Duncan and Spellings Just Can't Quit Testophilia

Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan are caught in some sort of black hole, a time loop that will not let them escape their dreams about federally-driven test-centered education reform. And they're back again at EdWeek with the same old baloney, pretending that agreeing with each other represents some sort of bipartisan landmark. 

Why now? Well, the opening franken-sentence tries to construct a current events hook for the tired rehash. 

With students back in school and Nikole Hannah-Jones’ first person account of her struggles with the education system lighting up social media, education is back at the top of the national conversation.

Yeah, some AI agent told them that NHJ's piece was spurring all sorts of responses, so hop on that bandwagon! And pivot immediately to some classic reformster chicken littling:

What remains clear is that parents and educators are experiencing unprecedented confusion about our education performance and direction while millions of students are unprepared to face a rapidly changing economy.

"Unprecedented confusion"!! Wow, that sounds bad.

They note that the nation has been "adrift on education policy for a decade," and I'd argue that Trumpism hasn't been so much adrift as ploughing aggressively through the weeds and toward a sheer cliff, but metaphors aside, I can agree that the last decade has not been great for education policy. But their implication that education policy was super-duper prior to the last decade is just self-serving fantasizing baloney.

They point to a "false argument" about who's in charge-- feds, states or parents-- and it is a false argument, but only because the feds want to stay in charge, just in an inefficient spread-over-several-departments privatize public education way. But Spellings and Duncan have to parse their criticism of the current administration carefully, because when it comes to privatizing education, there's not much space between Spellings/Duncan and DeVos/McMahon.

Spellings/Duncan offer one of the more breezy arguments for federal control I've yet seen:

However, Washington can’t simply send dollars to states and call its job done.

Well, it totally could.

But Spellings/Duncan think the feds should "reestablish" a commitment to "education excellence—setting ambitious goals for student outcomes, investing in research, preserving measurement, and ensuring parents and taxpayers can see whether students are on track."

"We've done it before," they claim, invoking No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which is the part where I yell loudly at my screen, "No, you have not." 

But this is the cherished fantasy of the corporate privatizer wing of reformsterdom-- the fairy tale that under these two testophiliac programs were some sort of golden age of educational progress.

Based on that fantasy, Spellings/Duncan argue for third-grade reading proficiency, financial and technical literacy, and just generally "clear federal goals and strong accountability." China's beating us! The duo call for putting "student achievement back at the center of the nation's agenda."  And "back" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 

Look, some of what they call for is perfectly lovely a reasonable. But their blind spot is, as always, a total, unquestioning faith in the Big Standardized Test. That faith allows them to completely skip over one of the most challenging questions in education-- how can we effectively measure actual student knowledge and skill? How do we measure the parts of learning that require time and reflection (like reading a whole novel and mulling it over to draw conclusions and insights)? How do we measure that habits of mind that pay off both now and ten, twenty, thirty years from now? How do we measure a student's ability to apply critical thinking to a body of knowledge from science or history or literature? How do we measure their ability to incorporate an appreciation for the arts into their lives? How do we measure the breadth and depth of their content knowledge across multiple disciplines, and further measure their ability to build connections between different parts of that body of knowledge? How do we measure their ability to communicate effectively with written or spoken word? How do we measure their ability to fully integrate their acquired knowledge and skills into a holistic view of the world and what it means to be fully human in it? And how do we adapt any of these measures to reflect the individual achievement of a student who has chosen to pursue achievements along their own particular individual path? 

To all of this, Spellings/Duncan say, "Give the kid a single multiple-choice math and reading test. That'll tell us everything we need to know."

NCLB/RttT were extended experiments in proving Campbell's and Goodhart's Laws. Attach high stakes to a narrow measure and pursue those scores, and you distort everything and measure nothing. And under NCLB/RttT, policy leaders exacerbated the problems by using lousy tests.

Every piece of their preferred policy rests on the groundless belief that the Big Standardized Test accurately measures what they want it to measure. The whole business is a process of deciding we want to measure something, inventing a proxy for that measurement, then practicing getting better at the proxy instead of the thing itself. 

Spellings/Duncan also want us to worry about impending doom. The future of the US economy and your child's employment will be threatened unless we get education fixed. And lord knows I believe that education is important, but corporate reformsters have been ringing this bell since they manufactured A Nation at Risk forty-some years ago. And yet, the disaster hasn't quite manifest. Yes, our economy is stuttering in some areas, but the fingerprints on that mess look a lot more like the greasy handprints of Donald Trump and not any failures of education. And NCLB and RttT both made big promises to the economy and students; if they were such a fabulous success, that should be manifest in a generation of students who were able to reach new economic heights, even lift themselves out of poverty, thanks to those programs. If Spellings/Duncan want to pretend their programs were successful, that's what they should be pointing to-- not BS Test results.

When Spellings/Duncan say that we need to get education fixed, I don't disagree. But since they led much of the breaking, I'm not ready to take advice from on the fixing. Given a magic wand to wave at education policy, the very first thing I would do is end test-centered accountability and send policy leaders back to the accountability drawing board. We do not need to move backward to the failed policies of the past.

Yes, I've said all this many times before, but if Spellings/Duncan are going to keep repeating their same old baloney, I can repeat myself, too, to rail against their failed and damaging ideas. But I'd rather move forward, and I wish they could leave their testophilia behind. 

Here Comes Direct Instruction, Again

Emily Hanford is back with another story to sell about a story someone's been sold. This time is apparently pumping direct instruction, and in talking to Alexander Russo, she pitched this frame:

This season, which is about teaching and about direct teaching in particular, just taps into a lot of questions about fears that certain kinds of teaching or teaching kids in a very direct way is somehow gonna squash their independence or not allow them to be independent.

Sigh. So we're going to try to reopen one of the fauxest debates in education-- the direct instruction vs. discovery debate. Let's hit a couple of points here. 

1) I call this a faux debate because I have never encountered, in person or otherwise, a single capable teacher who believed that they needed to use all of one or the other. It's strictly mix and match, depending on the content. I have never so much as heard of, for instance, an elementary teacher who thinks that students should just sort of discover the multiplication table. OTOH, there are people in leadership positions, thought leaders, administrators on local and state levels, and various edupreneurs who adhere to one side or the other, but actual teachers in the field are in general more practical than ideological.

2) Direct instruction covers a wide range of possibilities, from super-strict scripting to handing out a times table and telling students to commit it to memory to explicitly instructing a student after face-to-face analysis of what brick is missing in the student's building.

Look-- both direct and discovery instruction have very definite limits. 

Students have a limited ability to discover things about subjects of which they are ignorant. And when the question at hand has a clear, known answer, it's just annoying as hell for someone to demand that you "discover" the answer and wait for them to tell you whether you're right or not (which is, in fact, just a twisty way of delivering delayed direct instruction). Make me go look it up? That's just having me get direct instruction from a book. 

And lord knows we need knowledgeable filters. Have we not seen a universe of people who "did their own research" in a flurry of internet-based discovery self-instruction and thereby arrived at utter and complete baloney? Never tell me you "learned more from the kids" than they did from you-- if you, the certified teacher, are not the most knowledgeable expert in your classroom, then why are you there? You're no more useful than one of those "guides" at an AI school.

But direct instruction can't do it all, either. It's not so much that endless direct instruction robs students of agency and autonomy; it's that you, the adult teacher, are not going to enjoy the ways that your supremely bored students find to exercise their agency and autonomy. 

Students are not simply buckets into which information is easily poured, and "thinking" is not simply the act of retrieving little data chunks from the bucket. And I am frankly suspicious of folks who think everything is a settled Truth that needs only be collected and repeated (looking at you, classical education folks).

And when we enter the world of interpretation and analysis, direct instruction simply doesn't cut it. There is no reason for students to have to "discover" the dates of major events in The Great European War, but direct instruction is inadequate for learning about the causes of the war. There is no reason for students to "discover" the setting and characters of Hamlet, but direct instruction is inadequate for grappling with just how mad Hamlet may or may not be.

