The cult-like religion of corporate education reform
Recently I've seen some interesting, puzzling news items about education wherein the principal players seem to cast logic to the wind and fall back on irrational opinions like medieval peasants.
Like those parents in New York who are angry about the fact that their school just ended homework for young students. A committee was created at the school to examine the efficacy of homework, whether it made any difference in grades or learning outcomes, and they found that there is no evidence that homework makes any difference. They looked at a lot of research and, based on the factual, empirical evidence, sent home a letter to families that said: we see now, based on all these studies of children and learning, that all this homework does nothing for our children's intellectual development. In fact there are indications that it might be bad for their intellectual development. So we want your kids to come home from school, play, read, spend time with their families.
And now parents are angry and not only giving their children homework at home, but are planning to withdraw their children from the school. Why? Because children need homework to be smarter!
You sense, perhaps, my puzzlement.
But it all became clear to me this morning, when I was in the middle of doing a hundred other things. Sometimes epiphanies are like that.
Most parents with school-aged kids have by now been sort of brainwashed. We've been told so many times that our schools are failing and our children are failures and the only way to fix it is to give them more, and harder, work, continuously. And now we literally can't see it any other way. We are so convinced in our conviction, that all the research in the history of the world, all the empirical evidence based on all the experiments, could not move us from this belief.
This belief.
That was my epiphany.
We parents have been listening to folks who are richer and more powerful, and seem smarter than we are, for 20 years now. They've been telling us lots of things contrary to reason but we've stopped arguing and started believing them. We do this because those reformers have us in the tight grip of a very particular type of persuasion.
Corporate education reform is a belief system that operates like a religion, or even a religious cult.
I have long known that corporate ed reform proponents like Rahm Emanuel operate on our schools not out of knowledge but out of ideology. His The cult-like religion of corporate education reform:
