*The Case Against Education*: Response to a Reformer

My reaction to Brett van Zuiden's critique

Brett van Zuiden has written a thoughtful critique of my The Case Against Education. Here is my response, point-by-point. Brett’s in blockquotes; I’m not.

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I’ve spent the last 10 years of my career working in and around K-12 education, so I was intrigued when I came across The Case Against Education. Overall, I thought the book was great — I deeply appreciate the willingness to think critically about the worthiness of the education industry.

Likewise.

Areas where I am in agreement

• Much — potentially 80% as stated in the book — of the individual benefit of education comes from signaling. Bryan references David Labaree’s work Someone Has to Fail which discusses this in greater depth, but I am in agreement that Red Queen races around status signaling are abundant in education in a way that is harmful to children. 

Good, though let’s not forget about harm to taxpayers who pay the bills, and consumers and employers who have are deprived of able-bodied young workers.

• I agree that the “College For All” movement is misguided because most discussions of the college premium talk only about the college degree premium, ignoring both dropout rates and the difference in value depending on the prestige of the institution and the choice of major. The Case Against Education’s analysis on the personal returns to college is the most comprehensive and compelling that I’ve seen; thank you for doing the hard work of collecting the data and crunching the numbers!

Someone noticed — a rare exception to my slogan that “no one cared about my spreadsheets.”

• What schools teach is determined by state standards and tests, which is in turn decided by a very small number of career academics; the system is designed to be great preparation for academics and lousy for everyone else…

It’s not even very good preparation for academics! Most obviously, the dissertation phase of the Ph.D. is so different from everything that precedes it that a large share of hitherto excellent students flounder.

• I loved the book’s points about the internet making “enlightenment” more available than ever, but that it is still wildly underutilized because most students are apathetic about what adults ask them to learn. This extends to adults as well — most of my peers who studied hard in high school and college no longer read books, let alone take advantage of the internet’s abundant supports for learning. 

Indeed.

Different perspectives I’d offer:

• While signaling is dominant in a world where students are competing to be hired by employers, in a world with more entrepreneurship I suspect students would demand more authentic human capital development. The market corrects skill vs. credential disparities faster when people are selling products than when they are in a bureaucracy. I would be very interested in seeing a fuller analysis of this, but my sense is that the rise of high school and then college enrollment in the US roughly tracks the shift in the US labor market away from farmers and little-c capitalists towards larger corporations. I see this dynamic play out in Silicon Valley: Credentials are still valued, but uncredentialed talented folks can pretty quickly establish themselves by making things people want.

You make a good point, but the harsh reality is that most humans aren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship isn’t just intellectually demanding; it’s emotionally demanding. To successfully run a business in a complex and changing world, you have to be a self-starter eager to bet your fortune on your own judgment. Few fit this description.

Furthermore, this dichotomy between working for yourself and working for others is overstated. Yes, most educational signaling involves workers using their credentials to impress potential employers. But entrepreneurs also use credentials to impress potential customers. It’s a common sales tactic.

• A few places in the book advocate for “test and track” — when schools have done this in practice, it was usually pretty racist in practice even if in theory it could be done in a meritocratic way. By “racist” I don’t just mean “there were racial differences in the makeup of different tracks” but educators sorting/nudging students based on race rather than actual ability.

Taken literally, you’re right, because, conditional on test scores, the U.S. education system heavily disfavors Asians and moderately disfavors whites. But I assume you’re talking about the opposite problem, where blacks and Hispanics get worse treatment conditional on their scores.

If so, what’s your evidence? Can you show me a single paper with data on tracking, test scores, and race after 1970 that shows that blacks and Hispanics were treated notably worse given their test scores?

• I think a better approach that we use in my school network is to focus on broad exposure to different career paths early (internships/apprenticeships, job shadows, student entrepreneurship, etc.) and then let young people naturally sort out what they like and are good at vs. deciding it for them via a test. Think “free market” of matching people to professions rather than the “planned economy” of test and track.

The free market doesn’t work by magic. It works by collecting and acting on useful information. And test scores are extremely useful information! While “letting young people naturally sort out what they like and are good at” is a fine goal, test scores should be a big part of this natural sorting process. If a brilliant child aims too low — or, as more often happens, a not-so-brilliant child aims too high — you should tell him. A functional educational system has to occasionally crush kids’ unrealistic dreams.

• There are two factors that I think meaningfully change the calculus on society’s return to education that I didn’t see in the book. My hunch is that these make the expected value positive for universal K-12 but not for universal post-secondary:

1. Childcare: as we saw during the school shutdowns during COVID, if kids aren’t in school it significantly impacts parental productivity. Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent. I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates. Maybe some people think this would be a better world, but it would certainly reduce the tax base.

