The Further Adventures of David Coleman, the Man We Bet the Country Upon
23rd June 2015
As I’ve mentioned before, we’re in the weird situation of having pretty much bet the country on a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman’s vision of education. First, Coleman sold his Common Core K-12 idea to Bill Gates, who has pretty much bought off most potential prestigious dissidents in the field of education. Then the College Board hired Coleman to rewrite the SAT college admission test.
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In everything I’ve read about Coleman, I’ve never seen anybody claim he knows much about testing. You don’t have to be a professional psychometrician to have common sense about testing, and Coleman certainly has the raw brainpower to eventually come to grasp the ins and outs. But the education racket has a long history of reformers getting into it on the assumption that everybody who came before them must have been an idiot, then slowly reinventing the wheel before they get depressed and bored.
Putting this much untested power into the hands of one obscure individual with no track record sounds like a bad idea. On the other hand, in an era when honest discussion of the realities of American education is largely forbidden because it’s all about various Gaps, turning control over to a single guy who strikes Bill Gates as smart might be about as good as we can do.