Reply #4: not stop teaching it; just don't make reform the top priority [View All]

I'm an ed research consultant--so I don't say this lightly. I just see millions being poured into the subtlest of reforms that aren't clearly demonstrated to improve achievement anyway, while the same groups of policymakers and their philanthropist friends who get together at their posh "conferences" refuse to direct any money into deeper causes of low achievement in school and poverty in adulthood. It's mighty convenient for them, to displace blame.

Just because the Coleman report of the 60s had flaws doesn't mean that there aren't larger causes that can't be addressed. I've been up to my eyeballs in "STEM reform" since the early 90s--have helped people get around $60 million in research dollars for it--and I don't see it deeply changing much of anything.

There's only so much money and so much energy to go around, and I'm telling you, the obsession with STEM or any ed reform problem as a cure-all for our workforce problems has become a form of de facto silencing of larger issues.