Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

This is a fair point, but in many cases you need to be rich, hard working, and smart. This is a major improvement over the old system where you just need to be rich.

This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Top universities in the UK and top grandes ecoles in France are also dominated by the middle class. I'm sure other countries are like that too if not worse.

I think any system with inequality will have this issue. Parents want to help their children and some parents will have a greater ability to do so.

This is not unique to capitalism either. I'm sure those of us from the Soviet Union will be intimately familiar with the concept of блат, which is significantly more pernicious than wealthy children doing better because they have tutors.

If you're high up in the middle class, you have a high-paying job. That means one of three things:

1) medical degree

2) high-end engineer

3) varia (like climbed-up MBAs) (but this is a small group)

Now when it comes to groups in society, the picture looks very different:

Largest groups are non-working people, and workers and tradesmen (from factory workers and construction workers to truck drivers) (total of these groups is like 90% of America)

Both of these groups are famous for disrespecting education, telling anyone who'll listen how college and university degrees are worthless (and for their positions in the world, I'm sure that's true).

And ... surprise ! Their kids mostly don't care about education, and don't score well on SATs (except the ones that figure out they really DO want to in time). Could this be ... because kids believe their parents ?

The "problem" is the entire feedback loop running through society, which mostly is the people itself, not that "rich" people tell their kids to achieve things. You cannot fix this without separating kids from their parents somehow, and you don't want to do that.

The only thing you can do is to prevent the middle class from achieving anything, or anything worthwhile. Which is exactly what is mostly happening in these diversity efforts.

Even that is disregarding the fact that there are already too many college and university graduates to make sure such a degree is definitely worth it. This is a problem akin to "let's make the lowest 50% of the population better off than average".

You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

If Mark Zuckerberg had attended some university in Slovakia (being as smart and skilled) there is no way he would have started Facebook (and it goes for every networking effect - from co-workers, through financing to reputation of place that allowed this network to grow).

The linked piece is very nice, and illustrates the selection bias problem extremely well.

One additional comment I might have is about variance. That is, in the figure with red and blue plots, those means are hiding within-school variance. In data I've seen, what often happens is that the lower-status schools often have more variance in them. So in some ways the problem with selection bias is maybe even worse than what the author suggests, because people not only tend to attribute to schools what was pre-existing, but they also tend to stereotype. E.g., you went to a school on the left side of that figure, so you're lower in ability and/or learning than on the right, even though you might be at the upper end of the distribution of the whole figure. This pertains to vocation too: people tend to assume certain vocations are signals of lower cognitive ability than others, when the reality is that uncertainly only increases for some.

The other thing I might mention is some social benefits to attending selective schools. The author at times seems to imply that "talented people will end up doing well regardless of where they go" somewhat dismissively. I think this was probably unintentional, but I think that's not exactly true in the way that people care about, because the studies that are done are kind of coarse. That is, if you study outcomes, they tend to be things like general income, or terminal degree attained (undergrad, master's, doctoral), or whatever. In that sense, things are fine. But because of social connections, people might not get into the particular job they want, whereas another person is given a free pass, or might be at a state-level position rather than a federal-level position, or whatever. That is, there are real consequences to overlooking selection bias, that have real importance for people, but tend to get fuzzed over in studies because it's difficult to study.

It also keeps the government system honest because people can and do leave schools that don't work such as many of those in poor areas in the outer suburbs of the big cities and regional areas. If there were no private system the only way to get into better schools would be to own very expensive houses.

Meanwhile, the selective schools show that the government can provide a good education for highly able students as well. In NSW ~18 of the top 20 high schools are government schools.

Personally I think most people are unwise to send their kids to expensive private schools and they would help their kids much more if they put the money toward investments. But they are free to waste, in my mind, their money to reduce the cost to the tax payer of education.

Secondly, you have just pontificated on schooling in Australia - so, my second question is, if an article came out with different conclusions (with which you disagreed) would you be amenable to being force to read it as you are in the class of people who pontificates on schooling in Australia.

There are good private schools and there are good public schools. There are bad private schools and there are bad public schools. What makes them good or bad is a function of the school administration, teachers and families involved in those schools.

All are interrelated and how they handle "problem" students is very dependent on the three groups. I have seen both private and public schools that do not handle such matters well and the result is that everything (in time) goes to hell in a handcart.

But I have also seen schools completely turned around by a change of administration, change of teachers and a more involved family community. This has affected both public and private schools.

You negativity toward private schools (comment about partial government funding) doesn't seem to recognise that if private schools closed down the public school system would be so overwhelmed that it would no longer have any hope of coping.

