An Educational Contrarian

No pilot is allowed to fly a plane unless they can demonstrate a thorough knowledge of each instrument and the information it provides. In education, however, we find it perfectly acceptable to allow someone who has no understanding of what a test instrument is, how it was made, or what it was designed to tell us, use that instrument however they see fit. Such use is akin to a pilot flying a plane without regard to altitude, the amount of fuel left in the tanks, or whether or not the wheels were lowered for landing. No amount of good can come from it. Strange that we now run schools under a similar scenario and then accuse those willing to work in that environment as being responsible for whatever failures occur.

In a recent Ed Week editorial Marc Tucker at the National Center on Education and the Economy argues that the Common Core standards offer a way out of a twenty-year trend of declining expectations for students. He points to the notions of grade inflation and fewer hours of study per college course as evidence for these declining expectations, noting that students now receive credit for coursework that would have been deemed sub-standard twenty years ago. I find those points entirely valid. But in order for the Common Core—or any other set of statements regarding what students should know and be able to do as a result of schooling—to contribute to a solution we first need to examine the motivational system in which such a thing operates. By “motivational system” I mean the processes by which we attempt to induce behavior in teachers and students such that it moves us towards a better state. The motivational system in schools is pretty straightforward: students take s...

That question is one that we absolutely must ask ourselves in 2013. Policy makers adopted an educational formula that imposes behavioral statements as educational standards, standardized tests as the basis for all quality determinations, and accountability to those tests as if they capture the bulk of what students should have learned over the year. The system cannot be said to be working effectively by anyone examining the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Our standing internationally continues to head in the wrong direction, curriculum winds up limited by the tested material, and the goal of a K-12 education to produce students ready to face the worlds of college and work seems ever further away. The response, however, is the system of standards, standardized tests, and accountability is itself just fine—in spite of the limited evidence the system is moving us closer to the overall goals—and we just need to do two things: fine tune a few of the parts, and really hold...

At a conference this week I heard a panel attempt to define what personalized learning is. It was interesting, all over the board, and inconclusive. I felt for the educators given the challenges they faced and their willingness to try something new. What was missing from the conversation was a defined rationale. The panel agreed it was the right thing to do, but at no point did I hear them offer a reason that was compelling. It was like they sensed it and yet weren't quite sure how to give voice to their logic. What I hoped to hear was the idea that individualized learning is about moving from the current state of things where time is a constant with the result that achievement varies widely, to one where the level of proficiency is the constant and time, effort, and the instructional path by which each student arrives at that point are the variables. The path would be determined explicitly against a student's needs. The lack of a rationale for any educational endea...

(Reading the previous post first may help—this one follows from it) A data-less decision in education is just that: a decision made absent supporting data. Data-less decisions are bad for the simple reason that whatever decisions are made tend to be in support of an existing bias. Such bias can be positive or negative, very fair and objective or extremely unfair and subjective. Sometimes the bias is based in what is actually true, but just as often it is based on an untruth or a stereotype. All this is why the mantra of data-driven decision-making has been established as a proper goal for educators. The problem is that if I look at a student in a particular situation and I possess no meaningful data I am highly likely to let any number of my biases enter in to my view of the student. This can include but is certainly not limited to my views on gender, race, socioeconomic status, whether the school is in an urban, suburban, or rural setting, and perhaps the quality o...

A standardized test is at its simplest a data collection tool. It only works if the data collected meet a certain standard in terms of statistical reliability. Reliability is all about the consistency of the measure or observation, and generating a sufficient level of reliability to allow for reasonable inferences to be made requires both skill and planning. In the process of achieving that reliability, however, you impose a whole series of limitations on what the resulting data can say in the name of allowing it to say a few things well. To make the idea of reliability more concrete, imagine that you have two observers of a rat moving through a maze and you ask each observer to record their observations by writing down what the rat is doing during the experiment, with no other tools than a pen and a piece of paper. Odds are the two observers will offer a related but very different narrative, which means that from a research perspective the observations would be of limited us...

