Hi everyone!

I'm a current Yale student who went to a pretty normal public high school in the Midwest. Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is the fact that I and a huge proportion of my peers are going into jobs in software engineering, consulting, and quantitative finance, which are sectors I had basically no exposure to in high school.

I have a Substack where I write a lot about social mobility and education, and I wrote a much longer post on this idea there: https://neuralnetworking.substack.com/p/ambition-the-elite-job-market-and

I think it would be great if we had more gifted and ambitious high school students from lower and middle-class backgrounds going into these fields. I'm not sure exactly what the best way to promote this is, but I thought I might reach some of those people here. I'm happy to answer questions about my experience in the software or consulting recruiting process. I also encourage you to read my longer post, which has some explicit suggestions for bright high school students.

Welcome to the forum!

I came from a small industrial city in Canada, across from Port Huron, MI. I had no idea about careers in finance. I was never exposed. But after getting an engineering degree, I found myself as a junior equity analyst at Merrill Lynch, in Toronto for 2 years and then in NYC. It is hard to get exposed to finance, consulting types of careers in the midwest, unless you are in Chicago. But I think with social media, there is so much information. Why don't you make a documentary (Netflix is buying everything these days) about kids that started out in Decora, IA, end up at Yale and then went into ETF structuring?

I don't know that we do want to promote more and more smart kids into consulting or quantitative finance, given all of the areas where their talents could be applied (although not as well compensated).

But probably the first step towards that goal would be to introduce finance into high school curriculums. Real finance, net present value, how to evaluate 2 different spending choices, understanding compound interest, how to read a basic balance sheet, etc.

The ones who feel an affinity for it will, hopefully, intentionally pursue it in college.

As a former strategy consultant and corporate strategist, I'm going to bite and ask why? I'm a firm believer in applying sound business principles to important causes to maximize value for those most in need. Many of my former colleagues agree, and are now leading or in CXO roles in what would traditionally be considered siloed research or R&D-heavy firms.

As a social entrepreneur now, it's *exactly* my consulting background that is allowing me to fill a niche that is not covered by either private or public sectors, or inadequately so, where the least well off have urgent unmet needs. And my quant finance training ensures I have access to capital to maximize my impact, and not get fleeced on term sheets in the process.

I think there is:

a) Considerable room for lots of different professions to be fostered, to the detriment of none

b) Opportunity for high ability students to develop interdisciplinary skills to tackle some of the world's toughest problems

c) A need for the private sector to step up and carry water on the humanitarian issues of the day

A great example of where consultants add value is in the (IMO, impressive) roll-out of vaccines in the US. I think we'd both agree that that is a great use of consulting talent. Making bobbleheads of Pokemon characters and optimizing the sales strategy? Not so much.

there are more engineers that leave the profession for finance since engineering tends not to be highly compensated in the manufacturing and petro chemical sectors. They just didn't know they could, until they were bored and looking around.

And finance is introduced to schools. DECA. This is the most popular business competition and it introduces kids to all aspects of business and finance. It has steamrolled into the most popular EC. So there is not need to introduce finance. They are so equipped now. And probably where they find out about those types of careers. The only problem is that Wall Street really doesn't want business degrees, they want Physics and math PhDs. Speed and algothrims.

Sure, and I want to preface my response by saying that it's not a slight towards finance or consulting industries or an implication that smart people shouldn't pursue those industries.

But there's no shortage of smart people already pursuing those industries. The enrollment rates of top end MBA programs tells us that. Lower end MBA programs were seeing an enrollment decline pre-pandemic. As referenced in this thread, the finance and consulting fields already reach into other industries to recruit smart, talented individuals for their ranks. Interdisciplinary skills are already recruited.

The consulting and finance fields are accomplishing this without the need for additional promotion. The potential compensation has proven to be compelling enough promotion for smart talented individuals in all disciplines.

To speak anecdotally, I know a guy in high finance who majored in English and did his Master's thesis on Shakespeare. His path to the world of finance or consulting wasn't derailed by initially pursuing the literary arts. And I'm sure we all know plenty of stories of people who found their way into finance from other disciplines. I would wager that we know far fewer people who go in the other direction.

So, I don't think we need to promote more and more smart kids into consulting or finance because the consulting and finance industries seem to have developed a strong and nuanced recruiting strategy that already reaches into other disciplines to find talent.

