"Those who study education quickly realize the surprising shallowness and inaccuracy of existing knowledge and practice: the curriculum and research output of education schools are driven by ideologically driven visions and fads. Most of the best information is found on isolated blog posts, within neighboring disciplines like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and in books written decades or centuries ago. As our project develops, we will organize and expand this knowledge to create a framework education schools have not."
This is absolutely true. I worked as a secretary at a university that churned out teaching degrees. It took 2 years to finish the degree (which was in addition to a bachelors) and was almost entirely non scientific fluff. I wish more educated, experienced people could become teachers without the beaurocracy of being certified. I think many people would choose to serve their communities as teachers for a few years, especially in retirement. A lost opportunity.
In many states private schools don't need the same certifications as public institutions [1]. I'm sure they would prefer it in applicants but beggars can't be choosers.
Do the certifications mean anything in particular? Beyond perhaps the primary grades, I would settle for mastery of the subject matter and an ability to manage the classroom.
Yep. And that's why charter schools, school vouchers, and private schools are the manifestations of desire for those wishing to destroy and defund public secular education.
If the "public secular education" you're paying for is functionally worthless, and the ppl. running it are fine with that, perhaps destroying it and doing something else with the money is an attractive option?
Some public school districts that are short of teachers will hire with just a Bachelor's degree, and then require you to obtain a teaching credential by a certain deadline. They might even give you some tuition reimbursement to help. Hiring criteria for substitute teachers also tend to be somewhat less rigorous.
I have a hard time with any ideological approach to education that comes from those not participating in the system. There are competing goals that are stratified from the classroom to the federal government. Due to the diversity of the participants, literally most of the country, aligning these goals makes it a never-ending problem with new strategies and approaches and proposals being produced every few cycles.
Here is my take. The most important and impactful area that you can put your collective effort is into the teacher and student relationship. The educators are the ones challenged to tactically implement this year's "flavor of instruction", but their goal remains to elevate your child. You can argue about what measure they are using, but the end-result is that they are working for the betterment of your child within the constraints of their situation. Which includes every other child in that same classroom, an ever changing curriculum, assessment goals, local, state, and federal expectations.
The teachers are the ones translating all of that into effective instruction to the best of their ability. Give them your support, your understanding, your time, and your advocacy. You will see change while the rest of the country argues over the next "best idea".
I don't think the authors are calling for more spending. In fact they point out that funding is not a cure-all:
> In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.
The piece focuses more on encouraging separation of pupils by ability, instead of uniformly teaching to the median.
The Wing Institute appears to be a 2 generations removed repeat of Challenger Schools: educators who got tired of bureaucratic fads and mediocrity and decided to do something about it in their small corner of the world.
They're still not paying public school teachers nearly enough anywhere. And school facilities are crumbling in impoverished areas.
NCLBA was a disaster rammed through by the person least qualified to understand education, the bozo GWB, and without asking educators.
Singapore PISA average score beats that of the US by 110 points (1). The PISA is an exam which measures the relative performance of 15-yos in OECD countries.
It's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from country-level differences like this, especially when the countries are as dissimilar as the U.S. (pop. 340M) and Singapore (pop. 4M).
Looking specifically at PISA, it's not usually administered at the state level in the US, but when it has, individual states have outperformed national scores, as one should expect.
For example, Massachusetts has scored similarly to Singapore in Reading and Science (zero or small statistical difference between) and not far in Math.[1] It would be a reasonable hypothesis that a PISA score for the Greater Boston schools (pop. 5M) would even further outperform the U.S.
Sweeping country comparisons tend to amplify noise rather than reveal a clear signal, and are often about regression to the mean as much as anything else. It's not impossible to make sound inferences, but it's difficult to avoid motivated reasoning.
It’s not clear to me PISA scores mean anything, because they’re not uniformly administered in the U.S. And if the scores are reliable, they point to distributional issues outside the educational system. For example, Asians in the U.S. perform comparably to Singaporeans: https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/us-asians-scored-.... White Americans perform comparably to Japan and South Korea, and ahead of all of Europe.
