The brain, the abacus, cats, dots and nets: Notes to close achievement gaps by developing a coherent theory

of the possibility of equal educational opportunity. Rabbit boy was a smile-ridden elf with dark brown hair and huge brown eyes. I met him in school where he had a provisional ticket to the slow class stamped by just about everyone. He was especially bad in third grade math. He had significant trouble with relevant recall of arithmetic facts on examinations, yet he was able to run a rabbit business that included calculations of the marginal return for each additional rabbit unaided by parents, teachers or anyone else. Then there was the young sister of a child enrolled in a math enrichment afterschool camp I ran. She also was considered slow. Her teacher noted that she had a real gift for art and was trying to get her placed in a program that would allow her to develop her gift. She was not enrolled in the math program, but because there were significant transportation issues for the family, either both children had to come to the camp or neither did. Because she had to be there --- and only because she had to be there -- she was allowed to try to learn to play the difficult analytic games we were teaching. Because she had to be there, we also allowed her to join a tournament --- out of a sense of fairness. She out-performed even the instructors on one of the more difficult of these games. She completed 12 levels of the game in about 15 minutes when instructors had taken days to accomplish less. These children could do what we were trying to teach them but their competence was invisible. Clearly these are only anecdotes., but if you want more of these stories, ask around. You will find plenty --- but they are usually anecdotes as well. Why? For one thing, even if we find evidence of such children as they go through school, we have little idea of what to do with them and it is unlikely that they will ultimately succeed. If we see a child who, on measures of ability does very well, but cant seem to achieve in a way that is commensurate with that measure despite real effort, we place that child in a learning disabilities class in the hope that the creativity of the LD teacher might help the child along. Sometimes that works, sometimes not. When we dont understand how to ensure the success of these children, what do you suppose will happen to a child who tests poorly on ability and achievement examinations, but who in fact can do what the tests are ultimately designed to examine? Is it likely that the child is competence will ever be known? Yet such anecdotes are not rare. Yes, I know that believing anecdotes is a risky business, but believing any particular research result might riskier still: we have gone there and done that with not much effect. I think it is time to look at all the information we have to get beyond where we are. Our nation has consistently been a destination and an inspiration for those who seek a place where their history would not shackle them in reach of only a short set of uncomfortable futures. Our system of education and governance is dedicated, at least in theory, to the assumption that by dint of hard work in school and beyond, a person from any background could make an august place among us. Schooling is supposed to equalize the playing field so that people from all backgrounds --- all religions, races and ethnicities and SES levels--- can be successful. It is clear that the promise, having made some headway, has not been fulfilled. We have groups of people who do not, on average, do as well as other groups in school and in those roads to success gated

