Let's Have Some Education Reform

It is past time for education reform.

The privatization crowd hasn't made a lot of noise about the "status quo" in a while, because currently much of the status quo is what they forced on education. The new status quo is loaded with bad, toxic ideas; some are now old enough that the Duncan and DFER crowd waste our time opining about the days when their bad ideas were shiny and new and not dusty and disproven.

American education has never been perfect, has (like the country) been on a long journey to try to live up to its own ideals-- and the journey doesn't always lead directly forward. So what reforms do we need right now to move education forward?

End Test-centric Schooling

It is time to end the tyranny of the Big Standardized Test, which warps and distorts the shape of education. We do test prep drill instead of full, deep, rich studies. We judge every school expenditure, every education program, every idea by one question-- will this raise scores on a mediocre multiple-choice math and reading test given once per year. 

We have convinced a generation of teachers and students that the only real job of schools is to get students to score well on the Big Standardized Test. What a cramped, meager vision of education. 

If we absolutely can't quit the test, then at the very barest minimum, we have to remove every last stake from it. That includes never again using it as a proxy for "student achievement," which is probably impossible because education journalists and education researchers are so addicted to that sloppy shorthand. 

How will we know how students are doing? That's a tough question, but my real answer is we don't know all that much now, because the sliver of data produced by the BS Test is tiny and certainly disproportionate to the amount of damage that focusing on the test does to education. Start by asking the big questions, like "what is education for" and then start trying to figure out how to measure that instead of asking "What can we measure and reduce to simple data, and how can we convince ourselves that that's what's really important."

Regulate Choice

Choicers have insisted every step of the way that charters and vouchers should operate free from government oversight and regulation because the magical free market will take care of it. We are far enough into the experiment that this assurance is bunk. Furthermore, children only get one shot at school-- it is unacceptable to have to tell a student "Sorry. Turns out we didn't know what we were doing and your last few years of school were a waste." Choicers are going to say, "But bad public schools do that, too" and maybe they do, but you don't accept it there, so why accept it for choice schools.

And that goes double for voucher schools. If you want to get voucher money, your doors will be open to all students, you won't discriminate, and you will meet the basic educational standards of the state. If you want to be free of government oversight and regulation, then don't take vouchers and remain a fully independent private school.

And education savings accounts should also have oversight. The kind of guardrails that Arizona voters wanted in order to prevent the kind of fraud and abuse that Arizaon's program typified. 

Taxpayers deserve accountability and transparency for how their education dollars are spent, not assurances that magical free market forces will make everything okay. 

Worried about parental choice? It is not necessary to unleash an unregulated free market to give them choice, and it is absolutely necessary to have oversight and regulation to protect the interests of the rest of society. Spoiler alert: parents are not by any stretch of the imagination the only stakeholders in education.

End Teacher Micro-management

The technoreformsters of the modern era have dreamed of a world in which classrooms are teacher-proof and teaching requires only slightly more qualifications than a fast food fry cook. The result is continued micro-management of teachers and a deprofessionalized profession. Teachers should work with support and guidance in a system that is built on trust. 

Do not try to legislate curriculum and instruction. Do not decide that whatever program a senator just heard on a podcast should be turned into a legislative mandate. By all means, advocate for better and better curriculum and instruction, but do it by making the case to teachers as if they were, in fact, education professionals, and don't just try to force them to follow the flavor of the month.

Let teachers teach. Yes, hold them accountable to professional standards. But let them do their damned jobs. Give them the tools and support they need. Make the profession attractive again with decent levels of pay and autonomy linked to power and responsibility. 

And in connection with this--

Fix the teacher pipeline

Look, the teacher training pipeline has never been great, but these days its even worse. It has always suffered from college professors whose familiarity with K-12 classrooms runs from limited to non-existent. Now add to that education departments that are teaching future teachers that their job is mainly test prep. 

I've talked about better approaches to teacher training many times. They programs should emphasize content knowledge, a big pedagogical toolbox, and lots of support in the early stages. 

Really fix the administrator pipeline

Show me a school with problems, and I will show you a school with a bad administrator. Administrative jobs are the least attractive in education-- all the responsibility and little power. So maybe they just attract a lot of the wrong people. But we don't talk about this issue nearly enough. 

