What Doesn’t Work

Jay Greene has a good column about the U.S. What Works Clearinghouse and asks how can you trust a government-sponsored organization to recommend research on topics and policy it doesn’t support?

        According to Greene: “WWC makes mistakes, is subject to political manipulation, and applies arbitrary standards. In short, what WWC says is not The Truth. WWC is not necessarily less reliable than any other source that claims to adjudicate The Truth for you. Everyone may make mistakes, distort results, and apply arbitrary standards. The problem is that WWC has the official endorsement of the U.S. Department of Education, so many people fail to take their findings with the same grains of salt that they would to the findings of any other self-appointed truth committee. And with the possibility that government money may be conditioned on WWC endorsement, WWC’s shortcomings are potentially more dangerous.”

We could ask the same questions here in Canada.  We have similar organizations such as the Council of Ministers of Education,  Canadian Education Association and the Learning Partnership, organizations that get lots of tax-payer money for research that has generally been safe and politically acceptable.  

The CMEC is responsible for reporting on Canada’s results in international testing.  The CEA looks to transform education by looking at equity issues and engaging teaching—whatever that means.  One of their policy papers on literacy states: ”We no longer think of literacy as a prescribed set of skills to be acquired in a formal learning environment and measured simply by the ability to read and write.”  Huh?  Nowhere does the document call for teachers to be trained in DI techniques or is the word phonics mentioned.   The Learning Partnership is the group started the “take your kid to work” programme and again offers research that generally supports the status quo.  They do nice safe feel-good things like annual teacher awards as well.

What you won’t see is ground-breaking research on school choice or effective teaching practice that falls outside of the educrat-approved pedagogy—-policies most current governments do not support. In other words as Greene points out:

         “We have no alternative to sorting through the evidence and trying to figure these things out ourselves. We may rely upon the expertise of others in helping us sort out competing claims, but we should always do so with caution, since those experts may be mistaken or even deceptive. But when the government starts weighing in as an expert, it speaks with far too much authority and can be much more coercive.”

Doing research on what doesn’t work doesn’t help.

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Update:  I received this email notice from the CEA today.  Seems Linda Darling-Hammond is coming to Toronto.  Notice who the sponsors are! So readers, what CAN schools do?

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