The best thing you will read about the education debate this week. This essay from Education Week is by David Rutkowski, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and Leslie Rutkowski, an assistant professor of inquiry methodology at the university.
Yet, the education discourse is particularly troubling because we have abundant high-quality data to inform the conversation and to evaluate schools. One caveat, though: We argue emphatically that the data that fuel these debates are fundamentally error-prone. And any data-driven evaluation is also subject to error. Consequently, there is no magic formula to control for all the complexities inherent in systems of schooling. It might be somewhat puzzling, then, that reformers in both camps are nearly religious in their beliefs. But we believe an explanation for this seeming zealotry falls into three broad, overlapping categories.
They’re overstating it. In part, radicals on both sides don’t really believe what they are saying. According to a close colleague, a state education commissioner recently blamed obstacles to implementing a new teacher-evaluation system on the poor quality of the state’s principals. When our colleague asked what percentage of administrators was truly unable to implement these systems, the schools chief sheepishly estimated that it
