Education Reads to Start Your Week, April 6th

Commentary on Education Fads, Becoming the Lab, What Reading Looks Like

Author

James Shanahan
April 06, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Author’s Note: There will not be posts this Wednesday or next Monday due to spring break.

Commentary on Education Fads

Every few years, education seems to discover something new that will finally fix schools—a new framework, a new approach, a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. It arrives with urgency and conviction, spreads quickly, reshapes professional development and classroom practice, and then fades away, either replaced by the shiny new thing or layered on top of it. Twenty-first century skills, trauma-informed pedagogy, flipped classrooms, 1:1 devices—all promised to succeed where the last one fell short.

Ask a veteran teacher to list the major instructional initiatives they’ve been trained on over the past decade and you’re likely to get a weary laugh before you get an answer. Discipline systems cycle from zero tolerance to restorative practices; “data-driven instruction” yields to “personalized learning,” which is now being rebranded yet again in the age of AI. Each shift arrives with urgency and moral clarity. Each requires retraining, new materials, and a reorientation of practice. Spend enough time in schools and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. Which raises an uncomfortable question:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

He provides four answers. Weak feedback loops in education make it difficult to tell if success or failure is the result of some program or initiative rather than some other confounding variable. School leadership often gains legitimacy by making changes and so are always seeking to take some kind of big action. (As an aside, I learned from his links that some district superintendents usually only last for the duration of their initial contract.) There are low barriers to new ideas which enter education not through research and practical validation but through consultants, curriculum publishers, professional development cycles, and community pressure. Finally, Pondiscio lists moral urgency. Schools are full of children and of our future workers and citizens, so failing them is both an immediate harm to kids and a societal harm to our future. This, he says, creates a powerful bias toward action.

In a lot of ways this is an astute piece that gets many of our problems in schools right. Pondiscio is one of the few people who sees just how much of what’s going on in schools is attributable to administrators and central office leadership more so than to teachers. I also see a few red flags. For example, he argues that fidelity is an important fix to these problems.

If we want to break the cycle, the solution is not to scold educators for chasing new ideas. It is to realign incentives so that stability and execution are valued as forms of leadership. That means treating implementation fidelity as an achievement, not an afterthought, and creating political and institutional cover for leaders who choose continuity over novelty. It means building systems that measure and reward long-term improvement, not short-term activity, and elevating professional norms that prize mastery over constant reinvention.

In short, we need to make competence visible. Because until we do, the system will continue to reward the appearance of change over the reality of improvement. So yes, education is fad-prone. Just not for the reasons we usually assume. We don’t chase reform because we forget what works. We chase reform because the system makes standing still look irresponsible—even when standing still is exactly what success requires.

I get off the ride at this point because teaching with fidelity to some kind of curriculum or pacing guide or script is exactly the kind of fad that he’s decrying at the outset. What “implementation fidelity” means is teaching the same way on the same day. It means never deviating from the plan. It is rigid, externally validated, expert driven teaching that sees kids as a blank slate and teachers as nothing more than facilitators. It positions teachers as incapable of developing expertise or producing knowledge about their practice and content. Most importantly, requiring implementation fidelity leaves little space for questioning whatever’s being implemented. To me, that sounds like a recipe for more fads, not less. If you want an antidote to the fidelity fad, see Kate Roberts’ recent post, Old Dog, Old Tricks.

I also think what we also fail to get from Pondiscio’s post is a sense that education’s faddishness is downstream of policymakers’ willingness to allow reformers incredible amounts of leeway in making huge changes to how schools function. Deep pocketed philanthropies and wealthy executives spared no expense attempting to implement merit pay, universal standards, small schools, algorithmic personalized instruction, and numerous other reforms that went nowhere and often had a weak evidentiary basis.

