The best thing you will read about the education debate this week.  This essay from Education Week is by David Rutkowski, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University Bloomington, and Leslie Rutkowski, an assistant professor of inquiry methodology at the university.

 Please go to Ed Week to read the full piece before commenting. This is an excerpt:

 Yet, the education discourse is particularly troubling because we have abundant high-quality data to inform the conversation and to evaluate schools. One caveat, though: We argue emphatically that the data that fuel these debates are fundamentally error-prone. And any data-driven evaluation is also subject to error. Consequently, there is no magic formula to control for all the complexities inherent in systems of schooling. It might be somewhat puzzling, then, that reformers in both camps are nearly religious in their beliefs. But we believe an explanation for this seeming zealotry falls into three broad, overlapping categories.

They’re overstating it. In part, radicals on both sides don’t really believe what they are saying. According to a close colleague, a state education commissioner recently blamed obstacles to implementing a new teacher-evaluation system on the poor quality of the state’s principals. When our colleague asked what percentage of administrators was truly unable to implement these systems, the schools chief sheepishly estimated that it was around 10 percent to 25 percent. You don’t need a statistical test to know that’s different from a majority. Do some schools need to improve tremendously? Are some of our K-12 schools world-class? Based on volumes of readily available data, the answer to both of those questions is a resounding yes, and many participants on both sides of the schools-good, schools-bad debate will admit this in private, off-the-record conversations. It just doesn’t fit their political strategies to admit it publicly.

They’re not overstating it. Conversely, many advocates on both sides of the good-bad debate are true believers. As an example, a schools-bad advocate contacted us recently regarding our perspective on Indiana’s “poor” performance on the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. His disappointment was clear when we shared Indiana’s strong results—Hoosiers outperformed even Finland in mathematics.

There are no moderates left in American political life.

Perhaps because the loudest voices are the ones that tend to offer the most extreme positions, moderate reformers simply aren’t included in the broader public debate on public education.

How do moderate reformers make themselves heard in the radical fracas that dominates popular and policy discourse? We see this point as fundamental to addressing the real issues that plague American public education through research and evidence-based reform. One possibility, as we see it, is for these moderates to speak up and to be present in the media. Not as defenders of the status quo (which, by the way, we must acknowledge as academics is our public image). Instead, effective moderate reformers can act as champions for cool-headed, dispassionate research and analysis that lauds our achievements and acknowledges our problems.

Kahlil Gibran once wrote “a little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.” Moderate reformers need to push into the oft-uncomfortable limelight and start to deflect attention away from the schools-good, schools-bad zealots and their extreme positions.