don’t change, what happens to the Asian applicants it rejects? More interestingly, what happens to the otherwise-qualified students it rejects because their profiles are too culturally or politically heterodox? They do go to college somewhere. Are their life outcomes affected by not having Harvard’s brand on their degrees? Do those other colleges take advantage of the opportunity to develop distinctive brands, or do they mostly just position themselves as slightly inferior versions of Harvard?

“Education Realist” writes,

Changing the laws of public schools is what needs to happen. But allowing small little schools to skate the law and then bragged that they’ve fixed the problem will just make things worse.

I will comment on that below.

I have some core beliefs about K-12 education in the United States.

1. The null hypothesis. That is, the manner of schooling makes very little durable, long-term difference in lifetime outcomes.

2. Teachers’ unions wield too much power in some jurisdictions, including Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. The result is that huge sums of money go for pensions and for “administrators” that are simply union featherbedding positions. This non-teaching staff adds to the burden of classroom teachers, rather than helping them.

3. Parents have fairly good instincts about when their children are thriving in school and when they are not. Parents’ instincts may not be perfect, but centralized evaluation systems, such as using test scores to measure “teacher value added,” are much, much worse.

4. Even the best teachers can only handle a limited amount of disruptive students. And note that Scott E. Carrel, Mark Hoekstra,
and Elira Kuka have a paper which claims that

exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 24 to 28 by 3 percent.

The methods used in this paper are suspect. Disruptiveness is a matter of degree, not kind. Also, I really think that the number of disruptive students matters. A lot of teachers can handle one disruptive student. I suppose a really exceptional teacher can deal with two or three. More than three and you are getting into no-hoper territory.

Next, consider three possible policies for handling education.

a) Force everyone to attend a government school, and do not allow affluent parents to segregate their children away from children of non-affluent parents.

b) Get government out of the school-provision business altogether. Instead provide vouchers to low-income families with school-age children. Provide supplemental vouchers for children with special needs, including students who have emotional problems that make them disruptive. Allow schools to decide which students to accept.

c) Stick with what we have now.

I think that it is impossible to satisfy Education Realist with (c). That is, as long as we have a mix of government-run and private schools, the playing field will never by level. Even within the system of government-run schools, allowing people to segregate by neighborhood makes the playing field uneven.

There are at least two interesting questions about what would happen under alternative systems. First, how much segregation by socio-economic class would take place? Second, what would happen to disruptive students? I think that it’s hard to get around the fact that parents like to self-segregate. It is also hard to get around the fact that disruptive students exist and pose a major challenge.

I think that (a) represents the ideal of public schooling. That is, when people defend public schools, they try to make it sound like public schooling creates egalitarian social integration and capably handles disruptive students. But I don’t think that this is the reality.

I would like to see us try (b), at least in some states, to see how it works. I wonder what the incentive has to be to get a school to take on a disruptive student. I wonder if socio-economic segregation would get worse. But I don’t think we can answer those questions without trying some experiments for several years.

What we have now includes a great deal of socio-economic segregation. As for disruptive students, I think that they ruin some classrooms. Affluent parents use private schools and affluent neighborhoods to try to keep their children out of such classrooms. Teachers opt out of classroom teaching and go into administration after they get fed up trying to deal with such classrooms.

these families think that by being anti-charter they’re defending America’s institution of public education. In reality, they’re defending a specific model of public education, one developed more than a century ago: an industrial-era model built around top-down management and bureaucracy, in which control and decision making belong to the central office rather than the practitioners. This model is a poor fit for today’s world because it treats all kids the same, often assigns them to schools based on their neighborhoods, and produces cookie-cutter schools that educate most children in the same way. It isn’t working well for the majority of urban students. And here’s the irony: it doesn’t always work well for suburban students, either.

It comes from a report by Emily Langhorne for the Progressive Policy Institute. I would add that today’s suburban public schools are not what they used to be. Many of the challenges that we used to associate with urban public schools, including large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds, are now prevalent in the suburbs.

Personally, I am not so optimistic that charter schools will produce significantly better outcomes. But I do think that it is more humane to allow families to opt out of the large-scale school districts that empower bureaucrats at the expense of parents.