Becoming the Lab

Tom Mahoney, an Australian educator writing at The Interruption has a neat post that, I think, offers another view of what’s going on with education fads. He says that Explicit Teaching is not making a difference because findings in their learning laboratories aren’t replicated in the real world. Their response is to try to make school conditions as close to laboratory conditions as possible. In other words, instead of making theories that fit the world, they seek to make the world fit their theories.

Allured by “best bet” thinking, schools become hyper-fixated on retrieval practices, cognitive load and worked examples, forgetting to consider the many other reasons and purposes for education.

Classrooms become places where conformity and control are conflated with student engagement, as teachers increasingly exert control over students’ bodies to engineer student attention and behaviour.

We may tell ourselves we’re doing it all for the greater good, and if all we’re trying to do is get more information into long-term memory, then maybe we can justify these practices.

But is this all we’re trying to do through schools?

You know, that middle paragraph sounds a lot like a school implementing some kind of program with fidelity. It’s also worth stepping back and reminding ourselves that the Science of Learning, like that other famous “Science of…” movement, is at risk of falling into a trap. Knowing how learning happens, or at least a very good approximation of it, doesn’t tell us why we should learn something or set other important goals. If, as Mahoney warns, we are too narrowly restructuring school around long-term memory efficiency, then we risk losing sight of our purposes for education. Moreover, because schools can only ever imperfectly resemble laboratories, these theories and practices derived from them can only ever imperfectly function. Foreclosing other approaches in an effort to laboratorize schools means we lose access to the very tools we need to function in an imperfect reality.

Now, I don’t necessarily read this as a rejection of the science of learning so much as a rejection of school reforms meant to make all teaching and learning look like the conditions of the studies that show SoL works. Again, that’s the trap SoL proponents have to work to avoid, and in the process save the value of their movement. If you’d like to see an example of some writing that I think walks this tightrope well, check out Chris O’Brien. The point he makes isn’t that, for example, discovery learning and exploration should go away, it’s that kids need the proper foundations, often best built through explicit instruction, in order to succeed at discovery learning and exploration.

I am saying the sequence matters.

You cannot connect the dots if you have no dots. Exploration is powerful — but only after the foundational knowledge exists that makes the exploration productive. Inquiry works — but only when students have enough background knowledge to actually inquire with. Grappling produces learning — but only when the student has the prerequisite understanding to make sense of what they’re grappling with. Cognitive science is clear on this: unguided discovery places a burden on working memory that novice learners cannot carry. They don’t construct understanding. They construct confusion.

Seems about right.

What Reading Looks Like

Okay, I’m technically linking Kate Roberts twice today because she appeared on the Broken Copier podcast last week to talk about what reading looks like in classrooms.

I think one of the really important points Roberts and host, Marcus Luther, spend time on is the difficulty teachers have today in getting kids to develop reading stamina. “If I can’t get my kids to read for 15 minutes,” she asks, “what am I even doing?” Rather than being a typical lament about kids not reading whole books, Roberts makes the case that the kind of sustained attention needed to read a book for even 15-20 minutes is an important cognitive capability, but that this capability is an tension with our goals as teachers to teach about what makes something literature, how authors create themes, or how language evokes emotions. Interestingly, she says we’ve probably placed too much emphasis on developing a love of reading and less on the utility of reading and of thinking about reading. If you’re reading a novel together as a class, you have to find that sweet spot where you have a plan about 1) what specific content about reading you’re expecting kids to learn by reading that novel and 2) what the kids are supposed to be better at doing once they’re done reading it. Whether they love or hate the novel or reading in general is ultimately not that important. Whether they have an encyclopedic understanding of the novel itself is, likewise, not the point. It’s okay if the kids forget 90% of Their Eyes Were Watching God if they became better at noticing how an author uses language to indicate a change in a character or in the plot. It’s okay if kids forget 90% of Their Eyes Were Watching God if they had concrete strategies in place for identifying themes in literature as a result of reading Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Anyway, it’s an interesting chat and hard to excerpt so give it a listen this week.

Thanks for reading!