Freddie deBoer
Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.
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What they believe
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Education cannot be done to a person: without at least a minimal act of will from the learner, no method, resource or reform works.
Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.
freddiedeboer.substack.comSaid 24 Mar 2026This on korrents
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The golden age of American schooling that reformers want to return to never existed anywhere.
But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.
freddiedeboer.substack.comSaid 12 Mar 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 18 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Education cannot be done to a person: without at least a minimal act of will from the learner, no method, resource or reform works.
Education is not something that can be done to someone; it’s something that requires at least a minimal act of will from the learner, and no reform agenda can engineer that away.
When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids" Said 24 Mar 2026
The best teachers, unlimited resources and every evidence-based intervention still fail on a student who does not want to learn.
You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.
When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids" Said 24 Mar 2026
Putting the children most likely to succeed into one school is segregation, not educational excellence.
Simply creating artificial separation between different students is not a strategy for “educational excellence.” It’s just segregation.
When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids" Said 24 Mar 2026
Show 15 more
The golden age of American schooling that reformers want to return to never existed anywhere.
But please, stop saying things like “I just want us to get back to a world where kids were graduating high school with basic skills!” Because the world you’re referring to never existed.
What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever Said 12 Mar 2026
The educational crisis narrative is downstream of the labour market: we destroyed the jobs that did not need a degree and then ordered schools to make everybody degree-ready.
Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.
What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever Said 12 Mar 2026
Opening school to everybody necessarily made average measured performance look worse, because the students who used to be excluded are now in the data.
But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.
What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever Said 12 Mar 2026
The United States was never a leader in international educational comparisons, so there is no lost first place to return to.
We have never, ever done well in international educational comparisons.
Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No Said 20 Nov 2025
The recent fall in test scores is a rich-world phenomenon, and steeper in several European countries than in America, so it cannot be blamed on American policy.
Learning loss is a global phenomenon, exacerbated by a catastrophic event, not a structural flaw unique to the American education system.
Was the United States Once a Global Leader in Educational Metrics? Have We Fallen From Those Lofty Heights? No and No Said 20 Nov 2025
Educational miracles are manufactured by selection: the students who would have scored badly are quietly moved off the books.
That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.
There Are No Miracles in Education Said 28 Sept 2025
Who is in a school predicts its results better than anything about its teaching, its teachers or its methods.
Once again, the composition of the student body is always more powerful a predictor than any identifiable pedagogical, school, or teacher variable.
There Are No Miracles in Education Said 28 Sept 2025
Schools account for a tenth or less of the variation in how well students do.
That makes perfect sense when you consider that schools control 10% or less of the variance in student academic outputs.
There Are No Miracles in Education Said 28 Sept 2025
Academic talent is normally distributed, so some students failing is inevitable rather than anybody's fault.
Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable.
There Are No Miracles in Education Said 28 Sept 2025
In thousands of years of trying, nobody has found a reliable, repeatable way of moving a child from one educational percentile into another.
But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
Children settle into a band of academic performance early in life and stay in it, whatever their schooling does.
The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling.
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
Education can raise how much everyone knows, but it almost never changes who is ahead of whom.
Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
Any teaching method that helps the weakest students also helps the strongest, so closing the gap between them is not something teaching can do.
Because some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
We accept without difficulty that people differ in athletic or musical talent, and refuse to accept that they differ in academic talent.
But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse.
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
School's purpose should be humanistic rather than economic, and the people who are not academically talented need a welfare state rather than a promise that school will lift them.
What we need, ultimately, is a return to a holistic, humanistic vision of what school is for, and we need a robust social safety net to protect those who are not lucky enough to be naturally academically talented.
Education Doesn't Work 3.0 Said 8 Sept 2025
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 9 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends Burning Chrome
He'd already coined "cyberspace" in a 1982 short story, "Burning Chrome," which was later included in his excellent collection of the same name. (I have recommended people read "New Rose Hotel" from that collection more times than any other short story, I'd wager.)
