Grubstakers - Episode 82: Education and Charter Schools feat. Freddie Deboer (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 16, 2019

Writer Freddie DeBoer joins us to share his thoughts on charter schools, our education system, and his forthcoming book. Part 2 is available now on our Patreon but will be unlocked in one week. See more of Freddie's work at: https://fredrikdeboer.com/ His book "Cult of the Smart" will be published around Summer 2020.

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin a start in the dynasty. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people. I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. But anyway. All right. In five, four, three, two. Hello. Welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. In 5, 4, 3, 2, Show love.

Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by everybody I know. Yogi Poyle. Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. And so this week, we're talking about charter schools, and we're talking about billionaires and their relation to charter schools, and we're very pleased to have a very special guest with us who's an expert on this subject

and a person whose work that I've read and enjoyed for a long time now. Today, we're joined by Freddie DeBauer. Hi, how's it going? Yeah, my name's Freddie. I am an administrator at Brooklyn College where I run the Office of Academic Assessment. So I do evaluating student learning professionally. I have a PhD from Purdue University, where I studied

applied linguistics, test theory. I wrote my dissertation on the CLA+, which is a standardized test of college learning. And I've written a bunch about education online. Did I get your last name right? DeBoer. DeBoer, like the Boer War, right? Exactly. Not DeBauer, like Jack Bauer. Right.

But thank you so much for being with us, Freddie. Actually, I have a piece of disclosure I should probably say. Of course. I am a member of New York State United Teachers and of the American Federation of Teachers Local 2334. Right. So just for a little bit of background. So people would say, oh, you shouldn't listen to him about charter schools. He's got his own biases because he's a union person. And that is actually, I think, an interesting or the main focus of charter

schools is that some of them are unionized, but I would say the majority are not unionized. And it is something where when we talk about, you know, the billionaires who promote charter schools, just to give you a few examples to go through. Michael Bloomberg was the mayor for a while. He tripled his net worth during that time, but he was a major force in getting charter schools off the ground in New York City. Mark Zuckerberg is a Facebook billionaire. He spent like $100 million putting into charter schools in Newark, New Jersey. Bill Gates, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation almost single-handedly is responsible for charters in Washington State. The Waltons, the Walmart family, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education,

Reed Hastings, the Netflix billionaire, was instrumental in getting California to lift the cap on the number of charters in 1998. And then, of course, you have Doris and Don Fisher, the founders of The Gap. Man, they all love education. I wondered why the new Stranger Things was about the limitations of unionized public schools.

Now, I didn't hear Jeff Bezos on that, and that's probably just because he doesn't give money to anything. He'll be setting up the first charters on Mars. Yeah. But it is something where it's like, you know, so billionaires, they talk about their philanthropic giving, and they will often cite that as a reason why you shouldn't raise taxes. It's like I'm already doing so much better work myself, but it's like a lot of that work is going into charters, you know Carl Icahn, another person, but

I guess my point is it's interesting where you can't really get inside their head, but you assume they've set up some sort of justification where they think the problem is that schools are bad and not that the problem is that schools are bad and not that the people going into schools are often poor or, you know, hungry or, you know, they need lunch, these kinds of things, you know. And I guess I actually wanted to quote from one article you wrote here, Freddie, because you talk about these market forces in charters that they supposedly bring that the public schools lack. You say,

Reform types love to argue that market forces compel schools to promote student learning, but this is incorrect on its face. Market forces compel charter schools to please parents, which is not at all the same thing. And essentially you make the argument that charters really kind of create a race to the bottom with trying to advertise and lure parents into sending their children there, essentially,

in a way that public school does not. Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to zoom out a little bit and to say, okay, you know, what is the fundamental sort of idea behind charter schools? And the fundamental idea is that if you increase choice, then you necessarily increase quality. And this is to begin with, you know, this is a very conservative idea on its face, even though many of the people who promote charter schools call themselves

liberals. So for example, you can make the identical argument about public transit. Sure. And people have, saying, oh you know, there's no competition for the MTA, that's why the MTA is so bad, we should pull money from the MTA and spin it out to the different private corporations that could then compete and whoever does the best job will rise, the cream will rise to the top. The problem with this thinking, even if we wanted to, even if we were cool with sort of removing public accountability and gutting public institutions, is that a child's brain is not like a widget in a factory, right?

