We've Got to Stop Letting Enthusiasm Run Ahead of Evidence

I think we need to be a lot more careful about letting our enthusiasm for an education reform run too far ahead of the evidence, because what tends to happen, especially in America where we have a lot of political polarization, is an idea gains some traction, and then before we can figure out if it's actually a good idea at scale, we start to scale it up, and we let our enthusiasm become our only concern, and then whoever doesn't like us decides that it must be a bad idea, and we get entrenched into an ideological position while we're still waiting on the evidence to come in.

And then by the time the evidence for a new practice has come in, we've already decided whether we're going to accept that evidence or not.

And I can give you four specific examples of where I've seen this happen over the past 10 years, where we decide as an ideological matter, like it becomes part of our professional identity to have a stake in what ultimately should be a scientific question, right?

Like we take it so personally whether something is good or bad before we actually have the evidence.

And the four issues where you probably heard me talk about all these here on TikTok.

First, discipline reform.

We tried the idea, and I think it was reasonable to try, that we could reduce consequences for behavior and improve outcomes, that maybe punishment was excessive, maybe that was a bad thing for students, so we tried to scale back on consequences, and we're seeing what's happening with that.

And we've become polarized and entrenched on that question, and that's making it harder for us to actually learn as the evidence does come in.

Second issue I wanted to bring up is special education and the idea of full inclusion, the idea that some students can be served in a fully inclusive setting with no self-contained programs, that's the case in many districts now, again, a promising idea that was worth testing, but it's not worth testing if we're going to become immune to the evidence.

If we're going to ideologically choose to ignore the evidence that comes in, why are we even testing it?

And that's, I think, what's happening now is that we're rolling out every idea on ideological grounds before we have the evidence.

The third idea is grading reform.

The idea that we can grade in some specifically different ways, like standards-based grading or No zeros, get 50 points no matter what, or you can turn in late work anytime.

Like there were some ideas, again, that were worth testing.

Maybe this will make things better for kids.

But if we dig in our heels ideologically before the evidence comes in, we're not going to learn from the evidence.

And then the fourth issue, this one I've just started learning about this week, is SEL, maybe social emotional learning.

is a good thing for us to be focusing on in schools, but maybe it's not.

And if we dig in our heels ideologically and become politically polarized about it, we won't be able to learn from the scientific evidence as it comes in.

So I think we've got to stop doing this.

We've got to start testing things scientifically, but then be patient.

We cannot just get so excited about a new idea that it becomes our identity and we become willing to make enemies over it, right?

Because like, here's the thing, even if we're right, we've already set up enemies by the time we actually have evidence to make our case, right?

I personally would rather have evidence so that if people think I'm stupid and I'm an evil person because they're my ideological enemy, as long as I have the evidence on my side, I'm not too worried about them.

But if everything is politically polarized and it becomes a threat to my identity and only bad people believe that thing, well, what if the evidence is on their side?

I think we've just got to stop doing this in education.

Let me know what you think.