I totally with the author's suggestion that we invest more in teachers. It's incredibly important.
But I hate, HATE, arguments of this form:
"[proponents] have been making similar claims for years, yet [outcomes] are as bad as ever"
It's absolutely just as vapid as "It will be different this time", yet I hear people make this argument over and over.
Things happen until they don't. Sometimes it's a tiny event that precipitates the change, sometimes it's a massive event, and sometimes it's the accrual of thousands of chancy occurences. Past performance is a useful indicator of future performance only if aggregate statistics are your sole concern. If you care about individual situations, like whether a single property of classrooms will change in response to a single new technology, past outcomes in similar situations tells you very little.
And yes, if someone tells you "things will be different solely because of X", where X is something that's happened dozens of times before, they are full of shit.
But anyone who tells you "things will be the same because X happened before too" is just as misguided.
But I hate, HATE, arguments of this form:
"[proponents] have been making similar claims for years, yet [outcomes] are as bad as ever"
It's absolutely just as vapid as "It will be different this time", yet I hear people make this argument over and over.
Things happen until they don't. Sometimes it's a tiny event that precipitates the change, sometimes it's a massive event, and sometimes it's the accrual of thousands of chancy occurences. Past performance is a useful indicator of future performance only if aggregate statistics are your sole concern. If you care about individual situations, like whether a single property of classrooms will change in response to a single new technology, past outcomes in similar situations tells you very little.
And yes, if someone tells you "things will be different solely because of X", where X is something that's happened dozens of times before, they are full of shit.
But anyone who tells you "things will be the same because X happened before too" is just as misguided.