by schooling. We have individuals who, like those in the anecdotes described above, are competent, but their competence is somehow overlooked as we assess who knows what. These problems are persistent despite a redwood-forest-paper-pulp worth of research over the past 50 years. Our research findings do not tell a clear story. Some research implicates parenting practices, some say it is class size, some say that schools cannot ever make up for the deficits our social stratification has caused, some say it is culture and some say that genetics is the culprit. We have realized over the years that our schools have not performed the equalizing function we require. Research to find the causes of the failure has alternatively suggested that our goal of universal education is akin to asking a system to create silk purses out of everything imaginable, to the suggestion that schools reify existing social stratification. One thing is clear: our problems are persisting and research has not been much help. I will tell a story that implies that, if we want to regain our dream for education, we must never use our current idea of remedial work to help students who are currently not doing well in school. It is a story that should make us rethink exactly what our research is implying in what it actually shows. It is a story that suggests how we need to refocus our schools and retool our measures of success if we want to attain the ideal of educational equality --- an ideal essential to who we are. It is a story that will suggest that we must embrace the idea that there might be a genetic link with some measures of ability and achievement, but hat we need give it no more educational weight than we would an indication of a genetic inclination to like pistachio ice cream. The story will show that while genetics is not a necessary governor of educational success, it can be conditionally linked to that success. It is that link we need to protect against: both for those with the in genes and those without them. But I am getting ahead of the story. A good rule of thumb to use when attacking a persistent problem is to assume that every considered thing that people say about the problem is true --- even and especially if what they say is contradictory. In this case it means that we should assume that all the theories and research findings are informative. That does not mean, however, that the solution is to devise a basket of fixes for the ills discovered from each of the possible culprits mentioned by theory and backed by research. In other words, the cash value of believing that everyone is right is not the expectation that we will cure our educational ills by simultaneously retraining parents, improving teacher quality, making classes smaller and find a shot to give children with bad genetic material or any other combination of cures suggested by our current research. What we should believe is simply that the theories and research have discovered an aspect of the beast that has to be take into account. We need to understand that social stratification and segregation have adverse effects on performance. We need to understand that certain parenting practices are, on average, associated with better performance. We need to understand that there does seem to be a genetic link between certain measures of ability and achievement. But we do not need to make the unnecessary inferential leaps that usually follow an acknowledgement of these findings. We do not need to conclude that the existence of a genetic link requires us to believe that a childs genetic makeup is in any way a real governor of our achievement or ability --- and not because we can fix the environment to overcome the genetic deficit. We do not

need to believe that a parent must have the education and linguistic skills to monitor a childs homework if that child is to succeed. We do not need to believe that a child has to be in a small class to succeed. We need, instead, to examine why these things in fact are associated with success and we must, ultimately, tell a story that reconciles all of these findings including those that appear incompatible. We need a story to tell that makes everyone right without at the same time buying the way we are structuring the problem. Currently if we buy that everyone is right, we would become really frustrated both because the effects we have found in research are very small and costly to fix and because, in the case of genetics, there is no reasonable fix (despite the suggestion that we might eventually be able to find a shot to fix the problem if only we owned up to it --- cite). We need to find a frame that takes account of everything research has shown without making us drink the kool-aid of functional hopelessness that buying these results usually causes. When parenting is implicated we face one set of boulders. Many parents do not have the requisite skills or necessary time to get involved. Providing surrogates for the gain in performance research has found does not look very cost effective --- even if the surrogates could have the requisite relationship with the child necessary for the requisite result. Under the current economy, reducing class size for the small gains research has shown is going to be a really hard sell. When genetics is implicated, people like me who want education to provide access to opportunity get nervous and angry. The studies are flawed. I think. So genes are implicated. We can change the environment enough to compensate. I just drank the kool-aid. Although I said that the first step in resolving a persistent problem is to believe that everyone is right, we do need to look for trouble. Trouble here is to be found by not by looking to see that a finding is wrong or a study is flawed. What we need to look for are holes in our theories and research: we need to look for evidence of phenomena that are not explained by any of the theories or research. For example, I can find that the young girl in the anecdote I related above really does very poorly on both in-class and standardized tests. I can also find that, given difficult analytic tasks, she performs exceptionally. The first set of examinations is used in school to determine achievement and ability and the second is not. The trouble we want to find comes when we note that and ask ourselves why. None of our theories and research tells us a good story for this kind of anecdote. Where do such anomalies tell us to look? If there are people who do what we want them to be able to do yet cant do well at examinations that are purported to examine exactly that, we need to look at the assumptions behind both our curricular offerings and our examinations. The Current Frame We assume that we have a continuum of understanding and skill in every subject and that continuum goes from easy to hard. The easy understanding and skill will be enough for untalented people to know to help them get along in the world and the difficult understanding and skill will train students to actually work in the field. Our tests assume that there is a trait, called achievement that we can measure. We measure this trait by using statistics and expert

