Some questions and answers about whole-class discussions

Some teachers are architects, others engineers. Myself, I’m more of an amateur plumber, in the sense that I have clumsy solutions to issues I’ve created for myself. I show up and start thwacking away at a problem until it’s fixed and then I continue teaching, until I find something else wrong and go thwack thwack again.

This is very much how progress with whole-group discussions has gone for me. I’ve never had a big “aha!” moment that has fundamentally changed how I’ve gone about running a discussion with a group of kids. Just one problem after another that I’ve slowly amassed answers to.

I think that there is value in whole-group discussions. I think part of the assumed classroom contract is that students will be able to share their thoughts and that teachers will care, and I think that’s good. Students probably need practice sharing their thoughts, and over and above any cognitive impact, the social value of doing this is immense — not just that they can divide fractions, but that they’re the sort of person who can divide fractions.

OK, but there are problems with discussion. They all cluster around questions of inclusion, status, participation. So here is a list of questions, along with how I currently deal with them.

What do you do if a kid had a hand raised and was excited to share, but then put their hand down after someone else answered? And then you call on them, and they say “oh I was going to say what [other kid] said?”

I say, “how were you going to say it?” Or “why do you agree?” Or “how would you have put it?” And if they tell me they were going to say the exact same thing then I say, “no two people put things in the exact same way, with the exact same words.”

Basically I don’t want to create a classroom economy where all we value is being first to say something.

What if a kid says something and it’s complicated and you don’t think others heard them?

I’ll ask them to repeat what they said, but I’ll warn the class that I’m looking for someone who will be able to restate the idea — their first words will have to be “[Student] said,” and the goal is to get as close to what the student actually said as possible. I’ll correct them if they start “umm basically what I think.” No! You’re restating. I learned this from the New Visions Mathematics Curriculum and their instructional routines.

What if there are a ton of hands and you don’t know who to call on?

Then I might ask the entire class to express an answer at the same time. This only works for short questions (obviously), but if it’s a question like “and what would you do next to solve the equation 2x = x – 10” and I’m looking at a ton of hands, I’ll say: “let’s all say what we think at the same time,” and then the class will.

Really? How do you make sure they all speak at the same time? What can you possibly learn from that?

I usually find that a quick countdown and a very visible arm motion gets a group to say things all at once. “OK, let’s all say it together, 1…, 2…,” and then I gesture and they speak.

What’s cool about this is that everyone can participate. If pretty much everyone has the same (correct) answer then I get to congratulate the class, it’s a nice social bonding moment. Hey, we all did it! Nice!

It’s surprisingly easy to tell when there’s dissent in the room when we’re all trying to respond as one. Which gives me a nice follow-up move: “alright, there was definitely some disagreement when we all just called out, let’s talk about that.”

How do you make sure that you call on students in a fair way? In particular, how do you call on boys and girls equally?

I always try to switch genders when I’m calling on students to speak. If I’ve called on a girl, I’ll call on a boy next. And so on.

Some of the most cringe-worthy teaching I’ve witnessed is a teacher saying to a group of girls, “hey, girls are a bit quiet back there, what do you have to say?” Ugh. Gross. Ugggggh.

What if only boys are raising their hands?

What, like half the class is raising their hands and it’s all boys?

Yeah.

In that case I might ask everyone to put their hands down, without any explanation, and I’ll switch to cold-calling.

Cold-calling? Doesn’t that make students feel uncomfortable?

Yes, sometimes, which is why it’s important to do it right.

If I’m worried that students won’t have anything to say when I cold-call them, I stop the class and say: “Hold on everybody, I think this question requires some thinking, and I want to give you a moment to think about it.” And after I write the question on the board or whatever, I’ll assign partners and ask students to share ideas about the question with those partners. While that’s happening, I’ll walk around and see how those discussions are going. Often I’ll hear a kid say something and decide to cold-call on them when we return to the whole-group.

If a student is particularly shy or not confident, I’ll interrupt their conversation and say: “I just was overhearing, what you said was really smart and interesting. I’d like to call on you to explain that to the class. Can I do that?”

But this all represents a significant time investment, and sometimes our whole-group discussions are much shorter than this. In those situations, I’ll find myself cold-calling even though I’m not sure what a student is going to say.

What if you cold-call on a kid and they say something wrong? Isn’t that embarrassing?

Potentially!

I used to handle wrong answers in a bad way that emphasized (inadvertently) the student’s failure. Here’s how it went for me:

Me: What’s 3 + 8? Charlie?

Charlie: 10.

Me: Yes, super interesting. Anyone else have something to say? Yes, Susan?

This violates several principles of whole-group discussions that I have. One of those principles is: If you call on a kid, don’t leave until they’ve said something smart.

Another of those principles is: Don’t set up a kid to get knocked down by some other kid.

It’s never fun to say wrong things in front of other people, but a willingness to do so can accelerate learning. So I’m trying to reduce the social costs of wrongness, what people sometimes call “normalizing” error.

The way I do this (and in line with my two stated principles) is in two ways. First, I correct the child myself. Second, I give them a chance to revise. Here is what that above conversation might look like for me now:

Me: What’s 3 + 8? Charlie?

Charlie: 10.

Me: So [looking at Charlie] it’s actually not 10, it’s 11. But how can you prove that it’s 11?

Or maybe “how could you know it’s not 10” or “why is it 11” or “now given that it’s 11, what is 3 + 9” or whatever it is that you’re trying to teach.

But we’re going to stick with Charlie until he says something that everyone in the room agrees is smart, and then we’re going to give him credit for it, and then we’re going to move on.

What if Charlie never says anything right?

You gotta pick that follow-up question until Charlie has learned something or revised in some way. Hopefully it doesn’t take forever, and a few times a year it does and it can be a bit painful. I try not to give up, but you know, no absolutes in teaching.

Why is this all about managing student responses? Isn’t there more to whole-group work than asking students questions and asking them to answer them?

This is very important: no. I try to make as much of my whole-group time about asking questions and students answering them.

Do I give explanations? Absolutely. But I try to embed explanations in questions. Class begins with a question: “What fraction is this shaded piece of the whole?”

And then, after students respond, I say: “Notice that you can write this as 1/2 divided by 2, and that it equals 1/4. And this is true in general. For example, what is 1/3 divided by 2?”

And I think that’s a big part of how whole-group discussions can be engaging instead of a drag. A lot of boring discussions are light on questions for students and heavy on asides and reflections from the explainer. Questions, questions, questions. Let’s actually enshrine that as another of my Principles: Almost everything in whole-group should either be a question or a response to a question.

So, in summary:

  • If you have a ton of volunteers and the question is short, ask everyone to say it at once.
  • The goal is everyone participates.
  • Give yourself rules to make sure you’re calling on volunteers equitably.
  • Use cold-call so you don’t have to rely on volunteers.
  • To prepare for cold-call, ask individuals to think and then give time to discuss with partners.
  • If you call on a kid, don’t leave until they’ve said something smart.
  • Don’t set up a kid to get knocked down by some other kid.
  • Almost all time spent in a whole-group should be spent by students responding to a question.

Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

Where My Cynicism About Education Ends

I think it would be helpful for me to outline precisely how cynical I am about education.

I am very cynical about the impact of wealth on education, and especially on what that means for social mobility. I don’t think education is the great equalizer in American society. I think maybe at one point it was, but now? No. There is competition for whatever is educationally valuable, and those with the resources gobble up those things fairly efficiently. Thanks to widening inequality the bottom 25% of Americans have fewer chances to rise above through schooling just as the costs of not rising are as high as they’ve ever been. It’s not good, very bad, and it impacts education at every level.

I am somewhat cynical about the school curriculum, in particular the school math curriculum. Math is big, and the school curriculum is narrow, and a dozen mathematicians would end up with a dozen different curricula. Sure, every kid should know something about numbers and algebra. But what exactly are we going for in high school? What’s with the onslaught of function types and finicky expressions? But it seems hard at this point to change things in a major way — the stakes are too high, see everything above about widening inequality, we are apparently stuck with the math that we have, more or less.

I am a bit cynical about the ability of math class to keep people from killing each other, as Deborah Ball put it. The gap between some of these social aspirations and the reality of the classroom is just vast. I don’t seriously hope that my teaching helps create informed citizens, or sparks social change, or inspires people to act more kindly with each other…

…but that last one actually gets pretty close to the limits of my cynicism.

Because I’m not at all cynical about schooling. I think that schooling is essential. I think that learning is valuable, really any learning, even if what we’re learning is somewhat arbitrarily chosen. I think it’s good to spend your childhood learning. I think it’s good to spend your adulthood learning. I just like learning. I think a large part of being a kind and good person is being able to continue learning about others and their needs. Learning is good, I am not cynical about it.

And school is a good place for most kids to learn. Highly imperfect, but despite the imperfections I’m not at all cynical about the big picture. Get a bunch of kids together, get adults whose job is to be kind and nurturing towards these kids? I’m not cynical at all about that, this is my job, this is what I love doing. And because I’m not cynical about any of this, I’m pretty intolerant of adults who aren’t kind to children.

And even if I am not very optimistic about “teaching so that people stop killing each other,” I’m pretty committed to being kind to people in the classroom. I think that’s valuable. I think kids just need to be around people who are kind to them. Maybe because it’ll impact them in some way, or maybe just because it’s nice? Not in the future, but right now.

In other words, the kids are here, in your classroom, and wouldn’t it be better if they had a good time instead of a bad one? That’s what my teaching is about.

So, tallying it all up, I’m pretty cynical about the curriculum, teaching for social impact, or social mobility. What that leaves is the classroom, in particular my classroom, where every day I get another chance to do it right or not.

All the numbers from 1 to 500, ranked from worst to best by a middleschooler

500. 328

499. 149

498. 373

497. 55

496. 137

495. 18

494. 59

493. 452

492. 40

491. 470

490. 107

489. 379

488. 37

487. 165

486. 97

485. 377

484. 236

483. 252

482. 275

481. 479

480. 366

479. 297

478. 122

477. 465

476. 49

475. 154

474. 187

473. 191

472. 139

471. 235

470. 365

469. 315

468. 392

467. 414

466. 299

465. 117

464. 415

463. 425

462. 475

461. 48

460. 440

459. 173

458. 193

457. 142

456. 199

455. 229

454. 249

453. 329

452. 412

451. 218

450. 492

449. 43

448. 408

447. 311

446. 248

445. 150

444. 96

443. 306

442. 459

441. 146

440. 141

439. 123

438. 376

437. 319

436. 182

435.  60

434. 206

433. 177

432. 240

431.  28

430. 476

429. 389

428. 372

427. 214

426. 382

425. 225

424. 125

423. 444

422. 51

421. 127

420. 447

419. 8

418. 53

417. 342

416. 473

415. 274

414. 65

413. 321

412. 56

411. 245

410. 287

409. 257

408. 496

407. 375

406. 347

405. 417

404. 190

403. 468

402. 24

401. 438

400.  5

399. 266

398. 353

397. 16

396. 327

395. 4

394. 323

393. 22

392. 352

391. 91

390. 396

389. 212

388. 131

387. 215

386. 317

385. 129

384.  20

383. 442

382. 436

381. 99

380. 367

379. 82

378. 75

377. 103

376. 144

375. 100

374. 197

373. 270

372. 209

371. 201

370. 114

369. 37

368. 394

367. 58

366. 395

365. 437

364. 159

363. 259

362. 54

361. 243

360. 264

359. 439

358. 261

357. 185

356. 232

355. 289

354. 482

353. 135

352. 330

351. 304

350. 455

349. 296

348. 81

347. 38

346. 357

345. 364

344. 241

343. 90

342. 308

341. 341

340. 361

339. 242

338. 356

337.  3

336. 94

335. 344

334. 36

333. 47

332. 461

331. 128

330. 124

329.  88

328.  1

327. 318

326. 359

325. 272

324. 489

323. 178

322. 31

321. 222

320. 217

319. 325

318. 499

317. 490

316. 14

315. 413

314. 349

313. 401

312. 410

311. 407

310. 466

309. 83

308. 474

307. 405

306. 160

305. 106

304. 157

303. 210

302. 431

301. 138

300. 383

299. 307

298. 443

297. 427

296. 11

295. 195

294. 380

293. 45

292. 340

291. 110

290. 397 & 332 (tied)

