This is a smart post from Matthew Yglesias, especially the part about the Ed Tech backlash being a symptom, not necessarily THE malady. I say that as someone with an anti-Ed Tech bent, because most of the first-generation Ed Tech was well-marketed garbage.

I’d classify this moment as a backlash against Stuff That Didn’t Work (including but not exclusive to Ed Tech), witnessing the revolt against Balanced Literacy curricula... which is now being followed by a backlash against overly-conceptual-and-discourse-oriented math curricula, overly-complex phonics curricula, oral-only phonemic awareness programs, and I-could-go-on.

Mind you, iReady is not a good tool for instruction! We just published a piece on the issues over at the Curriculum Insight Project:

curriculuminsightprojec…

As important as it is to root out things that don’t work (whether it’s Ed Tech or a flawed curriculum), the equally-important question is: What are schools supposed to replace it with?

Which brings me to my concern about the accountability-can-fix-it thesis.

The accountability theory of change assumes that schools know what to do to raise outcomes, and if we just put the right carrots or sticks in place, they will do it. I don’t actually believe that’s the case, writ large. The embrace of crummy programs is a symptom of an education ecosystem where educators receive (and often believe) loads of misguided signals about what works to improve outcomes.

Put another way: if we implemented new accountability schema today, paranoid schools would be just as (or more) likely to embrace the next faddish tech-enabled solution (“just like iReady, untested for efficacy, but now AI-enabled so it’ll work this time!”) as they would to embrace the curricula in Louisiana and Tennessee. Ask me how I know.

So, I think we need to go upstream with accountability, and look at Accountability at the Input Level, or at least better research/insight, so we give better signals to schools (and school boards and parents) about the quality inputs/programs.

There can be a role for policy here. I like the idea of a national curriculum database, so we can do research into what schools are using and correlations with performance: karenvaites.org/p/a-cal…

More to say on how we can kick accountability upstream, but that’s probably its own post.