subject understanding to help us select a subset of questions that examine relevant tasks and understanding along this continuum. Achievement is itself thought to be a function of another trait, ability. We can achieve more to the extent that we have more ability. We can also measure ability, but here we employ special exams that measure those skills and understandings that are seen as necessary to learn a variety of subjects. If this story is wrong, that is, if there is no such continuum and if our real educational goals cannot be reached if we assume such a continuum, then understanding what inputs to our educational process cause a particular outcome on the scale we have constructed is liable to give us some seriously flawed information. We are liable to think that a child is limited when in fact our worldview is limited. We are liable to implicate a parenting method when it is our methods that are lacking. Is there any evidence to think that we might have the wrong story? There are plenty of indications that we are not justified in making the assumption of a unique continuum. If it is wrong, it would be a major reason that we are not reaching our educational goals and it would clearly do violence to childrens prospects. The following notes roughly on cognitive science and education show a few such indications. The Brain: Cognitive Science and Education Although we are increasing the rate of understanding of how our brain functions, we already know a good deal. Unfortunately, we have not always tried to alter either what we teach or how we teach it to take what cognitive science has found into account. For example, arithmetic competence is arguably not necessary and certainly not sufficient for mathematical prowess. Mathematics by draws a good picture of this phenomenon. We need to teach arithmetic, but if we assume an invariant continuum between arithmetic and higher math we will get it wrong. Arithmetic and Higher Mathematics We taught analytic games in that math program I mentioned on the theory that targeted practice of abstract analytic, logical thinking between ages 10 and 11 would prepare a childs mind for advanced mathematics. Interestingly, generally math curricula hardly touch this kind of thinking at all. The first years in school are relegated to studying arithmetic. Now, arithmetic is a subject that teaches many skills that are necessary for life, but the part of our brain that processes arithmetic functions is very different from the place activated when we consider higher mathematics. Indeed, a person can be completely unable to calculate a sum, yet be very proficient at algebraic manipulations. Why do we use arithmetic achievement measures as a gate to access to learning higher mathematics? If there is no continuum, as brain function studies seem to indicate, then assuming there is one is a serious problem if the goal is to eventually train mathematicians. If, on the other hand, we do not want to train mathematicians, but we want to accept pre-trained mathematicians (children who receive the requisite pre-mathematical training

at home since such training might require teachers who are adept at something the ordinary teacher might not be adept at) then it is likely that the practice will have no effect on our desired outcome. But, of course, this is not a practice consonant with providing equal educational opportunity. Jumping to conclusions about the summer fading phenomenon. One educational stylized fact (a stylized fact is simply a finding with significant corroboration) is that minority children returning from summer vacation seem to have forgotten more of what they knew than children from the majority. While the finding is a fact, the conclusion that we jump to is unwarranted without further research --- research that has not been done. We conclude that children from the majority must practice what they have learned over the summer while minority children do not. As a result, we propose longer school years and/or programs to keep children practicing school facts over the summer. The fading phenomenon is a wonderful opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how learning is accomplished. We know that as people become adept at mimicking new sequences of behaviors, they incorporate these new sequences into existing structures of behavior and understanding. If I learn how to subtract, I will use my new knowledge when I go to the store to make sure I get the correct change. If I help my parents in a store, I use my new sequence to make the correct change. When I do either of those things, I will forget some facts and remember others. I will develop strategies that will allow me to effect the incorporation efficiently. If I fail to incorporate the new sequence, I will probably forget it over time. That even goes for the tasks that we have designated as easy on our mathematical continuum. If you doubt that, ask yourself if you think that, without study, you would do well on a GED test even if you currently hold a PhD. This is so well known that in Scarsdale, a few years ago, parents protested vigorously against having their children study for a new set of competency exams because they felt that their children needed to take the time to study the advanced mathematics required by the colleges these children hoped to attend, rather than bone up to do well on tests of easy skills. If there really is no easy to hard continuum, what is there? One approach to finding an answer to that question is to explore the answer to a related question: Is it not possible that minority children who seem to do worse after a summer break are exhibiting a different pattern of forgetting than majority children? Let us take a hypothetical example. Suppose one child works in her parents store over the summer break and another child goes to camp, but is required to finish workbook sheets of subtraction facts and is rewarded for the number of pages finished. Is it possible that the child who works in the store has forgotten many subtraction facts, but is actually faster in recall for those facts that involve money-like sums? Is it possible that she can do any subtraction given, but the ones without a monetary underpinning will be done more slowly than are done by the workbook study child? If one child has done workbooks full of subtraction facts over the summer, but has never actually incorporated this learning into practice so hasnt actually made

