A recent story quoted two professors at the University of Illinois as saying that many self-described education experts weren’t actually experts. The professors determined this by first looking at people quoted in the media on education reform, then looking to see how many had Ph.D.s and then running their names against databases containing research citations. It seems that lots of published and popularly cited experts were under-credentialed.
The central challenge in the current debate in education reform is how best to sharply improve the achievement of students who come from backgrounds where family and community generally lack successful experience with education and where poverty can provide a powerful barrier to progress.
And a central problem in the current debate is that a high proportion of the people actively advancing solutions to helping these students learn have no actual experience in working with them.
Unfortunately, having a Ph.D. and a long list of publications is no guarantee at all that you have the requisite experience for this debate. Without the experience, a reasonable person should have a reasonable suspicion that the expert doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about.
Sometimes, I think there’s an inverse relationship between a Ph.D. and a lot of publications and any kind of knowledge of how schools work.
That’s the cynic in me coming out, I suppose. But if we look at the implementation process for the Common Core, I think we can see that a central flaw was having too many highly-credentialed theorists and not enough experienced practitioners.
The Illinois professors should go back to the drawing board and give us a study with a more thoughtful definition of what constitutes expertise in the current context.
