It was announced by sweeping statements.

When the New York City Public Schools chancellor, David Banks, caused the largest district in the country to change how it taught students to read last year, it was with a sense of alarm. Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in third through eighth grades couldn’t read proficiently, which Banks blamed on the city embracing a “fundamentally flawed” approach to reading instruction. Per reporting from The New York Times, he told parents: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.” Reforming, Banks said, was “the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

The sentiment wasn’t isolated to New York, with almost all states having passed some legislation in the last few years to correct course on how reading is taught. These changes, called a “decisive victory” in the long-standing “reading wars,” have pitted education research favoring phonics-based instruction against other ways of teaching students to read, including word recognition. In the wake of the shift, a prominent curriculum group dissolved and the educational publisher Heinemann reportedly experienced sagging curriculum sales. Meanwhile, students still struggle to read.

But these recent education scraps in reading have also caused fresh uneasiness, as some observers begin hunting for the next education reform effort to go bust — perhaps in math next time.

There’s an unvoiced assumption behind this — that education is prone to “fads.” So where does this perception come from? And is it accurate?

The Reform Merry-Go-Round

Fad is the wrong word, says Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who writes a blog about school reforms.

For Cuban, reform movements appear to be caught in a loop, attempting similar changes “again and again.” But it’s not that schools are constantly being burned by the latest craze. It’s that they’re suffering from deep structural problems, and they seem not to learn from the long history of school reforms.

The lesson? Public schools are particularly vulnerable to pressure, Cuban said on a call with EdSurge. That’s because national problems tend to become school ones, Cuban says. Schools have to walk a “tightrope,” striking a balance that is both stable for students and able to adapt to changes in the broader society, he says.

Pressure on schools to respond to new issues often ends up altering curricula or introducing new courses, because that’s the easiest part of the public education system to change, Cuban argues. But classrooms are isolated from the superintendent’s office, the school board and other “policy elites” who push change, he says.

For example, he adds, when it became known that teenage driving was causing road deaths, driving became part of public school curricula. When drugs became a national concern, schools added anti-drug curricula. “When the nation has a cold, schools sneeze,” Cuban says, adding that it’s an old cliche that turns out to be true.

That focus — the classroom, where abstract ideas about school meet real students — is a common sticking point, according to other observers as well.

It's not that specific reform ideas are fads, argues James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's that schools seem susceptible to fads because people don't understand what it means to take an idea seriously, he says.

In reality, many ideas out there haven’t been properly tried out, because that would mean focusing largely on how they are put into practice in classrooms, he adds. There are probably a lot of ideas out there that are effective, he says — but nobody knows what they are.

To Ronald Gallimore, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates believe they are on the cusp of something that will really work this time, he says. But they may not be aware of the history of instruction. It also doesn’t help that the U.S. has a highly decentralized school system, with schools being locally controlled, making it hard to make uniform sweeping changes to how students learn, he adds.

So how would teachers know if a proposed reform is effective?

Can You Prove It?

Evidence is the magic word, says Adrian Simpson, principal of St. Mary's College at Durham University in England and professor of mathematics education.

It’s also the source of part of the problem.

Those questing for evidence-based education approaches tend to rely on randomized controlled trials, a robust form of study widely used in medicine to establish causation, Simpson notes. In education, that can mean field experiments that show a practice worked in a particular context or laboratory experiments in cognitive science, he says.

“But what [these] tell you is very powerful, but very narrow,” Simpson says.

These studies are taken to show that certain approaches work. But, Simpson says, they only really establish that the sum of all the differences in interventions caused learning for some participants. Which specific intervention worked, and whether it would work for other students, is hard to determine, Simpson says.

That also puts pressure on how changes are carried out in the classroom.

Imagine the best teacher. How much time goes into designing his or her lessons, refining them, and adjusting to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. That's what makes implementation of any reform effort so difficult, he says: to go from a general idea down into the details of making it work for a specific group of students, often across a range of different learning contexts.

