Education, Literacy, and the Limits of Reform with Freddie deBoer

Five years after their initial discussion, we are back with Freddie DeBoer—author of The Cult of Smart and the upcoming book All in Your Head—to revisit the state of American education.

In this episode, we move beyond the usual pundits' talking points to address the material and institutional realities facing schools today. From the uniform decline in literacy scores globally to the complex economics of "cost disease" in special education, we explore why most modern reform efforts are failing to meet the actual challenges of the system.

Key Discussion Points:

The Literacy Crisis: Why reading scores are declining internationally and why standard "reforms" often prove delusional.
The Myth of Educational Intervention: Challenging the belief that schools can fully overcome socioeconomic disparities and why academic aptitude remains remarkably static over a lifetime.
The Cost Disease & Bureaucracy: How the expansion of administrative apparatuses, driven by compliance mandates (like the ADA) and state oversight, has bloated costs without improving outcomes.
The Special Education Dilemma: Addressing the ballooning cost of special education and the perverse incentives created by a system that requires a "diagnosis" for students to receive basic resources.
The Future of the "College for All" Model: Why the assumption that every student must pursue higher education is breaking down in an economy that no longer offers a reliable industrial path for those who don't.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Why Revisit Education Now

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varm Vlog. And I am back here with Freddie Deboer, who's been on the show a few times. He is the author of The Cult of Smart, of which we will be talking about today and how his thoughts on education have developed in the five years since writing that book, and the four years since he'd been on the podcast to talk about this book. And he also wrote how Elites ate the social justice movement in 2023, which I also interviewed him for. And you are currently writing a novel correct on mental health. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

So my my first novel came out this past October. And then my third nonfiction book is coming out this October called All in Your Head, which is my sort of the nonfiction portion of the mental health stuff. But I have to correct you because I looked this up and it's crazy to me. We had our education chat five years ago. It was May of 2021, which just seems insane to me.

C. Derick Varn 1:44

Yeah, that's that's nuts. It also means I've known you for more than a decade, which is also weird.

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Well, you know, the reason but I know I was watching that video in anticipation of this, and the reason I wanted to do this again is that like that discussion is one of my favorite kind of on-ramps to everything I've been doing in this space. And I was like, you know, half decade in, maybe it's time for a for a refresh.

C. Derick Varn 2:09

Yeah, I I I think it it kind of is because a lot of the points that you made in Cult of Smart and that we talked about such about the the issues with abandoning standardized testing, but also the kind of falseness of the narrative that we ever completely abandoned it in secondary school. Um I do live in a state where that is where you could claim that we have kind of abandoned standardized testing by making them not mandatory, but we still do them um every year. And I've been thinking a lot about the literacy crisis, which I think is very real, and most of the uh solutions that I hear to it to me are delusional, in so much that they don't deal with the fact that supposedly better school systems all over the planet all are having the same problem. And you basically got in an argument with a bunch of education reformers who for have gotten all misty-eyed and weepy about no child left behind being somehow better than it was. And you started pushing back about that and also pointing out that the goal that progressive education has given itself, even when it takes a conservative guise, and we could talk about that too, because it does sometimes, has not been tried ever. And yeah, I talked about some attempts that are maybe closer to it in my responses to you, but even in the Soviet

Global Literacy Decline And PISA Data

C. Derick Varn 3:47

Union, they were never trying to make everybody like able to code or to do high-level humanities tasks or to do engineering, like that was not what the goal was. Their goal was just to find the people who could from any class strata and to have a strong enough background in education that people could orient themselves to what they were naturally good at. And that's not what we're doing. So, why did you get back into the education debate game?

SPEAKER_02 4:21

Well, you know, this is kind of of all the stuff that I kind of do as a generalist, this is the stuff that I find sort of most intellectually stimulating. My graduate student experience, I was doing you know, education, pedagogy related stuff. And it's just, you know, it's just an interesting sort of political thing in that it is absolutely core to the story we tell ourselves uh politically, and nothing ever changes, right? And nothing ever gets fixed. But we all sort of take our assigned places in this thing. And so, like this debate that you're talking about, I really want to underline something that you said, and I think this is really important for your listeners to understand, which is that as you said, the literacy crisis we're experiencing is remarkable in how uniform it is in terms of what we know in the international data, right? So despite what you know, those conservatives you you talked about will say, oh, you know, the woke San Francisco school board, you know, killed literacy in the United States. I if you go, if you look on my newsletter, I have some fairly recent stuff where I made some charts with PISA data. So that's the big OECD, you know, comparative test, looking at the the developed world. The way that the graphs look, if you look compare the United States to Germany, Finland, Ireland, to the Netherlands, if you compare it to the OECD average, right? It is remarkable how uniform these declines have been, right? So different countries have different baselines, and so where they are on the graph varies a bit. But the where the the decline starts happening, the intensity of the decline, it's all extremely uniform. So you can actually look at just graph out pizza pizza reading scores over time, and you can look at all these countries that are close analogs to the United States, and you can see the collapsing literacy, the reading numbers, right? One of the little ironies of what's happening right now is it's it's also happening in math and science in the PISA, but it's not as uniform and it's not as obvious. But one of the kind of ironies of what's happening is that because the United States is crashing a little bit less, we've actually improved our relative standing in the OECD compared to other countries. Unless you're looking at real outliers like Singapore, which is tiny, which is incredibly wealthy, and which you know, there's reasons to doubt their numbers, but that's a whole other subject. Everybody is seeing this decline, right? And so that is not useful for the typical American policy debate because it's difficult to ascribe that to, you know, oh, those teachers' unions, right? Or, you know, or oh, hey, you know, if it had gotten better, you could say, oh, look, the charter schools, whatever. So everything is getting worse for pretty much across the board. I am one of those people, I can't say this with scientific rigor, but it certainly seems to me that the rise of the sm the smartphone and internet video and TikTok, etc., is implicated because time that used to be spent by children reading is now spent doing anything other than reading. Which we have we come to this sort of impasse right here, which is like this is my fascination, right? Which is, you know, I've I've often used the example of like, you know, there's the old sort of allegory of the man with only a hammer who sees a world of nails. That's always the American education policy debate, which is because we don't have the kind of muscular state interventions into the economy that would be, you know, act as an alternative, our our educational debates are the man with the hammer, right? It is we have to have educational solutions to our various socioeconomic problems. And so that when they don't work, we have nowhere to go. And I think this is the perfect example where it's just real hard, right, to blame declining reading scores in Belfast or in Amsterdam or in Düsseldorf on teachers' unions. It's just real hard to blame those things on the demise of Nochal Left Behind. And so the debate is stuck. And so one of the things that I thought was interesting after writing that, I mean, after excuse me, after watching that five-year-old video of our last discussion about this stuff is nothing has really changed other than that it does seem like there's a sort of widespread throwing up your hands, no one knows where to go now, right? Where we no one knows what the post-sort of neoliberal education landscape is, but even a lot of the sort of diehards don't even seem to have their heart in it right now. You know what I mean?

C. Derick Varn 9:08

No, for sure. I mean, I looked at what they're talking about doing in the in the in the UK, for example, which is Keir Starmer's government is now gonna like somehow procure AI assistance for every struggling student. And I'm just like I realize that the that the research and AI's affection on cognition is all very new, but every study is that without careful curation and and cultivation, AI is cognitively degenerative. So, like, and I find it crazy. We we see this here in U in Utah, for example. We have banned smartphones, so there's now finally an anti-smartphone uh thing going on. There's a distrust of the internet, which my state is leading, I think for pernicious reasons that aren't even about education, it's more about expanding monitoring who's online for any reason. Because my state is also claiming in the ability to fight porn universal jurisdiction over the entirety of the planet to enforce their laws locally. Right. So that's fun. But what we've seen is that now that they've given up on smartphones, there's a big push for AI. I think I'm a in some ways, I might even be more cynical than you that I think most of these reforms are more about seeming cost-cutting initiatives that often don't work and they don't cut cost. And also about administrative prerogative to be looking

