An Educational Contrarian

(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...