Ginger Lewman asked the following question on Facebook the other day:

Is it possible for a person to talk about, even advocate for, educational change, yet not believe in it?
What might be the first (or most obvious) indicator that a person doesn’t truly believe in what they’re talking about? What will they be doing (or not doing) that demonstrates they don’t believe?

This is not a rhetorical post. I’m truly asking.

It’s an important question to ask right now, because there are a lot of people who are claiming to be working in service of educational change when really their true motives should be questioned. The question becomes, how do we know the difference between a change agent who is legitimately working in service of their ideas, and someone whose motivations may be driven by something other than the ideas they are actually espousing? I think those of us working in education today need to get good at what Howard Rheingold would call "crap detection."

We get there by asking good questions. Here are a few I like ask of anyone advocating for education reform:

1. Who benefits most from what they are advocating.
2. Who stands to lose the most from the idea?
3. Are there too many cliches that sound good but mean little?
4. Are the solutions and the problem stated in such a way as to be reductive?
5. Is there a price-tag attached in such a way that only the speaker or the speaker’s organization can fulfill the change they speak of.
6. Is the solution to the problem so complex as to necessitate consultants to do it?
7. Would the speaker advocate for this change for their own children? (Probably the biggest question.)

I wish we lived in a time where those involved in education reform were all honest agents. In all truth, that time probably never existed, But today seems that we must be very careful to consider the motivations and motives behind those speaking about educational change. In her book, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson writes, “If you want to keep your teeth, make your own sandwiches.” It is incumbent on all of us to listen deeply, with an open mind and an open heart, and then make up our own minds, thoughtfully and critically, about what we believe needs to happen to positively affect educational change, and to understand that not everyone who says they have the answer — or even an answer — is doing so because they have the best interests of students and educators at heart.

It is time for everyone who is acting as an honest agent in education today to understand that a healthy skepticism about everyone who claims to know just what we need to do to fix education is not only important, but necessary.