The March of Folly

K-12 education is a magnet for fads, gimmickry, silver bullets and half-baked quick fixes. Dress codes. Smaller class size. College and career readiness. Tablet computers. Value-added teacher evaluation systems. High-dosage tutoring.

Perhaps good ideas in the abstract, yet lacking reliable empirical evidence of efficacy.

Buzzwords, catchphrases and jargon abound. Social-emotional learning. Culturally relevant teaching.  Data-driven teaching.  Learner-centered education. Again, the concepts might be worthwhile, but precision and execution matter, too.

Most Popular Stories

Most Popular

Why aren’t various proposed panaceas, cure-alls and magic pills questioned, and why do school systems cling to “stupid”—unsubstantiated, ineffectual—policies?

Those are questions that a new book, Duck and Cover: Confronting and Correcting Dubious Practices in Education by Rick Ginsberg and Yong Zhao, a dean and a distinguished professor of education, attempt to answer.

In some cases, it’s out of desperation.  Under pressure to combat learning loss or reduce achievement gaps, educational leadership scrambles to do something, anything.

Often, smart people do dumb things because they fail to appreciate a problem’s complexity and are looking for a simple solution. Then, too, many educational leaders think of themselves as successful problem solvers and want to sustain an image of competence, confidence and being in control. They’re sure “they’re on the right track, that they’ve got the situation under control and they know exactly what to do.”

In other instances, a sensible, innocuous attempt to tackle a genuine challenge becomes an excuse to promote an ideological agenda. That might be in the name of equity (for example, the decision of Cambridge, Mass., public schools to eliminate advanced math in middle school) or expand parental choice (by issuing school vouchers to subsidize the tuition of private and religious schools).

What dubious solutions hold in common is their “lack of a research basis, their utility in gaining publicity or political capital, their lack of follow-up evaluation and their longevity in place, long after any purpose has been served.”  Other common features of these purported solutions are “unintended consequences, waste, superficiality, lack of consultation and performativity,” as well as the careless use of meta-analyses, the lack of randomized studies in education.

The Ginsberg and Zhao book offers some provocative suggestions. For example, schools might create career ladders and more diverse roles for veteran teachers. Or schools might reject the idea of merit pay and instead financially reward the top 90 percent of teachers while freezing the salaries of the bottom 10 percent.

The authors’ overall argument is that:

1. top-down decision-making and micromanagement are inevitably insensitive to the more nuanced problems in individual schools;
2. one-size-fits-all solutions consistently fail to respond to variations in individual student needs;
3. educators need to clarify their goals, move deliberately and respond carefully as they assess the impact of any reform or innovation; and
4. above all, society needs to recognize that educational disparities are largely the products of economic and social disparities—of concentrated poverty, high levels of household instability (often related to eviction) and neighborhoods with high levels of crime, social stress, joblessness and violence—and that in the absence of concerted efforts to address those problems, there are limits to what schools can do.

Higher education has its own dubious ideas and practices. Here are a few:

• Placing first- and second-year students in large lecture courses with limited feedback and little interaction with professors or classmates.
• Equating general education, which is supposed to provide a broad introduction to the liberal arts, with discipline-specific introductory courses.
• Rejecting coherent, integrated degree pathways in favor of disconnected classes that rarely build on one another.
• Reducing instruction in communication and numeracy and statistics largely to a handful of rhetoric and composition and lower-division math classes.
• Instituting “gated” majors that push many students, disproportionately Black and Latino/a, into less lucrative fields of study.
• Concentrating the students with the greatest academic needs in the institutions with the fewest resources and lowest graduation rates.
• Making vertical transfer harder than it needs to be by failing to align curricula with feeder schools, delaying transcript evaluation and refusing to give transfer students equal access to financial aid, entry into required courses and participation in research, honors and other co-curricular and extracurricular opportunities.
• Failing to do more to open windows into careers, provide the high-demand career-related skills (for example, involving project management or industry-specific software) or give students practical work experience (through in-person or virtual internships) or the opportunity to create a portfolio of projects, activities, accomplishments, achievements and skills.
• Treating teaching and faculty research as contrasting and incompatible, rather than as complementary.
• Relying heavily on pedagogies that lack scientific substantiation.