freddiedeboer.substack.com 27 Jul 2026
Loved Neuromancer
Neuromancer is a book I love without reservation and have loved for a long time, and not only has it never been successfully adapted
freddiedeboer.substack.com 27 Jul 2026
Liked Dangerous Blues
Policoff has written three novels, including 2022's Dangerous Blues, a book I really enjoyed and reviewed positively here.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 27 Mar 2026
Show 6 more
Liked A Ribbon For Your Hair
There's too much yearning in the book, too much dark humor, and too much of a characteristic attempt to keep finding some thread to follow through all the sadness. This book is mournful but not bleak.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 27 Mar 2026
Disliked No Country for Old Men
The Coens are typically considered to be at their best when they're cruel diagnosticians of American life - see their portentous, overstuffed, painfully self-impressed No Country for Old Men
freddiedeboer.substack.com 29 Jan 2026
Loved Ran
Gun to my head, I might very well choose Akira Kurosawa's Ran for the best film of the 20th.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 29 Jan 2026
Loved Amour
If I was put on the spot to name the greatest movie of the 21st century, I would probably say Michael Hanneke's Amour, an achingly moving, relentlessly unpleasant portrait of an elderly couple sinking into illness and senescence, forced into making the grimmest decisions possible.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 29 Jan 2026
Loved Raising Arizona
the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona, which is, I will argue without apology, the greatest film they ever made.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 29 Jan 2026
Loved Inherent Vice
Which brings me to the film adaptation of Inherent Vice, that widely-disliked, subtly-championed shaggy stoner LA noir that confused critics and rankled fans and also happens to be the best movie Paul Thomas Anderson has ever made.
freddiedeboer.substack.com 29 Jan 2026
Where they publish
Newsletter Freddie deBoer His near-daily newsletter on politics, education, media and culture.
Open freddiedeboer.substack.com
Recent
- Four Direct, Reasonable, and Important AI Questions (Which the AI People Will Ignore) 19 Oct 2026 an AItheist’s lament
- Neuromancer, Chapters 23-24: The Convergence of the Twain 13 Oct 2026 Till the Spinner of the Years
- How Do You Reckon? 9 Oct 2026 Last week on Substack Notes I discussed how odd the New York Times’s approach to the Cornell rape scandal has been.
Show 17 more
- Neuromancer, Chapters 21-22: Neuromancer, In the Digital Flesh 7 Oct 2026 We have finally met Neuromancer, officially.
- Two Grandfathers 5 Oct 2026 privilege, celebrity, and the end of up from below
- AUDIO FIXED: Optimistic-Ish Thoughts About the Future 3 Oct 2026 this video has more goddamn versions than Blade Runner
- Subscriber Writing, ~September 2026 2 Oct 2026
- Neuromancer, Chapters 19–20: Feelings Made of Zeros and Ones 1 Oct 2026 Forgive me for the inexcusable delay this week….
- The Politics of Fantasy and Entitlement Are Driving Everyone Insane 29 Sept 2026 imperfect reality can’t win in a culture of fantasy
- All In Your Head: You Be My People Power 27 Sept 2026 this conversation needs to happen, this book needs to sell
- The 50-Year Hangover 25 Sept 2026 thirty years created expectations we haven’t met for a half-century
- Call for Subscriber Writing, Septemberish 2026 24 Sept 2026 It’s that time again!
- No School Will Decide Najya Hannah-Jones’s Future or Fate 23 Sept 2026 nothing in our educational debates will ever get better until we accept as a society that schools cannot change an individual’s nature
- Neuromancer, Chapters 16-18: Bon Voyage, Armitage 22 Sept 2026 Well, things are not looking good for our intrepid crew, which is not much of a crew anymore.
- Sooner or Later, You’re Going to Have to Make an Actual Argument 17 Sept 2026 you can’t hide on Tumblr or campus or behind a paywall forever
- Neuromancer, Chapters 13-15: Immortal No More 16 Sept 2026 Last week ended with three mysterious figures, waiting for Case to get back to his hotel room.
- Nobody Owns Disability 14 Sept 2026 and if adult academics and activists presenting formal papers at a conference are not fair targets of good-faith criticism, who possibly could be?
- Germany Proves Again that Censorship Doesn’t Work 10 Sept 2026 the German far right’s rise is happening in a country that has aggressively attempted to censor the far right for 70 years
- Talking FOOTBALL with Neil Paine 9 Sept 2026 the only sport I care about is back
- Neuromancer, Chapters 10-12: A Doll’s House 9 Sept 2026 Last week our crew left Earth and took a pit stop at Zion, a Rasta colony founded by construction workers who got sick of building luxury habitats for rich people and so one day decided not to finish the job.
Link verified 5 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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