Fix the research pipeline

So much education is junk-- or indistinguishable from junk. And working teachers don't have the time to sort through the mountain of stuff. I sure wish there was a way for meaningful, useful research to get to classroom teachers. 

Funding

Can we bring an end to the American desire to fund education on the cheap? A tough haul, but still a reform that is needed. Fund so that districts can compete for top teachers. Fund so that districts can lower class sizes and provide more supports for teachers and students. Fund so that outdated facilities can be brought up to speed. Fund so that some students aren't attending what everyone knows is the poor, run down school. 

Talk about what education is for

This is not a question we will ever answer definitively for all of the country. But our failure to talk about it all has allowed Certain Folks to plug in their own answer, which appears to be roughly "To generate a stream of data that will allow corporate overlords to better command and select meat widgets to generate profits." This is not a great answer, but we've never discussed it. Nor did we ever discuss "The purpose of school is to generate good scores on the BS Test," so we were just stuck with it.

One of the challenges of the classroom is that you face a hundred different expectations, most unspoken. We should have the conversation and not be afraid that it's a question that can't be settled, because the conversation really matters, and people who want education to suck for Lessers because "those people will just be digging ditches anyway" should have to say so out loud.

Rebuild the social commitment

Part of the conversation we haven't had and part of the effect of the free market choice movement has been to quietly torpedo the societal commitment to educating all children. We need to strengthen that commitment.

It's not a new issue. We can go all the way back to the days after Brown v. Board when a whole lot of folks complained, "What do you mean I have to pay taxes so Black kids can go to school??!!" Part of the free market education project as envisioned by Milton Friedman has always been taking education as a commitment for which society, through government, takes responsibility and turning it into a commodity for which individuals take responsibility. The underlying message of school choice is "If you want an education for your kid, that's a You problem." Vouchers, dressed up as choice and freedom, are a pint-sized payoff to soften the blow (given enough years, I predict they would slowly shrink away entirely).

This is wrong at least two ways. First, it's a shitty, selfish stance, a declaration that I should never be in any way inconvenienced for the benefit of my fellow human. It's an odious ideology. Second, it's impractically short-sighted. Do you really imagine that you will suffer no ill effects if large sectors of society are under-educated? History says you are a dope. In fact, as Adam Laats points out in Mr Lancaster's System, part of the origin of our system is a societal concern about too many unschooled youths running about. 

This is one of the cheapest asks on my list. It just takes some people in leadership positions to talk about how we are all of us stakeholders in education and we all benefit from a well-educated citizenry. It just takes some leaders to talk about how we have a collective responsibility to make it possible for every child to unlock their potential to the benefit of not only them, but all of us. Lord, how long has it been since we had leaders talking like that? Instead we get noise about how education will fix inequity (so nobody else in government needs to work on the problem) and education will help individuals make more money and/or be more useful to future employers or talk about how schools must serve parents because the students are their parents' chattel. 

Screw all of that. We all pay for education because we all benefit from education. Because the most fundamental feature of a nation is that we take care of the other people in that nation. Because no nation ever ran into trouble because of too much education. Education is the work of helping young humans find and embrace their best and truest selves even as they achieve greater understanding of what it means to be fully human in the world. I want to hear leaders talk like that, and then I want them to craft education policy like they believe it.

Is this an exhaustive list?

Probably not. Feel free to add to it in the comments.

I’ve been starting and restarting this post for a couple of years now, because I believe we need education reform-- as long as we understand that “ed reform” doesn’t mean what it meant ten or twenty years ago. Something just possessed me to finally finish it off today. And I hope the message gets out there.

The Testing Barrier for Whole Books

There's been a growing amount of noise over the absence of complete books from high school education. That's a good thing, though like many educational issues, it's a cause that can be used in the service of not-particularly-swell goals. But let me tell you what we should be looking at.

The barrier to whole works in the classroom is not student laziness or social media or screens or our transformation into a post-literate society, though all of those factors deserve discussion.

