In 2014, National Public Radio’s Freakonomics Radio gave almost all of its program on “America’s education problem,” to three high-profile reformers, Joel Klein, Dave Levin, and John Freidman, who believe – or act like they believe – that education underperformance is “just a teacher problem.” Supporting statements for the “schools are broken” view of education were provided by Amanda Ripley and Barack Obama, the President who incentivized the entire test, sort, reward, and punish agenda for our diverse nation. Only Dana Goldstein provided a corrective, questioning a reform model where, “we start from the assumption that our teachers are failing, … And then we decide that we would like to get them out, so [reformers] find ways to weaken their job security to get them out of the classroom and also to bring a new cadre of teachers in who are going to do better.”

The only support for Goldstein’s position opposing the “driving people out, bringing new people in” approach came from the Freakonomics host, Stephen Dubner. He concluded, “For many kids, the first three or four years of life is all parents and no school. But when serious people talk about education reform, they rarely talk about the family’s role in preparing children to succeed.” Dubner indicated that “the very words ‘education reform’ indicate that the underlying question is ‘what’s wrong with our schools?’ – which, these days, inevitably leads to ‘what’s wrong with our teachers’?” He thus previewed the type of coverage that would explain why teacher quality “is a relevant question but plainly not the only question.”

In 2016, Dubner begins his Freakonomics program, “Does Early Education Come Way Too Late?,” with the words, “in our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens — at home.” Even the first words of the featured research paper are President Barack Obama’s 2009 statement that,

Dubner’s affirmation of shared responsibility was followed by three economists seeking incentives and disincentives for school improvement. This time, however, they are not scapegoating teachers; the economists understand:

The first segment of the show was devoted to a $1 million experiment, conducted by Roland Fryer, John List and Stephen Levitt involving 257 Chicago families, where poor parents are paid up to $7000 for helping to teach cognitive and noncognitive skills to their preschool children. Sometimes the economists’ words about schools’ “production function” rubbed me the wrong way. For instance, List seemed to betray a bias when he said that their gains compared to those that could be achieved by a charter school. On the other hand, before they could investigate the value of incentives, the economists had to start a high-quality preschool. Levitt learned that that task “was one of the most difficult things I think we could have tried to do.”

The most difficult thing for a person listening to the radio, as opposed to studying its transcript, is determining when the first part of the program was analyzing the value of preschool, as opposed to the incentives that make the preschool more effective. Those incentives would not have been possible if the investment had not been first made in a high-quality early education program! However, wouldn’t the benefits of the early education program almost certainly be greater than those of the incentives?

And, at the risk of getting too wonky, their evidence argues against the idea that such incentives could be scaled up. They were able to recruit 257 families out of the target district which had 7,500 families. They did so with five direct mailings to the roughly 2,000 target families, as well as 19 other organizing events. Real world, it would be impossible to scale up the high-quality early education system, while also building the infrastructure for recruiting participants in the incentives program.

I hope the economists recognize that that same applies to the scarce evidence that performance pay (measured in tests scores) can attract top teaching talent. Reformers proclaim the modest, per teacher gains that have been produced in extremely expensive pilot projects, but they downplay the miniscule number of teachers who will accept the trade-offs – for every top-performing teacher who accepts potential $20,000 pay increases in return for being evaluated by the type of unreliable and invalid algorithm which Friedman peddles, and Klein imposed, another 29 turn it down.

We should also note the guard dog that didn’t bark. Roland Fryer gained national attention by asking whether parents stigmatized their children by giving them black-sounding names. Freakonomics showcased a hard-working mom, Tequillia, who is deeply committed to her son, Sincere. At least Fryer isn’t promoting incentives and disincentives for encouraging parents give “cross-over,” not “super-black” names!

The first great thing about the Freakonomics program, which is a part of a broad shift away from the “bad teacher” narrative which dominated the last 15 years, is that the economists studied noncognitive, as well as cognitive skills. Although there are plenty of reasons to fear market-driven reformers, who are shifting gears from the punitive in order to raise test scores and towards behaviorism to quantify and grade the socio-emotional, their new methodology allowed the discovery of a reality which Paul Tough documents. The only students who benefitted from their expensive pilot were students with above average noncognitive scores. In other words, if a child “can’t sit still or follow directions,” he “won’t be ready to learn.”

This seemingly obvious fact also explains why the Klein, Friedman, and Levin test-driven, blame-the-teacher reforms were doomed. Levin’s KIPP charters are free to push out the children who lack noncognitive skills, or who merely can’t abide by its “No Excuses” pedagogy. Moreover, KIPP doesn’t even attempt to admit and retain nearly as many of the kids who have endured multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as we do in neighborhood schools. In addition to being unreliable and invalid in terms of determining how much learning can be attributed to a single teacher, Friedman’s regression model  excluded the 6% of students in his New York City sample who were on Individual Education Plans (IEPs) and in classes of 25% or more. Worst of all, Klein’s scorched earth edu-politics was brutal in the way it shoved high-risk students into schools he wanted to close. In other words, Klein damaged some children (who likely scored lower in noncognitive skills) so he could defeat the schools he targeted, and so he could create artificial advantages for favored schools in the life and death battles he choreographed.

I want to stress that the show also emphasized other win-win policies, great PBS programming, such as Sesame Street, and treatments for hearing and vision problems. Dana Suskind notes the same pattern she identified in terms of surgical outcomes. To serve her patients Suskind had to address “what we call, social determinants of health outside the operating room.” Similarly, teachers can’t be held solely accountable for what happens in the classroom because those results are a result of history and society as a whole.

For years, corporate reformers have ridiculed calls for making teaching a team effort as the search for “Excuses!” Now the obvious can be reported without a backlash; kids can’t learn if they he can’t see the blackboard (or hear the teacher). I’d add that neither can they hear or see what’s happening in class if they aren’t in school. As is now clear, it takes a team to battle the structural barriers that create chronic absenteeism. Moreover, we need a coordinated effort for home visits to address absenteeism in the early years before it morphs into the extreme truancy that can undermine even the most effective instruction.

And, that brings us back to the unambiguously greatest message of the Freakonomics episode. As Suskind explains, we need preventive, not remediative programs. “About the only way” that we can “move the needle,” she says, is through science-based programs which begin the learning process at birth or before. I would add that we need a higher and more respectful vision for economic and education equality.  We should question the idea that experts need a free rein to “fix” whatever is wrong with poor parents (and teachers). This accidental study from last year showed that a small boost in family income led to significant improvement in student outcomes. Instead of “fixing” the supposed flaws in these families, we should focus on science-based, positive contributions to families’ welfare, ranging from home visits to direct guaranteed income payments, as was suggested decades ago by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.