Maybe Old Teachers Don't Suck

A repeated refrain among some reformsters is that we need to get rid of tenure, job protections, and seniority rules for teachers because the system is clogged with washed-up uncaring has-beens and when budgets are slashed and staffing is cut, it's the hot young rock stars of education that are thrown out on the street (oddly enough, their concern over this issue never translates into calls to knock it off with the budget slashing, but that's another conversation).

But what if older teachers didn't suck?

This month the Learning Policy Institute released a new research brief, Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness? The report is a meta-analysis, a study of studies that looks at thirty studies over the last thirty years. And it turns out that maybe older teachers don't suck.

I'm going to start with my usual caveat-- many of these studies use student scores on the Big Standardized Test as a proxy for student achievement or teacher effectiveness or general swellness of the school, and it needs to be said that this is crap. The BS Tests are not a measure of student achievement; they are a measure of student ability to take BS Tests. We'll be able to accomplish a lot more in the world of teacher training, development, and effectiveness when we start talking about the real marks of excellent teaching instead of this standardized test baloney. But test scores are the measure reformsters have chosen, and I'm provisionally willing to use reformster tools to disprove reformster policy ideas, because if they can't win on their own court with their own ball and their own rules, that's just further proof that they should get out of the game.

That said, here are what study authors Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky found.

1) Teacher experience raises student "achievement" throughout the teacher's career. The gains are steepest in the first few years of the teaching career, but they keep on happening through the next several decades.

2) As teachers gain experience, students do better on other measures of achievement. This one surprised me-- the more years of experience a teacher has, the fewer days her students miss school. Teacher experience is also positively correlated with student discipline, student time spent on homework, and student time spent reading for pleasure.

I'm wondering if some of this is correlation-- are experienced teachers less likely to be assigned less well-behaved students? But it also makes sense-- experience in particular lets teachers learn how to handle classroom management without making boneheaded mistakes that make things worse ("If I hear one more peep out of any of you..."). Experience also teaches teachers how to assign homework that isn't a waste of everyone's time.

3) Teachers make the greatest gains in effectiveness when they work in a collegial environment. In other words, you do better teaching when you are connected to a supportive team of colleagues. I would file this finding under Too Dumb To Need Mentioning, except that there are a bunch of folks who would like to turn schools into teach thunderdome where teachers compete with each other for raises, bonuses, and job security. So for those folks, here's some actual research to show how dumb it is to install a system built on competition instead of cooperation.

4) More experienced teachers help everybody. Research indicates that teachers are more effective when they work with more experienced teachers. In other words, experienced teachers don't just do a better job for their own students, but elevate the game for the other teachers in the building.

There are several important implications here. Last year, in discussing two other big studies that revealed similar findings, Stephen Sawchuk homed in on one of the most important implications-- the picture of "teacher quality as a mutable characteristic that can be developed, rather than a static one that's formed in the first few years on the job." We need to stop talking about good teachers and bad teachers as if various teachers are forever locked into a solid-state permanent status as one of the other; instead, let's look at teaching as an action and talk about how to do it most effectively.

The LPI study offers three recommendations.

First, increase job stability. No kidding. Here's a thought-- since teachers do their best work as they accumulate more experience, why not come up with a system that encourages teachers to stick around. Like, a system that offered tangibles like higher pay for longevity and intangibles like job security that favors the more experienced teachers. Incentivize sticking around. Just a thought.

Second, create a collegial atmosphere. Create a system where teachers are encouraged to cooperate, not a system that incentivizes non-cooperation. The calls to make it easier to fire old teachers, the systems for making pay and job security based on "beating" the other teachers in your school-- these are exactly wrong.

Third, look at longevity in high needs schools. If teachers do their best work after years in the classroom, then schools that have nothing but beginning teachers who are steadily churned in and out (as they complete their two year stint with TFA or move on to other schools) are schools that are not getting the top quality in staff. Staffing your turnaround charter with nothing but newbies and led by operators with no actual classroom experience-- that's not just an educational issue or an economic issue, but an equity issue as well. Staffing your most challenging district school with your youngest teachers and offering them no incentives to stay there for the long haul (from pay to resources to a capable principal) is, once again, an equity issue.

As always, I cast a somewhat dubious eyeball at educational research, but the implications here are fairly clear-- it would be useful to stop looking at experienced teachers as big ticket items that are fat that needs to be trimmed from budgets and instead see them as a major driver of excellence within schools. Is every experienced teacher a paragon of educational awesomeness? Of course not. But the research seems clear enough-- teachers generally age like fine wine (or the stinky cheese that my wife likes for some reason), and it would strengthen the educational system to encourage the teacher pool to age long and well.

