Educational radical

The most radical idea I know of in education comes from Charles Murray in the most recent New Criterion.

 Murray says that K-12 schools can not significantly change the reading or math outcomes for students, regardless of how good or bad they are.  All the research, he says, confirms this.

Murray excludes dangerous schools but considers all other differences to be irrelevant.

"To sum up, a massive body of evidence says that reading and mathematics achievement have strong ties to underlying intellectual ability, that we do not know how to change intellectual ability after children reach school, and that the quality of schooling within the normal range of schools does not have much effect on student achievement."

I went to ordinary low quality public schools and then to the University of Chicago, the leading academic university.  Murray captures my personal experience in the following:

  "The normally bad school maintains a reasonably orderly learning environment and offers a standard range of courses taught with standard textbooks. Most of the teachers aren’t terrible; they’re just mediocre. Those raw materials give students most of the education they are going to absorb regardless of where they go to school. Excellent schools with excellent teachers will augment their learning, and are a better experience for children in many other ways as well. But an excellent school’s effects on mean test scores for the student body as a whole will not be dramatic. Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren’t that far behind, and you caught up quickly."