the leap that learning requires --- a certain amount of forgetting --- are we justified in sending the child who worked in the store to summer programs? Is it possible that the child who worked in the store actually has learned subtraction ---- that is, has reached an important educational goal while the workbook bound student has not, yet we see deficits in only in the store-working childs performance? The point here is not to suggest that the picture I have painted is true, but rather to expose some flaws in the way we think about the problem of education. We havent looked at our assumptions. We havent looked at patterns of forgetting to understand what is going on because under our assumptions, patterns of forgetting wont help us understand much that is valuable. It cant because there is one set of facts and processes that are arranged in a row from easy to hard. We assume that our children either forget randomly (there is no pattern of forgetting, only the noise that might occur should our Joe not be concentrating on a question) or our children have failed to learn a particular step necessary to climbing the hill required to know arithmetic. Patterns of forgetting might tell us which step Joe doesnt get, but we will never ask ourselves what Joe does get given his pattern of answers. We wont see that Joe in fact knows arithmetic very well having answered all questions dealing with money sums --- even very abstract and hard questions, --- but Joe is slower and less accurate in answering questions based on workbook style facts. We dont know whether Joes performance will remain long after Jeffs workbook acumen has faded because Jeff never had to incorporate what he learned into his life. This is not an argument for the way learning style differences among students are thought to work. Under the learning style description, students are thought to have different learning modalities that work best for them. These are thought to be a part of how the student is wired and is invariant from subject to subject. In other words, a student who learns by listening in mathematics will also learn by listening in science. Joe learns in exactly the same way as everyone else, it is just that his life requires forgetting in a way that differs from the way Jeff will forget. This is an argument for differences in specific strategies that we need to understand before we go around bad-mouthing what our children know. The Abacus: Coordinating Action or Why We Need to Teach Arithmetic I mentioned that arithmetic skill is not necessary for high mathematics. However, we somehow understanding that we need to teach arithmetic (just ask anyone about how prepared children taught the new math were). What does teaching arithmetic mean in terms of what we need our children to learn about how to do arithmetic? Suppose you were a child and you came into my store, selected an item that cost $5.31, gave me a twenty-dollar bill and I gave you $14.69. Suppose you did not believe that was the correct change since you had calculated that it would be around $5.50. If I took out my abacus and performed the relevant bead movements in front of you, would you be likely to be persuaded that I had made the correct calculation? Unless you somehow knew how to use an abacus, you would be unlikely to be persuaded. In fact, unless both of us shared a common way of doing things, it is unlikely that I will be able to persuade you that I was correct. Moreover, suppose we both had