Smartphones, Attention, And The Reading Crash

C. Derick Varn 10:47

to do something, which has also been a bit, you know, you you've studied education for long enough to know. It's a big problem because even if there was validity to some of these reforms, we wouldn't know because we don't ever stick with them long enough to fully implement them through a long enough longitudinal cycle to say if they worked or not. Usually they're abandoned before child's education between kindergarten and 12th grade is over. You know, I could think about this in terms of like all the math reforms of the aughts that we did where we implemented, you know, Japanese style math, which it wasn't really Japanese style math, that's neither here nor there, but that's what they sold it as. And we started abandoning it or piecemealing it or changing it through common core expectations, etc., uh, within five years. And then we've changed that within five years. And if you think about like scoping a curriculum, you're like, oh, well, that kid wouldn't have been even through primary school yet. And I'm like, yeah, so we don't know how much they worked or not. But regardless, and I think you know, this is one of the quiet parts out loud, people who study pedagogy know Hattie and Marzano and all those guys. For all the emphasis they put on teacher efficacy and what teachers can do and their like meta and their meta-analysis, if you actually look at their effect ratios, even for the stuff there's evidence of effect ratios on, and there's methodological issues even with that, because they don't really sort out good and bad studies, they don't do, they don't follow it up with crit over with like critical review and analysis that other fields do. The effect ratio of anything in education as far as outcomes is marginal. And so they take even a marginal effect ratio, like the effectiveness of direct instruction. And they make a big deal out of it because they're like, oh, this is the one thing you can affect. But okay, true. It's such a marginal effect, though. Like it's tiny.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Yeah. So I've been debating Chetty recently. So for you know the people who are listening or watching Raj Chetty, you know, about 10 years ago, I think he's he's at Harvard now, he wasn't at the time, but Raj Chetty and his team, he's an economist. And um, a lot of the sort of hot educational research ends up coming out of uh economics, excuse me, um, departments, which has something to do with sort of the biases of the sort of neoliberal media establishment. But anyway, Chetty was the one who sort of reinvigorated after you know a series of stumbles, the idea that you know teachers have this major impact on student long-term outcomes, and we shouldn't be nihilistic about teaching. I don't think we should be nihilistic about teaching either. I just how we should be enthusiastic about teaching to me is a different question. But Chetty, you know, one of his most famous studies found that if you take a class from among students, you know, the difference between having like, I think it's like having a like 80th percentile teacher versus a 20th percentile teacher, something like that. The it's a $250,000 of lifetime earnings across that class, which sparks you know a million uh essays in the Atlantic, etc. If you think about that for five minutes, a class of like 20 to 25 students, $250,000 over a lifetime, it breaks down to like you know $10,000, $12,000 for each student, which over a lot 40 years of earnings actually isn't that much money, but anyway, setting that aside. Here's the punchline. Even the teacher value added modeling stuff that Chetty is into, right? On the high side, it identifies like I think I think the figure from his uh initial papers is like 17% of the variance in an individual student's outcomes are attributable to the teacher, which of course means that even if we were to accept that number, and if and much of the data is says that it's in fact quite lower, most of the sources will tell you that it's a single single digit percentage. That's like 83% of the variance is not controllable by the teacher, right? So you have that sort of reality. You know, you you were talking about how Utah, you know, has sort of defanged the accountability regime. You hear an awful lot about this. Oh, we saw scores rise under NCLB. One thing that I would point out, and I think it's always important to say, and you were you were just sort of hinting at this, is for everyone, it's important for everyone to understand you do have this sort of test opt-out movement, like the parents movement, which is parents say they don't want their kids to be testing so much, parents say they don't want their kids to be being taught to the test so much, which makes sense, and there's a validity to that. A lot of people have sort of made that the reason why NCLB ultimately died, or the reason why the accountability approach has died now under ESS, every student succeeds, sort of the Obama replacement of the NCLB. A big part of it though, that you know uh doesn't get reported on is NCLB was expensive for states, right? I mean, I think people need to understand this. NCLB provided federal funding for the initial period of development of state level assessments, right? It did not provide continuing ongoing federal funding for those types of one of the things that happened with NCLB is that states were like, oh, awesome, we want more control over schools, right? So traditionally, you know, public schools have been in a sort of fight between local authority and state authority. States, people in state

AI In Schools And Reform Whiplash

SPEAKER_02 16:47

government always want more state control. So we'll get more control because we're gonna control the assessment mechanism. And also here's this federal money. It seems like many of them just didn't realize that the money spigot was gonna get turned off, right? And that's what happened though, which is you had we're left with a bunch of states where it's like $45, $50 a student goes to Pearson for their state, you know, assessments at third and eighth grade. You multiply that across, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of kids. That's a lot of money, right? So what so if you want to understand part of the reason why this is pulling back, right? This sort of parent-led, you know, opt-out movement is the sort of optics on the top. But a lot of states were really eager to slash these costs anyway. And so what you have ultimately is you have this sort of nobody is going to admit to it, but a sort of a low grumble of people understanding that that you know the teacher quality stuff isn't very high value, even if you take the sort of expansive view, and then the extreme cost. And you could sort of arrive at this place where, without like an ideological transformation, you have a lot of states saying, What are we getting for our you know, the the 45, 50, 55 dollars we're sending to Pearson per student every year, you know?

C. Derick Varn 18:09

Well, I think that's a key point. I think another thing that you point out with the with this parents opt-out movement are with some of these quote unquote quoke reforms that I've also been banging a drum about for six years is these initiatives almost solely are economic because the rationale for them are diametrically opposed, but the effects are are the same. And the narratives about this are interesting to me. So I recently talked to a journalist from Baltimore. I think he's vaguely conservative, and he was talking about all the issues in corruption with over-administration and and secondary schools, an issue that I care about and actually mostly agree with him with. Off air, I asked him, why did he think this was so intractable? And he said the teachers' unions, and I kind of like suppressed a laugh because I was like, Well, you you yourself said that the teachers don't like this either. And that this is a ubiquitous problem, and you can play about Baltimore, but I was like, what about Georgia? Where you there are there are teaching and lobbying organizations, but there are no teachers' associations that can that can negotiate a contract or strike.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

Um collect dues, like formal dues.

C. Derick Varn 19:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah, or yeah, or even collect dues. So there are whole states where where the teachers association is just a donation-based lobbying institution that still have this problem. And the other thing that I think has missed out, and it's implied in what you said, is the precise point where board-level administration went gangbusters and expansion at great cost to education, is actually in CLB. And a lot of these reformers will complain about that sometimes, although they usually complain about teachers, but sometimes they'll complain about the administrative hijinks and and the financing of the data and and all this, which you know, with all these systems you and I can talk about, they're actually quite bad. I don't trust anyone's data. Um the you end up with a you end up with situations where there's an teaching cost crunch here, but there still is not a whole lot of demand for gutting, even from these reformers, gutting this administration, this administration explosion. I wanted to talk to you about that because one of the things that you said is there is no crisis, and I'm of the opinion that there is a crisis, but I still ninely that I still agree with you because I don't think the crisis is about teaching at all. I think it's about a bunch of funding traps in schools that are becoming increasingly burdensome to the entire apparatus.

unknown 21:09

Right.

C. Derick Varn 21:09

But I wanted to get your your thoughts on that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 21:12

Like, yeah, so I mean, look, like let's let's sort of define the the this the situation. There is certainly an American education crisis if you are sort of concerned with the performance of the worst off. So yeah, so here's here's the the top-down sort of the 10,000 feet sort of overview, which is the median American student does fine. Okay. This there's an awful lot of investment in saying that that's not true, but it is true, which is that if you look at our position in the international hierarchy, our kids, our median student is fine. You know, I I you know I spend that I spend a lot of time talking about this finding, which has been true for like 30 years. It's the same, the same survey has been being done for for decades, which is that the you know, the the pollsters ask parents with with kids in American public schools, K through 12 schools, and the parents say, Oh, the state of American education writ large, oh, it's bad. They give they say, you know, give it an A through F, and they give it like I think it comes up like in D plus, is usually like around where it is. Like the Americans think that the American education system is bad. And then they say, rate your kids school. And it's always like a B average with a lot of kids parents in the A range. In other words, parents dramatically to a dramatic degree, parents rate their kids' schools higher than they do the abstraction that is American public education rate large. Now, this has long been sort of treated by the punditing class as like, oh, it's cognitive dissonance, oh, they're deluded, they don't want to accept that their kids' schools are. Or bad. But in fact, it actually perfectly fits the reality, which is that in America, if you reach into a bag and pull out a random American public K through 12 school, you're most likely to get a school that's doing fine, right? We have a top performance sort of strata in the American system that is the envy of the world. I better this is a thing that just blows people's minds. Like do people circulate things that are just wrong from Reddit or whatever, like, oh my God, an American won, America's team won the International Math Olympiad. What an incredible feat. We do that all the time, right? Of physics, chess, even like things like linguistics, uh robotics. Our top performing students are the envy of the world. We we do incredibly well. The problem in the United States is we have a relatively small number of very geographically located pools of extremely poor performance that are in places that are predictable. Many of them are high minority, like Detroit is typically the worst school district in the country, or Cleveland. But there's also, just for the record, places like the, you know, the sort of rural uh West Virginia, the Ozarks, whatever, with those, those have horrendous numbers as well. And so our numbers are pulled way down by those. If you want to define that as an educational crisis, then yeah, we're in crisis because those kids do truly abysmal. Then again, like in Detroit public schools, 40% of kids have what they call extreme chronic absenteeism, right? Which is not a problem that a teacher can solve if the kid's not there, right? And so my perspective is, you know, this is a social crisis, but it's not really a crisis of education or the education sort of system, right? Okay, so that's that sort of that's the sort of 10,000 foot sort of thing. Why do we so often talk about a generalized American public school crisis? Well, because that's what the plendatocracy has sort of wanted to do. And there's like a more sympathetic and a less sympathetic version of why they did that, right? The more sympathetic is they know that the American people are not going to get super you know concerned about a bunch of poor black kids in Detroit or Cleveland struggling in public school, right? And so if we create the pre a perception of a broader crisis, then that will lead to reform that these kids need. That's the benefit, that's the sort of you know, sympathetic way. The unsympathetic version is just that you know they just lie, right? Like, I mean, like there's you know, it's it is simply empirically indefensible to say that the Americ average American school, 10th or 12th student is doing poorly, which it's just not true, right? And I and again, you can check my newsletter, I have tons of information to this effect. But to get to your like what you were saying about the about the states and this sort of this sort of back and forth with uh local districts, I really want everyone to understand that how important this all is for the structure

