THE FIRST AND THE LAST
It’s been one of those weeks. Family wiped out in Baltimore, girls murdered in Boston, pirate landing in New York (going to Execution Dock? No, they don’t have that anymore), Staten Island wife on trial for shooting her husband dead in bed, wow!
I had to mention these things so people won’t think I’m completely oblivious to what’s happening around us because I’ve decided to use this space for, yes, reviewing a book, which might be looked on by some as an escape from reality instead of an embrace of it.
Not so. This book is reality, so real that it touches the daily life of every parent in this country. It’s called “Outliers”, a statistical term for values that differ greatly from others found in a sample population, e.g., a cluster of .400 hitters in a baseball league where the overall batting average is .250.
The book opens with a prototype outlier story about an Italian village in Pennsylvania where a permanent golden age of peace and prosperity exists for no other reason that researchers could find than the congeniality of the inhabitants with each other going back to their shared roots in Italy. No other reason such as diet or heredity or climate could be found. Community was the answer, the researchers declared and left it at that.
The next “story” in the book isn’t really about outliers since it deals with statistics that are already familiar to most people and are easily explained to anyone wanting to investigate them. They are the meat of the book, though, and the most relevant to average readers, particularly parents. It’s an eye-opener like few books I’ve ever seen, so it’s no wonder it’s been on the best-seller lists for months. I hope it stays there and attention is paid to it. If so, I predict the following results:
A. The average level of athletic achievement for scholastic athletes will improve significantly through the development of talent previously overlooked due to poor selection practices.
B. The same will be true for academic achievement in schools.
These two predictions are based on the facts revealed by Malcolm Gladwell, the book’s author, in his chapter on the selection practices of high school athletic teams in Canada and elsewhere. In the ‘80’s a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley and his wife attended a junior hockey game in Alberta and Mrs. Barnsley spotted an anomaly in the program they were reading and pointed it out to her husband. Wasn’t it strange, she asked, that so many of the players were born in January, February and March and so few in October, November and December. Her husband was astonished. He began research on Canadian hockey generally, and found the pattern of first-quarter dominance prevailed all through the elaborate Canadian hockey structure right up to the National Hockey League. N.B. Don’t think all this is about Canada and hockey only. Everything said here applies to America with double force and to all American sports.
The explanation wasn’t far to seek. Selection, streaming and differentiated experience made the difference. Starting with boys of ten or so, the most mature ten-year-olds, the ones born soonest after the cutoff date of January 1st, generally were the top players in their year. The December boys were a year behind them in athletic development, though not necessarily in innate athletic ability. They might as well have been, though, because their elders were the ones given extra playing time, extra instruction, and selection for all-star teams and travel teams. They piled up an advantage which kept accumulating during their playing years and resulted in their domination at the highest level of the sport as it had at the lowest level.
All this was very natural, but also totally unfair because if all the boys of each year’s class completed only against others on the same level, there would have been just as high a proportion of standouts coming from the younger classes as from the oldest class. But with December forced to compete with January, no such results were possible. December went to the foot of the class forever. In any elite hockey group from pee-wee to professional October-December contributed ten percent of the players and January to March contributed forty percent.
Other highly organized sports which called for a dedicated playing area such as a rink showed the same results. Unorganized ones like playground basketball didn’t display it to the same degree. Anyone could play. But a close analogy to Canada can be found in Czechoslovakia where soccer and hockey are organized in the same highly structured way, with the same results, as the book shows.
The answer lies in reorganization. Split the boys or girls of one calendar year into four quartiles and let them compete with the quartile on each side of them only. This would cost too much? Then introduce a handicap system such as that used in golf or racing or boxing for that matter and credit the younger contestants with enough extra points to offset the superior height, weight and maturity of the older players. Give them the chance to get on the all-star team. Equalizing the conditions doesn’t mean equalizing the outcome.
Sports aren’t everything, we know. The discoveries made in sports have led to similar ones in other fields. The results of academic tests follow the same pattern as in sports. The children born closest to the startup date for their class get better marks than those who get into it just before the cutoff date. The January-December pattern is the same as in sports. As in sports it needs reconstruction.
Did all this affect me when I went to school? Well, I was born in December. That says it all if you read “Outliers.” You should read it and you should ask your local school board to read it and then tell you what they intend to do to correct the problems created by people looking for the easy way out. I would have twenty years ago.