Education is Neither Food nor Drugs (nor Retail Sales)

NPR un-ironically tars another proposal from the Harvard Graduate School of Education as a call to create an FDA for education research.

"However, recent studies using randomized admission lotteries at charter schools and the random assignment of teachers has suggested that simple, low-cost methods, when they control for students’ prior achievement and characteristics, can yield estimates of teacher and school effects that are similar to what one observes with a randomized field trial."

It's interesting that the premise - that education can be compared to food, drugs, or medicines -
is not even questioned. . . . Well, to be fair, Thomas Kane, the Harvard author of this proposal does try to differentiate his ideas from a medical model, but then he invokes a comparison with the retail industry . . . !? Still, there is just no acknowledgment that any proposal to identify best practices and duplicate them in the field of education is just another iteration of Taylorism, better known as "scientific management" which is still largely characterized as part of a grander, ongoing, workplace transformation involving the de-skilling of the workforce and mechanization.

I am not opposed to research or reform when it comes to education – and there are many instances when online learning can be superior to face-to-face instruction. But we now live in a time when the veil - obscuring pervasive elite incompetence with deep pockets of malign intent - is being shredded by the actual results of policies that have successfully promoted inequality and undermined democracy for generations. (I wonder whom President Trump will appoint as Secretary of Education?)

Is it fair to point out that the current Dean of Harvard's Ed School had an affiliation with William Rehnquist, a Chief Justice so famous for gratuitously affirming the legitimacy of Plessy v Ferguson and the prerogative of the majority to define the rights of minorities? This was well after Rehnquist's leadership in a GOP sponsored program in Barry Goldwater's Arizona to suppress minority voting through literacy tests and other measures.

It’s a relevant consideration due to the notoriety earned by the Harvard Ed School for promoting a corporate agenda of "education reform" which has not yet been able to distinguish itself from other long-term efforts to promote inequality and undermine democracy.

There is nothing inherently wrong in Ed Schools forcefully advocating for research and evidence-based interventions. But anyone who uncritically compares educational research to the types of studies so imperfectly conducted in medical and pharmaceutical contexts should face immediate suspicion that he or she is an unwitting (or very witting - as witting as Scalia was witty) implement of forces that are deadly to any prospect for quality mass education.

One ongoing reasons we still have no true alternative to teachers (and sometimes schools) doing the best they can on their own terms is that proposals like this (coming out of Harvard) need to be subjected to a great deal more self-questioning to ensure that they are not merely churning out more chum for the corporate sharks of "Ed Reform" and their insatiable teams of grifting pilot fish. Once they’ve done that, they might then be able to plausibly reassure some thinking front-line educators that their credentials are not simply justifications for flouting their recommendations - whenever they cannot be effectively avoided or ignored.