Teacher Impact And Value Added Myths

SPEAKER_02 25:47

and the future of American schooling. Many people, most people still you know think that American public schooling is like dominantly funded at the local level, right? That's what people think is happening, right? The you have property taxes in your city, your property taxes pay for the public schools, and that's why they're that's how they get funded. It's it's true that that is the case, and particularly that's true in affluent communities. In the last 10 years or so, state funding has pulled even with local funding. Okay, so it's this is quietly one of the more um consequential realities in American education is that states are now paying about as much per pupil in the totality of the system as uh local uh districts are. Again, this money is heavily concentrated in the poorest districts, right? In the most struggling districts, right? You have also have federal funding, like Title I funding goes to the poorest districts. You're seeing more and more of this nonprofit or foundation money, private money, and that flows heavily towards the poorest districts. But the reality is the vision of American schooling, public schooling as being like dominantly both funded by and controlled at the local level just isn't true anymore. And like the sharp edge of this of the spear here has been recently assessment, right? So, and this is what Derek and I have been talking about in terms of NCLB, which is the the sort of the move by the states to assert themselves. Like NCLB gave them the ability to do that. And then, like I said earlier, they sort of found themselves hanging, sort of holding this bag in terms of funding these things that they don't want to pay for. And so now you're in this situation, you have this sort of post the sort of post-pandemic reality. Donald Trump doesn't give a shit about any of this, right? The Bush Obama consensus, I mean, among the expert classes, it hasn't really changed, but there also hasn't really been a lot of movement in any direction. And so you have this sort of sort of this this push and pull back and forth of who controls this and who funds it, right? And who is left holding the political bag for the money that gets spent. And I do want to say, because we were talking about value-added modeling earlier, one of the things that people thought was going to happen, one of the things that many administrators seemed to think was going to happen, was that NCLB and value-added modeling and the ability to get rid of bad teachers, etc., like all this stuff was going to empower the school administrators, right? And one of the reasons why value-added modeling has fallen out of favor, I mean, the biggest reason is that it doesn't work and it's nonsense. But another reason is that principals thought it was going to reinforce their perception of who was good teachers and who were bad. And that's not what happened, right? In other words, a lot of people who were really supportive of like value at moderating, uh value-added modeling, excuse me, and merit pay, et cetera, in the systems thought that this was going to strengthen their hand when it came to you know who they liked and who they didn't. And then they found that these systems are capricious and sort of you know volatile, and they don't like it any more than anyone else does.

C. Derick Varn 29:09

Right. I mean, having, you know, I've been a teacher for 17 years and having been under some value add models. There were years where I looked amazing and stellar, and then there were years where I looked terrible, and it was the luck of the draw. It really was. It was oh I let's let's underline this, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:24

There was this really big and important study that was done, sort of it was sort of drafting in the wake of the Chetty study. And my impression is the people behind the study thought that they were going to find good, strong support for Chetty. But what they actually found was in their very large data set, okay. The if you had a teacher who performed in the bottom 20% of the the value added metric one year, they were more than twice as likely to finish in the top 20% the next year than in the bottom 20%. So let's let's let's let's be clear to what we're saying here. A teacher who was one of the in the bottom fifth in terms of quality, according to this metric, one year, was twice as likely to be in the top fifth the following year, right? And so the question that you have to immediately ask is number one, did these teachers just forget how to teach, right? Or did they just hate the students the following year? And second, how do you build any kind of meaningful accountability regime if year over year the best teachers become the worst? It's also like anecdotally, I can tell you that like when you have like high school teachers or middle school teachers who are teaching different sets of students by the period, right? Some of them look exceptionally good one period and like the worst the next period. What do you do? It doesn't make any sense.

C. Derick Varn 30:46

One thing that you hinted at that I think people should really pay attention to is the cost of monitoring, and you have the cost of the test, but also like one of the reasons why we've seen cost disease in education, despite the higher pupil per teacher ratio, and even with like in Utah, we had huge gains in pay over the past decade. But I'm just gonna put that out if we control for inflation, all it did was catch up with past inflation. So they went from being under inflation for for what they made in 1990 to 2012 to now being about where they would have been if they had been compensated on par with inflation for the entire period. So one of the things I was pointing out to people is of course people perceive this as major gains, but I was like, no, but the cost that we're spending on right now is tech. That's still not a huge cost. Most of our costs are still staffing, but it is our tech and our tech costs have increased dramatically. And in administration, and when I said, look, I hate administration as much as the next person, but a lot of it is compliance administration to be able to administer these tests, to follow federal and increasingly state mandates to deal with cultural mandates. Like whenever we have to start banning books, we need people to coordinate if they're even if they're just coordinating teachers to do it, to coordinate the teachers to go in and pull those books out and then get rid of them in a certain manner, which is often we're often not allowed to just throw them out. Like so we have been experiencing cost disease. The public perceives that as like teachers making tons of money, but we're not. The one place where I get really upset is the claims about graduation rates showing that we've been improving, because I can tell you flat-out administrators doctor those numbers. We have come up with so many ways to buy credits, to get credits other ways. And and you're right, in the sense that the average middle class person, whether it's school or not, is probably going to be okay. The median student's probably going to be fine. I don't think this is really hurting them. I don't think it's helping them either. It's just, you know, avoiding accountability for administrators, if I'm quite honest with you. That's not for so much for teachers. So I do find that interesting, but where I flip that back and be completely sympathetic to you is everything the reformers have suggested to fix that has made it worse.

Why Testing Regimes Got So Expensive

C. Derick Varn 33:48

And you know, cause disease for a cycle. But go ahead, yeah, let's revine.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's just so look, like one of the side effects of the sort of quasi-federal. I mean, like, look, like NCLB, which again was replaced, but it was replaced by a deal that was written to, you know, very closely follow NCLB because you know, the transition from the George W. Bush uh education policy to Obama was largely a matter of continuity. So you have this weird law, right, that is a federal law that injects more sort of state oversight into local education policy. Because whether, you know, whatever anyone wants to say, right, some degree teaching to the test is inevitable if the test exists. And again, like a lot of state legislatures, a lot of state sort of policy wonks like the fact that NCLB was a backdoor way to influence local education and curricular policy. That's just a fact, right? Well, now you have a just this unholy amalgam of federal, state, and local oversight and federal, state, and local funding. And one of the things that happens is that the more that those things get confused, the harder and harder it is to say, you know, who is making sure that X person is actually doing something for their money. Five years ago, when we had a similar conversation, you were talking about these off-site curricular specialists, right? So it schools pay someone and they say, I'm a history expert, I'm gonna set the curriculum for you, and I'm gonna, and now I'm gonna do it in line with uh common core standards, which I don't think you have in Utah.

C. Derick Varn 35:39

We don't, but we do. So we don't, okay. I'm gonna have to be very careful about how I legally state this. We do not have common core, but we copied the common core and setting our standards anyway, and just changed like five of them in English, and like and like there aren't common core in social studies and what and whatnot, anyway. So those stayed the same. Uh math is pretty much identical to what it was.

SPEAKER_02 36:04

So yeah, so go ahead. Those of you who don't know, you know, Derek coming from Utah, Utah has long been in like an outlier state. I mean, before this ramp up in in funding for education, you Utah used to comfortably be the lowest per pupil spending, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Anyway, you have these curricular specialists who are people who set the curriculum for middle, typically, typically middle and high school students. Many of them are off-site in the sense that like they don't aren't physically at these specific schools. And this is a task that used to be fulfilled by the teachers at the schools, right? Why does something like this get funded? Number one is we build a bureaucratic apparatus and the and the you know, what is it, the the bureaucracy is expanding to satisfy the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, right? In other words, when you created the sort of no child left behind, every student succeeds sort of thing, you were ensuring that state level, local level, you're going to be getting extra layers of bureaucrat to administrate this thing. And then also when politicians and state level figures want to show that they take something seriously, they hire people, right? Maybe some of these people do a good job, right? The problem is, is if you're a parent, you have absolutely no sense of who these people are, where they operate, that they're involved at all. There's nobody like the parent, the kind of parent who is and like and taxpayer and voter who is going to be motivated enough to go looking for like who do I yell at about the cost being imposed by this curricular off-site curricular, expect, you know, it just that person doesn't exist, right? So you have all this sort of stuff going on with all these sort of additional sort of tests and fees, and and you have this increasingly Byzantine and complex set of relationships between various entities that are sort of larding over the sort of actual educational policy for the individual student. And the effect is just to make Leviathan grow a little bit bigger and make it harder and harder to say, okay, what's happening here? What's getting funded? Why are we funding it? What is the what is the sort of the path through which these dollars sort of flows? Who's providing these dollars, who's paying for it? And so you get this sort of like, it's not surprising to me that there's a kind of ideological stasis right now, right? Like, I one thing that I can tell you unofficially in a way that I can't actually sort of call anyone out and wouldn't, but it's like I think a lot of the sort of previously diehard, like true believer and reform people have kind of kind of like subtly and quietly lowered their standards, right? That like since I published that book, I'm not obviously I'm not saying it's because of my book, I'm just saying like this as sort of a time horizon. You know, in this sort of Trump era where Trump doesn't care about educational policy and the Biden administration was fighting a war on so many fronts and you had the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I really think that there has been a kind of a sort of loss of faith in among the sort of neoliberal reform set in charter schools to solve these problems, in merit pay, in firing teachers, in crushing the teachers' unions. But they don't want to give up publicly. You have an ascendant right-wing sort of school choice for everyone because they explicitly just want to destroy public expenditure and they want to be able to send their kids to religious schools on the public time. And you have this sort of hollowing out of like the of the sort of the old school sort of ideological stakes where more and more often I'll interact with people who are sort of like old school sort of liberal reformers who now just tell me privately, I can never say this publicly, but yeah, I don't really believe we can improve the schools this way. But no one knows what the next step is, right? Like there's it is it is it is rapidly sort of devolving into a sort of now kind of wounded and marginal, but still their sort of woke wing of assessment is racist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We should decolonize everything. And there's sort of like the sort of the teachers' unions sort of holding down, like defending their own. And then instead of it being like an old school sort of neoliberal, like, you know, let's get charter schools and they'll improve the public schools. The the all the sort of the counterforce is sort of MAGA, like there should be no department of education, there should be no public schools, universal private schools for for vouchers for everyone, and pay me to homeschool my kids, you know.

