ct Instruction. Yglesias is talking about direct instruction; the two are not the same. McWhorter is overselling DI a bit. He's also underselling it as well. So, Yglesias's concerns are only partially probative here. Yglesias's concern of a "potential future backlash appears to be based on the following:
Even the most egalitarian countries have statistically meaningful achievement gaps, and the United States is far from being the most egalitarian country.
Believing that egalitarian policies, or lack thereof, are somehow the cause of achievement gaps is a good example of what you get when you use correlational studies without understanding the underlying issues. Just because poverty and educational achievement are correlated and egalitarian policies and achievement are also correlated, does not mean that egalitarian polcies cause increased student ahcievement. See La Griffe's latest analysis to see why this is not so.
Yglesias does appear to stumble upon the right answer in the end though:
There’s no “solution” to the general existence of achievement gaps. There are, rather, policies that can be effective in narrowing them and this is one.
Even though the rest of his comment is wrong. Funny how that works sometimes.