So that's where all of these analogies, these conservative analogies to business come from, that, yeah, well, if I've got a factory and I build a widget and you've got a factory, you build a widget, whosoever widget is better will win. But we don't have direct control over a child's brain in the way that we do over a widget in a factory. So if we wanted to really make that analogy, well, okay, you build the widget. But in fact, somebody else builds the widget at birth, and they take care of the widget during its most important formative years. Right, right. When a vast amount of important parts of their personality are imprinted on them. You only get the widget after four or five years, and it gets into your system.

But you only see the widget for six hours a day, five days a week. You then send the widget home, sometimes the homes that are broken homes, the homes that are filled with violence or drug abuse, and then you get the widget back. And sometimes the widget comes to school hungry, comes to the factory hungry. Sometimes the widget doesn't have adequate clothes for winter. And so at the end of that process, if you look at that widget and you

say, look at this shitty widget, look how beat up it is. And you say, you're the problem. The factory is the problem. That is not rational even if we accept the logic of charter schools. I think that widget ended up in my TV stand.

It doesn't really do anything. It just kind of hangs out. But no, and I totally agree with that. And it is just something where you talk about backfilling. I guess you talk about survivorship bias. But I guess before we even get into that, we should mention, guess democratic accountability because that's an important thing where I would say even good faith charter reformers essentially believe that democracy is the problem with education in the United States I mean that's the what makes a charter school a charter school is

precisely its ability to evade public accountability I mean if you you know there's many different kinds of charters and many different charter systems but the one thing that unites them all is that their supposed market advantage is the ability to not be under the control of local people. I don't like that, and I don't like charters because I like democracy. I think democracy works. I think that local control over local public institutions is absolutely essential. And I think that the sort of the end for doing away with the free fundamental rights of the members of a local community who fund a given school district to have a say in how that school runs. It's very disturbing to me.

Right. And so, you know, local schools are controlled through local elected school boards, essentially. Right. And if you as a parent really don't like something about how the school board is going not only can you petition the school board or not only can you petition um superintendent you have the power to organize democratically to get members of the school board removed and replaced and in some school some school districts some some cities you have the ability to get superintendents of schools removed. And that is your only real lever over what happens at your student school in the macro sense. And we're denying that lever to people. And I think it's particularly cynical when we think about the poorest people who don't

have the resources necessary to move their kids into private schools. They're the ones who have the most to lose from this disenfranchisement. Now, if I may take advantage of this to win conversations I've had over beer years ago, one of the main arguments, or one argument I've heard for charter schools is that it's better because the teachers aren't unionized so you can fire bad teachers. Is there any merit to that at all? Well, so despite what some people will say, it remains the fact that we do not know how to evaluate who is or is not a

good teacher. There are all manner of selection effects that are built in, as I write about an awful lot. Efforts to institutionalize teacher evaluation systems have had remarkable problems. So, for example, here in New York, pilot programs in student merit pay, for example, where teachers excuse me, teacher merit pay, where teachers are paid more or less depending upon how well their students do, were suspended because they kept giving incoherent results. In other words, one semester a teacher would be the very best teacher in the system. The next semester they'd be among the very worst. Or there have been times in other institutions where a teacher's 9 a.m. science

