I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a little bit obsessed with Freddie deBoer. I know it doesn’t make any sense, given that he is an avowed communist and, as far as I know, might not be having any actual impact on the education policy debate. But he’s obviously a brilliant guy, whose Substack clearly has a lot of readers on the center and left, and in his book and in many of his writings, he makes one really important point about the ed reform movement. Where he’s wrong is in thinking that his one good point makes the whole reform enterprise a waste of time.
What’s his one good point? It’s that we have overpromised and underdelivered because we have not been willing to acknowledge what everyone in the real world knows intuitively: Some kids are smarter than others.
He’s right, both that it’s of course true, and that we in ed reform don’t like to say it. And for good reason; if you’re a teacher, we want you to suspend disbelief and assume that the kids in front of you are all capable of greatness (or at least high achievement). That’s because of the many research studies indicating that most children and teenagers respond well to high expectations. And as Freddie himself would say, we surely don’t want teachers to make assumptions about kids’ intelligence based on their race or ethnicity, their zip code, or any other demographic markers that might be related to achievement in the aggregate but not in the particular.
Freddie is also right that, back in the bad old days, it was unfair to measure schools’ effectiveness (or lack thereof) by the proportion of students who could read and do math at the “proficient” level—because that didn’t take into account kids’ varying abilities. But news flash: It’s not 2005, when No Child Left Behind was still in effect. It’s 2025, and almost every state has moved beyond using proficiency rates alone to measuring student-level growth, so that today we can evaluate schools based on their impact on achievement, after controlling for prior student achievement. That means taking into account the demographic factors that we all know are related to achievement, as well as the variation in kids’ academic potential.
So what’s Freddie’s beef? Enter his school-reform straw man.
Ed reform versus income redistribution
What Freddie is really mad about is that some of us reformers, once upon a time, argued that education reform was an alternative to a European-style social welfare state. The “cult of smart,” he argued, was a thought system that assumed that the winners in our knowledge economy deserved their just deserts because they were the smart kids who worked hard in school and won the game of meritocracy fair and square. On the other hand, people stuck in low-wage jobs only have themselves to blame for not doing better in school, not working harder, and not educating themselves to the middle class and beyond.
He's right: That’s dumb.
But does anyone actually believe this? Especially after a decade and a half of populism, I think we all understand that rich people who believe that they entirely “earned” their success are annoying and self-unaware. Indeed, we should teach young people who are good at school to understand that their intellectual gifts—the amount of horsepower under the hoods of their prodigious brains—were bestowed by grace. They are also super lucky to be born at a time when book smarts are highly valued, versus most of human history, when brute strength might have been more in demand.
But Freddie goes further. He believes that most of ed reform is pointless because it doesn’t shake up the academic hierarchy and therefore fails to challenge the economic hierarchy. He’ll concede that stronger schools can help kids learn marginally more than they otherwise would but not enough to change their lives significantly. The kids scoring at the 10th percentile in the third grade are never going to get to the 40th percentile, much less the 80th percentile, by the twelfth grade and therefore aren’t going to have a shot in our knowledge economy, no matter how great their schools might be. The only hope they’ve got is some sort of system of social welfare.
Like I said, he’s a communist.
But is he right that it doesn’t matter much if kids do or do not learn marginally more than they otherwise might? It doesn’t matter if children and teenagers do or do not achieve their full academic potential?
Because if we’re honest with ourselves, that’s what education reform is about—helping students learn marginally more than they otherwise would so they achieve their full academic potential (or close to it). Maybe that won’t “transform” society. But young people who reach basic levels of literacy and numeracy because they are lucky to attend great schools will surely be better off than they otherwise would have been, even if they still face a lifetime of low-skill, low-wage work. And so it is across the academic spectrum. Great schools can be the difference between being college-ready or not. Or well-prepared for rigorous career-tech programs or not. Or competitive for admissions to highly selective colleges or not. As the University of Michigan’s Richard Nisbett wrote over a decade ago, “schooling makes you smarter.”
And in the aggregate, do we really believe it doesn’t matter to our country or our economy whether test scores as a whole go up or down? We’ve run an experiment about this recently, of course. During Covid, we kept kids out of school for a year or more, and guess what? They learned less. Especially the lowest performing kids, who disproportionately come from the most disadvantaged homes. We’ve seen the bottom fall out on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and other tests. Does Freddie think this is fine? Because plenty of research studies indicate that the individuals in the Covid cohort, and the group as a whole, are going to be scarred for life in terms of lost productivity, earnings, and opportunities. Marginal learning, or the lack thereof, matters a lot.
Here’s just one recent study that proves the point. High schools in Massachusetts that helped their students learn more than they otherwise would have also helped those same students earn more than they otherwise would have. Even though the measures of learning were just reading and math tests. Even though high school is super late to intervene in kids’ lives. Still, the relative quality of high schools mattered in real-world terms to real-world kids.
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Freddie is right that we reformers should shelve the happy talk about “transformational change.” Let’s embrace more honest, if less inspirational, bumper stickers like: “Marginal learning matters” or “Every bit of learning counts!”
But don’t buy his argument that ed reform is beside the point. We have way too many mediocre schools in this country—and making them better would indeed improve lives, our economy, and our democracy. Let’s keep working on it.
