Malcom Gladwell's Outliers,, Part 1

Malcom Gladwell's new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days--90 at the outside--before I'd heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in the eye as a distraction from the pain. I believe the medical term for this is "Thomas Friedman Syndrome."

Outliers is a good book in many ways, and says a lot about education. It's a critique of the standard narrative of extraordinary success, those inspiring tales of hard work and gumption that are often used to explain the achievements of sports stars and CEOs. The Bill Gates's of the world, in other words--and the Malcolm Gladwells. These stories are badly incomplete, Gladwell says, because they ignore context. Success is not just a matter of who people are, but where they come from, along with countless instances of plain luck, for better and for worse. 

The first chapter deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of birthdays and Canadian hockey players. A hugely disproportionate number of elite hockey players have birthdays in January, February and March. That's because the age cutoff for entry into junior hockey leagues is January 1. A five-year old hockey player born on that day (they start early in Canada) could be as much as 25 percent older than his youngest competitors, giving him a major advantage in size, strength, and coordination. Since junior league hockey is a ruthless meritocracy, that success would lead to selection in more elite leagues, and thus more opportunities for practice, better coaching, more success, even more elite leagues, and so on. What begins as an arbitrary age-based difference evolves into actual differences of skill and technique, masking the original injustice. 

Gladwell notes that this problematic in two ways. First, it's patently unfair to children born at the end of the year, who have virtually no chance of advancing to the highest hockey ranks. Second, it's really inefficient as a means of matching training with talent. Canada has effectively cut its pool of potential hockey stars in half. 

The parallels with higher education are obvious. Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed

As a Democrat, and as someone who thinks smart people should be running the country, I'm thrilled. But the assumption that a true valedictocracy would naturally lead to an administration staffed exclusively by the graduates of a tiny handful of private universities is wrong. The process by which students end up at Harvard and then the upper reaches of government is nothing close to a pure merit-based sorting process. First, all kinds of educational resource misallocations at the K-12 level give greater opportunities to upper-income students. Then elite colleges add admissions preferences for legacies, donors, the children of the rich, famous and powerful, and graduates of long-established networks of elite private secondary schools. From there it's a short distance--via alumni, social and recruiting networks--to the seats of power in finance and government, which, like many elite colleges, are on the East Coast.

So while the President-elect himself comes from famously humble origins, the family and educational backgrounds of the advisers Brooks mentions contain a vastly disproportionate number of elite university professors and administrators, wealthy families, and exclusive private high schools, when compared to the population at large. That doesn't mean those people aren't brilliant, talented and hard-working. They are, in the same way that NHL hockey players are. But in both cases they're products of an inefficient and unfair system. In any given year, the 50 smartest public high school graduates from the state of Florida will surely have more raw intellectual ability than the 50 smartest graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy, but members of the latter group are much more likely to end up in the West Wing someday. 

More on Outliers, KIPP, why Asian students are good at math, and K-12 education generally tomorrow.