Some parents “unschool” their children. That is, they object to schooling as traditionally understood, so they register themselves as home schooling but don’t formally teach much, limiting themselves to answering kids’ questions as they come up. When adjusted for confounders (ie usually these parents are rich and well-educated), their young children lag one grade level behind public school students on average – but only one (though these students were pretty young and they might have lagged further behind with time). By the time these unschooled kids are applying for college, they seem to know a decent amount, get into college at relatively high rates, and do well in their college courses. I think there’s some evidence that not getting any school at all harms these children’s performance on some traditional measures. But it doesn’t harm them very much. Given how little effect there is from absolutely zero school ever, I think missing a year or two of school isn’t going to matter a lot.
I suspect that the further down the socioeconomic scale you go, the more likely it is that missing school matters. I am willing to doubt the Null Hypothesis for very poor children.
There is also a selection effect. Alexander is looking at data from parents that, based on their localized distributed knowledge about themselves and their children, decided that voluntary unschooling was best for their kids. He then draws a conclusion about the effect of involuntary unschooling on kids of parents that, based on their knowledge about themselves and their children, want to send their kids to school. It’s like concluding that, because video game enthusiasts really seem to like playing video games 5 hrs/day, society might benefit a lot were government to mandate that everyone played video games for at least a few minutes each day.
+1
I knew on unschooled kid who indeed was doing fine in college but didn’t like aspects of his unschooling (though mostly that his hippie parents weren’t very responsible parents).
I’d push back on suggesting the Null Hypothesis fails in the case of the very poor, because in that case, a confounder is involved. The ‘Null Hypothesis’ should be restricted to ‘education’ per se – in some cases, the school is the place where free food is given, where nursing care is available, where social services are observant for signs of malnutrition and other physical problems. This isn’t education in any meaningful sense of the word.
+1
I would also say that it can be the reverse as well. If the school environment is particularly violent or harmful then being at home might be an improvement.
remote learning is also associated with cutting off almost all in person socialising for children. I am pretty unconvinced that remote learning works, I am very convinced that the associated isolation makes children miserable.
Really makes you wonder about the trillion or so poured down the education rat hole each year.
A lot of the value is probably in education’s ability to serve as a daycare for two income households.
From an economics perspective, where we are concerned where marginal benefit equals marginal cost, it seems education spending is way beyond the socially optimal level, even accounting for the daycare function.
I’d wonder what school enrollment would look like if education budgets were dolled out to parents on a per capita basis, and parents could choose to enroll the kids in a formal school or just home school themselves.
This seems unlikely, it is hard to imagine a child teaching themselves math (by asking questions) to get by in college. Colleges generally teach algebra at the lowest level, are kids not in school with parents that don’t really care going to know multiplication and division enough to get through an algebra class?
The children don’t ‘teach themselves’ by asking questions, they demonstrate an interest in the subject by asking questions.
A kid who likes math enough select a math major has likely taught themselves enough to match or beat the average.
Anyone who makes it into a competetive math program is interested enough in the subject that they will have self-taught to some degree – at my school there was an “advanced” track where the freshman courses started at the postgrad level.
For most programs the professors assume the freshman class knows absolutely nothing, which is generally true for at least some of the class.
For most programs you can go in knowing nothing and come out knowing nothing. Even in third and fourth year you see students who cannot write at all. To be fair they are mostly ESL, but the point is that you can get a degree writing English at a junior high level or below.
Setting freshman undergrad classes to graduate level wouldn’t make sense. Would that mean that undergrads + grad students study the same content at the same level?
I had a perfectly normal middle-class public school education, but am entirely self taught or parent taught in maths.
School was a place where I got the chance to drill in things I had leanred years earlier. Had I been diligent, that drilling would have been to my advantage. I was not diligent.
Some circumstantial evidence for the Null Hypothesis failing mostly for poor kids: there’s some research showing that the positive effect of increased school spending is concentrated on those kids. This summary may be too biased pro-spending-increase overall, but it’s pretty good on the disparate effects on low- vs high-income kids:
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/8/13/21055545/4-new-studies-bolster-the-case-more-money-for-schools-helps-low-income-students
Lots of parents don’t send their kids to school without going through the rigamarole of applying for home schooling and not doing it- they just allow persistent truancy. I bet Alexander didn’t consider that cohort in his analysis.