Too much direct instruction in a classroom and students zone out, learning that their only task is to collect and retrieve whatever the teacher wants them to collect and retrieve. Too much discovery in a classroom and students feel aimless and abandoned by an adult who is somewhat useless. To guide students successfully through the learning landscape, you don't make them follow in your exact footsteps, step by step, and you don't just turn them loose with a "Good luck, hope to see you on the other side."

At this point in the debate, some advocates of either school are going to pipe up and object that I have mis-described their preferred mode of teaching, and they will proceed to describe the "true" version of discovery or direct instruction, and they will describe a mode that is, in fact, a blend of both, at which point I will grasp at one of my remaining hairs because that is my frickin' point.

I sometimes look at back at my 39 years in the classroom and try to decide where my teaching lands in this dichotomy, and I land on a third possibility-- exploration and examination.

To explore the learning landscape of whatever content you're dealing with, the student needs both some direct instruction about the fundamentals of the landscape and some freedom to range about it. We can't get to a useful and enriching conversation about the themes of Hamlet without some hard foundation in what the text does and does not say-- but we can't stop there. It's hard to examine what we don't know, but once we have that knowledge, we need some freedom to sift through it, turn it over, see what we can find in it. It's hard to grapple with advanced math if you haven't memorized your times tables, but you can't memorize your way through every math problem you ever encounter.

I don't know what the new season of Hanford's work will bring, though I'm sure that once again a whole world of education amateurs, journalists, thought leaders, policy wonks, politicians, etc etc etc will have many discussions about it. No doubt various teacher examples of one failure or another will be unearthed (because in a group of 4 million, you can find a couple of examples of anything). Meanwhile, I expect that the rest of the actual teachers in actual classrooms will continue to continue working on a balanced blend of what actually works for them. 

Guide on the side or sage on the stage? How about a guide who is knowledgeable enough to periodically stop and deliver some sage advice, and who is wise enough to know when to lead and when to get out of the way? It won’t sell many stories, but it will get the job done.

MAGA Moms Sic AI On School Districts

In the midst of their current summit (cleverly scheduled for the end of Banned Books Week), Moms for Liberty unveiled a new AI tool. M4L AWARE (a name that looks much like MAL-AWARE which is a little on the nose) will flag "DEI contracts, gender policies and curriculum changes every 12 hours to mobilize parents," says Fox News, which was the first outlet to share the scoop.

AWARE is supposed to stand for Agenda Watch, Alert, Response, and Engage. Sure. M4L itself announced "school boards put on notice," as if school boards do not already operate under laws that require transparency, including things like publishing the agendas of future meetings. 

Co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich handled the rollout herself. Co-founder Tiffany Justice recently finished her brief fling with the Heritage Foundation; her linkedin now says she's self-employed as a "conservative activist, strategist, and donor advisor," so I guess the "ordinary mom at the kitchen table selling t-shirts" mask is fully off now.  Meanwhile, co-founder Bridget Ziegler hasn't been very busy since her own bi-sex scandal (other than suing the city) and chose not to run for re-election to the Sarasota School Board this year (her husband was booted from his party chairmanship gig).   

There was a time when, if you squinted hard, M4L looked like a conservative parental activism group. These days they're just an unabashed estrogen wing of MAGA. So of course Descovich, when rolling out the new surveillance AI, invoked Joe Biden. "The Biden admin targeted our parents for showing up to school board meetings," Descovich claimed, echoing a new report from Trump's Weaponization Working Group, part of Dear Leaders use of the Department of Justice to target and push back on anyone who was ever mean to him or his allies. Back in 2022, when M4L and other MAGAs were aggressively attacking school boards, the National School Board Association asked law enforcement at every level for some help for its members and used the phrase "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" in their letter, which has been a PR gift to the MAGA crowd ever since.     

