Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, Part 2

Continuing from yesterday's post about Gladwell's new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it's a book about unequal opportunity--how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how those circumstances vary profoundly among people in complex, inequitable, and often random ways. 

In the chapter on expertise--a concept that has (justifiably) gotten a lot of attention from cognitive and education researchers--Gladwell asserts that there's essentially no such thing as great accomplishment without long, hard work. You need roughly 10,000 hours of practice at something to be really good at it, he says, and what distinguishes people like Bill Gates from others isn't fantastic intellect--although Gates certainly has that--but rather the fact that he had an exceedingly rare opportunity to accumulate those hours early in his career, at exactly the right moment in history. Which leads to another of Gladwell's main themes: timing. The 20th century's software titans were all born around 1955, he notes, just like the 19th century's industrial giants were born near 1834 and the most successful Manhattan lawyers were born in a few years bracketing 1931. All of these people had the intelligence and courage to take advantage of a rare opportunity created when the circumstances of their business fundamentally changed. But the fact that the opportunity presented itself in the first place was just luck. Men (and women) need their moment in order to succeed. 

From there Gladwell moves on to family background and culture, with a side conversation about IQ. He notes the lack of correlation between extremely high IQ scores and success in life, and offers the sad example of one Chris Langan, IQ of 190+, who grew up with an abusive father in a broken home, dropped out of college due (he claims) to some truly incompetent and uncaring financial aid officers, and currently lives on a horse farm in rural Missouri, working in solitude on a theory of the universe that nobody will ever read:

He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how...These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone.

Gladwell devotes most of the rest of the book to culture. Appalachian blood feuds, Korean airline crashes, successful Jewish lawyers, and the tendency of Asians to be good at math, he says, can all be explained by the particular values, attitudes, and inclinations of different cultures. Asian agricultural societies are built around rice cultivation, he observes, which requires entrepreneurial ism, attention to detail, complex management, perseverance, and phenomenal amounts of work, all year long. European-style wheat cultivation, by contrast, is much simpler, amenable to mechanization and unskilled labor, and lets you take half the year off. The things you need to do to cultivate rice are the same things you need to do to learn math, he says, noting:

When students sit down to take the TIMMS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It ask them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it's so tedious that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on TIMMS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. 

The book also has a whole chapter about KIPP, and this is where the flaws in Gladwell's way of writing are most glaring. He cites Karl Alexander's well-known "summer learning loss" research of students in the Baltimore public schools. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their well-off peers, Alexander found, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead. It's an important point, and has led to a lot of discussions about the use of time in school. (See an ES report on the subject here.) But this leads Gladwell to say the following:

What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at [Alexander's data]. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. 

The weird thing is that Gladwell goes directly from here to a description of the KIPP Bronx Academy, which indeed provides students with more time. But, as Gladwell himself notes, it also has a culture that demands a lot of effort from students. The KIPP teachers emphasize discipline, self-control and respect for authority, peers, and oneself. They explicitly teach students how to listen and respond in class. They consider every student, no matter how disadvantaged, as bound for college. Does Gladwell really believe that most inner city schools work this way? That the only difference between KIPP and regular public schools is time? Long hours are far from the only "lessons from the rice paddy," as Gladwell more than adequately describes.  

Gladwell is often characterized as public intellectual, and he's clearly a very smart guy. But his real genius lies in explanation. His 10,000 hours of expertise came not in sociology but journalism, at the Washington Post. He's a master of marrying compelling anecdotes with important ideas. The world is a complicated, confusing place, and Malcolm Gladwell makes it understandable by telling stories that are fun to read. This is an extremely difficult thing to do, and nobody does it better. But there's a temptation in this kind of writing to sand down the edges of things to a bright polish and summarize complex issues in a pithy phrase. It's a comforting, attractive message--things are simpler than you think. But it's not always true. Saying that school time matters is one thing--saying it's the only thing that matters is something else entirely. 

That said, I admire the spirit of Outliers and really enjoyed reading it. It's rooted in compassion and a belief in the possibility of a better world. Gladwell thinks that if people really appreciated all the dimensions of opportunity, they'd be more likely to support ideas and policies designed to expand opportunity to more people. Gladwell himself is an outlier, and the book is a worthy way to use the influence that position affords. 

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. 

Time Matters

Last month Seattle parents released an analysis of student learning time (defined as time students actually spend in class) at the city's ten high schools. They found large discrepancies:

At Garfield High in Seattle, classes last at least 55 minutes. At Nathan Hale High, they're often 50. Garfield has eight short days when students arrive late or leave early so teachers can collaborate and train. Nathan Hale has 40, and schedules 100 minutes each week for students to simply read.

At the end of the year, that means students at Garfield spend about 23 more hours in each academic class — roughly the equivalent of four more weeks of instruction, according to an analysis done by a parents group in West Seattle.

The article follows with a dramatic "does it matter" without ever answering the question. Like money, education commentators tend to look to the research without thinking about common sense. Do time and money matter in education? The logical answer is of course they do, but there might not be a direct linear relationship between the two inputs and educational outcomes. There are always confounding variables--things like central office inefficiencies cutting down on the impact of money or a teacher not using her time effectively.

But we should not dismiss inputs as completely irrelevant, especially in the case of these two high schools. Students at Garfield High School spend 23 hours more in class than their peers at Nathan Hale. That's about four weeks of extra schooling.