C. Derick Varn 40:49

Yeah, I mean, we tried to pay the homeschool my kids with no oversight. So we were just giving families about $9,000 a year not to send their kids to school. And uh, that ultimately has been, I think, currently stopped by a judge uh here in Utah, but it's definitely been like that's the only idea they have. Because they've had so many charter schools that have been exposed as scams, they don't save money despite despite crushing, you know, being designed to crush the teachers' unions and stuff, which they do. Their profitability incentive, particularly the for-profit ones, means that the only way you can make money is by skimming the difference on how you crush the teachers' unions and what you get from the state, or by outright illegality, of which there's been a massive amount documented, and I think it got worse after COVID, not better. So those scandals have hit the public. I think that has slowed

Administration Growth And Compliance Machinery

C. Derick Varn 41:47

charter school growth. I do agree with you. There are still some of the old social justice warriors left. I will also say with you, I don't think it's there was a little while where that was becoming popular amongst like young teachers. That seems to have completely died.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

I feel like I think it was convenient for a certain kind of person to hang the extreme woke thing. But Sam, I I I looked into this, like so you know, San Francisco banned teaching algebra in eighth grade. I tried to find reliable numbers on the total number of districts in the country, which is thousands and thousands of districts. And I I couldn't find even double digits of cut of districts who had actually done that. But it was it was ideologically convenient for some people to sort of hang that stuff on the teachers' unions, right? In other words, like there's the union side. Well, that's the side that thinks math is racist, right? But that was a political move.

C. Derick Varn 42:45

Absolutely. And one that in so much that the the NEA and the AFT actually tried to do that, and they did they did kind of flirt with it a little bit, they got immediate pushback from their membership. I remember when they sent us out like, should we be prioritizing diversity or our teacher work conditions stuff? And almost universally, including from teachers of color, was like, fix our work conditions. What the hell are you talking about? Right. Like, I know you don't even have the balls to call yourself a union anymore in a lot of places, but like this is what we this is what you exist to do. And also, if you did it, we'd be more diverse.

SPEAKER_02 43:27

So because as I've said, it's it's worth saying, like again, like a you know teachers' unions are among the most naturally gen, especially like heavily women, but also like racially diverse national unions that exist, right? I mean, if you if you want like a vision of what a a union should look like for you know a woke person, it's like the AFT, right?

C. Derick Varn 43:51

You know, right, exactly. And they get pushback from that because it's just like no attempts to do Abraham X Kindie X stuff right after right after COVID met from near universal hostility. The one you talk about San Francisco, I was thinking about the one teachers public school district that did something that I was like, that's outright illegal and you know it, which was the positive discrimination and firing written into the contract. And I was like, that's gonna be thrown out, and of course it was, because even I was like, that's that's against the Anti-Discrimination Act. It's it's not it's not gonna pass muster. Those things get a lot of attention, but we're talking about two school districts who got quashed immediately for doing it, and it did not spread. I you could argue about. About the ethnic study stuff in California, and I have been like, you know, in those debates, I'm like, okay, if people locally want it, great. Otherwise, I don't care. You know, which is how it was handled in New York. But again, that doesn't affect most of the country. It really doesn't. You know, yes, some some schools might offer AP African history, but they probably have 30 students in a school of 4,000 who ever encounter it at all.

SPEAKER_02 45:18

I mean, even I mean, if you go, if you go to the largest school district in the country, which is New York City Public School District, right? I think you would be surprised. I think a people, I think people would be surprised at how unwoke the average K through 12 class in the New York City public school district is. I should maybe just say out loud, like part of the reason why in Utah some of the sort of right wing sort of stuff is more likely to actually happen is because Mormons are great organizers, right? Like they're effective. Right, yeah, they're very effective at what they do. So look, like, but let's like, I mean, let me so so let's like sort of look at like at this sort of right wing idea of like private school boxes for all, right? Which is like there's no reason that the state should be in the business of running schools. The the market is the most powerful thing. We'll have we'll have you know private entities, what people pay for, and either everyone will get a check, every family will get a check, or just the families that can't afford it will get a check and we'll send all the kids to the private school. So you can read this from me in all manner of different places. I have a couple of versions, I have one version that is 18,000 words long if you want to seek that. But the basic, the basic uh observation is just that look, like, and and again, this is something that I think is like gathering steam in terms of people understanding it, but it has no political constituency because people don't know what to do with it. But it is that like most of education is about an individual kid's natural level of talent or aptitude, and that you can see this play out in the research record because from the beginning of academic life, so like kindergarten through all the way through college, you can look at how kids perform, and there is remarkable stability in their relative placement within the performance distribution. Meaning, so for example, if you gather a bunch of data about kids in their, you know, the the summer after kindergarten, right? Um, and you compare that to who ends up graduating from college, et cetera, it's remarkable how stable those relative positions are. And that's true even in the face of remarkable intervention, right? That we try all kinds of things to shape this up and it doesn't change things up. Like, and there's there's been there's all manner of ways that you can express this. I mean, uh, you know, maybe one of the famous findings is that if you have like, if you look at like third grade reading group, it's a really, really good predictor of who's going to graduate college, right? So, like, and that's true even the like third grade reading group. Typically, you know, you have like three levels, right? Which the, you know, they might call gold, silver, or bronze or whatever. But you have, you know, high, medium, and low, the high kids almost all go to college, and the low kids almost none of them go to college. And this is true throughout, sort of. And the question is, is like to the degree to which you can alter this. And what we find is like with things that look promising in the beginning, as interventions that alter this reality, there's inevitably really serious fade out so that over time students again gravitate towards their natural level. And sort of there's the debate about whether this exists at all. Certainly, plenty of people will call you racist if you say it exists, even though this is about individual student aptitude, not about racial categories. And then there's, well, yes, there's a natural tendency, but it's not that powerful, whatever. Okay. But so, like private school for all, like, you know, this vision, this conservative pundit vision, one of the things that's really interesting, and sort of in my sort of educational journey, and since, like, you know, my book sort of made me a locust of sort of people talking about this. A lot of people in the private school world are really not down with the idea of private school for all, because they know that their appeal to both parents and to teachers, their employees, is that not everybody can go to public school or go to private school. In other words, if you're unaware, private school teachers make significantly less than school, right? Of course, there's like, you know, very tony private academies where they pay a lot. But in general, the average private school teacher at any given level is making significantly less than the average public school teacher. Number one, they don't have a union, and that's you know, that's probably the biggest reason. But also, the bargain that private school teachers make is I will go teach at this school and I'm gonna make less money, but all of the hardest cases are gonna be filtered out, right? Because they're not gonna go to private school. And that is also the like sales job for for a lot of parents, which is you're gonna pay money to send your kid here, but we're keeping them away from all the thugs in the public school. It's like, you know, the that's the sales job. And so if you talk to people in the private school world, a lot of them have a really ambivalence about the idea about like really dramatically expanding private school vouchers. Because it's like, well, sure, you know, we'd like some access to more government money, but we don't want to, we don't want all those kids from the from the public school. We don't want to open our doors to them, right? And in fact, they won't have to. I mean, part of the problem with this vision is, you know, unless something changes, unless you can prove actual racial discrimination or gender discrimination, which is very, very hard to prove, these these private schools don't have to take anyone. They can reject anybody

Where The Real School Crisis Lives

SPEAKER_02 50:47

that they want to. And so it's this sort of, it's this fantasy sort of built on an obvious misunderstanding of why private schools look good, right? Because they exclude the artists to educate students, how private schools recruit faculty to teach and how they recruit students, you know. I mean, I've been I've been making some version of this of this argument for a long time. And I occasionally will encounter people who are like, you know, surprisingly honest, who say, I know the private school is not teaching my kid any better. I know it's not making him smarter, but it does mean that he doesn't have to go sit next to those kids over there. But they don't want to be, but they don't want to sort of broadcast this because the educational version is the version that is like polite. But that's what what that's what's really going on at a ton of these schools is it's just parents who are under no illusions, right? But they just they don't want their kid to have to go to school with black kids, poor black kids. And you know, my message is you know threatens to sort of undermine that.