The view from the inside is different, but maybe we're touching different parts of the proverbial elephant. (I will caveat this statement with a disclaimer that I don't practice a finance profession, but have graduate degrees in economics and business.)

The fields are generally moving more quant-heavy, yes, but that doesn't imply that all non-traditional backgrounds are of equal value in a professional context. (Not PC, I know, but true.) Wren makes a good point about finance now recruiting heavily from math disciplines. Economics PhDs are also now prioritizing math majors. The interdisciplinary applicability of the quant skills allows for easier transitions between professions.

However, transferable skills do not equal domain-specific knowledge, and the candidates I see without graduate training in more than one field don't cut it when they try to straddle disciplines. The people who really carve out new domains and make a name for themselves are "generally specialists", to put it goofily - multi-domain specialists. So quant becomes a necessary, but not sufficient, qualifier. In other domains I'm not close to, I'm sure there's a new hybrid ideal.


To a very limited degree.

In Canada, which is my experience, strategy consulting and investment banking only recruit for analyst roles from a handful of schools, all with heavy quant and applied learning components embedded within the programming. Outside those programs, pathways into the professions are extremely limited, short of an impressive publishing record, military service, or entrepreneurship. Ditto MBAs to associate roles. Strategy consultancies recruit very few experienced professionals outside the field, save for senior leaders moving firm-side from industry. Operational consultancies do tend to have a more open arms approach where they cover technical implementation.

The US is a little different at the undergrad level, since it doesn't have commerce programs, so it draws from a broader spectrum of fields, increasingly concentrated in quant domains (eng, CS, economics, math, etc.) At the MBA level, the recruitment is pretty uniform across countries, with some joint Phd/MBA, MD/MBA, JD/MBA programs. The firm that I worked at had a similar philosophy of recruiting only from select Ivies in the US.

So even if there is a large pool of candidates seeking access, it translates well below 1-1 into jobs in the field. Make sense?


The reality is that these professions are incubators for talent that then migrates into the general market in 2-5 years, with far more exposure than conventional candidates have to a variety of cultures and problem solving approaches. The lifestyle is punishing and can't be sustained long-term for most who enter. So I would say there is a societal interest in graduates cutting their teeth in challenging environments and applying that rigor and discipline to future work. I'd say the same about military service. A high tide raises all boats.


Bar none, the people working at MBB, PE funds, and ibanks are all whip smart. However, I would argue there is a shortage of exceptionally original candidates in those fields, as evidenced by the proliferation of wickedly hard problems in the world that go unsolved, and cookie cutter decks I saw flying around. It's high-skilled grinding, much like a thoracic surgeon who can perform the same 3 procedures flawlessly day in and day out, but who doesn't pioneer new methods.

I'd love to see business training extended to more joint degree program candidates, as described above, so their discovery/research is carried out with commercialization in mind from the get-go. And if there were an appetite for it, I'd be thrilled to see social work programs combined with commerce undergrads in an expedited format, because the intersection between people and resources is key to so many of our biggest humanitarian challenges.

Either way, really interesting to share perspectives! Thanks so much for pushing back and sharing your thinking. Now your turn - I've talked too much! - which roles do you think we need to expand, Philly?

It's really a question of backward induction and inferring which skills/opportunities are missing at transition points into these fields.

Sadly, my sense is that that happens well within the K-12 span. What we need is outstanding math and language programming, with a lot of wrap-around services in the K-6 age range to ensure low SES students have the opportunity to be exposed to secondary level training that will:

a) Allow them entry to university
b) Allow them entry to elite universities
c) Allow them entry to elite universities in elite fields

well, aquinas, I disagree that US doesn't have commerce programs. There is a s--t load of universities and colleges in the US. And I think it is interesting that the hardest undergrad program to enter is the business program at MIT.

And MBA progams were getting specialized more than 20 years ago. Stern had the best financial structuring. Interesting that they have the PG math program also. That kid, I had written about him, he finished Columbia undergrad physics and math degree before he technically graduated from Hunter high school. He then went on to the math center at NYU. And U of Chicago is known for finance.

Since I spent 7 years as an equity analyst, it is a very fun job. I got to travel around the world in my 20s first class, in private jets sometimes, always a limo waiting. It is a very fun job. I looked at dozens of automobile plants and auto parts and compared automation at Toyota and Audi. But it is a fun job. And that is why people do it. Consulting is arduous for anyone entering right out of school. It is like being an entry level lawyer and you work for 80 hours a week until you burn out. But now everything is changing. So much is automated. And at the end of day, consulting, investment banking, law, you need to get the business. And the more you can network, build relationships, helps. And general knowledge helps. People from the midwest generally have broader understanding of what the country is like, moreso that east coast preppy types.

I stand corrected! Looks like MIT introduced this in 2016 - well after my time, and well before my son's. About time!

https://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-sloan-launches-three-new-undergraduate-majors-and-minors-0121

As I understand, there aren't many undergrad commerce programs in the broader US, particularly at the elite schools. Feel free to correct me if you know otherwise. I'm not talking about Podunk B School in Upper Rubber Boot.


Definitely. That's exactly what I'm getting at.


Depends which firm, and what level you're at. But yes, it's drinking from a fire hose.

100%.

I won't break your post down into the various pieces because it's getting late and I'm feeling lazy. I'll lead with my professional background which is business and real estate attorney with some experience in finance, mainly helping SEC compliance stuff around private placement fundraises. Relevantly, I took and passed the Series 7 securities exam but I never entered the industry. So, while I'm comfortable discussing this stuff, it's not my bread and butter so I'll stick with business and real estate lawyer, undergrad in business and econ.


Interdisciplinary skill recruitment is always going to be limited because other than the math heavy skills on the quant side, finance is a distinct discipline and formal training is required. However, I don't think finance or consulting is anymore lacking of exceptionally original talents that any other field and it's not because they don't know how to recruit those people.

They simply face the same limiting factor that every field faces, the relative lack of exceptionally original people, period. And in that sense, it is a zero sum game. If the EOP's are directed to finance, there will be less of them for chemistry or physics. If they're directed towards physics, there will be less of them for finance, English or medicine.

And, as I said earlier, finance and consulting have proven pretty adept at finding talent on their own.

As for what I think we need to expand - the trades. They need exceptionally original people too but I don't think that's what you're referring to, so I'll say doctors. But the barriers there are Congressional in source, not a lack of interest. It's definitely not lawyers, lol.

I suppose I'm more Invisible Hand here and would prefer that people gravitate towards their natural inclination rather than be subtly steered in a particular direction. Naive as that may read.

Sure, but maybe we're conceiving of that set differently, or I made it sound too rarefied.

I think you're giving humanity too much credit here in your belief that these fields can trade off zero-sum, particularly across such disparate domains. It seems more likely that these interests are additive, not mutually exclusive.

Conceptually spitballing here: what's the critical mass of any one field, in terms of new idea generation, realistically? That's distributed tightly at the top, maybe top 3%, where you're less likely to see inter-disciplinary shifts. Other than a few Da Vincis, I'd bet that astrophysicists are in the field because they love astrophysics, chemists love chemistry, etc. It's not like a behaviouralist nudge will have them catch religion on enterprise risk management or run off with a backpack of Proust. At any rate, far better to grow the population who has access to these professions than to worry about distributional effects between them.

(Agreed 100% on trades, but I think it's probably not what the OP was thinking, either.)

And, like you, I prefer an invisible hand approach, where possible. But because these professions have such outsized impacts on networks and access to capital, IMO it's important that these fields be prioritized for minorities / low SES students precisely because of the spill-over effects they'd carry in other professions. Maybe after a couple of generational cycles, once the field is more level, the consultants and financiers can go the way of the lawyers. :p

Nice chatting! Rest well.

Zero sum may have been a tad hyperbolic but I think you get my main point.

I should clarify that point in the context of what you wrote (which I agree with). If we over-promote any specific field, finance for example's sake, then we run the risk of shifting that potential astrophysicist into finance when we would be better served letting him find his own way into astrophysics.

Everything else, particularly your last paragraph, I completely agree with.

I have absolutely no qualifications in these fields, but this is a fascinating discussion to watch!

Ignorance will not, of course, prevent me from tossing in my two cents.

