In Case You Missed It…
We like to think that schools can make all students equal. Decades of research, however, show that as learning conditions improve, gaps between the most able and the least able students widen rather than shrink - and that well-meaning efforts to equalize outcomes often only mask differences rather than eliminate them. IQ remains the strongest predictor of educational success, yet many teachers misunderstand it, underestimate the role of genetics, and embrace widely debunked ideas like Gardner’s “multiple intelligences.”
These topics were the focus of an excellent recent Quillette article by psychologist Russell Warne, titled “Education’s Elephant in the Room.” Warne exposes the uncomfortable truth: Ability gaps can’t simply be erased, and ignoring them ultimately does more harm than good.
Below are some excerpts from the piece, but the whole thing is well worth your time.
We devote a lot of resources to trying to equalise student outcomes. However, when schools have a good curriculum and experienced teachers, individual differences in student achievement widen. Yes, struggling students do perform slightly better—but the most able students show greater gains...
After the communist revolution, the Soviet education system was reformed to equalise school environments as much as possible throughout the Soviet Union. During the 1920s and early 1930s, educational achievement tests showed that some children were still learning more than others. So, in 1936, the USSR banned standardised testing altogether. It was much easier to ban the tests and hide individual differences than it was to actually eliminate them…
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that intelligence—as measured by IQ—is the best predictor of educational outcomes…
[I]n industrialised nations, about ninety percent of differences in learning outcomes are associated with individual differences among students. This means that only about ten percent of differences in learning outcomes are related to school- and classroom-level characteristics...
One of my students and I surveyed a sample that included 200 American teachers to learn about their knowledge and opinions about intelligence. The results showed that teachers sometimes had an appalling lack of understanding about intelligence. Over 85 percent believed that it was too simplistic to measure someone’s intelligence with just one score, like an IQ. Almost 85 percent endorsed Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Almost forty percent thought that “street smarts” were more important for life success than intelligence. All of these beliefs are completely incorrect, yet large numbers of teachers—sometimes the majority—hold them. In contrast, only a third thought that students who perform better on intelligence tests would also perform better in school.
This is as if engineers had basic misunderstandings about the laws of physics...
How could teachers—who see intelligence differences every day in their classrooms—be so badly informed? A major reason is that they were never exposed to accurate information in their training. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences—despite having little support from psychologists—is widely taught in American teacher training programs. My wife was a middle school drama teacher, and while we were dating, she told me that she learned Gardner’s theory in her teacher training program and thought it was true. She had no reason to question this received wisdom because the theory sounded good, and her education professors believed it. She knows better now, but a teacher shouldn’t have to marry a psychologist in order to learn that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is wrong.
Sometimes, teacher training programs even work to keep information about intelligence and IQ from their students…
[T]here is no evidence that grade skipping creates any harms—academically, socially, or otherwise—for children... Most educators are shocked when I tell them that up to a quarter of American students could skip their final year of high school…
The differences among students’ educational achievement start early and increase as children grow. By 5th grade, the average American classroom has children whose achievement in mathematics and reading ranges from the 2nd grade level to the 8th grade level or higher. It is simply impossible for a single teacher to prepare lessons in every subject that allow every student to learn new information. Some sort of ability grouping, in which students at similar levels of achievement are taught together, is necessary...
What causes these individual differences in intelligence and achievement that educators are so determined to deny, downplay, or ignore? …
This is where educators get really nervous, because the major cause of individual differences in intelligence seems to be genetics. The heritability of IQ varies, but in wealthy, industrialised countries, it approaches .80 in adults, which indicates that eighty percent of individual differences in IQ are associated with individual genetic differences. In young children, heritability of IQ is lower, but it hits .50 at about age ten and continues to increase into adulthood before levelling off…
In a British survey, only 29 percent of teachers thought that genes were one of the top three factors affecting student achievement. In other words, the scientific research shows that genes are usually more important than every environmental cause combined, and yet most teachers don’t even believe that genes rank in the top three causes of educational achievement…
Individual differences existed in the education system long before standardised tests could objectively measure them. They will always continue to exist because these differences are partially genetic in origin, and they manifest themselves when the educational environment meets basic standards. For decades, politicians and educators have tried to eradicate these differences, but they have always failed because they can’t equalise students genetically. As psychologist Arthur Jensen stated over fifty years ago, “A philosophy of equalization, however laudable its ideals, cannot work if it is based on false premises, and no amount of propaganda can make it appear to work. Its failures will be forced upon everyone.”
You can access the full article here.
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12 Things Everyone Should Know About the Dark Triad. (Check out the rest of the “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series here)
The Problem of Free Will, Part 3: Does Determinism Make Us Bad? (Check out the rest of the series here)
New Research on the Evolutionary Psychology of Love and Romance.
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Related Reading From the Archive
12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ
This is the first post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can access the complete collection here.
The aim should be to attain a highest average level as possible, with specific intervention for outliers. When I was in primary school I had difficulty reading and the head mistress took all the “bad readers” and made sure that we could read. In junior school I excelled in math and the head master had a special class for the math over achievers. Such an approach is the best of all worlds. This was in the 1960s and early 1970s in the UK, things may of course have changed since then!
Russel Warne’s “Education’s Elephant in the Room” is a compelling post. Thanks for sharing.
The author does a compelling job of showing that our educational system is doing a far worse job of helping our students thrive than it could. Also, that there is strong resistance in the system to the findings of psychology regarding intelligence and the effects of individual differences.
To his credit, he does this without attacking the teachers and school administrators that have caused this to happen. Or more accurately that have continued to resist change as more and more evidence piles up. This is more generous than I probably could be.
The resistance from the education community seems closely related to the ideological echo chamber pervading the education industry. Admitting there are non-environmental differences between individuals would puncture the blank slate foundation of leftist/socialist/communist thought. It would also raise the chilling thought that our current polarization is in large part caused by the left’s resistance to accepting this science. Was it Stewart Smalley who said: “If I got this wrong, what else did I get wrong?” Perhaps they can't bear to go down that road.
With the coming of AI in addition to the compelling scientific studies Warne presents, it seems pretty obvious that the foundations of our educational system and our educational philosophies are out of date. They were developed in a much different world with much difference needs than our own.
So I was surprised, and now I’m referring to the last section of Warne’s post, that his proposed correctives were not much more than tweaks to the current educational system. For example: “Struggling students should get extra help and tutoring, while gifted students should receive advanced classes and opportunities for acceleration. We should encourage educators and policy makers to accept, and perhaps even embrace, individual differences.”
Rather than tweaks, it seems we need to experiment with substantially different approaches to find what works best for our times. Two approaches I’ve been following are:
• Mastery-Based Learning: Only promoting the child once mastery of the subject matter is achieved. However, it seems that this approach is only partially implemented as reports reference the children still being within a couple of years of each other in high school.
• 2-hour Learning as invented by the Alpha School. Individualized AI-based training for two hours followed by 4-6 hours of passion directed self-discovery led by Guides, not Teachers.
What do you think about these approaches? The latter seems the only one really implementing the findings that Warne discussed. Are there others?
Beyond that, any thoughts about how we get past the strong resistance from teachers, Teacher Unions, and School Boards?