Education Progress on Chalk & Talk!
Conviction vs. evidence: What’s driving math education’s worst policies?
Today we’re excited to share our conversation with Anna Stokke on Episode 71 of the Chalk & Talk podcast. Thomas and David join Anna to pick up where her guest piece left off, delving deeper into the uses and abuses of “research shows” in education.
One useful way we’ve been thinking about the obstacles to evidence-based instruction is the distinction between misunderstanding and conviction in education. Often, ineffective practices persist simply because educators and administrators haven’t been exposed to what the best research says about effective instruction; better awareness and a clear path to implementation are sometimes enough to put evidence-based practices in place.
In other cases, however, educators, administrators, and academics remain committed to ineffective approaches even after encountering the high-quality evidence that counts against them. In cases like these, challenges may be reflexively reframed on ideological or political grounds rather than engaged on the merits. These thornier cases demand a different response.
We work through this distinction with four concrete examples we’ve been covering on our Substack: the algebra placement failures in North Carolina, the New York State Math Briefs controversy and NYSED’s response, YouCubed’s recurrent data troubles, and the full arc of San Francisco’s algebra detracking experiment. We have posts going into more detail about each of these stories that you can find below.
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Listen to the episode at the Chalk & Talk website, or see our faces in the video version on YouTube!
