Markus (below) takes apart my piece on education reform (belower). At the heart of things, he suggests that I am a pillow-headed, book-larnin’ intellectual too cerebral to realize what’s up. I suppose this is not the sort of accusation which you can employ quotes from Balzac in order to disprove. So you win this count, Markus — I’ll be nursing my wounds in the poetry library.

But every once in a while, I might meekly point out, pillow-headed, book-larnin’ intellectual types have some decent points to make. And in that gamely nerdy way of mine, I would like to take a closer look at this point:

Sure, there might be a widening conceptual gap between cultural success and educational success, but if so it’s likely because schools have over time failed to provide students with a toolkit for cultural success. Either way we have no evidence of this — and honestly, for any of us Harvard students to impute anything to “inner-city kids” is to tread in some pretty presumptuous waters.

First of all, dismissing the conceptual gap between cultural success and educational success with a trivializing “sure” is to suggest that this gap is not at the very center of why certain types of children check out early from school and no type of pedagogical innovation has proven successful at bringing them back. Secondly, the gap is not properly understood as between cultural success and educational success but rather between cultural assumptions and educational success. The totalizing, instrumentally-rational, authority-oriented dictum of the modern school is simply incompatible with certain social assumptions. I would not label those assumptions as somehow less successful ones, but rather different ones—ones in which the schematic of educational rewards is not immediately valued. To suggest that cultural “success” is somehow an analog of good educational discipline and educational achievement is a weird sort of cultural gentrification that Markus implies, but I don’t suspect he actually agrees with.

Thirdly, we do have evidence for this—fairly comprehensive sociological and ethnographic evidence. And it’s unclear whether it is something that schools can compensate for by “providing a toolkit for cultural success,” unless it is done at very early ages.

Like a giant leatherbound bomber dropping two payloads that make snooty British accent sound effects as they fall downward, I would like to lay the following two works on Markus: Paul Willis’s Learning To Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs and Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. It’s important to note that both books are particularist anthropological accounts of pedagogical systems in Britain or France—systems fairly different from American ones at the time. But I would suggest that the biggest problem facing American schools today is their increasing approximation of the class-based, power-structured school systems of Western Europe. To grossly reduce Willis, Bourdieu, and Passeron, they argue what educational systems teach is not principally academics but rather a culture of academicism—that is, they teach children how to be good students. This suggests that educational mechanisms are principally mechanisms of class renewal, and that the ‘uneducated’ classes actually imagine themselves against the cultural assumptions of the educated class.

So while teachers, and especially good teachers, make a huge influence on the margin, I would guess that the penetrability of simply improving teacher quality is quite low. Markus’s graphs correlate teacher experience to test scores (already an extremely dubious measure of holistic educational success), meaning they are measuring only the effect of teacher quality on students still enrolled in school. This is already a subset which excludes a fairly significant portion of people who—I hope at least—we should be trying to reach with our educational reforms.