Study what works -- and what keeps on working

Steubenville, Ohio schools have used "Success for All" to teach reading for 25 years.

Educators should study successful schools and "learn from greatness," writes education writer Holly Korbey on BellRinger.

It's not that people in education are incurious about what works, responds Robert Pondiscio. The problem is that success isn't always sustainable.

Education suffers from confirmation bias, he writes. Some educators"try to explain away good outcomes" for disadvantaged students. Others learn only the lessons that affirm their existing beliefs. "If a high-performing school is succeeding with a strong curriculum but not one we like, we see strong teaching and engaging lessons," Pondiscio writes. "We harvest the agreeable pieces and quietly ignore or discard the rest."

The biggest problem is that schools are often spotlighted "at a breakthrough moment of success," he writes. But will the success endure?

Education is a fad-driven field. We worship at the altar of “innovation.” We celebrate visionary principals, breakthrough models, and dramatic turnarounds. . . . What we pay far less attention to is sustained excellence.

When a school "beats the odds, it usually has a first-rate principal who transforms the school culture, hires teachers who share the vision and adopts a well-designed curriculum. In time, that principal leaves for a new job and is replaced by someone who can't provide the same leadership. Or the new superintendent brings in a trendy new curriculum and weakens the discipline system. Or ... Things fall apart.

Karin Chenoweth did great work profiling schools In It’s Being Done (2007) and Schools That Succeed (2017), profiled "schools beating the odds through leadership, coherence, and adult responsibility," writes Pondiscio. Nearly 20 years after the earlier book came out, only a small number of the 15 schools Chenoweth profiled have maintained their quality, according to state report card data. "Many have declined significantly," he writes, and several have closed.

Samuel Casey Carter’s No Excuses (2000) looked at "disciplined, high‑expectation models meant to prove that poverty need not determine academic outcomes," he writes. "Yet decades later, only a minority have clearly sustained their performance, while "the rest declined or disappeared."

Stuebenville, Ohio provides a counter-example, Pondiscio writes. The district, which serves mostly low-income and working-class families, adopted Success for All, a structured, explicit approach to reading instruction, and stuck with it for 25 years, Emily Hanford reports in Sold a Story. (Chenoweth profiled Wells Elementary in Steubenville in a 2009 book, How It’s Being Done.) It worked. So Steubenville ignored all the fads and kept doing it.

"Studying peak performance can teach us what is possible," writes Pondiscio. "Studying long-term consistency can teach us what is reliable. And in education, reliable achievement is far more important and far more rare."

"English children are the best readers in the western world" on PIRLS tests, and moving up in math on PISA, writes Helen Baxendale in Education Next. It's the result of "more than a decade of steady improvement" linked to national reforms, not a flash in the pan, she argues.

Finland was the star of PISA testing in 2003, creating a wave of Finland mania, "a whole industry . . . devoted to studying, venerating, and emulating the purported drivers of Finnish excellence," she writes. It turned out that Finland's schools had peaked. "As of 2022 — the latest round of PISA testing — Finland’s performance had declined more than any other country."

Between 2010 and 2024, Baxendale writes, "England embraced phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, explicit teacher-led instruction, and greater school autonomy." The reforms were "not especially nove." At the same time, "Scotland and Wales eschewed the evidence on early literacy instruction, doubled down on national curricula focused on the acquisition of amorphous 'generalizable' skills, and promoted self-directed 'discovery' learning as state of the art." English students' scores improved on international tests. Scottish and Welsh students' achievement stagnated.

"London’s gritty outer boroughs and the dowdy post-industrial towns of northern England haven’t attracted the same levels of edu-tourism and breathless fascination that Finland garnered in its heyday," writes Baxendale. "Aspiring reformers the world over would do well to familiarize themselves with the English example."