Thread by @tcoynek12

These two tweets speak volumes. I'll be they prove prophetic. Here's why... @RbnLake @MargueriteRoza @EdunomicsLab @rickhess99 @Kress_Sandy @MichaelPetrilli @MatthewAKraft @EdWriters @BizRoundtable @USCCFeducation #edcolo #copolitics @CSInstituteCO @ColoConcern

It is not that district managers & boards lack access to excellent research on how to evaluate research on achievement improvement. Matthew Kraft's excellent research has taken care of that...

scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publica…

And it is not that district managers and boards lack access to high quality, comparative meta-analytic research that shows the effect sizes and cost/benefit ratios of different achievement improvement initiatives. @WAPublicPolicy has produced it...
k12accountability.org/resources/COVI…

And it's not that district managers and boards lack a framework for rigorously planning for the recovery of learning losses. #MTSS provides that. And many districts already claim to be using it...

It is also not the case that districts and boards haven't been warned -- repeatedly -- about the financial traps they can fall into unless they carefully plan for the use of federal aid. @EdunomicsLab has done that...

But despite all this, we are confronted with Edunomics Lab's findings about what many districts are doing. As Robin Lake says (echoing the thoughts of many EdPolicy scholars), "this is not going to end well". But that raises some critical questions...

What accounts for what we see? Having ruled out ignorance of the applicable research, we are left with the hypothesis that recovering student learning losses is NOT district managers' and boards' primary goal...

It looks much more likely that adding union employees is the goal, and paying them more money. For years, class size reduction has been shown to be a very cost ineffective way to improve achievement results...

And why should a district add counsellors without (1) having data -- not anecdotes -- about the increase in prevalence and severity of student mental health issues, and (2) assessing whether existing staff has the clinical credentials to address those needs...

and (3) if they don't, comparing alternatives for doing so - including partnering with outside organizations that already have the clinically qualified staff to do so...

The dog that isn't barking is telling the real story here. And that leads to another reason that US education results haven't improved for the past decade plus: The inability or unwillingness of K12 media to tell stories that anger district managers and boards...

Here's my bet: You won't find many K12 journalists using the Edunomics findings as the basis for an investigative story about what their district is doing, and the logic and evidence that underlies the board's decision...

Last point: What signal does this send to the business community? With a shrinking labor force, improving productivity is critical. And that can't happen without a substantial improvement in human capital quality to support the diffusion of advanced technologies...

In the absence of that, and in the face of rapidly improving automation technologies, the war for talent will intensify, winner-take-all economics will spread, and inequality will grow worse. That's a bleak picture, but it is one that K12's actions make much more likely...

Which gets to the last question. Can district managers and boards not connect the dots? Or, since nobody in K12 ever suffers any consequences, do they just not care, and just focus on looking out for themselves (certainly not the kids)?

This is a very bleak forecast. But it is based on logic and evidence. And I have yet to see an alternative forecast that is based on anything other that ideology, emotion, anecdote and vacuous aspirations that collectively claim to be a strategy (that is never linked to metrics).