Research does not show that school affects long-term outcomes

Parents make all the difference. We should stop wasting funding trying to prove this is not true.

Read this post on my blog here.

The measurement for whether school is successful is -- drumroll -- if the kid does well in school. Think about it: You have never read research that says what kids do in school causes a person to have a good adult life. Neither the school nor the teacher has long-term impact on outcomes. So we make up stories about why school is important. Based on no data. To make ourselves feel better.

Here's an example of the circular logic that guides education research:

Children and adolescents spend a considerable amount of their time in school, and the school environment is therefore of importance for child outcomes. Research within the framework of “effective schools” has established that factors in the school environment play a part in pupil achievement.

Translated into normal English: "Kids are in school for a lot of their life so it must have some sort of impact on the child. Research shows that school environments correlate to school achievement." Notice that these two sentences are unrelated. Because no one is showing that school achievement has an impact on the child's long-term outcome.

We have long-term studies showing it does not have an impact (Harvard's 75-year study, twin studies).

We ignore those studies because it's inconvenient.

We have accepted this situation for decades. The pandemic laid bare why we accept that school has no long-term proven benefits: the short-term benefits to companies. The only way companies can pay low wages is to have children in school all day so parents don't have to pay for child care. School is universal, government-subsidized child care.

If parents stayed home the care and education would be better, because it would be customized for each child instead of the factory-style system we have now. We almost did that experiment during lockdown. And moms didn't want to leave their kids to go back to work. So they didn't.

The jobs are terrible and the school option is becoming visibly terrible as well. Also, parents are finding that as long as they don't have to be insanely stressed by balancing work and kids, taking care of kids is manageable including homeschooling them.

It turns out that school and low wages go together. School makes parents feel like they are not suitable teachers. And low wages make parents feel like they are not worth enough in society to be calm, stay-at-home parents. But if you give that same parent permission to be home with their kid and in charge of that kid's education, the parent will finally feel calm and in control.

When I started homeschooling I'd post pictures of my kids doing workbooks. Or reading. Now I post pictures of the kids basking in attention, because I know things in childhood that make a long-term difference have everything to do with relationships and nothing to do with school.

So how can society support parents in their quest for calm families rather than  juggling impossible roles. We need to remind ourselves over and over again, collectively, that we never had evidence that school accomplished anything beyond keeping kids safe while their parents were at work. We can raise the bar on ourselves now. We can accomplish so much more if we put families back together again.