Elite Capture and the Cult of Smart: A Market Lens

He cites academic research that cuts against the education reform industry. Random assignment to a better school in Chicago, Beijing, or Kenya produced no measurable improvement in outcomes. Selective public high schools like Hunter in New York make no difference once you control for student ability. Elite colleges offer no earnings premium over a comparable non-elite school when SAT scores are held constant. The studies keep piling up, and the policy world keeps ignoring them.

DeBoer calls this madness from a strategic angle. Left activists routinely write off the white working class as irredeemably racist. That group helped elect Obama and then Trump. DeBoer sees refusing to engage with that complexity as political suicide. White voters make up 70 percent of the electorate. Telling them their success must come at someone else's expense is a losing strategy.

He reserves special scorn for performative language policing. The idea that the phrase "I see what you mean" is ableist because some people cannot see struck DeBoer as nuts. He chose the word carefully.

Both books land on a common theme: within-group variation matters more than between-group gaps. Two students of the same age, race, gender, income, and neighborhood can have wildly different academic outcomes. The education debate focuses almost exclusively on the gap between black and white students or rich and poor students. DeBoer thinks the real question is why some kids from identical circumstances succeed while others fail. That line of inquiry leads straight back to genetic and developmental factors that no school policy can touch.

DeBoer's solution is not conservative. He still wants redistribution on a scale that would make Bernie Sanders blush. He insists that progressives must first admit hard truths about ability and inequality. A meritocracy that actually worked would be crueler than the current broken system, because it would blame people for traits they never chose. The blogger Scott Alexander captured this in a piece titled "The Parable of the Talents." DeBoer quotes it approvingly.

For anyone tired of the culture war treadmill, these two books offer a framework that explains why the past five years of activism produced so little change. The answer is not bad strategy or insufficient zeal. It is a refusal to confront what the data says about human variation and political coalitions. DeBoer makes that case with enough evidence and self-awareness to avoid sounding like a polemicist. He is a critic of the left who genuinely believes the left should win.