Two articles in The New York Times this weekend showed the extent to which general educated opinion still doesn’t have a clue as to how to bring about educational change but likes to insist that some panacea is there for the using. The magazine section had an article about the wisdom of very early childhood education, which means pre- kindergarten. This was presented as an alternative to No Child Left behind, with its emphasis on tests, and the usual Democratic view that more money should be spent on schools and teachers. Rather, the idea is to provide the early childhood experiences that are absent from poverty homes. Pre-schoolers need an emphasis on reading, discipline, self-control. That will make them students who will, in the long run, perform better. The idea is based on the Children’s Zone philosophy of hands-on educational reform, which apparently has some impact, though I am reminded of an adage of my wife, who works in educational reform, that it is very difficult to replicate the results of even successful pilot programs. Something always seems to get lost in the translation from the initial mix.

The trouble with the article by Paul Tough is that it is all promise and no evidence. It doesn’t even have testimonials, just one chart that is difficult to read and, not unlike other charts in the Times, says just the opposite of what the article it is supposed to document is saying. The chart shows the differences between the reading scores over three years of three groups: children assigned to a “human capital” program in kindergarten on the basis of their very low scores on a cognitive-ability test, children with equally low scores who are not assigned to the program, and all other students (that is, those not at the bottom on the cognitive-ability tests).

The results are the following: For kindergarteners, the group which underwent the program had 66% of their students reading at or above grade level, the comparison group had 53% of its students reading at or above grade level, and 71% of the other students were reading at or above grade level. O. K. so far. Those in the program outdid those like them who were not in the program, though they had not caught up with the rest of the student population.

Now, let’s move on to first grade. The students in the program made a slight improvement, 70% of them now reading at or above grade level, which was also the case for the comparison group, where 56% were now reading at or above grade level. There is the curiosity, though, that the students not in either the program or its comparison group were making more progress because 78% of them were now reading at or above grade level, which means they had improved by 7 percentage points while the other two groups had gone up by 2 or 3 percentage points.

That increased differential is even clearer in the second grade, where 71% of the children in the program are reading at or above grade level, which means that the rate of improvement for this group has just about come to a halt and its difference over the comparison group has dropped from 14% to 9%, while the “ordinary” students, the third group, continue to do better, with 80% reading at or above grade level, now nine points above the group that underwent the program.

Well, you might say, the program did work because the program students went up from K to second grade in their reading scores from having 66% at or above grade level to 71% at or above grade level. But the students who did not have the program but shared the same cognitive abilities improved more, from 53% at or above grade level to 62% at or above grade level. So the program does not give people much of a kick up and not as much of a kick as those similar students who don’t have the program. Moreover, there is no way this is a program that makes kids catch up, which was the hope behind Head Start, where the gap between ill performing and well performing students would disappear because of that early intervention program. Indeed, the same thing happened with Head Start: whatever early gains were made between program and comparison groups disappeared by the third grade.

The clear conclusion is that it is very difficult to compensate for the cognitive deficiencies that exist before children show up for school. Whether it is nature or nurture that has its way, habits and mental software are already set by the time of kindergarten. If you want to be ambitious and try to alter that, you have to either place kids outside their families from the nursery on, or you have to provide babies with the nutrition and the parents with the parenting skills they need to deal with newborns. Otherwise you are just whistling “Dixie”. And yet such very early intervention is either socially unacceptable, which would be the case if you, for example, declared all poor children wards of the state, or would require the abolition of all of those differences that make, for example, poor people different from the rest of the population. (I cannot think of any set of circumstances other than those of poverty that would account for large numbers of cognitively deficient young students.)

The second idea was presented in an Op Ed piece that rounded up other than convention news items, and so presented its selected items with the bemusement that sometimes accompanies a human interest story. Michelle Rhee, the reformist Superintendent of Schools in Washington D C. is going to pay kids to show up to class and behave themselves and get passing grades. She is quoted in this very brief article as saying that going to school is like the world of work: you get paid every two weeks for doing your job. This is a false and glib analogy, however much we may want to think of school as a way for kids to learn to buckle down to the demands made of adults. What you are supposed to do at work is clear; what learning is about is not. All that can be done is exhort the students to do so and provide some modeling and drills that will help them do it for themselves. Yes, school is like work in that it is a responsibility with a public face: you are performing for others and being judged on it. But the issue is precisely that these kids won’t know how to present themselves in one or the other of these situations and that the incentives for learning have never been primarily economic. A student wants to do well to outshine parents or to gain prestige and fame or even for the intrinsic pleasure of having a command over knowledge and therefore some control over one’s life, not because there is a raise coming with a better grade. That is to trivialize the very difficult process of learning. If an attitude toward learning was that easy to cultivate, then everyone would have caught on by now, the poor putting aside their peer group allegiances for the hope of making a better buck, but the ones who don’t come to care for the far off goal of just doing better in life and making all the mental adjustments required to do that are hardly going to make those adjustments just for some pin money. Big changes in mental outlook require big goals not petty ones. 

The key and obvious failure in the analogy of school to work is that you can get fired from a job. Can you get fired from school? If we want to pursue the school as work analogy, will students be able to organize into a union? Will they have grievance procedures? Will they have guaranteed time off? Maybe turning school into a job is not such a bad thing after all, I add facetiously, because that at least would mean there would be no way of extending the school year and requiring students to work more days even if for the same pay unless they agreed to do so. Treating education as a job would simply be to recognize how alienating school is rather than a way to recognize what it is, an opportunity to learn something and to test out your wings.

Why all these misleading analogies, that of “human capital” and that of education as a job? It is because that is the state of knowledge about how education works, strained analogies grasped at in lieu of anything solid. Cognitive psychology and brain neurology have not yet come up with very much that can enlighten us about how people really learn, how you get your mind to memorize or how you come up with analogies. Given the absence of real research, we reach for clichés, and treat them as findings. That, after all, is part of how the mind works whenever it is confronted with situations that are but barely fathomed. Education is still looking for its Newton. Meanwhile, we just have to push on as best we can, engaged more in the game of identifying winners at the game of education than knowing how to improve the performance of students, especially those who are never going to be winners.