56 Theses About Education, for Fun and Debate
Fight! Fight! Fight!
I don’t know a single thing about scholastic disputation. Well, I’m aware of the Ninety-Five Theses. But beyond this I’m clueless, except for the things I hastily searched for and read just now in hopes I could write an impressive-sounding sentence or two in this paragraph, before realizing that I don’t really care about any of that stuff—I just like lists of strongly worded takes.
So, here is a list of things I believe about education. I couldn’t get to ninety-five. Taken collectively there is a perspective here, one that I sometimes find myself wanting to share with others. It would be fun and interesting to discuss and debate these.
So, here we go—the beliefs:
To understand a person, look for their contradictions.
Ditto for institutions.
Schools are asked to do many contradictory things.
School is supposed to host a fair competition for academic distinction.
There is no such thing as a fair competition.
To a very real extent, you get the education you pay for.
If you incentivize schools to focus on, say, improving math and reading abilities, then that will take away time and money from things like science and social studies.
Every minute spent on art and music is a minute not spent teaching students to read.
Schools are expected to reflect the values of their local community. They are also expected to be open to those who don’t share those values. My son’s public preschool has a huge paper Santa Claus standing in the auditorium. For his sake, they also taught the class a Hanukkah song.
Different children need different things, and schools can’t do all of them equally well.
As a consequence of all this, schools are a bit dysfunctional. They don’t do anything as well as it seems like they could. David Labaree says it: “The educational system is an abject failure in achieving any one of its primary social goals… The apparently dysfunctional outcomes of the school system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of bad planning, bad administration, or bad teaching; they are an expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.”
Said differently, schools are sites of compromise. They are institutions that, more or less successfully, paper over the contradictory needs of parents, students, and voters.
This is a strength, not a weakness, of schools.
In any conflict, there is rarely just one possible compromise.
The history of education could be told as a story of shifting compromises.
Larger schools tend towards the same compromises, because their size exposes them to a greater cross-section of the contradictory desires of parents, students, and voters.
Smaller schools can more easily reach compromises than larger schools.
Arrangements that work for younger students often fail when extended to older students. An instructive example from Success Academy’s attempts to build a model high school: “Another concern, according to a former Success official who spoke on condition of anonymity, was that the network wanted to cement policies that it could replicate in its future high schools, and the first high school didn’t look like the example Moskowitz wanted it to be.”
It is functionally impossible to create a large school that has (say) no grades or features (say) an intense focus on discipline, since these “innovations” would go against the will of many parents in the larger population. But in small schools, anything is possible.
Parents are the most powerful educational group, not teachers or unions.
Homework would have been abolished by educators in the early decades of the 20th century in many places if not for parent opposition. “In 1913, one principal who had abolished homework admitted that he “incurred considerable opposition on the part of parents, who were so indoctrinated with the idea of home study in their own school days that they protested vigorously against its prohibition” (quoted in Bok, 1913).
Most “innovative” ideas in education are unsavory to large segments of the parent, teacher, or student population. But smaller communities can be formed where these ideas are seen favorably (or where students, parents, teachers have less influence).
“Nothing scales” in education.
Scaling involves, along with everything else, exposing your “innovative” compromise to something more like the full force of parental desires. This is one way that scaling pushes institutions towards business as usual.
Countries, states, districts, schools, grades, classrooms, students—education happens at multiple nested levels.
Classroom pedagogy is also about contradictions and compromises.
Ideology is the refusal to compromise.
Teachers love theories, in part because of a real desire to slip free from painful compromises.
What works for students of certain ages, subjects, or schools, may very well not work for others. Novel pedagogies are often “born” in one educational context and then attempt to migrate to others. This almost never works.
“Nothing works” in teaching. Which is to say, there are no universal “best practices.”
“Two entrenched dogmas currently divide thinking about teaching... The first, which we have characterized as 'best practice,' views teaching primarily as technique or method, and educational improvement as a problem of identifying, disseminating, and mandating the most effective methods. The second, opposing dogma views teaching as fundamentally personal and particular, and teachers' professional autonomy as a key condition for educational improvement… Our perspective seeks to avoid the extremes of both dogmas.” —Adam Lefstein and Julia Snell in “Better Than Best Practice.” Also me, I say this too.
