Does anything we do in schools actually matter?
The Sold a Story podcast is only the latest vehicle advancing the notion that we could fix our schools if we only choose to.
This contention has been a constant in American educational debates for decades, exemplified by the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman” and its triumphalist narrative about charter schools. Unfortunately, this attitude runs into a stark reality: Schools and teachers just don’t have that much impact on relative student outcomes.
I’m afraid that the evidence shows that student academic talent is more or less static. Nothing is more predictive of a student’s future success than their past success. In large majorities, individual students gravitate to a given level of academic performance at an early age and tend to stay there throughout their academic life, as this 2025 meta-analysis demonstrates.
There are many other studies we can pull from. As far back as the 1960s, pioneering large-scale federal studies (like Project Talent, the Coleman report, and Project Follow Through) supported the notion that most students stay in the same performance band over time. Data collected the summer after kindergarten provides useful predictive information about how students will perform in high school; a student’s third-grade reading level is an effective indicator of who will go to college and who won’t. Standardized tests administered at age 12 or 13 tell us not only which students will go to college but which will earn a doctorate, hold a patent, or get tenure. The basic reality is that our rank in the academic hierarchy is largely fixed.
Douglas Detterman has summarized the research record by saying “only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers.”
Interventions that are often treated as transformative just don’t appear to matter. Promising early results inevitably fade out in educational research, and I use the word “inevitably” carefully.
Phonics-based reading instruction is currently undergoing a period of immense hype, but the advantages students see from phonics at age 5 are dramatically reduced by age 7 and nonexistent by age 11. For years, liberals championed pre-K schooling as a magic bullet, but study after study shows little or no positive effects as children age.
Past hype is no predictor of future performance. Class size reductions were ballyhooed, then over time their effects were revealed to be inconsistent at best. Many high-quality studies have shown that coveted “exam” high schools in large cities make no difference for student outcomes.