I'm all-in on young people following their passions into their careers (but self-supporting while following one's passion is definitely preferred!). The hiccup is you have to be aware that a career exists to follow your passion into it. (Unless you are truly an EOP, and manage to create your own career.) That's one of the limiting circumstances for highly capable but environmentally disadvantaged young students, and likely partly why they frequently undershoot on college applications (in addition to being unaware that many of the costs of elite universities will be offset for them by financial aid and scholarships). Information gaps.

I remember my physics professor approaching me about graduate studies and part of me really wanted it. But you have to consider life style. I didn't want to sit and do math all the time and probably teach. I liked how I lived for over 25 years on Wall St. Life style is key. How do you want to live? My kid wants to work with deep sea robots and do marine surveys....its her thing.

On the topic of access to elite institutions - and their attendant opportunities - for gifted students, here's an interesting NYT opinion piece on supply throttling of pedigreed post-secondary access.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/opinion/stanford-admissions-campus.html

Key quotes


A quick summary of the Equity Lab pilot project's results:
https://edequitylab.org/wp-content/...Preliminary-Fall-Results-At-A-Glance.pdf

A poignant quote on perspective and sense of opportunity from a lab participant from New Mexico:

Personal comment: I'd like to see this pilot expanded across disciplines, particularly STEM and business. This was also a Harvard Extension School course, so I'd be curious to see coding to compare it to its on-campus analog. Could be a promising avenue of study...!

This reminds me of the "Measure for Measure" quote, "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt." If we can remove the scales from less-privileged students' eyes (and those of educators who would deny them access to these learning experiences) and expose them to the opportunity of one or more challenging courses, what grand attempts might be made?

#dailyinspiration #audaciousgoals

Not being in the field? Sure. Ignorance? Pshaw.

as per NYT article, Harvard doubled their percentage of first time college admits. Looking at their profiles on college confidential, they are usually at the low end of SAT scores, they are very different candidates than the top group. But they are given the chance. 14% of the ED acceptances. I think that is pretty good.

This looks like an excellent pilot project. I hope they do expand it (carefully, with fidelity). It's the same rationale behind our early college dual enrollment program: give first-gen college students proof positive that they are college quality, while also coaching them through the EF skills they will need to make it through college graduation.

One note: most of the elite universities do have branch campuses--in their search for "quality applicants"--but they are generally international, either in highly competitive communities outside of North America, or in significantly disadvantaged development districts. The twist would be for them to start looking at domestic development districts from similar angles.

It's easy to generate impressive growth off a small base. But as you say, the right direction, and the ED numbers are reassuring.

True, and I agree. Unfortunately, it's usually fiscally motivated. International students are an entree to market access and higher tuition per capita. For publicly funded institutions with flatlining state allocations, it's a survival imperative. In competitive overseas markets, the choice of add-on institutes often is taken because the parent brand is judged not to be at risk of dilution because the customer segments are sufficiently distinct, both in geography and customer overlap.

I don't know the US market as well, but all the strat plans of the U15 in Canada prioritize sustainability and international enrolments.


Aeh, would you be willing to do a quick research dump (links only are fine) for studies looking into expressly teaching EF skills as a class in this group outside preschool and early elementary settings? Even a handful of names of researchers in the space would be terrific.

I was scanning the link below, but much of the lit is preschool focused.

https://developingchild.harvard.edu...he-Development-of-Executive-Function.pdf

Welcome, neuralnetworking.

I see you've not signed in since 4/5/2021 when you made your OP for this thread. I've read with great interest a sampling of your posts at your substack, including your featured article in the OP of this thread, "Ambition, the Elite Job Market, and the Information Gap" (https://neuralnetworking.substack.com/p/ambition-the-elite-job-market-and). Also "The Case for Compassionate Meritocracy" (https://neuralnetworking.substack.com/p/the-case-for-compassionate-meritocracy) in which you appear to suggest that technology-driven GDP growth might fund future universal income rather than allowing the wealth to be retained by the few roboticists and AI researchers. I also noted that and More on GPT-3 here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/openai-gpt-3-text-generation-ai/ Might this description also include positions in what you have termed in your OP, "the Elite Job Market of finance, consulting, and tech"? In which case, it seems we've rather quickly come full circle. Along the lines of jobs being displaced by tech, here's an old post based on an article in Fortune Magazine, Technology may replace 40% of jobs in 15 years (2019).