288. 402

287. 263

286. 220

285. 497

284. 186

283. 370

282. 181

281. 80

280. 203

279. 21

278. 108

277. 424

276. 345

275. 445

274. 430

273. 227

272. 116

271. 120

270. 233

269. 246

268. 133

267. 313

266. 111

265. 386

264. 115

263. 136

262. 416

261. 400

260. 487

259. 72

258. 130

257. 262

256. 155

255. 278

254. 258

253.  9

252. 388

251. 277

250. 104

249. 354

248. 140

247. 87

246. 19

245. 238

244. 265

243. 471

242. 419

241. 143

240. 89

239. 355

238. 310

237. 491

236. 467

235. 500

234. 483

233. 93

232. 303

231. 368

230. 171

229. 305

228. 333

227. 198

226. 221

225. 109

224. 10

223. 448

222. 219

221. 456

220. 433

219. 42

218. 267

217. 384

216. 387

215. 404

214. 284

213. 205

212. 71

211. 337

210. 46

209. 273

208. 312

207. 166

206. 35

205. 32

204. 67

203. 480

202. 70

201. 226

200. 163

199. 92

198. 294

197. 26

196. 41

195. 271

194. 231

193. 230

192. 486

191. 44

190. 134

189. 86

188. 324

187. 216

186. 423

185. 79

184. 282

183. 50

182. 288

181. 29

180. 348

179. 293

178. 30

177. 322

176. 291

175. 78

174. 290

173. 298

172. 68

171. 172

170. 334

169. 161

168. 283

167. 279

166. 255

165. 485

164. 228

163. 162

162. 343

161. 204

160. 350

159. 84

158. 421

157. 478

156. 477

155. 25

154. 145

153. 192

152. 446

151. 435

150. 180

149. 385

148. 339

147. 168

146. 113

145. 360

144. 390

143. 23

142. 295

141. 434

140. 256

139. 351

138. 454

137. 39

136. 184

135. 371

134. 411

133. 276

132. 381

131. 251

130. 253

129. 281

128. 406

127. 73

126. 247

125. 76

124. 280

123. 292

122. 62

121. 374

120. 27

119. 460

118. 362

117. 472

116. 77

115. 112

114. 176

113. 331

112.  2

111. 495

110. 309

109. 52

108. 418

107. 320

106. 183

105. 151

104. 57

103. 61

102. 391

101. 174

100.  7

99. 268

98. 148

97. 175

96. 152

95. 300

94. 101

93. 484

92. 462

91. 285

90. 481

89. 213

88. 102

87. 153

86. 239

85. 95

84. 224

83. 393

82. 338

81. 17

80. 358

79. 286

78. 223

77. 346

76. 326

75. 316

74. 105

73. 119

72. 33

71. 74

70. 302

69. 156

68. 34

67. 167

66. 118

65. 399

64. 498

63. 207

62. 336

61. 188

60. 66

59. 378

58. 208

57. 254

56. 12

55. 301

54. 398

53. 98

52. 488

51. 429

50. 132

49. 426

48. 85

47. 422

46. 260

45. 147

44. 244

43. 179

42. 189

41. 450

40. 158

39. 314

38. 409

37. 196

36. 202

35. 363

34. 457

33. 63

32. 64

31. 403

30. 463

29. 458

28. 451

27. 200

26. 211

25. 453

24. 164

23. 250

22. 194

21. 464

20. 13

19. 126

18. 449

17. 234

16. 335

15. 432

14. 121

13. 494

12. 493

11. 170

10. 441

9.   6

8. 428

7. 15

6. 469

5. 369

4. 269

3. 169

2. 420

1. 69

YouCubed is More Than Just Sloppy About Research

When I started writing about YouCubed in 2017, I said they were “sloppy” aboout research. Partly this was because they have a habit of talking about cognitive science and neuroscience in unscientific ways, e.g. talking about “brain sparks” or “blocked working memory.” It’s like if a doctor told you that Asprin would make your neurons vibrate, you might consider that a sign of things to come.

But the bigger sloppiness was their interpretation of a study by Jason S. Moser. The study found that people improved their performance on some task after they made mistakes, the reason being that they noticed the mistakes and improved. In the hands of YouCubed, this Moser study was cited as saying “the brain sparks and grows when we make a mistake, even if we are not aware of it,” i.e. precisely the opposite of what it says.

(Robert Kaplinsky also looked into this, by the way, and never heard back from Moser.)

I don’t want to write the same thing over and over again, because that’s boring, but I do want to add that it’s not just about their interpretation of existing research. The research YouCubed itself releases is often extremely misleading, or so shoddy that it’s hard to even talk about it as research.

There is a particularly clear example in a recent release, “Raising Expectations and Achievement: The Impact of Two Wide Scale De-Tracking Mathematics Reforms.” The authors, Jo Boaler and David Foster, want to show that eliminating tracking leads to better outcomes for kids.

The state of California used to allow 8th Graders to take a variety of courses: Pre-Algebra, 8th Grade Math, Algebra 1, Geometry, or Algebra 2. Students would take a test at the end of the year in whatever course they were in. Which is rather chaotic, sure, but this is California we’re talking about, my understanding is if 100 people sign a piece of paper they have to pick a name out of a hat and then that person has to be governor. California is a bit chaotic.

Anyway, California wanted to do something about this, so they made everybody take a class called “8th Grade Math,” and then they all took the same test.

Well, first of all, are you surprised that scores were better on average after they made everyone take the same test? Would you have predicted it?

I’m not surprised, though I wouldn’t have predicted it. That’s because the tests are totally different. I don’t have any clue what the Geometry test in California is like! Why would I have an opinion about whether students would do better on that or this 8th Grade test? And even if they did, what would that even show? Maybe the 8th Grade test is easier and kids who used to take Algebra 2 aced it.

Anyway, as it turns out, scores went up after this “de-tracking” and Boaler and Foster call this “Study 2” in support of de-tracking.

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I couldn’t fit this into the post but remember the time they just sorta took math activities from around the web without attribution and called it a curriculum?
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By the way, YouCubed has an entire Data Science initiative.

There are other publications that are less funny, but no less flawed. In particular, there is a MOOC paper where 100s of people dropped out of YouCubed’s intervention, and the study just ignores it. But when hundreds of people are dropping out of your intervention…if hundreds of people stop taking a drug in the middle of the trial, you need to ask some questions, questions like “why did they stop taking it?” and “did their hair grow back after they stopped?” and so on.

So, what can I say, YouCubed and Boaler are not producing legitimate research.

Which, as I often point out, wouldn’t be so concerning on its own. This is the world we live in. People misuse research, literally all the time.

But YouCubed’s entire shtick is that they are research-based. They have risen to influence by beating the drum of research with particular enthusiasm. Their mission mentions research not once, but three times: “Our main goal is to inspire, educate and empower teachers of mathematics, transforming the latest research on maths into accessible and practical forms. We know from research how to teach mathematics well and how to bring about high levels of student engagement and achievement but research has not previously been made accessible to teachers.” Research, research, research.

All this while Jo Boaler has become the closest math education in the US has to a celebrity. (You’ve seen #JoOnAStick, perhaps?) And of course, part of what makes her an important voice in education is that she is a researcher, who does research, and can speak for research.

So, what is going on?

I don’t know. It’s clearly all connected to the first big controversy in Boaler’s career surrounding the Railside study, but I don’t really understand the full trajectory. Clearly, Boaler now sees the world of math education in terms of conflict, frequently highlighting the fact that her agenda has opponents, signing every YouCubed email with “Viva La Revolution [sic].” Was this tendency towards conflict a result of the wars of Railside, or one of their causes?

Either way, it’s been four years since I started writing about YouCubed and I’m feeling ready to go further than “sloppy.” For whatever reason, YouCubed as an organization frequently produces or cites research in ways that don’t show what they claim to show. As a result, I wouldn’t trust the organization (or Boaler) to make any research-based claim.

And the issues will continue to grow until the mathematics education community decides that it isn’t OK to mislead people about research.

A growth mindset is a tendency to explain things in a certain way

While I’m starting to feel more comfortable believing in growth mindset research, there’s still one thing that bugs me, which is how growth mindset is defined. Here is the definition from Mindset Works, a company founded by Carol Dweck & Co.:

When students believe they can get smarter, they understand that effort makes them stronger. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement.

This is fine, and I think I get it. But what does it mean for kids to “believe they can get smarter”? Not to get extremely pedantic, but I have some very pedantic questions to ask. What does “believe” mean? Does it mean that you sit a kid down over a nice glass of apple juice, start shooting the breeze about life, work, how busy we all are, and then raise the question: do you think you can get smarter?

