How amateurish thinking damages public education

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 place and grouse every year that the results are not what they had hoped for but leave the policies pretty much intact. After thirty years any lack of progress is blamed not on the governance failure, but on those in the medical profession who just aren’t trying hard enough. And then, rather than admit failure on their part, they declare the medical profession irredeemable and award charters to a few non-medical professionals to create hospitals that they free from many of their own bad policies.

Hard to imagine, right? But not for public educators. That is the world in which they go to work every day. That is the world in which they educate our children every day.

Now imagine that some idiot comes along—and here I use that term as unflinchingly as I can— musing about the demise of public education and if perhaps it’s time we move on from public schools as a failed experiment given all the kings men and all the kings horses that have given it their all but to no avail.

Now imagine a thousand like-minded pundits who claim to support the notion of education reforms they can’t possibly understand and then complain when their reforms that were never designed to work don’t. And that they then amplify the idea of public education as a failed institution (forgetting, of course, their role in promoting polices that failed to have the result they wanted) so that the narrative becomes commonplace in the literature, the American psyche, and state and federal legislatures.

Imagine that and you’ll see the predicament of public education at this moment in time. And that if I’m right (I am), the failure of all these pundits to not call out and admit their contributions to the root of the problem risks personal complicity in what may well lead to the downfall of a system we can hardly afford to lose. The fact is that those who toss their hands in the air and say “we tried” didn’t. Those who say “we care” and then continue down the path of a compliance-based accountability don’t. Those who say they are lost as to answers so let’s just repeat the past never bothered with the hard work of searching for real solutions.

That predicament would have destroyed any commercial organization in far fewer than thirty years. The fact that public education still stands is a testament to some remarkable people who go to work every day and struggle against that very environment.

What needs to be reformed is how we think about the public education system, how we account for the work done in schools, and how we think about the profession of education. Here are a few thoughts on that:

1. Demand that educators educate and lead education and are embedded in the policy conversations. Education is the only profession that is largely led at the state and federal levels and completely governed by those outside the profession. This is perceived as justified because educators are presumed to have failed under a valid set of reforms that are anything but. Let’s see what educators can do if we take the handcuffs off. 
2. Trust educators to drive a new edition of accountability based not on what legislatures want, but what the stakeholders of a public education want—the students and their parents. When you ask about the benefits a student or a parent want, it is a surprisingly consistent list, and shouldn’t those things comprise the basis of a meaningful accounting? By the way, the one response that never comes up as something to aspire to is a higher standardized test score.
3. Finally accept what standardized testing can and cannot do. Standardized testing sorts students onto a number scale useful to trained empirical researchers. The scores were never designed to serve as a signal of anything on their own, but rather, as one source of data for those attempting to understand the broad happenings in a school. What we have done in the name of standardized testing for thirty+ years should be called out for the malpractice it is. Lab work from a doctor is not a Rorschach blot onto which the most convenient interpretations can be assigned. Neither is a standardized test score. We spend $2+ billion a year on a system that cannot by design signal school effectiveness and pretend otherwise. Let that sink in for a minute.

Or we can spend another thirty years and $60-70 billion more on testing and in thirty years if I’m still around I can republish this post and it will be just as valid then as it is today. Let's make sure that doesn't happen.