Since there’s no test which currently compares the best American 15-yos with the best other OECD 15-yos, we can’t assume anything about potential results. The best we can do is look at the data which exists and learn from that.
In general, I’d caution that presumptuous ideas like “best Americans will always be best” create cultural rot, and then something like DeepSeek happens. The cultural rot deepens when the elites run around trying to save face instead of admitting an opponent’s ingenuity, and aiming to do better. But I am not sure if that’s what you’re trying to imply (that best American students will out compete best students from other countries) but that’s the sense I got from your comment. America is resting on a lot of built-up wealth and power, so even objectively mediocre elites do well here.
I think everyone already knows this, but success in American society is predicated on intergenerational wealth and/or charisma, which is how people like George W. Bush or Trump become presidents despite being academically mediocre. People who make promises of meritocracy would never appoint some natural genius person-of-color as Barron Trump’s boss, for example. How likely do you think that is?
I’m not saying anything about the “best American students.” But America has unique social challenges—former slave society, mass immigration—that European countries and Singapore don’t have. Those impact test scores, but that doesn’t mean there’s problems can be fixed by schooling.
P.S. “person of color” isn’t a category that exists.
Education is the purview of the States, not the Federal Gov. So if you're comparing scores you have to compare Singapore against individual States. You will find a HUGE disparity between states. Some do quite well, close to SG levels. Others are abysmal.
Unsure if this is a scalable model public schooling can afford. While it would be wonderful if every child could have an IEP, that tends to only work at rich schools with lots of educators. OTOH, what could be done is encouraging and expecting more achievement from students (perhaps at 2 or 3 different pace levels) using proven methods rather than foisting uncontrolled experiments on millions of students without evidence for efficacy.
> Want to raise reading comprehension scores? Direct Instruction (or direct instruction) is a surefire way to do it.
> But the strengths of the program are also its weaknesses. The program dramatically narrows the aims of education and leaves little room for creativity, spontaneity and joy in the classroom.
It strikes me that the problem here, much like with phonics vs "holistic" learning, is that educators don't want to do it. It's too grim and serious, and culturally, that's not what people who go into education in America are about.
Maybe instead governments should pursue resource equalization. Some posts on a linked blog (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-2...) suggest that the differences in achievement between different demographic groups can be due to environmental differences. Unequal "head starts" due to economic circumstances are an obvious one. It may be that the best way to "pursue excellence" has nothing to do with education; it may have to do with taking money away from very wealthy people and giving it to less wealthy people.
I don't think your point that root cause is lack of initial resources contradicts the article's view on the benefits of pursuing excellence in education over uniformity. It is plausible that more uniform starting conditions and pursuit of excellence can coexist.
Sure, I don't think they're incompatible. But I don't think pushing "educational excellence" will do as much for our society as will reducing inequality.
San Francisco and other left-leaning areas tried pretty hard to directly reduce education inequality over the last 20-ish years, as discussed in the article, and the results were poor, to say the least.
This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
Here’s an interesting example of a school district with a good approach:
It turns out that many students who are capable of performing above grade level don’t do so because no one signs them up for it. So Dallas ISD tried signing students up automatically, and it works! Achievement appears to be increasing as a result within each major racial group and there’s less inequality.
> This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I'm a bit confused. Was there a missing "not" somewhere in the first sentence? Your second sentence there begins with "instead", which makes it seem like you're saying you don't believe in "introducing intentional unfairness" but the first sentence says you think it is a valid approach.
Overall I agree that tinkering with specific details like test score thresholds is not a great idea, although I think my perspective is a bit different from what you're saying here. My view is that these various manipulations of educational parameters won't work because the differences in educational outcomes are largely a result of differences in parents' economic circumstances. Or, put another way, the "inputs" to the educational system, in terms of where kids are at when they enter it, are at least as important as what the system does once kids are in it. We cannot equalize the outputs without equalizing the inputs.