And what does it mean to “get smarter”? Or to “understand” that effort makes one “stronger”? What if I think that working hard increases my knowledge but leaves me at the same smartness? What if I tell you over apple juice that effort makes me stronger, but then in the moment I curl up in a ball of learned helplessness?

Pedantry aside, after reading up and thinking about these things I don’t think any of these questions really matter. There’s a way of defining growth mindset that makes a lot more sense to me, and I think it’s true to research. Here goes:

When students have a tendency to explain their successes or failures in terms of their efforts, they tend to work harder. Therefore they put in extra time and effort, and that leads to higher achievement.

I think this has a few advantages over the “belief”-based definition. Here they are:

  • If you have a “belief” and an “understanding” about intelligence then you presumably carry that around with you from room to room. But a tendency to explain your experiences in certain ways can quite clearly vary from room to room, even minute to minute. (Maybe this tendency is really just what we mean by “belief”?)
  • It makes clear that mindset training does not require lying to people. Every success we have is the result of our innate abilities along with our efforts. Defined in terms of a tendency to explain, the only question is which of these factors we are paying attention to in the moment. If our attention is constantly drawn to innate abilities, that will be demotivating. If our attention is drawn to the equally valid factors that are in our control, we will likely be more motivated.
  • It explains why some of those studies have such eye-popping results. Not because they’ve instantly changed some deeply held belief concerning the nature of intelligence with a few videos and lectures about brains. It’s because they have created a context in which students have are set up to explain successes/failures in terms of effort. If you’re running an experiment and researchers make a big stink about effort, and then in the context of that same group activity you have a success/failure, you will of course be more likely to turn to that explanation.

So I’m very happy with all this.

One thing I wonder is whether it’s somehow important, for the purpose of all these materials and studies, to define mindset in the Mindset Works way. It makes less sense to me, but maybe it’s important. The interventions involve taking a thing that we think of as innate and telling people that it’s actually malleable. “Intelligence can grow”; “Smartness depends on effort”; “Your brain gets bigger”; “Talent takes hard work.” If this messaging is effective, maybe it works because people with a tendency towards innate reasons are reminded of it when they reach for those “fixed” explanations?

Probably. Probably it’s a bad messaging to say, “of course you have some innate limits, but life goes better if you don’t stew on that and instead think about the things you can control.” God knows that I’ve spent my fair share of time stewing about how life would be different if I had spectacular literary talent, a tremendous hook shot, God-level charisma and an inspiring childhood, the ability to create a search engine in 1998. Probably the innate-to-malleable messaging in its most direct form — “talent is a matter of effort” and so on — is perfectly appropriate.

But that’s the messaging that for years left me unsure whether I should believe the results of growth mindset research. They might be good messaging, but they rang untrue. But if “teach people that practice grows your brain” is just a snappy way of saying “encourage people to explain their achievement in terms of effort,” I can absolutely live with it.

What People Get Wrong About Memorizing Math Facts

I haven’t done a survey or anything, but I’m pretty sure the most common way people try to teach math facts (like 3 x 7 or 9 + 6) is by giving kids a bunch of problems on a page and asking them to solve them. Sometimes the activity is timed, sometimes not, but that’s pretty much it. I think the lesson starts with putting, like, 10 problems on the board, and then sort of asking “ok so who knows how to do 3 x 7, Timmy do you know” until all the problems are solved, and then they move to the worksheet.

One of the most popular curriculums in the US for elementary school is EngageNY/Eureka, and they have a version of this activity that they call “Sprints.” A “sprint” is 44 problems that you’re supposed to solve as quickly as you can. It’s a bunch of problems on a page.

Some people love these activities, but a lot of people in math education hate them. Many of them are haunted by memories of “Mad Minute” drills in school, where you’re supposed to answer as many math fact questions as you can in a minute — that’s mad. These opponents prefer non-stressful practice that doesn’t have a time constraint. In their classrooms the facts are maybe presented one at a time on the board, and students are asked to derive the solution any way they like. Then they talk about the strategies people used. It’s not problems on a page, it’s a problem on the board, and we’re talking about it.

A good example of a proponent of this view is Jo Boaler, whose YouCubed has a position paper titled “Fluency Without Fear.” Besides for number talks (talking about a problem on the board) she also calls for practice that is fun and engaging, stuff like dice games and puzzles. As usual, the essay talks a lot about “brain research” that supposedly proves that this stuff works. Sure it does, whatever. This is the other perspective.

And what I’d argue is that actually both of these approaches make the same mistake, and it’s a big one. Because what both approaches assume is that if kids solve a problem a bunch of times, they will commit it to memory. And the thing is that this is not true, at least not true enough.

What we need is a theory — an explanation, really — for when people remember something. Let’s not make it complicated, we can put it very simply: people remember something when they’ve successfully remembered it a bunch of times. I don’t think this is saying anything that retrieval practice advocates haven’t already said — the best practice for remembering something is practicing remembering it.

Suppose that I ask you to find the product of 12 and 5. What is going on in your head as you answer the question? Maybe you start counting by 5s. Or maybe you remember that 12 x 4 is 48, and you do 48 + 12. Or you grab a piece of paper and start adding 12s. None of this is retrieval practice — none of this is practicing pulling the fact out of memory.

(To be fair, maybe you did practice pulling 12 x 4 out of memory. And maybe, when we’re talking about this problem after you solve it, you’ll end up having to remember that your answer to 12 x 5 was 60. But neither of these are sure things, though they might help if you keep doing them for enough time.)

There is a very simple question we can ask to see if math fact practice is likely to help in the most direct way: Are kids practicing remembering? Or are they practicing something else?

Let’s apply this test to EngageNY’s Sprints. Will kids be practicing remembering when working on them? Here’s a basic point: not unless they are successful. If a kid is unsuccessful at pulling a math fact out of memory, what are they going to do? They are going to try to derive it, using some sort of strategy. Maybe they’ll try using the most basic sort of strategy, something like skip-counting for multiplication or counting on fingers for addition. But of course they’ll derive — what else are they supposed to do?

The “Sprint” aspect of this is encouraging kids to move quickly, which is really only possible if they have very efficient strategies or have many facts in memory. True, if kids are successful then they’ll get some good practice. But if kids are not successful, they will be forced to derive solutions, which will take more time and is not the sort of thing we were trying to help kids get better at. They will complete much fewer problems, especially if they thoughtfully arrive at solutions to the questions. It’s a trap. Not hard to believe that this stresses some kids out.

Which means that “problems on a page” is lousy practice that helps strong kids get stronger but leaves students who know fewer facts spending time practicing something else, a.k.a. Not Very Good News.

OK, but we have precisely the same problem with the “Fluency Without Fear” activities. What are kids thinking about during a Number Talk? They are thinking about — the whole point is to think about — the various strategies that we’ve used to derive some fact. That’s great if you’re trying to study strategies. But it’s not giving anyone a chance to practice remembering stuff.

