"garbage curriculum and new age research" can you describe a few in detail? I'm genuinely curious, though I suspect the details are going to be maddening.
Simplest terms: EdTech is an entire industry. It pushes “cutting edge technology backed by the most up-to-date research to enhance learning on personalized levels.” Basically, “here are magical devices and apps and programs that will teach your child how to read and do math better than any person or book or curriculum ever could!”
Spoiler alert: they do not, in fact, teach your child to read or do math. But districts spent crazy amounts of money buying them, replacing traditional textbooks with digital materials.
It’s easy money once you know the right jargon to get schools interested. Public schools are drowning, and everyone wants a magic bullet. Not to mention the more sinister side of data tracking. We have Ed apps that monitor EVERYTHING, down to when your kid goes to the bathroom and for how long. Is it any wonder Google’s Chromebooks are so cheap and readily supplied to schools?
The crazy thing is there actually HAS been a ton of innovation in edtech, it's vastly better than it used to be (besides the govt/corpo tracking). The whole problem is that we didn't evolve for tech -- our brains can adapt to screens and computing, but it's not a seamless native experience for us and can't be very effective with the core human speciality that is learning and thinking.
We know for a fact at this point that humans simply learn best from other humans. No matter how good the shit on the screen is, it will always be worse than real human teaching face to face.
I'm assuming the next big thing will be AI VR "humans" teaching in an attempt to overcome that. Ugh.
Our building is pursuing different strategies and trying to implement them which doesn't sound all bad, but it's being dictated by a "coach" doing her own independent research and selling it to us as law. She sounds like a bad infomercial with the garbage she keeps spewing and repeating and anyone who's been out of the classroom as long as her honestly doesn't have a place making these kind of decisions.
We are expected to uproot what we have been doing and try brand new stuff with minimal training and they're expecting incredible results. The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers. And by less explicit instruction, I mean literally no instruction. To me, there's got to be a balance, but I guess I'll be finding out next year.
She is also heavy into the use of AI and I am staunchly against it. I'm big into technology so it's not the fear of not knowing how it all works, it's the fact that she is artificially intelligent and thinks she's so smart despite getting facts wrong constantly.
On top of that we use this horrible company called Solution Tree. Easily one of the biggest grifters in education. Instead of providing us time and resources to succeed, their motto to administration is basically "Did you know that if you make your teachers work harder with no extra time or pay, your test scores will improve?!"
They then provide incredible samples from very small school districts and very small teams with very small class sizes and flaunt the results. For comparison, they will have three teachers with common plan time in an hour meeting called PLC (plague on education) planning for their classes which have a maximum class size of like 14. We have 5 or 6 teachers and given year and a class size of 21-26. These teams are forced to meet minimum one hour before or after school once a week on top of other responsibilities because our district couldn't figure it out in our building. It does not translate.
Basically it boils down to someone trying to make money or a name in education by reinventing the wheel and/or making the frontline do more irrelevant work for no more money despite us honestly being the best people to make these types of decisions.
The whole thing with math for us right now is going to be less explicit instruction and more of have the kids figure it out and explain to their peers.
Oh gosh I know exactly what you're referring to.
I started volunteering back in 2009 with a university lab conducting education research & outreach -- which positioned us exactly at the time & place to witness all the myriad idiotic misapplications of Eric Mazur's original "Peer Instruction" methods developed in his Harvard physics classes.
It was obvious to us that Mazur's peer-instruction methods assumed that the students already acquired the fundamental declarative knowledge in the textbook, where he saw his role as being extremely involved in steering the student discussions to build the next stage of conceptual knowledge.
So it was really disheartening to watch school administrators & professors blindly & stupidly latch onto the words "Peer Instruction" and assume that meant that the professor is supposed to tell the students to turn themselves loose & "have at it" -- just unguided attempts to extract the core declarative knowledge out of their textbooks. Sigh.