I expect that the real underlying effect here is that the vast majority of time spent in school is entirely wasted from a testable learning standpoint. American public school is mostly daycare, indoctrination, and socialization.
Unschooling seeming to be alright is pretty congruent with the findings at the college level that smart kids do well no matter where they go to college, as well as all the school quality measures that control for socio-economic status etc. Kids do about as well as their natural talent, IQ, parental socialization for learning and other factors allow them to do; the part where their butt is in a seat in a school is secondary at best, and largely a wash in many cases.
I think we want to be careful about mixing the finding about “kids don’t seem to know less if they don’t go to school than similar kids who do go to school” with the present day concerns about opening schools or not due to COVID. The two don’t cut against each other. If the value of public school is daycare and socialization with friends (and indoctrination if you are into that), then remote learning is entirely pointless, other than a little of that indoctrination. You are getting no daycare or hanging out with friends for the kids.
If learning is all you care about, sending your kids to public school seems to be pretty ambivalently valuable. Maybe don’t worry about taking a week off to take the kids to visit grandma and grandpa in AZ or FL.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to be pretty pissed off that the super expensive day care social setting we all pay for isn’t even earning its keep on that front.
I think you are missing that in some schools, networking is important.
That may be obvious for elite prep schools. But it can important locally for even blue collar kids going into the trades.
It is hard to imagine that poor students could perform much worse than they were before the pandemic. (See: https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/reardon%20whither%20opportunity%20-%20chapter%205.pdf
“the income achievement gap is now nearly twice the black-white gap”.). The recent revelations out of Baltimore suggest the public schools have reached an absolute zero in educating low income children so there really is no where to go but up.
Another observation, while touching on some pro-teacher papers on the effect of strikes on student performance, Scott Alexander ignores a vast literature finding either little or no effect of strikes on student performance. Some studies actually find a positive impact of strikes on performance:
(See: https://www.psea.org/globalassets/for-members/member-resources/files/strikesandacademicperformance.pdf
“Despite differences in time, place, and approach, the overall findings for the long line of research has been surprisingly consistent. In studies in Canada, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the clear majority of the statistical analyses resulted in nonsignificant differences between strike and nonstrike samples with regard to student achievement.
For example, the Pennsylvania researchers Caldwell and Jeffreys found that the students in the nonstrike districts significantly exceeded those in the strike sample in only two of 10 analyses with respect to achievement in grades 5, 8, and 11. When the results are examined for only reading and math, they were significantly different in only one of six analyses (math at grade 5). The results of a more recent study found significant differences in only two of 18 analyses.
… …
In sum, the verdict that strikes have notable negative academic effects must be reversed and remanded with regard to students’ school-related attitudes, their attendance and dropout rates, and their academic achievement. The preponderance of the proof to date, with due weight for quality combined with quantity, is that student harm is largely a myth.
The debate does and should extend beyond this “academic’’ question. But to the evident extent that courts and legislatures rely upon the irreparable-harm or educational-effectiveness criterion, they should replace their knee-jerk emotional response with a more objective and reasoned consideration. In some ways, “kids’’ are being made the goats, or scapegoats, of other parties’ interests.”
wrote Professor of Education Perry Zerkel a few years back, and, as Scott Alexander suggests, not much has been published that would counter that since (see https://www.academia.edu/23664363/The_impact_of_teachers_unions_on_educational_outcomes_What_we_know_and_what_we_need_to_learn )
This is not surprising given the negative effects of teacher unionization on student achievement. (See: https://faculty.smu.edu/millimet/classes/eco7321/papers/hoxby%201996.pdf. “teachers’ unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance”) and poor training and middling cognitive abilities of US teachers (See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2013/10/24/a-key-reason-why-american-students-do-poorly/?sh=298d555f2349. “It’s worth noting that in Japan there are no education majors, or even education schools. All prospective teachers must take a real academic degree and then apply for a teaching apprentice position. By all accounts, the Japanese system leads to highly competent teachers, although fewer of them than in the United States. They get better educational results with relatively large classes taught by experts than we do with small classes that are often taught by teachers of low ability.”).
Dr Kling once wrote that a good time to reopen the public schools might be never. I think we can reject the null hypothesis on that one.
I thought Scott’s article was deeply unconvincing, both here and elsewhere. I say that thinking he is a great writer and thinker.
