An Educational Contrarian

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...