Basically, I liked the book a lot. Schools will be a mess until this kind of thinking is taken seriously. The author is a Marxist, I’m not, but there are great ideas here that everyone who cares about education should read and ponder.

(If you’re prejudiced about marxists, rest assured that this one is smart, humane, and well educated about the genetics of intelligence - maybe not what you expected?)

This is a better review than I could write, by Andrew Sullivan who is certainly no marxist:

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-bell-curve-leftism ( )

I was planning to write a comprehensive critique of Mr. DeBoer's work, but coincidently he published an essay a few days ago railing, correctly, against twitter-style reviews of complex books, so I'll give him a laugh and make a few comments anyway.
Mr. DeBoer, a self-described proud Marxist, sounds more like a classical liberal with his thesis condemning the existing education system. His arguments are sound, as his is writing (even though I disagree with most of his leanings), but they all emanate from a fallacy - that our capitalist system is inherently flawed due to its societal pressure to succeed - and that education is the route to this success. He believe moving toward a classical socialist society would cure many of these ills - a naive view that reminds me of Churchill's famous quote, "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
He is correct that intelligence has a genetic component (see Charles Murray, The Bell Curve), and gives a nod to environmental factors which can either accelerate or slow a child's intellectual development, but complete ignores the effect of culture on intellect. One need only to look at 18th century Scotland or eastern european Jewry in the US since the 1880's to realize how much a society's focus on intellectual improvement can move a civilization forward.
I agree with him that college is not for everyone, as well as his realization that some topics just don't resonate with a particular person is not cause for alarm (calculus, for example). He should study a movement called giftedness, which believes in the unique abilities that resonate within each individual, Identifying the types of activities that each individual responds to and developing those talents. ( )

This appears to be a book about our education system, and mainly it is. But I purchased it for the intra-left political argument that runs through several chapters and culminates in the seventh, entitled "Before the Veil of Ignorance." There you are there invited to enter the leftwing holy of holies, to open up the political-philosophical ark of the covenant, and gaze on a radical egalitarianism that will melt your face off.

Accidents of birth mostly explain smarts, and smarts tend to afford a person greater life opportunities. To assess whether this kind of inequality is just, we can consider a basic questions like: is it fair for a person to have a lower income just because they were exposed to lead or drugs in utero? If it is not, and you generalize the point to cover other accidents of birth and circumstance, many of the alleged problems with the education system are revealed to actually be symptoms of a deeply unjust economic system. ( )

This is a leftist/Marxist who in spite of that presents an unrelated true argument -- intelligence isn't evenly distributed, is key to success in current society, and that educational intervention doesn't do much to affect that. This is basically the same argument as Charles Murray but focusing on different aspects, and then trying to bring in his Marxism to destroy society as usual in response.

The irony that he's a university administrator making the zero-sum education argument/lack of utility, of course (most education being a filtering/sorting game, not adding value...)...

He makes the argument of "intelligence is individual, and doesn't vary across groups" for political reasons, predictably.

I'd probably skip this and just read the better form of the same argument in Real Education by Charles Murray, or his other books. However, if someone is a leftist and more responsive to a leftist making an inferior form of the same argument, this might be the book for them. ( )