CURMUDGUCATION: Implementationism and Barber

CURMUDGUCATION: Implementationism and Barber:

Implementationism and Barber



This week, the Education Delivery Institute is delighted to announce a new book/marketing initiative co-authored by Nick Rodriguez, Ellyn Artis, and Sir Michael Barber. Rodriguez and Artis may not be familiar to you, but Barber is best known as the head honcho of Pearson. So you know where this is headed.

 This is Nick Rodriguez, a personal trainer in Houston. Not the same guy.



Their new book has the more-than-a-mouthful title Deliverology in Practice: How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes, and it sets out to answer the Big Question:

Why, with all the policy changes in education over the past five years, has progress in raising student achievement and reducing inequalities been so slow?

In other words-- since we've had full-on reformsterism running for five years, why can't they yet point to any clear successes? They said this stuff was going to make the world of education awesome. Why isn't it happening?

Now, you or I might think the answer to that question could be "Because the reformy ideas are actually bad ideas" or "The premises of the reforms are flawed" or "The people who said this stuff would work turn out to be just plain wrong." But no-- that's not where Barber et al are headed at all. Instead, they turn back to what has long been a popular excuse explanation for the authors of failed education reforms.

Implementation. 

"Well, my idea is genius. You're just doing it wrong!" is the cry of many a failed geniuses in many fields of human endeavor, and education reformsters have been no exception.

Just an implementation problem. As in, don't implement these into your digestive system.





I have trouble wrapping my head around the notion that implementation is somehow separate fromconception. Cold fusion is a neat concept, but the fact that it cannot actually be implemented in the world we physically inhabit renders it kind of useless. Politics are particularly susceptible to the fallacy that My Idea Is Pure Genius and if people would just behave the way I want them to, it will all work out brilliantly.

"Millions starving? Don't worry-- it's just an implementation problem."








The implementation fallacy has created all sorts of complicated messes, but the fallacy itself is simply expressed:

There is no good way to implement a bad idea. 

Barber, described in this article as "a monkish former teacher,"  has been a champion of bad ideas. CURMUDGUCATION: Implementationism and Barber: