It’s been 11 days since the NCTQ report on teacher ed (see my comment from earlier this week), and we’re already into the third stage of defending bad research.
- It’s great research, and the conclusions are essential to understand and spread.
- It’s flawed research, but we should give it some credibility since it tracks with what we knew before.
- It has “started a useful debate.”
Alas for consistency, if we’ve known the conclusions for a long time, it’s a little late to say the bad research has done us a service by starting a discussion.
By the way, a pro tip on long-term relationships: if you completely screw up, do not say you were “just trying to start a discussion.”