A pedagogy is a teaching system. What I describe as “fussy teaching” is a pedagogy where the teacher asks the entire class to respond to questions that are delivered at a fairly steady clip. For variety, students switch modes a few times in class, between paper worksheets, mini-whiteboards, turn-and-talks, etc. The benefits are reduction of disruptions and active participation.
Every pedagogy fails. The drawbacks of “fussy teaching” include: boredom from strong students, monotony, students spend the same amount of time on every question.
Every successful teacher has multiple pedagogies. I don’t believe there exists a good articulation yet of what teaching with multiple pedagogies looks like.
One way of measuring the success of a teacher isn’t how effective they are in their role, but how easily they can be placed in many different roles. They can adapt what they do for older or younger students, struggling or ambitious students, and so on. This reflects an ability to deploy multiple pedagogies.
Pedagogical variety, thoughtfully deployed, is itself the most successful pedagogy.
We lack the ability to measure most educational outcomes.
“Teacher effects on test scores capture only a fraction of their effect on human capital,” finds Kirabo Jackson.
Schools are not in the test-score maximization business. This is not what schools are being asked to do.
A “successful” reform could encourage schools to focus more on improving test scores. There would, predictably, be tradeoffs.
Almost nobody thinks that test scores are the only thing that matter in education. But there is little consensus about what those other things are.
Policy expresses itself in the language of consensus.
Test scores and academic skills are at the center of a giant Venn Diagram. They are the things that everybody, pretty much, can agree on. Partly that reflects their importance. Partly that reflects their status as a common denominator across educational disagreements.
Goodhart's law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Labaree, again: “A key to understanding the American school syndrome is to recognize that our schools have never really been about learning. The impact of school on society over the years has come more from the form of the school system than from the substance of the school curriculum.”
If you could wave a magic want and improve the nation’s math scores by ten points—what would you have accomplished, exactly?
I am not cynical about education. Learning is good. Teaching is important. Schooling is great.
The wealthiest people in the world could easily hire an army of private tutors to educate their children. Instead they send their kids to private schools and hire tutors to reinforce the school curriculum on the side.
If you increase the resources available to schools (or classrooms), new compromises become possible. (“Does money matter for schools? Most studies say yes.”)
“I gave him a call and basically said, ‘I’ve looked at your results, and you’re getting forty or fifty percent of kids reading, but it’s not ‘success for all,'” Greenblatt recalled telling Slavin. “‘I’m just a guy with money. Is it money?'” Yes, Slavin replied; its just money–if the money is spent in the right way. But it’s difficult to maintain tight control in most public schools. The two agreed to try to find a school they could convince to put “Success for All on steroids,” as Greenblatt put it.” From Robert Pondiscio’s book about Success Academy.
Decreasing the number of influential stakeholders also makes new compromises possible, for instance by creating smaller schools (or classrooms).
Smart, thoughtful, personable individuals can themselves make new compromises possible by attracting the trust of others.
It is hard to measure school quality, but relatively easy to observe it.
To understand schools people would need better numbers, but they are unlikely to get them.
In good schools, students are safe and reasonably happy while focused on academic content. Schools that can pull this off are more or less capable of figuring out what else the children and their families need.
Schools are poorly understood institutions.
“So nearly a half-century of experience in schools and the sustained research I have done have made me allergic to utopian rhetoric. Both my experience and research have changed my mind about the role of schools in society. I have become skeptical of anyone spouting words about schools being in the vanguard of social reform… Yet, I must confess that in my heart, I still believe that content-smart and classroom-savvy teachers who know their students well can make significant differences in their students’ lives even if they cannot cure societal ills.” —Larry Cuban, but also me, I say this too.
I feel like most of this is slightly above me in terms of parsing contradictions and the logic going to the end. BUT ....I either disagree with #7 and #8 or I don't understand what you are saying..... If teachers are well trained then it is entirely possible to teach math and reading while also giving them a rich curriculum in science, social studies and the arts. And if anything teaching social studies, science and the arts can motivate children to mastery. Also there is a wealth of studies that show that learning music and drawing end up increasing core skills in math and reading. So teaching music is not taking away from learning to read it might actually help (especially a dyslexic student) master reading. Learning about Apollo 13 might inspire students to master solving difficult problems in mathematics.
On a separate note Roen's reading seems to be doing a good job of incorporating all sorts of other topics like social skills, literature, art into learning core skills in reading and math. They are using a new curriculum based on the science of reading called Amplify CKLA and so far I have been pretty impressed with what I have seen come home.
I just resigned my leadership role. Now I know why.