Education's Sacred Cows

Is there anything wrong with Sacred Cows? Well it depends. Maybe yes and maybe no. We need to question if our Sacred Cows are useful, relevant, and correct for the needs of the educational system. If they have outlived their usefulness then those “cows” need to be questioned. According to the authors of Death To All Sacred Cows: How successful business people put the old rules out to pasture, if education only looks to the past, it is putting itself at risk because schools or districts that, “...only look to the past to guide their futures can be doomed to failure. In a rapidly changing world, anything dated tends to be dangerous.”

“If the world was a stagnant, predictable place, then steadfast rules would be okay. They would guide us and keep everyone honest. But the world in which we live changes constantly.”

Change is the new normal.

“If we don’t question why we do things the way we do, we’ll never be able to do them better. If we resist new approaches, we’ll be stuck with more of the same all the time.”

When was the last time you questioned why you were doing what you were doing? 

^{by TerData}

So here is the Education Innovation list of Sacred Cows.

All students can learn at high levels of achievement
All kids should go to college
Teaching takes place at a school
Teaching takes place in the classroom
Students should sit at a desk
Students learn from teachers
Students need to learn what teachers are teaching
Always put the needs of the student ahead of everything else
The government knows what students should know
The government knows best what teachers need to know
We need a Department of Education
The best way to measure learning is to give a test
The best way to show what you know is to take a test
Books are necessary
Paper is necessary
Homework is necessary
Students should not have cell phones
Always do what is best for students
Research based instructional practices
Data based decision making
Principals should be “instructional leaders”
Only the best teachers should become administrators
Administrators are out of touch
Private schools, charter schools, and home-schools are in competition.
Schools don’t have enough money
School waste too much money
Teachers are underpaid
Teachers are overpaid
Unions are good for teachers
Unions are good for students
Smaller class sizes are better
Class size does not matter
Other countries are doing it better than we are
We need to teach more math and science
Art, music, drama, dance, etc, are nice to have, but not necessary
Howard Gardner is always right
Robert Marzano is always right
The DuFours are always right
There is nothing you can do about bad teachers
Standardized test scores matter, and they matter a lot
Teachers are better when they work as team or a Professional Learning Community
The more experience a teacher has the better they are at teaching
Teachers should not be compared to other teachers
Schools should not be compared to other schools
Mistakes are bad.
Parents are always right
Parents don’t understand
Put the most resources toward the lowest students
Technology is not important for learning
Technology must be in the classroom

Some of these "cows" should stay "sacred" and some of these "cows" need to be put out to pasture.

What Sacred Cows would you add?

Comments

[Matt Townsley]

A few more sacred cows to add (some go are related to your current list):

PLCs are the answer to helping struggling students
A unit is over once a test has been administered
Ever unit must end with a test
Tests are examples of "summative assessments" while quizzes are examples of "formative assessments"

[Rob Jacobs]

Matt, those are excellent sacred cows. Maybe I'll put together a new list with the suggestions. Thanks for sharing.

[Chad@classroots]

Timely and thorough. Just talked about many of these over lunch with @DrJackKing.

Here are two I'd add:

Traditional grading is fair and accurate.
Instructional decisions are dependent on educational policy.

[amanda]

here's mine:

Students should be grouped by age/grade level
Students should follow curriculum and not jump ahead

[Todd I. Stark]

In terms that I would use, this would be something like a brainstorming session on the problems of education, a kind of broad situation assessment.

With that perspective, I'd like to suggest that when people actually pick "sacred cows" to question that they stop calling them "sacred cows" because that frames each issue in a needlessly binary and divisive way ("is it sacred or isn't it?). Rather than invoking more useful analytical questions such as "who follows this, when and how do they follow this, why do they follow this, what good does it do them to follow this, what harm might it do for them to follow this, what are the alternatives that meet the same needs, what is the expected result of following different principles under the same conditions? etc."

Questioning assumptions means questioning the chains of reasoning around those assumptions, and their implications. Which should be more than just picking out which ones seem fashionable or unfashionable at the time.

The "sacred cows" slant seems to me to encourage us to choose fashionable ideas rather than to really understand what those principles give us.

kind regards,

Todd

[Tami Thompson]

I would add the sacred cow that all goals must be SMART goals.