1.0 Education is…

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Pick any education reform idea, and there are likely to be several government and/or non-profit organizations earnestly pursuing it. There is no shortage of scholars, either; the 2010 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) attracted more than 13,000 attendees, all of them sporting at least a Master’s degree.

The education system is too big to work on all of it at once. It’s easy to become lost in the weeds.

Ed100 is designed to help you understand competing ideas about education change – and to look beyond your own personal perspective. It summarizes all the major concepts that vie for your attention, not just the “good” ones. It is a map through the weeds.

An outline of all the pages in Ed100 can be found on the Welcome page.

Any framework of this sort can sound simplistic. In a system as complex and interconnected as education, is it really possible to squish complex ideas into little boxes? With apologies, we shall do just that.

Any “Theory of Change,” stated alone, sounds like a magic answer: “Just do this, and all will be well!” It is a mistake to think about change in this way. Learning is fundamentally human work, and humans are complicated. To improve learning requires getting multiple things right at once. One “razor” for testing any idea meant to improve learning is to ask “will this idea change how kids and teachers use time?” Only changes that affect the behavior of students or teachers can change outcomes.

Before delving into solutions, it is constructive to confront the facts, including this: California’s public school results, though improving, are among the weakest in America. This will be the subject of the next post.

The next seven posts cover a lot of ground. Here is an overview: