Education Commentary Is Dominated by Optimism Bias

> There’s a bias that runs throughout our educational discourse, coming from our media, academia, and the think tanks and foundations that have such sway in education policy. It’s a bias that exists both because of a natural human desire to see every child succeed and because the structural incentives in the field make rejecting that bias professionally risky. The bias I’m talking about is optimism bias, the insistence that all problems in education are solvable and that we can fix them if only we want to badly enough. At least a half-century of research, spending, policy experimentation, and dogged effort has utterly failed to close the gaps that so vex our political class. But still we hear the same old song about how we could close those gaps tomorrow if we really wanted to, an attitude that has distorted education policy and analysis for decades.

> My first book, The Cult of Smart, was a commercial failure. It was released during the height of the pandemic and thus my ability to promote it was limited, but by any measure the market rejected it. It’s tough to produce a labor of love like that and find that few people were interested in it.

> But there was a silver lining: since publication in 2020 I’ve heard from dozens and dozens of teachers, thanking me for putting their thoughts to print. These educators come from public, private, and charter schools, from schools with affluent study bodies and schools that are mired in poverty, from big city school districts and from low-population regional rural schools. And again and again, these teachers shared the same perspective: they agreed with the book’s overall argument, and often had thought similar things themselves for years, but felt they could not express them publicly for fear of professional consequences.