M4L's AI agent will, apparently, scan school board agendas looking for any particular words or phrases that indicate Naughty Policies "buried deep within school board agendas." Because "it's incredibly time-consuming to sift through thousands of pages in agendas each week," says Descovich, "and school districts count on that." Because school boards are the enemy. Do any school boards have thousand-page agendas? Or is it the main M4L office that's scanning them, in which case, can't local M4L chapters scan local agendas? Is this initiative lazy, or is it trying to weaponize roving bands of MAGA moms to be deployed to whatever district the AI says needs spanking?

Using AI to track down objectionable DEI stuff (plus anything else these snowflakes think might harm them) has certainly been tried before. ChatGPT has become a popular tool for generating book banning lists, even as it puts books on the list that make no sense (The Life of Fredrick Dounglass? Les Miserables?)  And DOGE famously tried this on a large scale to find spending cuts, like cutting HVAC replacement as DEI and just generally doing such a bad job that the courts reprimanded them. In Texas, university professors must now submit course content for AI scanning. 

So MALAWARE promises at least some instances of a bunch of angry MAGAs showing up to protest a high school auto shop unit on transmissions because ChatGPT reported a lesson on trans stuff, which would be entertaining if anyone in MAGA world was capable of saying, "Ooops, we made a mistake" and not "Let's just keep repeating our original story even though it has no more evidence than the stories about litter boxes in schools." 

Maybe the main idea here is to use technology to make up for M4L's flagging membership in some areas. 

At any rate, one more way for MAGA moms to agitate the base while facilitating the harassment of school boards across the country, whose members are elected from their own communities and, in most cases, paid little or nothing for their trouble. Look, I'm all for local taxpayers speaking up about the actions of their school boards, but there is something lazy about this approach, which does not encourage people to pay attention to what their school board is doing all the time, but to wake up and squawk only when the AI tells them something is happening they might not like, with no context or background provided. MALAWARE is not here to facilitate involvement-- just attacks. Not involvement or engagement— just intimidation and undermining.

ICYMI: Banned Edition (10/11)

I have deliberately waited until after Banned Books Week this year to talk about banned books because it's a topic I hate to see relegated to just one week where we all wring our hands with concern and then, come Sunday, sigh "Well, now that's over with" and move on. But the attempts to curtail reading of certain Naughty Texts is a 52 week project for those who are determined to try to keep certain ideas away from human brains, so let's stay alert all the time.

Plenty of reading from the week. Remember to share the pieces that speak to you.

Banned Books Week: The Florida Law That Opened the Floodgates

It is, of course, the Free State of Florida that leads the nation in book banning. Sue Kingery Woltanski recaps the tale of how it got that way. 

A ‘Gold Rush Moment’ for Private Education

The federal voucher program is ripe for profiteering and discrimination, but some states are signing on anyway. Jacob Goodwin explains the issues at The Progressive. 

Trump’s School Choice Program Could Push Public Schools to Charge New Fees

Mark Liebrman at EdWeek tries to sort out what federal vouchers will mean for public school finance. 

What We Mean When We Say “Good School” (pt. 3)

Jose Luis Vilson continues his series examining what expect from good public schools (and who we expect them to welcome).

Billionaires Love This School Policy. Many Regular Parents Hate It.

Jessica Grose at the New York Times starts to catch up to Jennifer Berkshire, noting that the Texas GOP is having trouble because they sold out public schools. (Should be a gift link)

Merging school districts was supposed to save taxpayers money. It didn’t, a 20-year study in Arkansas found

Jill Barshay at Hechinger with a counter-intuitive study from Arkansas about how combining tiny school districts might not actually save any money.

How Texas Helped a Private School Chain’s AI Tool Get Into Public School Classrooms

The folks behind Alpha School have been very generous with political donations in Texas, and it seems to be paying off with some sweet side contracts.

Efficiently Mediocre: Why Measuring School Efficiency Requires Measuring Cost

I really appreciate Bruce Baker's ability to render school finance comprehensible, and I recommend his blog. Here's a quick tutorial in how to chart "efficiency" in non-garbage ways (as well as a debunking some garbage charting).