C. Derick Varn 51:45

Yeah, this is actually important. I've taught a private school's taught for years, and you do make less money. It is, I could go into way more advanced things than I ever could in a public school, but it was easier teaching, actually, because I could just talk, to be honest. I just had to know stuff. Whereas when I'm dealing with inner city kids, which I've done a lot too, I have to be engaging, I have to deal with their learning disabilities, I have to accommodate them. And that's another big difference, is while they're I mean, I have one of my most unwoke opinions lately has been talking about how 504s have become classed. And for those of you who don't know, 504 is the the disability act classification that gives you certain protections in school, and we cannot judge what a disability is internally, because if we did, we'd have all kinds of legal liability things and would be acting as doctors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that means that you can effectively just buy them. Like the number of anxiety-based 504s that I have have increased exponentially over 10 years. They were almost unheard of when I first started teaching in the aughts, and now they're like fifth of every class. And I'll have progressives say, well, this is good because it you're giving you modifications to everyone. And I'm like, if I have to give modifications to everyone, can you explain to me why tracking is bad? And they're like, and the the only valid argument I've ever gotten was social skill habitas. And I was like, okay, fine, but if we have a public school system, you're exposed to all social classes anyway. Maybe not in the individual classroom. But I've been told as pedagogical doctrine for my entire life, actually, at this point. And I'm approaching 50, so not fast, but I am. And so people have a scale for this that tracking does not work. And I look at all the European systems, I look at what they want us to do with differentiation. And I'm like, oh, so you just want us to track individually, completely inefficiently in a classroom, lying to the parent about specialized instruction, because we cannot possibly deal that for 200 to 300 students at a at a secondary school level, or 40 to 50 students at a primary school level, or 30, and if you're in one of the better states. And we don't even have enough meaningful time for the kid to make those assessments. Why are we saying that tracking doesn't work when you're also talking about the need for differentiation? And this is where I this is where I'm like, I'm with you, but I think a lot of the reformers have actually exacerbated the problem because when we did track the schools were less geared towards only producing things that are ahead of university. And as I've pointed to people, and this is this is one of the most cynical arguments that I make, but I'm like, we are charging kids for skills that they would used to get for free because we are forcing them to get them in remediation in college. But it's not because we're not trying to teach these things, but because we're trying to teach them to every single person, regardless of what they want and need to do. And you'll hear all this rhetoric about personalized education. Everybody learns differently. And yet I'm like, but you want us to pretend to some degree, even now, that most of these kids will go into professional white-collar careers and will need at least some level of higher education. And you know, one of the reasons why we don't do the trades, if we're honest, is they're expensive. Right. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 55:37

I so yeah, so just like look, look, like I really essential context for what Derek is saying is that special education is wildly expensive. And so if you look at sort of like a chart of what percentage of GDP is going to K through 12 education in the United States, it just goes up and up and up and up and up from the middle of the 20th century. It has come down a little bit in the last five years, sort of post-pandemic. I'm not quite sure why. I mean, one thing that is happening is that you know, white parents are pulling their kids out of K through 12 schools, public schools more and more, and private schools can teach these kids at a less of a per pupil cost, which might sound like an efficiency game, but it's actually more to do with this special edit thing. So, anyway, one way or the other, if you look at the enormous expansion in per-pupil funding in over the you know, the course of the 20th century is early 21st, a massive portion of that is special ed funding. You don't have to have a what do they call it? Iop, what is that individual IEP or something? IEP, yeah. IEP. You don't actually have to have an IEP for your student to be someone who is contributing to the cost of special education. All of this is coming with a you know, a very muscular uh Americans with Disabilities Act sort of protections that enforces these things, particularly in special in public institutions. It's also important to say, like, look, the Americans with Disabilities Act is a really it on balance is a really good thing. It has protected me specifically and many other people. There is, it is just a fact that there is an entire for-profit legal apparatus that exists, which is just lawyers who sue people for ADA violations all the time. And those lawyers have an inherent and obvious incentive to find violations where they don't exist. And public school districts have proven to be some of the most lucrative you can imagine. So there was just a piece in New York magazine a month or two ago about this, which is that like the New York Public School District pays something like a billion dollars a year, you know, from these ADA cases, right? A billion. Like you can you can look at it. The basic reality is like even now, after all sorts of changes, you know, the major costs for public education are manpower costs. And one of the things that the ADA mandates is that like if you have a certain number of students that have a disability uh classification, you need a certain number of sort of extra teacher aids, paraprofessionals to work with them. And that's just you know a major cost, a major carrying cost that is not fed that's you know federally mandated by the ADA, but it's not federally funded usually. And and so that's just added enormously to the cost of the system. Private schools, there, you know, it depends on the state, it depends on the situation, but generally speaking, private schools don't offer special education and have no mandate to do so, right? So if you're ever wondering why private schools are cheaper than public, a huge part of it is special education. As Derek just said, as you just said, the number of students who have cognitive or developmental disabilities has ballooned in recent years. There was a piece in The Atlantic not that long ago that pointed out that close to 40% of Stanford undergraduates have some sort of ADA designation, right? And, you know, so I have this new book coming out in the fall called Ball in Your Head. It's not about education, it's about mental illness and assorted topics, but a lot of it is about this, which is that once upon a time there was a ton of stigma associated with having these diagnoses. We've had a major anti-stigma effort going on to destigmatize them. As we've destigmatized them, the uh number of people with these diagnoses has increased exponentially. And one of the things that happens is that society just doesn't have the caring capacity for this many people with disabilities. And you see these incredible things where, so you know, Gary said you said, like, you know, 20% of students might have this. If you go into individual class size levels, which again is like people contacting me and telling me about this, because I, you know, I write about this all the time. I cannot tell you the number of professors or instructors at the college level who have said in an individual class, so again, this is you know 15, 20 students, whatever, but still in an individual class, they will have half, two-thirds of their students have one of these diagnoses, right? So that half, two-thirds, sometimes three quarters of these of these students in these classes get extra time on the test, among other things, right? At some point that stops being an accommodation for the students who have the disability, and it just becomes a penalty for the students who don't have them, right? Parents, bushy parents, well-to-do parents, parents who are ambitious with their children, know all about this. And so one of the things, you know, I have linked to in the past, I said, hey, look, here's a Reddit forum where parents are just talking about how to get a diagnosis for their kid, right? Like here are a bunch of adults, dozens of adults, talking pseudonymously, anonymously, being very straightforward about, okay, I wanted to get a diagnosis for my kids so they'd have more time to take the SAT, right? Uh, and I want you to uh I wanted to, you know, get this diagnosis. Here's what I did, here's what you can do too, right? These parents are shameless about it, right? But if you question any of this, there is an army of online disability activists who will descend on you and scream at you. I know because it happens to me all the time, right? Just to give you a little bit of the flavor, right? The portion of people taking the LS, uh, the LSAT, this is the law, the law school test, the test to get into last school, the portion of students who get a perfect score on the LSAT, who have a disability designation, is three times higher than their portion of them taking the test. In other words, for any individual test taker, right, if you are someone who has extra time on the LSAT because you have disability designation, you're three times more likely to get a perfect score than if you don't have that, right? At some point the whole system breaks. But again, the ADA is a muscular law. There's lawyers who are prosecuting this as their vocation, and people are scared to say anything. And so now we have this massively mushrooming cost of kids with disability accommodations in K through 12 schools, and there appears to be no political fire at all to challenge them.

C. Derick Varn 1:02:17

Right. There was some attacks on 504. My state was leading that, and then they dropped it and limited it only to trans kids. But I was like initially, I was like, Yeah, they're trying to claw back costs, is what this is about. I have, you know, my big frustration when I talk about the ADA is I'm like, I think it's broadly speaking a good law, but it's totally unfunded. Both in the public and private sector, it comes at it comes at cost elsewhere. There's entire cottage industries now that exist to make you compliant with it. Even I have

Charters, Culture Wars, And Choice Politics

C. Derick Varn 1:02:47

to worry about it as a podcaster. Uh somebody was like, Well, how do you make your podcast available to the blind? And I'm like, Well, they're audio. Uh, how do you make them to the deaf? Well, I try to include a transcript. How do you? I'm like, at a certain point, what do you do to the blind and deaf? I I have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:04

Like, well, so there's just classic, there's a classic case in like during in 2016, there was some DSA people wanted to to uh canvas for for Bernie. They're gonna then go in there, we're gonna door knock. And it's it's in New York, right? And so in New York, you have walk-up buildings that don't have elevators. And so they just had this plan, we'll go, we'll knock on doors, we'll give flyers, we'll talk about burning, right? Which is just you know basic, you know, ground level politics. And then some people got around to it and they said, Well, how are you gonna accommodate people with disabilities? And it's like, we can't possibly accommodate them. What are you saying? Are we gonna build elevators for buildings that don't have them? What are you talking about? The people didn't have any answer to that, right? But they still shut down the canvassing because they said, Well, this is ableist, right? And it's like that is like that kind of language, like that kind of sort of that model is extremely prevalent in that's this whole world, sort of the the disability activist world. I mean, I you know, I've I've had people say to me, like, oh, I no one would ever no one would ever fake a disability for personal advantage or social advantage. And I tell them, I say, every year, dozens of people are caught faking cancer, right? Like, like, what are you talking about? No one would ever do that. But they they're they're just literally within that culture, there is no way to confront the problem of like there are incentives that push people to fake disabilities or to believe they have disabilities when they don't have them. And the system at present has no immune system for how to deal with that stuff.

C. Derick Varn 1:04:40

Well, this is something that that I have told people recently. I was like, okay, so you're you're simultaneously telling me I need to raise my standards, but I also have to build an accommodation for every student. I'm gonna tell you what happens once you hit a certain threshold. When it's one or two, three students, I will gladly accommodate them. I have a learning disability myself, I have some physical disabilities myself. I completely understand that. I am I'm pretty forgiving. When I have 30 to 40 percent of the class and the disabilities are anxiety, which is also ubiquitous. So I'm like, okay, these kids also have anxiety, but they don't they can't afford to go to the doctor to get to fill out the paperwork to get the 504 because we don't do that. Now we will do IEPs if parents get annoying for for, and I I am gonna be honest, it's when parents get annoying. We we to like it's supposed to work in a pro. I'm gonna avoid the jargon that I would use. I'm gonna have to turn off my day job jargon, but we we have a process for finding kids to screen to get them eventually screened for learning disabilities and other special ed needs that are not medical, although that art that distinction itself is a creation of the ADA. And we do it to the best of our ability, but we have 400 kids, and particularly as they get higher up in the educational matrix, it's harder and harder to find kids that should have been found earlier. And if they haven't, it's it's difficult. So you'll have parents ask for it. We do accommodate that, but it's a very expensive, it's a very labor-intensive process on the individual teacher and on the system itself, because you the individual teacher has to go through, make personal accommodations for each one of these kids, do that, test it themselves, no oversight, no additional time, anything else. They do that, then then another round goes through, and then there may be testing. If you want to bypass that, you have a private doctor do it. Which does mean you have this irony that you've hinted. At that, this actually you have this like, oh, so all these elite well-off kids all have disabilities, and these poor kids don't. And that's not even getting into the disincentives of diagnosing poor kids, a because of the cost of special ed, but b because there's literally federal consequences for overdiagnosing minority groups and low socioeconomic groups with special ed, because back before IDEA and back before the ADA, southern schools would do that to get rid of black kids and throw them in special segregated schools, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I know why it exists, but it has perverse incentives down the line. I find it funny that people would say that to you, though, that no one ever fakes this when I don't know. Uh, what is it 12 years ago? There were well-documented cases of an entire ring of people like faking this to get their kids into elite universities off of um of test score accommodations. And my fear at the time was that we were gonna deny these accommodations to kids who needed them, and the opposite happened. We just started getting rid of tests. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:01

Why I mean, look, like so, so yes, and so again, this is this all very much depends on the state, but traditionally, special ed has been restricted to students who are when I was a kid, were you know, was were referred to as retarded. This is a term that has become offensive, and that's fine. Developmentally disabled, cognitively disabled, whatever. Kids who had individual, you know, sort of had intellectual disability diagnosis. They had autism diagnoses back when to get an autism diagnosis, it had to be disabling, which is a whole other conversation. Uh, kids with with down syndrome, etc. These kids were like the fact that they were special ed was assumed to be an indicator that they were not college. You're not going to end up in college, right? And in fact, for people who don't know, I mean, one of the wonderful things about special ed is that it functions as long-term care or, you know, for this period of life for families who cannot afford, you know, sort of to pay private entities to take care of their severely disabled kids. And it is perfectly common. Again, it depends on the state, it depends on the district, but many of these schools will keep these kids in school until 20, the age of 21, right? So, in other words, because they will, they will, they will utilize the tools available to them to keep the kid in school well past the point at which most kids you know graduate from high school. Because this is the only support many of these parents get, right? And that's a really important. Most of these kids would also, in these testing regimes, again, depends on the state, blah, blah, blah. You sometimes the term is checklisting out that you see a lot, which is just that like they these are reasons why individual students are removed from the testing poll for the federally mandated, you know, testing that was handed down by NCLB or uh or ESOs. The degree to which it, you know, the how easy it is to checklist kids out varies. Now you have the existence of a lot of kids who the schools don't want to checklist out, right? Because they're gonna look good in the testing data, even though they have have a you know aid and you know, IOP or whatever, individual learning plan, etc. So the very sort of idea about what special ed is and who it serves has changed. But fundamentally, right, if you are a public school, you very often are just going to roll over to whatever request the parents, these kinds of parents, want. Because the alternative is an ugly sort of public publicity battle where they will go to the local paper and they're saying, I my kid is has a disability and the school won't accommodate them. And an expensive one, because again, there's always some lawyer who is an ADA person who will sort of chase these things up. But at least, right, like public school teachers and public school administrators have a certain degree of like administrative muscle. Once you get to the college level, right, where now something close to like 70% of all classes that are taught by people with no, with no sort of like uh institutional power at all, right, are taught by grad students or adjuncts. Now it's a free-for-all, right? Because you're talking about like an adjunct can't be the person to say, hey, I know you have this horseshit autism diagnosis, but you appear to be in every respect someone who is perfectly capable of taking this class. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be the one to challenge, you know, your insistence that you get extra time on the test or that you do easier work, etc. Right. And so now this sort of buck has been passed along. And again, it just sort of points to like you just the sort of I oh it's sometimes I almost miss the purity of like 2000s era sort of and reform stuff that like Johnny can't read, it's those lazy teachers and there's teachers' unions. Let's let's get rid of the shitty teachers and you know, because now it's everything is just the complexity is multiplying all over the place. But like I said earlier, look, like if it's not clear, this country used to have an industrial base, a manufacturing base that served as the employers of a you know, hundreds or thousands of local communities where people will go and they get a job at the factory at the edge of town, right? But a for a good friend of mine, his dad, when he was 18, he graduated from the local high school and he went to go work at Pratt and Whitney, which is a defense contractor in my hometown. And he was there for 40 years or whatever, and that's what he did, right? And like that was a that was a a path through life that was available to him, though only in high school for 129, that his son, who has a college diploma, has not been able to advantage of. That all collapsed because of offshoring and automation. And even if we want to set aside sort of who's responsible for that and NAFTA and the whole thing, reality is that doesn't exist now in the United States, right? The the reliable manufacturing, blue-collar industry, etc. profession doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for a long time. And so it's not a it's not a coincidence that, like starting with like Reagan, you start to have this a nation at risk, like, oh, this this country is sort of like a crisis of schooling, because the only path we have to put people into lives of prosperity is to send them through the school system into college. And you know, it's like I've I've called it many times like, you know, if you listen to everything Obama used to say about education, you would think that he sincerely believed that every last American could go to Stanford and get a job at Google, right? Because that was like his only vision for what success looked like. Now that's, you know, now a lot of people are like questioning the college model. But what comes next, right? And now you have the sort of the AI complication. So it's just all very sort of muddled and befuddled, and no one kind of really seems to know what the next battle will be. But you do still have this ongoing sort of conservative campaign for just conservatives hate public institutions, they hate public schools, and they hate unions, and they're gonna just gonna continue to try to force everybody to adopt to this, you know, well, private school for all model.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:15

I mean, I want people to understand, neither one of us are uh it sounds like we're mad at the disabled, but you've written about it. I've I have thought a lot about it, which is even if I take all these diagnoses as sincere, I'm just gonna assume they are. I'm not allowed to make distinctions on levels according to the spectrum of my own. That would be considered a diagnostic act, and I'm not a doctor. But that does mean that the people making demands are usually people articulate

Private Schools And The Filtering Effect

C. Derick Varn 1:14:47

enough to make the demands, who have the social resources to make demands, who speak the class codes to get their demands listened to. And it also means that we go from a paternalistic model to a maybe a worse model, which is a bureaucratic model, that favors those representing disability who actually have the capacity to represent themselves. And so, for example, in my classifications of special ed, you know, you were talking about severe, what we would call severe and profound kids. And then there are kids in inclusion and kids with L, well, we don't call them LDs anymore, I forgot what we call them, because people got mad of distinguishing LDs and IDs. And for those of you who don't know, learning disabilities used to be legally defined as disabilities that were domain-specific and odd, dyslexia, aphasia, certain kinds of enumeracy. There's a bunch of them. Some of them are stranger than others. And so you'd have a kid who is perfectly functional and like three-fourths a day, and then they were just like way off on something else, and you test them, and you'd look at their gestalt intelligence, and you look at their domain skill sets, and you'd say, Well, this skill set doesn't make any sense compared to every other one. All right. And then there was ID, which is a polite word for low abstract reasoning, aka low IQ. We don't make that distinction anymore because it's considered too stigmatizing, even though when we did make it, we often did not tell the student anyway. You know, we might tell their parents, but we didn't tell the student. But we don't do that anymore. Uh, so now we have a severe and profound, which is kids that we know will not be able to graduate no matter what we do, because a lot of them are not even verbal. And in the discourse about special ed, those kids actually are the kids that are talked the least about because I mean, frankly, their parents aren't likely to sue you, and they tend to come from social economic backgrounds that are less likely to have the resources to sue you anyway. And so I I get very frustrated with this. And I know this ties into some stuff you've talked about with the gendrification of things like with diagnosis like autism. I think a lot of these autism diagnoses are probably somewhat valid, but it is crazy to me to treat someone who has so far in the spectrum that they're nonverbal as somewhat similar to someone who just has a trouble like completely parsing facial expressions and subtle social crews of the neurotypical. Those are rapidly different things.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:31

