The Problem of Binary Bias in Parenting and Teaching
and the challenges of avoiding it
Welcome! I'm Lauren Brown and this is my newsletter on education issues that impact all of us— parents, educators & concerned citizens. Today, I’ll begin with a reflection about parenting that reminds me of the perils of taking sides in education.
As a brand new and exhausted mother, I succumbed to the allure of parenting books that would help me get my 4 month old to sleep through the night. Parenting Expert “A” warned that if I let my son cry it out, it would send the signal that his needs would not be met, threatening his sense of security and ability to build secure attachments. He would become a lonely, bitter man with trust issues. Expert “B” argued the contrary. If I went to nurse my child every time he cried, my child would never learn “self-soothing” and grow up to become a helpless, needy adult—lacking resilience and ending up in a co-dependent relationship. I faced a momentous decision, with dire consequences if I chose the wrong path.
The decision was clear. I threw out the books.
The baby is now 25 years old, gainfully employed, with plenty of friends, in a healthy relationship and seems to have survived my parental indecision and flip-flopping between middle of the night soothing and neglect.
The world of education is rife with similar binaries. There are experts and studies and research that make all sorts of claims, some of which are eventually disproved (looking at you, three-cuing and learning styles) yet linger on in schools for decades.
Does this mean we ignore science and data when making decisions about education? Do we throw out the books?
No. We do, however, need to recognize the role that our passions and emotions play into our reactions to policy recommendations, whether on parenting or education. As Sigmund Freud put it, “reason is often reduced to finding justifications for these desires.” Tenacious attachment to data that rationalizes our emotional point of view doesn’t help us.
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (2021), has helped me understand the related problem of binary bias. People often recognize there are two sides to an issue and conclude, that “only one side can be right, because there is only one truth.” (Grant)
Some of the education issues I care about most devolve into binaries that ignore nuance, complexity and frankly, reality:
Phones, tech and AI: ban ‘em completely or embrace them and use them?
How we teach U.S. history: Greatest country on earth? Or racist to the core?
The role of teachers: sage on the stage or guide on the side?
Or some, teaching content versus teaching skills, that aren’t actually binaries at all. (More on all these topics, coming this year).
There is a saying in education, that if you stay in it long enough, you’ll see the same ideas come back around, just with a new name. That’s because the pendulum keeps swinging. Literacy expert Timothy Shanahan pointed out that in his fifty year career, he’s lived through 3 pendulum swings about how we teach reading. In this latest swing, the lack of phonics called out by Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” podcast has led to hysteria that I and others fear will lead to too much phonics and not enough attention to other equally fundamental aspects of literacy, like the importance of vocabulary and background knowledge.
To overcome binary bias, Grant suggests we pay closer attention the range of opinions within any given “side.” The “Science of Reading,” for example, is complex and broad. We shouldn’t just glom onto isolated talking points like “more phonics” without examining the broader context (e.g. the Scarborough reading rope). Reacting too quickly leads to bad policy: doubling down on balanced literacy or going overboard on only one piece of a recommendation.1
Grant also encourages us to adopt the open-mindedness of scientists who rely on curiosity and inquiry to constantly update and reevaluate what they already know using evidence. This is in stark contrast what he describes as three different mindsets: that of preachers (relying on faith), politicians (whose faith leads them to attack the other side) or prosecutors (who use evidence but for the purpose of attacking the other side).2
As I continue to write about education issues, I will work to keep this advice in mind. My strength as a teacher is my passion, so I lean towards preacher mode. But I’m also practical. Parenting is like teaching in that we have to make real decisions regarding real people. Our children and our students are not lab rats. The decisions we make are sometimes made when we’re half asleep or in a classroom with 25 other personalities.
Good research should inform our decisions, but it doesn’t always offer up a clear path forward. It does not always help the mother at the checkout line dealing with her screaming toddler or the teacher figuring out how best to teach about the legislative branch next Wednesday in 3rd period, which will be cut short because of a planned active shooter drill. Understanding the cognitive science of learning does not neatly translate to the creation of good reading curriculum; it can and should influence the pedagogy, but it doesn’t create it. As professors Sharon Vaughn and Jack M. Fletcher put it, “We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction.”3
As a sleep-deprived mother, I continued to wrestle with what to do about my son’s midnight cries. I mostly went with Expert B, both because the immediacy of the crying got to my emotions and because the volume of the crying kept me from sleeping anyway. Two years later, I took a different approach with my daughter. She would cry, but my exhaustion from days chasing her older brother kept me from getting to her crib quickly. By the time I summoned the energy to get up, she was asleep. And so she learned to sleep through the night far more quickly, despite being a “fussier” baby. Like her brother, she is healthy, happy, gainfully employed, has plenty of friends and does not appear to suffer from any emotional attachment issues.
The moral of the story? Both “sides” influenced the decisions I made, along with experience (for my second-born), what made sense for me as a parent, and consideration of the different temperaments of the small human beings in my care. I wouldn’t describe the road as easy. Neither is education. But if we want good policy, it’s a road we have to follow.
See “Taking stock of the science of reading: A conversation with Amanda Goodwin,” an insightful interview from May 2, 2022 in Kappan. Link here. Goodwin, a professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University, speaks thoughtfully about the dangers of talking about the science of reading in divisive ways.
See especially chapter 1, “A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind,” and chapter 8, “Charged Conversations: Depolarizing Our Divided Discussions” in Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Viking, 2021.