Is AI Being Oversold in Schools? A Quick Look Back to the 1990s and 2000s Would Say Yes Because Teachers Are AI-ed To

John Robinson reminds us that the ed technobaloney of earlier decades is still baloney.

Information vs. Knowledge vs. Application

Nancy Flanagan picks up some ideas from one of my posts and runs with them. I do like it when posts become a conversation.

Department of Education denies Freedom of Information Act request for school voucher data

Steve Nuzum is trying to get information out of the South Carolina Department of Education regarding the state's voucher program. It's not going great.

Fascism Warning Play “The Wave” Silenced at Ocean County Vocational in New Jersey

The Downstage Center blog has been tracking the censorship of high school theater productions. In New Jersey, administration has axed a production of The Wave, a play about that famous classroom experiment about the rise of fascism.

What Happens At TFA 35 In Vegas …

Gary Rubinstein went to Teach for America's 35th birthday party and brought us all an account of the events. Things I learned include that TFA is still tight with reformsters, that they can command quite the roster of entertainers, and that Michelle Rhee is still full of it.  Fascinating read.

Reclaiming a Vision of Humane Schooling

Ben Riley hosts a column by Alicia Stoller arguing for actual human values in schooling.

MAGA fraud hunting account targets money going to Ohio Islamic charter school

Ohio, like many other choice states, gives taxpayer money to some Islamic schools, and yet MAGA voices insist that such a thing is Very Bad and money should only go to religions they personally agree with. Stephen Dyer reports.

At the Bucks County Beacon, I make one more plea to Josh Shapiro to reject the federal school vouchers. 

Having Students Follow An Idea

Saurabh Anand published a piece at JSTOR last month that has been an open tab on my desktop ever since, even as I have added it to my file of Things I Would Totally Steal If I Were Still Teaching.

The piece is "Teaching Students to Follow an Idea," and Anand is talking about an assignment that he uses with first-year academic writing students at the University of Georgia. 

I developed this activity because students often perceive research writing as a series of requirements: finding scholarly sources, writing an annotated bibliography, citing sources, and producing a literature review. These requirements are useful, but they can also make scholarship seem like a collection of finished objects. Articles appear in databases, then students download them, extract information, and cite them. I wanted students to see something different: scholarship as a conversation that changes over time.

Yes! The "collection of finished objects" really strikes a chord with me, and the rationale parallels my thinking when I designed an assignment around having students research local history mostly from primary sources. 

But Anand lands in a different place, and it is also cool. He asks students to take a scholarly article, pick an idea from it, and trace that idea's history. Where did it come from? What were the responses to it? Who built on it? Who disagreed with it? 

What is the biography of that idea?

Anand is working in scholarly materials, but the possibilities here-- especially when applied to chunks of history--are considerable.

It also reminds me of teaching high school juniors about the various intellectual and social waves in US history. Because-- and some folks seem to have lost track of this-- we can talk about ideas in a classroom without actually "indoctrinating" anyone. Every year I had to talk about American attitudes, throughout history, about race and gender and religion and society itself. And I opened each new wave with a version of this speech:

I am not asking you to decide that these folks were right or that they were wrong. I am not here to convince you to agree with them, but I am going to present, as clearly as I can, how they viewed the world and the human beings in it. You can agree or disagree-- that's entirely your decision-- but I want you to understand where they were coming from.

Implicit in that approach was holding the ideas themselves at arm's length, studying them as things in themselves. The idea was to look at how they grew and spread and how the affected the people who embraced them, not to try to decide whether or not they were True. In doing so, my hope was that students would learn to recognize pieces of those ideas still floating around in our cultural soup today. (Also, if I'm honest, to help students develop the habits of mind that made it possible to examine their own beliefs and scan them for integrated consistency). 

So I can see a version of Anand's assignment working on a large scale (Where did the critical realists start? What were they reacting to? How did different writers try to articulate or dramatize their ideas, and which pieces of the ideas did particular authors favor? Did they fall from favor, and if so, why? What ideas pushed them aside? Damn, but I am just itching to go back in time and use some of this approach.). The assignment can also work on smaller scale (Where did the story about litter boxes in schools start? How did it spread? Who helped spread it? Has it peaked yet?)

