We Need a “Freezing Cold Takes” for Education

It’s time for some professional accountability for the empty suits who flit from one edu-fad to the next

It’s football season, finally.

One unhappy side effect, though, is the spike in dumb but self-assured pronouncements from analysts, pundits, and sports-radio yammerers. Fortunately for those exhausted by the jibber-jabber, there’s Freezing Cold Takes, a sports media site that shames these “experts” by surfacing their old hot takes when they’re proven spectacularly wrong. It brings some tiny bit of accountability to a whole profession of well-paid yappers who otherwise make a lot of coin from spewing consequence-free inanity.

As I was writing this, Freezing Cold Takes resurfaced the confident 2021 declaration by Sporting News’s Jarrett Bailey that “Trey Lance will be a better quarterback than Lamar Jackson.” (Lance was a bust. Jackson? A two-time MVP.) It highlighted Kevin Steimle of CBS Sports coolly asserting in 2017 that it’d be a huge “mistake” to draft quarterback Patrick Mahomes. (Mahomes has won three Super Bowls.) It recalled New York Daily News sports columnist Manish Mehta’s enthusiastic 2019 column: “Relax, Jets fans! Why Adam Gase is a brilliant coaching hire.” (Gase fled town with a 9–23 record.)

We could really use something like this for education.

I can’t even begin to count how frequently some self-assured pundit, advocate, funder, researcher, or vendor insists they’ve got the next great solution . . . if only everyone would just shut their mouths, open their wallets, and get with the program. And yet, when the results predictably disappoint, these folks never take responsibility. They’re never held accountable. They just move on, while students live with the consequences, educators take the heat, and taxpayers foot the bill.

Last winter, Tim Daly penned a terrific deconstruction of the wildly hyped “Finnish Education Miracle,” which a lot of fad-chasers rode hard for a while before discreetly tiptoeing away when the wheels came off. A decade ago, there was the mad embrace of “teacher evaluation reform,” which promised transformative improvement. When it turned out that the reforms delivered none of the promised benefits . . . crickets.

If you remember the hyped Obama-era multi-billion dollar federal School Improvement Grant program, you might also remember that it turned out to have no impact on student outcomes. The response from its onetime fanboys? A whole lot of nothing. Remember when tech enthusiasts were pushing hard to get more cell phones into classrooms? Or when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were the future of education? We can do this all day with school-improvement strategies, math programs, intervention schemes, tech applications, and the rest.

Today, the Center for Global Development is celebrating “Sobral’s education miracle,” pitching the Brazilian municipality as a new mecca for education transformation. Wide-eyed visitors are flooding in from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Global Partnership for Education as well as the Gates, Jacobs, Tinker, Zenex, Yidan Prize, Lemann, and Queen Rania foundations. A year and a half ago, in April 2023, enthusiasts were promising that in “a matter of weeks or months,” artificial intelligence would be “your kid’s tutor, your teacher’s assistant & your family’s homework helper.” It’s a little early for scorekeeping, but I’ll go on the record noting that their timeline was off and predicting that the consequences will be far more mixed than the cheerleaders promised.

The problem, as I’ve noted before, is that there are a lot of rewards for touting the new new thing. It’s the ticket to grant funding, speaking slots, and access. Self-assured innovators (paging Paul Banksley) earn a lot more glowing media coverage than skeptics who ask inconvenient questions.

Some vendors, policy entrepreneurs, and “visionaries” may protest that overpromising is what it takes to get new policies passed or new practices adopted. Or that they didn’t know they were selling nonsense because they really, really thought this was the ticket. Okay. Either way, it’d be nice if parents, educators, public officials, journalists, and the like had some idea if the new new thing is being pitched by a serial hype artist—and could gauge their credibility accordingly.

That’s why it would be so helpful if there were someone perched over a Freezing Cold Takes in Education website, just waiting to re-up the empty assurances and eager hype if (or when) the latest flavor-of-the-month goes sour. The possibility of getting nailed, and of having funders or potential clients see how wrong you’ve been before, might encourage some of the hype artists to tone it down. Failing that, observers might be better equipped to gauge a hypester’s credibility.

One problem with the status quo is that there’s absolutely no consequence for snake-oil salesmen and ideologues who peddle destructive pedagogies or toxic dogmas. Since there’s no accountability, everyone blithely moves from one edu-fad to the next. The result is a phalanx of funders, education consultants, teacher trainers, and ed-school faculty who seamlessly pivot from one dubious idea to the next without ever being called to explain what they got wrong last time or why this time will be any different.

That’s how we get professional fad-chasers, a whole industry of empty suits who morph from NCLB champion to turnaround impresario to Common Core acolyte to anti-racist avatar to SEL authority to chronic-absenteeism expert as the headwinds shift and funding opportunities evolve.

Do these people know what they’re talking about? Did they succeed last time? If yes, why are they onto a new thing? If no, why should we trust them this time?

These questions need to be asked and should guide a Freezing Cold Takes for Education. I mean, it’s ironic that we talk endlessly about the need to hold individual schools and educators accountable but hardly ever talk about accountability for those eager to influence how we spend billions in public funds to educate millions of children. It’d be nice if they faced at least as much public scrutiny as the big talkers on ESPN radio.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”