It’s not a lack of evidence. Ideological, professional, structural, and political obstacles remain—and many of them are fixed features of American education.
Teaching high school English to kids who don’t have “background knowledge” was probably the biggest differentiator between students that I noticed. Just teaching skills isn’t enough - lack of coherent curriculum, weak teacher content preparation, myth of the heroic teacher, local control… this essay covers so many reasons why education reform is difficult and, as a result, why many kids graduate unable to read and write.
I'm so glad Daniel Willingham made this suggestion on X! It makes it an even 20.
@DTWillingham
Robert Pondiscio: 19 reasons that knowledge-rich curricula have not been broadly adopted in the US, despite strong research support. I'd add this one: "educators underestimate what young children can learn, and the joy with which they will learn it." https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowledge-rich-curriculum-never
When I started developing the list, I wanted it to be "13 Reasons Why" a la that ubiquitous YA novel. Almost immediately, it ballooned to 27. Annika Hernandez, my peerless RA and editor quickly trimmed it pointing out how many of them overlapped, were redundant, etc. But I cannot believe I forgot "Developmentally Appropriate Practice." Duh.
The irony is that there is so much developmentally inappropriate practice that happens, expecting children to make meaning out of text before they are fluent decoders, expecting children to write stories before they have sufficient penmanship and reading skills, etc., etc. My school district has kindergarteners writing multi-sentence stories when they don't even know what makes something a sentence. Watching your 5 year old have repeated meltdowns trying to do kindergarten homework is a shocking experience as a parent. Then everyone wonders why children don't like reading and writing. Because their introduction to them was overwhelming and frustrating.
This essay was restacked by another poster and appeared today in my feed. The topic interested me as a second career teacher.
My entry into education was not planned. I was looking for work and a couple people (separately and unknown to one another) suggested being a substitute teacher to have income during the job search. It wasn't long before principals were requesting me to sub in their schools. One began recruiting me to become a full-time teacher. It took several years to become "credentialed", during which time I continued working as a para-professional. This allowed me to be introduced to curriculum, observe teachers' methods and student behavior, and learn how to teach students in every grade level K though 12. Two things were glaringly obvious: kids weren't learning things I'd learned and knew at those various ages AND I was out of step with the times.
This began in 2003 and "No Child Left Behind" was in full swing. Foolishly, I misunderstood the phrase. My interpretation: "No Child Would Be Allowed to Fall Behind". I acted accordingly and was called into the principal's office three times and threatened with termination in the first month as a para. "Things are different than when you went to school," was his explanation. I was never sent to the principal's office as a student during my K-12 years. This was culture shock. Extra training was assigned and the indoctrination into "child-centered" education began.
In 2017, I was hired as a full-time teacher. It was in a parochial school. Public schools were not an option after all the years of experience in them. The desire was to be where real education took place. That illusion was quickly destroyed. It was obvious it was no more than " a public school with a cross on the front" (my phrase). However, the priest had received a "Classical Education" growing up and wanted to bring it to our school. He noticed how the kids responded to me and their improved performance. Other teachers also noticed and would ask how I did what I did. He placed me on a committee to improve our methods of instruction. This is when I began researching Classical Ed. It explained what I was doing naturally and made a way to share it with others. The priest died, but the teachers who had inquired about my methods and applied them, began improving also.
After 5 years there, I was run out of the school despite the bishop's direction for our school to transition
Thank you for your essay and reading this response. Your observations are in line with my experience.
This was a great article, but I have two points of mild contention lol. 1) student-led learning is a progressive education concept that has been bastardised by a lazy education system. An example of correct and valuable student-led learning: my elementary school child is learning about the American rev. They love it and are simultaneously learning, at home and quite deeply, about the French rev and become obsessed with Marie Antoinette, having visited her furniture from the Conciergerie at a museum in Paris. They ask their teacher if they can be Marie Antoinette for the classroom living wax museum and present an argument that she is also a part of the American revolution because her husband/the crown funded it and went into extreme debt for it and the debt caused tensions that ultimately resulted in her death. In an ideal student-led situation, the teacher might have said it was an interesting idea and told my child they could be Marie Antoinette if they put together a small presentation or essay on her connection to the revolution and then scripted their own lines for the living museum drawing on the arguments from this presentation/essay. This is also successful project-based learning. Instead, at a progressive school, the teacher said “that’s interesting, but I don’t really know. I think we’ll just stick with the list we have,” effectively closing the door on what could have been a rich and valuable educational experience. There were other opportunities to visit historic sites of the revolution nearby. There are many streets here named after Lafayette. There’s plenty of space for progressive ed concepts when done well, but many teachers are not adequately trained and lack, as you said, the university-level content knowledge, to deliver them.
2) project-based learning on its own is not useless in early elementary school or late in high school providing kids are otherwise following a knowledge-rich model. Waldorf schools are a good example of this. Play-based and project-based prek and k lead into a more traditional, knowledge-rich first grade year. The opportunity to learn via projects, be it acting out the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer in class, arguing in the Roman forum, etc, develop alongside the students as they become teenagers. Until then, handcrafts are the primary model for project-based learning, through which the kids learn to problem-solve. Even art is otherwise pretty controlled.
First off, thank you for the thoughtful, beautifully written essay. Gorgeous writing is so rare these days.
Secondly, I worked long and hard to write a reply which the Demons of the Internet ate with a single errant key stroke! I doubt the following reconstruction is as good. *sigh*
No, none of your points has anything to do with cognitive science. But the majority of them are facets of the same lump of coal. (I cannot bring myself to write “gem.”) Upon that lump of coal is engraved the words, “KNOWLEDGE IS HARD.”