Circling back to the mention of GPT-3 helping to author portions of the updated substack piece on "Compassionate Meritocracy," from digitaltrends we read: We also read, Might the substack, and this thread, be examples of such applications? Are members of this forum unwitting subjects in a Turing Test?

At a minimum, some of us are humans.

You are not! (although I have been very impressed with the content I've gotten GPT-3 to produce). I apologize for the lack of response here; I have been caught up in midterm season.

Yes! I suspect a not-insignificant proportion of these jobs will be automated in the next century or so (especially analyst-type finance jobs). I'm nowhere close to an expert on automation, but my guess is that a lot of the high-level problem-solving jobs in tech and consulting will survive much longer than most of the work people are doing right now.

On EF

Review articles:

https://ies.ed.gov/ncer/pubs/20172000/pdf/20172000.pdf
US DOE roundup on EF, including a section on interventions

https://www.researchgate.net/public...on_Treatment_and_Intervention_in_Schools
Note: one of the authors is also the primary author of a cognitive measure intended to assess certain aspects of EF. He's also highly-regarded in the field, but one should always be aware of possible conflicts of interest.

https://www.researchgate.net/public...ion_Deficits_in_Children_and_Adolescents
roundup on older children

Standard text:

https://www.amazon.com/Executive-Function-Education-Second-Practice/dp/1462534538/
Lynn Meltzer is the editor, but the chapter authors also include many of the big names.

A few more names:

George McCloskey (author of neuropsych & EF tests)
Russell Barkley (author of tons of popular-level and professional books on ADHD)
Jack Naglieri (author of an EF processing test)
Peter Isquith (author of a go-to EF rating scale)
Richard Guare (Peg Dawson works closely with him, but with a more applied angle. Co-authored "Smart but Scattered")

Dawson & Guare now run an EF coaching business, working mainly through a "train the trainer" model, so although they aren't generating as much research, they do have a lot of practical suggestions and techniques.

A number of the above names worked together or in close proximity (many in the Boston area) at one time or another, so there's a fair amount of cross-pollination among them.

The reason so much of the research is on preschool is because that's the critical period for maximum benefit. It's not impossible to teach older children and adolescents, of course, or even adults, but brain plasticity gives one a bigger payoff in early childhood.

Much appreciated, aeh! Will thoroughly enjoy digging into these resources.

How do you develop EF unless you actually apply the skills? Teaching EF, is like playing tennis wii, but unless you get on a court, how will you play? Because dealing with real life obstacles, contacting 50 people, hoping one door will open, is hard in real life. There is a lot of rejection.

I know people think that executive function is more basic about self control and time management, but I look at it differently. If you have basic executive function, you should be able to manage and apply to administrative functions, like leadership, building an organization. Hence, my comments.

Wren, what informs your "should"? Are you thinking of bridging gaps for first-generation university students? Or are you talking about all EF deficits carte blanche?

If it's the former, absolutely. That's certainly the end goal.

With respect to EF programming, broadly speaking, the degree of skill generalization will hang on several factors:

a) The degree of deficit
b) The age of the individual at time of remediation
c) How closely the training approximates in-vivo skills
d) Training duration and intensity
e) Whether practice is maintained post-training
f) Environmental factors - supportive caregivers, educators, degree of toxic stress, history of trauma or abuse, history of brain injuries, etc.
g) Personal factors (academic ability, social skills, personal resilience, temperament, etc.)

And others.

These programs, speaking generally, seek to scaffold EF skills progressively, such that they do translate from training to in vivo contexts. Without digging into a specific program, age range, or indication, it's hard to agree or disagree with your analogy to wii vs tennis. The answer could vary anywhere from "yes, absolutely" to "not even remotely".

That is an excellent point. As also contributes to my ambivalence about social skills training in vitro, executing in real time, in a complex, rapidly-shifting situation, is a significant step up from skills training with an adult or very small group of peers.

As you note, there are also higher-order EF skills that require metacognition, and consequently should be taught later than early childhood for most persons.

This is why the ideal would be for families to teach and coach their children through EF development on an ongoing basis, since constant feedback over distributed practice in relevant contexts is obviously much more effective than sporadic skills training in isolation. But if it isn't accessible in everyday life, then 30 minutes once or twice a week of coaching is far better than not. In any case, I don't think most educators are viewing the skills training in isolation as the be-all end-all, and at this point, most of these interventions are based either on Bandura's social learning theory and related coaching models (peer modeling, feedback, coaching)--if in a group, or on more direct adult coaching (adult exemplar modeling, feedback, coaching)--if individual. So there's almost always "homework" practicing a specific EF skill for a period of time, with self-monitoring and coach feedback on accuracy and progress.

