How Ed Schools Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas

A few years ago, when I was on my university’s Graduate Council, a new course proposal came to us from our College of Education. The proposal referred to the different learning styles of students, something that struck me as odd — I remembered having heard years before that the learning-styles theory had been discredited. Trusting my colleagues’ expertise, I kept my mouth shut and, assuming that learning styles must have been rehabilitated by new research, voted to pass the proposal.

I later polled the education majors in one of my history classes: Not only did they know about learning styles, they all knew the acronym “VARK,” which stands for visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic — the four alleged learning styles. The theory, it seemed, was alive and well.

Then I sought out the supporting research. Instead, I quickly came across a New York Times article on the curious persistence of learning styles — curious because of widespread evidence debunking the theory (The Atlantic has since published a similar piece). Despite all this, learning styles still apparently pervade colleges of education. A 2014 article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the topic of “neuromyths” found that over 90 percent of teachers it surveyed believed in learning styles.

Another disturbing example of ed-school thinking involves the way reading is taught. According to a 2018 report by American Public Media:

The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

Evidence shows that virtually anyone can learn to read if they are taught to associate letters with particular sounds (phonics) and that trying to teach students to read using the whole language approach works poorly. Still, colleges of education continue to resist phonics.

There are real costs to these inertial, anti-scientific ways. Researchers warn that trying to accommodate students’ beliefs about their own learning styles may actually make it harder for them to learn. The fact that fewer than 40 percent of American eighth graders are proficient readers is partially attributable to educators’ dogged opposition to phonics.

That colleges of education serve as a refuge for bad ideas and sloppy thinking is not news, as readers of this magazine will remember from Lyell Asher’s “How Ed Schools Became a Menace.”

In a 2005 report about the nation’s educational leadership programs, Arthur Levine, then president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, stated that the quality of these programs ranged from “inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Indeed, there has long been a cultural divide between ed schools and the rest of the university. At Columbia, 120th Street, which separates the Teachers College from the rest of the university, is referred to as “the widest street in the world.”

Perhaps believing ed-school-thinking unlikely to cross so wide a street, universities have been curiously complacent about the problems in ed schools.

That complacency is no longer warranted.

Whatever bright line existed between the two worlds is now blurring. Dual enrollment means that more college courses are taught in high schools; remedial programing has led to more high-school material being taught in colleges. As courses and teachers move easily between high schools and colleges, the two formerly distinct institutions risk becoming more similar. People now talk about P-16 education. This refers to preschool through “grade 16,” formerly known as the senior year of college.

What was once the widest street in the world is now, in places, little more than a sidewalk.

No doubt there are useful things we could learn from the high schools and they from us, but what’s wandering in from the sidewalk may be the worst aspects of the high school, not the best. Instead of the enthusiasm of the robotics team and the Latin club, it’s the top-down administration and the stifling, centralized approach to curriculum and pedagogy that seem to be trying to get their noses under the tent.

Ed school graduates now occupy a growing role in academic administration, especially at lower-tier schools, and they are bringing an ed-school mentality with them. When Levine offered his critique of educational leadership programs, he was talking about programs meant to train primary- and secondary-school leaders. More recently, there has been a proliferation of programs meant to train people to work in higher education. As the graduates of these programs get jobs in college administrations (sometimes in positions of real power), the influence of ed schools on universities increases.

For example, the University of Mississippi’s doctoral program in Higher Education says it “prepares individuals for advancement within the institution they currently serve. Graduates from this program have taken on vice-presidencies, directorships, state and federal government positions in various areas and types of institutions. A few have become presidents of institutions.”

At Ohio University a similar program claims to deliver “up-to-date knowledge about Higher Education with the academic rigor that is demanded in Ph.D. studies” and indicates that “graduates of the program serve in faculty and cabinet-level administrative positions in colleges and universities.” As the program’s website indicates, its graduates are not just working in student affairs — many are actually in academic administration, with control over curricula.

The most visible consequence of the growing influence of ed schools in academe is the metastatic growth of assessment. Learning outcomes assessment is not purely a product of ed schools, but it is deeply embedded in that world. Most assessment commissars come from either education or educational psychology backgrounds. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), for instance, is housed in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. Assessment’s pioneering Ph.D. program at James Madison University, though not housed in a college of education, is heavily staffed by people trained in colleges of education. All of this would amount to little more than guilt by association if assessment did not share so much with the worst and most persistent ideas to come out of ed schools.

Like learning styles, assessment has a superficial appeal. Learning styles proposed that there was a simple, low-cost way of making schools work better for everyone. Just identify students’ learning styles, adapt the curriculum to those learning styles, and watch the learning happen. It also comforted the egalitarian-minded by suggesting that students struggled not because of differences in ability or socioeconomic circumstance, but rather because their particular learning style was not being accommodated.

