Stick a Fork in Carnegie’s New Education Initiative
Education philanthropy has not exactly covered itself in glory over the past few decades. After a policy-focused agenda centered on academic standards (the Common Core) and test-based teacher evaluations crashed and burned, the myriad astroturfed reform organizations had a nervous breakdown and rededicated themselves to promoting left-wing ideology under the banner of “anti-racism.”
Surveying the rubble, the Carnegie Foundation has recently announced a new reform initiative, in partnership with Education Testing Services (ETS): to undo the “Carnegie Unit” of seat-time-based academic advancement in favor of a mastery-based approach to education evaluation. The bad news, writes the Fordham Institute’s Daniel Buck at National Review, is that if their initiative succeeds it “could choke out our already wilting commitment to tradition, rigorous academics.” The good news is that it’s too conceptually flawed to prove anything more than a footnote in the long history of failed reform efforts.
In theory, partially dismantling the Carnegie Unit would be easy and immensely fruitful. It would require the most minimal of philanthropic efforts to lobby state legislatures to allow students to test out of academic units by demonstrating mastery. AI learning tools would allow students to breeze through materials as quickly as their capacities allow. But while this would be great for excellence, it would be terrible for “equity.” The Carnegie Unit holds back bright students and pushes along lower achievers. Given the Carnegie Foundation’s stated commitment to “equity,” it’s no wonder that this is not what they’re advocating.
Rather, they want to evaluate the “whole child," meaning broader human skills such as empathy, communication ability, leadership, and critical thinking. Things that, they reasonably note, parents want and employers demand. The only problem with this approach is that it’s practically and politically impossible and would likely prove counter-productive even if it weren’t.
If teachers want to evaluate math skills, the method is straightforward enough: give the student a math test and see if he gets the right answer. But how could a teacher evaluate 30 students accurately on domains like empathy and leadership? She couldn’t do it herself. So, Carnegie is throwing money at ETS to develop what its CEO Timothy Knowles calls “stealth assessments” for those domains. Color me skeptical that it’s possible to develop psychometrically reliable metrics for such soft skills at all. But if it were possible, it could only be done by AI deeply datamining student behavior.
Hence the problem this initiative would face from the right. Conservative parents are already deeply skeptical of big tech and education-establishment-driven social engineering efforts. They won’t take kindly to the prospect of classroom cameras datamining their kids to grade them on character skillsets defined by progressive do-gooders. If and when this initiative gains any prospect of traction, red state legislatures would pass laws, and parental rights advocates would execute opt-out campaigns, that would make these stealth tests dead on arrival.
It would face an even bigger challenge from the left. The education establishment is firmly bought into the Critical-Race-Theory-derived notion of “culturally responsive” education. Soft skills can’t be evaluated without reference to a behavioral and human standard, a notion that the edu-left derides as profoundly racist. They will attack any character evaluation as rooted in a standard of “whiteness.” Such evaluations would either have to formally evaluate students by different standards based on race or be prepared to have their tests display new racial gaps in human skills. The left is already turning against standardized tests on the grounds that differences in math achievement prove that math tests are racist. How would they react if Carnegie’s tests were to show racial gaps in “empathy,” “communication,” and “collaboration”?
Let’s assume, though, that Carnegie could wave a magic wand, develop reliable tests, and somehow implement them at scale without political backlash. What then? The theory of action seems to be that if we can develop reliable ways to measure empathy, communication, and collaboration, schools will be better able to teach these skills.
There is, however, no good reason whatsoever to believe that this would follow. Education vendors have a long and storied history of selling “evidence-based” products based on low-grade to non-existent evidence. And then, when their products or reforms harm academics, that failure is used as justification for more aggressive implementation of counter-productive products or methods.
We basically only know one big thing about education: how to teach early literacy. And despite testing reading achievement annually for decades, schools have – until very, very recently – proven wholly resistant to adopting what we know works. Instead, they double down on the proven failures of whole-language programs like the (Carnegie-backed) Reading Recovery program.
Carnegie’s new initiative is unlikely to prove as disruptive as the Common Core for the simple reason that it’s essentially certain to go nowhere. But there is still a kernel of wisdom within it that more sober-minded reformers who value excellence would do well to take note of. If we harness it properly and provide kids with a pathway, AI could enable bright students to truly take flight. Partially dismantling the Carnegie unit with an eye to academics, not “whole child” skills, is a worthwhile endeavor – and one that deserves an effective champion.