So it’s tricky to translate the lessons of these experiments into learning.

Researchers also understand less about the mechanisms of how people think about, say, fractions than how kidneys function, according to Simpson, of St. Mary's College. So the evidence provided by experiments about specific practices in education is weaker than in other areas like medicine where it tends to be similar from person to person: “You can’t establish laws of the classroom that will apply everywhere,” Simpson says.

Ultimately, there’s no quick fix for the reform cycle, Simpson says. But he thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which is striving to make its interventions more attuned to personal peculiarities. Teachers should bring together insights from a number of sources — from research about memory capacity to tips from the teacher next door — to inform how they unlock learning for their students, he suggests. Rather than asking what they can do to make a student better with fractions, a teacher might ask: “What’s causing this child to handle fractions poorly?” That could provide an insight that isn’t solely focused on teacher interventions which could, nonetheless, help the student learn, Simpson says.

To Stigler, of UCLA, it’s hard to know what works in education right now.

Reform movements need to focus more on getting disciplined plans for moving from the idea phase to the implementation phase, he says. Teachers also need the time to make sure ideas have been effectively put in place, he adds.

Without that, Stigler says, nobody knows what’s truly effective.

© Photo By GoodStudio/Shutterstock

When Sheresa Boone Blanchard, a mother of three in North Carolina, started homeschooling her son during the pandemic, it might actually have saved her time.

Isaiah, her middle child, had finished fifth grade in June 2020. With the health crisis going on, Blanchard switched him to virtual lessons when he started sixth grade. But he has ADHD and just couldn't focus without someone with him, she says. So Blanchard, who was working remotely as a college professor, and her mother, Loretta Boone, who was retired, were spending a lot of time every day trying to help Isaiah with his virtual school assignments.

Blanchard felt like the school wasn’t able to accommodate her son, despite his 504 plan. After he fell behind on some assignments, it felt like he’d dug a hole from which he couldn’t get out: While the school would let him turn in the assignments, he would only get partial credit for them, and all the while new assignments kept coming. The school was unwilling to really compromise to help him catch up, Blanchard says. “It was an almost overly punitive environment,” she reflects.

Since they were spending so much time with him anyway, the family figured that homeschool would give them control over curriculum and the style of teaching. So they decided to withdraw him. The homeschool curriculum — BookShark, a four-day-per-week literature-focused package — arrived near Isaiah’s birthday. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, like, that's amazing that everything's aligning. Like, this is the way we're supposed to do things,’” she recalls.

Sheresa Boone Blanchard and her family. Photo courtesy of Blanchard.

A professor, Blanchard says she “triaged” her schedule. That meant devoting several hours in the mornings to homeschooling her son and then teaching courses and taking meetings online.

While it took energy and time, it wasn’t more than she was already devoting to “trying to make the system work.” The curriculum also let Blanchard tailor the lessons to Isaiah, focusing on the subjects where he needed extra help and zipping through the ones where he didn’t. “And it ended up being a really positive experience overall, for him and for our family,” says Blanchard, who currently works as an associate professor at East Carolina University.

Blanchard isn’t alone. During the pandemic, the number of students struggling climbed, increasing the interest in alternatives to public school. Now, homeschools and microschools — two categories that overlap — are booming. About 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, a collection of homeschooling research and resources. Blanchard’s state, North Carolina, has the second highest percentage of homeschooled students in the country: at about 9 percent, according to the Homeschool Hub.

The lack of oversight for these alternatives means that curricula and rigor vary widely, and that students don’t experience some of the protections of public school. But recent attention and federal dollars have also spurred attempts to increase regulations. Still, there’s a tendency for people to remove some of the nuance when talking about the uptick in homeschooling and microschools, Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, told EdSurge in May. But in reality, there’s a sweep of reasons parents are attracted to these types of schools. Even within a state, she added, the level of interest in non-public schools can vary, perhaps due to the available options.

For some Black families, she said, interest shot up due to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some families, particularly ones whose children need learning accommodations, also feel like those students are being pushed out, she said.

For some of these families, the need for these types of alternative schools seems urgent.

Dismantling the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’

Black families are turning to microschools for “safety,” says Janelle Wood, founder of Black Mothers Forum, a network of nine microschools in Arizona, a state considered friendly to the “school choice” movement.

These families are perhaps drawn to alternative schooling for different reasons than conservative, white families, she adds.

In 2016, Wood and other Black mothers were looking for a place to voice their rage and sadness over police killings, including of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. So she called a meeting to discuss how to safeguard their children from systemic racism. “I’m a reverend,” Wood says, adding, she felt a religious calling to “be a voice for those without a voice.” Her platform, she elaborates, put her in a position to articulate the needs of her community.

But before long, the group had focused its attention on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They had identified education as the beginning of a chain of events that fed into poor life outcomes. In education, Black students are over-disciplined, “criminalizing” normal behavior from an early age, Wood says. Around the same time, Wood also noticed that classrooms seem crowded with too many students, so that teachers can’t give adequate attention to those who are struggling, especially across racial divides, which she believes reinforces the problem.

The result? These families don’t feel supported by schools, Wood says.

Black Mothers Forum opened a microschool four years ago. Wood argues that keeping schools small and rooted in the community enables deeper relationships between the teachers and students. It means that when students make a mistake or need correction because they are acting out, Wood says, they know it’s coming from a place of support. “And so the milestones provide a space for them to grow, a space for them to be seen as human, as validated,” she says.

These days, Black Mothers Forum microschools are educating about 60 students spread over nine schools, ranging from five to 10 students each. The less established of those schools have two adults overseeing the classes. More established ones are overseen by one adult, often a former teacher or a parent with an advanced degree related to education, and students and parents play an active role in setting school culture, according to Wood. Almost all of the students and teachers are Black.

In part, Wood views the schools as an answer to the continued fallout of the pandemic. For her, microschools allow students to have social lives — in a less intimidating learning environment than large schools — hopefully speeding their recovery from the negative effects of school closures. “Some children need a smaller environment, and microschools seem to be doing the job for a lot of these kids,” Wood says.

Initially, a lot of parents were interested in microschools as a way to build up their students’ capacity to go back to public school, she says. But increasingly, she claims, there’s interest in staying in microschools. Recently, the network expanded to include high school options.

A Potential Lifeline

For Blanchard, the homeschool experiment was useful. Her son’s academic performance improved.

Still, when Blanchard’s job became less flexible — in addition to her worries about what limited interactions with other students might mean for Isaiah’s social development — it felt like time to change again. Local homeschool groups weren’t very diverse, she says. They tried a private school, but found that Isaiah struggled there. He felt alienated, she says, because he was being singled out for punishment. So now, Isaiah is back in public school for ninth grade.

Although they never quite found the perfect situation for Isaiah, Blanchard says, the homeschool trial served as a “reset year.” She and most of the other families she knows who are homeschooling are reacting to an ecosystem that they don’t feel is nurturing or supporting their kids, she says. His home proved a more affirming environment, and that let his family build Isaiah up to prepare him to re-enter public school.

Other advocates of education alternatives believe that microschools are a chance to assist public schools, either by trying out new methods for learning — which could then be reimported back into public schools if they work — or, in some cases, by providing community assistance.

For Wood, of the Black Mothers Forum, microschools could represent a way to relieve pressure from public schools. Public schools should bring microschools onto their campuses, Wood argues. That way, they don’t lose students and can bring in assistance for overworked teachers, she says. It’s a way of bringing the community further into schools, Wood adds.

“Let someone who actually understands [the students who are struggling] and looks like them be the ones that work with them, and watch the difference in these children. Now you don't lose children, you're now helping children,” Wood says.

She says she’s been looking for a public school to partner with her own organization. But so far she hasn’t found one.

© Photo by Juan Crum