drive by education experts

drive by education experts

The Impact of Drive-By Education Experts: A Critical Analysis

1. Introduction to Drive-By Education Experts

The popularity of news today is overwhelmingly driven by a desire for the new and sensational – another outcome of the proliferation of news outlets and 24-hour coverage opportunities. One such tangent to this trend is what I have termed Drive-By education experts – both informally with popular literature and in research contexts. These relatively fleeting experts – who are not experts in education, policy, or related fields – nevertheless leap into media and research outlets armed with opinions, critiques, and solutions, receive extensive attention, and then leave, often never to return. The impact of these experts, for both the news and the related area of critique, is substantial. They provide a feeling of balance and fairness, dedication to law and procedure, and the authority and backbone required to respond violently if necessary. However, by ignoring or only superficially acknowledging the complexities and connections within the areas they criticize, they are brushing over these areas’ important contribution to shaping educational programs and outcomes. Further, society by and large sees the restorative techniques of the Drive-By expert as in absolute advance of whatever alternative may be utilized and scorns implementations that fall shy of achieving the purported effects.

Today’s media is seemingly designed to support the rapid, easy, and often superficial digestion of news coverage. From the emergence of the cell phone to the twenty-four-hour news cycle and updates every twenty-five minutes, news consumers have energy for only so much information. It is not uncommon for radio or television news stations to carry the same stories throughout the day, with little variation except for the ordering of events. Because these news updates are cyclical, elements of a story are repeated, often because they must be heard time and time again by new potential listeners. Once listeners gain an understanding of the story, the desire to hear it again diminishes, and news outlets must find a new story to attract fresh ears. The result of this model of news and entertainment consumption is that while this approach may support the need for novel information, it also inhibits the exploration of an issue or news item in any depth. Even while many scholars argue that issues, problems, and ideas are multifaceted, news outlets are so keen to move from topic to topic that news experts receive the same rapid, superficial treatment as everything else.

2. The Proliferation of Drive-By Education Experts in the Digital Age

At a very basic level, the rise of the drive-by education expert is a result of a stronger and more organized approach to feedback. Believes that “the rise of the drive-by education expert is testament not only to the **** tools of the digital age but also to the **** discourse of the public sphere”. On this understanding, the community is not worth listening to. In this case, the rise of the drive-by expert is a form of civic barbarism. For most educational marketers (in our case, those with formal teaching credentials who promote their training services and/or schools on social media), posting weekly or publishing monthly is not particularly concerning. After all, it makes sense that a professional would want to promote his or her work. Regularly publishing and podcasting is not always or necessarily compatible with being a drive-by expert, but it can be, especially when the message is about influence, impact, or expertise.

There is no denying the presence of drive-by education experts in the 21st century, as it is evidently much easier to disseminate one’s views now than in any previous time period. More accessible content creation tools, the capacity to sidestep the peer review process, and the relatively inexpensive cost associated with the creation of personal websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts have made education opinion-making a growing enterprise. The aforementioned resources, as it turns out, also account for the pernicious spread of educational nonsense. There are hundreds of individuals who have no formal training in education yet allow themselves to be viewed as education authorities, even though their claims would not stand up to the scrutiny of any major peer-reviewed journal.

3. Challenges and Dangers Posed by Drive-By Education Experts

Although they are driven by informed opinion, they are not subject to control and criticism; there are neither regulations nor controls and expertise they are formally required to fulfill in order to participate in public debates. In these contexts, public debates risk being polluted by social and educational speculation, formalized as more certain for their apparent scientific background. Indeed, in education, all the hedges and hesitations that should condition the application of what is only “probably true” – considering the variety of data sources, methods, international contexts, peculiarities of situations, and the uncertainty about outcomes – are often lost. Driven by “pleasant stories”, social speculation is definitely turning into “fake news”. At worst, hard-line policies are drafted, leading to harmful effects. For these bad reasons, impact analysis of drive-by education experts’ discourse is crucial for understanding what happens in both the “desk reality” and the school field.

III. Challenges and Dangers: Several concerns can be raised about the inclusion of drive-by education experts in the public debates about schools and schooling. On one hand, they are often involved in drafting public policies, but clearly stand hampered by limits in their knowledge of key issues – facts, methods, and results – in education. In other words, their competence in discussing evidence-based educational policy is questionable. On the other hand, this is where drive-by education experts are located in their discourse: they often do not put forward “expert quotations” as do traditional opinion-makers, mostly interviewed by a journalist. Rather, they extract from light and less known sources generalities and over-interpretations, in order to give their opinion a “scientific flavour”.

4. Best Practices for Engaging with Drive-By Education Experts

The section above suggests that this is a difficult topic. So much of what the D-BEEs do is so rightly frowned upon. Nevertheless, we have argued that whether and how to engage and under which conditions is a fraught but vital question. Read education research or join any set of informed policy discussions and people are bound to disagree; disagreements, moreover, often fall along the fault lines between educational reform and educational research or engage research vs. practitioner. Consequently, even as we are critical of D-BEEs, we are loath to paint all experts with the same broad brush. Some experts burst onto the scene with wisdom that shapes practice and policy; and many researchers do work that affects practice and changes data.

How might educators and stakeholders best interact with experts who only make brief visits and yet may leave long-lasting impacts on disparate communities – Drive-by Education Experts (D-BEEs)? The arrival of such experts is fast and impacts are often uncertain. They leave websites, books, and quotes, but their conversations and debates can produce a ready amount of D-BEE conditions. We suggest some concrete ways to start as practitioners and researchers critical of the practices we discuss above. The best practices are by no means beyond contestation themselves and this is part of the point. Our guidance, meanwhile, should evolve based on our combined scrutiny of our practices and new and imagined cases.

5. Conclusion: Navigating the Landscape of Education Expertise in the Digital Era

It is no longer sufficient to dismiss (or accept uncritically) education expertise as an immovable or self-interested product of the material and social changes which have apparently cleared the way for system-level governance in “the west” (understood here as the Global North, USA, and UK). Popular intuitive tendencies, policy movements, and research directions towards a technocratic anti-hero narrative, for example, need to be influenced (if not necessarily substantiated) or directed against a background where the epistemic quality of education experts remains in flux. We must face the reality that the value of education expertise has experienced inflationary pressures in a flooded marketplace and is being undermined by the sheer volume of drive-by interactions undertaken by those who make up the new expert class.

The analysis concludes that there are clear signs that intuition is colored by the changing nature of expertise in digital education. There is a growing digital ecosystem of talented, entrepreneurial, and uniquely branded individuals who offer expert input based upon their own professional successes in one or two educational environments. What this ecosystem lacks, however, is institutional regulation or standardization of qualifications and a process of professional accountability for those who inhabit this expert space. This is due to a deeper unwillingness and inability to define terms like “successful”, “innovative”, or “interesting” in unilateral or globally accepted terms suitable for the circumstances of individual students and schools or for a system (like the north of England affair) which is teetering on the edge of metaphorical bankruptcy.