All of your Ideological Obstacles, all but one of your Professional Obstacles, half of your Structural Obstacles, all of your Political Obstacles, and your point on Technology are covers and excuses for the fact that teaching knowledge is difficult; teaching knowledge that you do not have yourself (and may not want to admit you do not have) is well on nigh impossible.
It is far, far easier to modify the “best practices,” to change the definitions of teaching and learning, to move the goal posts of education itself, than to accept the difficulty of the task at hand and to meet its challenge. Broadly speaking this part and parcel of modern American culture (your sub-culture may vary), the easy path is the better one, no matter where it leads.
I am firmly convinced that we, as a society, know how to teach, and we even know what to teach (allowing for flexibility and spirited public debate), but we have lost the will, the intestinal fortitude, to get stuck in and Just Do It! We took the easier, more travelled road as Americans always do. Look where it’s gotten us.
P.S. I am not normally so pessimistic, typically I’m Pollyannaish to a fault. Your piece hit hard, but, I still find reasons to be hopeful. The dialogue here is one.
Thank you for an excellent assessment of the current disaster.
My grandchildren are blessed to be in a classical school. The fabulous curriculum is designed to transmit Western cultural knowledge from kindergarten through twelfth grade. If you are not familiar with it, https://charter.memoriapress.com is their curriculum. I think you would appreciate it.
I briefly taught algebra in a parochial school. I had to spend time on math fact drills because memorization had been considered cruel. We discovered that when computation is difficult, you get stuck before you can even begin doing math. Kids would say they were bad at math, and it turns out they were missing some critical concept, like how fractions and division are related. I also required daily timed quizzes; I told them it was like an allergy shot, and pretty soon, they would not react to timed tests. So many of the "helps" we give students end up hurting them.
My home is filled with books and ideas, which gives my children and grandchildren a significant advantage. Schools should level the playing field; instead, they have made the difference greater. The failure of our public schools and the harm it has done to underprivileged students is the civil rights issue of our day.
It's gonna be tough without a lingua franca. Identity, unfortunately, is core to our identity. That which you don't identify with becomes irrelevant culturally. It wasn't always this way, but Jeannie never goes back in her bottle voluntarily.
Yes, states and school districts, lemming like, are racing towards “feel-good” pre-packaged magic bullets. NYS is eliminating the Regents Examinations and replacing with Portrait of a Graduate undefined projects. And AI is neither an answer or the problem.. change is in the wind, we just can’t control the direction of the wind.
Your criticism of teacher “ownership of practice” is unfortunate, teaching is not tightening bolts on an assembly line, kids differ, kids change, teachers must be nimble and teacher collaboration on a school and district level improves outcomes.
I post my Substacks regularly (Ed in the Apple) and hope the policy makers are listening….
The "Portrait of a Graduate/Student/Learner/etc." is perhaps one of the biggest educational consultant scams. The amount of time and money school districts have wasted on these Portraits, and continue to waste in trying to "align" everything they do with these Portraits is frightening.
I found this essay interesting. I don't disagree with any of the 19 points, but I think many of them function as straw men. Focusing on knocking them down distracts from a more important question: how do we design curriculum and instruction that reflect what we know about learning and development? I'll focus on the ideological obstacles.
1. The Skills Myth
It is absolutely true that critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content. People have to think critically about something! And expertise in one domain does not automatically transfer to another. For that reason, teaching "critical thinking skills" separately from content is unlikely to be effective.
But the opposite mistake is equally problematic: teaching content without developing students' ability to analyze, evaluate, and apply what they know. The challenge is not choosing between knowledge and thinking. It is building curriculum that develops both simultaneously.
Unfortunately, too few curricula do this well, and those that do are often not distinguished from less effective alternatives in the marketplace. We should be investing more heavily in the research and development needed to build stronger knowledge-rich curricula that also cultivate reasoning and problem-solving, and continue to work on the signaling problem (as Ed Reports and the Evidence Advocacy Center are doing).
2. Child-Centered Learning
I agree that students need exposure to people, places, ideas, and events beyond their own experience. Education should broaden horizons, not simply reflect students' existing interests.
At the same time, one of the most powerful ways to help students understand distant times and cultures is to connect them to dilemmas that remain recognizable today. Students may better understand why Ancient Egyptians devoted enormous resources to building pyramids if they first consider a contemporary tradeoff: Should a school use a financial surplus to build a swimming pool that would make it famous, or should it repair bathrooms and buy books? (See SERP’s Social Studies Generation). Such comparisons do not replace historical knowledge; they make it meaningful.
There are also circumstances in which "holding up a mirror" is educationally important. Adolescents who are years behind in reading often associate reading with repeated failure. Seeing themselves reflected in literature can provide a powerful source of motivation and engagement. The ESSA Tier 1 evidence supporting SERP's STARI intervention suggests that this approach can help students persist long enough to develop the knowledge and skills they need.
3. Project-Based Learning
I agree that project-based learning becomes problematic when projects replace systematic knowledge-building. Students need a coherent foundation of facts, concepts, and ideas.
At the same time, decades of cognitive research show that students often struggle to use knowledge outside the contexts in which they learned it. They may recall information on a test yet fail to apply it in real-world situations, as described in How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Donovan, Bransford, & Pellegrino, 1999). Opportunities to apply knowledge are an essential part of learning. Application should not replace instruction, but it should accompany it.
4. Anti-Canon Sentiment
I agree that it is unfortunate when important content is excluded simply because it is associated with a traditional canon. Students deserve access to the ideas, events, and individuals that have shaped history and culture.
