He announced it with forceful statements.
When New York City public schools chancellor David Banks had the nation’s largest district change the way it taught students to read last year, he did so with a sense of alarm. Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in third through eighth grades were unable to read proficiently, which Banks attributed to the city’s adoption of a “fundamentally flawed” approach to reading instruction. New York Times Report“It's not your fault. It's not your children's fault. It was our fault,” Banks said. The reform was “the beginning of a radical change.”
The feeling was not limited to New York, with almost all states In recent years, several laws have been passed to correct the course of reading instruction. These changes, which have been hailed as a “decisive victory” in the long-running “reading wars,” have pitted educational research against each other. promoting phonetic-based instruction against other ways of teaching students to read, including word recognition. In the wake of the change, a A prominent curriculum group was dissolved and the educational publisher Heinemann, reportedly Experience in selling decayed resumesMeanwhile, students still struggle to read.
But these recent failures in reading education have also provoked new malaise, such as Some observers begin On the hunt for the next failed attempt at educational reform — Maybe in math next time.
Behind all this lies an unspoken assumption: that education is prone to fads. Where does this perception come from? Is it correct?
The carousel of reform
“Fad is the wrong word,” says Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who blogs about school reform.
For Cubans, reformist movements seem to be stuck in a loop, trying to make similar changes”and again.”But it’s not that schools are constantly being burned down by the latest fad. It’s that they are suffering from deep structural problems and seem to be failing to learn from the long history of school reform.
What’s the lesson? Public schools are particularly vulnerable to pressure, Cuban said on a call with EdSurge. That’s because national problems tend to become school problems, Cuban says. Schools have to walk a “tightrope,” striking a balance that is both stable for students and able to adapt to changes in the broader society, he says.
Pressure on schools to respond to new problems often ends up in changing curricula or introducing new courses, because that is the easiest part of the public education system to change, Cuban says. But classrooms are isolated from the superintendent's office, the school board and others.political elites“those who drive change,” he says.
For example, he adds, when it became known that teenage driving was causing road deaths, driving became part of public school curriculum. When drugs became a national concern, schools added anti-drug programs. “When the country has a cold, the schools sneeze,” Cuban says, adding that it’s an old cliché that turns out to be true.
That approach — the classroom, where abstract ideas about school meet real students — is a common sticking point, other observers say, too.
It's not that specific reform ideas are fads, says James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's that schools seem susceptible to fads because people don't understand what it means to take an idea seriously, he says.
In fact, many of the ideas out there have not been properly tested, because that would mean focusing primarily on how they are implemented in classrooms, he adds. There are probably many ideas that are effective, he says, but no one knows which ones they are.
For Ronald Gallimore, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates think they are on the cusp of something that will actually work this time, he says, but they may not know the history of teaching. It also doesn’t help that the United States has a highly decentralized school system, in which schools are controlled locally, making it difficult to make uniform, sweeping changes to the way students learn, he adds.
How then can teachers know whether a proposed reform is effective?
You can try it?
“Evidence is the magic word,” says Adrian Simpson, head of St. Mary's College at Durham University in England and a professor of mathematics education.
It is also the source of part of the problem.
Those seeking evidence-based approaches to education tend to rely on randomized controlled trials, a robust form of study widely used in medicine to establish causality, Simpson notes. In education, that can mean field experiments showing a practice worked in a particular context or lab experiments in cognitive science, he says.
“But what they tell you is very powerful, but very limited,” Simpson says.
These studies are used to show that certain approaches work, but Simpson says they really just show that the sum of all the differences in the interventions led to learning for some participants. It's difficult to determine which specific intervention worked and whether it would work for other students, Simpson says.
This also puts pressure on how changes are implemented in the classroom.
Imagine the best teacher. How much time does he or she spend designing his or her lessons, fine-tuning them and adapting them to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. That's what makes implementing any reform initiative so difficult, he says: getting from a general idea to the details of making it work with a specific group of students, often in a variety of different learning contexts.
It is therefore difficult to translate the lessons from these experiments into learning.
According to Simpson of St. Mary's College, researchers also have less understanding of the mechanisms by which people think in fractions than they do of how the kidneys work. That's why the evidence from experiments on specific educational practices is weaker than in other areas, such as medicine, where they tend to be similar from person to person: “You can't set rules for the classroom that apply everywhere,” Simpson says.
Ultimately, there is no quick fix for the reform cycle, Simpson says. But she thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which strives to make its interventions better tailored to personal quirks. Teachers should gather information from a variety of sources — from research on memory span to advice from the teacher next door — to inform how to make learning easier for their students, she suggests. Instead of asking what they can do to help a student get better at fractions, a teacher might ask, “What’s causing this child to mishandle fractions?” That could provide insight that doesn’t focus solely on the teacher’s interventions but could nonetheless help the student learn, Simpson says.
For UCLA's Stigler, it's hard to know what works in education right now.
Reform movements need to focus more on developing disciplined plans to move from the ideation phase to the implementation phase, he says. Teachers also need time to ensure that ideas have been effectively put into practice, he adds.
Without that, Stigler says, no one knows what's truly effective.