class is one of the highest scoring and their 2 p.m. science class is one of the lowest scoring. So I would just reject the notion that we currently have the ability to accurately investigate teacher quality. Yeah, there's so many variables in what makes students benefit from the class size to what their home life is to all of it. Is charter schools in general a newer concept? How long have these things been around? Well, there's been charter school, there have been charter schools since the 1970s. I guess I would say in their modern, in their, what, something like approaching their modern form. Right. But the movement really got rolling in the late uh 1990s um that was when you started to see places like new york um uh where charter schools stopped being these sort of rare one-off magnet type of

situations to being like a real sort of system systemic force and a real attempt by people in power to uh to undermine undermine the public school system. Now, would it be fair to classify charter schools as private schools? This is a different argument I've had. So I'm not sure that I would call them private. What I would resist calling them is public. So in other words, there's no such thing as a public charter, right? So, okay, so there are schools that market and brand

themselves as being charter schools that are just private schools um and that's mostly a matter of marketing um do they benefit from calling themselves a charter school over a private school is that the reason yeah i think i think it's just it's the hot thing yeah sure gotcha um wow branding in schools what a, stupid age we live in. Now, there are charter schools that receive public money and yet operate essentially as for-profit entities. One of the things that I – this is like a whole side quest, but in general, the not-for-profit designation, like non-profit designation means nothing, right? So the perfect example are the ETS, or ETS, the company that produces the SAT and the college board, technically non-profit,

but raking hundreds of millions of dollars. Right, right, right. So the reason I would never talk about, I would never refer to a public charter is because just because you're receiving public money, that's only one part of public. Public transit, again, is, yes, funded in large part by government funds,

but it also has public accountability. We have the ability to influence the MTA through our democratic processes. There is no such public accountability in public charters, so-called. I would, so I did just want to kind of put the, let's say, libertarian John Stossel argument to you, because I remember I watched some of his videos when I was a kid, and they convinced me at the time. So essentially, he will talk about like, okay, so if you're stuck in a, let's say bad public school district, you have to send your kids there. But the idea again, with these like, you know, charters or vouchers or whatever the case may be, it's like, oh, you can pick anyone.

So even like if say you're mentioning if they don't like their charter, there's no democratic accountability. It's a corporation. You can't do anything. But couldn't they just take them out of the charter and send them to another charter? I mean, wouldn't that be the argument? Well, yeah. So and that, again, is sort of the market force. But again, the question, I mean, this all comes back to the test score, right?

I mean, the thing that looms over all of these discussions is that the currency of this debate is the test score, right? I mean, the thing that looms over all of these discussions is that the currency of this debate is the test score. And so it's not sufficient for a parent to move their child from one charter school to another and to feel that they're getting a better deal because, frankly, the people in charge don't care about that right nobody is going out and giving parent satisfaction surveys what they are doing is they're pushing for more and more intense and more and more frequent standardized testing right and generically this you know I mean I get a lot into this in my upcoming book but generically you move one particular kid across all different kinds of educational contexts. You take him from an East Coast private small boys-only high school

and you drop him in a Los Angeles public school. His relative performance, that is, in other words, his class rank, will likely improve because of the systemic issues that make public schools, L.A. public schools, suffer. But his absolute performance, like his test score results, can stay with enormous confidence that they won't change much at all. In other words, moving students between different systems seems to inspire very little change in test scores. And, you know, just generically, most students sort themselves into ability bands very early on in life and stay in those ability bands for their entire educational experience. So, you know, third grade reading group is a really good predictor of whether you're going to finish college.

Wow, really? Okay. And, of course, we can predict third grade results fairly well from preschool results. Sure. And so there's this image of a student moving between different school types and different individual schools and having these wildly different outcomes. And that's just not what we see in reality. It's mostly students have a sort of set ability level and they perform to that ability level generally, regardless of where they go.

