New Gates Study of-- Oh. Never Mind
It's becoming evident that the Obama announcement heralding the fake repudiation of testing contained some sort of dog whistle or backwards masking message that was a cue for reformsters to unleash the hounds of Competency Based Education and Personalized Learning. Lots of players have laid there bets, and we've seen new heraldry from the big kahunas at Pearson. Now comes a big report funded by the Gates Foundation and conducted by the good folks at Rand.
"Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning" reports on a study about the effectiveness of various personalized learning strategies. As always, someone has paid good money to have the report laid out and graphically sweetened professionally, and the report itself is about thirty-eight pages of report, one page of footnotes, and a dozen-plus pages of appendices.
But don't worry. I read it so that you don't have to. Only here's the thing-- as I started writing about it, I realized that I don't have to read it either. Nobody does. And I don't need to talk about the whole thing.
It's true there are nits to pick, most notably that the bulk of the experimental subjects are mostly charter schools and charter students-- so not remotely a random sampling. We might also note that some of the information is self-reported, so reliability is an issue there. And in all fairness to the report, its list of personalized learning techniques includes baloney like competency based learning, but it also includes the idea of student-directed learning as well.
None of this matters. The report is a big beautiful waste of time.
Imagine NASA issued a five hundred page report on establishing a Lunar Base, and it talked about CURMUDGUCATION: New Gates Study of-- Oh. Never Mind: