Why Johnny can't teach

Reason, Dec, 1993 by Jonathan Marshall

Without knowing what works in the classroom, American educators have become fad followers.

It's a giant industry, one that most Americans consider vital to their country's future competitiveness. Yet it spends less than 1 percent of its $375-billion annual gross revenue on research and development--and much of that is squandered by reliance on shoddy, unscientific methods. No wonder this industry is deeply troubled and in need of fundamental reform.

Public education--the industry in question--still uses much the same methods it did a century ago. One reason is the failure of educators to learn better ways of doing things. Bad research, underfunded research, and lack of official interest in good research have all crippled the ability of this industry to show improved results over time.

In a rare public acknowledgment of the research gap in education, the state of California's nonpartisan legislative analyst earlier this year declared that because of "severe methodological problems" afflicting nearly all evaluations of state-sponsored instructional programs, "educators simply do not know how well most programs address the problem for which they were created."

Last year the prestigious National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences issued a scathing report condemning the field's penchant for "methodologically weak research, trivial studies, an infatuation with jargon, and a tendency toward fads." Without "high-quality and credible evaluations," it warned, "school districts will never be able to choose wisely among available innovations." And even when scientifically valid research is available, the report added, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and parents often ignore it.

No other industry would last long with such a haphazard approach to self-improvement. But in education, notes Diane Ravitch, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and former assistant secretary of education for research, "there are no consequences for failure. It is a public monopoly like the Post Office. Whether you are good or bad, it will be funded. There is no bottom line."

Flying blind without good research guidance has produced many an educational crash, charges Donald Orlich, a researcher at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. "This nation has wasted billions of dollars on poorly conceived but politically popular reform movements that have sapped the energies of school people," he says.

Billions of dollars more stand to be wasted unless things change. As Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, warned in 1988, "Without good research, we will continue on an endless cycle of mistakes and the loss of successful insights and discoveries. Without good research, there will continue to be an endless invention of mousetraps, the same rehashing of controversies, and, in the end, the same faltering school system."

Robert Slavin, who runs a distinguished educational research facility at Johns Hopkins University, has observed that the typical educational innovation starts with a burst of enthusiasm, followed by "widespread dissemination, subsequent disappointment, and eventual decline--the classic swing of the pendulum." He says education resembles a progressive science less than it does the fashion and design industries, which gyrate according to fads and changing tastes. Gullible principals, school boards, and even state legislatures too often jump on the latest educational bandwagons, led by charismatic proselytizers who promote their programs with unsupported or anecdotal claims.

Slavin cites as one example the highly popular Instructional Theory into Practice, or Madeline Hunter model, which emphasizes the need for clear objectives, careful control of classroom time, and frequent assessment of student understanding--all sensible, but hardly revolutionary, steps. The technique did not receive a large-scale evaluation until 19 years after it started sweeping the nation. The study, based in South Carolina, found no significant improvement in performance by students of teachers trained in the model. Studies in New Jersey and in Napa, California, produced the same result. "You could get the same effect by throwing a pizza party," says Orlich, another critic. Yet the model continues to enjoy favor in many states.

Another example is the "open classroom," which was all the rage two decades ago. Schools were built (or redesigned) without walls, and students moved flexibly within classes between "learning stations," supposedly guided in part by their natural curiosity and sense of direction. "This was the hottest thing of its time in the early 1970s," Slavin says, "but research found consistently it didn't have the effect claimed."

The "whole-language movement" in reading is one of the latest fads to sweep the nation. Deriding the phonics method, the movement rests on an intuition that children will learn to read naturally when exposed to books and other reading materials. "It is not only not validated by any research whatsoever, but carries with it a philosophy opposed to evaluation," Slavin complains. "It may or may not be a good idea, but the extraordinary diffusion of this method from coast to coast without a shred of evidence is terrifying."