The problem is testing. Not just the effects of the Big Standardized Tests, but the fact that really meaningful assessment a student's work with a whole book is nearly impervious to any sort of standardized test at all. And yet the past several decades has been marked by a push to reduce all assessment to simple standardized data points.

I have ranted about the effects of the BS Test on reading at length. The best way to prepare for a test is to run students through lessons that closely mimic the test. This is the flip side of the principle that you should design an assessment to closely fit what and how you have taught, which is why you design your test after you have designed your instructional unit-- but of course the BS Tests were meant to drive and control instruction, so they came first.

Anyway, the best way to prepare students for a test that is based on superficial multiple-choice questions in response to a context-free short excerpt is to subject them to batteries of multiple-choice questions attached to short context-free excerpts. Education "experts" have tried to argue that an excerpt is fine, that in many instances it's all that's necessary and we don't need to bother with complete works. These experts are full of it.

But the reliance on the BS Test is just a symptom of the trouble with reading whole books.

There's no easy, standardizable way to assess student's work with a whole book. How do we work our way into a whole book? Slowly, carefully. Plenty of support. Lots of discussion. Lots of mulling and reflecting. Maybe some reading of other opinions about the work. 

Studying a whole book is the epitome of work that cries out for slow schooling. The time to dig deep, to turn the pieces over and over. And the best results are not particularly easy to assess.

The cheap and ugly method is superficial and pointless (I still have bitter memories of a test question about Oliver Twist asking about the appearance of Bill Syke's dog). But it's easy to check, easy to score, produces a clear digital score. I was fond of assigning papers, with topics often growing organically out of classroom discussion. It gets even better when you start talking and writing about the connections between different works (Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness make an intriguing pair). And if you have thoroughly wormed your way into the piece, projects that allow students to build and repackage their understanding (and make jokes-- I have always maintained that the more education you have, the more jokes you get) in ways that are both illuminating. I still have fond memory of one group's sketch in which Hamlet went on The Dating Game and tried to choose between Ophelia, Edna Pontellier, and Lady Brett Ashley. My colleague regularly put Lady MacBeth on trial (redeemable or not) in her AP class and my 12th grade vocational students served as the jury. 

Point being, you can dig deep into the meanings and ideas of whole books, many of which defy any attempt to declare that there is Just One True Way to read them. They become rich sources of experience existing at the intersection of the work and the students and the teacher's own expert guidance, but you aren't going to measure that in a quick-to-take, easy-to-score assessment.

The SAT is supposed to measure college level reading, yet a new study shows that the test is getting, well, dumber. The passages are shorter, and mostly expository (aka the kind of thing that is more likely to have One True Reading).  Says Thomas Aquinas College Vice President John Goyette, “The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore.”

The Classic Learning Test wants to pitch itself as a better, less woke, more classically awesome alternative to the SAT, but it has failed to make much of a mark, though Florida likes using it for a graduation test because more students pass it. 

But no standardized test of the SAT or ACT or CLT sort is ever going to provide a useful assessment of really reading whole books. The AP test's version of "pick a work from this list and write this essay" came closer to an ideal, but the AP folks have totally lost their way and are now looking for a director of AP English Language and Composition who will be "leveraging generative AI to author and/or review assessment content, improving and/or making more efficient assessment processes and outputs."

The challenge remains-- teaching whole books requires time and care and does not lend itself to the kind of speed and "efficiency" favored so much in education these days, nor can it be assessed in nice, neat simple numbers. That doesn't mean it can't be assessed at all, but that assessment is best if it's loose and flexible and takes into account the subjectivity involved in grappling with whole works. Teaching whole books takes time, and it requires a level of comfort with squishy imprecise assessments that involve a certain amount of flexibility and grace. If you can't get comfortable with those features, you will have a hard time putting whole books back in your classroom. 

Use Google's AI Or Else

Tired of tech companies trying to shove AI down your throat? Or worse, your children’s throats? Google says open wide, or else!

