Brooks on character and ECE

Another letter, to the NYTimes, in response to David Brooks:


To the Editor;

David Brooks exposes the central contradiction in educational policy when he writes that "... There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances." ("When families fail," Friday, February 15, 2013).

The difficulty of adequately measuring any progress is that it takes a long, long time.  End of year testing, at whatever level in the school system, create false consciousness about learning.  If the government creates oversight that is 'as simple as possible,' it risks creating systems that sacrifice valuable longitudinal knowledge for politically motivated insufficient data.  There is no 'real and ambitious' way forward through short-sided, coercive policy.