Education Reform & Bad Ideas FAQ
Why most school improvement initiatives fail, and what research says about lasting change in schools.
Fads, Evidence & Skepticism
Q: Why does education keep falling for fads?
We have systemic incentives that reward leaders for pushing new ideas, not for doing proven things well. There's no threshold test a new idea has to pass before we implement it everywhere — unlike pharmaceuticals, which have to prove they work before anyone can prescribe them. Until we demand evidence before adoption, this cycle will continue. Watch the video →
Q: How do I tell if a new education idea is actually good?
Ask yourself: would I tolerate this for my own kids? Over and over, I see educators willing to experiment on other people's children with approaches they'd never accept at their own kids' schools. If you wouldn't let someone try it on your family, it probably shouldn't be tried on anyone else's. Watch the video →
Q: Should we be skeptical of people who say everything we've always done is wrong?
Absolutely. If someone comes out of nowhere and claims the exact opposite of established practice is true, the burden of proof is on them. Contrarian claims sell books and consulting gigs, but most of the good ideas in education have already been discovered through generations of practice. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Watch the video →
Q: Why do we let enthusiasm run ahead of evidence?
An idea gains traction, we scale it up before we know if it works, it becomes part of our professional identity, and then we can't accept the evidence when it finally comes in. This has happened with discipline reform, full inclusion, grading reform, and SEL. We've got to test things scientifically and then actually be willing to learn from the results. Watch the video →
Q: Is skepticism about fads the same as being politically conservative?
No. Respecting tradition and demanding evidence for new approaches is not a political stance. Schools across all geographies converge on similar practices because those practices work — that's institutional isomorphism, not conservatism. Calling critics "conservative" is a tactic to avoid engaging with their arguments. Watch the video →
Q: How did the Lucy Calkins situation happen?
Hero worship. Nobody made us treat Lucy Calkins like a goddess who could do no wrong. We chose to participate in that as a profession — we elevated her to guru status and stopped critically evaluating her methods. The antidote is rigorous demand for evidence, not devotion to any single person. Watch the video →
Q: What's wrong with celebrity education gurus?
When Matthew McConaughey is being quoted extensively in the editor's introduction to a major education journal, something has gone sideways. Celebrity endorsements aren't expertise. Schools should base decisions on research and professional knowledge, not star power. Watch the video →
Q: Should we worry about programs from people with minimal classroom experience?
Yes. The founder of Conscious Discipline has one year of teaching experience — kindergarten — and zero other K-12 experience. If someone's advice isn't grounded in classroom experience, it had better be backed by really strong research. In a lot of cases, it's neither. Watch the video →
Discipline & Consequences
Q: Why have so many schools eliminated consequences?
They violated Chesterton's Fence — they got rid of something without understanding why it existed. Consequences were doing real work: maintaining safety, holding students accountable, and enabling learning. Schools eliminated them based on the unproven belief that alternatives like restorative circles could do the same job. They can't. Watch the video →
Q: Do restorative practices actually contain any new good ideas?
The good parts — caring about students, building relationships, understanding their backgrounds — are things good teachers have always done. Restorative practices just rebranded them. What's actually new, like replacing consequences with circles for serious behavior, hasn't proven effective and is turning out to be harmful. Watch the video →
Q: Why is "order" such a dirty word in education?
If you had the privilege of always attending safe, orderly schools, you might think of order as oppressive. But if you attended a chaotic, dangerous school, you'd appreciate how essential it is. None of the progressive goals we care about — equity, inclusion, student voice — are achievable without it. Watch the video →
Q: Should schools get out of the behavior business?
A lot of what schools do around behavior is theater — unproven interventions that make us feel like we're doing something but don't actually work. Schools need rules, and the way to tell if a behavior intervention is working is whether the student can follow those rules. When we throw out the rules to give interventions time to work, things fall apart. Watch the video →
Q: What's wrong with using relationships as a substitute for consequences?
Nothing is wrong with relationships — they're essential. But weaponizing them by saying "just build a relationship" instead of addressing violence or unsafe behavior is destructive. Relationships depend on healthy boundaries. Without consequences, there are no boundaries, and the relationships can't function either. Watch the video →
Q: Is some compliance in school actually necessary?
Yes. The whole idea of education is that you follow the lead of someone who knows what they're doing. Deadlines, turning in work, and following directions aren't oppression — they're the structure that makes learning possible. Being weirdly anti-compliance is just as unhealthy as being weirdly pro-compliance. Watch the video →
The Status Quo & Change
Q: Should we disrupt the status quo in education?
No — we should carefully surpass it. The status quo exists for reasons. Before you replace something, understand what job it's doing. In advertising, they run the same proven ad for years until they find something that performs better. Education should work the same way: don't disrupt what works until you've proven the replacement is actually better. Watch the video →
Q: Why do we always take things too far in education?
Any good thing can be taken to an extreme. "Be responsive to students" becomes "never say no." Inclusion goes from "serve students in the least restrictive environment" to "no student should ever be in a specialized program." The best version of any practice is found in the middle, not at the edge. Moderation is the enemy of ideology. Watch the video →
Q: What about open-concept schools with no walls?
