I think Arnold is right about how hard “kid change” is; right that the short-term wins on test scores (no matter how hard won) haven’t consistently led to long-term gains; and right that the gains from strategies like high-dosage tutoring and City Fund models haven’t held up at scale.
But! I’m cheerfully optimistic.
After being part of several reform waves—sometimes in the driver’s seat but often in the caboose for efforts that generated short-term randomized-control-trial wins but experienced long-term fade out—I’ve moved back towards pursuing artisanal change with kids. Help 20 students here, 100 students there. Kids are tough puzzles!
Typically, you need twin engines to propel change: (1) relationship-building skill and authenticity, and (2) genuine human problem solving—people who can take dozens of details that separate this kid or this situation from 100 similar ones and build just the right recipe. You need to turn both keys to launch the missile, to “reset” the kid.
Maybe it’s a failing ADHD kid who, even after medication, therapy, and a school-side 504 plan, still can’t or won’t do any homework from 6:00 p.m. to midnight and is flunking out.
Maybe it’s a KIPP alum who persisted all through high school and college, yet, even after “career coaching” from a nonprofit and the university career office, he still can’t land a decent entry-level job.
You know one good thing about the coming AI displacement of white-collar workers? The price of labor from really talented problem-solvers is about to drop. Artisanal efforts that fully embrace the tendency of kids to “revert to the mean,” while still changing their arcs, can multiply. And if we build it (the 1,000 flowers blooming), new philanthropy will come. To get there, though, we have to engage with the good-faith donor critique (mostly unspoken but always under the surface) of folks like John Arnold.
