Education Rethink: What Should We Believe? Part 1: Evidence of Relevance

I started this series by telling a story about how I had to re-examine my beliefs about an experiment I did while taking a science class in high school.  That started me on a path of rethinking about how I should decide to believe. Previously, I was a math nerd, and I thought I could prove everything by setting out some postulated ideas and then could build all of truth from there. But, the world is messy, with few, if any, truly self-evident truths. And so, I started down the path towards a scientific philosophy, believing that evidence should be the ultimate arbiter of truth.

Isn't this what we are basically what we are taught in most schools? That we should use evidence to form our beliefs. Yet, there is an irony, because overall our education systems do not use the best evidence to make their decisions.

I have seen this firsthand: I helped write some of California’s educational content standards for career and technical education. And why was I chosen for this job? Because I was cheap ??. Literally, since I lived near Sacramento and was volunteering, it didn’t cost the California Department of Education to fly me around, etc. Thankfully, I also have an expertise in information and communication technologies, of which I wrote two of the four pathway standards.

But, I was also asked to write the standards for Health Care Administrative Services. To be quite honest, this is not an area that I’m an expert in. But, I saw that no one else was going to spend the time and research to do a good job at it, so I took it on. To be fair, I did have some background, as I had taught a course in health informatics, and I knew some people who were experts and worked with them.  But, the very fact that I was asked to write these standards, is a clear demonstration of how our education systems do not actually practice what they preach about using the best evidence to make decisions.

This is not an isolated situation, as the development of other standards have been about as bad. For example, I once saw a report funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, that basically concluded that college professors didn’t think that most of the higher Common Core math standards were relevant to college. Further, it is clear that rigorous social research was not done about the needs of future adults when writing the Common Core math standards, because while kids are supposed to learn what imaginary numbers are (which are basically not used in real-life), they are not required to know what a “trillion” means, nor learn anything about math related to technology, such as binary, hexadecimal, or Boolean algebra (when these concepts underpin nearly all of the information and communication technologies we use).

To be fair, there are some good things in Common Core, such as more emphasis on statistics, and the English standards improved in having more learning that is relevant, but I have not seen any evidence of rigorous job market or other social research done in their development process.

So, to me it is critical, that any rethink of education uses the best evidence available to determine what is important for students to know and be able to do to have a better adult life. It goes back to what I believe the aims of education should be. If education doesn’t further these aims, or doesn’t do it as well as it could, then it should change.