The Village Green

eSchool News online published an article reporting on an appearance by Bill Gates before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He made a case for establishing an education data center to track trends, identify what works, and generally provide the long-promised data-driven instruction we all hear so much about in education these days. The call for more attention to education is laudable, and I hope good things come out of it. I’m also a little skeptical. Recently I read a book called The Future of Everything, the Science of Prediction (ISBN-13: 978-1-56025-975-6) by David Orrell, PhD. In the book, he makes a compelling case for why the fields of weather, health, and wealth have such difficulty in making predictions. He explores the historic roots of predictions and points out the impossibility of making certain types of accurate forecasts. While he does not directly address the field of education, I found myself wondering how if educational forecasts would be subject to the same limitations. I’m a firm believer in the individual nature of learning. Spotting educationally significant trends will hopefully provide some benefit to students as a whole, but I doubt that it will ever provide the necessary insight needed for each student as an individual.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6935