In a school context, the assignments and outcome measures would nearly all be naturalistic ones (e.g., homework completion, attendance, grades, agenda, seat time, behavioral measures), many of them collected on a regular basis by most teachers anyway.

ETA: In certain communities, often on the more affluent side, there is a current boom in for-profit offerings for executive function coaches for students, much like there was a rush of adult executive and life coaches some years back. While many of them are excellent and quite helpful, I would probably view those with a little more caution, precisely because of their distance from the everyday situations affected by their clients' EF skills.

This.

Just another thought to your point Wren - to some degree, it's possible that exposure to these classes *is* the intervention. For HS students aiming for university, they may well have the metacognitive skills (or supports) to identify gaps and work on them again in other coursework. Striving in the ZPD is healthy and motivating.

It would be fascinating to run this program longitudinally to track whether the class itself is a treatment.

That seems to be one of the implications of the pilot project, since even the students who faiiled the class felt it was a valuable experience that inspired them to view college as more attainable.

Joining this thread a bit late, so hopefully this hasn't already been covered.

I have said it before. Getting into Harvard is the hard part. Getting out is as easy as you want to make it. It's pretty easy to graduate from Harvard with far less effort than it took to get in.

If someone is getting a straight B in a Harvard course, that means they aren't doing very well. A grade of B+ is now what used to be the "gentlemen's C". And for the third that didn't get either an A or a B, I will repeat what my nephew said about his Yale experience: "It can sometimes be hard to get an A, but it's much harder to get a C".

From what my children have shared with me about their classmates at Harvard and UChicago, it seems to me that Harvard has a considerably larger talent spread. If we calculated a 95% to 5% talent spread in UChicago, Harvard would have some more at the very top, and considerably more at the very bottom. Some are the David Hoggs of the world, who are not admitted based upon academics but upon potential future impact. And because Harvard wants to keep these people with potential from flunking out, there are a large number of fairly easy courses available.

In a sense, Harvard has a soft quota for the number of PG students that are admitted because it wants its share of future politicians, actors, inventors, business people and other groups that are defined by more than just intelligence, GPA, and test scores.

"should" because what is executive function except discipline from decades past.

I recall you mentioning this before, mithawk, and can understand why it would be in the interests of the institution to do so, especially when there are so many reasonably robust markers of academic success already available to them at the admissions gate.

Interestingly, what I've heard of one of their neighbors across the river is that Berklee College of Music, whose stature in its own field is elite, has relatively generous admissions (about 50% acceptance), but dramatically high freshman attrition (about 60% graduation), possibly because the available precollege markers for success in their programming are much less consistently predictive, and certainly less predictive than how those students actually do in Berklee classes. So the first year is essentially its own post-tuition bill admissions performance exercise (aka, a weedout year).

A complex neurological phenomenon, of multi-factorial aetiology, from which “discipline” is only one of its effects.

There is certainly significant overlap between the kinds of skills that students were expected to learn in an educational environment that traditionally was called more disciplined or structured (both from the environment, and in order to survive in the environment) and the neurocognitive skills that we now call executive functions. As with many other skills that are or were once assumed in a traditional, majority-culture educational institution, there were always some students who walked in stronger in those skills (by nature or by home nurture), some who walked in nearly devoid of them (ditto), and many who were somewhere in-between. In the setting, those pre-equipped with the skills were likely to thrive, of course. Of the others, many absorbed enough along the way to get by, and some always struggled with them in the absence of direct instruction. Not unlike reading and dyslexia. Or social skills and ASD.

A mediocre instructional system, implemented consistently, often is enough to get the majority of the population to a functional level, even if there are holes here and there (like the generation of whole language readers who are poor spellers, but at least have access to text). Similarly, old-school traditional classrooms may or may not have explicitly taught students EF skills, but having a system of any kind probably supported the acquisition of some approximation of EF. It did not, however, necessarily reach those most at-risk, who really required more explicit instruction, just as most kids learn to read even with whole language, but dyslexics do not.