It was announced in a grand statement.
When New York City Public Schools Chancellor David Banks last year forced the nation’s largest school district to change how students were taught to read and write, it was out of caution: Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in grades three through eight were not proficient in reading and writing, and Mr. Banks criticized the city for a “fundamentally flawed” approach to literacy instruction. The New York Times reports“It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It’s our fault,” Mr Banks told parents. The reforms were “the beginning of a big change”, he said.
This sentiment is not unique to New York. Almost every state In the past few years, several laws have been passed aimed at changing the course of how reading is taught. These changes have been called “decisive victories” in the long-running “reading wars” and have intensified educational research. Prefer phonics-based instruction A movement emerged against other methods of teaching reading, including word recognition, Prominent curriculum group disbands Heinemann, an educational publisher, Experienced a slump in curriculum salesMeanwhile, students are still Struggling to read.
But the recent fragmentation of reading education is also raising new concerns. Some observers Looking for the next failed attempt at education reform — Next time in maths.
Behind this lies the unspoken assumption that education is susceptible to ‘trends.’ So where does this perception come from, and is it correct?
The Reform Merry-go-round
Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who writes a blog about school reform, says “fad” is the wrong word.
For Cubans, the reform movement seems to be caught in a loop, attempting similar changes.Again and againBut schools are not always at the mercy of the latest trends. They suffer from deep structural problems and seem to have failed to learn from a long history of school reform.
The lesson? Public schools are especially vulnerable to pressure, Cuban told EdSurge in a conference call, because national problems tend to become school problems, he said. Schools must “walk a tightrope,” he said, striking a balance between remaining stable for students and adapting to changes in the broader society.
Pressure on schools to respond to new problems often leads to changes in curriculum and the introduction of new courses because that is the part of the public education system that is most amenable to change, Cuban argues. But classrooms are the responsibility of the superintendent’s office, the school board, and other “institutions.”Policy elites“People who drive change,” he says.
For example, he added, once it became known that teen driving was causing traffic deaths, driving became part of the public school curriculum. When drugs became a national issue, schools added anti-drug curriculum. “When the nation has a cold, the schools sneeze,” Cuban said, adding that it’s an old cliché but one he’s found to be true.
Other observers say the focus on abstract ideas about school and the classrooms where real students meet is a common sticking point.
James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that specific reform ideas aren’t just fads. He says schools seem susceptible to fads because they don’t understand what it means to take an idea seriously.
In reality, he adds, many ideas out there aren’t properly tested because the focus is on how they’ll be implemented in the classroom. There are probably a lot of ideas out there that work, but no one knows what they are, he says.
To Ronald Gallimore, professor emeritus of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates are confident that this time they can really get it right, he says. But they may not know the history of education. Another problem, he adds, is that the U.S. school system is highly decentralized, with schools controlled locally, making it hard to make sweeping, across-the-board changes to how students learn.
So how do teachers know if proposed reforms will be effective?
Can you prove it?
“Evidence is the magic word,” says Adrian Simpson, president of St Mary’s College, Durham University in the UK and professor of mathematics education.
That’s also part of the problem.
Those who call for evidence-based approaches to education tend to turn to randomized controlled trials, a powerful form of research widely used in medicine to establish causal relationships, Simpson said. In education, that could mean field experiments that show a practice works in a particular situation, or lab experiments in cognitive science, he said.
“but, [these] “The power of communication is very powerful, but very narrow,” Simpson says.
These studies are seen as evidence that certain approaches work, but Simpson says that what they really do is prove that the differences in the interventions, when added together, improved learning for some participants. It’s hard to say which interventions were effective, and whether they would work for other students, he says.
This also puts pressure on how change is implemented in the classroom.
Imagine the best teacher. How long would it take to design, refine and tailor that teacher’s lesson to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. What makes implementing reform efforts so difficult, Gallimore says, is distilling general ideas into details that work for specific groups of students, often across different learning environments.
So it’s hard to translate lessons learned from these experiments into learning.
Researchers understand less about the mechanisms that make people think about, say, fractions than they do about how the kidneys function, says St. Mary’s Simpson. That means experimental evidence about specific practices in education is weaker than in other fields, such as medicine, where people tend to have similarities. “You can’t establish classroom laws that apply everywhere,” Simpson says.
Ultimately, there are no quick fixes to the reform cycle, Simpson says. But he thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which strives to tailor interventions to individual characteristics. He suggests that teachers should bring together insights from a variety of sources, from memory studies to tips from the teacher next door, to think about how to unlock student learning. Instead of asking how to help a student do better with fractions, teachers could ask, “What is it that’s making this kid not do better with fractions?” That could yield insights that inform student learning, rather than insights that focus solely on teacher interventions, Simpson says.
For UCLA’s Stigler, it’s hard to know what works in education today.
The reform movement needs to focus more on developing a disciplined plan to move from the idea stage to the implementation stage, he said, adding that teachers also need time to ensure that ideas are being implemented effectively.
Without that, Stigler says, no one will know what really works.
