Book Report Segment #1

When we hear the word outlier I am sure that many of us can think of somebody that we know, from high school, sports, etc. Usually when I think of an outlier my mind jumps to a person who is different from most people that I know. In his book, Outliers: The Story of Success (http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017922), Malcolm Gladwell defines an outlier two ways:

1.) Something that is situated away from or classified differently from a main or related body.

2.) A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

However you look at it, Malcolm Gladwell holds that successful people exemplify the idea of what it means to be an outlier. The basis for his research and novel is that we must examine the world that surrounds the successful when trying to understand their triumphs. Gladwell argues that we must look beyond the individual, to their culture, family, friends, and towns, in order to understand their true story of success. Usually when I think of a successful person I think of how outgoing they are or how talented they are. I rarely consider how their upbringings led them to their talents and fame. And this is what Gladwell will try to explain in the Outliers.

In the first section of the Outliers, Gladwell goes on to explain how “outliers are beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies, allowing them to learn and work hard and make sense of the real world.” The first example that is brought to the reader’s attention is called the phenomenon of relative age. This particular phenomenon was first discovered by a man name Roger Barnsley, after his wife brought it to his attention.

While viewing an Ontario junior hockey game the couple realized how strange it was that the vast majorities of the boys on the team were born in the months of January, February, or March. After doing some research, the pair soon discovered that the explanation was that the Canada eligibility cutoff for age class hockey was January 1^st. This means that a boy born on January 2^nd could be competing with a boy born December 31^st (almost a full year younger) for a spot on all star teams. At this age the older, more mature and stronger boy would be picked for a better squad with more practices and better coaching, thus setting him up for success while the younger boy is lost.

According to Barnsley, skewed age distributions exist when three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. In fact this same phenomenon happens with US baseball and European soccer leagues. After reading this section of the book I was definitely shocked at how unfair these cutoffs could be when it comes to sports, but then Gladwell decided to raise the stakes. The same phenomenon of relative age that exists in sports also exists today in areas of consequence- like education.

I had never put much thought in to how age would make a difference in education. One second grade student should be at around the same education level as another, we are all in the same grade after all. But the Gladwell quickly proves me wrong as it describes how teachers confuse maturity with ability to succeed. Even a small initial advantage of a child born in the beginning of the grade level cutoffs over the child born at the end of the year persists. The phenomenon has become bad enough for some kinder garden parents to consider holding back children born at the end of the year.

One thing that interested me about this phenomenon and how it effects education is how the disadvantages continue on through the collegiate educational levels. In 4-year colleges in the US students belonging to the youngest group in their class are under-represented by 11.6%. And as for the rest of these younger and disadvantaged students, they must work twice as hard to compete with the GPAs of classmates with a big head start (the early cutoff). This also relates to the article we read about employers only looking at GPAs when bringing in graduates for interviews. It should not be fair to compare a student who had a head start from the begging of their education, to one who is trying to catch up while being held back by their continued disadvantage. What happens when there is a false head start in racing sports? Everyone gets a fair restart, and I say that the latecomers deserve a chance to catch up when it comes to education also.