Mike Schmoker is a veteran educator who’s long been a go-to source for “practical, nuts-and-bolts advice, wisdom, and insight” on school improvement. In his book Results Now 2.0: The Untapped Opportunities for Swift, Dramatic Gains in Achievement, Schmoker calls out the “massive gap” between proven practice and common practice. He argues that schools can make immediate, measurable academic gains by leaning on proven curricular and instructional practices. Given the recent surge of interest in high-quality instructional materials and the science of reading, I thought it a good time to hear Schmoker’s take. Here’s what he had to say.
—Rick
Rick: Mike, for those who haven’t read Results Now 2.0, can you briefly explain the premise?
Mike: There’s an immense, and overlooked, opportunity for schools to make swift, significant academic gains. Our schools have yet to implement even the most foundational, impactful practices—the low-hanging fruit of sound pedagogy, like frequent “checks for understanding.” It also contains an unvarnished critique of teacher preparation and professional development and discusses how changes there could have a game-changing impact on student outcomes.
Rick: You’ve argued that “our K–12 system operates in defiance of logic and evidence.” What do you have in mind?
Mike: I wish that were an overstatement. We would expect that a logic-based profession like teaching would prioritize sharing its most indispensable practices through its preparation and training. But as the late Richard Elmore and others have demonstrated, it doesn’t. The initial preparation of K–12’s teachers and administrators is patently misguided, if not abysmal. Similarly, PD’s priorities continue to be based on what one research group in 2015 called “whims, fads, opportunism and ideology.” As a result, malpractice is rampant. It’s hard to disagree with Daniel Willingham and Richard Rotherham’s claim that “in education, we still don’t ‘wash our hands.’” Our recent reckoning with phonics gave us a glimmer of this. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Rick: You describe a chasm between proven practice and common practice. Can you elaborate?
Mike: I’ve visited countless schools and classrooms over the decades. It’s heartbreaking to see the absence of a coherent curriculum, along with the paucity of purposeful reading, writing, and text-based dialogue. And we seldom see evidence that teachers have been trained in the most vital elements of instruction—like short cycles of teaching, checking for understanding, and reteaching throughout the lesson. Instead, we see students spending staggering amounts of time in groups, staring morosely at screens, completing worksheets, or ambling from one low-value, unsupervised “literacy center” to the next—where, instead of reading or writing, students often engage in cut, color, and paste activities. That’s a hell of a gap. It’s also a gargantuan opportunity for academic improvement.
Rick: Why don’t school leaders shift from common practices to evidence-based ones?
Mike: School leaders aren’t encouraged to routinely test common practices, programs, or mandates against evidence. The most popular teacher-evaluation frameworks are a good example. Leaders were urged to adopt these tools nationally, almost overnight, despite zero evidence of their effectiveness. These bloated frameworks are rife with ambiguous, jargon-laden criteria, while omitting the most critical elements of good instruction. We continue to saddle evaluators with these instruments years after their architects have admitted that their mere length precludes their usefulness. The highest-scoring schools and teachers I know operate in defiance of these frameworks. Our administrators deserve better.
Rick: How does this play out with classroom teachers?
Mike: The same points I just made about school leaders also apply to them. For example, they’re told to believe that students learn best with minimal amounts of explicit, whole-class, “frontal” instruction. Many aren’t informed that such teaching is both exceedingly effective and an essential prerequisite to more inquiry-based tasks and projects. Similarly, they’ve been sold the notion that students always learn best in groups, despite ample evidence that while group work is vital, the most effective seating arrangement is desks in rows—yes, desks in rows! Many baseless beliefs in education exemplify what Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman calls the “illusion of validity.” They are unquestioningly embraced only because they are endlessly repeated.
Rick: OK, so how can school leaders and teachers turn those dynamics around?
Mike: There’s no simple answer, but I think positive pressure could create momentum toward an eventual tipping point in preparation and practice. I’d love to see members of the K-12 community, including those on school boards, call for routine, thorough examinations of every major practice and initiative against the preponderance of the evidence. There’d be disagreement, but with any luck, the most high-leverage practices would gain traction, and the worst forms of malpractice would be exposed and abandoned. We could then ferociously focus on the most potent, proven practices until they are mastered and have an impact in schools.
Rick: Anything else?
