D. Carnine provided a coherent explanation to guide educational reform
What will it take to move education toward improved outcomes for students, families, and educators?
A prediction for you, Dear Readers: You will be reading and hearing about Doug Carnine’s 3 January 2026 post of “Touching Only a Part of the Education System: A Fatal Misunderstanding” in the coming days, weeks, and months. Likely, Doug’s post will even be in the conversation years from now.
In this article Doug explained how to progress from the hope that education will adopt the trappings of professionalism to the actual achievement of that hope. He systematically and explicitly described the actions that different consistencies in the reform of education must play essential roles—and play together, coordinating their efforts—to create the an educational system that will serve our students.
Please do not devote any more time to reading this post. Go read “Touching Only a Part of the Education System: A Fatal Misunderstanding.” Then share it. Discuss it. Reread it.
Come back here later and read a couple of earlier posts about Doug and his efforts:
Thanks, John for alerting me to this effort…. I sure hope it is successful. In my years observing our educational system and wishing it was more like medicine, I find that there are some striking differences. Notably the influence of parents, teacher and administrator unions, and policy makers that have fought useful reform. In my region, when teacher (and school) accountability was built in by mandating tests that would be connected to teacher and school evaluation, unions fought back and as many as 50% of parents “opted out” of the tests, lest their little darlings be put under too much stress (or found to be less that the best). Plus, our locally elected and run school boards (parents) did not want their district to be seen as less successful than the one next door. Even the politicians, who fund the schools, wanted to be sure to look good while crimping on the budgets. I’m not sure that happens in medicine, notwithstanding recent attempts by RFK, Jr and friends to get overly involved in treatment and funding.