I'm a bit behind on my reading, but Frank Rich's??column from last week is worth noting. I usually don't agree with Rich on much--and I don't agree completely with where he takes this argument--but I was struck by his observation at how easily we are bamboozled by the big-wigs... in politics, in business, in sports. Tiger Woods, he asserts, should be TIME's Person of the Year for the "exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer's public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led." The financial crisis, Enron, Eliot Spitzer's dalliances--all are examples of how we've had the wool pulled over our eyes... and let it happen.
The same idea is undoubtedly present in education. Despite??A Nation at Risk's dire 1983 warnings, we've largely danced around the problems festering in our nation's schools. When research showed that smaller class size had no measurable effect on achievement, we kept on hiring teachers and shrinking them anyway. When fuzzy math and whole-language reading methods were shown to be wobbly at best, we kept on using them, cutting such successful programs as Reading First. When blatant abuse and incompetence was seen amongst our children's teachers, we shrugged our shoulders at the 300-page+ collective bargaining contracts. When we learn that tracking can have positive effects on achievement, especially for high-achievers, we keep detracking anyway. We let proponents of all these theories and techniques talk us into trying and then expanding them, despite any data or our own common sense to the contrary.
It's not hard to explain this kind of rose-colored-glasses-wearing. Success in education is very hard to measure--that is if you can define it first. (Remember the equity vs. excellence argument over racially??homogeneous??schools?) Even student achievement, perhaps the most cut-and-dried metric, is far from really cut-and-dried. Mobile cut scores, easier tests, scoring on a curve, all of these things should make us look closely at the numbers. Put simply, student achievement tests are blunt; value-added assessments are still in their infancy. Education schools have no rubrics for self-assessment, and methods to develop them are only in two states and only partially implemented in those two. We know very little about children's learning styles and close to nothing about how to tell if a teacher is going to be any good before they enter the classroom.
With rudimentary assessment systems, education is particularly vulnerable to??rhetoric, feel-good theories, and overall bamboozle-ment. Terry Moe and John Chubb??see technology as the way out of this morass. Their argument is certainly compelling, but we've a long way to go before it completely bears fruit. In the meantime, it would do us all some good to treat education policy with a more critical eye. After all, remember the line that it's "good for the children"? What kind of churl would argue against something that was "good for the children"? Well, depends on your definition of "good." Let me assure you there are millions.
--Stafford Palmieri