That's not to say that things like the Dallas approach you linked to are bad or will have zero effect, just that it can only get us so far.
>> > This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I am indeed missing a "not". That should be "...is not a valid way to do it".
And I kind of agree with you. I spent quite a bit of time growing up kibbitzing conversations with people involved in the now-defunct University of California affirmative action system, and I learned a few things, or at least a few things that the people I talked to believed. There are plenty of things one can measure: SAT scores, GPA, race, parents' income (W-2, AGI, whatever is reportable on FAFSA), statistics about the high school that the applicant went to. And there are goals one can try to meet with one's evaluation and that one can try to estimate: aptitude for college, grit, race (of course), degree to which they outperformed expectations, etc.
So one can be fair in the sense of admitting people only based on their present measurements (SAT score, for example). Or one can be differently fair and throw parents' income into the mix, but this has issues: certain groups, in a manner that is highly correlated with race, have family wealth and resources that are not reflected in W-2 income. You can try to correct for that by throwing race into the mix, and that is a giant rabbit hole and now rather illegal. One can try to account for kids who have excellent aptitude but test poorly because they were at a bad school, and this is hard, and maybe one's analysis indicates that race should be a feature used for this purpose, and see above about rabbit holes. One can strive for racial equality (does that mean equal fraction black and white? or matching population demographics? population demographics where? or just less outrageously imbalanced?), but how does one go about this?
In any case, the laws and judicial opinions changed, and UC had been considering race, and they stopped. And I think this was for the best. Regardless of statistics, considering an applicant's race directly seems very unfair. And it forced the people who wanted to improve equality to find what I think are better approaches: outreach, trying to improve the pipeline, etc. And, frankly, I don't think I'd want my own race to be considered in my applications for things, regardless of whether that consideration would make me more or less likely to be accepted.
I think I get what you're saying. Another way to think of it is to think about what is the domain in which we're striving for fairness.
We could say the rules of basketball are "internally fair" if what we're trying to do is determine which team played better. But if we start using the results of basketball games to, say, determine who qualifies for a mortgage, then maybe we would say that loan qualification system is not fair.
In a similar fashion, we could say that some hypothetical admissions scheme is fair in that it selects the students most likely to have the characteristics the school is looking for. (If it instead selects students most able to game the admissions process itself, then it's not fair in that way, but let's assume for now that it's fair in terms of selecting for on post-admission performance.) But the overall resource allocation in society, which depends in part on education, may be unfair even if the "internal fairness" of the educational merit system is fair.
My position is basically that it doesn't make sense to get too focused on that education-internal fairness specifically. I'm more concerned with the overall fairness of our society. And I think that if we made our society as a whole more fair, that would make education more fair as a byproduct. If, on the other hand, we do not make society more fair, making education more fair on its own is an underwhelming result. The main reason to make education more fair would be if you believe it will have knock-on effects that make society overall more fair. I think some of the people pushing for increased "fairness" in education (e.g., via affirmative action requirements) believe it can have large effects of that type; but I believe that, while it may have some effects, those effects will be relatively small.
I don’t want to be uncharitable, but is it a fair interpretation to say you’re advocating that we stop prioritizing improving outcomes through hard work and education and instead disincentivize financial success?
"Those who study education quickly realize the surprising shallowness and inaccuracy of existing knowledge and practice: the curriculum and research output of education schools are driven by ideologically driven visions and fads. Most of the best information is found on isolated blog posts, within neighboring disciplines like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and in books written decades or centuries ago. As our project develops, we will organize and expand this knowledge to create a framework education schools have not."
This is absolutely true. I worked as a secretary at a university that churned out teaching degrees. It took 2 years to finish the degree (which was in addition to a bachelors) and was almost entirely non scientific fluff. I wish more educated, experienced people could become teachers without the beaurocracy of being certified. I think many people would choose to serve their communities as teachers for a few years, especially in retirement. A lost opportunity.