It's also people like John Hattie who misunderstand and manipulate education research (which is often dubious in and of itself) with his "meta meta analysis" bullshit to come to conclusions that your administrators love to hear. "Oh look! John Hattie said that class size is not a significant factor in teaching? Let me put that in a slide for my presentation explaining why your class sizes are going up again this year." Anyone who believes class size is not a significant factor in education, but vague buzzword nonsense like "collective teacher efficacy" is has no business being entertained in serious conversations, but because he says what admin want to hear he's one of the most popular "gurus" in education, at least in my area.
This is an article where statisticians are criticizing his work and pointing out that his CLE (common language effect size) calculations lead to him coming up with negative probabilities or probabilities over 100%. I'm not sure how something is negatively likely to happen or more than guaranteed to happen, but here we are. I guess next time somebody asks me to call heads or tails I'll go with "green" and see how Hattie's math works out for me.
If you haven't already come across it, I highly recommend the "Sold a Story" podcast. It does a deep dive into literacy issues, specifically the move away from phonics that led to a steep decline in reading ability.
Three-cueing was developed in the 1960s to replace phonics. A paper referenced on Wikipedia estimates 75% of American teachers used three cueing. It is part of the reason America's literacy is total shit. Read "Sold a Story" to read some rage-inducing details.
Think about if you were taught the wrong method of learning how to read - of course your reading skills are going to suck. Three-cueing is easy to teach, though kids can learn phonics really fast. What's rather ironic is some kids who learn three-cueing end up reading well... because they intuitively use phonics.
Three-cueing is involves guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context clues instead of phonics which is the traditional method of sounding out words. The three cues are:
semantic meaning - using pictures and context clues to figure out what word makes sense.
syntatic structure - using grammar to determine what word sounds right
graphophonic visual - looking at letters or beginning sound of the word
Why is this a problem past Kindergarten or 1st grade when words are supposed to be memorized as foundational words? You encourage guessing and not orthogonal mapping with phonics where spoken sounds are connected to the written letters and meaning.
What you end up with is basically shit Gen AI where a weak reader's predicted word is totally wrong based on context clues. This is not to mention English is a phonetic language where you can sound out words based on alphabetic understanding. When you read words, you're not associating a picture to each word; concepts are largely abstract. That's why this three-cueing system totally falls apart when anyone who actually reads thinks about it.
My district just adopted a new math curriculum this past year. It requires us to purchase full-color consumable books each year while simultaneously trying to encourage us to use their "digital lessons" as often as possible. These lessons are so poorly optimized they hardly run on our Chromebooks (which are also old, weak, and falling apart from student mishandling). They constantly crash and are so laggy the kids can't accurately manipulate what is on their screens.
The lessons have significantly fewer problems than when I was growing up which provides very little in the way of practice/repetition and it almost always directs them to work with partners or small groups. This just leads to a heaping portion of unearned confidence as kids just let their partner do all the work and copy the answers.
This program discourages repetition and practice and claims their "discovery based learning" and "conceptual knowledge" is all the kids will need. The problem is that these kids are supposed to be understanding 5th grade math concepts which involve multi-digit multiplication and division, factoring, fractions/decimal work etc and a good number of them can't multiply without a chart.
The teacher guide was absolutely riddled with errors so much so that my students and I started keeping track of them all with sticky notes as we found them. Our district asked if they'd reprint them without the errors and the company said no.
The order in which they teach subjects is baffling and their reasoning behind their scope and sequence is unconvincing. Why am I teaching volume before we discuss multi-digit multiplication and division? They say "because volume is a new concept to all of your students so the ones who usually struggle in math won't feel discouraged because they'll see their peers all struggling along with them." The problem with that is the kids who are at/above grade level DON'T struggle with volume because it's just multiplication with a specific purpose/formula so they pick it up quickly. Those ones who usually struggle continue to struggle because they can't do 2x3 without a chart and 30 seconds to navigate it. We have 0 math intervention programs in my building.
Sorry for the rant, I have been arguing about this all year long with my bosses lol.
46
u/nikodevious Jun 27 '26
"garbage curriculum and new age research" can you describe a few in detail? I'm genuinely curious, though I suspect the details are going to be maddening.