As covered by Dana Goldstein and Natasha Singer for the New York Times, Google has announced that starting next fall, schools will have the option of turning off AI in the Google toolbox offered to students. But--

If the school turns off AI, threatens the not-actual-mobsters that run the company, students will not have access to Google search. As Goldstein and Singer report:

“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

And, you know, creating a version of Google for students that doesn't incorporate AI is just incompatible with their plans to recruit young customers too hard to do.

This from the same company that cannot produce a genAI product that doesn't easily facilitate cheating. Guided Learning is supposed to get students to Learn Stuff rather than just using a cheatbot (spoiler alert: it's still just a cheatbot).

But Google, the folks who previously declared internally that its school products were intended to create a pipeline of future users, really really really really REALLY want to put AI in front of the 70 million future users sitting in schools. They have just had a "negative cash flow quarter" thanks to massive AI spending. That is further exacerbated by the discovery that this AI-incorporated search that they want to force on students actually makes less money than the old approach.

Look, if you are of a Certain Age, you might still harbor the quaint notion that Google's main business is running a search engine. It is not; the New Google's (the post "Don't Be Evil" Google) main business is advertising. But we tend to be sensitive about the idea of turning over young minds and eyeballs to advertisers, so it has been useful for Google to wear its Ed Tech mask when approaching schools.

Only the Ed Tech mask won't cover up AI, and educators and parents and even students have been pretty clear that they'd rather not give children unfettered access to AI products. 

This is a hell of a bold move for Google, considering that there are plenty of other search engines in the world.

I expect that many other tech companies will be whipping up a counter-Google education campaigns by end of business today.  I can only hope that this piece of evil thuggery will blow up in Google's piggy corporate faces, and I certainly intend to share with my own local school district how I think they should respond. 

In My County, Children Vote

I will vote today. I always vote; I am what political operatives call a super-voter, a person who has voted in every election he was ever eligible to vote in, and therefore can be counted on to vote next time, so aiming a megaphone of electioneering at him might not be a waste of time. Today, I only vote in three races, and none of them have any great significance because it would be a huge shock and surprise if they didn't go the way they are expected to go. Josh Shapiro seems hard to beat, and my state and US House members-- well, in my area, if Jesus registered as a Democrat and ran against a drowned rat registered as a Republican, I would not bet against the rat.

Anyway, I will still vote, because that's what good citizens do-- they vote. No matter what. No matter the outcome.

But I won't vote until after I pick up the Board of Directors from school, because they always vote with me. Not in the actual election. But in my county, someone decided years ago to start offering ballots to children.

The children vote on issues like favorite type of cookie or best pet or best way to spend vacation. They vote on a special ballot, hand it in, and in a week or so, the local newspaper/website will publish the results. 

One actual result of this is that the Board knows what an election is, how it the voting place is laid out, how one approaches it, waits one's turn, signs your name, marks a ballot-- the whole business. When the day comes that they can vote in the real election, it will be exciting, but it will also be familiar and unintimidating.

Yes, their teachers sometimes run election simulations. But this gives kids exposure to the real thing, the whole business of voting. No mystery. No fear.

And as a bonus, thanks to some of my former colleagues, some high school students are spending the day as volunteers at polling places.

The cost of this Young Voter Education Program is minimal. There's some non-zero number of man-hours used to tabulate. There's the copier paper used to make the ballots. That's about it. 

So my hat's off today to county officials who hit on a simple but effective method of educating the next generation of voters about how the process works and helping them prepare for the day when they can try to execute their obligations as US citizens. 

It's Not A Tutor

There's a new ten-week study from the UK looking at AI as--well, the study people writing about it (like Greg Toppo at The 74) insist on calling it AI tutoring. There's also a recent paper studying the use of Khanmigo which is also characterized as an "AI tutor." We'll look at the results in a moment, but first, I want to look at that term--

"AI Tutor" is yet another marketing term. "Tutor" tries to connect the software to the (somewhat dubious) data showing that tutoring does awesome things for learning! (Two sigma!!) But the use of "tutor" also evokes the idea of a human tutor, a knowledgeable human expert who sits down with the student to provide face-to-face individual support and assistance for learning. That's such a more charming image than, say, a solitary student hunched over a desk and working her way through a ten-inch stack of worksheets.

