How to unleash student potential in education (with Jack Despain Zhou)

U.S. education is largely stagnant, fighting the same battles and making the same mistakes for decades, rather than being in a state of continuous decline. While there are areas of decline, such as recent drops in math and reading scores, the overall issue is a lack of significant progress and improvement.

The primary cause of stagnation is the persistent effort to provide a universal curriculum for everyone, rather than tailoring education to individual student abilities. This approach often overlooks highly talented students and struggles to effectively support those who are behind, keeping everyone on a single, undifferentiated path.

The biggest reform needed is to shift from age-based grouping to ability grouping, where students are taught at their specific skill level. This allows students to progress as far and as fast as they are capable and interested, rather than being constrained by an age-defined curriculum.

Meta-analyses of education research, particularly those that include gifted programs and serious curricular changes, consistently show that ability grouping has large positive impacts on the learning of high-achieving students. Programs like direct instruction, which incorporate ability grouping, have shown effectiveness at all learning levels.

Principles like spaced repetition (reviewing material at increasing intervals) and interleaving (mixing different topics during study) are well-understood to be effective but are often not incorporated. This is partly because these methods can feel less intuitive or more difficult for both students and teachers than less effective approaches.

Education schools are often criticized for being more vocational than research-focused, prone to fads, and ideologically driven, rather than prioritizing the science of learning. Teachers may also be focused on credentialing for pay raises, and the system is slow to evolve, allowing intuitively appealing but unproven ideas (like learning styles) to persist.

The 'grammar of schooling' refers to fundamental, resistant-to-change structural elements like age-based grouping and fixed class durations (e.g., 50-60 minute blocks). While specific curricula or fads (like project-based learning) may come and go, these underlying structures remain largely consistent across classrooms.

Ability grouping can be implemented through various methods, such as offering different math classes (e.g., pre-algebra, algebra, geometry) that students sign up for based on readiness, or through more flexible elementary school models like direct instruction, which regularly tests students and moves them between different classrooms for multi-week chunks.

Pushback against standardized testing often stems from an discomfort with the achievement gaps they reveal, leading to a tendency to 'smash the thermometer' rather than address the underlying issues. Critics also worry that tests are imperfect proxies and incentivize teaching to the test rather than deeper learning.

NCLB's fundamental flaw was treating the goal of education as getting all students to the same arbitrary 'proficient' level, regardless of their starting point or circumstances. This created a punitive system that labeled schools, teachers, and students in difficult situations as failures, rather than providing appropriate, tailored support.

Instead of using test scores for rewards or punishments, they should be treated as diagnostic tools to understand student needs and tailor curriculum. While value-added metrics (measuring student change over time) have been tried, they can create perverse incentives, suggesting that direct assessment for improvement is better than high-stakes systems.

While intelligence is real and matters, expertise research suggests that progress is more constrained by interest than by intelligence. Almost any individual can progress in any given domain if they are serious, focused, and receive effective training, making the question less about 'can they do it?' and more about 'how difficult will it be and are they willing to put in the work?'

Classroom management is a very real and significant problem, particularly in more difficult neighborhoods, as an environment conducive to learning requires order and focus. Addressing issues like phone use in classrooms and removing extremely disruptive students are high priorities and prerequisites for serious in-classroom learning.

In 2014, the FAA completely overhauled its air traffic controller hiring process, voiding previous aptitude test scores and CTI school degrees. They introduced a biographical questionnaire with seemingly random 'correct' answers (e.g., lowest high school grade was science) that knocked out over 90% of applicants, severely disrupting the hiring pipeline.

The change was driven by political pressure to address the 'disparate impact' of the previous aptitude test, which, while highly effective, showed significant racial disparities. Despite lacking substantive backing that the new process would maintain or improve performance, the FAA elected to overhaul hiring to reduce disparate impact.

While it didn't mean wildly unqualified controllers were guiding planes, the scandal exacerbated a shortage of air traffic controllers by significantly weakening the hiring pipeline. This resulted in busier, more stressed, and overworked controllers, leading to a general degradation of performance and an increase in overall risk.

Instead of lowering standards or implementing a nonsensical biographical questionnaire, the FAA could have focused on meaningful outreach and providing extra training to underprivileged communities. Advocates for diversity in aviation emphasize encouraging more people to apply and preparing them to meet high standards, rather than neglecting safety or skill requirements.