We could really use something like this for education.
I can’t even begin to count how frequently some self-assured pundit, advocate, funder, researcher, or vendor insists they’ve got the next great solution . . . if only everyone would just shut their mouths, open their wallets, and get with the program. And yet, when the results predictably disappoint, these folks never take responsibility. They’re never held accountable. They just move on, while students live with the consequences, educators take the heat, and taxpayers foot the bill.
Last winter, Tim Daly penned a terrific deconstruction of the wildly hyped “Finnish Education Miracle,” which a lot of fad-chasers rode hard for a while before discreetly tiptoeing away when the wheels came off. A decade ago, there was the mad embrace of “teacher evaluation reform,” which promised transformative improvement. When it turned out that the reforms delivered none of the promised benefits . . . crickets.
If you remember the hyped Obama-era multi-billion dollar federal School Improvement Grant program, you might also remember that it turned out to have no impact on student outcomes. The response from its onetime fanboys? A whole lot of nothing. Remember when tech enthusiasts were pushing hard to get more cell phones into classrooms? Or when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were the future of education? We can do this all day with school-improvement strategies, math programs, intervention schemes, tech applications, and the rest.
Today, the Center for Global Development is celebrating “Sobral’s education miracle,” pitching the Brazilian municipality as a new mecca for education transformation. Wide-eyed visitors are flooding in from the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Global Partnership for Education as well as the Gates, Jacobs, Tinker, Zenex, Yidan Prize, Lemann, and Queen Rania foundations. A year and a half ago, in April 2023, enthusiasts were promising that in “a matter of weeks or months,” artificial intelligence would be “your kid’s tutor, your teacher’s assistant & your family’s homework helper.” It’s a little early for scorekeeping, but I’ll go on the record noting that their timeline was off and predicting that the consequences will be far more mixed than the cheerleaders promised.
The problem, as I’ve noted before, is that there are a lot of rewards for touting the new new thing. It’s the ticket to grant funding, speaking slots, and access. Self-assured innovators (paging Paul Banksley) earn a lot more glowing media coverage than skeptics who ask inconvenient questions.
