Capitalization

Malcolm Gladwell presented at the AASA National Conference on Education this past week. His topic was capitalization of education. If you don't know Gladwell, he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers.

In his speech, Gladwell used the story of Michael Oher, the National Football League player whose life is the subject of a book and movie titled The Blind Side. One of the conversations with Oher revolved around the number of athletes in his hometown of Memphis that had the talent to play in the NFL. According to Gladwell, Oher and others claim that there were at least five athletes capable of playing at the NFL level who never went on to play college football. Gladwell used this analogy to speak of the capitalization rate of football players to be 1 in 6 and then went on to talk about the capitalization rate in education.

While discussing some of the barriers and constraints that exist to students achieving their full potential, Gladwell brought up institutional bias. He used the Czech national hockey team to illustrate his point. A majority of those players had birthdays in the first three months of the year. Why? Because the cut-off date for playing in certain leagues was January 1. Those players born at right after a cut-off date would be older and more mature than those born later in the year.

What does that have to do with education? The same thing could be said of students. At early grade levels, where development takes place at a much greater rate than later, students born after the cut-off date for school enrollment could be substantially older than those born right before. This could affect achievement and provide a structural disadvantage to certain students. I found the concept intriguing and will be looking for further research to verify if this is indeed the case.

If such an institutional bias exists, what can schools do to remove this barrier? One method might be further differentiation of instruction so that students would enter at various times during the year and exit when they were ready, not at an arbitrary timeframe such as May or June. Of course, schools and states that fund those schools may have to restructure to allow for such a change. It would be interesting to see if such a change could take place.