Cancer research and education

When I'm not writing about CMS budget cuts, I've been reading "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."

It's far more fascinating than depressing, but it's not good escapist fare. As I read about the long, difficult quest to save lives, I find myself thinking about the quest to save kids from educational failure.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, who bangs out bestselling books while working as a cancer researcher, explains in layman's terms how treatments that initially look successful, even miraculous, can wither under the scrutiny of long-term research. Even the best minds of medicine can be misled by their own hopes and early results, pinning their hopes on costly, invasive treatments that don't stand the test of time.

It's both inspiring and heartbreaking to read about all the children and adults who took part in randomized trials of experimental treatments. Some were destined to be denied a treatment that might have saved, or at least prolonged, their lives. Others got the cutting-edge therapy, knowing they might go through suffering and expense that would ultimately prove fruitless. Year by painful year, scientific knowledge has advanced.

Medicine is not a perfect analogy for education, of course. But I'm struck by how often, in the world of public education, the consensus jumps quickly from "This seems like a great idea" to "This is clearly the best practice and it would be wrong to deny it to any child." Any uptick in test scores can be seen as "proof" that all sorts of reform strategies are working.

Yes, real educational success is hard to measure. Yes, we want to keep intuition and innovation alive in teaching. And no, serious research doesn't yield answers by the next election or budget cycle, let alone by reporters' deadlines.

But if we can do rigorous, long-term research when it's literally a matter of life and death, shouldn't there be a better way to put educators' beliefs and visions to the test?