(And I really do think it’s good to teach strategies. For some facts, like 9 + 8, a lot of successful people just use a very efficient strategy and never end up memorizing it. Plus, you can’t memorize every useful fact, at some point mental strategies come into play. But also because it’s easier to memorize 9 x 5 if you know that it’s going to end in a 5 or a 0, easier to remember 7 x 9 if you know the digits are going to sum to 9, easier to remember 9 + 8 if you know it’ll be in the teens. Strategies are useful, but practicing with strategies isn’t retrieval practice.)

In sum: the vast majority of math fact instruction doesn’t focus students on the thing that it’s purporting to teach. Good news, though, it’s far from impossible to engineer practice that does focus on memorization. But how?

The basic answer here is “flash cards,” which has two big advantages. First, if you fail you can turn over the card and stick the fact back in your memory, then try again. You aren’t left to derive the fact (though you can). Second, you can repeat problems frequently to practice the problems that you didn’t answer correctly.

There are more complicated things to say. Brian Stockus just wrote a great post showing how he is doing one-on-one flashcard work with his daughter. I’ve written about some of the ways I’ve used flashcards in my 3rd and 4th Grade classrooms. And of course there are a million computer programs that promise to help teach kids math facts…they all are basically flashcards, each and every one of them, combined with some sort of gamey practice. You want research on how to help kids with difficulty learning facts how to learn facts? You’re going to find a lot of flashcards.

Nothing is a sure thing, and I don’t mean to make this sound easy. There are no guarantees in teaching, especially when you’re working with a whole class. Follow some of the links above and you’ll find lots of practical advice on how to manage the difficulties. Given our focus on retrieval practice, it goes without saying that you should only introduce a few new facts at a time, and the goal needs to be for students to be successful at remembering them by the end of the practice session.

There’s no point bemoaning the state of discourse in education, it’s bad, everyone knows it’s bad. Stop me if it sounds like I’m bemoaning, but it seems to me that pretty much every discussion about math facts misses the point, viz. everything I said above. People don’t ask the right question, which is “how do kids remember stuff?” Or rather they do, but answer the question in clearly insufficient ways.

People do not necessarily remember the things they derive. Repeatedly deriving something in a way is practice avoiding retrieval from memory, which is (I admit!) a very mathematical thing to do. Mathematicians love talking about formulas that they derive every time and can never seem to remember. These theorems or formulas aren’t anything but upper-level math facts.

So we should remember that this is a real phenomenon, and that it’s true for little kids as well. If you want people to remember something, it’s often not enough to get them to derive it, whether on a big page of problems or as part of a number talk. As usual in education, the people with the strongest opinions have missed the point, and apologies for just a bit of bemoaning.

The Change-Resistance Explanation for Why Kids Struggle So Much with Algebra

A lot of researchers think that the math kids learn at an early age makes a difference when they learn algebra — or when they try to learn algebra but have a hard time with it. Specifically, everyone points their fingers at “mathematical equivalence” as crucially important. Equivalence isn’t just one thing, it’s more like a cluster that includes:

  • solving problems like 2 + 8 = ___ + 3 (it’ s not 10 and it’s not 13)
  • knowing how to define the equals sign as “is the same as” (not “the answer is”)
  • remembering equations like 2 + 8 = ___ + 3 after seeing them (“encoding in memory”) even if they aren’t in the most common a + b = c format (often kids reconstruct the uncommon ones incorrectly)

Taken together, these can predict a certain amount of a kid’s future success in learning algebra. And this prediction goes beyond overall math ability, IQ, or many other things that you might want to control for.

Here’s a fantastic new paper from leading researchers on all this. The intro and discussion at the end contain tons of readable, thoughtful exposition on all these things:

Looking at these relationships between early equivalence knowledge and later algebra success leads inevitably to a conclusion: it’s really important to help kids understand how equations and equality work in their early years of school. If you can improve knowledge of equivalence, more kids will learn algebra.

OK, but why does this stuff help? A lot of theories don’t add up, but Nicole McNeil writes about a “change-resistance” hypothesis that makes a lot of sense to me.

The hypothesis goes like this: It’s harder to learn a second language as you grow older. Your knowledge of the first language is so strong that you lose flexibility. Your understanding of language is highly structured by your deep and thorough experience with the first language, and it is really hard to change how you think. You may never be 100% successful, you will never sound like a native speaker, you will never feel entirely comfortable with your non-native tongue. Not because of what you haven’t learned, but because of what you already have.

Students usually encounter equations for the first time at school, and when they do it’s often a heavy dose of equations that look pretty much the same: NUMBER SOMETHING NUMBER EQUALS BLANK. Four plus three equals blank. Five minus one equals blank. Sure, sometimes you get a question mark or a box instead of a blank. Yes, eventually multiplication and division make an appearance. Either way, there is this very rigid format to the equations kids experience in their early years.

The change-hypothesis account says, this changes kids. This is their native language.

It explains why kids can’t solve equations like 10 + 2 = ___ + 3, instead answering 12 or 15. Isn’t that how equations always work? It explains why kids define the equals sign in a narrow way as “here’s the answer” — that’s how it’s being used in all the equations they’ve experienced! And it explains why their memories have a hard time holding on to the nontraditional equations, as memory has been structured around the a + b = c format.

Now, here comes a subtlety, because we haven’t explained why this impacts later algebra success. A clean story would be that these mathematical equivalence skills are lacking for algebra students. They’re clearly prerequisite for success with algebra. If you think that equations are always telling you to perform some operation with a numerical result, yeah, algebra is going to be tough. If you can’t solve equations like 3 + 10 = __ + 5, why would you expect to be able to solve 2x – 3 = 5 + x? If you never learn mathematical equivalence, of course algebra is going to be tough for you.

Here’s the thing, though:

  1. The best predictor of later success is solving those problems (3 + 10 = __ + 5), following by encoding, and having a good definition of the equal sign doesn’t predict much at all
  2. Kids pretty much learn how to solve those types of problems as they get older (in one study that we’ll get to in a moment, undergrads solved 91.8% of these problems correctly when untimed)

But McNeil and others have an explanation for all this, which is that it’s not just about the learning. Go back to the language analogy — maybe you taught yourself to conjugate correctly in French, even though it’s not your native language. Maybe you studied really hard and practiced a great deal. But what happens in stressful moments, when you aren’t able to explicitly think through the situation? What happens when you’re negotiating over the phone and trying to remember the correct suffix for the verb? Or what happens when you’re trying to read an especially tricky French text?

The change-resistance explanation says that the initial, narrow way of thinking about equations never goes away, and it impacts your ability to learn more advanced material later.

