The Unintended Consequences of Education “Reform”

Years ago, I was a member of a loose affiliation of business consultants concerned about new technologies, The Sociotechnical Systems Design Group. The driving force behind the work of this group of brilliant consultants was recognition that new technologies often bring with them a lot of unforeseen, unintended, negative consequences. Consider, as an example, Customer Resource Management (CRM) programs. These are software packages that keep tabs on salespeople’s interactions with and knowledge gathered about customers. The software makes this information available to senior managers. Here’s an unintended problem with that: for a long, long time, salespeople have kept a little black book containing their notes about customers—names, titles, number of children, children’s names and ages, wife’s name, hobbies, interests, pet peeves, hot buttons, comments about products, wishes, ambitions, and so on. Over time, this annotated list of contacts would become the salesperson’s most valuable possession—the distillation of his or her life’s work—and, importantly, WHAT MADE THE SALESPERSON VALUABLE. And the last thing a salesperson wanted to do was TO GIVE THAT AWAY. And so, salespeople resisted CRM, often withheld information from these systems, and often put in bad information, which led to garbage in, garbage out. Here’s another example: years ago, I was managing a large team of editors, designers, and freelancers in an educational publishing house. My projects, and I typically had several of them going at once, were complex, with lots of parts. I learned about GANTT and PERT charts—project management software—which promised to keep minute track of these parts and to help me identify and address slippages and bottlenecks and keep track of project component costs and, importantly, budget overruns.  And these programs WORKED BEAUTIFULLY. I soon found, however, that I was spending so much time working on my charts that I was missing important stuff going on with my staff—and a business is, of course, its people. So, I put the project management software away and went back to what folks in business call “Management by Walking Around.” Unintended consequences, aka, the unknown unknowns.

The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] (CC$$) were first announced in June of 2009. They were common only in the sense of being vulgar. They did not spell out the core of English language arts, which is knowledge, but rather were an almost completely content-free skills list. They were not developed by the states but by a group of individuals whose work was funded by Bill Gates, who saw the Core as a single set of national standards to which educational software products could be correlated and then “sold at scale.” At scale. You know, monopolistically. Because in ELA the CC$$ are simply a skills list and in Math they contain a lot of developmentally inappropriate stuff in the early grades and are no improvement on the preceding standards from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, one cannot with a straight face, I think, call these “standards,” which implies high goals one might seek to achieve.

The new “standards” were announced with much fanfare (and a lot of financial pressure to adopt them), and part of the initial messaging, incorporated into notes attached to the “standards” and into a series of speeches given by self-styled Common Core “architect” David Coleman, whom Gates had appointed the decider for the rest of us, was a call for a “return” to reading classic, substantive works of literature from the canons of American and world literatures, including plays by Shakespeare, excerpts from the Bible, and foundational works in American history like the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. Coleman was PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of K-12 education in the United States. He didn’t seem to know that ALMOST EVERY SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY, with very, very few exceptions, was using a hardbound literature anthology at each grade level, such as McDougal, Littell Literature or Prentice Hall Literature or The EMC Masterpiece Series, that contained—guess what?— classic, substantive works of literature from the canons of American and world literatures, including plays by Shakespeare, excerpts from the Bible, and foundational works in American history like the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. What an incompetent idiot! (For this idiocy and incompetence, Coleman was awarded the presidency of the College Board.) Furthermore, Coleman had no clue that throughout the U.S., in almost every high school, foundational works of American literature were taught in an 11-grade American Literature survey course that ran concurrently and was often taught in conjunction with an 11^th-grade American History course. The 12^th grade was usually reserved for a British literature survey course (though some schools chose to do a world literature course at this level, instead). No, Coleman, ignorant of the domain he was placed in charge of by Billy Gates, put into his “standards” a call for foundational works of American literature AT BOTH GRADES 11 and 12, which resulted in a weird phenomenon—publishers adding a smattering of American literature to their British literature anthologies. Weird.

Here’s an important thing about the Gates/Coleman “standards” bullet list: though it has tacked onto it this call for reading substantive literary works, the bullet list itself consists ALMOST ENTIRELY of very broad, very vague skills items—e.g., the student will make inferences based on texts. In other words, the list is almost entirely knowledge-and-content free, even though mastery in the English language arts involves acquiring an enormous amount of domain knowledge!!!!

How did that happen? Well, Coleman and crew, being incompetent, mostly just copied existing egregious state “standards” that had the same problem and tweaked those. HOWEVER, and here’s the HUGE ISSUE that these “standards” created: now that they were national, they did have the effect that Bill Gates was aiming for of leading to products based on the standards that were sold “at scale,” including a lot of online instructional products so bad that students would prefer having all the hair on their bodies plucked out by tweezers to having to do the next lesson in these. And because students in every state had to take high-stakes tests based on these national “standards,” being able to answer these skills questions on the standards became all important.

And that’s where the unintended consequences come in: these almost entirely content and knowledge free “standards” have led, in ELA, to a vast devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy into random exercises on random “standards” from the Gates/Coleman bullet list. Where before, a publisher would put together coherent units of study of substantive work—units on the Elements of the Short Story or on Transcendentalist Literature, for example—now, even if such names of units are retained—the actual content becomes random exercises on random skills from the list. I call this the “Monty Python “And Now for Something Completely Different” Approach to ELA Instruction.” The actual consequence of the Gates/Coleman bullet list has been the end of coherent, cumulative, substantive ELA curricula and pedagogy.

And so an entire generation of students has been ROBBED of coherent, cumulative, substantive knowledge-based instruction in ELA.

Unintended consequences.

Copyright 2024. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved. This essay may be reprinted and shared freely as long as this copyright notice is retained. Please do reprint and share it. Thanks.

———-

NB: The opening call by Coleman for reading “substantive works of literature from the canon” led E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of Cultural Literacy and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation, to embrace the Core INITIALLY. He soon, however, repented of this when he recognized that the Common Core was basically a list of vague, untestable skills like the egregious state standards that preceded it. This was confirmed to me in private correspondence with Hirsch, and he then wrote about his disenchantment with the Core in various places. So, if you read somewhere that Hirsch was a fan of the Coring of American education, bear this in mind.

For more on Education “Reform,” go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/