EBD Blog

Over on Mentor Matters, Mrs. Ris refers to a post on Education Wonk about US Secretary of Education M. Spellings’ call for teachers to “get serious” about education. The original content to which these blogs refer is Sec. Spellings’ editorial in a special issue of Newsweek in which she calls for educational reform, especially at the secondary level.

Although there’s a grain or two of truth in Sec. Spellings’ editorial (e.g., the decline in the US relative US position in graduation rates; the extensive emphasis on the social aspects of college), the argument is open to some riposts, one of which Mrs. Ris makes. Mrs. Ris argues that teachers have been serious about education. They may be mistaken about what they do, but virtually all teachers have their hearts in the right place. They want their kids to have good outcomes. In her analysis, Mrs. Ris replies to Sec. Spellings’ call to get serious thus:

If she thinks I was not serious about teaching/ learning in the past, she just doesn’t get teachers. I’ve met only a handful of teachers in 20 years who were not serious about their teaching. Being SERIOUS is not the problem. It’s about being effective, about knowing (not guessing) what works and what doesn’t, and getting the support to put all of it into place.

Mrs. Ris is right about the importance of effectiveness, and it’s great to have her company on this matter here on this blog and over on Teach Effectively. Teachers have been serious. Mrs. Ris is right that we educators need to be serious about focusing on outcomes for kids as the foremost metric for judging educational policies, methods, and practices. (To be fair, in her editorial Sec. Spellings refers to the need for using data to make decisions about secondary and higher educatioon decisions, a point with which I bet Mrs. Ris agrees.) We all need to be serious about predicating our efforts on evidence that directly examines outcomes using research methods that meet standards for rigor. And we educators need to be serious about implementing faithfully those policies, methods, and practices that have the strongest evidential support.

Link to Mrs. Ris’ post. Link to the US Department of Education press release about Sec. Spellings’ editorial. I didn’t find the actual post Education Wonk about this editorial.