*The Case Against Education*: A Reformer Responds

The accomplished Brett van Zuiden recently sent me detailed comments on my The Case Against Education. He combines a lot of first-hand knowledge of the industry with an open and critical mind. And he’d appreciate your reactions…

---

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.

In Bryan’s taxonomy, I’m in the “reformer” bucket — I spent five years in an EdTech company working with the largest K-12 school districts in the country, then moved to Outschool and was initiated into the world of homeschooling, unschooling, micro-schools, and other alternative educational models. Two years ago I joined a network of twelve charter middle- and high-schools where I’ve come to understand schools in much greater depth. All opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

Thank you Bryan for letting me share my thoughts here — I’m looking forward to engaging more with you and the community around these ideas.

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. 

• 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!

• 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. Shakespeare is fine, but the fact that we force all students to suffer through it for weeks instead of hundreds of other more useful and practical topics is a waste. Individual schools can and do chip away at the margin, but what constitutes the core curriculum is enshrined in stone — specifically, policies like the UC A-G admission requirements and the accreditation process schools must go through for their students’ transcripts to grant admission to college. I found the book The End of Education to be an eye-opening presentation of alternative designs for curricula that would better fit our world. 

• 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. 

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.

• 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. 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.

• 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. 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, 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. So then, if you allow that the government should run childcare, you might as well try to do something useful with that time, and as expensive as $13k/child/year sounds, it’s cheaper than the average daycare costs. As I said above, I think the current curriculum is wildly unoptimized, but I think the childcare function of K-12 schools makes them more economically valuable to society than just the returns to the student’s income.

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. 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. 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! 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!
   
   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.

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.

• 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. 

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.