© Dragan Andrii | Dreamstime.com
Why work extra hard when you won't be able to get an A? Why try to improve when you won't get worse than a C?Modern public-education history is littered with novel
education theories that have failed so spectacularly that the terms are now used as pejoratives. For instance, when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, the "New Math" focused on teaching abstractions rather than fundamentals. You can find reams of research documenting its failure decades later, but the evidence was recognized almost immediately.
That then-new approach "ignored completely the fact that mathematics is a cumulative development and that it is practically impossible to learn the newer creations if one does not know the older ones," according to Morris Kline's 1973
Why Johnny Can't Add. Another well-known but more recent failure is "
Common Core" a set of educational standards embraced by California and 39 other states in 2010. On hindsight, it also deserves a failing grade."Despite the theory's intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality," read a 2021 Brookings Institution
report. "The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers' flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students." Don't get me started on some of the loopier ones: pass-fail grading, the replacement of
phonics with whole-language learning, and
Social Emotional Learning (SEL).
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