Education Reform is NOT rocket science!

January 22, 2004

Which means Educational Research should not be rocket science, either!

Joanne Jacobs links to an Education Week article (registration required) that gets so many things so very wrong, and we'd like to set the record straight.

Karin Chenoweth, the author of the piece, seems to feel the "dirty little secret of education" is that we don't know what works in education.

Yes, you read that correctly. She feels that we, as educators, don't know what works.

Now we'd agree with her halfway, in that our Schools of Education at universities across the nation are churning out certified teachers indoctrinated in precisely the worst methods to use in teaching. So yes, a great many teachers, administrators, and educational bureaucrats don't know what works. They're just doing the job the way they've been trained to believe it should be done, which is a huge reason why public education, especially in our cities, is in the toilet.

But come on, does she really feel that there are no schools in this great land that aren't meeting success daily, including those doing it "against the odds?" Does she believe that the education of children is so completely mysterious that we honestly don't know how to do it?

Does she feel that there isn't a network of educators who have resisted the banner of Progressivism, and thus are highly successful in their craft, either in individual classrooms or schoolwide, or even district-wide?

This would come as a surprise to the folks manning the stations at The Center for Education Reform, School Reform News, the No Excuses project, the Thomas B. Fordham foundation, Mathematically Correct, the National Right to Read Foundation, the KIPP Academies, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, just to name a small handful.

Instead, with regard to our knowledge in how to best teach kids, she says, "Unfortunately, we have no idea." (Here, we means her and just about every other progressive educator on the planet.)

Individual educators may have implemented successful practices in their schools, but without linking those practices to research demonstrating that what they do could be successful with other kids, all we have are individual experiences, not standard practice.

Translation: she claims there's no research that backs up the staggering volume of evidence of what really works with students and in schools.

This leaves us with philosophies. We have a bilingual philosophy and an English- first philosophy, complete with testimonials about what worked for whose grandparents, but these really are political--bordering on the religious--arguments, rather than scientific ones.

Ahh, now we get down to brass tacks. The message is, "See, all these competing theories are just rolling around on a level playing field, and no one theory is better than any other." This is the educational version of moral relativism: "we shouldn't be judgemental of others because, face it, we're all different and everyone's opinion is just as valuable as ours." Pardon us, but we beg to differ.

She even gets the "what works" testimony wrong. We don't know of anyone's grandparents talking about how wonderful it was to be forced to take all their classes in Spanish while struggling to learn English. We also have never heard anyone complain that they were taught to sound out words using phonics, giving them the ability to pronounce words and names they've never seen before.

It is precisely this "turning one's back on what works" (yes, even what worked with one's grandparents) that opens the door for all sorts of malodorous theories. But if you believe that kids should be taught phonics and learn their times tables, and if you believe we should have English-only classes for new immigrants--Ms. Chenoweth writes you off as being merely "political--bordering on the religious," and not scientific at all.

Thus she sounds the clarion call for more educational research, which we can fully support.

But we're pointed to a site called the "What Works Clearinghouse," which immediately got our attention, because we're all about doing what works. She writes, "the idea behind the What Works Clearinghouse is to set standards for judging the evidence about the effectiveness of educational approaches."

Unfortunately, the Clearinghouse (a U.S. Department of Education project) turns out to be a maze of gobbledygook, blathering on and on about "interventions" but never about actual programs in use in real schools to routinely teach real children.

Even though it was established in 2002, there doesn't seem to be any actual content on the site.

They just go on and on about how they're proposing to begin a facilitation process to open the door to a conceptual development for circumspection, which will enable the furtherment of the potential streams of the deliberation about theoretical paths into fact-finding investigative research . . . (deep breath) . . . at some point in the future.

So, we figured we'd check out their standards for educational research, a category prominently located on their main menu bar. (After all, Ms. Chenoweth said the whole point to the Clearinghouse was to set standards for educational research, right?) Here is the introductory paragraph from their site titled Standards (note that we didn't pull this out of the middle of some technical manual, this is how they introduce the topic of standards):

The Study DIAD (Version 1.0) and CREAD (Version 1.0) were unanimously approved by the Technical Advisory Group at their June meeting. The approved version of the Study DIAD (Version 1.0) is posted below. The approved version of the CREAD (Version 1.0) will be posted in mid-August. The WWC standards undergo frequent revision and improvement. For example, the WWC is currently working on a modification to the Study DIAD to guide the review of single-case research designs. This new version will be posted later this year.

We swear, we are not making this up.

It would appear as though one of their study goals is to dramatically increase the bullcrapificiation of educational research. We think it stinks.

Okay, repeat after us. Education Reform, and Education Research, and heck, Education itself, is not rocket science! We know what works. Let's go with what works.

Any questions?