System

One of the dreams of ed reform has been to come up with a system that is teacher-proof, a program or script or curriculum that works exactly the same way no matter what carbon-based life form you have propped up in front of the classroom.

Systems are particularly appealing as a method of controlling "bad" actors, with "bad" defined as "does not do what I want them to do." This is a false hope, a snare and a delusion. Systems rarely fix bad actors, and frequently hamstring your best people.

You have a troupe of dancers, some of leap and soar and move with grace and beauty, and a few of whom dart around the stage like spastic rhinos. So to get the rhinos slowed down and under control, you put everyone in the company in forty-pound cement shoes. The rhinos are now chastened and restrained, but your best dancers can no longer leap and soar and move with grace and beauty.

You worry that the cooks in your restaurant have too much variety, some producing genius blends of flavor and texture and culinary awesomeness, while others can barely make meatloaf. So you create a menu system with easy instructions that anybody can follow that will always result in a predictably consistent product. Congratulations. You are now McDonalds, and nobody is ever going to go to your restaurant because they are in the mood for excellence.

You want your students to write with structure and organization, so you teach the five paragraph format. In fact, you strictly enforce the five paragraph system so that nobody wanders off the farm or blunders into the weeds. And now all the students who could have been excellent writers of sophisticated essays with varied and content-driven structure will just crank our mediocre five-paragraph essays.

The idea that a system can raise the not-very-good performers up to a level of excellence is an illusion, a lie. Nobody gets to excellence by following a system laid out by someone else and designed to be simple enough that nobody could supposedly mess it up. Such a system might raise the bottom of the barrel barely a hair. But at the top end, your idiot-proof system will require your best people to act more like the idiots the system was designed for.

On top of that, because the problem people are the ones most likely to disregard or mess up the system, your effect on them is likely to be minimal. They may simply not want to follow along, or they may not understand how the system is supposed to work and so when it's time to adjust or adapt, they can't do it well.

If Mr. Dimwittie doesn't know how to teach prepositions, handing him a scripted lesson may make him slightly less terrible, but it will not make him good. On the other hand, handing the script to Mrs. Brightangel, who already had a killer lesson about prepositions and understands them thoroughly-- that will just turn her excellent teaching with mediocre teaching.

Your best hope is that Mrs. Brightangel will be able to use her deep knowledge of content and teaching, her professional expertise and experience, to chop up, augment, replace, and ignore the scripted lesson. She will be the teacher equivalent of a Project Runway contestant (personally, I hope she's Chris March) who has to make a couture gown out of a burlap sack. Your best hope is that Mrs. Brightangel will find a way to do what she knows she needs to do, even if you put her in cement shoes.

In short, education in this country will not be improved by coming up with systems that are teacher-proof.

The solution is to have more teachers that are system-proof.

Remedial Baloney

When arguing about college readiness, reformsters like to point to the number of college freshmen placed in remedial courses are proof that high schools aren't rigorous enough with coursework, aren't honest enough with grades, and aren't standardized enough with curriculum.

There are problems with that. First of all, we keep using the words "college ready" as if we know what that means. We don't. Ready for which college? Ready for which major at that college? You'll for instance see a stat about how very few students get high enough scores in reading and math, as if a student can only be college ready if she has sufficient background to major in both.

But hey-- if colleges say they need to put more and more freshmen in remedial courses, doesn't that mean something. I'd say yes, it does. It means one or more of the following:

1) The college has decided to increase its revenue flow by requiring more students to take more remedial courses that do not count toward graduation (but which must still be paid for). Since remedial coursework can be taught by the lowest rung on the professorial ladder, they're cheap to put on.

2) The college has decided to increase its revenue flow by loosening its acceptance standards to take students who aren't really prepared to be there. If Pat got Cs in vocational-prep classes in our high school, don't act all surprised that Pat turns out to be ill-equipped for your mid-rigor college. This makes us crazy at the high school level-- we try to tell Pat, "Look, if you want to go to a really good college, these are the classes you need to take and the skills you need to master," and pat just laughs, because Pat knows a student who snoozed to a Barely Passing GPA and was still happily accepted by Wossamatta U. In this way colleges shoot us all in the foot-- part of the challenge of getting maximum challenge to high school students is that some students have always said," Hmm, what's the easiest, lightest courseload I can get away with here." Don't tell us that Pat wasn't ready for your medium-tough college-- we told you Pat wasn't ready and you sent an acceptance letter anyway.