And would you theorize that environmental factors are more the cause of that essentially? I mean, we don't know, but. Well, so I, there's,

there's a few things. I mean, I, controversially, I do believe in the concept of natural academic talent. Right. I think that some people have, just as there's natural athletic talent,

some people are born with gifts, academic gifts, and those kids are going to succeed no matter where they go, right? Yeah. Here's a good example of the moving between schools and how little it can mean. So you guys have likely heard of these public test schools in places like here in New York or in Boston. I think it's called Latin something in Boston. Here, for example, Stuyvesant is a very famous public test school. So Chris Hayes, who's a host on MSNBC, went to Stuyvesant.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created Hamilton, went to Stuyvesant. They have a set of alumni that... The mortal technique went there. Beat up Lin-Manuel Miranda. And they can boast these, I don't know, like Supreme Court justices or whatever and all these people who are extremely oppressive who came out of there. So you say, okay, that's got to be a high-quality school. They're really changing lives.

But in fact, people did research with similar schools and they use what's called a last in, last out model. So to get into those schools, you have to pass a particular cut score on an entrance exam, which means that you have the advantage of over years, you have the data of people who just barely got in and barely got out, right? So you have people who scored very similarly in the test, but had a completely different outcome of getting into the school where they didn't. And then they looked at years down the line, things like their income, their employment status, all these markers of success. There's absolutely no difference between the kids who got into those schools

and those who did not. Oh, wow. It made no difference at all. Sure. In all of their economic life indicators, the kids who didn't get in succeeded just as well. You say, why? Well, you say because they have

a fundamental underlying talent, and getting into that school would have been great maybe for them socially or in terms of making connections, but their talent still would have asserted itself. And so that's just another example of these results are far more static than people want to think. And I get why people don't like that. For a lot of people, it offends their sense of justice.

Right. don't like that. For a lot of people, it offends their sense of justice. They think it's like, you know, cursing people to, you know, to live lives of drudgery if you say that they don't have a lot of academic talent. I do have quite a long political platform I could tell them about how to save people like that. But that's a discussion for another day. Would you say then maybe the German system's better, where people who don't have the more academic, like, background would, or, you know, as much of an academic aptitude in Germany, you know, they're sent to more vocational training courses for more, you know. Yeah, that kind of rigid tracking, I think, as long as it's voluntary,

I'm on board with it. In the book, I advocate for creating at least two, maybe three paths in terms of vocational focus compared to academic and maybe a hybrid, but it would be chosen by the student and their parents sure of course um as long as they can move um i think that that can be a very helpful system and in fact you know the the german outcomes are quite good don't don't give freddy's critics ammo by having him endorse the german model i was just gonna say i mean like because i've read some of what you wrote about standardized chest testing and you know, you said innate ability there. And it's like, I mean, I guess that's just the funhouse mirror of the Internet where if there are people who characterize your position as essentially action T4 or whatever else, eugenics or whatever, just absolutely ridiculous thing.

And, you know, I did find it interesting, like Ava Moskowitz is, I believe I got her name right. Yeah. Ava Moskowitz is the founder of Success Academy and she promotes charters with these exact kind of, well, let's say the language of social justice. But I mean, it's so I don't know if it's anything innate to that or if it's just kind of the moment that we're in. But I mean, do you have any feelings about how these positions you have which seem very reasonable to me are characterized this way well the first thing is i genuinely don't believe that anyone actually disagrees with the concept of innate academic talent i think that everyone has observed throughout their life that some kids did better at school than others right

and i you know i use the phrase academic talent carefully. I'm not interested in debating what is and is not intelligence. Certainly there are many different kinds of intelligence, and certainly I've known many people who sucked at school who were very intelligent. I mean, I would like to think that I'm at least a decently intelligent guy. I only had one semester in high school when I didn't fail math and science. Wow. Okay. I only had one semester in high school when I didn't fail math and science wow and that semester was just because the teachers felt sorry for me

that they didn't fail what year was that? you can see maybe see how old I am which grade was it sorry no no well not to be a bummer I was out orphaned in high school and so so the teacher was like, oh, let's throw this guy a bone.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was like, thank you, guys. So yeah, I fundamentally don't think that people really believe there's no inborn or natural academic talent. The other thing is that it's very strange because in certain wings of academia, the relevant wings, behavioral genetics, the fact that academic ability is partially genetic, partially heritable, that is, you know, passed down from parents to children, is just an absolutely banal statement of fact. Because that finding, the heritability of performance on standardized tests, is one of the most well-replicated findings in the history of social science. There are literally hundreds and

hundreds of studies that have found the same result over and over again. That's twin studies, so you look at identical twins raised apart and you see how... Dr. Mangala's? You see how, not those twin studies, how similar or different the twins are. And in fact, twins raised apart are more like each other than they are like their adopted siblings. Right, right. You look at adoption studies, so you look at...

Parent trap. Parent trap. You look at kids who are adopted into other homes. By the time that they reach high school, the adopted kid is much more like their biological parent academically than they are like the adopted parent. And now finally, we have genome-wide association studies. There's a big one that was written up in the New York Times maybe one year ago, maybe two years ago by Carl Zimmer, which found many variations, SNPs, single nucleotide polymorphisms, just little differences in the genetic code that are associated with academic performance.

Again, the important thing is that this is about individual difference, not group difference. So a lot of people want to say, oh, this is scientific racism, but I'm not talking at all about group difference. I don't think there's any group differences in inherent academic ability at all. I don't believe that black people are less intelligent than white. I don't think that men are better at math than women. I don't believe that Asian people have some sort of natural facility for science.

I don't believe any of that stuff. But on the individual level, right? So from parent to child, it's really hard to argue against the weight of the evidence. And in a certain sense, of course, academic ability would be somewhat heritable, right? Sure, sure. Evolution, the brain is an evolved organ, right? And it uh subject to uh genetic influence the way any other part of our body is evolution from the neck down doesn't make any sense to me do you um do you think there's anything to like the epigenetic explanation for um stressors on early life like changing your genetic code to make you do better in school um i think I would not be surprised at all if some of those studies are correct, yeah.

So the idea that, I mean, epigenetics was interesting in that for a little while it was kind of the hot academic fashion, and whenever that happens, some people take it too far. But that doesn't mean that the original observations weren't correct. And I think absolutely, yeah, past traumas, traumas in previous generations could imprint themselves on the DNA of the parents and influence outcomes.

Yeah, that's why I failed eighth grade chemistry was Oliver Cromwell. Yeah. That's why I passed eighth grade chemistry was because my parents were carrying out Oliver Cromwell's bidding. The thing you mentioned about how some people would look at it like it's bigotry, do you think those arguments come from the elite that are advocating these type of schools,

or is it just a misunderstanding of the research that is out there about what's going on? I think the first thing is just a misunderstanding. Here's the analogy that I've used before. Suppose you go to a basketball game and LeBron James' son Bronny is playing. Bronny James is a top tier, you know, five-star basketball prospect who will be in college in a couple years, I think, or the league. If you went to that basketball game you saw him play and you turned to his friend and said that kid's good at basketball because he's black right that would be a claim about group difference right right and i would agree with if someone said that was racist you know i would agree that that is offensive thing to say right

but if you went to a bronnie j basketball game and you said, he's good at basketball because LeBron James is his dad, that wouldn't be crazy. That would be the most natural thing in the world to assume, right? I'm making the second kind of claim, right? I'm talking about the relationship between parents and their children, not between races and their children. Do people opportunistically take advantage of that to sort of deny the existence of natural talent? They do. And, you know, look, I read a lot of education literature,

a lot of published studies, things from think tanks. You can read dozens and dozens of them, and the very idea of natural talent just does not come up. Like the very idea that some students just does not come up like the very idea that some students are just better at school than others is is sort of like this uh a big secret in in education in many ways that people just don't want to talk about it well i work for a company that teaches kids to learn and love math and we have uh animations and interactive uh web applications uh so i i think it's just a couple more years until the results disprove what you're and we have animations and interactive web applications.