In fact, if we're thinking about a student ploughing through worksheets or simply buried in a book about the topic at hand, nobody says that students is being tutored. They're just studying. The worksheets are a study aid. The book is just a study aid. And any sort of software-- that's just a study aid being viewed through a computer screen. 

The advantage of actual tutoring (if any) is working with a human who can enter into dialogue about what the student does or does not understand, drilling down to find the mental error the student is tripping over. The tutor also has the advantage of the ability to put human-to-human pressure on the student to perform-- to actually try and keep at it, as opposed to just checking out and/or wandering off. 

GenAI promises that kind of interaction, or at least markets itself on that notion. But the Oreopoulus and Low Khanmigo study found, as did an earlier study this year, that students don't actual interact in that way. Students are supposed to be able to message Khanmigo to discuss issues, but only 17% followed up on a mistake. And many didn't do anything at all. As Khan himself told Matt Barnum of the program's tutoring efficacy for students, “They just didn’t use it much.”

The new study is a trial with ten weeks worth of lessons for 1,179 UK students with Eedi's product, built on Gemini, Google's fine-tuned for teaching genAI bot. Google Deepmind did the analysis and discovered that the AI didn't make much difference compared to "static content." There are differences between girls and boys when it came to AI vs. human tutors, but generally not much difference. Eedi proudly notes that the AI generated hardly any errors. But in terms of advantages, it offered just one-- it's probably cheaper than an actual human tutor. 

What about the 5% problem-- the finding that these programs work great for students who use the program as intended, but that's only about 5% of all students. And there's plenty of reason to think that the 5% students are the ones least in need of help or at the very least would have done just fine with any sort of study aid. Eedi's students engaged more regularly, however there is zero mystery to that finding-- the Eedi sessions were built into regular class time. And 1 in 5 students still ignored the software when a "do you need help" message popped up. Clippy can relate.

AI "tutors" still lack one other element of the human approach-- motivation. Bibi Groot, Eedi's chief impact officer, told Toppo that AI tutoring is “great to support students who are already motivated, but we need to figure out how to motivate students who aren’t motivated in the first place.”

Look, it's not a tutor. It just isn't. It's one more study tool, and for the right student in the right situation with the right material, it might even be a useful one. But a study tool is all it is, and the rush to make it a useful one could only be aided by dropping the charade that it is a replacement for a (costly) human tutor and instead focusing on how it could be a more useful study tool.

But the AI industry isn't going to do that, because it would involve going back to what AI "tutoring" really is-- an extension of the old ed tech Personalized Adaptive Learning model, which was mostly just an endless series of worksheets chosen by an algorithm and fired off at some beleaguered student until they were allowed to unclamp themselves from a screen. But an infinite pile of worksheets was never very compelling-- not even if you shout "But they're coming at you through a computer screen!" 

AI ramps up some of the tech capabilities ("Now, instead of selecting from a library of thousands of worksheets, we can create all new worksheet based on our library of thousands of worksheets!") and the ability to mimic human speech (but not the human thought or insight behind it-- being able to generate a question doesn't make you Socrates). But a study guide, however zippy, is not a tutor. 

ICYMI: Sugar Crash Edition (11/1)

Happy Day After. Now please, don't put up your Christmas decorations today. 

Here comes this week's list. 

Why Gov. Shapiro must say no to federal vouchers

A retired PA superintendent explains why the federal vouchers are a lousy idea.

Public Schools Are Prepping for Federal Choice Cash. They Still Might Not Get It

At EdWeek, Mark Lieberman addresses the continuing pipe dream that the federal vouchers will somehow infuse public schools with cash.

Empathy. Again.

Nancy Flanagan wonders why empathy is in the cross hairs again.

Commissioner Mack says competition is improving EVERYTHING. Show Us The Data.

Sue Kingery Woltanski looks at Florida's education honcho's delight in the privatization of education.

Was American education ever great? What Linda McMahon gets wrong about the past

Matt Barnum provides some historical perspective on Linda McMahon's ahistorical ranting.

It’s Time to Teach Students to Be Drivers of AI, Not Passengers

At The 74, two Newark teachers describe how they manage AI in their classrooms, and it's not the worst framework I've seen.