That lost time matters. Nathan Hale has lower percentages of white and low-income students than Garfield, yet it has lower test results in reading, writing, math, and science. Despite having greater diversity, Garfield has lower achievement gaps in reading between men and women, whites and blacks, students on free and reduced lunch and those who are not, and students in special education. Nathan Hale is a good school, but Garfield outperforms it across the board despite a harder assignment.

State and district officials don't seem to see the link between Garfield's success and its additional time. The article quotes Kathe Taylor, policy director at the State Board of Education, wondering if counting minutes is like missing the forest for the trees, saying "If one school district can do in two hours what it takes another six hours to do, and the students achieve equally well, then you have to ask what difference does it make." Nathan Hale's principal chimes in to say, "Raw minutes is nowhere near the whole story."

Not the whole story, maybe. But not one to ignore either.

Hat tip to NCTQ.

Student Loan Shenanigans

Sherman Dorn blogged today about the difficulties his wife has had getting Nelnet (a loan company that has engaged in nefarious practices in the past) to process her paperwork for the federal loan forgiveness program. The program provides loan forgiveness up to $17,500 for teachers who teach in hard to staff subject areas, like special education.

Dorn wants to know if anyone else has had similar troubles getting their loan forgiveness paperwork processed. My guess is that yes, there are others out there with the same problem.

High School Seniors Are Like Opilio Crab

I love the Deadliest Catch, an action filled Discovery Channel show about Alaskan crab fishermen. I might just eat crab instead of turkey this year because Captain Phil asked me to. But I've never been able to find the education connection I needed to write about the Deadliest Catch on Quick & Ed--until now (not that that stops some of us). And I'd like to say thanks to Inside Higher Ed for giving me the opportunity.

Kent Barnds writes in a column for IHE today about how the tough, hard bitten job of a crab fisherman is like, well, a college admissions officer. Ignoring, of course, the admissions officer's climate controlled office and cushy chair.

Here are a few of the parallels Barnds draws: the unwanted commentary both admissions officers and the now famous fishermen receive from those who haven't actually done the job; the need to catch just the right amount of crab, or students, to meet the quota; and the anxiety of watching the pot come out of the water wondering if it'll be full of crab or just contain a dead fish--much like the anxiety admissions officers face as they get replies from admitted students. Hauling a 700-pound pot filled with crab and risking a paper cut: it all has drama.

Barnds says, "Jonathan Hillstrand, who captains the Time Bandit, once declared “We’d rather be lucky than good any day.” Let’s be candid — it takes quite a bit of luck to predict and “know” where the crab will be and takes just as much to predict and “know” what 17-years olds will think and do." So the end lesson is that, like opilio crab, 17-year old high school seniors are running in herds along the ocean floor and admissions officers are in boats, developing a strategy to find them and figuring out the right bait to haul them in.

At least the admissions officers don't have to toss the females back into the ocean anymore.

Admired, Not Read

Last year, I was invited to Dickinson College in southern Pennsylvania to debate the meaning of success in higher education. My counterpart in the discussion was Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College, a small liberal arts school in Annapolis, Maryland. We were introduced by our host, and Nelson went first. His speech was erudite, passionate, and replete with classical references. He waxed eloquent about the meaning of knowledge, and how teaching as an enterprise was central to the St. John’s philosophy. I found myself glancing uneasily at my own notes, which had always served me well in the past but suddenly seemed paltry by comparison.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had run headlong into the Great Books of the Western World, the subject of a smart, engaging new book by Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe. In A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Beam traces the history of a peculiar moment in the development of America’s striving middlebrow culture, when hundreds of thousands of families across the nation decided to spend a lot of money on ancient texts that few would ever read. It’s also a story of higher education, and a 140-year-old argument about the responsibilities that colleges have to students.

Beam’s narrative begins in 1869, with the appointment of Charles Eliot to the presidency of Harvard University...[for more, in which I argue that the great books matter and liberals need to reclaim the liberal arts, click here]

EVENT: Computers, Professors, and the Cost of Higher Education

Note: Pushing this back to the top as a reminder to sign up, and also because the magazine article in question is now live to the world, here. Read it! Right now!  

It's commonly believed that higher education suffers from an acute case of "Baumol's Cost Disease," an affliction that causes labor-intensive industries to become less productive over time. It takes a professor just as long to deliver a 90-minute lecture today as it did 100 years ago, the thinking goes. But other industries have radically increased productivity in the meantime, often via use of technology, driving up the cost of highly-skilled labor across the labor market. In other words, colleges have to pay a premium for productivity increases they don't actually get, which is why tuition is now a zillion billion dollars and anyone planning to send their kids to a private college should expect to be in in debt for the rest of their, and their children's children's, natural lives. 

In fact, this is wrong. Colleges are perfectly capable of becoming more productive in the same way that lots of other industries have--by substituting capital for labor and replacing lots of expensive employees with less-expensive computers. It's not a theoretical idea--hundreds of colleges are doing this right now and more are jumping on board every day. Given that colleges are about to be mightily screwed by recession-induced budget cuts, this trend is likely to accelerate. But you haven't heard about it, in part because the significant cost-savings aren't being passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. This is the subject of new article I've written for Washington Monthly which you can--nay, must--read here. 

And to see a sure-to-be-fascinating discussion of these issues, live and in person, featuring a panel full of experts, plus myself, sign up for and attend this Education Sector Event, to be held on the morning of December 2nd here in Washington, DC. Ask questions, heckle, throw things, get free magazines and related materials--it's sure to be a great time.