3) High school grads really are less prepared for college than they used to be. Hmmmm. What has changed about public high schools over the past decade that might account for students getting a lousier education than they used to. It's possible that higher remediation rates are simply further proof that the Common Core and test-centered schooling are failures.

4) Colleges lie. All I have here is anecdotal evidence, but I find it compelling the number of times that I've had a former student tell me about their college saying, "You need to take this remedial course" and the students saying, "No, I don't think so" and not taking the course and never having any trouble academically.

Now, in this morning's Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay offers some research to support at least one of my theories.

Barshay writes about the Alaska Study, conducted by the USED and looking at the University of Alaska, which has not atypically huge remediation numbers-- about a half are placed in "developmental" math, and about a third in "developmental" English. The study suggests that if the university scrapped their placement test and just looked at student high school grades, they'd have had better predictors of the students' college performance. Barshay is not unsympathetic to the university's plight:

And it’s easy to sympathize with college administrators who want to use an objective test. After all, students attend different high schools and take different classes. Some are rigorous. Some aren’t. Some teachers give easy A’s. Others are tough graders. Why would it be fair to let the student who took easy classes waltz into a college course, while the student who struggled under a demanding teacher is dispatched to a remedial class? Wouldn’t be better to figure out exactly what students know?

Theoretically, yes. Practically speaking, no. The study found a much higher correlation between high school GPA and college achievement than between placement test results and college grades. The study even found a bunch of examples of  my #4-- students who bypassed the remedial courses they were supposed to take and did just fine.

Michelle Hodara, lead author of the study, has some thoughts about why the placement test system doesn't work. For one thing, it may have been over a year since the students last sat in a math class, "but once they’re immersed in math classes again, it comes back to them, and they don’t really need to repeat an entire year of algebra."

Hodara has another theory that I find intriguing:

Hodara argues that what students know, or “content knowledge,” isn’t the most important thing anyway. She says that GPAs capture important non-cognitive skills that tests don’t. “It’s likely that if you have a high GPA, even if you’re in an ‘easy’ class, you likely showed up and turned your homework in, and did things that are important for college readiness and success,” said Hodara.

I'm not going to get too excited about this single study. It covered just four years' worth of students at just one university, so while it's certainly suggestive, it's also possible that many of the problems it uncovered are problems specific to the University of Alaska. But it joins a body of research reaching similar conclusions (here's a big fat study from 2012 also concluding that screening tests were doing a crappy job and colleges should just check the GPA).

The rate of college remedial class placement certainly means something, and that includes the possibility that the process used by colleges to place students in those courses is just chock-full of baloney and bad data.

Pearson & Irony Overload

Here's an article about a familiar topic in education-- "Why Teachers Are Leaving the Classroom, and the Effort To Get More To Stay." True, the topic has been hit pretty thoroughly, but one more piece on the topic can't hurt and perhaps this particular website reaches a different audience than-- wait. What?

Yes, this article about the teacher shortage is on LearnED, the website covering News About Learning and operated by Pearson. Yes, that Pearson. The All Your Education Business Are Belong To Us Pearson.

So. What does Pearson know about the teacher shortage and how to fix it? Well, strap on your irony impact helmets, boys and girls. This ride is short, but it's designed for maximum psychic whiplash.

The unnamed writer opens with a close-up on Jahana Hayes, National Teacher of the Year, a woman with a story so inspiring that she could give John King a run for his money. Hayes reminds us that while students are the whole point, "recruiting, supporting and retaining culturally competent and diverse educators cannot be overlooked."

Next up-- Dr. Kathy McKnight, Principal Director of Research at Pearson, Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness (not this one, but this one). She's a co-author of a December, 2014, report from Pearson entitled Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative which is seventy-some pages of history and proposals for some alternate universe. Here's one swell pull quote:

One study concluded that the TFA and Teaching Fellows programs represent two examples of program models for recruiting, selecting, training and supporting teachers that can address teacher shortages in secondary math within high-need schools without decreasing student achievement.

The report also likes the idea of "neo-differentiated roles" and differentiated pay and new career ladders, as well as performance-based compensation (aka merit pay).

Here's what strikes me as weird(er) about this report-- by December of 2014, Pearson had already released, with honcho Michael Barber's personal seal of approval right on it, the big report on the Assessment Renaissance which, among other things, described how teachers would be reduced to educational flight attendants, there to fluff pillows and check on student comfort while students got all their educational content, testing, and personally crafted curriculum straight from the the Pearson-imbued computers.

So does Pearson have entire right hand divisions working on things that the left hand division will render moot? Is part of Pearson set up as a sort of front for the rest of Pearson, to make it look like they are working hard on, say, how to pump up the teaching profession while in the back room, the real Pearson is working on how to make the teaching profession vanish entirely? It's not an idle question-- either Pearson is spectacularly devious or amazingly disorganized and confused.

But I digress. Back to Dr. McKnight and the teacher shortage.

McKnight starts by noting that there is such a thing, and rattles off some states. Is this a bad thing?

“Experts tell us that on average, it takes four to five years for teachers to feel comfortable in the classroom and to become proficient in their teaching,” says Dr. Kathy McKnight, Principal Director of Research at Pearson. “We’re also seeing 40- to 50-percent of new teachers leaving the profession before they get to that five-year mark.”

Probably ought to pass this news along to all the people who think that the most pressing problem in education is that it's too hard to fire older teachers.

But does McKnight have any idea why teachers are leaving in droves? She does, and I want you to check to make sure that helmet is on tight before you read this next quote that comes, I will remind you, from a Director of Research of Pearson being cited on a Pearson website:

So many teachers feel like they’re not treated as professionals. They feel over-managed, they’re not rewarded for their expertise, and they don’t feel like they have a voice in the education system.

Over-managed? You mean, like entire educational systems and programs designed by a textbook and test manufacturer to be teacher-proof so that any semi-sentient being can unbox the program and just follow the directions? Voiceless, as in being turned into a cog in a machine designed by a large, faceless corporation that is busily consuming the entire ed biz for the benefit of their own bottom line? And never mind how much I'm rewarded for my expertise (because, no, merit pay doesn't work)-- it would be an exciting day if my expertise were consulted or considered rather than ignored by a corporation that sends salespeople out to tell me how to do my job, as if I'm too dull and thick to know how to use a text book or a computer program.

Research from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that a large percent of American teachers, compared to those in other countries, feel like their profession is not valued by the public.

Gee, thanks, nameless Pearson website writer. Does this mean that Pearson will stop sending lobbyists to capital buildings to tell elected representatives that those elected officials need not talk to real teachers when they have access to folks from a huge multinational education corporation? Does that mean I can expect Pearson to take back its support for TFA, with its minimal training and "anybody can be a teacher" ethics?

McKnight has some thoughts about how to retain teachers. These thought harken back to the career ladder idea and boil down to "We can hold onto teachers by making them not-teachers. Curriculum directors, or tech specialists, or do research or work with policy makers."

New generations will also bring new definitions of teaching. Young people who only teach for a few years and leave. Old folks who have finished one career and might want to try teaching. Well, now at least I'm hearing from the Pearson that I recognize. Let's get more short-timers in here so that schools can waste less money on personnel costs. Maybe the psychic whiplash part of the ride is over and-- uh-oh

“I think about my own profession as a researcher,” Kathy says. “I love doing what I do. I feel like it’s valued by my colleagues. I have an expertise that people need. People trust me to do good work. Why would we think teachers wouldn’t want the same?”

Yes, that would be a completely sensible thing to say-- were it not coming from a corporation that has done its best to squash teacher voice and create an educational system in which teachers are an easily replaced appendage, a cog that simply turns in its prescribed tiny circle on command.

People trust you to do good work? That's great. That's how it should be. But as a teacher, I find that the educational-industrial complex, in which Pearson is the 800 pound gorilla, doesn't trust me to do a damned thing, and is mostly busy coming up with ways to make me irrelevant and unnecessary.

I can't decide whether this little limb of Pearson is simply cluelessly wrapped in the comforting embrace of deep-seated cognitive dissonance, or whether they are trying to gaslight the rest of us. Either way, this little piece of Pearson puffery has made irony so tired that it has to go lie down for an all-day nap.

ICYMI: June Is Busting Out

Here's edu-reading to kick off your June.

How Five Lost Minutes Altered Our Class Culture

A look how even a small shift in how time is used can have a huge impact on the classroom.

Boston To Protesting Students: You're Not Worth It

Jennifer Berkshire takes a look at how Boston reacted, or didn't, to student protests about massive budget cuts.