Multiple sources have accused me on multiple occasions of hating the Common Core and thereby the Common Core assessments. This is understandable. I am one of the few people to criticize the overall selection of behavioral statements as the paradigm for what we call an educational standard, and the Common Core follows that trend. By “behavioral statement” I mean that our standards in education tell students what behaviors they should engage in: understand this, comprehend that, multiply two digit numbers, etc. As a curriculum guide such statements are extremely useful since that is precisely what a teacher attempts to do everyday: get students to behave in ways that further a students’ learning. As the basis for a standardized test such statements are also more than appropriate, since such instruments are designed to allow for inferences about student performance relative to such behaviors and to other tested students—when used properly, which is another issue for another time. Bu...

If one Googles "rigor" and selects the image option the result offers clear evidence that the term has a huge variety of meanings in education--many of which are incommensurate with each other--strengthening my argument that its use as an educational term is more about the creation of a community around a set of terms than in serving as a useful adjudicator for what should comprise a quality of education. Consider the following: 1. The dictionary definition clearly has not yet caught up with the current use of the term as "the adjudicator for everything that is to be valued in a quality education." The definition below is from a recent unabridged dictionary and even dictionaries on the internet have not yet posted anything resembling the new meanings. Perhaps that is because nothing approaching actual agreement exists in the term's current usage. It is more likely the severity of the semantic offense in that these new possible meanings are so far removed from ...

In October 2011 an article I wrote appeared in Educational Leadership in which I compared  teaching to the test in schools to studying for an eye exam. You can read it (and see a horrible picture that seems to have deteriorated with time) here . The same comparison will be made in a book I have coming out this fall on the pitfalls of education reform, and Peg Tyre used it in her book The Good School . I also spoke at the AASA conference the following spring and you can see an article on the talk  here and see a brief interview here .

Lots of attention is now being given to the notion that a skills-based education is a good thing and in our test-obsessed culture many are starting to look for assessments that indicate the presence or absence of such skills. That’s likely to lead to a whole bunch of inauthentic behaviors if we aren’t careful. Consider that researchers are quite adept at finding ways to identify the presence or absence of such things under the guise of research, but in order to do so must take a fairly circuitous route. Questions, observations, and a host of other data gathering efforts that distill information into usable chunks are extremely valuable in allowing a researcher to make statements regarding skill attainment in schools, but the data elements almost always represent a correlation that in turn enables the inference. In order for the inference to be valid, however, the correlation must be to the desired behavior. The instant any sort of accountability is tied to the correlation t...

(This was adapted from the most read post from another blog I wrote that seems to fit with the theme of Ed Contrarian) The educational environment suffers from imprecise language about the most important elements of our activity and the lack of clarity harms us in subtle but significant ways. The word “rigor” refers to the quality of being thorough, exhaustive, or precise. Its secondary meaning is severity or strictness. Only in its noun form (rigors) does it take on the idea of being demanding, but this refers to things like “the rigors of the harsh winter.” The etymology of the word comes from Latin and literally means “stiffness”: think rigor mortis . Nowhere in the history of the word has it meant what we seem to think it means when used today in education. Strange that in education today we hear a great deal about the need for rigorous standards, rigorous tests, rigorous passing scores on those tests, and rigorous accountability standards. Google "rigor" an...

One way to create real understanding of something is to shine a new light on it in the hope that something new will be revealed. Due to the way the human brain works this is actually harder to do than it sounds. Our brains seem wired to pay attention to smallest amount of material possible in the construction of meaning. It isn’t that they are lazy, but rather, we seem to have limited amounts of memory and processing power and natural selection seems to have made us very efficient in this regard. We take what we need to generate meaning and then we’re on to the next thing. That’s why metaphor works. I can read “my love is like a red, red rose” and imagine the vibrant color and the rich fragrance and my associations are positive, and yet that ignores the fact that roses have thorns such that gloves have to be worn when you pick them. Or in the case of the Christian image that Jesus’ followers are like sheep, our brains go to the caring part of the image in which the shepherd will spe...