For example, I’m surprised at the minimal discussion Alexander gives to negative serial correlation from effort, tutoring, and the like. What happens to the people who give up on un-schooling? Isn’t it very likely that those the fail out of un-schooling end up in more formal school and are likely smarter, more curious, and more studious, with and without controlling for observable factors?
I think lots of people target objective learning standards and engage in catch up learning. Which would explain why disadvantaged but not immigrant or elite children lose out less. Those parents make their kids catch up.
I also think that cumulative reading and math experience matters a great deal. I find that my operational math expertise is approximately two class behind the most advanced classes I ever took and in general, vocabulary correlates strongly with number of books read.
I don’t understand hating on homework either. It seems so obviously helpful by introspection. Is there literally any human skill that doesn’t get better with practice? Is there anything difficult that children don’t typically need a push to practice? I think this is either about very low quality homework, low quality students, or crowding out other enrichment.
So yeah, maybe you can recover, but what does that crowd out and isn’t it better not to have to catch up?
I think it’s fair to look at Scott’s argument with a critical eye. Here are my comments which are limited to only my experience, and obvious they won’t necessarily generalize.
–“I also think that cumulative reading and math experience matters a great deal. I find that my operational math expertise is approximately two class behind the most advanced classes I ever took and in general, vocabulary correlates strongly with number of books read.”–
I think for math it’s really about continuous use. My operational math expertise is probably five or six classes behind the most advanced I ever took, as I generally don’t directly use anything beyond Algebra I, which I took in 7th grade.
I agree on vocabulary (and perhaps style of writing as well), though I’d guess that my formal schooling constitutes 2-3% of all of the reading I have ever done. I was able to get away with doing perhaps 10-20% of all assigned reading I was ever given without any serious consequence. If I didn’t like an assigned fiction book, I could usually learn enough about it from class discussion (or later on, spark notes) to avoid having to actually read it. I rarely performed assigned textbook readings, class notes were nearly always sufficient.
–“I don’t understand hating on homework either. It seems so obviously helpful by introspection. Is there literally any human skill that doesn’t get better with practice? Is there anything difficult that children don’t typically need a push to practice? I think this is either about very low quality homework, low quality students, or crowding out other enrichment.”–
I agree that practice helps develop skills. However, in my case, I was able to avoid much of the actual practice part.
For most of my formal schooling years, I didn’t care much about most of the homework that was assigned. If it was purely textbook reading, I almost never did it. If it was math, I made heavy use of the back of the book (affectionately called bob) which had the answer for every other question. One year in middle school, I had a math teacher who checked homework by walking down the aisle and giving you a check in her book if you had it, and I found out that she just looked at the title so you could literally erase ‘8-2’ and call it ‘8-3’ and you’d get credit for the homework for 8-3. In high school, I often spent class time doing homework for the classes following, as I didn’t want to waste my time at home.
Even in college, when I cared more, I didn’t spend much time doing any homework, usually only writing essays and studying for exams.
Now, were I to go back to school for a topic I was interested in, I’d probably be focused and complete the homework as directed. But when I was a child, if I had zero interest in a topic, I did the bare minimum I could get away with and still get a 3.0+ GPA.
Point taken that lots of homework is either done very badly or not at all. But, if that’s true, then there isn’t much time spent on it either, and therefore the costs are lower than it appears.
In a better world homework would be developed to be more fun, better tied to the material, harder to fake, easier to grade, to reveal information about student misunderstanding, and customized to student needs. But that’s very far from being useless.
Also, while you say that “formal schooling constitutes 2-3% of all of the reading I have ever done,” This is often untrue for most people. Something like a quarter of adults have read no books in the last year and only 20% read approximately daily. For lots and lots of adults, in school reading is likely a much more substantial share of their total lifetime reading.
The hating on homework is probably due to it being given to all kids equally. If you are in the top of the class, you’ve mastered it already, so repetition doesn’t improve your understanding, you’re just wasting your time on 5 + 3 = 8. In the lower grades you get this where it is reasonable for some kids to learn past their grade level at various subjects.
One way to avoid that is to give kids time to practice in class, where you can help those who are having difficulties. Anything that isn’t finished then becomes homework.
Or you can have tracked classes. But that is a no-no in present day schools.