The Assault on Public Education in North Carolina

Valerie Strauss runs a piece from Stuart Egan that provides a one-stop collection of all the ways North Carolina's citizen-hating legislature has worked to dismantle public education.

Failing the Test

Capital and Main runs a series of pieces looking at the charter industry. This will take you a while to work through, but it's worth it.

Chester Uplands: Exhibit A for Broken Charter Law

The most effed-up funding mess in Pennsylvania, highlighting everything that is so deeply wrong with how we handle charter schools in this state.

English Teacher Re-Titles Classic Poems as Clickbait

One more shot fired in the battle to make classic lit appealing in the internet era. Fun times.

The LA Times Editorial a Distraction

This week the LA Times was apparently hit on the head and ran an editorial critical of the charter industry. Nancy Bailey reminds us of all the reasons we shouldn't get too excited.

Trump University Shows Why For Profit Motives Don't Belong in Education

Probably the only useful thing there is to learn from Trump U-- just how bad naked marketeering looks in education.

Oklahoma's Teacher Shortage: Not Just Salaries

Oklahoma is 49th in teacher salaries, and working hard to drop that lost spot. They started the year with 1,000 unfilled teaching jobs and handed out 1,000 emergency certificates to, well, anybody with a pulse. This is the first of a three-part series considering some real ways to address their shortage. Lessons for everybody here.

Third Way or the Highway

Jennifer Berkshire went to the latest Massachusetts education profiteer confab. What she found there.

What I Hope To Tell My Kids about Muhammad Ali

Jose Vilson reflects on what to tell his students about the death of one of America's great-- and imperfect-- athletes.

Give the Democratic Party Your Two Cents

Yes, there's every reason to believe that the Democratic Party is pretty thoroughly run through with corporate shills, oligarchic toadies, and neoliberal tools. It is also true that a party platform is like the line-up for an all-star game-- hotly debated one day and completely forgotten a month later.

However.

Sometimes it takes a hundred hits of the hammer to crack open the stone. Sometimes it takes a trillion drops of water to smooth the edge of the mountain. Sometimes it takes the voice of one more Who in Whoville to get the message across. So even if, like me, you have your doubts about making your voice heard in the midst of all this foolishness, in a political season in which education should have been a major issue but instead was ignored once again, in the midst of this hopeless hoopla-- well, let's go ahead and speak up if for no other reason than it will make it impossible for the politicians to later say, "Well, gosh, we had no idea y'all felt that way about that thing."

For supporters of public education, it's easy-- the Network for Public Education has created an easy-to-sign-on petition directed to the Democratic Party. Here are some of what NPE calls on the Democrats to support:

Eliminate high stakes testing. Let experienced professional classroom teachers develop the tests they need and use multiple measures for students. Stop using the Big Standardized Test to evaluate teachers and close schools.

Opportunity Gap vs. Achievement Gap. Instead of using a standardized test score gap as an excuse to visit all manner of reformy nonsense on non-white, non-wealthy schools, let's drop the no excuses and zero tolerance approaches and instead give struggling schools the resources they need. Furthermore, let's leave the governance of all schools in the hands of local community members.

IDEA. Finally fund IDEA properly. Finally.

Funding. Do it. And while you're at it, prioritize public school funding over charter funding. And when you fund charters, require them to accept the same proportion of high-needs, high-cost students as the local public schools.

Student privacy. No selling of student data. Keep it safe. Keep it protected. And let parents know what you're thinking about doing before you try to do it.

The Danger of Venture Philanthropists and Big Business Interests. American public education is being broken down and sold off so that rich, powerful people can get their hands on a piece of the $600 billion pile of education money in this country. The Democratic Party should be standing up for local control and quality public education for all students. Do that.


Yes, I know. If it's going to go along with all of this, the Democratic Party will first have to have its lips surgically removed from the buttocks of some rich and powerful folks. But-- and (I can't stress this enough-- a year from now I would much rather be saying, "This is what we told you, and you ignored us, You said no." than to be saying, "Well, we didn't say anything because we figured you'd ignore us."

Sometimes you just have to speak up not because you anticipate a particular reaction or payoff, but because something just needs to be said (now that I think of it, that's kind of the whole philosophy behind this blog). The Democratic Party has largely abandoned public education and the people who work there. We need to tell them what they should be doing, what policies they should be backing.

