A Couple Of Items That Caught My Attention

The first was an item from Stephen Downes’ OLDaily from last week.

OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
Apr 22, 2024

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The Fallacy of Best Practices
Eric Sheninger, A Principal’s Reflections, 2024/04/22

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“The time has come to break free from the shackles of ‘best practices’ and embrace the power of effectiveness driven by the true experts in education—the schools and educators who implemented these strategies consistently and with a high degree of fidelity.” Certainly there has been criticism of the idea of ‘best practices’ over the years for precisely this sort of reason. But are ‘the schools and educators who implemented these strategies’ really ‘the true experts’? Certainly they would have valuable feedback, as would any practitioner. But they do not assess their practices scientifically, and they are unable to view outside their own context. The problem with ‘best practices’ isn’t that we’re talking to the wrong people – it’s that we’re asking the wrong question. Image: Perceptyx.

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I have to be honest and say that I share this sentiment for the most part.  Not necessarily that best practices can’t exist, but only that we rarely do the kind of longitudinal, large scale research needed to establish a best practice.  Heck, I’d even argue that promising practices are few and far between – because what Stephen and Eric are describing above doesn’t even rise to that level for me from my researcher’s perspective.

The second was an item in Education Week, which underscores for me the fallacy of the corporate-driven educational reform movement.

Teachers Aren’t ‘Silicon Valley’s Lackeys’ (Opinion) “We must remember that tech companies want different things for our children from what we do,” writes an English teacher. READ MORE

In much the same way that teachers aren’t silicon valley lackeys, the public education system is not a private enterprise.  You can’t make reforms to it like it is one.  You can’t exact it to respond the same way the private sector does.  You can’t have winners and losers in a public system, as there simply can’t be losers – but that is the fundamental basis of private enterprise.  This is why educational reform movements have simply been little more than efforts to privatize public education – and for the corporations behind those efforts to pilfer one of the last public purses that they have yet to completely privatize in the United States