I love some of the predictions and studies McNeil has used to test this hypothesis. My favorite are when she takes adults who — as I mentioned a moment ago — can pretty much solve the 3 + 10 = __ + 5 equations when you give them enough time, and she shows that their native language is lurking beneath the surface. There are two ways that she does this:

  • Rushing them with a time constraint, and showing that when you rush a competent adult they start to make the same mistakes that 2nd and 3rd Graders make — and eye-tracking data shows that they don’t look across both sides of the equals sign when analyzing the equations, consistent with the left-to-right way of reading basic traditional equations
  • Asking people to solve an arithmetic problem (like 8 + 4) reduces their ability to solve equations like 3 + 10 = __ + 5 under time pressure, compared to a control condition where participants had to add colors instead of numbers (blue and green makes ____)

According to this view, what ends up making it harder to learn algebra is this strong bias towards a + b = c equations. It’s this tendency to see equations of this type more easily. It’s possible to learn algebra even if you have this “native language” but it requires a certain amount of mindful redirection of your attention. This saps your available cognitive resources — a little or a lot, depending on the strength of the a + b = c paradigm — and makes it harder for you to learn algebra.

It also explains why interventions that simply expose students to nontraditional problem solving formats (such as 4 = 2 + 2) can make a difference — you’re really trying to disrupt the strength of the a + b = c paradigm in its formative years. McNeil’s current approach though is more holistic, focusing not just on nontraditional equation formats. I suppose this makes sense — you need to give kids a way to avoid reforming that strong bias towards a + b = c even if they continue to see problems in that format after the intervention.

If the change-resistance story is right, though, I’d think that the ultimate solution to the problem would be teachers and curricula using a variety of equation formats. There’s no real reason why equations have to all look like NUMBER OPERATION NUMBER EQUALS BLANK. I don’t think anyone says changing the way equations look would magically help everyone become great at algebra, but I think there’s a very plausible explanation for why it could really help.

What actually even is a growth mindset?

Not so long ago it seemed that growth mindset — briefly, the idea that your beliefs about ability impact your reactions to failure — might be on the ropes. The so-called “replication crisis” called into question research findings across many different fields, but especially social psychology. “Nobel laureate challenges psychologists to clean up their act,” wrote Ed Yong in 2012 after Daniel Kahneman called out Carol Dweck’s entire field for its underpowered studies, unreplicable work, and habit of spelunking down a dataset to find noteworthy results. (The replication crisis would come for Kahneman soon enough.)

Many of Carol Dweck’s TED talk colleagues have been lost in the reproducibility wars. Remember power posing? There were a number of prominent replication attempts of growth mindset that failed, and it seemed as if mindset was about to be essentially debunked.

But the 2nd Act of growth mindset research has been intriguing, especially once David Yeager got involved. He has helped design the sort of large, pre-registered, independently-monitored experiments that emerged from the 2010s as safeguards against researcher shenanigans. And there is now a fairly plausible story in which growth mindset holds up in a real way as a robust research finding.

“What Can Be Learned From Growth Mindset Controversies?” is the question Yeager and Dweck ask in a recent research article. They list four controversies surrounding mindset:

  1. Do mindsets predict student outcomes?
  2. Do student mindset interventions work?
  3. Are mindset intervention effect sizes too small to be interesting?
  4. Do teacher mindset interventions work?

And, in the spirit of not wasting your time, here is their answers to these questions:

  1. Do mindsets predict student outcomes? YES
  2. Do student mindset interventions work? YES
  3. Are mindset intervention effect sizes too small to be interesting? NO
  4. Do teacher mindset interventions work? NOT YET

There are conflicting findings in the mindset literature, but Yeager and Dweck attribute those to either sloppy methods or heterogeneity in impact, i.e. the fact that not everyone benefits from having more of a growth mindset.

This is crucially important for them, as the controversies have allowed them to clarify who mindset interventions will work for: students who are at risk of doing poorly but whose efforts would be rewarded. If you’re in a school where your hard work won’t be rewarded, mindset interventions won’t help. If you’re not at-risk of academic failures, mindset doesn’t come into play very much.

This sort of picking and choosing about who mindset interventions actually works for may set off your “research shenanigans” radar, and Yeager and Dweck get that. “We are aware that these kind of moderation results might, in the past, have emerged from a post hoc exploratory analysis and would, therefore, be hard to believe.” That’s right, this is the data spelunking mentioned above. However:

“But these patterns emerged from a disciplined preanalysis plan that was carried out by independent Bayesian statisticians who analyzed blinded data using machine-learning methods, and the moderators were confirmed by an independent research firm’s analyses, over which we had no influence.”

In other words, it is now part of the mindset hypothesis that this only matters for these students, and this hypothesis has support from the big, well-designed studies designed by Yeager and Dweck. Mic dropped, end of paper.

***

This is all very interesting, but any skepticism I’ve had about mindset was more rooted in confusion than methodological doubt. It just has always seemed incredibly implausible to me that these interventions should be able to make any real difference at all. So the part of the paper that I was actually most interested in was the succinct and admirably clear bit titled “What is Mindset Theory?”

I’m leaving a big chunk of this section here in case you’d like to read it yourself, but feel free to skip it. What I want to do below is explain as clearly as I can what Mindset Theory is and what it predicts, and why it would only apply to students at risk of failure. I don’t know if I believe it yet, but I now realize that there are two very important ways that people misunderstand what the Mindset Theory involves:

  • It has nothing to do with the belief that “you can get better with practice”
  • It largely has to do with the explanations that occur to people in the heat of a failure, like what happens to pop into their heads
Feel free to read or to ignore.

Here is an observation: when people fail, they react differently. Some people seek to figure out why they failed, seek to improve, etc. And others just throw up their hands and give up. What explains these different reactions?

As an example, take me and my basketball skills. I’ve started taking going to the park sometimes and shooting around. I am, objectively speaking, bad at shooting. My form is garbage. I received one year of basketball coaching when I was in 7th Grade, but the coach pinned a kid to the floor during gym class and got fired, so it was a shaky season. When I go to the park, I miss something like 90% of the shots I take (and 100% of those I don’t?). That said, I do have good days where it feels like my shot it on and things are just going in.

Here are some things that I think are basically objective facts:

  • I am bad at shooting a basketball compared to, I don’t know, people who are good at it.
  • If I practiced, I would get better.
  • Even if I practiced, I would never be an all-time great basketball shooter

None of these beliefs have anything to do with mindset. That’s right, even the second one about practice. That’s not mindset, not relevant here.

Now, imagine that I had a particularly bad day of shooting around at the park (like yesterday). You could imagine me not really thinking very much at all about why I did so poorly. Or you could imagine me trying to figure it out. And if I did try to explain it, to what would I attribute my failures?

In my case, I attribute yesterday’s bad shooting to a bunch of factors. First, it was raining, that’s not my fault. Also, as I mentioned, I’m not very good at shooting a basketball. Like, fundamentally, if you’re not very good at something then sometimes you’re going to be really bad at it. Now, do I think of that ability as a fixed thing? Absolutely not. I understand that I could get much better with practice. But as of now, I’m just bad at it. I think that’s a pretty productive explanation for my failure. I just need to practice.

But this is me being reflective. What about in the heat of the moment, as I’m encountering the failure for the first time? Here I might get emotional — I’m just no good at this, for whatever reason. I can imagine if a lot of people were watching me shoot around or if I was around much stronger shooters, or if I was expected in some way to be better at shooting than I am, I might just give up. And I might explain it as “I’m just no good” even if I also believe that I could get better with practice.

OK, so what does mindset theory say?

