Joel Rose of New Classrooms Innovation Partners recently wrote a piece for AEI illuminating the forces that keep schools as they are and exploring how these forces might be addressed. Main points include the following:
- K-12 innovation has a fundamental paradox: Meaningful improvements to student outcomes require learning models that challenge the basic constructs of how classrooms operate – and yet, the more new education models do so, the harder they become for schools to adopt.
- America’s K-12 schools tend to resist efforts to redesign the classroom due to four underlying forces:
- Assessment and Accountability Policies that Demand a Uniform Instructional Path
- Inadequate Investment in Developing Innovating Learning Models
- Bureaucratic Inertia
- Stifling Procurement Barriers
- Creating space for innovation in accountability policy, catalyzing investment to develop promising models, expanding ways to support early adopters of new learning models, and removing barriers to procurement are key to giving new models a chance to deliver for America’s kids.
