Any New Idea Is Unlikely to Be Better Than the Status Quo
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why most educational innovations fail to outperform existing practices, and why schools keep adopting them anyway.
Key Takeaways
- Most new ideas don't work better - The base rate for new educational innovations beating established practices is very low
- Incentives drive adoption, not evidence - Schools adopt new programs because of marketing, pressure, and novelty rather than proven results
- Protect what works - Before chasing the next big thing, schools should invest in doing established practices well
Transcript
Most new ideas are bad ideas, and that creates some systemic problems for us in the education profession, especially when leaders are rewarded and promoted for pushing new ideas.
And when I say new ideas are mostly bad ideas, I don't mean that as some sort of traditionalist or conservative statement.
I mean the good ideas have mostly been discovered.
We've had millions of adults working with tens of millions of students for generations Figuring out what works and what doesn't work.
So the work stuff, the good stuff that actually works has mostly been figured out.
And any ideas that are truly new are probably not good.
And I say that kind of as a scientific statement, not, again, a traditionalist kind of statement.
If you think about pharmaceutical development, there are still lots of diseases that we could have drugs for, that we would love to have medications to treat.
and developing new drugs is tricky because a a new drug may not work and b a new drug may have unacceptable side effects or be dangerous so what do we have to do in order to develop a new drug well we have to test it and it has to pass a certain threshold and and be good enough before it's adopted and available to be prescribed to people.
We don't have that same thing going on in education for new ideas.
We don't have any threshold test that a new idea has to pass before we implement it all over the place.
And what I see happening with educational fads especially is we have systemic incentives in place for leaders or people who want to become leaders to advance themselves professionally by pushing unproven new ideas that turn out to actually not be better.
And I don't wanna throw leaders under the bus here.
I love school leaders.
No one is a bigger fan of the principalship than me.
I work primarily with principals.
So I'm not saying this as an individual failing or blaming any individual administrator, but it is a systemic problem That in educational leadership, we reward people for pushing untested things and we punish people for promoting proven practices because they're not new.
So I don't know exactly what we need to do about this other than to just be aware that it's happening and to be maybe a little bit more patient and demanding of evidence and asking for, hey, like, let's make sure this actually works.
Let's make sure this isn't just a fad.
that we're all being enthusiastic about because we're individually incentivized by this system of advancement that we all work within to run after fads.
Let me know what you think about this problem.