I think that if at any time pre-Covid someone had suggested that regular, in-person school attendance was not that important and kids would be okay just watching video lessons and doing online work, that would have been understood as a kind of right-wing techno-libertarian crank viewpoint. Thanks to the pandemic, though, we got to find out if the techno-libertarian cranks are right about school.It turns out that they are not. In Virginia, for example, student test scores plummeted and the racial gap in scores exploded
And we’ve seen this basically everywhere. McKinsey and NWEA found huge learning losses concentrated in poorer kids nationwide. Texas and Indiana reported big early test score declines. A study from the Netherlands indicated that during an eight-week period of virtual schooling, students learned basically nothing on average.
and
For years, study after study has shown that the effect sizes of education interventions tend to be really small. And when they don’t look small, they tend to be very difficult to scale up. That led some people to infer that schooling is largely pointless. But we learned during the pandemic that if you try something out-of-sample like not having school at all, the effects are actually very large.
I think that this example illustrates two major themes.
One, which we've been discussing for ages, is that it is very difficult to extrapolate data out of the range of observation. When there is effective teaching going on then small tweaks with how it is done seem can be challenging to show as having an impact. But let us be frank -- the human species has been educating children in numeracy and literacy for (literally) thousands of years. The Lyceum and the Academy were founded before the dawn of the Roman empire. China has been using exams to evaluate qualified graduates for centuries. Now there can be possibilities to use improved technology and such, but the basic idea is old and small tweaks have been tried for (literally) millennia.
Two, is that disruption is often not focused on the basic delivery of services. Far more common is regulatory evasion. Uber evaded taxi regulations far more than it had a new idea -- taxi companies quickly mimicked the app, the innovation that they had trouble with was the ability of Uber to classify employees as independent contractors. Financial companies often do better by finding ways to evade regulation that protect investors than just finding better investments. [EDIT: In conversations with Mark, he pointed out the precise mechanism by which education disrupters can save money: fewer students with disabilities given the ADA. While this gap is closing, it is still the case that charter schools end up serving fewer students with disabilities than traditional public schools. Insofar as there is any strategy here, this could create a perceived efficiency gap].
It is this second point that always worries me with education reform. There is a lot of money in education, finding a way to skim 1% off of the top would be worth billions per year. When real progress is hard because a system has already been extensively optimized then one should be suspicious of claims of important advances, especially if there is a lot of opportunity for the investment to pay off for the "innovators" involved. Taking away 1% of educational spending and inflating a few numbers might well be a easy pathway to success.
But the first point is well worth remembering -- the system, as is, is already delivering a lot of value and taking it away shows immediate and large effects that reduce outcomes. These are despite the efforts of teachers and parents to continue online.
Or, in other words, one can innovate but always be worried about the arguments that a system centuries in the making is fundamentally flawed. It might be for some areas (e.g., computer programming is relatively new and perhaps autoshop is less related to other crafting skills than I suspect) but this is not a place where the current equilibrium is obviously easy to beat.
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