An Educational Contrarian

Education is the only profession that is governed and regulated by non-professionals who regularly view it through highly technical tools they don’t understand and that don’t mean what they think. Their complaints that their policies aren’t getting them what they want in truth are an admission that their policies are ineffective, but rather than admit the truth, they pretend their governance is fine and it's the darned educators who must be blamed. This has been going on for thirty years! Can you name any other situation where a theory of action had failed for decades and there are so few ideas about what do that the policy response is always just to do it again? Let’s imagine for a moment just how truly nonsensical this is. Imagine a group of non-medical professionals who have never performed surgery, been to medical school, or practiced medicine in any way, are put in charge of all governance, regulation, and accountability for medical professionals. They put a set of policies in...

This week the Dallas Morning news published yet another pro test-based accountability article/op-ed by someone of renown—former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings—who along with a great many others has now invested more than three decades promoting a theory of action (“test-based accountability will transform America’s educational system if only the damn educators would get their act together”) that so far has failed to produce the desired result. Thirty years .  Can you imagine a parallel in medicine, engineering, business, or literally any other profession or organization? You can’t because it doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t be allowed to exist. To doggedly stick with what has not yet worked for thirty years is literally unthinkable. So how is it still a thing? How is it that so many people fail to consider that maybe when it comes to accountability we got something wrong?  The claims made here for test-based accountability are old: those who do not support such an accoun...

The response to a decline in NAEP scores was as predictable as the fact that I will be a year older one year from today: the sky is falling, learning loss is real, we should have kept kids in the classroom (or insert the second guess of your choice instead), oh want are we to do? I could go on, but I’d rather point out what that response is really saying: someone designed an educational system that isn't ready to serve kids in whatever circumstance we find them. In most organizations, disruptions are treated as a natural part of existence, something that will create a new reality against which the organization must constantly reinvent and update itself to succeed, or, in a great many situations, continue to exist into the future. As the adage goes, adapt, or die. The leaders of healthy organizations know this and go to great lengths to keep their organizations as nimble as possible so that the inevitable disruptions—even large ones—are just moments to rethink what the organization ...

The nature of our public dialogue in its current form reveals a gaping chasm that only education can fill. We see that chasm in our current political ugliness, the fact that social media amplifies falsehoods exactly as it amplifies truths, and in our personal management of irreconcilable positions. I would argue that we paid a huge opportunity cost at the outset of the information age by shifting the focus of education to science, technology, engineering, and math (affectionately referred to as STEM) and away from other subjects. That focus meant the information age was going to be viewed and treated first as a technological challenge and second as a content challenge. It is in this vein that Facebook and Twitter ironically identify themselves as technology companies when what defines them and the value to their stakeholders is the content in the interactions that occur. I’m not suggesting we never needed real expertise in the STEM areas, but rather, that the way we turned our gaze to ...

In education, the recent concept of “learning loss” in reference to the effects of the pandemic (a marketing strategy for testing companies if ever there was one, and a gift to pearl clutchers) is only possible in a world in which we can only see the past, only see an old way of doing things. In that past students start kindergarten at the age of five, attend an additional twelve years of scripted coursework, and then walk across the graduation stage supposedly ready to start their lives. That system has most certainly been disrupted. What we have long understood about that system is how deeply inflexible it is given its entrenchment in a dizzying array of state and federal policies, how poorly suited it is for serving the needs of a more and more diverse student population, and how behind it is given the needs of an eighteen year old when they head out into the ever changing modern world. One thing the pandemic made possible was the removal of the scales of ignorance from the world’...

What are the essential data points in education? I get asked that question a lot and it’s totally understandable given we’ve had nearly three decades of conditioning that has led us to think that somehow a data point or metric exists that can bring the educational enterprise suddenly into focus. However, just because we’ve been conditioned to think something doesn’t mean it’s true, and in this case it is not. But the question, altered ever so slightly, has tremendous merit. The altered question should be this: what is the one thing we owe to every student to accomplish during their education? That question will of course ultimately lead to a need for evidence, but a very different kind of evidence than those seeking the magical data point might anticipate. My answer to that question about the one thing we owe to every student is this: we know what the profile of a successful adult looks like, and since we owe it to every student to do what we can to help them be successful, we owe them...