Mike: Yes. We should ceaselessly gather, celebrate, and broadcast every measurable, evidence-based success at every level—from annual achievement gains to units, projects, and individual lessons. Every concerned educator should be shouting from the rooftops about the role of the “science of reading” in the “Southern surge.” We should also be sharing stories about schools like the ones I write about in my book, where the introduction of homegrown curriculum and significant increases in the amount of reading, writing, and sound instruction caused achievement levels to soar in a single year or two.
Rick: While a lot of experts emphasize issues like policy, funding, and governance, you always bring it back to curriculum, literacy, and proven instructional practice. Why?
Mike: I’d contend that curriculum, literacy, and instructional practice are the most fundamental, amply substantiated elements of effective schooling. We’re starting to recognize their importance. But we’re miles behind on their implementation. Schools rarely work from a clear, sequential, content-rich curriculum that abounds—this is critical—in opportunities for students to read, discuss, and write about what they are learning. As I point out, that’s even true of schools using popular commercial programs, including those with glowing ratings from EdReports. The lessons in some of these highly touted curricula actually trample on the core elements of effective instruction. At the successful schools I write about, ordinary educators made their own curricula that led to dramatic gains at “amazing speed.”
Rick: You’ve called for big changes in teacher preparation and professional development. What do you have in mind?
Mike: I’d love to see both the teacher prep and PD communities formally establish that academic achievement, rightly defined, should be our highest, though not exclusive, priority. We need to see that achievement is at the root of our most urgent social and equity-oriented issues. Then I’d like to see a serious commitment to identifying the most effective practices, followed by effective training. Not just lectures or reading assignments but performance-based training like I once received. The goal should be mastery. This absolutely has to include administrative preparation and PD in how to monitor curriculum and instruction to ensure implementation. None of this is rocket science, as numerous schools demonstrate. Any school, district, or team can do these things now and expect results within a school year.
Rick: You hammer on the importance of valid research findings. Given that, what’s your take on the current state of education research?
Mike: Ed. research is in a sorry state. For instance, the research community has yet to come out against differentiated instruction despite its heavy dependence on debunked notions such as “learning styles.” Differentiated instruction’s claim to be “research-based” has led a legion of well-meaning teachers to abandon common curriculum and whole-class instruction. Instead, it has them frantically trying to customize each child’s materials, instruction, and assessments around a dizzying panoply of specious criteria. All this despite the fact that there is no agreed-upon definition of differentiated instruction, and its benefits have yet to be conclusively determined.
Rick: Given the uneven quality of what’s out there, how can educators know what research to trust?
Mike: They should demand a clear, convincing body of evidence before adopting any strategy or initiative, with a bias toward the most widely endorsed—but still rarely implemented—practices like those I’ve cited. Our education journals and publishers could be critical partners in this work. Too much ink is spilled on popular but unproven innovations, tools, and approaches, often in breathless prose. We have to stop conflating “new and different” with “effective.” We’d be better served by more research on how to successfully implement the most long-standing, if less sexy, elements of effective schooling.
Rick: Obviously, we’re at a moment when there are big questions about the role of classroom technology. How should educators think about phones, AI, and the rest?
Mike: As New York Times columnist Jessica Grose has written, we should be deeply skeptical of AI or any tech that enters our classrooms. It’s not that complicated. No technology should be adopted until it demonstrates that it is not only effective but superior to the most effective known methods and tools. There’s much wisdom in Doug Lemov’s call for our classrooms to be mostly “low tech, high text.” Several Scandinavian countries are moving in this direction. Could anything be more logical, more considerate of our kids? We have no right to conduct a national experiment on them in the name of imperious claims of ed tech’s “inevitability.”
Rick: Last question: You’ve argued that profound, rapid academic gains are possible if schools embrace evidence-based practice. What’s your most important single piece of advice for school leaders pursuing rapid, transformative improvement?
Mike: That claim may sound extravagant. But I quote a bevy of revered researchers whose work demonstrates that focused, intensive efforts to implement the highest-leverage practices produce what Michael Fullan described as “stunningly powerful consequences” in levels of learning. Start by identifying and then presenting the evidence for these elements to a willing team or the whole faculty. Then focus: Devote time and energy to initial and ongoing training, modeling, and monitoring around just one or two priorities. Gather, celebrate, and learn from every short-term success, starting with measurable assessment results from single lessons—seriously, single lessons. Do this, and success is bound to follow.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