I fully agree that daycare is valuable for young children. But unless you’re teaching them useful skills, daycare should be fun. Most school is not fun.

In a non-agrarian society, my guess is that having a bunch of 12-18yos roaming around not in school would cause lots of problems. You could say that these students should go into the workplace…

Exactly. By this age, most kids should be doing apprenticeships. Almost all historic societies have employed 12-18 year-olds. They may not be very mature, but they’re mature enough.

, but without very robust oversight I think we’d see a lot more abuse — while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools have created structural advantages that make it easier for them to prevent and catch this versus in the workplace.

“A lot more abuse” seems pretty paranoid to me. Until recently, it was common for teens to have part-time jobs, and abuse of teen workers was a minor issue at most. Abuse is a lot worse when you’re stuck in a classroom than when you can quit anytime. And teens are notoriously prone to quitting.

So then, if you allow that the government should run childcare, you might as well try to do something useful with that time…

Or, let kids have fun.

and as expensive as $13k/child/year sounds, it’s cheaper than the average daycare costs.

I have to blame government regulation for that, since you could obviously provide the actual service on the cheap.

2. “Fat tails”: The fact that most kids find most of their classes useless and boring doesn’t automatically mean that the expected value per student is not positive. I took a computer science course in high school and it changed the course of my life and career, but that same course was probably boring and useless for most of the other people in the class.

Yes, the distribution has long right tails. But what makes you so confident that the tails are “fat”? To me, the tails look thin. Razor thin. That’s why The Case Against Education compares these to the classic hoarder’s self-justification: “I might need it.”

Looking back, it’s easy to say that I should have taken that course and the other students shouldn’t have, but I don’t think you could have predicted who would have their life changed by a course a priori.

I couldn’t predict a priori. But I can predict using base rates and test scores. Learning CS often gets people much better jobs… if they’re smart enough to learn the material.

My uncle took French in high school, went to Paris for a semester in college, met a woman there and lived in France for most of his adult life. French was probably a waste of time for nearly every other student in his class, but for my uncle it was a big deal!

I’d say there are at least 10,000 students of French who get nothing but misery out of it for every man like your uncle. Is that really a “fat tail”?

Steve Jobs learning about calligraphy is about as “mickey mouse” of a course as you could get, but it turns out he put that to use in designing the Apple computer — as he says, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. At an individual level, is the opportunity to take one life-changing course worth sitting through 30 other boring/useless ones? Maybe!

By this logic, why don’t you enroll in 30 random courses over the next four years and see what happens? “Thin tails” is the best response.

At a societal level, If the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 widely available within 18 months of the virus appearing, that might very well justify keeping the requirement, even if 99.9% of students find it useless.

Or, you could use base rates and testing. And don’t forget all of the brilliant minds that go into academia, then work on pet projects that deliver zero real-world value.

Minor squabbles

These smaller issues are somewhat peripheral to the main argument of the book, but were distracting for me and would be unfortunate reasons for folks who work in education to dismiss the book entirely.

• Page 34 in the paperback: Physical Education isn’t for preparing students to be professional athletes, it’s a public health campaign like the requirements a) to teach Sex Ed, b) to offer free lunch for low income students, and c) to require vaccinations. Schools are the avenue by which these public health campaigns are delivered, but to me they are distinct from the case for or against education.

I stand by this. A large share of boys dream of becoming professional athletes, and the school system in general and coaches in particular heavily encourage their pipedreams. And what evidence is there that a few minutes of daily sports durably improves kids’ health, anyway?

• Page 172: schools have no incentive to inflate special education numbers; students with IEPs cost schools way more than the meager additional funds they get per student with an IEP. The numbers have grown due to parents pushing for their students to be classified as having a disability (lots of reasons why). If a school tries to push back they can be sued for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. It’s a thorny, messy topic, but I certainly don’t blame schools for the surprisingly high percentages. 

I’ve read nothing about this for almost a decade, so maybe you’re right. But it looks to me like parents and schools both push for disability diagnoses. I suspect schools’ main motive is ideological, but money is still plausibly a marginal factor. What if a school takes a kid who would have simply been considered “lazy” in the 1980s, diagnose him with ADHD, and mainstream him? That’s not a financial win for the school?

Again, thank you Bryan for the thought-provoking book and the opportunity to share my thoughts here. Given that we spend > $1,000,000,000,000/year on education, it’s worth thinking critically about it, and I’d appreciate hearing discussion and counterpoints from the community.

Likewise, Brett.