My own children have been at both public and private schools. I have even been on the school committee for the public school so I got a direct management insight into the operation of the school and the processes required for dealing with "problem" children. At times, it was more problems with parents than children, at other times it was problems in the families which could be mitigated by giving them appropriate help and at other times it was just related to recalcitrant and stubborn children that their own families had difficulty with and the families were supporting the school actions in relation to their children and finally there were problems with the teachers themselves and their interactions with specific children.

If there is no cooperation between schools and the families involved in wanting to develop the children to be their best, then failures will increasingly occur.

Your comment about selective schools misses one salient point, children are not all the same. In Victoria, we used to have trade oriented schools, which were done away with. We now have little opportunity to have students who are interested in practical fields to be specifically educated in those areas. The education model is to have all students head for higher education and big debts.

I have a grandson who is autistic and is being educated in the private school sector where there is facilities for him to progress. The local public schools don't have those facilities and hence he would be on the scrapheap. However, there are public schools around who only take the "best" students and pride themselves on having great education standards. If you don't qualify, you'll have problems getting in.

What the solutions are is contentious and many just blame one sector or another for the problems (private/public) without thinking about the broader community aspects and the benefit to students. Teaching is not a highly regarded profession and that in itself brings about structural problems of all sorts. We then have various political interferences that want to control the specific social education across all schools, irrespective of any school community feedback.

I went to Melbourne High in Victoria (all boys academic selective), and think my peers and I benefitted from leaving our original (mostly public) schools to go there.

Do you think the education system overall suffers from the 'extracting' of these students out of their original schools?

Funny thing, though. We've done a bunch of studies on this and it doesn't actually help. The people who care about their kids more getting them into better schools, yes - but placing the kids of parents who don't care into better schools, no.

This has been shown time and time again. The best results to the contrary managed this by ... drumroll ... designing selection bias into the study.

What about the non-troubled kids? How much of a negative effect can a few troubled kids have on non-troubled kids?

One kid acting out in a class can ruin the learning atmosphere for the entire class.

In all seriousness, I had never even heard of the ACT until college. The SAT and AP exams were the only tests ever discussed with us.

I suspect there may be more variation in this than geography.

(FWIW I live in Poland and had a short run with our private education system on both ends.)

What has to be fought is discrimination in employment based on the origin of degrees. All too common. There is enough of this based on connections already.

In fact, looking at the chart you can see that it is a split distribution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

there's different types of 'good' and 'bad'. for example, the whole IQ thing came into the light in the UK when poor Jewish kids from the ghetto (bad) were clearly outperforming their non-Jewish counterparts from more affluent (good) neighborhoods.

Good kids grow up in a different environment. The consequences of not knowing to handle oneself around "bad" kids are very high. There is no doubt that on average "bad" kids are much bigger bullies with lower empathy.

The consequences of not knowing how to conduct oneself around good kids as a "bad" kid are much lower in severity. For the most part, the parents of good kids set limits to the aggression of their children. For example, the biggest social rejects at my upper middle class schools weren't ever really bullied. People pitied the complete rejects and most people thought anyone who would bully the rejects is a complete douchebag.

I can't imagine how the social rejects or even the normal nerdy kids at my high school would have fared at a "bad" school.

Then there is the minority immigrant issue. Segregation is good for certain minority groups that do not have the language skills and cultural knowledge to integrate into America. They segregate themselves into a separate community that can provide support for its members. Desegregating these communities and their children will have negative effects.

The children of these immigrants will have the worst time dealing with the "bad" kids because they may have stunted language skills and lack cultural knowledge and context to be able to effectively navigate bad situations.

And to get a better picture of the winners and losers:

- > 90% of African Americans are born in America (and presumably have parents, family and connections who know English and understand American culture).

- Spanish is ubiquitous in the USA and the Hispanic population is huge. Hispanic people have a much lower need to congregate into a community compared to other minorities.

We (students) all hated those teachers who wasted our time with things that wouldn't help us get further in the job pipeline. I'd like a little more gamification, because I'm in college and still dealing with too many profs who teach less and less about what people need to do their jobs and more and more stuff no one asked for.

There doesn't have to be an immediate connection between what a teacher says and the subject they are supposed to teach. Many fantastic teachers have inspired me and made me who I am by giving little pieces of unrelated advice. But the advice of a teacher is really, well, just the advice of some teacher. They aren't gods. Plenty of them give really bad advice. I just care about students learning to learn and developing critical thinking. Students can read literature for opinions on things unrelated to school subjects, and ponder on their own. They can watch movies, listen to songs, google things, or even talk to other students. But I don't think teachers should go even further out of class discussions than they already do.

If you were scored based on delta, gaming it would be laughably easy. Just completely fail your first exam, and then steadily "improve" to your real skill level. That's basically incentivizing students to do what Intel does with processors :)