It's the peers, stupid

I remember being struck, years ago, by Laurence Steinberg's idea that what parents in expensive school districts are really buying isn't good schools but good peers.

Made sense.

From a new NBER paper:

When effort is observable to peers, students may act to avoid social penalties by conforming to prevailing norms. To test for such behavior, we conducted an experiment in which 11th grade students were offered complimentary access to an online SAT preparatory course. Signup sheets differed randomly across students (within classrooms) only in the extent to which they emphasized that the decision to enroll would be kept private from classmates.

[snip]

When offered the course in a non-honors class, these students were 25 percentage points less likely to sign up if the decision was public rather than private. But if they were offered the course in one of their honors classes, they were 25 percentage points more likely to sign up when the decision was public. Thus, students are highly responsive to who their peers are and what the prevailing norm is when they make decisions.

How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments?
Leonardo Bursztyn, Robert Jensen
NBER Working Paper No. 20714
Issued in November 2014

"Hold On to Your Kids"

For a number of years, now, I've been thinking that schools per se are a bad idea. Not education, schools.

The way I put it to myself had to do with "age segregation." Every time I thought of middle school or high school, I would think: all those 14-year olds together in one place---eeek!

The age segregation of the middle school struck me as particularly unnatural. K-8 schools seemed a more constructive social grouping, and in fact there is evidence that K-8 schools are more constructive academically, although I'm not going to take the time to look it up just now. (Middle school posts here.)

In any event, age segregation bad is as far as I ever took this line of thought -- until this week, when I ordered Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. Debbie S was raving about it, so I got it.

Neufeld's book is a revelation.

Neufeld puts into words the inchoate thoughts and intuitions I've had re: kids, schools, and parental authority (helicopter parent posts here).

Hold On to Your Kids argues that teens are being raised by teens -- and that our culture sees this historically unprecedented situation as normal and correct.

The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers. It is the thesis of this book that the disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives....For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role--their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.

I imagine Neufeld and Maté are going to say that a school, depending upon its culture, can act to increase -- or to decrease -- "peer orientation," but we'll see.

That is certainly what I've observed.

More later.