If We Don't Self-Police, Lawmakers Will Force Clumsy Legislation on Schools
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder warns that if educators don't voluntarily address problems like excessive screen time, politicians will step in with poorly designed laws.
Key Takeaways
- Self-regulation is better than legislation - Schools that address problems proactively get better solutions than those imposed by politicians
- Clumsy laws are coming - Without voluntary action, legislatures will mandate phone bans and other restrictions with little nuance
- Act before you're forced to - Proactive policy changes preserve professional autonomy; waiting guarantees external mandates
Transcript
Should educators be prevented from using known ineffective practices?
That's been some of the discussion over on Twitter today and there was a pretty big announcement on the 74 million major ed reform website about the Evidence Advocacy Center, a fairly new organization that was designed to create kind of a kind of a directory or kind of a clearinghouse for effective practices according to research with the hope that that teacher preparation, state legislation, district practice, educator practice would be informed by the research.
And of course, this is not anywhere close to the first attempt to do something like this.
We've had the What Works Clearinghouse from the Department of Education since 2002, over 20 years ago.
This was established to help us make evidence-based decisions about how to approach teaching and learning and every aspect of schooling.
And I'm not super confident, honestly, that simply having the information out there or published on a website will make that much of a difference because we seem really, really addicted in this profession to bandwagons and to chasing after fads and to doing stuff that sounds good, that sounds innovative, that sounds like the opposite of whatever people were doing a generation ago.
And because it's the opposite, we jump on it and we act like we've discovered something new and proven.
I don't really know if I believe in our ability as a profession to do a great job of self-policing when it comes to using ineffective practices and making sure that we're not doing that and actually following the research.
I think we should, though.
I think we should try because if we don't, What's going to happen is that really clumsy state legislation is going to take the place of what should really be professional self-policing.
Like we should be the ones as educators who look at the evidence and decide what to do and what not to do.
And over and over again, we've failed to do that.
And now, especially in response to things like sold a story, we've seen state legislators say, look, if you guys aren't going to get your own house in order, we're going to pass laws that make you use proven approaches to say, teaching reading.
I don't think that approach is one that we want to grow because again, it's going to be clumsy and it's often going to be quite politicized if state legislators are spending a lot of time on education issues.
I think state legislators should probably mostly fund education and educators should decide what good practices and policies are, but if we're not willing to use the evidence, we are going to find that other people are going to tell us what to do because we seem to not be able to self-police.
So I think the main thing that we have to do here is stop chasing fads.
Stop believing things that sound good when there is not good evidence.
And it looks like some of the people who are leading these fads are running a little bit scared.
I saw some reactions to this new center, the Evidence Advocacy Center, like being seen as Orwellian by some people who maybe need to pay a little bit more attention to the evidence and stop saying hokey new stuff that makes them sound innovative.
So let me know what you think about this.
Are we capable of self-policing as a profession?
Let me know.