So I think it's just a couple more years until the results disprove what you're saying. Well, you know, I would be thrilled to be disproven. I would much rather live in a world where everyone's educational outcomes are perfectly malleable. But look, here, let's, you know, forget about genetics then, okay? Let's not even worry about the cause. What we know for sure is that some students end up with significantly better academic ability than other students. And whatever the cause, you know, that academic ability does not appear to be particularly mutable, right?

The idea that like every student's this unmolded jar of clay or ball of clay that you can just twist into whatever position you want to be is simply belied by the data. Again, as I said, and I'll say again, most students sort themselves into a particular ability band and they stay in that band throughout their education. And I think that most people listening to this will think back to their school experience. And the kids who were in the top reading group in first grade were probably still the smart kids in high school. Sure, yeah. Right? Are there exceptions? Of course there's individual exceptions.

We're talking about big groups There's always variability But in general that's true And so you mentioned your new book It's called Cult of the Smart It's due to be published You said summer 2020 That's right

And it deals with these things we're talking about here But also charters as well Yeah I would assume, yeah I mean I guess the basic argument is this And I've changed this elevator pitch a thousand times I mean, I guess the basic argument is this. And I've changed this elevator pitch a thousand times and will again. In the late 20th century, in the last several decades of the 20th century, the American economy changed in a really profound way.

We saw the demise of jobs for people without college educations that nonetheless were able to provide a solid middle class existence. Now, the causes of this, the scope, these are all things that are debated, the degree to which this was manufacturing or whatever. I can't speak on that stuff. But one thing is for sure is that over time, it became harder and harder to build a good life for yourself if you didn't have a college education. Eventually, the policy apparatus woke up to this. And they said, okay, what are we going to do about this? Now, if you have a system that only rewards people who have academic abilities, you could do something to change that system. But rather, they did the opposite, which is they said, if the economic advantages go to the smart kids, we're going to make everyone a smart kid.

And that really is at the center of the education reform movement. It's the idea that we can make everyone one of the smart kids, and that's how we're going to save our economy and our people. There's two problems with this. Number one is that if everyone's a smart kid, nobody is, that academic distinctions are valuable precisely because they are distributed unevenly. In other words, a college education has financial value. I'm not talking about the other values, which are great, but the

financial value of a college education depends in large part on the fact that it's a rare good still, right? Two-thirds of American adults don't have a college education. The National Bureau of Economic Research did some research in 2006, and they looked at, over time, over the 20th century, how the college wage premium, so the advantage that you got by having a college degree, changed over time. And what they found was that it was a pretty simple ratio, the comparison between the number of jobs that required a college degree and the number of people that had a college degree and unsurprisingly when there were more jobs and there were people right excuse me when there were when there are more people than were jobs the the advantage of having a college degree went down when there were

more when there was fewer people with college degrees relative to the jobs that needed them their economic advantage went up. So what's going to happen when everyone has a college degree? We're already seeing a race higher and higher with more and more people getting master's degrees because they feel that they need the new credentials. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is we have no ability to make all the kids smart kids. We have mountains of testing data to demonstrate that we can't do that. There's never been anything

in the history of education in the world, in the history of the world, as ambitious as what we're trying to do. Like, for example, No Child Left Behind, which was not only had no country ever accomplished such a thing in terms of raising test scores, no country had ever attempted it before, and for good reason um we can't do it we're not going to make all the

smart kids all the kids the smart kids um and the book is an articulation of that idea and articulation of a better system i did want to so one thing just on the causation um i mean my personal theory on this is unions, you know, and so, like, I always use the example of my father, he had a high school degree, he loaded baggage on the airline for US Airways, he was part of the Teamsters Union, he could buy a house. And you look at this, you know, like peak in the United States private sector, 33 ish percent unionization down to 6% today. And so it is just something where if you do think the cause is unions, then charters would, if anything, exacerbate that by destroying unionized teachers movements, which not only give themselves, you know, good wages and benefits, but by having

unionized workforce, you know, benefit the entire workforce. My best friend growing up he his father works at still works at Pratt & Whitney which is a company that makes jet engines he got a job right out of high school there he started out on the assembly line he now does real deal engineering doesn't have a degree but he's been grandfathered in could never get a job there today. Right. He was able to buy a house, a couple of cars, put three sons through college. And his son, who does have a college degree, works at Whole Foods because, you know, the market is that tough.