We tried that in the 1970s. It failed. The noise is unbearable, the distractions are constant, and walls turn out to be really useful for learning. The UK spent hundreds of millions building open-concept schools this decade and watched the idea fail again. Check the history before calling something innovative. Watch the video →
Q: Why do schools pile on so many initiatives?
Leaders make their decisions on the front end — arranging training, writing checks — and then move on. But teachers are still implementing the last initiative two years later when leadership starts the next one. It's not resistance when teachers say they're overwhelmed. They literally are. School improvement is about doing a few things well, not collecting acronyms. Watch the video →
The Teaching Profession
Q: What would make teaching a job people actually want to do?
Three things: fair compensation that competes with other industries, physical safety from day-to-day student violence, and a manageable workload. Tolerating bad behavior is not discipline reform. Expecting 60-hour weeks is not professionalism. These are fixable structural problems, not personal failings. Watch the video →
Q: Should teaching be doable in 40 hours a week?
Yes. If the job can't be done in 40 hours, something is structurally wrong. Your pharmacist friend doesn't take paperwork home. Look at your peers in other industries — they clock in and clock out. Teaching shouldn't be in its own special category of martyrdom, or people will keep making the rational decision to leave. Watch the video →
Q: Why doesn't education have career ladders like nursing?
In nursing, you can start as a CNA, advance to LPN, then RN, then NP — earning as you learn the whole way. Education has three steps: para, teacher, admin. That's not nearly enough. We need intermediate roles and advancement pathways so people can grow professionally without leaving the classroom. Watch the video →
Q: Are paraprofessionals the future of the profession?
I think so. Fewer people are entering through traditional college-based certification. It makes far more sense to let people try working in schools first as paras and then create pathways into the classroom. We need to value paras as professionals, pay them fairly, and stop putting them in harm's way as human shields for violent behavior. Watch the video →
Mission Creep & Scope
Q: What is the purpose of education?
To teach knowledge and skills. We have content standards that specify what we're supposed to teach. When we try to take on every other societal function — behavioral health, nutrition, childcare, therapy — we dilute our ability to do our actual job. A school where a student needs surgery doesn't grab a knife. Recognize the boundaries of our training. Watch the video →
Q: Is "meeting the needs of the whole child" the school's job?
Meeting the needs of the whole child is society's job, not schools' alone. We can feed kids breakfast and lunch while they're here, but if a child is only eating at school, something is deeply wrong at a societal level that schools can't fix. Every non-academic mission we take on pulls resources from teaching and learning. Watch the video →
Q: Are bad education policies an intentional effort to destroy public schools?
I don't think so. I think narrow special-interest groups advocate for single issues — no suspensions, no restraints, no recess consequences — without understanding how those pieces fit together. The damage is real, but it's driven by well-intentioned incompetence, not conspiracy. Intent doesn't matter though — bad policies are still bad policies. Watch the video →
EdTech & Innovation
Q: Is ed tech actually better than pencil and paper?
At scale, the evidence says no. There's increasing research that pencil and paper produces better learning outcomes. The gamification and dopamine traps in ed tech apps may actually be frying kids' attention spans. Lawmakers in 16 states are now pursuing legislation to roll back one-to-one device programs. I'm betting on a return to low-tech learning. Watch the video →
Q: What about Alpha School's AI-instead-of-teachers model?
It's being overhyped. Putting kids on computers with AI for two hours a day and withholding snacks until they finish their lessons sounds more like in-school suspension than innovation. Human instruction and the social experience of being in a class with peers provide motivation and learning that AI can't replicate. Watch the video →
Q: Can school choice put failing public schools out of business?
That has literally never happened. The private school doesn't want all of the public school's students — they only want some of them. Public schools educate everyone, including students with disabilities and special needs. When a private school takes all students and gets better results, I'll believe the argument. Until then, it's a fantasy. Watch the video →
Professional Culture & Groupthink
Q: Is it okay to be negative about bad practices?
Yes. When the solution is "stop doing this dumb thing," that's a perfectly valid answer. Toxic positivity silences honest evaluation of what's working. Collecting lesson plans nobody reads wastes billions of dollars of teacher time. Being critical of that isn't negativity — it's saying teachers are professionals whose time matters. Watch the video →
Q: Is groupthink a problem in education?
Out of control. Not only are dissenting voices punished when they question popular ideas, we're literally having students take tests in groups now. If you can't individually assess whether each student knows the material, you've lost the entire point. We need more critical voices, not more conformity. Watch the video →
Q: If we don't self-police, what happens?
Clumsy state legislation. If educators won't use evidence to decide what works, lawmakers will do it for us — badly. We've already seen it with reading instruction after Sold a Story. State legislators should mostly fund education while educators decide what good practice looks like. But if we keep chasing fads, we'll lose that authority. Watch the video →
Q: Is the oppressor-oppressed framing helpful in education?
No. Reducing every educational relationship to oppressor vs. oppressed is dehumanizing and counterproductive. It leads us to pity students instead of investing in them, and it makes us see accountability and high expectations as acts of oppression. The most unsafe schools end up being the ones where we're most hesitant to maintain any discipline at all. Watch the video →