Mindset theory says that this isn’t just about basketball or academic performance — that I might have general beliefs that determine the sort of explanations I give for my failures. I might be tempted to think (as they say) “I have a certain amount of intelligence (or ability -MP) and you really can’t do much to change it.” That belief is totally consistent with a belief that you can improve with practice.

But it’s somewhat confusing to call this a “belief” because if so, it’s not a belief that you necessarily will profess all the time or in any situation. Maybe this is something you say on your bad days but not your good days. Maybe it’s something you say about ability 70% of the time, but when pushed you concede that you can do a lot to change your ability. This is a more complex and subtle — maybe more accurate — way to think about what belief means.

OK, but let’s put the pieces all together. From the perspective of mindset theory, if you are doing worse at something that you’re “supposed” to be better at, you will be tempted to explain that in terms of ability being the most important factor. Sure, you might agree that you could improve with practice. But you might believe that this would take an enormous amount of practice, given your ability. The worldview where ability or intelligence is the most important factor is the so-called “fixed mindset.” To the extent that you hold this belief strongly and absolutely, you have more of a fixed mindset. If it’s weaker or there are a lot of exceptions, you have more a growth mindset.

Can you teach people not to see the world in this way? And if you teach them that ability is not the most important factor for navigating life in our world, does that change the explanations they give for their failures? Does it lead to better actions?

Mindset theory says, yeah, it does.

One thing that’s interesting to me about this is the “more or less” or “can’t do much” side of it. There are obviously things that I can’t do because of my ability. I can’t be in the NBA, and while I agree that I can get better at basketball with practice, I don’t think I can do much about that. I think that degree of excellence at a sport is more or less about ability.

But that’s not really a problem for Yeager and Dweck. They don’t have a theory about the NBA — they have a theory about academic environments. That theory is you can teach people who fail a lot but have the potential to succeed that failure isn’t mostly about ability. And their theory is that this changes how they respond to failure.

Is it crazy that you could teach people this in an hour? I don’t know. I guess this is the same as asking whether I believe their research? I think it’s not absurd to say that you could get people headed in the right direction with an hour-long intervention that attempts to teach one big idea: that success in school mostly has to do with how hard you work. And it makes sense that this would only work if it were true — kids don’t benefit from this perspective in schools that don’t reward effort.

Maybe one way to think about why this works only for kids who experience a lot of failure is because they’re super likely to experience failure not long after the intervention. I bet a lot of kids have forgotten about this one-hour mindset lesson by the time they fail for the first time.

Maybe kids who are prone to failure get a chance to exercise this new perspective not long after their lesson, and that makes it stick longer. It gets the ball rolling in the right direction, and if their efforts are rewarded? It sticks for good.

I’m still trying to make sense of it, but Mindset Theory is starting to make some sense to me.

A Good Eye for Arithmetic

While trying to get my lovably dorky son to put his math down and go to sleep, I came across this mistake in his work:

I rewrote it for clarity and so forth.

He is seeing this equation symmetrically — good! — but in this case he’s using mirror symmetry. From this point of view, the right side of the equation needs to be read from right to left. Isn’t this nice? That’s how equations should work.

It goes to show: a certain amount of mathematical knowledge is the ability to see things in a particular way. This is most evident in areas of math that involve shapes and stuff, but it’s just as true in arithmetic and algebra.

Jeffrey K. Bye recently shared a paper with me that explores this. The title is “Mastering algebra retrains the visual system to perceive hierarchical structure in equations” and, yeah, it’s about that. “Mathematical practice is undeniably perceptual,” they write. Some people might be inclined to say that none of this matters to the mathematician. But the algebraic notation, only a few hundred years old in most cases, is often sensitive to mathematical meaning:

While low-precedence operations like addition require a full symbol (p + q), multiplication requires only an abbreviated symbol (pq) or no symbol at all (pq). If the visual system were sensitive to such regularities, then the hierarchical structure of algebra could be read off directly from an expression’s layout. And, indeed, people are sensitive to these visuospatial norms.

Part of learning algebra is learning to see certain kind of letters and numbers as especially significant. This is a cognitive thing, but it’s also a perceptual one. A trained eye looks at these expressions differently — they have structure! We see expressions as composed of “chunks” of mathematics:

David’s teaching strategy here is to chunk a shape. Then he represents the structure with a structured arithmetic expression. The chunks of arithmetic correspond to chunks of shape.

The claim of the paper is that learning algebra literally retrains your eye to see strings of symbols as objects. Their premise is that you can tell the difference between a trained and an untrained eye by how much attention is necessary to answer a question. The researchers would show participants an expression like w x a + c x f, and then ask a question about it. For example, sometimes they would color two of the letters and asking if the colors were the same of different. The goal wasn’t to catch some people answering incorrectly. The idea was that the amount of time they spend answering each question could be significant.

figure1

Their results suggested that when the mathematically significant variables are involved, people familiar with that structure answer the question with less required attention. Or, in their more jargony words, “participants who had mastered the hierarchical structure of algebra exhibited object-based attention for algebraic sub-expressions.” Right, that.

They raise another interesting point, which is that teachers and others sometimes just hate when kids aren’t thinking about things when they solve problems. The mistake that my son made at the start of this post was not the result of thinking — it was just his gut “intuition,” really a perceptual error. But when people get really good at math, they don’t think about things all the time. First they think, then it becomes “automatic.” And one of these paths towards automaticity is the retraining of the visual system:

The current results suggest that relying on visual processing might be a boon, not a barrier, to mathematical reasoning. This might come as a surprise. Confronted with evidence of students’ reliance on misleading, superficial visual strategies in algebra, some have argued that mathematical training should avoid and even suppress perceptual strategies (e.g., Kirshner, 1989; Kirshner & Awtry, 2004). For example, when asked to solve 4 + 4/2 + 2, some students might be led to answer “2,” incorrectly, because of the superficially tempting, perceptually strong 4 + 4 and 2 + 2 groups. Indeed, we sometimes found evidence for perceptual grouping around addition, rather than multiplication, particularly among participants who had yet to master the hierarchical syntax of algebra. But the fact that novices use perceptual strategies to arrive at incorrect answers does not imply that experts abandon such strategies entirely. [My emphasis – MP] Instead, experts may refine those perceptual strategies so that they become reliable, robust, and rapid routes to correct solutions (Goldstone et al., 2010; cf., Hutchins, 1995, and Rumelhart et al., 1986).

Do you have to explicitly teach students to see the structure of expressions and equations? Or does it just happen on its own when kids learn a lot of algebra via the usual concepts, procedures, skills? I don’t know. I don’t think this paper knows either.

After my son made this mistake I first said, please just go to sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning. But when he insisted, I said, this is not how we read equations. We read both sides of the equation like we read English, left to right. Oh, he said, and he started trying to erase. Yosef, I said, please go to sleep. And then I walked out.