made an error. Suppose I gave you $14.59 and you had calculated $14.79. If we were both adults and the sums involved were considerably higher, we might end up in court or in fisticuffs. One of the primary goals of having a free, public education is to facilitate the coordination of action. If we have common ways of doing those things that most commonly need to be done and if we have the skills necessary to those things in the agreed upon way, then we will go about getting what we need done efficiently and effectively. Making change, buying groceries, paying bills, using transportation all require that we coordinate our actions with others. Each of these functions requires that we have the skills to perform the subset of tasks necessary to complete the function. We need to know how to subtract, we need to know how to add, we need to know how to read and understand certain kind of communications. If our only goal for a public education were to make sure that each student had the skills and knowledge of tasks necessary to coordinate basic action, we would most likely have examinations that did not admit of levels but rather knowledge of sequences: either you have the skills and understanding or you dont. Can you subtract under conditions that are liable to obtain in the world or cant you? Can you communicate the results of your subtraction to someone else in a way that they will be able to understand? Truly we need to leave no child behind when we consider this goal. But, we dont know how to accomplish even this. Unfortunately we cannot even achieve this goal because we have no coherent way of looking at how closely strategies have to be in order for actions to be effectively coordinated. Herbert Clark, the eminent psycholinguist, following a long line of philosophers has a way of looking at this that can help us understand what is at stake. He points out that actions that require coordination also require error correction routines. The more different people are, the more error correction is needed to effect any particular coordinated action. If we are in Atlanta and you ask me for directions to Peach Street, I will have to ask you for some more information before we continue. Some time ago a friend of mine, recently from the UK, went in to the very new and very young secretary of his department to ask for rubbers. Needless to say getting his erasers took way more time than it would have had there not have been the linguistic differences between countries. Differences have a time penalty. The trick to using public education to coordinate action would be to find out how different things could be before a person would become labeled as someone to avoid when you were in a hurry. Then we could develop a minimal set of strategies that need to be identical, leaving others to differ for reasons I will go into later. Clark also points out that routines and word meanings change as a result of interactions. That means people who are not interacting risk becoming even more different. This is not a new story. One of the first things that happened as a result of integration was that test score gaps closed by leaps and bounds. Our understanding of this is also behind affirmative action (among other reasons). We simply cannot afford to have whole segments of our population avoid each other because avoidance breeds avoidance and a balkanized nation is not liable to be a stable one --- nor a productive one. So we need to find a minimal set of strategies that we need to have in common. Does the choice of strategy matter? If some things need to be the same, can some things be allowed to differ?

Cats I love cats, but the expression there are manyways to skin a cat is too much a part of our vocabulary to avoid when I relate this part of the story. In the interest of my own sensibility, I will define skin here are merely giving a very close haircut. I ask you now to suppose that there are exactly three ways to skin a cat and that each way is the province of one particular group. So, Group A does it using technique A, Group B uses B and Group C uses C. We need to suppose that each groups method results in skinned cats in equal amounts of time using equal amounts of resources and the resulting cats haircuts are indistinguishable from one another. Which strategy should we use to coordinate cat-skinning functions? Does the choice matter? The answer is that it most certainly does matter if we are going to grade on knowledge of cat skinning assuming that there is only one way to do it, but it does not, generally, if we just require a yes/no response (do you know the steps or dont you --- and can you communicate that you know the steps to another). Let us make a few more suppositions to make this clear. Let us suppose that our Group A is a minority group --- it makes up about 20% of the population. This group is relatively poor. Group B is the majority group, and it makes up about 70% of the population. Group C makes up only about 10% of the population, but they are well off. We also need to assume that each group gets the cats skinned in 7 steps, and each step is an identifiable task. Finally we can assume that Groups B and C share several tasks in their respective strategies but Group A shares at most one task (it will work with more than one) with either group. If we decide to choose Group Bs strategy given the wide use of this strategy, we could simply teach it in school as the coordination choice --- making sure to have the children understand that there are equally good other ways to do this. Our exams would be on the task set for Group B strategies. There would be no levels of understanding --- just a simple can you do it or cant you because the exam would be one concerning knowing how to do something. If a childs hands shake when handling the scissors for the first time, that would not count as a pass. When the child can hold the scissors and effect a cut, that would be a pass. A little shaking, but a good clip --- and the little one can do it several times in a row? A pass. The clip is the thing. Right now we assume that there is one way to skin cats and we assume that we are teaching it. In fact we are liable not to be teaching any one strategy, but rather a committee-designated set of tasks that are associated with cat skinning from every group. We examine that the student knows that these tasks are associated with cat skinning and we also try to see whether or not the tasks can be reliably done. Blooms and other learning taxonomies are based upon thinking that knowing that is one level of understanding and knowing how is another, higher level. We believe that not every child can reach the knowing how stage, but that everyone should know that certain tasks are required for cat skinning. It should be obvious that, to the extent we are interested in coordinating action, knowing that is a

