EricHoefler.com

I can identify at least two reasons my educational blogging has dwindled so dramatically in the last year: (big obvious one) I left the classroom and (increasingly more obvious one) the arguments around education reform make me tired. I feel like there’s very little that hasn’t already been said, and ignored, by someone, somewhere.

Take this op-ed in the New York Times by David Brooks, for example. It’s full of so many reductive, clichéd, and just plain wrong notions that it makes my scalp burn, but he rattles them off as if he actually knows what he’s talking about and has evidence to back it up.

Now, I read his mini-bio, and he sounds like a really smart and interesting guy, and like he probably knows a hellofalot about business and politics. Why do we, as a nation, seem to think that qualifies someone to provide commentary and advice on how education should happen!? (You know the answer already, don’t you?)

Let’s run through a few of his comments, just for fun (emphasis added):

… increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

The bait-and-switch here is infuriating. What is the primary cause of all the "treating students like cattle" stuff, that concerned teachers have been warning and raging against for years? Oh yeah, all that standardized testing … which Brooks will go on to praise:

Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind, we’re a lot better at measuring each student’s progress.

The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too.

NCLB has done nothing to help us get "better" at measuring progress. We’re measuring lots of things, but we’re no where near getting enough correlation out of any of it to say we can speak confidently about "progress." And our primary method for collecting data right now is to ask kids to fill in bubbles. So no, our data hasn’t improved in any meaningful way, we just have more of it. And therefore, maybe the consequences that teachers (because that’s what he really means) are trying to evade are the consequences of bad data that’s being praised as helpful and reliable.

The thing is, plenty of people (people much smarter and more eloquent than I) have said all of this and more, and have done so over and over again. Still, here it is again in the NYT, and there it is again pouring from the political pulpits, and there it is over there on my TV screen, and …

So I find it hard to scrape up enough energy to have the same argument again. It seems like not enough people are paying attention to the well-reasoned debates. (And they are out there if you look for them, but even those are feeling a bit repetitive lately). I guess that’s because they take time and effort to think through, don’t fit easily into headlines, and don’t make for effective sound bites.