You probably know who Peter Greene is: a prolific high school teacher in Pennsylvania who specializes in skewering fools.

But do you know who Mike Barber is? He is actually Sir Michael Barber of Pearson. He wrote a book called Deliverology, which provides the theoretical construct for corporate reform. It argues for setting targets (test scores) and incentivizing people to reach them.

In this post, Peter Greene reviews Mike Barber’s latest book , which he wrote with two co-authors. The goal of the book is to explain why ordinary people have failed to do reform right. The problem is implementation.

Peter writes:

“Their new book has the more-than-a-mouthful title Deliverology in Practice: How Education Leaders Are Improving Student Outcomes, and it sets out to answer the Big Question:

“Why, with all the policy changes in education over the past five years, has progress in raising student achievement and reducing inequalities been so slow?

“In other words– since we’ve had full-on reformsterism running for five years, why can’t they yet point to any clear successes? They said this stuff was going to make the world of education awesome. Why isn’t it happening?

“Now, you or I might think the answer to that question could be “Because the reformy ideas are actually bad ideas” or “The premises of the reforms are flawed” or “The people who said this stuff would work turn out to be just plain wrong.” But no– that’s not where Barber et al are headed at all. Instead, they turn back to what has long been a popular excuse explanation for the authors of failed education reforms.

“Implementation.

“Well, my idea is genius. You’re just doing it wrong!” is the cry of many a failed geniuses in many fields of human endeavor, and education reformsters have been no exception.”

Yes, Communism was a great idea but it was badly implemented. Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a great idea, badly implemented. All those millions of people who died? Collateral damage.

Peter writes:

“The implementation fallacy has created all sorts of complicated messes, but the fallacy itself is simply expressed:

“There is no good way to implement a bad idea.

“Barber, described in this article as “a monkish former teacher,” has been a champion of bad ideas. He has a fetish for data that is positively Newtonian. If we just learn all the data and plug it into the right equations, we will know everything, which makes Michael Barber a visionary for the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for Barber, in this century, we’re well past the work of Einstein and the chaoticians and the folks who have poked around in quantum mechanics, and from those folks we learn things like what really is or isn’t a solid immutable quality of the universe and how complex systems (like those involving humans) experience wide shifts based on small variables and how it’s impossible to collect data without changing the activity from which the data is being collected.

“Barber’s belief in standardization and data collection are in direct conflict with the nature of human beings and the physical universe as we currently understand it. Other than that, they’re just as great as they were 200 years ago. But Barber is a True Believer, which is how he can say things like this:

“Those who don’t want a given target will argue that it will have perverse or unintended consequences,” Sir Michael says, “most of which will never occur.”

“Yup. Barber fully understands how the world works, and if programs don’t perform properly, it’s because people are failing to implement correctly.”

You have to read it all. It is Peter Greene at his best.