But when the canon is incomplete or biased, the solution is not to teach it uncritically. The solution is to teach it more accurately and more completely. George Washington was an extraordinary military and political leader who played a central role in the nation's founding. He also enslaved people and was motivated, in part, by ambitions for western lands occupied by Native Americans. Students should learn all of these facts as part of a coherent understanding of American history.
5. Individualism
I agree that there are things every educated person should know. Shared cultural knowledge matters. Children should know stories such as Goldilocks and Cinderella because those references continue to function as cultural shorthand in everyday communication. But children should also be able to choose books that interest them. It’s not an either/or.
Self-direction can certainly be overemphasized, but it can also be underemphasized. It is unfortunate when students graduate with little exposure to humanity's accumulated knowledge. It is equally unfortunate when students graduate having succeeded in highly structured environments but lacking the ability to decide what to do when no one is telling them what comes next.
The fact that examples can be found of each of these five barriers does not make them the central problem facing education. One can just as easily find examples of supposedly knowledge-rich curricula that violate well-established principles of learning and development.
The real work is not choosing sides in these debates. It is making sustained investments in the research, development, and implementation of curriculum and instruction that occupy the Goldilocks zone: enough knowledge to build understanding, enough critical thinking to make sense of that knowledge, enough application to make it useful, and enough choice to help students develop agency. The goal is not knowledge versus skills, content versus engagement, or structure versus autonomy. The goal is an education that develops all of them well.
I found this essay interesting. I don't disagree with any of the 19 points, but I think many of them function as straw men. Focusing on knocking them down distracts from a more important question: how do we design curriculum and instruction that reflect what we know about learning and development? I'll focus on the ideological obstacles.
1. The Skills Myth
It is absolutely true that critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content. People have to think critically about something! And expertise in one domain does not automatically transfer to another. For that reason, teaching "critical thinking skills" separately from content is unlikely to be effective.
But the opposite mistake is equally problematic: teaching content without developing students' ability to analyze, evaluate, and apply what they know. The challenge is not choosing between knowledge and thinking. It is building curriculum that develops both simultaneously.
Unfortunately, too few curricula do this well, and those that do are often not distinguished from less effective alternatives in the marketplace. We should be investing more heavily in the research and development needed to build stronger knowledge-rich curricula that also cultivate reasoning and problem-solving, and continue to work on the signaling problem (as Ed Reports and the Evidence Advocacy Center are doing).
2. Child-Centered Learning
I agree that students need exposure to people, places, ideas, and events beyond their own experience. Education should broaden horizons, not simply reflect students' existing interests.
At the same time, one of the most powerful ways to help students understand distant times and cultures is to connect them to dilemmas that remain recognizable today. Students may better understand why Ancient Egyptians devoted enormous resources to building pyramids if they first consider a contemporary tradeoff: Should a school use a financial surplus to build a swimming pool that would make it famous, or should it repair bathrooms and buy books? (See SERP’s Social Studies Generation). Such comparisons do not replace historical knowledge; they make it meaningful.
There are also circumstances in which "holding up a mirror" is educationally important. Adolescents who are years behind in reading often associate reading with repeated failure. Seeing themselves reflected in literature can provide a powerful source of motivation and engagement. The ESSA Tier 1 evidence supporting SERP's STARI intervention suggests that this approach can help students persist long enough to develop the knowledge and skills they need.
3. Project-Based Learning
I agree that project-based learning becomes problematic when projects replace systematic knowledge-building. Students need a coherent foundation of facts, concepts, and ideas.
At the same time, decades of cognitive research show that students often struggle to use knowledge outside the contexts in which they learned it. They may recall information on a test yet fail to apply it in real-world situations, as described in How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Donovan, Bransford, & Pellegrino, 1999). Opportunities to apply knowledge are an essential part of learning. Application should not replace instruction, but it should accompany it.
4. Anti-Canon Sentiment
I agree that it is unfortunate when important content is excluded simply because it is associated with a traditional canon. Students deserve access to the ideas, events, and individuals that have shaped history and culture.
But when the canon is incomplete or biased, the solution is not to teach it uncritically. The solution is to teach it more accurately and more completely. George Washington was an extraordinary military and political leader who played a central role in the nation's founding. He also enslaved people and was motivated, in part, by ambitions for western lands occupied by Native Americans. Students should learn all of these facts as part of a coherent understanding of American history.
5. Individualism
I agree that there are things every educated person should know. Shared cultural knowledge matters. Children should know stories such as Goldilocks and Cinderella because those references continue to function as cultural shorthand in everyday communication. But children should also be able to choose books that interest them. It’s not an either/or.
Self-direction can certainly be overemphasized, but it can also be underemphasized. It is unfortunate when students graduate with little exposure to humanity's accumulated knowledge. It is equally unfortunate when students graduate having succeeded in highly structured environments but lacking the ability to decide what to do when no one is telling them what comes next.
The fact that examples can be found of each of these five barriers does not make them the central problem facing education. One can just as easily find examples of supposedly knowledge-rich curricula that violate well-established principles of learning and development.
The real work is not choosing sides in these debates. It is making sustained investments in the research, development, and implementation of curriculum and instruction that occupy the Goldilocks zone: enough knowledge to build understanding, enough critical thinking to make sense of that knowledge, enough application to make it useful, and enough choice to help students develop agency. The goal is not knowledge versus skills, content versus engagement, or structure versus autonomy. The goal is an education that develops all of them well.