Yeah, I mean, look, look, let yeah. So let me, I mean, to to sort of echo your disclaimer at the beginning, look, I don't like I the the you know, has the disability or is disabled label is not of of individual or emotional meaning to me. When I worked for a state employer, when I was a part of the the city university of New York, I had a registered disability, right? And had I needed to, I would have happily taken advantage of the ADA to remedy something because that's why the ADA exists. And like I said, the ADA is good. What I would say uh to anyone, and I'm going to be saying a lot this fall with this new book coming out, is there are some things in life that are truly zero sum. And it is just genuinely true that uh the disability designation, right, only really has meaning if it does, if it's not anything else, right? I mean, a thing that I state you know directly in this new book is disabilities can be available to anyone and you can self-diagnose and you can pick one up at the street corner and say you have disability. Or having a disability can have social force, but it can't be both, right? Again, if you think about these kids who get extra time on things, if that spreads to everyone, then it it is no actual accommodation, right? Because everyone is playing from the same playing field, right? And that might sound like an extreme case, but if you look at like, so like, you know, like again, like the degree of impairment, right? One of the one of the things that's supposed to be factored into any ADA uh uh request is the degree to which you are is a a disability is actually disabling, right? Is like, you know, ex student actually autistic is just like not in my, it's it's not at all in my best interest to try to define that. The question is, is is does their condition disable them in a way that calls upon the state to enforce that uh designation in a way that has legal force, right? Part of the problem is that if you are a public institution like K through 12, and your school like you know, schools are uh tend to be filled with people who are very sympathetic to students who don't want in the least to be seen as you know, unsympathetic to disabilities, have sincere concern for people with disabilities, and at the top are have principals who would very much like to avoid you know being talked about badly in the local paper. All of the incentive is just not to question a disability, right? But as I just said, that is not sustainable, right? Like at a certain point, you can't have an IEP for every kid. It's this is all very expensive. I mean, talk to an actual uh special education teacher, and many of them will tell you that the worst part of their job is not dealing with severely disabled kids, the worst part of their job is dealing with the paperwork, right? That every time you have any of this shit, right, you are inviting precisely because the ADA exists, you are inviting this giant layer of uh red tape and paperwork that falls on these people. And what happens over time is well, part of the reason why is special ed so expensive, because you have to have people whose job it is to make sure that your school does not get sued under the ADA, right? I think so. Like like CUNY, I worked for CUNY, great institution. And again, I I highly like I totally support the existence of the ADA to give teeth to the defense of people with disabilities, but there are people at CUNY whose only job is effectively to keep them from getting sued under the ADA, right? Because that the the financial threat is so serious. And so if you care about the ADA and you care about people with disabilities and you care about these issues, you have to believe in a certain degree of gatekeeping because it's the only way that these things continue to have force. And again, like this stuff really is not sustainable. Again, like you have a K through 12 system where more and more sort of white affluent parents are pulling their kids out. The the sort of mandated amount of uh attention and spending on special education is enormous. The burdens of more and more sort of well high-functioning kids with disability designations is high and growing. And then you have an alternative, which is the private school system that in general has absolutely no requirement to take kids with with disabilities or special ed kids at all. This can't, this, this is not sustainable. And I don't know how it all blows up in the long run, but you know, just piling more and more cost and paperwork and stress onto the K through 12 system is not going to work in the long run.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:25

No, what happens with the with the IAP paperwork, uh, because you can get sued under two large, you can also get sued under the revised IDEA. But what happens with this is you start getting rubber stamped accommodations, which they give, they don't try to evaluate if the accommodations fit the disability or if they fit the the the learning disability, either one, IAPR504. They will just extra time, reduced work, sit in the front of the class, go. So, how have we handled that? We got rid of the front of the class a lot of the times because we now push things to books and I'm I'm into computers, and I'm serious about that. That's not me making it up. If if everyone's got a laptop and interfacing with the laptop, then the front of the class does not matter because we can't put every student in the front of the class definitionally. We have dropped most timed anything. Sometimes we put time on things just to drop it so that we said we made accommodations. I'm serious about that too. And we we make most tests open book, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if people care about accountability that they've been talking about and all this other stuff, this could should concern them. But they don't have an answer for it because no reformer is gonna say we need to

504s, IEPs, ADA, And Zero Sum Limits

C. Derick Varn 1:23:47

get rid of special ed. I'm not saying we need to get rid of special ed either. But what I'm also saying is what has happened is special ed accommodations are also more and more generic, which means they're gameable, but also not particularly geared towards the actual problems of students that really are disabled. So, like as one, you know, as a dyslexic person, I didn't necessarily need extra time on a test, to be quite frank, and I never asked for it, but I did need some things. Like I find this like fascinating to me because I mean, frankly, I I I don't think it should matter that I can pull this card, but I'm a member of the community at hand, right? And I'm also very frustrated with it because I I also feel like I can't accommodate the kids who deeply need it as well, because now I have to accommodate half the class, and what we just do is like, okay, everyone's got the same accommodations at this point because we can't figure out how to do this or even keep up with it. The other thing I'm not even getting into is like we don't necessarily know because this is where these federal privacy laws kick in. So, for example, uh, I have kids who will be designated with an IEP or a 504. I am technically supposed to get those. I serve a district, I serve at a district level. I don't always, I have no idea sometimes what the accommodations are. People, these special ed specialists are way behind. They can't get me the accommodations, even though that's their job. They have so many to process. We get it like three months into the year. And what can we like? I'm like, I've been operating Let's Kit for three months with no knowledge whether or not they had an accommodation on. I just had to trust them when they invoked it because what do I know? You haven't given me the paperwork, and I can't even ask because of other federal legislation. The amount of kluegeness in this does, you know. I I think people hear me talk about this and they think I'm conservative, but I'm like, you can't do this universally in any of this be meaningful. And with the ADA, I'm like, it one, we do have to be discriminatory discriminatory on who actually needs accommodations, and two, they should be funded. Because that's the other, that's the other thing about all this. We have to do all this somehow on our own dime, which means we have all this expensive apparatus. The expensive apparatus does not actually provide the accommodation. The normal teacher at normal pay does, right? But they have to uh uh be accountable to this entire structure of people whose slow job it is to keep us from being sued, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:30

And and at the same time, while you know, the Atlantic and then the argument and slate.com and any other place is still pushing old school, you know, reform is also demanding that you raise your standards, right? It's just like you know, it's just there's you know, if if the reformers had any sort of actual commitment to anything other than attacking teachers in their unions, right IDA IDEA and ADA reform, special ed reform would be at the top of their list, right? But they don't give a shit about that because they have a designated target and they have had for 25 plus years, and you know, so they you know they're almost entirely silent on this shit.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:15

Yeah, and I think to flip it back to your other point about like when we had an industrial off-ramp for a lot of these kinds of scenarios, right? Okay, you can't function in college, who cares? Like it you could even get a lot of what white-collar jobs that now are credentialed that in before the 1990s weren't. I mean, I was like shocked that you could become an actuarial uh with like a high school diploma.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:39

Well, that well, well, that friend that I that I mentioned, his dead. He started on when he was 18, it was just a high school diploma. He started on the assembly line. By the time he retired, his title had the word engineer in it, right? Because he had been there for years, but also never in nowadays it they would never think to hire someone with the word engineer in their title who didn't have a master's, let alone a bachelor's degree, you know.

C. Derick Varn 1:28:06

So, yeah. Well, I was actually trying to explain this. This tells you about how the current generation is removed from this knowledge in some ways. I was someone was yelling me about calling JD Vance a child of the working class, and they're like, His grandfather had stocks. What working class? I was like, hold on. You could have an eighth-grade education if you entered during the Fortis period, right after the baby boom, if you entered the workforce in the late 40s and 50s, and you could have easily had stock options, you could have easily had high level management experience, even through through time in in work. Reproving your thing on the shop floor. If you didn't have additional education, it was paid for by your shop. You don't understand. Now, I admit that this is a brief period in history and it's remarkably brief, and that's something that we do need to account for. But you could be a blue-collar person working an assembly line job, and there was enough profitability in that field in the 1950s and 60s that you could have also eventually got stocks and everything else, and have been you had the label of an engineer or anything like that. Today it it's it is kind of astounding what it's meant for education. And and one of the things I agree with you on is like I've seen the stats. I even had oh I can't remember her last name now. She's one of her first name is Jane. She worked with Robert Marzano, and I met her at one of these private schools actually. And she told me verbatim that like since we have achieved universal education density and since the integration of schools in the 70s, there has been no real uh substantive improvement in education except on margins. There has been some improvement on margins, particularly with minority groups, although it wasn't during NCLB, it was actually during the late 70s, early 80s. And but then she would flip it and say, Well, we need to you know just focus on where we do have an effect, which is teacher efficacy. Even though that effect is very small, very small things can really matter. That's what I got told.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

And I mean, that's but that's what I was saying earlier, which is a lot of the usual suspects now will just tell you that. We'll just they'll say they you know they'll cop you. Sometimes it won't be like in writing, and sometimes it'll just be personally, but they will just say, Oh, yeah, I I know the portion of the variance that's controlled by teachers is very small, but I have nothing else, right? And to me, right, the whole idea is okay, that's when you need to just change your analysis, right? When you just say you need to just be willing to say, educational talent is normally distributed, we're always going to be able to, you know, to uh predict, you know, what uh how big the the tranches are, you know, like how many students fall in between you know the median and one standard deviation higher or lower than the median, and like stop setting some sort of unrealistic goals for ourselves. And if the issue is really social conditions, if you really are you know concerned for the poor black kids who can't get out of the inner city, then maybe you need to attack that from a different sort of lens than education.

