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...

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 ...

  A new myth is being perpetuated on the American public and the education community concerning standardized testing: that doing it multiple times a year is better for students and schools than just doing it once. This myth is being furthered under several different labels: progress monitoring, periodic assessments, formative testing, etc., all of which muddy the water. Even worse, the arguments for the myth are almost always arguments in the name of equity. For a moment, forget the names. Let’s use standardized test, since that is a phrase the world is reasonably familiar with. Standardized tests are tests built in partnership with very talented statisticians as comparative instruments. That allows the scores they produce to be used to compare different students to each other as well as compare a student’s score this year to last year. Or in the instance of this latest idea about testing, a score at the beginning of the year to a score at the middle of the year to a score at the e...