FREDDIE DE BOER: Education Doesn’t Work 2.0: a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps. “The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.”

It’s like human abilities are distributed according to some sort of . . . bell curve, or something.

Plus: “If you’re really dead set on education as the key to improving the economic fortunes of the disadvantaged, and you don’t think we can or should redistribute our way to a more just and equal society, and you’re fixated on moving kids from the bottom of the academic performance spectrum to the top, what can we do? What works? Nothing.”

Related, Paul Krugman even noticed this some years ago: “Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).”