Education is fond of fads: If it feels good, fund it
- Joanne Jacobs
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Giving every student a laptop was supposed to transform education -- for the better. Now Chromebooks are back in the carts, and students are flashing mini-whiteboards or writing with pencils on pieces of paper.
Like 1:1 devices, "21st-century skills, trauma-informed pedagogy, flipped classrooms" were supposed to be the answer, writes Robert Pondiscio. Why is education so damned fad-prone?" Can't anyone remember that the last shiny thing failed to work? And the one before that?
Among other things, Pondiscio writes, change is how administrators show they're leaders. The new superintendent" announces a bold vision, rebrands existing efforts, and introduces a new set of priorities. Three years later, often before results are fully visible, that leader departs," and a new one comes in with bold new ideas. If the experiment is working, it's hard to sustain the success.
"Schools that improve often do so through unglamorous means: adopting a coherent curriculum, building teacher expertise, reinforcing consistent instructional routines, and maintaining focus over time," he writes. It's not flashy. And it is fragile.
Education innovators don't worry about proving that their ideas work, 22nd-century skills guru Paul Banksley (a fictional character) tells Rick Hess. “We inhabit an aspirational praxis, one where we envision transformational potentialities and nurture them via a deep-seated, future-facing belief in the urgency of now. That requires language that summons untapped opportunities to unlock crucial philanthropic support.”
“Just because a program hasn’t worked in the past and doesn’t work today doesn’t mean it won’t work in the future . . . What counts is what feels true." -- education consultant Paul Banksley
Even if there's no evidence it's effective, "there are hints that some applications of our core intuitions may lead to an exciting array of innovative practices with regards to emotive and equitable benchmarks. And this, of course — supported by best practices, AI-infused classrooms, and added investment — is the way to usher in a future of personalized, permissionless educational transformation.”
In the "search for solution-ness," what counts is "what feels true," not what can be proven, says Banksley. "We’re weaving new realities . . . That’s what the funders are paying us for!”
Half of social-science research papers can't be reproduced or replicated, and education research does the worst, reports Nicola Jones in Nature. A massive study found many published social-science papers -- especially in education -- don't provide enough data to be evaluated.
Kyle Saunders on Sacred Cow BBQ.
20 years ago I taught statistics as an Asst Professor in the psychology department at Minnesota - Duluth, an oddity in the department because my PhD was in health services research, trained in economics and epidemiology. The special education Director of Graduate Studies asked our department to offer a graduate research design class taught by me because she was disgusted with the low quality of education research and wanted their grad students taught a more rigorous approach. The students - all of whom were ALREADY special education teachers - fumed over how many students they saw with reading deficiencies that could be quickly corrected with a semester of remedial phonics instruction instead of the "whole language" approach that was being…
The easiest way to do "original research", as is needed for most academic degrees claiming to be doctorates, is to write and conduct a survey. The data may be real enough (albeit limited), but the desire to attach ideological interpretations, claims of novelty, and normative claims, is natural and widespread, and such claims are what gets publicized and remembered, if anything is remembered of a piece of research.
I think the "Hey! Here's something new, never tried before, and sure to work!" ethos is also fostered by education schools in universities (which, sadly, control teacher certification and credentialing in most states).
People need to present a thesis for their education doctorate (don't call it a PhD, since it's not!), and this pushes them to manufacture a whole new way of looking at an issue , never understood before. It's kind of a paradox, but this encourages the ed biz bureaucrat to think up a new method (of teaching) that's never been used before--whereas you'd think the current generation would look back to their predecessors to (re)learn what they already knew.
Not everything has been taught and studied before;…
Fads?
They are unregulated life altering experiments on children without informed consent of either the child, their parents, or often the teachers conducting the experiments. And the victims have no recourse to claim compensation for the harm they incur.
Once everyone accepts that effectiveness is not the real goal here but the endless churn resulting in consulting fees, expensive new classroom materials, new administrative positions, publications needed for promotion and tenure, and creating the illusion that "something is being done," it all becomes much easier to understand.