Ideas and beliefs have their own lives, growing, changing, both responding to and shaping the world around them. They are not set in concrete, unchanged and unaltered by time, and they can be studied by questions so much more interesting and useful than, "Is this correct?" This, for me, is one of the fundamental problems of the those who are fighting "culture wars"-- their insistence that for most questions, there is one True Answer and it has never changed and will never change-- which is itself an idea that has shifted and ebbed and flowed and changed over the centuries. 

Humans and human society shift and change and rise and fall and regularly re-assess the world around them and their place in it. That process, that life of ideas, is fascinating and useful. I am glad that subtext was part of my teaching, but right now I would love a little bit of a do-over.

The End of Disparate Impact Language

The Trump administration has been crossing out rules about "disparate impact" all across federal agencies. The language was axed in the Department of Education back in July, and while the change was covered in some media and greeted with appropriate complaints from a host of civil rights groups, lots of folks sort of napped through the whole business, even as the DOJ threw out fifty desegregation cases involving schools.

So let's take a second to talk about disparate impact and why anyone should care that the feds no longer pay any attention to it.

The principle of disparate impact starts with the understanding that 1) not all discrimination is intentional and 2) not all intentional discrimination is announced as such.

Disparate impact allows us to bypass an argument about whether or not someone in charge had prejudice in his heart which he deliberately enacted through policy. 

For the last several decades, everyone has understood that you cannot write down in official policy, "We will not hire Black people." But if you have hired 100 people in the last six months and 50% of the applicants were women and 0% of the actual hires were women, there is reason to suspect that perhaps your organization has a civil rights problem.

In education, a common disparate impact argument has centered on discipline, the argument being that if Black students composed 20% of your student body and 90% of your discipline referrals, maybe something is going on. 

The effect of the principle of disparate impact is that many employers and schools have been super-careful because they're afraid they might be doing a racism without even trying. The principle of disparate impact has launched thousands of implicit bias PD sessions and made folks examine more carefully how they might be discriminating without even meaning to. 

But that same effect makes reactionary snowflakes sad. You can't just let every discriminatory thought fall out of your mouth without someone making a fuss! Even Supreme Court Justices aren't immune; “You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Sam Alito said at a Federalist Society event in 2020. “Until recently, that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now, it’s considered bigotry.”

So for MAGA, already accepting the premise that white men are the most oppressed and downtrodden group in the country, disparate impact is one more way that they are held down. 

Ther is no doubt that parsing out disparate impact is an inexact art, and there is absolutely no doubt that public schools do not suffer from a shortage of people looking over their shoulder, waiting to catch them doing Something Wrong.

But the loss of the principle of disparate impact means that discrimination can only be called out when some school administrator or staff member is stupid enough to announce, "I am taking this action in order to discriminate against this group of people, a group that I personally hate." It may take a while for some districts or states to feel free enough to start doing terrible things, but they've got at least two years to get comfortable with the idea. In the meantime, families of female or minority or LGBTQ students will have to start looking for another means to protect themselves. 

What's Wrong With Educational Research (Part 23,881)

Noah Smith is an "econ blogger" who mostly does econ stuff, but a week ago he decided to take a swipe at education. Yes, it's always super-awesome when economists try to talk about education, but this particular post caught my attention because Smith would like to explain why smaller classes are a snare and a delusion, and his argument highlights one of the major problems with education research over the past several decades.

Smith starts out commenting on the Nikole Hannah-Jones piece (I believe at this point there are three grown adults on the planet who have not expressed an opinion about the piece, and two of them are stuck under rocks) and then wades into a round of "do schools need more money" as a way of introducing his gripe, which is that when schools get more money, they spend it on teachers to try to reduce class size.