In many states private schools don't need the same certifications as public institutions [1]. I'm sure they would prefer it in applicants but beggars can't be choosers.
[1] https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/...
Do the certifications mean anything in particular? Beyond perhaps the primary grades, I would settle for mastery of the subject matter and an ability to manage the classroom.
Yep. And that's why charter schools, school vouchers, and private schools are the manifestations of desire for those wishing to destroy and defund public secular education.
If the "public secular education" you're paying for is functionally worthless, and the ppl. running it are fine with that, perhaps destroying it and doing something else with the money is an attractive option?
Government funding education != Government managing education
Nonsense. Charter schools are secular public schools.
Some public school districts that are short of teachers will hire with just a Bachelor's degree, and then require you to obtain a teaching credential by a certain deadline. They might even give you some tuition reimbursement to help. Hiring criteria for substitute teachers also tend to be somewhat less rigorous.
I have a hard time with any ideological approach to education that comes from those not participating in the system. There are competing goals that are stratified from the classroom to the federal government. Due to the diversity of the participants, literally most of the country, aligning these goals makes it a never-ending problem with new strategies and approaches and proposals being produced every few cycles. Here is my take. The most important and impactful area that you can put your collective effort is into the teacher and student relationship. The educators are the ones challenged to tactically implement this year's "flavor of instruction", but their goal remains to elevate your child. You can argue about what measure they are using, but the end-result is that they are working for the betterment of your child within the constraints of their situation. Which includes every other child in that same classroom, an ever changing curriculum, assessment goals, local, state, and federal expectations. The teachers are the ones translating all of that into effective instruction to the best of their ability. Give them your support, your understanding, your time, and your advocacy. You will see change while the rest of the country argues over the next "best idea".
We are well past the point of diminishing returns in education: https://www.winginstitute.org/does-state-education-funding. Schools should probably focus on developing healthy kids while controlling ballooning costs.
I don't think the authors are calling for more spending. In fact they point out that funding is not a cure-all:
> In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.
The piece focuses more on encouraging separation of pupils by ability, instead of uniformly teaching to the median.
The Wing Institute appears to be a 2 generations removed repeat of Challenger Schools: educators who got tired of bureaucratic fads and mediocrity and decided to do something about it in their small corner of the world.
They're still not paying public school teachers nearly enough anywhere. And school facilities are crumbling in impoverished areas.
NCLBA was a disaster rammed through by the person least qualified to understand education, the bozo GWB, and without asking educators.
US public education spending as a percentage of GDP is lower now than in 1993:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-government-expendit...
The percentage of children in the population is lower than in 1993.
Why should it scale with GDP? GDP growth represents more goods and services produced.
If GDP doubles and you go from $1 eggs to $2 eggs, GDP didn't actually grow or you are being swindled.
Expenses for a fixed goods and services should decrease as a percent of GDP over time. If they don't, that means spending is less efficient over time.
Singapore PISA average score beats that of the US by 110 points (1). The PISA is an exam which measures the relative performance of 15-yos in OECD countries.
Some information about the education system which produces these results: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Singapore
(1) https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1
It's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from country-level differences like this, especially when the countries are as dissimilar as the U.S. (pop. 340M) and Singapore (pop. 4M).
Looking specifically at PISA, it's not usually administered at the state level in the US, but when it has, individual states have outperformed national scores, as one should expect.
For example, Massachusetts has scored similarly to Singapore in Reading and Science (zero or small statistical difference between) and not far in Math.[1] It would be a reasonable hypothesis that a PISA score for the Greater Boston schools (pop. 5M) would even further outperform the U.S.
Sweeping country comparisons tend to amplify noise rather than reveal a clear signal, and are often about regression to the mean as much as anything else. It's not impossible to make sound inferences, but it's difficult to avoid motivated reasoning.
1. https://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.aspx?id=24050
It’s not clear to me PISA scores mean anything, because they’re not uniformly administered in the U.S. And if the scores are reliable, they point to distributional issues outside the educational system. For example, Asians in the U.S. perform comparably to Singaporeans: https://www.edwardconard.com/macro-roundup/us-asians-scored-.... White Americans perform comparably to Japan and South Korea, and ahead of all of Europe.
Since there’s no test which currently compares the best American 15-yos with the best other OECD 15-yos, we can’t assume anything about potential results. The best we can do is look at the data which exists and learn from that.
In general, I’d caution that presumptuous ideas like “best Americans will always be best” create cultural rot, and then something like DeepSeek happens. The cultural rot deepens when the elites run around trying to save face instead of admitting an opponent’s ingenuity, and aiming to do better. But I am not sure if that’s what you’re trying to imply (that best American students will out compete best students from other countries) but that’s the sense I got from your comment. America is resting on a lot of built-up wealth and power, so even objectively mediocre elites do well here.
I think everyone already knows this, but success in American society is predicated on intergenerational wealth and/or charisma, which is how people like George W. Bush or Trump become presidents despite being academically mediocre. People who make promises of meritocracy would never appoint some natural genius person-of-color as Barron Trump’s boss, for example. How likely do you think that is?
I’m not saying anything about the “best American students.” But America has unique social challenges—former slave society, mass immigration—that European countries and Singapore don’t have. Those impact test scores, but that doesn’t mean there’s problems can be fixed by schooling.
P.S. “person of color” isn’t a category that exists.
Education is the purview of the States, not the Federal Gov. So if you're comparing scores you have to compare Singapore against individual States. You will find a HUGE disparity between states. Some do quite well, close to SG levels. Others are abysmal.
Unsure if this is a scalable model public schooling can afford. While it would be wonderful if every child could have an IEP, that tends to only work at rich schools with lots of educators. OTOH, what could be done is encouraging and expecting more achievement from students (perhaps at 2 or 3 different pace levels) using proven methods rather than foisting uncontrolled experiments on millions of students without evidence for efficacy.
Every student, parent, teacher, and school administrator should read Derek Sivers' essay "There's No Speed Limit".
https://sive.rs/kimo
Worth drilling down on Direct Instruction- https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/guest-the-drawbac...
> Want to raise reading comprehension scores? Direct Instruction (or direct instruction) is a surefire way to do it.
> But the strengths of the program are also its weaknesses. The program dramatically narrows the aims of education and leaves little room for creativity, spontaneity and joy in the classroom.
It strikes me that the problem here, much like with phonics vs "holistic" learning, is that educators don't want to do it. It's too grim and serious, and culturally, that's not what people who go into education in America are about.
Maybe instead governments should pursue resource equalization. Some posts on a linked blog (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-2...) suggest that the differences in achievement between different demographic groups can be due to environmental differences. Unequal "head starts" due to economic circumstances are an obvious one. It may be that the best way to "pursue excellence" has nothing to do with education; it may have to do with taking money away from very wealthy people and giving it to less wealthy people.
I don't think your point that root cause is lack of initial resources contradicts the article's view on the benefits of pursuing excellence in education over uniformity. It is plausible that more uniform starting conditions and pursuit of excellence can coexist.
I would venture out to say that equality breeds excellence by reducing existential stress in families.
Sure, I don't think they're incompatible. But I don't think pushing "educational excellence" will do as much for our society as will reducing inequality.
San Francisco and other left-leaning areas tried pretty hard to directly reduce education inequality over the last 20-ish years, as discussed in the article, and the results were poor, to say the least.
This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
Here’s an interesting example of a school district with a good approach:
https://www.the74million.org/article/dallas-isds-opt-out-pol...
It turns out that many students who are capable of performing above grade level don’t do so because no one signs them up for it. So Dallas ISD tried signing students up automatically, and it works! Achievement appears to be increasing as a result within each major racial group and there’s less inequality.
> This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I'm a bit confused. Was there a missing "not" somewhere in the first sentence? Your second sentence there begins with "instead", which makes it seem like you're saying you don't believe in "introducing intentional unfairness" but the first sentence says you think it is a valid approach.
Overall I agree that tinkering with specific details like test score thresholds is not a great idea, although I think my perspective is a bit different from what you're saying here. My view is that these various manipulations of educational parameters won't work because the differences in educational outcomes are largely a result of differences in parents' economic circumstances. Or, put another way, the "inputs" to the educational system, in terms of where kids are at when they enter it, are at least as important as what the system does once kids are in it. We cannot equalize the outputs without equalizing the inputs.
That's not to say that things like the Dallas approach you linked to are bad or will have zero effect, just that it can only get us so far.
>> > This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.
I am indeed missing a "not". That should be "...is not a valid way to do it".
And I kind of agree with you. I spent quite a bit of time growing up kibbitzing conversations with people involved in the now-defunct University of California affirmative action system, and I learned a few things, or at least a few things that the people I talked to believed. There are plenty of things one can measure: SAT scores, GPA, race, parents' income (W-2, AGI, whatever is reportable on FAFSA), statistics about the high school that the applicant went to. And there are goals one can try to meet with one's evaluation and that one can try to estimate: aptitude for college, grit, race (of course), degree to which they outperformed expectations, etc.
So one can be fair in the sense of admitting people only based on their present measurements (SAT score, for example). Or one can be differently fair and throw parents' income into the mix, but this has issues: certain groups, in a manner that is highly correlated with race, have family wealth and resources that are not reflected in W-2 income. You can try to correct for that by throwing race into the mix, and that is a giant rabbit hole and now rather illegal. One can try to account for kids who have excellent aptitude but test poorly because they were at a bad school, and this is hard, and maybe one's analysis indicates that race should be a feature used for this purpose, and see above about rabbit holes. One can strive for racial equality (does that mean equal fraction black and white? or matching population demographics? population demographics where? or just less outrageously imbalanced?), but how does one go about this?
In any case, the laws and judicial opinions changed, and UC had been considering race, and they stopped. And I think this was for the best. Regardless of statistics, considering an applicant's race directly seems very unfair. And it forced the people who wanted to improve equality to find what I think are better approaches: outreach, trying to improve the pipeline, etc. And, frankly, I don't think I'd want my own race to be considered in my applications for things, regardless of whether that consideration would make me more or less likely to be accepted.
I think I get what you're saying. Another way to think of it is to think about what is the domain in which we're striving for fairness.
We could say the rules of basketball are "internally fair" if what we're trying to do is determine which team played better. But if we start using the results of basketball games to, say, determine who qualifies for a mortgage, then maybe we would say that loan qualification system is not fair.
In a similar fashion, we could say that some hypothetical admissions scheme is fair in that it selects the students most likely to have the characteristics the school is looking for. (If it instead selects students most able to game the admissions process itself, then it's not fair in that way, but let's assume for now that it's fair in terms of selecting for on post-admission performance.) But the overall resource allocation in society, which depends in part on education, may be unfair even if the "internal fairness" of the educational merit system is fair.
My position is basically that it doesn't make sense to get too focused on that education-internal fairness specifically. I'm more concerned with the overall fairness of our society. And I think that if we made our society as a whole more fair, that would make education more fair as a byproduct. If, on the other hand, we do not make society more fair, making education more fair on its own is an underwhelming result. The main reason to make education more fair would be if you believe it will have knock-on effects that make society overall more fair. I think some of the people pushing for increased "fairness" in education (e.g., via affirmative action requirements) believe it can have large effects of that type; but I believe that, while it may have some effects, those effects will be relatively small.
I don’t want to be uncharitable, but is it a fair interpretation to say you’re advocating that we stop prioritizing improving outcomes through hard work and education and instead disincentivize financial success?
I would say it is more like we stop pretending that hard work determines outcomes, and move away from conceptualizing "success" in financial terms.
[dead]