non-starter. It is in fact not always a necessary precursor to knowing how. I recently took up the Mountain Dulcimer having caused many piano teachers throughout my life to contemplate suicide. The interesting thing is that I can play the dulcimer --- play complex songs with complex chording and fingering without written music, without instruction and without having the faintest idea of what chords I am playing or indeed how to form any particular chord on the thing. In other words, I would still flunk knowing that tests, but I do know how. We can elect to choose one way of skinning a cat to make sure that we can coordinate the essential task of cat-skinning if we understand that our goal is to teach knowing how and that knowing how means simply knowing enough to be an effective partner --- a simple threshold test. Suppose we were, instead, to be back to the way things are currently done. First of all, we choose tasks to be incorporated into our teaching by committees of experts representing different groups. Remember that our underlying educational assumption is that there is one way to skin a cat and children will know more or less of what is needed to skin one. Those who know more have achieved more and they are liable to have achieved more because they are more able. Given this assumption, we will try to make sense of how it would play out with tasks that are chosen by representative committee. Before I go on, let me clearly state that it is imperative that our curricular committees have significant minority representation, but not to help choose a part of the curriculum or questions on tests. What we need representation for is to understand that cats can be effectively skinned in a whole lot of ways. In some cases, the ways a minority might use might be superior to the ways of the majority --- and for coordinating action their way might be chosen as preferable if the increased efficiency could overcome the weight of majority relearning. It is also important here to remember that we are talking about only those skills needed for our goals of coordinated action --- not about those skills needed to become a veterinary barber generally. So, we now have our committee-developed set of cat skinning-related tasks and we have our committee help write questions that examine a childs knowledge of these tasks. Generally speaking, easy questions will be ones that every child can get and hard questions will be those that only a few children can get. So, questions about tasks that all groups share will be considered to be easy. Test questions about tasks that only the majority group and the poor group uses will be less easy (70% and 20% will answer these correctly). Questions on tasks that the majority and the well-off group shares will be less easy that that (70% and 10% will get them), but the poor children are unlikely to know those. Question on tasks that the majority only knows will be even less easy (70%). Questions on tasks that are done only by the poor group (only 20% would answer these correctly) are even more difficult. Questions on tasks that the well-off group only knows will be seen as difficult (only 10% will know these). What questions will we choose to make up a test? Assuming a continuum, we will look at both the difficulty level and the ability level. The majority child and the well-off child will be able to answer easy questions, and middle-ability questions. The well-off child will be able to answer easy, middle and some very difficult questions, while missing some nearly hard questions. The poor child will be able to answer the easy question, and some nearly hard questions, but

will miss most of the middle group of questions. If we use computer-based assessment, the poor child will likely be given walking papers way before the nearly hardest questions are asked. No matter, since these questions are liable to have been eliminated from the test as an aberration for several technical reasons. What we have here is not only a failure to communicate, but a failure to understand. When I talk about this to testing experts, they routinely want me certified. If we ever saw anything like this kind of pattern of answering wed stop the presses. They also tell me to review the process of identifying biased test questions because if I understood that process I would clearly know why what I was suggesting is impossible. Well I do understand how to run a variety of tests for bias and I also know that the tests will not --- cannot see this pattern. We rarely look at socioeconomic status and we even more rarely look at bias locally. Remember what I mentioned about Clark? People develop different strategies from working together. That means that people in the same area are liable to have developed idiosyncratic ways of skinning their cats. If I look at question biases nationally I am going to miss questions that bias locally --where the action is. Even more important --- local tasks will not even be represented on standardized tests. No matter what else is true of this example, given the hypothesis of a single continuum and the examples assumption that there is no single continuum, which group will be disadvantaged will simply be a matter of luck: what particular flavor of test construction and validation is actually used. What about genetics? If the genetic link is real, doesnt that mean there is something to this continuum idea? How can we have a strong association between ability and achievement if there is no single continuum from easy to hard underlying a subjects tasks? The answer to this involves understanding that there can be a genetic link with a strategy for skinning cats, but that the genetic link does not limit ones ability to skin cats unless that strategy is chosen as the only one that is taught (or the one that has the majority of its subtasks taught). Dots