Some people think that higher education has changed too much. That it has watered down standards, reduced reading and writing requirements, and substituted faddish and trendy courses and majors for a more traditional, supposedly more rigorous, education.

But in important respects, higher education has changed too little. It needs to do much more to ensure that:

• Undergraduates receive a more holistic introduction to areas that are especially poorly covered in high school: the arts, social sciences methods and reasoning, and the frontiers of science.
• Students master the technical, analytic, communication, social and life skills and literacies that are essential in today’s society.
• The new student majority—the commuting students who balance academics with work and caregiving responsibilities and who received an uneven high school education—can enter the high-demand and cutting-edge fields that represent the economy’s future.

These are not just artificial intelligence or computer science or data science or neuroscience, but areas that combine the arts and the humanities, like applied mathematics, augmented reality and game design, computational humanities, financial engineering, machine learning, multimedia development, narrative understanding, natural language processing, quantitative analysis, sound engineering, technical theater careers, user experience design and visual design.

We in higher ed need to do the very things that Ginsberg and Zhao call for in K-12 education. We need to be more explicit about our learning objectives and the kind of graduates we seek to cultivate and ask ourselves, how can we best achieve those goals?

Let me conclude by way of a digression. You no doubt recall a University of Chicago student’s attempt to shut down a course entitled The Problem of Whiteness, and the controversy it engendered. Was that student engaging in free speech or harassment when he used social media to stir hostility toward the instructor and her course?

One UC law professor, Geoffrey R. Stone, who helped draft the university’s free speech policy, has argued that nothing should be done to punish the student since it is not possible to distinguish between free speech and cyberbullying and doxing.

Two readers’ responses to Stone’s claim stand out. One maintains that campus administrators should have told the student “that his actions did not contribute to academic discussion and that if future posts by the student led to repeated bullying, the student would be disciplined.” Then the student would “have fair notice” that any further attempt at bullying or harassment would be punished.

Another thoughtful response came from Clifford Ando, a UC professor of history and the chair of the classics department, who wrote,

That notion, that even a secular university ought to think of itself as an ethical community, strikes me as exactly right. As an ethical community, our institutions ought to demonstrate a commitment to moral principle in all of their dealings. That not only means integrity in teaching and research, it also requires equal opportunity for all its members and an obligation to educate students not merely in their field of study but also in ethical behavior and responsible citizenship.

A university is also a community of learners. It must foster an environment where faculty, students and staff are encouraged to engage in exploration and innovation and promote a culture of intellectual curiosity and academic excellence. The goal is not just to educate, but to cultivate critical thinking.

And, further, a university should also think of itself as a community of care, dedicated to the physical, emotional and mental well-being of its members, extending to the local community, and where everyone feels respected and valued.

In other words, our goal shouldn’t be limited to career preparation and vocational training, but the development of ethical, caring and thoughtful individuals who are knowledgeable about the arts, the humanities and the social, behavioral, life and physical sciences and who possess the attributes of engaged citizenship and responsible adulthood.

There is no idea or practice more dubious than that college is first and foremost a matter of credentialing. Sure, a college should promote upward economic mobility. But that’s not enough. Our objective should be much more ambitious, summed up in the German idea of Bildung and the Jesuit concept of cura personalis. A college education worthy of its name should be an instrument of well-rounded development that pays equal attention to the mind, the body and what we now call the emotional interior, but which used to be called the soul.

It’s no surprise that a commercial society would reduce friendship and sex to the instrumental and transactional. But a college education should be more. It’s not enough to train the intellect. A college education should feed the creative and feeling soul.