"I’ve been hearing all my life that smaller classes will improve the quality of education," he opines, then goes on to cite some contemporary praise for smaller class size. He cites a 2014 study and a 2013 program in Tennessee (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio or STAR) and digs into a study of the entire country of Israel, where due to a rabbinical rule, class sizes were capped at 40 (like 40 students somehow qualifies as a small class in any year since about 1957).

The initial study showed "gains" but then a follow-up study showed no class size effect. Then he pulls up a couple of meta-analyses (a study of studies, for those of you who skipped this day in college). He quotes a study from Filges et. al.:

Overall, the evidence suggests at best a small effect on reading achievement. There is a negative, but statistically insignificant, effect on mathematics. For the non-STAR studies the primary study effect sizes for reading were close to zero but the weighted average was positive and statistically significant. 

And more of the same, all looking at the effects of smaller class size on "student achievement." 

Student achievement.

Here we go again. Hundreds of studies that accept Big Standardized Test scores as accurate, reliable, and valid proxies for the desired outcome of an education. 

Do researchers use the proxy because they truly believe BS Tests are a valid proxy, because BS Tests are the easiest thing to find that comes in nice numbers, or because they know on some level that publishing a study that examines the effects of X on the scores from a single multiple-choice reading and math test given once a year would cause too many people to respond, "Well, who cares?" Or are they simply implicitly arguing that BS Test scores are, in fact, the whole point and object of education and nothing else matters?

Look, measuring education and student achievement and growth is really hard, because what we want for our children includes a whole lot of hard-to-measure stuff, not to mention things that don't really kick in or pay off until years later. Plus all the things that require a slow approach; can you measure how well a student can read and reflect and dive into a full novel by giving them a series of multiple choice questions about a 500-word excerpt? No, you cannot. But somehow many folks have come to accept that a tiny, not-very-valid measure of a tiny sliver of a tiny part of a whole human's education can be treated as a proxy for the whole big picture. And that leads to all sorts of bad conclusions.

This particular instance stands out because I don't think there's a single human being who remembers being in a K-12 classroom who does not understand that smaller class size is a plus. It guarantees students more attention, makes the teacher's job easier (both in teaching and management), and provides the student with a more human experience. There isn't a parent on the planet who, given the choice, would say "Don't put my child in the class with fifteen students-- I want her in the class with 45." There isn't a teacher on the planet who would say, "Yeah, could you just jam ten more students into each of my classes, because that will make my job easier." Need more? There's a whole organization (Class Size Matters) that can provide more. 

You can line up studies that "prove" that class size doesn't matter from here to the moon and the eyerolls and muttered comments of "bullshit" will far outnumber the responses of, "Oh, well, I see. I guess I don't care how big the class is after all." Because no sensible human being would believe that class size doesn't matter. And when research is based on bad and incomplete data that causes it to arrive at literally unbelievable conclusions, it does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Smith goes on to make some valid points. Like good teachers are better than bad teachers, and there is not an infinite supply of good teachers. So if we hire a bunch more teachers in order to reduce class size, we will end up hiring less-than-great teachers. Fair enough. Though I will point out that putting a mediocre teacher in front of a small class gives you a better chance of success than putting them in front of a large class. 

Maybe we could use the money to raise salaries and attract more good teachers rather than reduce class sizes, Smith suggests, and boy have we been here before. In 2015, Marguerite Roza and the Georgetown Edunomics Lab were trying to make a case for the Super Sardinemaster-- one great teacher in front of a couple hundred students. Way back in 2010, Bill Gates (who, I will remind you, has never been right about education) thought it sounded like a great idea. Reformsters like the idea because it's cheap. For a while, the Super Sardinemaster was imagined as a great teacher working over the internet with many students, but we ran a large scale experiment about that kind of teaching back in 2020, and mostly everyone hated it.

What many economists understand about education could be spread out on the head of a pin and still leave room for a flock of angels to hold a good-sized square dance. But they ought to understand that using bad data leads to bad results, and this is a particularly dramatic demonstration of that principle. Too much education research rests on a foundation of junk, no more reliably stable than a pile of sardines