The consequences of being wrong

How the most vulnerable in society have forced to pay for the mistakes of education reformers

It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (1995, p.136)

Sowell’s observation could serve as the unofficial motto of modern education policy. Few fields provide such fertile soil for well-intentioned folly. Ministers, civil servants, consultants, think-tanks, journalists and even school leaders propose, legislate, and regulate, while the effects of their misjudgements are borne not by them but by teachers and children. It is the perfect moral hazard: power without consequence, confidence without feedback.

Every decade brings another vision of the good society translated into classroom reform. Each arrives with the same predictable choreography: a new slogan, a glossy framework, a round of training sessions, and a promise to transform outcomes. When it fails, the authors of the policy rarely face any reckoning. They move on to advisory posts, research fellowships, or speaking tours, leaving schools to clean up the mess and children to sort through the debris of their education. The next wave of pundits arrive to diagnose the last initiative’s failure and the pattern repeats.

In The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell describes how social policies survive their own disproof. Once an idea becomes part of the “anointed vision” - that is, a moral narrative about compassion or progress - it becomes nearly immune to evidence. The policy’s defenders claim moral credit for their intentions rather than practical accountability for results. Their righteousness is measured not by success but by sincerity. As Sowell dryly notes, when the costs of being wrong fall elsewhere, error can persist indefinitely.

Sowell illustrates this pattern, the persistence of disproven ideas, with a series of case studies drawn mainly from American social policy between the 1960s and 1990s. Each example follows the same moral and rhetorical arc: a fashionable idea is launched under the banner of compassion, fails catastrophically in practice, yet remains ideologically untouchable because its proponents never suffer the costs of their error. IN his chapter of education, he examines the rise of ‘progressivism,’ with its rejection of traditional discipline and academic standards in favour of self-expression and ‘child-centred’ learning. When literacy and numeracy rates fell, advocates insisted that the reforms had not gone far enough or had been implemented poorly. The ideology of self-esteem became more important than actual attainment. Of course, the academics, policymakers, and consultants promoting such theories suffered no personal consequences; those costs were paid in full by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged students.

Education in England provides an object lesson in what Sowell called the persistence of disproven ideas. Nowhere is this clearer than in the history of reading instruction. For decades, official policy resisted phonics in favour of “real books,” “look-and-say,” and “searchlights.” The anointed vision was that children would learn to read naturally if only they were surrounded by rich texts and given the freedom to make meaning for themselves. Teachers who raised doubts were dismissed as reactionary. The research evidence for systematic phonics, long established by the time England finally acted on it—was ignored because it contradicted a cherished ideology. When the 2006 Rose Review confirmed that phonics worked best, the damage had already been done. Generations of children had been condemned to illiteracy by methods chosen not for their effectiveness but for their moral appeal.

The same pattern repeats across educational fads. “Learning styles” offered teachers the illusion of personalisation while excusing poor instruction. “Permissive discipline,” particularly visible in Scotland’s ongoing experiment with “restorative” behaviour policies, was sold as humane and enlightened. In practice it left teachers demoralised, classrooms chaotic, and students at risk. Yet the architects of such schemes continue to dominate advisory boards and research centres, insulated from the consequences of their theories. The worse the outcomes, the more earnestly they insist that the ideas were never properly implemented.

University education faculties have proved the most effective incubators of these defunct ideologies. Long after the classroom evidence has turned against them, doctrines of discovery learning, child-led pedagogy, and socio-constructivist assessment remain entrenched in initial teacher education. The reason is straightforward: there are no feedback loops. Academic reputations depend on publication and ideological purity, not on whether trainee teachers can actually teach children to read or maintain order in a classroom. Education academics suffer no penalty for being wrong. Their errors are paid for in lost learning, wasted effort, and the cynicism of teachers who must quietly unlearn their training in order to do their jobs.

If one figure embodies this pattern, it is Dame Christine Gilbert. As Chief Inspector of Ofsted from 2006 to 2011, she oversaw not only the height of the data-driven accountability regime, when inspection grades and target metrics distorted priorities across the system, but also the zenith of the ‘child-centred inquisition,’ the ideological war against teacher authority. Under her watch, inspectors treated “independent learning” as a mark of quality and viewed explcit instruction with a mixture of scorn and suspicion; lessons that placed the teacher at the centre were downgraded in favour of those that platformed student’s wandering about actively ‘doing’ things but learning little of value. The result was a culture in which teachers learned to game the numbers while pretending to relinquish control, inspectors learned to reward style over substance, and genuine learning became harder to see precisely because the apparatus designed to measure it had become a shabby performance. By the time Gilbert stepped down, the system was exhausted by compliance and confusion, yet no reckoning followed.

