Education Rethink: What Should We Believe? Part 2: Ensuring Accuracy

In my last Rethink, I shared the story of how when I helped write some of the educational content standards for California, I saw firsthand how there was no rigorous research conducted to determine the relevancy of the standards to students.

And while that has many negative ramifications to the future of our youth, it is not as bad as the issue of accuracy. On the surface, school traditionally are all about "accuracy". In tests, students either get questions "right" or "wrong", and we take for granted that our teachers would not be teaching misinformation. But, as the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, argues with excellent intellectual rigor, schools in the U.S. (and I'm sure elsewhere) often teach things that are simply not true, and in history classes this often is close to disinformation on the part of textbook writers.

I also have seen first hand how little regard for accuracy the U.S. system has. I have been involved with multiple forms of accreditation, as both being the person in charge of helping schools get accredited, and also leading teams that accredit schools. I have done most of this work with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, Accrediting Commission for Schools (WASC ACS). And, I want to say upfront, that overall I really appreciate what WASC ACS does, and their methods of focusing on improvement instead of compliance. But, they had a blind spot for accuracy.

I had the privilege of being on a committee that was tasked with updating one of the WASC protocols, which would be used throughout California, Hawaii, and also around the Pacific Rim. During this process, I found that nowhere in the current protocol did it say that schools should be teaching accurate information.

I gave them feedback that accuracy is critical to good education, and to WASC's credit, they added the following indicator: "Indicator 4.2: The school regularly reviews curriculum in order to ensure that the content taught in the classrooms is accurate and relevant" But what if I wasn't on that committee? No one else on the committee even noticed.

And this is not isolated. I have seen over and over again, quotes being used in education that are misattributed. I was in a professional development, where the County Office of Education shared an "Einstein" quote, that was never actually said by him. And, in one the conference rooms at the District Office that I work in, there is painted on the wall in big letters: "An investment in knowledge pays the best dividends" and then has Benjamin Franklin's name. Yet when historians have tried to see if there is any evidence for Franklin saying or writing that, they have found none... While these examples may seem minor, they clearly shows that education doesn't rigorously check its facts.

So it is sad, but clear, education needs to rethink what it teaches. It needs to be sure that what is being taught is likely relevant to the student in some manner (and I'm not saying everything has to be about jobs, art is very relevant to the well being of students). And what is taught needs to be accurate. Both of these should work to achieve the aims of education, which I have laid out my thinking about in an earlier article.

What do you think? Have you seen blatant inaccurate information taught? How do we fix it?