1) Yes, knowledge AND skills. To do critical thinking, you have to have something to think about, succinctly put. And yes, the point about domain-specific knowledge is extremely well-taken. The more you know about an area, the better you can think critically about it. 2) Child centered. Yes, people went overboard with this concept. I was a language teacher, and i always wondered how kids were going to tell me they wanted to learn about the dative case in German. 3) Project based. Occasionally useful, but "frontal instruction" (this practically became a dirty word) is an important basis for this. 4) Anti-canon - people also went overboard with this concept. Add to the canon but don't throw out what a culture has in common that has long-standing merit. 5) Teacher autonomy. This one is tricky. You don't want to remove it, but teachers need good training, good textbooks (I know a lot of language textbooks are not really great, but even a bad textbook helps order a learning sequence, although it will need supplementation.) But I always tailored my teaching to a specific class makeup (their prior knowledge and needs, etc). It wasn't about status. Teaching is an art not a science. Books often have teacher's guides. IF these are good, the can be a godsend. Most are not, and need supplementation. 6) Yes, curriculum as roadmap. And a national "roadmap" curriculum wouldn't be totally amiss. Say, American lit in 11th grade, and British lit in 12th grade. (And no, literature, and even history doesn't always have to be taught chronologically as long as a general schema is built over time.) But it wouldn't be amiss to provide grade-level goals, provide good textbooks if possible, and good school policies. Teacher autonomy IS important nonetheless. For any kind of real exchange in a class where magic and memorable moments occur, you need good teachers with autonomy working toward those curricular goals. Teachers are not technicians. 8) Yes, content knowledge on the part of teachers is invaluable. 9) Yes, coherent curriculum and accountability, yes teacher training (preferable in the context of real classrooms), and good teacher selection. and yes, sensible policies and guidance for teachers who are "ordinary." (although I'm not sure i understand whati s meant by that word.) Teacher education is necessary,and lesson preparation is necessary, and sometimes it can be labor-intensive. But with good materials (not just texts, but good suggestions for teaching it) it is a whole lot easier. But in the end, it should be the teacher's decision. She is the one with the class- which she knows - in front of her. 10) There might be merit to general curricular guidelines at a national level for kids who change schools which many do. This is a well-taken point. However, there IS something to be said for "schema" learning: i.e. you get the basics in a general area and afterwards if you have basic literacy and numeracy you can fill in the gaps as needed as your life progresses. 11) I do think school choice is important. You can have a general curriculum (there ARE homeschooling guides) but allow variety in the way the curricular goals are met. 12) There are good reasons why control of schools is local. Look at how out of control NEA and UFT have become in what they promote. 13) Curriculum wars. We certainly need to say no to any kind of political indoctrination. The same with to establish a uniform world view or outlook. That's KEY. 14) Yes, Hirsch was right about background knowledge - we all should have it, whether we get it from home or school. Background knowledge is a key to reading comprehension, critical thinking, and education in general. If students' background knowledge isn't uniform, gear teaching to include this for differently prepared students, including students who come from different countries. 15) Personally, i don't trust education "experts." Education "experts" fall prey to educational fashions and ideologies. Teaching is an art, not a science. My criterion (regarding any teaching approach) is "If it works, it works." In front of my eyes, in my classroom. 17) AI can be a boon to students and teachers, once we develop common sense safeguards. As an English teacher, I can tell you AI-generated writing doesn't have the "spark" of a good human writer.
Yes, it's very difficult to write a good textbook. Even a half-way adequate one is also a challenge. Careful sequencing, recycling of material, good exercises, good questions and activities - all of that is a challenge and not everyone is up to it. Even a creative teacher benefits greatly from the textbook (and the writer is paid well, esp. if the text is adopted, and usually has a lot of experience, strong knowledge, and writing talent and creativity.) Create your own scope and sequence??? That's nuts! It's reinventing the wheel or maybe the whole car. The result is either exhausted teachers making it up as they go along ("What the @#$% am I going to do tomorrow???") or sub par instruction that may not sequence and build properly, and I'm guessing often both. Heaven help beginning teachers. Even after a lifetime of teaching, I'd rather have some kind of textbook to start with rather than having to write my own.
Thank you for #8, "Weak Teacher Content Preparation". From my own experience, I've always thought it was weird that we have BA/BS in content (and not from a secondary lens), and are *never* evaluated on it, and an MS in Education, and our evaluations are entirely "best practice/pedagogical". Not that degrees automatically equal competence, but at least theoretically...
Also, there are parallels to health & fitness. Evidence is typically a shotgun blast around the bullseye, and rarely a single round through it; the convergence of evidence usually lands on something that's difficult *and* unpalatable; there's enough space between the evidence to fill with actionable, measurable, palatable, and mostly wrong narrative. All because caloric restriction is difficult and not everybody is going to do it, especially when calories are so cheap and tasty.
You make a strong point. "Best practice" is a subjective term and dependent upon the speaker's opinion. The person will claim his/her position is "evidenced based" while dismissing a counter position as anecdotal. This is done even with comparable supporting evidence.
Teaching high school English to kids who don’t have “background knowledge” was probably the biggest differentiator between students that I noticed. Just teaching skills isn’t enough - lack of coherent curriculum, weak teacher content preparation, myth of the heroic teacher, local control… this essay covers so many reasons why education reform is difficult and, as a result, why many kids graduate unable to read and write.
The breadth of this remarkable piece rivals Pam Snow’s from this week about evidence excuses (https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-dog-ate-my-homework-educations.html?m=1). Fighting off the urge to just fold, does this piece make the case that Susan Neuman makes about building literacy practices around existing content area standards? I discuss this in In a Dark, Dark Wood: The First Casualty in the Comprehension Wars Is Contextualization (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?r=5spuf&utm_medium=ios). Thanks for the reality check.