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These questions will be unlikely to be on the test because our assumption is that learning goes from easy to difficult and a poor child (under our assumptions) cannot answer questions that the majority knows and or the majority and the well-off, or questions that just the well-off knows. So if we see questions that the only the poor child gets, we will most likely eliminate them from the test.

Suppose there are only three groups in our society and each group has its own way to skin cats. Suppose that the ways to skin these cats involves doing several tasks in sequence. The following discussion will only answer a question about what our assumptions will do if there are several sets, not how we need to do things if this is the case. [if we have equally good methods of skinning cats, then our question choices --- no matter how we do it among the current ways of doing things, are going to make group cutoff assignments a function of numbers, not efficacy. Is this OK? Actually not for either goal. If we do not figure out the threshold differences that are tolerable we will violate the coordination goals. If we

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assume that there is a continuum that allows us to get to real proficiency, we will violate the goal about training students for real accomplishment. Ok --- we can see how, if there are alternative equally good ways to skin cats how our assumption of a unique continuum might have problems, but we still have some mighty strong evidence FOR our choice of a unique continuum. Furthermore, even if we have our story slightly wrong, it is hard to see how, without it, I could easily assess either student learning or assign school accountability. The following note addresses one of the most powerful sources of evidence for making this assumption: that those who have greater ability can achieve more in school. We have assumed that there is a continuum in order to test for the connection between ability and achievement. Given the assumption, we find the link. In other words, I assume that there is a progression of learning --- not more or less stuff learned, but learning that can be characterized as easier or harder. When I do this and devise tests based on this assumption I see a link between measures of ability and measures of achievement. Moreover this link appears to have a genetic component. This continuum-based story is troubling, as I mentioned. How can we explain what we are seeing without making the inference that some children are just sows ears. Oh, sure, we can say that we might be able to get things better than they are now, but in the last analysis, if this story is true, to date the changes we see we can make are dealing with small potatoes and we will never be able--- without genetic engineering or stem cell interventions--- to provide equal educational opportunity. One research put it this way in a recent publication: The thing is, the continuum-based story can be replaced by another story that does not force us to make that miserable inference. This other story, the tropism-based networking story, both accords with current research evidence, explains some research anomalies not explained by the existing story and explains how and why exceptions to research findings can happen without invoking ad hoc subplots to fill in the gaps. This story would allow us to get on with our search for strategies to reach the ultimate goal of having schools provide equality of educational opportunity. No matter how you dress up the continuum-based story, it is ultimately futile to try to reach that goal. Note 2: Dots: How serious genetic influences on measures of ability and achievement do not mean what you think they mean. There is a body of evidence is calming to those who believe that schools are being accused of something akin to not making a silk purse out of a sows ear. That same body of evidence is troublesome for those who want our schools to level lifes achievement playing fields. This body of evidence links genetics with both ability and achievement. It is particularly worrying to those who want equality of opportunity when we can increasingly link several complex behaviors (alcoholism, depression) to a genetic propensity.

