| Agree very much with all of this. The way I estimate the situation (and I admit this is not a rigorous scientific conjecture), is the following (for public schools in the US in the average): Early years: bad pedagogy, bad retention rates (ie, quitting after 5th grade to go work on the farm, bad average results, basically only the top 10% learned deeply and went on to intellectual pursuits 1900s - 1980s: Decent and improving pedagogy (the aforementioned procedure-first style for math), good and increasing retention rates, good parental and societal pressures to perform, great average results, top 50% or more went on to intellectual pursuits. 1980s - 2010s: Same math pedagogy, but with rapidly deteriorating parental pressure to perform, leading to worse results. A truly terrible detour for reading instruction (from phonics to context-based reading) that decimated the average reading level of those currently under 40. Currently being fixed but not yet replaced in all schools. See: "the science of reading". 2020 - 2024: an earnest effort, gaining traction and fast-tracked after the educational disaster that was COVID, to find curricula that actually work with current students. The concept-first, teach-them-how to think approach for math really is pretty new, and only just now being rolled out in a lot of states. In reality, a vanishingly-small subset of American students has ever been given an entire education using evidence-based instruction and curricula. Looking at what actually works and trying to synthesize it and scale it up state- or nationwide is truly a brand new experiment, and one the decentralized US education system is sort of designed to prevent. So we'll see. |
As a society, I honestly think we are a little too hooked on scientism. Not science itself (which we don't do nearly enough of), but treating the output of scientific research like a religion. In the few pieces of educational science that are actually proper blind studies, the p-values are abysmal. It's worse than psychology. And yet, every ~10 years, "the science" gives us a new way of doing things that turns out not to be any better than the old way (and plus it's new so nobody knows how to do it). As it turns out, "the science" in education usually means "a small cohort of very good, very enthusiastic teachers tried this, and their outcomes were better than their peers." I assume you can see the problem with that. There is no "phase 2" trial of this stuff or anything controlled, just a rollout of a new method.