I'm so glad Daniel Willingham made this suggestion on X! It makes it an even 20.
@DTWillingham
Robert Pondiscio: 19 reasons that knowledge-rich curricula have not been broadly adopted in the US, despite strong research support. I'd add this one: "educators underestimate what young children can learn, and the joy with which they will learn it." https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowledge-rich-curriculum-never
When I started developing the list, I wanted it to be "13 Reasons Why" a la that ubiquitous YA novel. Almost immediately, it ballooned to 27. Annika Hernandez, my peerless RA and editor quickly trimmed it pointing out how many of them overlapped, were redundant, etc. But I cannot believe I forgot "Developmentally Appropriate Practice." Duh.
The irony is that there is so much developmentally inappropriate practice that happens, expecting children to make meaning out of text before they are fluent decoders, expecting children to write stories before they have sufficient penmanship and reading skills, etc., etc. My school district has kindergarteners writing multi-sentence stories when they don't even know what makes something a sentence. Watching your 5 year old have repeated meltdowns trying to do kindergarten homework is a shocking experience as a parent. Then everyone wonders why children don't like reading and writing. Because their introduction to them was overwhelming and frustrating.
Robert,
This essay was restacked by another poster and appeared today in my feed. The topic interested me as a second career teacher.
My entry into education was not planned. I was looking for work and a couple people (separately and unknown to one another) suggested being a substitute teacher to have income during the job search. It wasn't long before principals were requesting me to sub in their schools. One began recruiting me to become a full-time teacher. It took several years to become "credentialed", during which time I continued working as a para-professional. This allowed me to be introduced to curriculum, observe teachers' methods and student behavior, and learn how to teach students in every grade level K though 12. Two things were glaringly obvious: kids weren't learning things I'd learned and knew at those various ages AND I was out of step with the times.
This began in 2003 and "No Child Left Behind" was in full swing. Foolishly, I misunderstood the phrase. My interpretation: "No Child Would Be Allowed to Fall Behind". I acted accordingly and was called into the principal's office three times and threatened with termination in the first month as a para. "Things are different than when you went to school," was his explanation. I was never sent to the principal's office as a student during my K-12 years. This was culture shock. Extra training was assigned and the indoctrination into "child-centered" education began.
In 2017, I was hired as a full-time teacher. It was in a parochial school. Public schools were not an option after all the years of experience in them. The desire was to be where real education took place. That illusion was quickly destroyed. It was obvious it was no more than " a public school with a cross on the front" (my phrase). However, the priest had received a "Classical Education" growing up and wanted to bring it to our school. He noticed how the kids responded to me and their improved performance. Other teachers also noticed and would ask how I did what I did. He placed me on a committee to improve our methods of instruction. This is when I began researching Classical Ed. It explained what I was doing naturally and made a way to share it with others. The priest died, but the teachers who had inquired about my methods and applied them, began improving also.
After 5 years there, I was run out of the school despite the bishop's direction for our school to transition
Thank you for your essay and reading this response. Your observations are in line with my experience.
~ Chris
This was a great article, but I have two points of mild contention lol. 1) student-led learning is a progressive education concept that has been bastardised by a lazy education system. An example of correct and valuable student-led learning: my elementary school child is learning about the American rev. They love it and are simultaneously learning, at home and quite deeply, about the French rev and become obsessed with Marie Antoinette, having visited her furniture from the Conciergerie at a museum in Paris. They ask their teacher if they can be Marie Antoinette for the classroom living wax museum and present an argument that she is also a part of the American revolution because her husband/the crown funded it and went into extreme debt for it and the debt caused tensions that ultimately resulted in her death. In an ideal student-led situation, the teacher might have said it was an interesting idea and told my child they could be Marie Antoinette if they put together a small presentation or essay on her connection to the revolution and then scripted their own lines for the living museum drawing on the arguments from this presentation/essay. This is also successful project-based learning. Instead, at a progressive school, the teacher said “that’s interesting, but I don’t really know. I think we’ll just stick with the list we have,” effectively closing the door on what could have been a rich and valuable educational experience. There were other opportunities to visit historic sites of the revolution nearby. There are many streets here named after Lafayette. There’s plenty of space for progressive ed concepts when done well, but many teachers are not adequately trained and lack, as you said, the university-level content knowledge, to deliver them.
2) project-based learning on its own is not useless in early elementary school or late in high school providing kids are otherwise following a knowledge-rich model. Waldorf schools are a good example of this. Play-based and project-based prek and k lead into a more traditional, knowledge-rich first grade year. The opportunity to learn via projects, be it acting out the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer in class, arguing in the Roman forum, etc, develop alongside the students as they become teenagers. Until then, handcrafts are the primary model for project-based learning, through which the kids learn to problem-solve. Even art is otherwise pretty controlled.
First off, thank you for the thoughtful, beautifully written essay. Gorgeous writing is so rare these days.
Secondly, I worked long and hard to write a reply which the Demons of the Internet ate with a single errant key stroke! I doubt the following reconstruction is as good. *sigh*
No, none of your points has anything to do with cognitive science. But the majority of them are facets of the same lump of coal. (I cannot bring myself to write “gem.”) Upon that lump of coal is engraved the words, “KNOWLEDGE IS HARD.”
All of your Ideological Obstacles, all but one of your Professional Obstacles, half of your Structural Obstacles, all of your Political Obstacles, and your point on Technology are covers and excuses for the fact that teaching knowledge is difficult; teaching knowledge that you do not have yourself (and may not want to admit you do not have) is well on nigh impossible.
