Why is Education So Damned Fad Prone?

I’m imagining a get together, Elle Bisgaard-Church, Z’s Chief of Staff, the same position she held in Albany, a close friend, a confidant, a keeper of the SDP Torch, meeting with the inner circle in the backroom of a bar in the Commie Corridor.

“We can’t let the Z v Tisch tension derail us, how can we get rid of her without alienating the movers and shakers?”

“Maybe Z can convince Trump to offer her a cabinet post, a step up without pissing off her acolytes”

“Run it by Fulihan, he can speak with Merryl.”

“Talking about pissing off, how we can bring back parents and teachers, those teachers vote, we can’t let this mayoral control thing simmer, we need Mulgrew.”

“”Z has to make sure that Tier 6 is fixed and we have to include the para pay bump in the budget, maybe Mulgrew will agree to a stretch out in the implementation of the Class Size Reduction Law, and we’ll commit to exploring more sweeping changes next year,”

Over the last twelve years, three mayors, six chancellors; the end users, parents and teachers on the sidelines with one failed idea after another.

Robert Pondisico writes, Why is education so damned fad-prone?”

The problem is not that education experiments with new ideas. Some experimentation is necessary and healthy. The problem is that the system struggles to sustain success once it finds it. 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. None of this is flashy. None of it lends itself to prizes or glowing media profiles. And all of it is fragile.

NYC dove into the world of phonics, follow the teacher guide, phonics is the holy grail

Liana Loewus on Education Next, The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics tells us,

“Everyone knows that real, actual reading is getting squeezed out because there’s so much attention to the components,” Reading in context generally comes at the end of a phonics lesson, and with so much to cover, teachers can end up with just a few minutes for it. At times, they’ll skip it altogether.But text reading is where decoding and language skills meet—it’s why teachers and students are doing this dance at all.

“Reading connected text allows students to read words in meaningful sentences and paragraphs, allows them to practice to build fluency, and gives [them] the context for understanding, for making inferences, for connecting to prior experiences and background knowledge, to continue building background knowledge, to talk about the vocabulary that’s occurring in the text,”

Students with more background knowledge and better vocabulary tend to be better readers. Supporters of the science of reading understand that decoding is just one part of reading and advocate for knowledge-rich curricula as part of effective teaching. Reading books and other materials helps students learn about words and the world.

David Steiner questions “Why Teachers Don’t Use the High-Quality Instructional Materials They’re Given” urges school districts and school to use High Quality Instructional Materials,

Research and insights from cognitive and educational psychology, sociology and curriculum studies converge on the foundational idea that knowledge acquisition is the essential foundation for complex thought, including thinking critically about a topic. Those who advocate for schools to teach metacognition should also demand that students first learn about the world and the human condition. The response that some things can’t be understood without studying them, or that students will struggle to comprehend texts if they are unfamiliar with the background knowledge those texts presuppose, hasn’t stopped the steady retreat from requiring schools to teach knowledge.

Daniel Willingham and ED Hirsch in Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading reminds us,

For decades, reading instruction in the United States has focused on helping children acquire generic, transferable skills such as finding the main idea of a passage or drawing inferences. At the same time, educators have minimized the contribution that knowledge makes to reading—the idea that knowing something about the topic of a passage helps a reader make sense of it.

Advocates for the skills-based approach have argued that children clearly needed to learn skills, but they didn’t have to store much knowledge in memory; they could always look it up, especially in the digital age. Contending that children need to learn some facts made one seem a nostalgic fuddy-duddy.But something has changed, and knowledge is having a moment in education fashion. All of today’s best-selling reading curricula describe themselves as “knowledge-rich” or trumpet that they “build knowledge intentionally.”

The authors of this article are tickled pink by this development—one of us has argued for the importance of knowledge to reading for 20 years, and the other for 40. But we use the phrase “moment in education fashion” advisedly, well knowing the faddish nature of education enthusiasms. Indeed, a cynic might wonder if some of today’s knowledge advocates will next week declare that knowledge is irrelevant to reading education, using some baseless logic such as the inevitability of brain computer-chip implants.

Almost Chancellor Eric Nadelstern, responding to David Steiner writes,

The curriculum is only as good as the teacher who deeply believes in it, will work to personalize it and make it her own, and will use it to do everything necessary for her students to succeed.

Anyone who thinks it’s about uniformity, or what appears in print,  is shooting in the dark for nonexistent panaceas.

That’s why I prefer for teachers to develop their own curricula, working collaboratively with colleagues, and implementing it together with common accountability for student outcomes. 

What better professional development!

Our newly appointed chancellor seems wedded to “the fad of the moment,” at least until the next fad jumps up out of the edu-fraud muck,

Elle, if I may call you by your first name, there are plenty of really smart people, thoughtful, and talking to them will help you with a, let’s call it for now, a redesign, a restart, rolling down the current pathway, sadly, in spite of the yeoman efforts of teachers, is spinning wheels, we can do better, much better, our students deserve it