University of Minnesota report warns student AI use poses 'severe' threat to learning

More research to fill the vast gap that these researchers decry. Some of the conclusions are blindingly obvious (AI use for primary students is a bad idea), but hey, now there's actual research to back it up.

There Is No Alabama Miracle (But There Is a Lesson)

Bruce Baker explains why Alabama's results are nothing to get excited about.

Why Students Hide Themselves from Us

Alfie Kohn, on why students don't always let teachers or parents see who they are. 

One to the Other

Adrian Neibauer shares a learning experience with his students based on "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street."

Ed Reform is Dead — it’s Parent Choice or Public Schools

Ben Riley and Jame Shanahan offer a take on the history of modern ed reform. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but it's an interesting version of the history and though-provoking at that.

Ohio’s Center for Christian Virtue Plans National Network of Religious Private Schools Paid for by Federal Tuition-Tax Credit Vouchers

Jan Resseger looks at one of the groups hoping to cash in on federal vouchers.

Selling Stories

Audrey Watters has a lot this time, including AI marketing, Democratic education leadership, and a host of valuable links.

Who Gets To Tell The Stories About Our Schools?

Jose Luis Vilson looks at the people telling all the stories about schools, and what it takes to have your story listened to.

The Slop is Creeping In

Michelle Banks writes about the frustration of arts communities rejecting AI "art" but still using those execrable AI posters for publicity.

More Than Music

I play in a community band, and a couple of my musical colleagues play in a larger community band festival. The conductor of their last one, Jari Villaueva, wrote this lovely tribute to community bands.

This week at Forbes.com, I reviewed Jen Jennings' excellent new book and also looked at the growing crisis in forced downsizing for districts.

Donnie Iris passed away this week. He was a Western PA icon of sorts, a regional star who peeked around the edges of national fame. This song is the closest he came to a real national hit (though the album King Cool has much of his best work).

The Imaginary One Size Fits All Education

It is one of the most-repeated myths of public education critics. Here's Linda McMahon spouting it again last summer:

We reject the one size fits all education approach. Parents, states, and local leaders know what’s best for our students! The Trump Administration is returning education decisions to those closest to our children. https://t.co/ItvHS7JxvB

— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) July 10, 2026

"We reject the one size fits all education approach." 

You and everyone else, ma'm. The American school system is not one size fits all. It is structured in a way that makes one size fits all functionally impossible. There are roughly 13,000 public school districts (plus private schools, plus charter schools) and each is controlled by its own local board, with each board making its own set of decisions that are then filtered down through individual building administrations. That's a whole lot of different sizes of education.

Which was, of course, the central complaint of the standards movement-- that there were too many districts and buildings and teachers doing all sorts of different things, and why don't we impose one size for all? Common Core was their best, biggest attempt to inflict OSFA on the nation, and it failed, a big clunky wave that shattered and fragmented on the individual rocks of a fragmented system. People with power tried, really hard, to make one size fit all in US education, and it didn't work, not even when the standards went into witness protection and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. 

One size fits all for education in this country??!! When I was still teaching, I wasn't even one size fits alling it for a single day. Each class needed its own fit. My vocational students didn't need to master MLA research format and my college bound students didn't need to wrestle (yet) with resumes and job reports. Certain students needed a different approach, and certain other students needed an even more different approach. And that's before we get to the occasional special class, like the class I once taught that was 75% teen moms. 

Nor was I one size fits all from year to year-- every year involved more fine tuning and editing and reframing what I had done before. 

One size fits all schooling is right up there with hasn't changed in a century schooling and factory training schooling-- they are all glib criticisms effortlessly deployed by people who don't actually know what goes on inside actual schools. These are also the same folks who think that one size fits all schooling is a great idea if they get to pick the size ("If all teachers did X, then all students would learn Y") and then get pissed off that they can't make the same t-shirt fit on every single teacher and student in the country. 

One size fits all education is, in fact, a terrible idea. Fortunately, it's an idea to which education is highly resistant. Unfortunately, it's an idea that amateur education reformsters never tire of A) leveling as an accusation or B) trying to impose.