malcolm gladwell

I am attending the National Educational Computing Conference here in DC and went to the keynote address by Malcolm Gladwell last night. I was a fan of his after the Tipping Point. I have become a little less so in recent years – especially after reading Freakonomics and seeing a great second reason given for the reduction in NYC crime. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe anecdotal causal evidence should be suspect.

In many areas of education, it is interesting to observe how easily wrong conclusions can be drawn from data. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell implies that because there is no difference in student performance between certified and non-certified teachers that we should eliminate the certification process altogether. You may label this the "Let them all in and sort them out later" strategy.