David Friedman gets the impression that the best schools are getting better (or more numerous) and the worst worse (or more numerous):
It’s relevant, among other things, to the ongoing issue of the dispersion of income, apparently increasing. Quite a long time ago the authors of The Bell Curve expressed concern that one result of an increasingly meritocratic society was an increase in assortive mating, increased correlation between innate ability and status, hence an increased division between social groups. In the old days, they argued, the students who went to Harvard and the students who went to Podunk U. differed a lot in parental income and status, not so much in innate ability. As the system got better at identifying kids who were poor but smart and offering them scholarships to Harvard, an opportunity to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, it increased the odds that high status people would not only believe they were smarter than those lower down but be right — with potentially unattractive social consequences.If they were correct, it would not be surprising if the K-12 schools, public and private, that serve the upper end of the income and status distribution were getting better while the schools serving the lower end were getting worse — as measured by the quality of schooling provided, itself in large part a function of the characteristics of the students being schooled.
Friedman adds that he’s skeptical that working students harder makes them better educated:
Some years back, I attended a reunion of my high school at which members of the current staff took the opportunity to tell the alumni what a good job the school was now doing. One of their central points was the amount of the students’ time being consumed.My suspicion was that what I was hearing was “The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands” theory of education. Keep the kids busy enough and they won’t have time to do drugs or get pregnant.
I doubt it works. It might just result in eating up time they could have used to educate themselves. Reading science fiction, arguing politics, playing board games, even playing D&D or World of Warcraft are, I suspect, more educational than homework given for the purpose of keeping kids busy.
I suspect that the Devil does find work for the idle hands of those kids most likely to do drugs or get pregnant — and extra homework does take away from the time young Friedmans would use to educate themselves.
Kids with low impulse-control and low IQ are fundamentally different from kids with high impulse-control and high IQ.