The Audacity of Skepticism

I  become very agitated when anyone introduces me as an "expert."  I'm educated, and I have a point of view.  Because I can string words together fairly lucidly and, perhaps because my voice is deep and stentorian (those of you who don't know me will just have to take my word for that), I may seem more convinced of my own expertise than I actually am. 

I say all this by way of establishing a patina of humility: "Shucks, don't think nothin' about this li'l ol' PhD.  My dawg, Daisy, is smarter'n some people what folks call 'doctor.'" 

She really is, actually.  When in the presence of some PhDs and EdDs, I wonder, "Who puts your pants on for you in the morning?" 

Or, the case of the more obnoxious of their ilk, "How is it no one has killed you yet?"

It was in a meeting with the latter that I found myself last week.  There are many things about this meeting about which I could complain, but I'm going to limit myself to the arrogance of some members of the academy and the myth of research-based best practices.

For those of you who don't recognize this word in context, the "academy" is the world of the scholar: higher education, colleges and universities, those whose primary responsibility is to create knowledge, not consume it.  What most people outside of the academy don't realize is that these entities' first responsibility is not the education of college students; it is the production and publication of research.  Members of the academy must publish. 

Now understand that these are not publications that the practitioners of education read.  English Journal, Teaching Children Mathematics, Science Teacher--these are all phenomenal resources.  Practical, readable, creative.  They are not "academic" journals. 

The late David Foster Wallace opined, "The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling—-pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead."  I had to look up most of those words, too.  Wallace was having a bit of fun by using lots of big words, most of which mean "using many big words unnecessarily."

The research that Wallace eulogized and that my sister, a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Education Association referred to as "unusable, unreadable sawdust" is the stuff that constitutes your so-called research-based best practices. 

Unfortunately, here's the process by which that sawdust makes its way into your classroom.  The author or authors publish the findings of a study that may or may not have

• been submitted prematurely because the author(s) required more publications to gain traction with the tenure committee;
• contained a non-representative sampling of students;
• been conducted over a very short period of time;
• made use of resources or experts provided by the university and not readily available in the average classroom;
• provided alternative explanations for the results the researchers found.

The researchers then present their findings either in print or at a conference.  If they are ethical, they limit themselves to a statement such as, "The findings SUGGEST that there is a RELATIONSHIP between our intervention and [insert selected improvement in student achievement.]  If they are not ethical, they say, "Our findings PROVE that X causes Y." 

CAUTIONARY NOTE: Any researcher in the social sciences who claims causation without hesitation is full of $#!+.  Put that on a bumper sticker.

Moving on.

Even ethical research, though, falls into the hands of . . . people.  And like a sinister game of telephone or when you make repeated photocopies of other photocopies, the original message gets blurry and distorted.  What started out as a suggestion that perhaps some children might benefit from an alternative to phonics because they have trouble identifying the individual sounds in words is subjected to round after round of reductionism, eventually finding its way into your classroom as, "Don't use phonics; use whole language instruction."

Like the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, you can pretty much count on some paradigm shift every year or so.  In the mid-sixties, we had The New Math, which humorist and math professor Tom Lehrer explained thusly: "It's more important to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."  Check out his song "The New Math," on the album That Was the Week that Was. Sadly, Lehrer no longer performs, claiming irony died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

But I digress

In the eighties, we were told to stop teaching grammar because it only made sense to people who already understood it and took time away from more valuable instruction. 

At some point, we were told to teach history NOT chronologically but thematically. 

We've been told not to correct children's spelling, that "invented spelling" is an important stage in the development of literacy and of phonics instruction. 

Oh, yeah, we went back to phonics instruction some time ago. 

My point is that, at one time, all of these "reforms" were the result of research-based best practices.  Any many of them were, essentially, neither.

Wayne Booth, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Chicago, created a fictional utopia in which researchers had to pay to be published and could only publish a limited number of works.  In this manner, only work that was of the highest quality and needed to be read by others would ever see the light of day.  Obviously, Booth was speaking tongue in cheek, but one can see a certain beauty in the concept. 

We K-12 educators cannot control what happens in the academy.  We can only control how we respond to it.  We need to get over our inferiority complex.  Yes, "scholars" can be arrogant and condescending.  They use academic jargon and complicated statistical modeling.  Unfortunately, we assume, "Hmm, I don't understand this, so it must be brilliant."

It's not.  Any idiot can make something complicated seem complicated.  True brilliance is making the complicated understandable.  Someone smarter than me once said that when people use a lot of words, they either don't know what they're talking about or don't want you to know what they're talking about.

K-12 educators and policy-makers have to become smarter consumers.  Be audacious.  We can't be so intimidated by scholars that we are afraid to make them explain their research in ENGLISH.  If they can't or won't, we can't be afraid to reject it.  Be skeptical!  I've seen educational research conducted.  Some of it excellent.  Much of it is crap. 





And we, as a nation, have to stop eating it.

XOX,
The Know-it-All