It is far, far easier to modify the “best practices,” to change the definitions of teaching and learning, to move the goal posts of education itself, than to accept the difficulty of the task at hand and to meet its challenge. Broadly speaking this part and parcel of modern American culture (your sub-culture may vary), the easy path is the better one, no matter where it leads.
I am firmly convinced that we, as a society, know how to teach, and we even know what to teach (allowing for flexibility and spirited public debate), but we have lost the will, the intestinal fortitude, to get stuck in and Just Do It! We took the easier, more travelled road as Americans always do. Look where it’s gotten us.
P.S. I am not normally so pessimistic, typically I’m Pollyannaish to a fault. Your piece hit hard, but, I still find reasons to be hopeful. The dialogue here is one.
Thank you for an excellent assessment of the current disaster.
My grandchildren are blessed to be in a classical school. The fabulous curriculum is designed to transmit Western cultural knowledge from kindergarten through twelfth grade. If you are not familiar with it, https://charter.memoriapress.com is their curriculum. I think you would appreciate it.
I briefly taught algebra in a parochial school. I had to spend time on math fact drills because memorization had been considered cruel. We discovered that when computation is difficult, you get stuck before you can even begin doing math. Kids would say they were bad at math, and it turns out they were missing some critical concept, like how fractions and division are related. I also required daily timed quizzes; I told them it was like an allergy shot, and pretty soon, they would not react to timed tests. So many of the "helps" we give students end up hurting them.
My home is filled with books and ideas, which gives my children and grandchildren a significant advantage. Schools should level the playing field; instead, they have made the difference greater. The failure of our public schools and the harm it has done to underprivileged students is the civil rights issue of our day.
It's gonna be tough without a lingua franca. Identity, unfortunately, is core to our identity. That which you don't identify with becomes irrelevant culturally. It wasn't always this way, but Jeannie never goes back in her bottle voluntarily.
Yes, states and school districts, lemming like, are racing towards “feel-good” pre-packaged magic bullets. NYS is eliminating the Regents Examinations and replacing with Portrait of a Graduate undefined projects. And AI is neither an answer or the problem.. change is in the wind, we just can’t control the direction of the wind.
Your criticism of teacher “ownership of practice” is unfortunate, teaching is not tightening bolts on an assembly line, kids differ, kids change, teachers must be nimble and teacher collaboration on a school and district level improves outcomes.
I post my Substacks regularly (Ed in the Apple) and hope the policy makers are listening….
The "Portrait of a Graduate/Student/Learner/etc." is perhaps one of the biggest educational consultant scams. The amount of time and money school districts have wasted on these Portraits, and continue to waste in trying to "align" everything they do with these Portraits is frightening.
I think we agree on a lot. I’m going to read this again, run it through my own schema and get back to you on this. 🤪🤪🤪
We don't, actually, know how much it is winning, or not.
We could know. But those in charge are waiting for the feds to create a form, and mandate filling in the form.
You remember the feds? The ones still using early 1990's web tech to power treasurydirect.gov?
If we acted as other sectors do, we'd know more by now.
Here is what we do know: Book-centered, knowledge-building curricula are gaining, with nearly a third of the schools in the data set using it.
Way outpacing the 'balanced literacy', and nose-to-nose with the basals. https://bennie.vercel.app
If I could triple like this post I would. Put this post on the front page of every paper in the country.
I found this essay interesting. I don't disagree with any of the 19 points, but I think many of them function as straw men. Focusing on knocking them down distracts from a more important question: how do we design curriculum and instruction that reflect what we know about learning and development? I'll focus on the ideological obstacles.
1. The Skills Myth
It is absolutely true that critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content. People have to think critically about something! And expertise in one domain does not automatically transfer to another. For that reason, teaching "critical thinking skills" separately from content is unlikely to be effective.
But the opposite mistake is equally problematic: teaching content without developing students' ability to analyze, evaluate, and apply what they know. The challenge is not choosing between knowledge and thinking. It is building curriculum that develops both simultaneously.
Unfortunately, too few curricula do this well, and those that do are often not distinguished from less effective alternatives in the marketplace. We should be investing more heavily in the research and development needed to build stronger knowledge-rich curricula that also cultivate reasoning and problem-solving, and continue to work on the signaling problem (as Ed Reports and the Evidence Advocacy Center are doing).
2. Child-Centered Learning
I agree that students need exposure to people, places, ideas, and events beyond their own experience. Education should broaden horizons, not simply reflect students' existing interests.
At the same time, one of the most powerful ways to help students understand distant times and cultures is to connect them to dilemmas that remain recognizable today. Students may better understand why Ancient Egyptians devoted enormous resources to building pyramids if they first consider a contemporary tradeoff: Should a school use a financial surplus to build a swimming pool that would make it famous, or should it repair bathrooms and buy books? (See SERP’s Social Studies Generation). Such comparisons do not replace historical knowledge; they make it meaningful.
There are also circumstances in which "holding up a mirror" is educationally important. Adolescents who are years behind in reading often associate reading with repeated failure. Seeing themselves reflected in literature can provide a powerful source of motivation and engagement. The ESSA Tier 1 evidence supporting SERP's STARI intervention suggests that this approach can help students persist long enough to develop the knowledge and skills they need.
3. Project-Based Learning
I agree that project-based learning becomes problematic when projects replace systematic knowledge-building. Students need a coherent foundation of facts, concepts, and ideas.
