An Educational Contrarian

The recent acquisition by HMH of NWEA seems to have been driven by a phenomenally flawed logic: that normative (i.e., standardized, predictive) testing can be tied to instruction. This error that apparently seems so rational on the surface is so fraught with absurdities that it’s hard to imagine—perhaps think of using a fish as a hammer on a ship since they both occupy a spot in the ocean. I wish I were exaggerating, but I can’t think of anything more absurd at the moment—it's the wrong tool for the job by as far as the eye can see. Standardized testing is a highly technical research methodology that sorts students onto a scale for the purpose of analyzing the relative differences between them. That’s a mouthful. Think of it like this: pretend you wanted to analyze height, but the measuring tape hadn’t yet been invented yet. You could still do an analysis by lining everyone up from the shortest to the tallest. From there you can find the average, identify how many steps above or be...

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...