It was such an honor and pleasure to be part of the TEDx Crestmoor Park Women’s event in November. Thanks to Dafna Michaelson-Jenet and Michael Jenet for their leadership and amazing support through the process! The video is now live so please enjoy and pass along!

This article makes such an important point and the flossing example is a perfect example to use because it is less politically and ideologically triggering than topics like education.  Flossing and the Art of Scientific Investigation One of the key ideas is captured in the following: “… the kind of long-term randomized controlled trial needed to properly evaluate flossing is hardly, if ever, conducted — because such studies are hard to implement … Yet the notion has taken hold that expertise is fatally subjective and that only randomized controlled trials provide real knowledge. Distrusting expertise makes it easy to confuse an absence of randomized evaluations with an absence of knowledge. And this leads to the false belief that knowledge of what works in social policy, education or fighting terrorism can come only from randomized evaluations. But by that logic (as a spoof scientific article claimed), we don’t know if parachutes really work because we have no randomized controlled trials of them.” I’ve written on this topic before but it’s worth coming back to. Education reform advocates have become infatuated with the idea of “evidence-based” interventions and for too many of them “evidence” is synonymous with some type of experimental evaluation. Funny enough, their evaluation dollars don’t flow towards longitudinal, mixed-method evaluations, but rather to short-term quantitative evaluations that rely on easy-to-measure and short-term metrics like test scores. Combine that with rhetoric and policy stances that undermine the value of expertise (something that, by definition, is developed over years of learning and practice and is lost when teachers exit the profession within 5-7 years) and you have a recipe for shallow, ultimately ineffective policy changes.

I’ve had some hard conversations about my original post on the Oppressive Schools letter. A colleague posted a comment that captures a lot of the details of these conversations and it’s worth reading. I thought about editing my first post but I actually think the distinction in how I would communicate about these ideas in light of the conversations is worth preserving. These are hard subjects to address, these are hard conversations to have. That is the whole point. But it’s worth documenting that dialogue allows for growth. In that spirit, I’m posting here something that I think better captures what I’ve learned and where I stand. *********** I said it would be a week before I posted on the Oppressive Schools letter and it’s been longer than that. The honest truth is that I struggled about whether or not to sign my name to it; the back-and-forth in my mind and heart has led to lost sleep and moments of anxiety. It’s been hard to put my finger on exactly what the issue has been and I am thankful for the chance to talk with the authors of the letter, friends, and even strangers, about that question because it has helped me clarify my thinking around why signing onto this particular articulation of the problem is so troublesome for me. Anyone who knows me knows that I care deeply about words and how they are used. They also know I care about the intentions of leaders and educators, and the words “oppressive” and “dehumanizing” are strong words that seem, at first, to not leave much room for good intent. When spoken out loud or even written, these words feel like a judgment of character. They often serve to make people defensive and/or shut down. I struggled with signing my name to language that would make people disengage from the constructive conversation and action that can move us towards improving systems. Through my conversations, though, I have come to understand that the authors also care deeply about words and how they are used, and they chose their words deliberately. A[…]