At the same time, decades of cognitive research show that students often struggle to use knowledge outside the contexts in which they learned it. They may recall information on a test yet fail to apply it in real-world situations, as described in How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Donovan, Bransford, & Pellegrino, 1999). Opportunities to apply knowledge are an essential part of learning. Application should not replace instruction, but it should accompany it.
4. Anti-Canon Sentiment
I agree that it is unfortunate when important content is excluded simply because it is associated with a traditional canon. Students deserve access to the ideas, events, and individuals that have shaped history and culture.
But when the canon is incomplete or biased, the solution is not to teach it uncritically. The solution is to teach it more accurately and more completely. George Washington was an extraordinary military and political leader who played a central role in the nation's founding. He also enslaved people and was motivated, in part, by ambitions for western lands occupied by Native Americans. Students should learn all of these facts as part of a coherent understanding of American history.
5. Individualism
I agree that there are things every educated person should know. Shared cultural knowledge matters. Children should know stories such as Goldilocks and Cinderella because those references continue to function as cultural shorthand in everyday communication. But children should also be able to choose books that interest them. It’s not an either/or.
Self-direction can certainly be overemphasized, but it can also be underemphasized. It is unfortunate when students graduate with little exposure to humanity's accumulated knowledge. It is equally unfortunate when students graduate having succeeded in highly structured environments but lacking the ability to decide what to do when no one is telling them what comes next.
The fact that examples can be found of each of these five barriers does not make them the central problem facing education. One can just as easily find examples of supposedly knowledge-rich curricula that violate well-established principles of learning and development.
The real work is not choosing sides in these debates. It is making sustained investments in the research, development, and implementation of curriculum and instruction that occupy the Goldilocks zone: enough knowledge to build understanding, enough critical thinking to make sense of that knowledge, enough application to make it useful, and enough choice to help students develop agency. The goal is not knowledge versus skills, content versus engagement, or structure versus autonomy. The goal is an education that develops all of them well.
I found this essay interesting. I don't disagree with any of the 19 points, but I think many of them function as straw men. Focusing on knocking them down distracts from a more important question: how do we design curriculum and instruction that reflect what we know about learning and development? I'll focus on the ideological obstacles.
1. The Skills Myth
It is absolutely true that critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught independently of content. People have to think critically about something! And expertise in one domain does not automatically transfer to another. For that reason, teaching "critical thinking skills" separately from content is unlikely to be effective.
But the opposite mistake is equally problematic: teaching content without developing students' ability to analyze, evaluate, and apply what they know. The challenge is not choosing between knowledge and thinking. It is building curriculum that develops both simultaneously.
Unfortunately, too few curricula do this well, and those that do are often not distinguished from less effective alternatives in the marketplace. We should be investing more heavily in the research and development needed to build stronger knowledge-rich curricula that also cultivate reasoning and problem-solving, and continue to work on the signaling problem (as Ed Reports and the Evidence Advocacy Center are doing).
2. Child-Centered Learning
I agree that students need exposure to people, places, ideas, and events beyond their own experience. Education should broaden horizons, not simply reflect students' existing interests.
At the same time, one of the most powerful ways to help students understand distant times and cultures is to connect them to dilemmas that remain recognizable today. Students may better understand why Ancient Egyptians devoted enormous resources to building pyramids if they first consider a contemporary tradeoff: Should a school use a financial surplus to build a swimming pool that would make it famous, or should it repair bathrooms and buy books? (See SERP’s Social Studies Generation). Such comparisons do not replace historical knowledge; they make it meaningful.
There are also circumstances in which "holding up a mirror" is educationally important. Adolescents who are years behind in reading often associate reading with repeated failure. Seeing themselves reflected in literature can provide a powerful source of motivation and engagement. The ESSA Tier 1 evidence supporting SERP's STARI intervention suggests that this approach can help students persist long enough to develop the knowledge and skills they need.
3. Project-Based Learning
I agree that project-based learning becomes problematic when projects replace systematic knowledge-building. Students need a coherent foundation of facts, concepts, and ideas.
At the same time, decades of cognitive research show that students often struggle to use knowledge outside the contexts in which they learned it. They may recall information on a test yet fail to apply it in real-world situations, as described in How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice (Donovan, Bransford, & Pellegrino, 1999). Opportunities to apply knowledge are an essential part of learning. Application should not replace instruction, but it should accompany it.
4. Anti-Canon Sentiment
I agree that it is unfortunate when important content is excluded simply because it is associated with a traditional canon. Students deserve access to the ideas, events, and individuals that have shaped history and culture.
But when the canon is incomplete or biased, the solution is not to teach it uncritically. The solution is to teach it more accurately and more completely. George Washington was an extraordinary military and political leader who played a central role in the nation's founding. He also enslaved people and was motivated, in part, by ambitions for western lands occupied by Native Americans. Students should learn all of these facts as part of a coherent understanding of American history.
5. Individualism
I agree that there are things every educated person should know. Shared cultural knowledge matters. Children should know stories such as Goldilocks and Cinderella because those references continue to function as cultural shorthand in everyday communication. But children should also be able to choose books that interest them. It’s not an either/or.
Self-direction can certainly be overemphasized, but it can also be underemphasized. It is unfortunate when students graduate with little exposure to humanity's accumulated knowledge. It is equally unfortunate when students graduate having succeeded in highly structured environments but lacking the ability to decide what to do when no one is telling them what comes next.
The fact that examples can be found of each of these five barriers does not make them the central problem facing education. One can just as easily find examples of supposedly knowledge-rich curricula that violate well-established principles of learning and development.
