I think that the distribution is mostly irrelevant to the problems and purpose of education systems. Public, large-scale, youth education is mostly about child-care and socialization, and only incidentally about skill or knowledge development. Outliers, regardless of the distribution or percentage, aren't particularly well-served.
I think there is a crucial difference between performance, as defined in the paper, and ability which should be taken very much into account. I will not debate if their definition of performance is consistent or not with the common usage, but they failed to state their definitions clearly and I think you misunderstood their results because of this.
The paper measures performance as the results of (roughly) zero-sum competitions. This is very clear when they analyze athletes (number of wins), politicians (election wins, re-elections) and actors (awards). But this is also true for research, as writing an impactful paper means arriving at a novel result before competing teams or succeeding at explaining something where other have failed.
But, for a professional runner, winning 90% of races is not the same as being 90% faster. Indeed, a runner who is on average 5% faster will win most races (not all, as he will have off days where his speed goes down by more than 5%).
Tests such as PISA and grades try to measure ability, e.g. your math skill. That is analogous to a runner's speed, not to how many races he wins. I believe this is very much Gaussian distributed, and the paper does not show anything to the contrary. Indeed it is very reasonable to believe that Gaussian distributed abilities result in Pareto distributed outcomes in competitive situations (it may be a provable result but I'm too lazy to do the math now). So, it's pretty much appropriate to give grades on a Gaussian.
Now, we could debate if productivity comes mostly from exceptional performers in the real world, which might result in similar reform ideas. BTW, that's something I mostly don't believe but it's a tenable position on a very complicated issue.
Providing one-on-one tutoring to highly intelligent children should be considered by the effective altruism community in part because many members of this community would themselves be qualified to be such tutors.
-
If ability in the underlying population is normally distributed, competition for jobs should still leads to people from the right side of the normal distribution ending up in the relevant jobs, and people from the left side of the normal distribution not getting the jobs. If we now measure the performance of people with the jobs, shouldn't we expect the graph to look like the right side of a normal distribution, which looks more like a pareto distribution than an entire normal distribution?
So surely finding that the performance of employees in a field looks more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution doesn't demonstrate that individual performance at the population level is more like a pareto distribution than a normal distribution?
In The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality of individual performance (2012), O’Boyle and Aguinis show that individual performance follows a Paretian distribution:
Currently, systems of formal education assume that individual performance is normally distributed. For example, in all countries that I know of, university grades have a strict upper bound and are at least roughly normally distributed. The PISA tests are another example. Following the release of PISA results, “most public attention concentrates on just one outcome: the mean scores of countries and their rankings of countries against one another.”
If it is true that individual performance is Pareto distributed, how should we reform education?
An answer: Decouple age from level and have very lax minimum requirements
Here is my (certainly not original) answer: Decouple age from level and have very lax minimum requirements. Structure schools so that students can progress at their own pace in different subjects. Crucially, make it possible to progress extremely quickly in as little as one subject.
Let’s say that you’re a math prodigy. We will let you concentrate on math as much as you want, ignoring other subjects. You could start making original contributions to mathematics years earlier, greatly increasing the time you have available for advancing the field. We would allow you to proceed to university without knowing how your country’s political system works.
Instead of worrying about the mean, we would let students follow completely different paths:
I could say a lot more about this idea, but I’ll leave it at that. What other ideas should we consider?