[cschneid]

You hit on a problem I hear from my high school teacher girlfriend. It typically looks like:

1. One or several motivated schools attempt a new style of teaching / grading / curriculum. 2. It succeeds amazingly. 3. Other schools rush to grab some of that success.

The issue is that the causality between #1 and #2 is: "A motivated admin & teaching staff all working in the same direction can improve outcomes". While #3 is assuming: "a magic curriculum will do it for us".

Then after adopting the new-hotness fails, repeat with another new idea.

[ashark]

I've even seen (though my wife, who's a teacher) admin that doesn't understand how replicability works, and takes on some new discipline strategy or teaching approach for their school(s), spending a bunch of money on it and wasting a ton of teachers' time, but jettisoning large parts of it they're not comfortable with... thus obviously to any observer with a lick of sense destroying any hope it had of succeeding. It's painful to watch.

I think most of the motivation for this (in general, not the specific failure mode in the previous paragraph) is blame-shifting. If you're switching stuff around you're trying something. It's a sign that you're working so hard to improve things. If it's some consulting-corporation-blessed system you don't need to justify it personally—they say it's good and sell it for you! If (when...) it fails, maybe the system was at fault, maybe the company, but at least there are potential targets for blame that aren't you.

And the only people who've lost are everyone who's not in school admin or education consulting/supply, so you know, just teachers, students, taxpayers, parents. No biggie.

[Bartweiss]

Even worse is the similar pattern of

1. A school produces great results. 2. A consultant comes and mines that school for "best practices". 3. Other schools pay the consultant a small fortune to replicate those practices.

Where the successful school may not even have updated anything in the last decade; they just have a particularly good combination of dedicated staff, helpful administration, and well-supported students. Particularly bad is trying to replicate something from a suburban school full of privately-paid tutors and parents reviewing the nightly homework in a setting where lunch and school supplies are a major hurdle for many families.

[wwweston]

I wonder if there's anything professionals developing software could learn from this by analogy.

[jrs235]

Yes. The "silver bullet" is having people that care and those people are all pulling in the same direction.

[maxxxxx]

Motivated team chooses technology X. Succeeds. Other team chooses X but forgets to have motivated people?

[mark-r]

I think you've just described Agile.