Continuing from yesterday’s post about Gladwell’s new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it’s a book about unequal opportunity–how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how those circumstances vary profoundly among people in complex, inequitable, and often random ways.
He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn’t know how…These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that’s because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one–not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses–ever makes it alone.
Gladwell devotes most of the rest of the book to culture. Appalachian blood feuds, Korean airline crashes, successful Jewish lawyers, and the tendency of Asians to be good at math, he says, can all be explained by the particular values, attitudes, and inclinations of different cultures. Asian agricultural societies are built around rice cultivation, he observes, which requires entrepreneurial ism, attention to detail, complex management, perseverance, and phenomenal amounts of work, all year long. European-style wheat cultivation, by contrast, is much simpler, amenable to mechanization and unskilled labor, and lets you take half the year off. The things you need to do to cultivate rice are the same things you need to do to learn math, he says, noting:
When students sit down to take the TIMMS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It ask them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it’s so tedious that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on TIMMS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.
The book also has a whole chapter about KIPP, and this is where the flaws in Gladwell’s way of writing are most glaring. He cites Karl Alexander’s well-known “summer learning loss” research of students in the Baltimore public schools. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their well-off peers, Alexander found, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead. It’s an important point, and has led to a lot of discussions about the use of time in school. (See an ES report on the subject here.) But this leads Gladwell to say the following:
What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding–all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at [Alexander's data]. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it…For it’s poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that’s the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city.
The weird thing is that Gladwell goes directly from here to a description of the KIPP Bronx Academy, which indeed provides students with more time. But, as Gladwell himself notes, it also has a culture that demands a lot of effort from students. The KIPP teachers emphasize discipline, self-control and respect for authority, peers, and oneself. They explicitly teach students how to listen and respond in class. They consider every student, no matter how disadvantaged, as bound for college. Does Gladwell really believe that most inner city schools work this way? That the only difference between KIPP and regular public schools is time? Long hours are far from the only “lessons from the rice paddy,” as Gladwell more than adequately describes.
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.
Great share
[...] Gladwell’s book Outliers (which I still have to read), a book that, as I have since learned, is really about education. My friend mentioned the well-known study that Gladwell cites in his book by a Johns Hopkins [...]
Great blog. Thanks. And John Thompson, excellent analysis. Thanks for your comment!
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
http://www.car-insurance-choices.com
Dang him, then, on that point at least.
Gladwell isn’t speaking in metaphorical terms; he means it quite literally.
I’m hoping that Gladwell means the differences between sharecropping culture and rice growing culture as semi-metaphorical. If anyone other than my good buddy Malcolm were to disrespect my redneck and white socks like that, I’d set down my blue ribbon beer and kick his pointy headed rear end.
Seriously, educators’ “must reads” include both the Gladwell canon and Catch 22. If you understand his version of “six degrees of separation” then you’ll understand why you (of all people) are right that inner city need to be taught to be students, as KIPP does. And you’ll understand why the welfare system has been unable to address the pockets of generational poverty. And you’ll understand why inner city students must be brought out of their buildings into the community, and the community must be brought in. The AFT’s recommendations on Community Schools aren’t just good ideas;they are following social science and cognitive science laws.
Similarly, you can’t understand why neighborhood schools are fundamentally different from magnet schools unless you understand the concept of the tipping point. If every teacher had three or four chronically disruptive students in class, we could stop bellyaching and handle it. But when every teacher has six or eight or ten chronically disruptive students per class, and that has been the case for the students’ entire careers, then the problem goes up geometrically.
The same applies to principals. If every school had 8 to 10% of their students on IEPs, the special ed law would not be a problem. But when a school has 35%of its students on IEPs, you cross a tipping point. When an assistant principal’s “To Do List” does not have one or two discipline problems with IEPS, but has twenty, then then are not enough hours in the day to even attempt to address the problems. Inner city principals face the Catch 22 of emotionally disturbed students who wouldn’t be victimizing others if they had not been victims themselves. But the principals, for all practical purposes, can not discipline them for behavior that stems from their disability, which makes sense. But their victims disproportionately include other vulnerable students, immigrants, children of whatever race is in the minority, gays, and other students on IEPs. So, anytime the administrator leaves his or her fingerprints on a case and regardless of how they handle it, they have assumed legal liability. So, federal laws – laws that I strongly support – become a part of the problem when a school has a critical mass of challenging populations.
My favorite Gladwell anecdote shows why data-driven accountability and data-driven decision-making are largely incompatible. During World War II, they charted all of the damage that was inflicted on bombers. The first impulse would be to up-armor the parts of the plane that received the most damage. That way, nobody could be blamed for planes being destroyed by certain damage. But, data-driven decision-making said that we should up-armor the OTHER parts of the plane. Think for a second, and you realize that the planes that RETURNED with certain types of damage RETURNED. You have to look for the other places where damage did not allow the planes to return and armor them!
In education, we shoud do the same. Analysts tour buildings that look like B-24s that barely survived a mission and see that their after-school safety nets are dysfunctional, instruction is weak, and that the signs saying “No Excuses!” and “High Expectations!” are falling apart. So schools have to place bandaids and adopt “teacher-proof” methods.
But to understand why these schools can’t fly, you must consider the things you can’t see in the building – the homes, the lack of interacion with the community, and the lack of a learning culture. So schools emulate Major Major’s approach of requiring tight bombing patterns because tight bombing patterns look good on the cover of Life Magazine. They don’t communicate honestly because that would open them up to the cardinal heresy of “low expectations.”
Which gets me back to why I love Gladwell. He’s intellectually honest. We Scotch Irish, Okies may have our problems with learnin but we don’t hide them under bushel baskets. If fact our system’s top educational researcher has a bumper sticker that reads, “My Pug Can Whip Your Honor Student.”
This is at the top of my to-read list. Thanks for the thoughtful review!