Instead, Gilbert’s career has flourished. She went on to chair local commissions, advise trusts, lead the Education Endowment Foundation, and - most recently - was appointed Chair of Ofsted’s board! It is the perfect illustration of Sowell’s warning: when the costs of being wrong are borne by others, there is little reason ever to admit error. And if error is never acknowledged, the possibility of learning from mistakes vanishes.

The deeper problem is structural, not personal. Education policy in England is largely designed - and too often implemented - by those furthest from the consequences of its design. Success is measured in pilot schemes, glossy reports, and favourable headlines rather than in what actually changes in classrooms five years later. Politicians chase quick wins to fit electoral cycles; civil servants prize stability and plausible deniability. Meanwhile, school leaders, schooled in the same culture of performative improvement, roll out new initiatives not because they believe in them but because innovation signals ambition. Career progression depends less on embedding what works than on appearing to lead change. In this way, the system rewards risk-free signalling over risky learning, movement over progress, novelty over knowledge, style - as ever - over substance.

Take a very recent debate around school behaviour. Steve Chalke, leader of the Oasis Charitable Trust which oversees the Oasis Community Learning multi-academy trust, denounced Tom Bennett’s proposed nine-point plan for restoring order in Scottish classrooms, saying, “This plan is focused on the wrong issues -on the presenting symptoms, compliance & punishment. Instead we need a focus on child development, the differences between adolescence female & male brain maturation, & our growing understanding of neuroscience.” He’s getting confused about the huge difference between ‘punishment’ (not mentioned in Bennett’s plan) and consequences. We all need to experience meaningful consequences for our actions. The real problem with Chalke’s naive beliefs is that the consequences are paid by the teachers who face daily violence and abuse in Scottish schools and, ultimately, the children who have to attend them.

Nowhere is Sowell’s warning clearer than in Scotland, where the consequences of being wrong are playing out daily in classrooms. The Scotsman’s teacher diary reads like a dispatch from a system paralysed by its own virtue. Teachers describe being kicked, sworn at, and filmed, yet told to “build relationships” instead of enforcing rules. Exclusion has become taboo, punishment rebranded as oppression, and “restorative conversations” have replaced boundaries. This is what happens when moral language takes the place of professional judgement: the anointed proclaim compassion while classrooms descend into chaos.

The architects of Scotland’s behaviour policies - ministers, advisers, school leaders - remain insulated from the disorder they have helped create. Their “restorative default” might play well in conference speeches and policy papers, but its real cost is paid by exhausted teachers and frightened children. When Steve Chalke defends these ideas, he is not the one being sworn at by a twelve-year-old who knows there are no consequences. He has no skin in the game. Even when his own schools are graded as inadequate and rebrokered to other MATS, or when his staff go on strike because behaviour is so poor, he doesn’t pay the price.

In other news, The Economist’s account of Portsmouth’s “fresh approach” to special educational needs captures, almost unwittingly, the persistence of well-meaning but superficial reform. The coloured overlays, sensory panels, and timeout passes described at Mayfield School are meant to show compassion and responsiveness, yet they exemplify the displacement of cause by symptom. Instead of confronting the underlying literacy and behaviour issues that leave so many children floundering, the system reaches for aesthetic palliatives. These interventions soothe adults more than they help children, creating the impression of progress while leaving structural deficits untouched. The hard, unglamorous truth is that no overlay will compensate for a child who was never systematically taught to decode print, just as no fidget toy will restore the authority stripped from teachers. The Portsmouth model, like so many of England’s educational innovations, reflects Sowell’s law in miniature: it is ridiculously easy to be wrong, when the costs are borne by children with special needs!

Contrast this with what Sowell calls the constrained vision: a recognition of human fallibility, the need for feedback, and the value of distributed decision-making. In that vision, the aim is not to perfect the system from above but to make it more self-correcting from within. A viable education system would treat policy not as revelation but as a testable hypothesis. It would build in mechanisms for feedback, trial, revision, and abandonment when the evidence turns against it.

But this is not how things are done. Our approach to reform is cosmetic rather than scientific: announce, implement, and move on. Teachers become the experimental subjects of theories devised by those who never enter classrooms. When outcomes disappoint, the blame is transferred downward: to “poor implementation,” “low expectations,” or “resistance to change.” The higher you sit in the hierarchy, the more wrong you can be without penalty.

If we took Sowell’s warning seriously, we would design accountability systems that share risk as well as reward. Policy-makers would have to specify what evidence would count as success, what would constitute failure, and what would happen if failure occurred. Schools would be given time to embed changes before judgement. Inspectors would evaluate coherence, not compliance.

Until that happens, the cycle will continue: ideas detached from consequence, experiments on children disguised as compassion, and the persistent illusion that good intentions excuse bad outcomes.

Sowell’s insight is as uncomfortable as it is true. Being wrong is human; persisting in being wrong is institutional. The cost of both, in education, is measured in squandered potential, paid by those who can least afford to pay the bill.