There’s something powerful and just a little bit scary about this kind of learning. We learn what we learn, and at some point along the way it forever changes how what we see when we look out at the world. It structures it, and then we just can’t avoid it. We’re teaching ourselves to see objects where before there were none. We can do that with algebraic expressions, OK that seems fine, but we must be doing this all the time. You know how first impressions always seem to be right? We’ve done that to ourselves, man. What we see is often not so different from how we think, something good to remember.

What if we ban private schools?

Countries handle private education in vastly different ways. Some countries have a lot of it. Some have none of it. The US has fewer students in private schools than most other countries, but as a result compared to other countries our private school students are quite wealthy.

Here is a graph showing the percentage of students in different countries attending private school. The red parts are truly private; the grey parts are dependent on government funding but privately operated, so sort of like charters in the US:

Image
Japan has a lot of private schools. So does Mexico.

In the US, there is a fancy private school to fancy college pipeline. Fancy colleges are a font of inequality. Which leads many to a tempting thought: what if we banned private schools? What if we simply passed a law that made it illegal for such schools to exist on the grounds of promoting education equity, as many people have suggested?

Let’s take a closer look at banning private schools.

THAT IS DEFINITELY ILLEGAL

The first thing that would happen is that courts would declare the law unconstitutional. We know this would happen, because it already happened. In 1922 the state of Oregon passed the Oregon Compulsory Education Act. The law’s main target was Catholic schools, but it impacted all private academies. The law made it so that one could not fulfill their compulsory education requirement through private school attendance. Unless you had some other exemption (e.g. homeschooling) you had to attend your local public school.

The Ku Klux Klan were really pushing this law in Oregon. At the time they were huge defenders of public education, and this was all part of a national panic about immigration. (The Immigration Act of 1924 was a few years away.) Cited in David Tyack’s piece, here is the statement put forth by the Oregon Klan’s Grand Dragon: “The Klan favors … The American public school, non-partisan, non-sectarian, efficient, democratic, for all the children of all the people, equal educational opportunities for all.”

Here’s the full statement. Sheesh.

Anyway, the state was sued and the case made it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was, like, nah man, this is very unconstitutional. It violates the 14th Amendment, the one that extends the rights of liberty to all citizens:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

The world of 2021 is of course very different from 1922. The people in favor of banning private schools today are absolutely not trying to Americanize immigrants. They are definitely not the KKK. Still, it’s very illegal in this country to ban private schools.

WE DID IT ANYWAY

Oh, I don’t know how. We change the constitution. The Supreme Court reconsiders. We find some weird loophole in the 14th Amendment, and also the 1st Amendment. Reboot the universe with a magic ring. Whatever.

As of 2017, about 10% of the nation’s students are in private schools, which makes 5.7 million students. That percentage has been declining slowly, with the loss mostly felt by Catholic schools. About a quarter of private school students attend nonsectarian schools. The rest attend religious schools.

What sort of religions are we talking about? Mostly Christian, mostly Catholic, followed by Jewish.

The United States of America is a bit of a global outlier when it comes to teaching religion. We are the land of strict separation of Church and State. But in much of Europe some sort of non-doctrinal religious education is compulsory. In Finland, a course in religious education is compulsory but you get to choose your flavor depending on your religious beliefs. According to a professional organization for Finnish religion teachers: “In 2012 91.9% of pupils in comprehensive school took part in Evangelical-Lutheran [Religious Education], 1.4% in Orthodox, 1.5% in Islam, 0.5% in other religions and 4% in secular Ethics.” Seems like most people just go with the flow and take the Lutheran course. Still, a nice gesture.

Here’s a soft prediction for this fantasy scenario: if private schools were ever banned in the United States, we would end up letting schools teach religion again.

Another soft prediction: We would have to get more serious about religious accomodations more generally. For example, in New York City providing kosher or halal food in public schools is still at the “let’s try this interesting experiment” stage and not “we give you the food you’ll eat” stage. But most Jewish students who keep kosher attend private schools. If you got rid of those schools, you’d need to decide how to deal with religious kids with restrictions.

ENOUGH ABOUT RELIGION, LET’S BAN PRIVATE SCHOOL FOR RICH PEOPLE

About 2.5% of US students are attending non-sectarian schools. I don’t know where this 2.5% falls on the wealth spectrum, but give-or-take special programs and financial aid, yeah, let’s go ahead and assume that these kids are all pretty well-off financially.

What happens if they all go into the public school system?

The first thing is that scores for these students, particularly math scores, would probably go up. Private schools as a sector underperform public schools on math tests, as argued in detail by “The Public School Advantage.”

At least in the US, I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious why scores would go up. The government surveys schools to see how much time they spend on various subjects. With the autonomy that private school purchases, these schools spend less time on math.

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Also ELA. I made this chart.

That’s a more or less minor point, but I think it’s helpful to remember that asking private school kids to return to public school has the potential to exacerbate certain inequalities, even as it reduces others.

But that’s small stuff. The big, lasting impact of eliminating private schools would be out of control residential segregation. Even more out of control than it currently is.

Julie Halpert wrote a really phenomenal piece about public and private schools that catalogs some of what you might expect in a pure public system. Wealthy people can — and frequently do — use their money to create insanely privileged institutions within the public school system:

On average, home prices near high-performing schools were $205,000 more expensive than they were in areas with low-performing ones. This suggests that in an all-public-school world, those with means would likely buy real estate in well-resourced districts—removing their resources from needier school communities and diluting from those poorer areas the pool of high achievers who experts say can benefit lower-performing students.

If you put wealthy students from powerful families back in the public school system, the main thing you’d get is more ultra-wealthy public schools. It’s hard to see how poorer students benefit from that.

And if that doesn’t work, wealthy parents who are sharing a district with poorer ones have another tool in their kit: they can secede, forming a newer, “higher performing” district:

Between 2000 and 2016, 63 communities split off from their existing school districts to form new ones. In just the last two years, 10 more communities have followed. Most of the new districts are more affluent, and less racially diverse, than those they left behind. Another 16 communities are actively exploring efforts to form their own school districts, according to the report.

But would this be widespread? Would there be some benefits for poorer students on the margins? Maybe policies and tests would be more reasonable if wealthy students were subjected to them?

I don’t know. Maybe. Though our system seems to accomodate plenty of double standards currently, so I don’t see why we couldn’t end up with music classes for rich public school kids and test prep for the poor, just as we have now.

To me, the problems in this country are the problems of wealth, and eliminating the most obvious manifestations of extreme wealth would do nothing to solve those problems. You’d just end up with slightly less apparent inequalities within the public school system. It’s like trying to reduce food inequality by banning high-end steakhouses. Or, for a much closer analogy, trying to improve health outcomes for poorer Americans by banning conscierge medicine. Ban private schools for the wealthy and we’ll just have a dozen more Thomas Jefferson High Schools.

In short: it’s definitely illegal to ban private schools for wealthy students. But even if you could all it would do is increase their math scores and more importantly spur the creation of new ultra-wealthy schools and school districts. This already happens in the public school system — the only reason it’s not worse at the moment is because so many wealthy students are educated privately. I don’t see how that leads to equity.

But maybe, if we really did pull off the ban, my kids would be able to get kosher food in public schools, which would at least be something.