Newsweek flunks education research

I absolutely agree with the score, but this failing grade didn’t come from me, this time.

Newsweek just examined the sorry condition of education research and declared “Education research gets an F.”

To be honest, as more and more evidence of the vacuous quality of most education research piles up at places like the Institute for Education Sciences and in the insightful discussions from Arthur Levine, past president of Columbia Teachers College, it is becoming shockingly clear that education research, and the education schools that create this nonsense, are a real mess.

We’ve been saying it for some time.

Thanks to lousy research, our schools are overrun with reading programs that don’t work (see my earlier blog today), or, as Newsweek points out, math programs that don’t work and methods of teaching science that don’t work, either.

And, all the while, our teachers are being told these fad ideas work, so don’t ask questions - just use them!