Stop Admiring the Problem

Escaping Education’s Groundhog Day

For decades, education has cycled through fads, abandoned what works, and treated novelty as progress. The solution is not another reform trend, but the construction of a profession strong enough to preserve knowledge, enforce standards, and protect students.

“We must resist the temptation to spend our time admiring the problem.”
— Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

40% of fourth-grade students perform “Below Basic” in reading.
— 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Education has spent decades diagnosing its failures. It is time to spend less energy describing the failures and “cures,” and more energy ending it by transforming education into a research-based profession.

As Robert Pondiscio argues convincingly in Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?, the real “miracle” in education is that any school or district manages to sustain success in a system defined by churn, fragmentation, and where compelling research on effective programs is not the driver of decisions about instruction.

He joins a long chorus. Larry Cuban made this point in “Reforming Again, Again, Again, and Again” published in Educational Researcher in 1990. Tyack and Cuban extended it in “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.” Searches of major education databases such as ERIC, Google Scholar, and JSTOR using terms like “school reform,” “critique of American education,” “failure of U.S. schools,” and “education reform” yield thousands of results.

I joined that chorus with my 2000 article Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices. But I began thinking along these lines in 1976, when I realized that the Project Follow Through findings on the Direct Instruction model had been suppressed, undermined, and ignored.

Ever since, I have felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Every morning, education wakes up to the same spectacle—fads rise, effective schools and districts fall, and the system behaves as if none of this has happened before. Fads abound. Criticism is abundant. Serious solutions are not.

One of the few viable answers is to transform education into a research-based profession. That is the argument to which I return through the work of the Evidence Advocacy Center (EAC).

In medicine, engineering, and other serious professions, knowledge accumulates, standards matter, and institutions protect practice from ideology, fashion, and wishful thinking. Education, by contrast, has never built that kind of protection. As a result, it lurches from one enthusiasm to the next while repeatedly abandoning what works and then rediscovering what should never have been forgotten. Until we confront that reality, we will continue to mistake novelty for progress and churn for improvement. We will keep replaying education’s own version of Groundhog Day.

Why Reform Keeps Collapsing

To understand why education keeps cycling through initiatives, we must distinguish between two levels of failure.

The Operational Failure

At the operational level, Pondiscio’s argument is exactly right; he points out that leadership turnover, weak feedback loops, political pressure, and moral urgency create what he calls “rational churn”. In that environment, starting something new is safer and more visible than making something work.

New programs generate headlines. Steady execution does not. Reinvention becomes a rational response to a system that prizes appearance over results for students. That helps explain why so many reforms are launched with fanfare and then quietly fade away.

The problem is not always a lack of intelligence or good intentions. The problem is that the system rewards disruption more than durability. In education, launching often gets rewarded more than sustaining.

The Structural Failure

But the structural level is more important. Education lacks the guardrails that keep other professions from drifting into fads. It fails to link and integrate research, preparation, licensure, accreditation, and accountability. Without that integration, effective practice remains vulnerable to being overridden by ideology, weakened by poor training, or swept aside by the next leadership change. That is why the churn never ends. The system has no mechanism for promoting and protecting what has already been learned.

Because of both the operational and structural failures, I no longer believe the central challenge is simply discovering what works. We already know far more than the system is willing to honor. The real challenge is building the structural capacity that can advance and defend evidence-based practice in a field that too often treats knowledge as optional.

In Stopping the Pendulum: Making Education a Research-Based Profession, I argue that serious professions do not continually recycle disproven ideas. They build institutions that preserve knowledge, enforce standards, and prevent the field from wandering back into error. If we want to stop the pendulum, we must stop searching for miracles and start building the profession itself.

See Part 2: Start Building the Profession.

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