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When we think of a genetic influence on these things, we imagine that we each have a set of switches that, when turned on (possibly by environmental intervention), enable us to do stuff. If we dont have the switch, we either wont be able to do that stuff, or we wont be able to do that stuff well. There is a story I would like to tell that that maintains the genetic link, but makes the link lack the heart-stopping implications for people like me, who want education to level playing fields. There is also some evidence that this story explains what was not reasonably explained by the switch theory. Suppose, instead of imagining that genes are sets of switches, we imagine that genes govern sets of very elementary propensities. Suppose one group of people likes to look at white dots and another likes to look at green dots. Suppose that is the kind of thing genes govern: a kind of tropism rather than complex behavior. How do tropisms become associated with complex behavior? Tropisms become associated with strategic approaches to problems. I might seek out the left-hand strategic solutions while you might seek out the right hand strategic solutions. One of these sets of strategies will come to dominate because of the way people form relationships. That will be explained in the note on nets (suspend disbelief for a few more paragraphs). The point will be made that the way people interact determines the adoption of a set of strategies not so much because they are the optimal way to solve each problem encountered but because they accord with one or more groups tropisms and/or they build upon other strategies that accord with those tropisms (path dependence). Before we do anything else, we need to know whether or not this story has any explanatory power that the switch theory does not? This tropism theory would predict something that has not been explained well by the switch theorists. Switch theorists can explain why monozygous twins have IQs closer to each other than fraternal twins, but they cannot explain (and the phenomenon is often ignored) that monozygous twins who have high IQs have closer IQ scores than pairs with lower IQ scores. The switch theorists suggest that those with higher IQs will simply use more resources to improve their standing. Not only is that an unproved assumption, but it violates what switch theorists normally mean by IQ (an largely invariant measure of ability to learn). What explains this phenomenon has to do with what can be explained as the contingent nature of ability and achievement. Go back to the cats discussion. I had no problem convincing you that there could be many ways to skin cats that were equally good (at least my collegial focus group bought it). If I can get you to buy one more thing, you will be able to see the contingent nature of intelligence and achievement. I need you to try to associate in your mind that people who like to look at green dots might use this propensity to develop one way of skinning a cat and people who like to look at white dots might develop another. Voila. We have a non-switch genetic basis for a complex behavior. To the extent that propensities are linked, strategies are linked. The thing that we all need to remember is: 1. All strategies might be equally good.

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2. A non-canonical strategy might be optimal and canonical strategies might be bloody awful, relatively speaking. Now how do we get it one way of skinning a cat to be canonical? Once I can you how we do that in a non-switch way, I have the genetic association I need --- but not the malevolent implication. I will argue in the last note on nets that canons are set through the establishment of a certain kind of relationship between people. In other words, groups are formed and an individuals relationship to a dominant group will influence an individuals IQ measure. The closer the relationship, the higher the IQ. Twins who are not closely related to the canon-setting group are torn. They have they might have their own groups way of skinning a cat, or they might have t each try to learn the canon. The techniques they use to learn the canon will govern their success and indeed they probably will learn from each other, but it is likely that, since it is a foreign idea that the resulting measures will be farther apart. A test of this would be to look to see whether or not the closeness of a group predicts the closeness of MZ twin IQs. Another research project would be to examine families with adopted children. Each of us teaches our children ways to deal with life either directly through a boring lecture or by example. To take a silly example, if our family tends to be very tall, we might teach lots of strategies for getting to see concerts more cheaply than others since we will be tall enough to see over most heads. If we adopted a short child, that strategy would be of little use. If those families who adopt children who are more closely related genetically are better adjusted, no matter their IQ, then The argument skeleton: Current story has unique c The following four notes are offered as a step in the process of establishing a new frame for our persistent problem. It is not meant as a full answer, but rather as an invitation to people who care about this issue to restructure our research agendas so that our educational problems cease to be persistent. We need to understand what our educational goals are and how to incorporate what cognitive science finds. We need to know how to set an educational research agenda that will test our educational assumptions so that we can develop strategies that can reach our goals. In particular, we need to avoid the perseveration we show when we continue to use --- indeed we increase the dose --- of educational methods that have not done what we had hoped.

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