C. Derick Varn 1:31:40

I mean, yeah, I I would I would absolutely agree. And I think that's actually true also for disability, frankly. I'm just like, we can't expect the the schools to fix all the disability problems either. That's a social program, a massive social program. It would not be cheap, and again, we still have to be somewhat discriminatory about it because it but like like I'm just I have been sort of shocked that I'm like uh I believe in a lot of these protections for people, and you know, I have some friends who will yell at me about still being like a secret egalitarian or whatnot. And I'm just like, I I can't I am and I'm not like I am on power, I am kind of on wealth. I'm actually not on on human talent. I I don't think it's meaningful even to talk about things that way. Like, like I don't expect to be equal to a mechanic who's trained to be a mechanic their whole life when I approach a car.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:31

Look, look, look, I'm I'm a Marxist, right? And so people think that that means that I think everybody is equal in their talents, but both Marx and Engels independently arrived at the conclusion that equality is a nonsensical political goal. I mean, the point of Marxism is to end exploitation, not to enforce human uh equality. The idea is, right, like yes, I want greater equality in terms of providing a floor of like living conditions for everyone, but part of the reason for that is because I am aware that people are very different in their talents, right? If we flash back 5,000 years, the guy who's the biggest and strongest in his village is a guy who's going to enjoy a great deal of social and you know economic power. Nowadays, that guy might be a day laborer who makes you know $50 a day. The point is spare people from the sort of vicissitudes of how what's valued in the labor market changes year over year, but that has nothing to do with asserting inequality between all people that doesn't exist. Right.

C. Derick Varn 1:33:33

I think that's it's really important. And I think the vicissitudes we should maybe end up talking about that because the other thing that I've been facing as an educator is even when my successful students they come to me and ask me what I can do to be successful in the job market. And you know, I I was on the job market for about a decade before I became an educator. Most educators, however, are not. But even with that, I'm like, I don't know. Like, there's nothing, we're not getting training for how they're like, they're they're like, integrate AI and tell them to use it responsibly so they can be on the job market. And then I'll ask specifically, what do you mean by that? How do we do that? Yeah, and I mean chirps.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:14

I mean, look, like I I find it so weird to sort of like train people to use AI. The entire economic proposition of AI is that it doesn't, but anyone can do it, right? Like the the idea that you need to go to college to learn how to use AI, if that's true, it dramatically undercuts the value of AI, right? Because the whole idea is any schmo can ask the computer to do anything, right? You know, this is like you know, one of the things that happened actually since the last time we talked is learn to code, the bottom of learn to code fallout fell out, right? About a year or so or two after we had that conversation, the entry-level coding labor market, the bottom fell out totally. It's it's actually recovering right now, despite the sort of the AI narrative. But the point is that was the the sort of like the smart money was on you should learn to code. And that turned out to be a false god. Just like going to law school for you know, when you were my age, I graduated from college. You know, if you graduated in the early 2000s, going to law school was the ultimate mercenary thing to do to like just to make money. Um, and it turns out that you know, actually in 2008, 2009, the bottom fell out of that labor market too. You can't predict the labor market, right? Like it's just it, and it is whatever you you tell students go do this, right, because it's practical, they will listen and they'll crash that field. Right. They'll they'll flood, they'll flood that field with cheap labor and they'll undercut each other's ability to get a job. So yes, we have to sort of we have to train flexible workers who can retrain and who have a diversity of skills, but also we have to get past the idea that we can predict the labor market because we can't, and we need to build a robust safety safety net that protects everyone because, like, you know, it might be you next, and you never know.

C. Derick Varn 1:36:03

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a good place to end it. Although I guess I do want to talk about one of the biggest pushbacks I got when my my recent video engagement with your essays, which was me trying to make a point that I think people misunderstood when I talked about genetics, and I said that I think that elements of intelligence are genetically heritable. However, even with the twin studies, epigenetics, the decline of the Flynn effect, womb conditions, all those things affect that. Here's what I'm still telling you. Even if it isn't genetic, it doesn't really change the situation. And people just heard me saying twin stuff uh twin studies are bad. And I was like, that's not my point. My point is let's say that you completely disagree with me on the genetics. And I will say we haven't found a single gene marker for intelligence. You got that. It's probably a complex fact number of things. I'm with you on that. It doesn't actually change anything because the heritability problems are not something that you can fix in educational models. You can mediate for it. I mean, like, I guess what are the irony?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:18

Look, look, so let's just to be clear, if I rewrote the book today, it would have much less influence, sort of much less focus on genetics. Not because I think that the genetic thing is wrong, but because it is it's not really the most important point, right? I mean, a part of the reason why I wrote it that way is because that's what that's what got me the book contract, because it was controversial. But look, I would look I'm looking at this, like this is what I said before, like in descending order of certainty, right? At the top level, you have the observation that to a remarkable degree, people have static levels of relative educational or academic performance over life to over life, such that, for example, if you give uh you know 12-year-olds SAT scores, those SAT scores predict not just how well they do in high school, not just how well they do in college, but like which of them will ever get tenure or hold a patent or write a book, right? Because these things are remarkably static. That's true, even with enormous amounts of intervention. People pick have a sort of level of academic performance and they stay in it with remarkable consistency over the course of life. That suggests, number two, that there is some sort of such thing as like an inherent or an academic aptitude, right? That we have within us a level of just being good at school or not that is like an intrinsic characteristic that doesn't change much. And then third and finally, you know, the most parsimonious explanation for that is genes, right? Like that would be that

Work, Talent, And The Hard Ending

SPEAKER_02 1:38:47

would be like the easiest like explanation to sort of fit. But that explanation to me is much less important and much less interesting than the first one, which is people just don't change in school very much. And your own experience tells you that. Like, I mean, tell this to people all the time. When you were in school, you went from K through 12, a lot of the kids were the same kids around you. Did the really kid smart kids suddenly become the very uh poorly performing kids? When you were in fifth grade, were there kids who were like the kids who were at the bottom of the class who, by the time you got to seventh grade, they were at the top of the class? No, right? When we send our kids to school, we might worry about like at the margins, are they gonna do better or worse? We might worry about what's the experience gonna be like, are they gonna like their teacher? But parents of exceptional kids don't actually worry if their kids are gonna suddenly become dumb. And if you actually talk to kid parents about their kids, they'll be as honest as they possibly can be and say, no, this kid is smart and that's intrinsic and it's not gonna change. And that's the observation, right? And that is just a fact of life. And the point of the book and all of my intervention in this is how do we make life better for the people at the bottom of the talent distribution? Because if we care about people, we care about their ability to provide for themselves, then we have to care about their academic talent because it has a lot of influence on how well they do in life.

C. Derick Varn 1:40:09

Right. And I guess I would I completely agree with that. And my next experience would be like, how do we make schools suck less for everyone involved, except for maybe administrators? I don't so much care about them. But like, I mean, I guess I kind of do. If they or if it's awful for them, it'll still be bad. But if we need it, I mean, like, because I what I've come to the conclusion of is we all kind of secretly know the reason why we need public education is not for education's sake, it's because we have no child care. And COVID made that abundantly clear.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:40

So I've I've said a thousand times, look, I I I I I am a big believer in education. I it, you know, it how it matters is that more important than like the you know anything else. But even even so, like the most important thing public schools do is give poor kids a warm, clean, safe place to be during the day.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:01

And we do all the a lot of this online stuff, it won't even do that. Right. So anyway, thanks so much for your time, Freddie. Uh, you have so you have a new book coming out you want to tell people about it?

SPEAKER_02 1:41:13

Yep, coming in October, but you can pre-order it now. It's called All in Your Head. It's my big treatise on mental illness, on autism, on disability. And uh yeah, it should uh it's already starting some some arguments, so pick it up.

C. Derick Varn 1:41:27

All right, thank you so much for your time. People should also check out your Substacked. And you probably won't be writing about education for a while, but if people want to read your most recent articles, a lot of them are on this topic. But you know, you're gonna be promoting a book. And as I'm as now I am promoting a book, uh, it does seem like when you are promoting a book, the only thing you talk about is the stuff in that book. So that's true. All right, take care. Thanks, Derek. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:51

Bye.