Similarly, assessment offers what appears to be a low-cost (in university money, if not faculty time) way of creating continuous improvement in student learning. Who would not want that?

Unfortunately, as with learning styles, there is no reason to believe that assessment works.

I have been banging on about this for years, but now a few voices within the assessment world are warning that however appealing the idea, it is not doing what it claims to do.

Natasha Jankowski, who is the director of NILOA, conceded at a recent public forum that assessment was a “hot mess.” David Eubanks, the assistant vice president for institutional assessment and research at Furman University and a mathematician, has devoted the last couple years to explaining to anyone who will listen why assessment as it is practiced does not work and will not work. Even the Department of Education seems to have figured this out, and its new guidance to accreditors says that assessment ought to require neither complex rubrics nor paid consultants.

But the same denialist mentality that has kept learning styles alive keeps assessment chugging right along. In the best traditions of the field, reality and evidence have not been allowed to intrude on hope and wishful thinking.

We should be worried about this, not just because of the costs we are now incurring by playing along with assessment’s theater of accountability, but because assessment may be just the beginning of a larger and more damaging set of concessions by the academic disciplines to the educators.

To see how this plays out in practice, consider the way educators’ “expertise” in assessment has led to their expanded ability to shape what happens in college classrooms. In “It’s the Assignments — A Ubiquitous and Inexpensive Strategy to Significantly Improve Higher-Order Learning,” an article in the journal Change by the Association of American Colleges & Universities-affiliated scholars Daniel Sullivan and Kate McConnell, the authors use a tentative and correlational finding that harder assignments result in better scores on the type of academic rubrics they champion, to make an alarming statement:

Insisting that faculty give assignments that are both appropriately demanding and intentional about higher-order learning goals as well as disciplinary content learning goals … is not only effective at improving students’ higher-order learning, it also represents an affordable, reasonable strategy for enhancing student learning.

Or this from the same authors in 2017:

The way our interpretation of academic freedom has evolved wrongly conflates the freedom faculty do and must have regarding the teaching of disciplinary content with the notion that they should be equally free — as individuals — to decide on pedagogical approaches even when strong evidence favors some kinds of pedagogy over others.

In other words, “content” belongs to the faculty, but the real experts are going to have to “insist” that we teach it the right way. Better get your lesson plans to the principal’s office right away!

In a 1990 journal article, Gilbert Allardyce, a historian at the University of New Brunswick, described the decade after the First World War when the “education men,” who came out of the then-new colleges of education, wrested control of the secondary-school curriculum from the American Historical Association.

“The result,” Allardyce says, “was a ‘terrific overhauling’ of the secondary curriculum, which broke the influence of the history profession in schools and brought on the reign of the social studies.” Social studies, then described as “the social sciences simplified for pedagogical purposes,” are a thin pabulum made from decontextualized sociology-lite leavened with a bit of civics; they constitute Exhibit A in the case against letting ed schools influence curricula.

These events took place just as secondary education was starting to reach a broader swath of the population. In 1910 secondary-school enrollment among 14- to 17-year-olds was just over 10 percent. By 1920 it had reached nearly 30 percent, and by 1940 it was 70 percent. The educators took over secondary schools just as they were making the transition from something that only a small number of well-qualified and privileged students attended to a “high-school-for-all” model.

The current push for “college for all” and “free college” suggests that even if college attendance does not become as routine as high school, we are still likely to see a larger percentage of young people attending college in the near future. Add to that the activism of educational-reform organizations like the Lumina Foundation, with its interest in expanding college attendance, advocacy of assessment, performance-based funding, and the completion agenda, and we have a situation that is eerily like that of the early 20th century when the academic disciplines ceded their influence over the high schools to professional educators.

The “education men” made a hash of the schools they took over, and it would be recklessly irresponsible to let them get control of colleges. The worst-case scenario would be to recreate at the college level the type of divide that now exists between elite private high schools (which hire teachers trained in their disciplines) and public schools (which must hire people trained by ed schools). Elite private colleges are immune to most of the pressures that are driving public colleges toward the educators. So it’s easy to imagine a situation where elite private colleges remain as they are and public universities move toward an increasingly educator-dominated system focused on a compliance culture, a mandated pedagogy, and a centralized curriculum.

If we are going to have college-for-all or even college-for-most, it will be a terrible waste if that means that students who can’t afford private universities are forced into a system that is dominated by the same zombie ideas and top-down thinking that made public high schools so mediocre. If that happens, we will end up reinforcing the very educational inequality that college-for-all is meant to reduce.