The End Of Education Reform, Or A New Beginning?

Have the past ten years been a "lost decade" for education reform? Or is the focus finally shifting to something that might actually work?

Ten years ago, reformers were confident they were on the brink of fixing the U.S. education system-especially for the most disadvantaged students. As a neophyte in the movement, I often heard some version of "We know what works." The agenda included:

· Replacing bad teachers with "rock stars;"

· Creating schools-outside the traditional system, if need be-where there was order instead of chaos;

· Focusing relentlessly on reading and math skills;

· Relying on data from frequently administered tests in those subjects to guide instruction; and

· Using end-of-the-year test scores to determine which schools were providing a high-quality education.

All this plus the Common Core standards, released in 2010, was to usher in an era where all teachers and students would be held to high expectations, backed up by rigorous tests. A child's zip code, as the saying went, would no longer determine her destiny.

None of this worked. To be sure, some poor kids got a better education than they otherwise would have. But American students' scores on international and national tests are stagnant or declining, and the gap between high- and low-achievers is widening. High school graduation rates have gone up, but many schools have simply succumbed to pressure to confer diplomas on students who haven't learned much. Outcomes for low-income high school graduates remain bleak. Not surprisingly, reformers have been beating a retreat from initiatives of the past. Disillusioned, philanthropists and states have cut funding for education-and the Trump administration would like to.

Now that the decade is coming to a close, there's a small flurry of retrospection. One conservative commentator, calling the 2010s "ed reform's lost decade," advises those aiming to reduce poverty to focus instead on initiatives like "incentivizing work." A progressive responds that he sees "a lot of good things happening" in ed reform, but they're modest compared to the hopes of a decade ago (for example: U.S. test scores at least remained stagnant while some other countries' declined). They and others argue we need more school choice. Still others, including Democrats competing for the presidential nomination, blame too much choice for our lack of progress-along with low teacher salaries, poverty, and racism.

At the same time, there's a development in the education world that has gotten relatively little attention and seems to belong to another universe. It's not about school choice or teacher quality or any of the other things that have dominated the public conversation. Instead, it's about what gets taught in classrooms and how-a subject in which reformers have shown surprisingly little interest.

The huge and largely unreported story is that American educators are trained to believe in ideas and methods that have little or no evidence behind them-and often conflict with what scientists have discovered about the learning process. Classroom materials rest on similarly flawed assumptions. The disjunction between evidence and practice makes it unnecessarily difficult for teachers to do their jobs and for all but the ablest and most advantaged students to learn. The glimmer of hope is that a growing number of teachers-along with some administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, and parents-are beginning to push for change.

The leading edge of this movement has focused on reading, and primarily on the aspect of reading commonly known as phonics. That's understandable. The debate over phonics has been around for a long time, and it may be easier for people to wrap their minds around it-although it's also easy for them to dismiss it. Many teachers believe they're already teaching phonics when in fact, because of deficiencies in their training, they're not.

The same goes for the other aspect of reading, comprehension. Teachers spend hours every week believing they're teaching comprehension "skills" -think "finding the main idea"-when in fact they're wasting precious time. As cognitive science has demonstrated, comprehension depends far more on how much you know about the topic than on generally applicable "skill." This is an even more complex and insidious problem than phonics-and it's not just about "reading." It's woven through the entire K-12 system, not just early grades. And the solution-switching to a curriculum and instructional approach that builds kids' knowledge directly and explicitly, beginning in kindergarten, instead of focusing on illusory skills-flies in the face of what teachers have been told about how learning works.

Teacher-training programs promote the idea that education is ideally a natural process in which students discover or "construct" knowledge for themselves. "Teacher talk," therefore, should be kept to a minimum, and group work or inquiry-based learning should be maximized. Under this theory, if teachers provide comprehension "skills," they don't need to build knowledge; kids can eventually use their "skills" to do that through their own reading. But cognitive scientists have found that when learners don't know much about a topic, it's far more effective for an expert to explain it and guide discussion than for them to try to figure it out on their own. Similarly, if you know nothing about chemistry or biology, you're going to have a hard time acquiring knowledge from reading an article on DNA, no matter how many times you've practiced "finding the main idea."

The sad truth is that in their well-intentioned zeal for "data," reformers have only made this problem worse. Standardized tests seem to measure comprehension skills, so schools have spent more and more time trying to teach them. The result has been the near elimination of social studies and science, especially in elementary and middle schools where scores are low-including charters. Even though many charters have rejected much traditional education dogma, most have wholeheartedly embraced its mistaken assumptions about reading comprehension.

That means kids who rely on school for academic knowledge-those who don't acquire it at home-are the least likely to get it there. They suffer the consequences when they take a standardized test that presents them with passages they don't have the background knowledge to understand, preventing them from demonstrating their "skills," and also when they lack the background knowledge to understand high school texts. This misguided pedagogical approach-not the amount of school choice, the quality of teachers, or even poverty and racism-is the basic explanation for our failure to make good on the promise of education as an engine of social mobility.

This can be a tough message to take in. When I stumbled upon the situation, six or seven years ago, it took me months to understand it and believe it was true. If such a pervasive and fundamental problem existed, how could it have received so little attention? (The answers are complex; I go into them in the book I ended up writing, The Knowledge Gap.) Once I accepted the problem's existence, I also had to confront the fact that I had been complicit, as a reformer on a modest scale, in perpetuating and exacerbating it. I can only imagine how difficult that is for educators who have put in years of hard work in the sincere belief that what they've been trained to do is helping their students.

Nevertheless, more and more teachers are embracing newly developed literacy curricula that focus on building knowledge. Crucially, administrators at the local and state levels are adopting policies that encourage and support that shift. It's not an easy adjustment, and results won't always be quick or clear-especially if we rely on standardized tests to measure them. Because the tests don't assess any particular body of knowledge, they don't always recognize growth in student learning.

Nor is simply adopting a new kind of curriculum a panacea. Teachers need support to implement it well, and especially to adapt it so that struggling students can reap its benefits. Yes, there's evidence that this new approach can boost scores. But you can also end up with puzzling counter-examples like that in Louisiana, where a recent shift to knowledge-building curricula seems to be widening the test-score gap between the haves and have-nots.

Results like that shouldn't lead us back to the failed practices and policies of the past, nor should we give up on making our education system work for the most vulnerable students. We need to understand the limits of current standardized tests and find other ways to measure progress-like, for example, assessments based in material students have actually been taught.

Maybe we still don't know exactly "what works" in the classroom. But we do know what science has discovered about how kids learn, and we need to make use of it. If we don't, we won't just lose another decade. We'll also continue to squander the untapped potential of millions of kids.