A significant portion of Chapter 1 is dedicated to exploring how high-stakes standardized testing can lead to cheating by teachers and administrators. As school rankings, funding, and teacher pay started being tied to test results in the 1990s, some teachers began manipulating results by:

• Giving students correct answers during the test
• Filling in answers themselves after the test
• Selectively reporting results from certain students

Mathematical analysis by the authors uncovered cheating in around 5% of classrooms per year in the Chicago Public School system. This shows how incentive schemes can be exploited when the stakes are high enough.

Section: 1, Chapter: 1

Author: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Chapter 9 explores how to instill rethinking skills from a young age by making intellectual humility a bigger priority in education. Many students today see school as a place to perform rather than to learn - to demonstrate their knowledge rather than to question it. Projects that encourage rethinking can help:

• Explicitly teaching students that knowledge can evolve over time, using examples of once accepted "facts" that were later overturned
• Having students role-play different historical figures with opposing views to understand multiple perspectives
• Assigning creative projects like rewriting textbook passages to correct outdated information or omissions
• Prompting students to write advice letters to their past selves, reflecting on what they've rethought recently
• Hosting "passion talks" where students teach the class about something they've changed their minds on lately

Section: 3, Chapter: 9

Author: Adam Grant

A growing number of students now have a dedicated adult aide or "shadow" that follows them throughout the school day. Shadows are now assigned for much broader behavioral issues like distractibility, social difficulties, or to provide emotional support and on-the-spot therapeutic interventions.

While intended to help kids succeed and prevent stigma, many students figure out which classmate a shadow is assigned to. It's unclear whether the constant adult presence and surveillance actually boosts learning and autonomy or hinders kids' self-regulation and problem-solving abilities in the long run.

Section: 2, Chapter: 5

Author: Abigail Shrier

The authors discuss how AI could enable a transformation of the education system from the current "factory model" where students progress based on age to a personalized model where each student receives customized instruction based on their individual learning needs and pace. Key points:

• In the factory model, the curriculum is tied to the student's age and grade rather than their individual progress, and teachers deliver one-size-fits-all instruction
• AI-powered adaptive learning systems can predict the optimal next lesson for each student based on their performance, enabling them to progress at their own pace
• Realizing this vision requires not just better AI but a redesign of the education system, including changes to student grouping, pedagogy, teacher training, facilities, etc.

Section: 2, Chapter: 6

Author: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

In 2013, Harvard University created a varsity women's rugby team, despite already having the most sports teams of any college. This let them recruit dozens of additional student-athletes. Admissions data shows that athletes are accepted at dramatically higher rates than non-athletes, even with significantly lower grades and test scores.

Rugby recruits skew heavily white and come from posh prep schools worldwide. Gladwell argues this is how Harvard maintains its desired "group proportions" and slyly practices affirmative action for affluent white applicants.

Section: 2, Chapter: 5

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a pervasive part of school curricula, aiming to teach kids "self-awareness," "social awareness," "relationship skills," "self-management," and "responsible decision-making." In practice, this often involves teachers eliciting highly personal information from students, documenting it, and providing feedback.

Despite claims it improves behavior and achievement, many teachers report SEL induces emotional dysregulation in students. Lacking therapists' training and ethical boundaries, educators are ill-equipped to manage the fallout. Rather than boosting learning as promised, SEL disrupts it with psychological meddling of dubious benefit.

Section: 2, Chapter: 4

Author: Abigail Shrier

A twentysomething client who built a successful career in an unrelated field from her major said: "I don't know what I want to do when they graduated. What people are doing now is usually not something that they'd even heard of in undergrad. One of my friends is a marine biologist and works at an aquarium. Another is in grad school for epidemiology. I'm in cinematography. None of us knew any of these jobs even existed when we graduated."

Section: 2, Chapter: 5

Author: Nate Silver

The KIPP Academy in the South Bronx demonstrates the impact of addressing cultural legacies and learning patterns on academic achievement.

• KIPP students, primarily from low-income, minority backgrounds, achieve exceptional results in math, outperforming their peers in traditional public schools.
• The key to KIPP's success lies in its extended learning time, including a longer school day, Saturday classes, and a shorter summer break.
• This approach counters the learning loss experienced by disadvantaged students during the long summer vacation, as highlighted in Karl Alexander's research.

Section: 2, Chapter: 9

Author:

The authors tell the story of two boys, one white and one black, to illustrate how much circumstances and environment matter regardless of parenting:

• The white boy grew up in suburban Chicago with encouraging, educated parents and a stable home environment. He excelled in school and was thought by teachers to be a math prodigy.
• The black boy grew up in the ghetto of Daytona Beach. His mother abandoned him, his father beat him, and he began selling drugs and carrying a gun by his teens.

On paper, the first boy should go on to great success while the second was likely headed for failure or imprisonment. But in fact, the opposite occurred. The white boy grew up to be Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. And the black boy was Roland Fryer, the highly successful economist now professoring at Harvard.

The point is that even the best parenting intentions can be derailed by mental illness, trauma, or other uncontrollable factors. Good parenting improves a child's odds but doesn't guarantee the outcome.

Section: 1, Chapter: 5

Author: Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Under the banner of "restorative justice," schools have shifted from punishing student misbehavior to accommodating it as a mental health issue. When fights, bullying, or disruption occur, interventions focus on eliciting the perpetrator's underlying pain, not imposing consequences.

Teachers report the approach emboldens students to act out without fear of repercussions. Serious infractions like physical assault often receive only a "talking to." The touchy-feely response leaves victims feeling revictimized and fails to curb the most violent offenders, who quickly realize they can get away with almost anything. Therapeutic victim-blaming has made schools less safe for the rule-following majority.

Section: 2, Chapter: 5

Author: Abigail Shrier

Chapter 7 provides valuable insights into the elements of a successful education system that prioritizes equity, intrinsic motivation, and student well-being. Finland's example demonstrates that achieving greater things in education is not about competition or pressure, but about creating a culture of opportunity where every child has the chance to discover and develop their hidden potential.

Section: 3, Chapter: 7

Author: Adam Grant

Achieving transfer - the ability to apply abstract classroom learning to messy real-world problems - has been called the "Holy Grail" of education. Yet research shows that even top students frequently fail to transfer their knowledge to new situations.

The issue stems from how formal education is structured. Classroom learning is often abstract and de-contextualized from real-world applications. It prioritizes memorizing facts and procedures over practicing skills in context. This trains students to execute set problem types but leaves them ill-equipped to transfer that knowledge to novel situations.

Enter the directness principle. Directness is ultralearning's answer to the transfer problem - learning a skill by doing it in the context you want to use it. The closer your practice matches your target environment, the more readily your skills will transfer.

Section: 1, Chapter: 6

Author: Scott Young

Just as AI is transforming the world of work, it is poised to upend traditional models of education. The author argues that the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 will accelerate a shift towards personalized, adaptive learning - but not without significant challenges and uncertainties along the way.

AI tutoring systems powered by LLMs have the potential to provide every student with the kind of one-on-one coaching and real-time feedback that is currently a rare luxury. However, the author also highlights the disruptive impact that AI is already having on traditional educational assessments and practices. The ability of LLMs to generate human-like text across a wide range of prompts has effectively rendered many homework and essay assignments obsolete as measures of student learning.

Section: 2, Chapter: 7

Author: Ethan Mollick