Gene Glass, the father of meta-analysis, gave a talk on campus yesterday. I went mainly so I could say I had laid eyes upon this icon. He was the advisor for a good colleague in the Ed Leadership department. I was inspired and moved, something I had not expected to happen.
He began by describe his intellectual forefathers of the 1950s. Those psychometric specialists believe they had won World War II. They designed the assessments used for sorting enlistees into pilots or cooks or infantrymen. Since those young men went forth and defeated the was all the evidence the nerds needed. After the war, they were confident that their brilliance could be used for improving education. Gene Glass not only sees the foolishness of this, but he confessed that his expectation that meta-analysis would save the day was naive. His word: naive.
He was adamant about the dangers of attaching ourselves to manufactured crises in education. He also gave very well reasoned critiques of international comparisons based upon standardized tests. He also decried the super-secrecy of the items used to compare children, cities, and nations. He once asked for six sample items so he could compare the German vs. English versions of reading passages. He is bilingual and wanted to see whether those were comparably difficult questions. Not only did the testing company refuse, but it was a former advisee who made that decision.
Now he had me. Standing before us was a pillar of educational research excellence -- confessing that we were stuck. He asked why 50 years of educational research has not produced COMMANDING ANSWERS – which he described as answers that were so powerful that they commanded implementation. He did not answer this question. I audaciously asked him to bring his talk back around to educational research. He was contrite but never did. When pressed, he revealed that there are two things that he believes are the crucial and maybe only true influences upon students’ learning. What would you expect from someone who edits a policy journal and was elected president of AERA when he was just 35 years old? Get this: teachers and curriculum. I was stunned and uplifted.
Because I didn’t RSVP to the talk (just showed up), I was not the beneficiary of a free copy of his new book. I stopped at a bookstore last night but they didn’t have a copy. Since his talk was based upon that material, and it is somewhat the a memoir of a man nearing the end of a distinguished career, I looked it up online. Here’s the blurb:
He began by describe his intellectual forefathers of the 1950s. Those psychometric specialists believe they had won World War II. They designed the assessments used for sorting enlistees into pilots or cooks or infantrymen. Since those young men went forth and defeated the was all the evidence the nerds needed. After the war, they were confident that their brilliance could be used for improving education. Gene Glass not only sees the foolishness of this, but he confessed that his expectation that meta-analysis would save the day was naive. His word: naive.
He was adamant about the dangers of attaching ourselves to manufactured crises in education. He also gave very well reasoned critiques of international comparisons based upon standardized tests. He also decried the super-secrecy of the items used to compare children, cities, and nations. He once asked for six sample items so he could compare the German vs. English versions of reading passages. He is bilingual and wanted to see whether those were comparably difficult questions. Not only did the testing company refuse, but it was a former advisee who made that decision.
Now he had me. Standing before us was a pillar of educational research excellence -- confessing that we were stuck. He asked why 50 years of educational research has not produced COMMANDING ANSWERS – which he described as answers that were so powerful that they commanded implementation. He did not answer this question. I audaciously asked him to bring his talk back around to educational research. He was contrite but never did. When pressed, he revealed that there are two things that he believes are the crucial and maybe only true influences upon students’ learning. What would you expect from someone who edits a policy journal and was elected president of AERA when he was just 35 years old? Get this: teachers and curriculum. I was stunned and uplifted.
Because I didn’t RSVP to the talk (just showed up), I was not the beneficiary of a free copy of his new book. I stopped at a bookstore last night but they didn’t have a copy. Since his talk was based upon that material, and it is somewhat the a memoir of a man nearing the end of a distinguished career, I looked it up online. Here’s the blurb:
In Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips, Gene V Glass analyzes how a few key technological inventions changed culture in America and how public education has changed as a result. Driving these changes are material self-interest and the desire for comfort and security, both of which have transformed American culture into a hyper-consuming, xenophobic society that is systematically degrading public education.
Since blogs tap into narcissistic behavior, now that I have also discovered that Dr. Glass had his book published by the same company with which we have a contract, not only am I proud to have ours appear in the same catalog, but I even wonder how simple it would be to extract a jacket blurb. Perhaps I need to make another effort to write even one new ¶ for that project.
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