So follow this link, add your name, and let NPE do the rest. Give the party your two cents. GOP folks-- give your party the message, too. Make some noise. Speak up. It may take a few million more drops before we see results, but we have to say something. If I speak up, I know that I can look at myself in the mirror tomorrow. If Democratic leaders can't, that's not on me. Do what you can. Make a little noise. Say what needs to be said.

Does High GPA = Low Creativity?

In April, research was released that suggests that students with higher grades are actually less innovative than their lower-graded peers.

The research comes from Matthew Mayhew, assoiciate professor of higher education at New York University, working with grad student Benjamin Selznick. The two surveyed over 10,000 undergrad and grad students at colleges and universities in four different counties (USA, Canada, Germany and Qatar) from a wide variety of majors.

To learn more, we asked students about their innovation intentions and capacities, their higher education experiences, and their background characteristics. We also administered a “personality inventory” to address the question of whether innovators are born or made.

I'll admit that I have my doubts about a researcher's ability to measure innovativity, but let's press on and look at the findings. Oh, that's right. I already told you the broad swath here, which is that good grades are not a predictor, in fact are arguably anti-predictors of creativity and innovation.

The researchers suggest that actual innovative capabilities come from two main places:

1) Classroom practices make a difference: students who indicated that their college assessments encouraged problem-solving and argument development were more likely to want to innovate. Such an assessment frequently involves evaluating students in their abilities to create and answer their own questions; to develop case studies based on readings as opposed to responding to hypothetical cases; and/or to make and defend arguments. 

2) Faculty matters – a lot: students who formed a close relationship with a faculty member or had meaningful interactions (i.e., experiences that had a positive influence on one’s personal growth, attitudes and values) with faculty outside of class demonstrated a higher likelihood to be innovative. When a faculty member is able to serve as a mentor and sounding board for student ideas, exciting innovations may follow.

The researchers also found that networking was hugely important, that getting the undergrad plugged into a network of like-minded peers as well as using those connections to see their ideas connected to the real world-- all that helped, too.

And why did the researchers think that as GPA went down, innovation went up?

From our findings, we speculate that this relationship may have to do with what innovators prioritize in their college environment: taking on new challenges, developing strategies in response to new opportunities and brainstorming new ideas with classmates.

So if you're more interested in taking on new and different challenges, collaboration, and cool new stuff than in just jumping through the right hoops to score that grade, you might just be a future innovator. Those strategies, however, may not be the best move for your GPA.

Also, this:

Additionally, findings elsewhere strongly suggest that innovators tend to be intrinsically motivated – that is, they are interested in engaging pursuits that are personally meaningful, but might not be immediately rewarded by others.

Getting grades is about jumping through hoops and getting a cookie for your troubles. If you don't really care about cookies, the hoops start to look less interesting. And if you, as above, happen to connect with teachers or friends who also find some things more interesting than hoop-jumping, you become even more primed for innovation.

They also hint that the students most likely to be rewarded and encouraged for non-hoopy behavior are white males. In a culture where women and non-white folks are taught to toe the line, behave themselves and color within the lines, that makes sense. In a world where some folks think that what non-white non-wealthy students need is a strict, strict environment, it naturally follows that such an environment would produce fewer innovators.

Peter Gray at Psychology Today (never a fan of hoop jumping) took a further look at this research, pulling in quotes from an interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, who opens by noting that GPAs are truly worthless when making hiring decisions.

I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Gray also notes the oft-mentioned negative correlation of the Chinese, who are laser-focused on passing that damned standardized test, and who lag miles behind other countries like the US in terms of creativity and innovation (a phenomenon also clearly noted by Yong Zhao).

There are plenty of caveats here-- selection bias for subjects, the question of how one measures innovative tendencies, the fact that Google says nice things about thinking outside the box but also loves TFA. So as much as this fits what I think I know about humans, I take it with a grain of salt.

Still, it's worth paying attention to because it is further proof that reformsters are getting things exactly completely dead wrong. They've tried to center education around a testing situation where students have to find the One Right Answer from a group of answers that someone else supplied for them. Reformsters have justified test-driven education by claiming that only external measures can tell students (and their parents, and their teachers) whether they are succeeding or not. And they have launched charter chains built on the premise that non-wealthy non-white students do not need to have their creativity unleashed, but rather must have all of their nature leashed so that they can better learn to give the One Right Answer.

We are doing everything backwards, aiming our students directly away from the education methods best suited to nurture and build their creativity and innovation. It's backwards, and it's wrong.