The real work is not choosing sides in these debates. It is making sustained investments in the research, development, and implementation of curriculum and instruction that occupy the Goldilocks zone: enough knowledge to build understanding, enough critical thinking to make sense of that knowledge, enough application to make it useful, and enough choice to help students develop agency. The goal is not knowledge versus skills, content versus engagement, or structure versus autonomy. The goal is an education that develops all of them well.
1) Yes, knowledge AND skills. To do critical thinking, you have to have something to think about, succinctly put. And yes, the point about domain-specific knowledge is extremely well-taken. The more you know about an area, the better you can think critically about it. 2) Child centered. Yes, people went overboard with this concept. I was a language teacher, and i always wondered how kids were going to tell me they wanted to learn about the dative case in German. 3) Project based. Occasionally useful, but "frontal instruction" (this practically became a dirty word) is an important basis for this. 4) Anti-canon - people also went overboard with this concept. Add to the canon but don't throw out what a culture has in common that has long-standing merit. 5) Teacher autonomy. This one is tricky. You don't want to remove it, but teachers need good training, good textbooks (I know a lot of language textbooks are not really great, but even a bad textbook helps order a learning sequence, although it will need supplementation.) But I always tailored my teaching to a specific class makeup (their prior knowledge and needs, etc). It wasn't about status. Teaching is an art not a science. Books often have teacher's guides. IF these are good, the can be a godsend. Most are not, and need supplementation. 6) Yes, curriculum as roadmap. And a national "roadmap" curriculum wouldn't be totally amiss. Say, American lit in 11th grade, and British lit in 12th grade. (And no, literature, and even history doesn't always have to be taught chronologically as long as a general schema is built over time.) But it wouldn't be amiss to provide grade-level goals, provide good textbooks if possible, and good school policies. Teacher autonomy IS important nonetheless. For any kind of real exchange in a class where magic and memorable moments occur, you need good teachers with autonomy working toward those curricular goals. Teachers are not technicians. 8) Yes, content knowledge on the part of teachers is invaluable. 9) Yes, coherent curriculum and accountability, yes teacher training (preferable in the context of real classrooms), and good teacher selection. and yes, sensible policies and guidance for teachers who are "ordinary." (although I'm not sure i understand whati s meant by that word.) Teacher education is necessary,and lesson preparation is necessary, and sometimes it can be labor-intensive. But with good materials (not just texts, but good suggestions for teaching it) it is a whole lot easier. But in the end, it should be the teacher's decision. She is the one with the class- which she knows - in front of her. 10) There might be merit to general curricular guidelines at a national level for kids who change schools which many do. This is a well-taken point. However, there IS something to be said for "schema" learning: i.e. you get the basics in a general area and afterwards if you have basic literacy and numeracy you can fill in the gaps as needed as your life progresses. 11) I do think school choice is important. You can have a general curriculum (there ARE homeschooling guides) but allow variety in the way the curricular goals are met. 12) There are good reasons why control of schools is local. Look at how out of control NEA and UFT have become in what they promote. 13) Curriculum wars. We certainly need to say no to any kind of political indoctrination. The same with to establish a uniform world view or outlook. That's KEY. 14) Yes, Hirsch was right about background knowledge - we all should have it, whether we get it from home or school. Background knowledge is a key to reading comprehension, critical thinking, and education in general. If students' background knowledge isn't uniform, gear teaching to include this for differently prepared students, including students who come from different countries. 15) Personally, i don't trust education "experts." Education "experts" fall prey to educational fashions and ideologies. Teaching is an art, not a science. My criterion (regarding any teaching approach) is "If it works, it works." In front of my eyes, in my classroom. 17) AI can be a boon to students and teachers, once we develop common sense safeguards. As an English teacher, I can tell you AI-generated writing doesn't have the "spark" of a good human writer.
Kathy,
One of the things principals have said to me, " Don't teach by the textbook. You need to write and submit your own scope and sequence."
My frustration was expressed, "Why reinvent the wheel? If we have to write our own, why spend money on textbooks?"
Its good to know that someone else sees what I've observed. Thanks.
~Chris
Yes, it's very difficult to write a good textbook. Even a half-way adequate one is also a challenge. Careful sequencing, recycling of material, good exercises, good questions and activities - all of that is a challenge and not everyone is up to it. Even a creative teacher benefits greatly from the textbook (and the writer is paid well, esp. if the text is adopted, and usually has a lot of experience, strong knowledge, and writing talent and creativity.) Create your own scope and sequence??? That's nuts! It's reinventing the wheel or maybe the whole car. The result is either exhausted teachers making it up as they go along ("What the @#$% am I going to do tomorrow???") or sub par instruction that may not sequence and build properly, and I'm guessing often both. Heaven help beginning teachers. Even after a lifetime of teaching, I'd rather have some kind of textbook to start with rather than having to write my own.
Thank you for #8, "Weak Teacher Content Preparation". From my own experience, I've always thought it was weird that we have BA/BS in content (and not from a secondary lens), and are *never* evaluated on it, and an MS in Education, and our evaluations are entirely "best practice/pedagogical". Not that degrees automatically equal competence, but at least theoretically...
Also, there are parallels to health & fitness. Evidence is typically a shotgun blast around the bullseye, and rarely a single round through it; the convergence of evidence usually lands on something that's difficult *and* unpalatable; there's enough space between the evidence to fill with actionable, measurable, palatable, and mostly wrong narrative. All because caloric restriction is difficult and not everybody is going to do it, especially when calories are so cheap and tasty.
You make a strong point. "Best practice" is a subjective term and dependent upon the speaker's opinion. The person will claim his/her position is "evidenced based" while dismissing a counter position as anecdotal. This is done even with comparable supporting evidence.