A good friend recently sent me an article that outlined the three big ideas in the idea of education reform as championed by Chester Finn, Frederick Hess, and Michael Petrelli. Petrelli Sums up their goals this way: “First, that the nation’s foremost education objective should be closing racial and economic achievement gaps. Second, that excellent schools can overcome the challenges of poverty. And third, that external pressure and tough accountability are critical components of helping school systems improve.” That three-legged stool has been the basis for both federal and state policy since at least 1990, and possibly earlier. The first two legs are of course entirely reasonable. The future of our country will be much brighter when both racial and economic achievement gaps are closed, and poverty remains the greatest barrier to the American dream. But that third leg, the idea that external pressures and tough accountability are how the first two legs may be put in place, that I take ...

A few years ago, I wrote a blog (see below) stating that school grading systems based on test scores, graduation rates, etc., are snake oil that does no one a lick of good. I just reread it and in hindsight it sounds incredibly naïve given that I was nowhere near strong enough in my condemnation of what is a truly terrible approach to trying to understand schools. So, I’ll say it again here the way I wish I would’ve said it then: schools are perhaps the most critical of our public institutions and require a significant investment to run, and yet we choose to see them through a lens that doesn’t tell us the truth, and what it says is almost always guaranteed to be bad news. And we do that all for the cool price tag of several billion dollars a year on top of what we already spend on schools. And in Texas and 16 other states, school grades are loaded on top of that nonsense and then sold to the public as representing the truth about their schools. It’s hard to invent a similar scenario g...

It is worth noting that in both the medical and legal fields states play a role in which they regulate, via compliance with a set of requirements, who can enter the profession and who cannot, but they do not attempt to regulate the quality of practice. In some instances, they may address complaints against individuals and in some cases against institutions, but the effectiveness of professional day-to-day practice is outside their purview. It is also worth noting that in almost every case the agencies assigned to oversee the actions that determine who can and cannot practice are led by seasoned practitioners. Entry into the profession of education is similarly governed from within state education agencies that grant teacher and administrator certificates to those who have complied with the requirements. But that is where the similarity ends. Given the importance of education in a child's life, both the federal government and state agencies have felt it necessary to undertake proces...

Americans spend a billion dollars a year (at least) on tests that tell us year in and year out that tell us where the wealthy kids live and where the poor kids live. Those tests don’t tell us what kids learned or if they are even learning. And don’t get me started on the sudden plethora of tests that claim to monitor progress by testing kids multiple times a year. Developmental growth happens despite the school or the teacher, and when “progress” correlates to a child’s development, a school or a teacher are at risk of thinking they are the cause and repeating whatever they did last year, without a clue if it is the right thing. That makes a school worse, not better. Worried about “learning loss” or the more “learning gap” that occurred during Covid? Those are marketing gimmicks for those who want to see public education in a negative light or for publishers to sell you tests that let you see them. Every student learns in fits and starts--Covid made a lot more of those than normal, whi...

School choice pundits have declared this school choice week in Texas. The argument de jour cites NAEP reading scores as evidence that school choice is the best option and that without choice things will just get worse. Here’s a school choice that would really be worthwhile: recognize that after thirty years of trying to make schools great under a test/punish/stigmatize philosophy maybe it’s time to admit it doesn’t work. (Here’s another: recognize that the so-called Texas miracle was a welcome artifact of a bad policy that finally got us to pay attention to underserved students, not a reason to keep touting what has never worked. But that will have to be for another time.) The fact is that no other profession regularly stigmatizes a significant number of its institutions as if doing so will create a continuous improvement environment for the simple reason that it never has and never will. That should cause us to ask a very pointed question: why keep doing it? Would we accept a system ...