So I think that dynamic of having like people with PhDs eventually, if this persists, becoming day laborers, will be, it's more a result of the existence and acceptance of unemployment as just something that you can't change. And so some of the ideas out there, like a federal jobs guarantee. So we can't have everyone being the smart kid and we have to accept a certain unequal distribution

of academic talent, fine. But we do have unlimited jobs that we could distribute. And we have to accept a certain unequal distribution of academic talent. Fine. But we do have unlimited jobs that we could distribute. Yeah. So that would be a way to ameliorate that problem and get away from academic talent as the only pathway to a decent economic life. You know, there's this big universal basic income versus jobs guarantee fight going on within the American left right now. And I'm completely agnostic. I mean, my position is I'll take either. Sure, sure.

I'll take either or both. Why not both? Yeah, either or both. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is one of the things that I say is like, it is profoundly strange to have an entire economic system where the only lever the policymakers think they have

is educational. It's profoundly strange to see all these problems in our economy and say, well, we have to start at the very beginning of life, and we have to use these effects that are incredibly vague, and everything that we're hoping to happen was going to happen well downstream. It's hard to see the impact. It's just a very weird way to go about creating a public policy.

I think frankly we can't with the climate challenges facing us, we can't afford to restrict our labor force in this way. There's too much work to be done basically. So why would you have a system where you are relying on um identifying natural academic talent as the means

of uh supplying all of the labor force that we're going to need yeah yeah and and again like i you know i will i will insist on repeating this point Once every kid gets a 1600 on the SAT, suppose that was possible, what is the economic value of a 1600? Right, right, right. It literally drops to zero. Okay, so some of those 1600s are going to still have to be unemployed or janitors in our system. You can talk to your cashier about Kant. Do you find that the, like, definition of intelligence in this country is a little

too narrow? Because, like the individual you mentioned who, like, worked his way up at the Pratt-Whitley job, I find that, you know, I dropped out of college and high school because I realized that I wasn't doing anything that required me to need to go

through those paths. And I remember very much thinking that, man, we all know how to read, but so much of us don't have so many practical skills. Like, you know, something as simple as how engines for a car work to, you know. But that's not even considered in the realm of intelligence. So do you find that the definition is too narrow or how we look at it is too narrow? Yeah, I think both. So this is the one thing that I am somewhat on the defensive with

with this book, which is people say fairly, when you talk about academic talent and you're talking about test scores and grades and graduation rates, you're taking a very reductive view of intelligence. But I'm not trying to say that those things are with intelligence, right? I'm trying to say that those are the metrics that count to the powers that be. Those are the ones that help you through your life pragmatically.

And so those are the ones that I have to talk about. But absolutely, you know, I absolutely believe that everybody has their own version of intelligence. And some people's just their potential is completely untapped because they're unfortunate enough to live in a world where what they're good at is not monetizable. But, you know, it should come as no surprise that under capitalism, ultimately the definition of intelligence is dependent upon what can generate wealth. Sort of that goes back to that Einstein quote where he said, I think everyone's a genius. It's just if you tell a fish to climb a tree, it's going to think it's a moron. Right, right, right.

Hey, everyone. So we're going to cut the conversation here on our free side We continue the conversation on our Patreon That's patreon.com slash grubstakers We want to say thank you for listening to this episode And a special thank you to our guest, Freddie DeBoer And I hope you have a wonderful day Talk to you later