Outliers: Success and Education, Part 2

One of the repeating themes in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success is that all of the individuals who are identified by society as most successful at their trades -- Bill Gates, professional athletes, 19th century entrepreneurs, pioneering lawyers, etc -- did not surf their way to success on intelligence and hard work alone. True, they no doubt possessed some natural ability and, at the very least, the drive to push themselves, but they also were children of exceptional circumstance whose successes were the products of so many different factors that popular press normally ignores. One of these is the fact that they put in an extraordinary amount of time practicing their trades -- many upwards of 10,000 hours -- before big time success ever hit them. I bring this up in relation to education because in its constant practice -- either in a classroom or through self-education in one's own time -- is the cause of a person's climb to success. This is especially important to defeating the old class explanation for why the educational gap exists; this class explanation, particularly relevant to geographic regions strongly dominated by an additional race-class paradigm, suggests that middle- and upper-class achievement is the result of an innate intelligence greater than that of the lower-class. I hope all agree with me that this argument is completely unfounded, on top of being disgusting.

Gladwell points out, though, that in the face of this class intelligence argument not holding water, public opinion and educational policy professionals have transferred responsibility for the educational gap to the schools themselves. "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 jobs schools are doing (259)." Gladwell, on the other hand, has done his homework and agrees with sociologist Karl Alexander that the research shows schools are, in fact, doing a fine job. In analyzing standardized tests given at both the beginning and end of any given school year, from first to fifth grade students of lower-class actually make more academic progress than the wealthiest of students. So how does the gap occur then? It's in the summer months away from school during which lower-class students fall behind. Wealthy students reap the benefits of being cultivated by their parents and by being surrounded by books, and intellectual conversation, and summer camps, and extra classes. In other words, they get to continue to practice their knowledge and gain some of the 10,000 hours other big shots like Bill Gates earned before he really stood out from the crowd. Their counterparts, on the other hand, are limited by their background and don't get to practice academics over the summer, which also means they forget some of what they learned during the year, and they're academically farther behind their wealthy peers at the start of the following school year.

This is especially true in my schools in Washington County, where the school year is traditionally several days shorter than many schools across the country, so as to allow students to help their families during planting and harvesting seasons. That may happen less these days, but the legacy of a farming calendar endures. Then add to it a 2 1/2 month summer vacation and schools in which students too often wander the halls and sign up for courses where homework can be completed during class, and you have the perfect formula for a culture in which students at an early age under-perform their peers across the country and therefore become more and more discouraged from making academic progress as they grow older. Hopefully they make it to high school graduation, but for many the next step is to drop out. This scenario is just another reason I have a job; this is how a college-going culture has escaped so many towns in rural Southwest Virginia.

So what is the solution? Gladwell says it's really a lot simpler than we'd think: "[Karl] Alexander, in fact, has done a very simple calculation to demonstrate what would happen if the children... went to school year-round. The answer is that poor kids and wealthy kids, would, by the end of elementary school, be doing math and reading at almost the same level (259)." And this, I failed to mention earlier, is in spite of poorer children starting at a disadvantage to the wealthy children. In Alexander's study, in the first standardized test of the 1st grade, poor children scored a full 32 points (significantly) below the high-income average. Summer schooling would more than help students make up for this initial disadvantage.

Highlighted as an example in Gladwell's books are the famous KIPP schools -- schools that don't require an intelligence test or entrance exam to be admitted, but merely a commitment to attend classes longer than an average school, to do extensive homework in the evenings, and to go to school for three weeks in the summer. It's the added classtime that enables success in students of all economic and racial backgrounds. Sure, it takes great sacrifice on the part of teachers, parents, and students themselves, but if working extra hours and changing the vacation schedule are the solutions for finally providing equal educational opportunities for all, then I think it's a sacrifice that I, personally, can be more than willing to make.