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A version of this essay originally appeared on “The Next 30 Years” Substack.
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 veteran teachers 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 artificial intelligence. 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?
The easy answer is also the most insulting — that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.
Education isn’t fad-driven because the people in it lack judgment. It’s fad-driven because the system they work in makes churn not just common, but rational. Four structural forces, in particular, push schools toward constant reinvention:
Weak feedback loops. In most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly. Customers leave, revenue falls and performance problems become unmistakable. In education, by contrast, the signal is slow and noisy. Instructional changes may take years to show results. Student cohorts turn over annually. Outcomes depend on factors well beyond the classroom, such as attendance, family circumstances and peer effects. Even when results improve or decline, attribution is murky. There are too many moving parts to say with reasonable certainty that any single input was determinative. Under these conditions, it’s impossible to offer decisive proof that a given approach is or isn’t working. This makes education unusually vulnerable not just to bad ideas, but to the premature abandonment of good ones.
Leadership legitimacy requires visible change. School systems churn through leaders with striking regularity. The onus is on each new superintendent, principal and state chief to demonstrate that he or she is, in fact, leading. Many will come to the unfortunate conclusion that leadership is signaled not through stewardship, but through action: launching initiatives, unveiling strategic plans, introducing new frameworks, reorganizing priorities. Anyone who has spent time around school systems has seen the pattern: A new leader arrives, announces a bold vision, rebrands existing efforts and introduces a new set of priorities. Three years later, often before results are fully visible, that leader departs (school superintendents tend to last a single contract cycle) and the wheel turns another revolution. A leader who says, “We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, but do it better,” risks appearing passive or directionless, even if the system is performing well. It is a structural expectation. In education, visible change is how leadership signals its worth.
Truly Good Schools Aren’t Derailed by Staff Turnover. They’re Built for It
Low barriers to new ideas. In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails. A new framework can be published, marketed and adopted by districts in rapid succession. Professional development cycles spread new ideas quickly, consultants package innovations into turnkey programs and procurement systems often treat instructional approaches as interchangeable. The result is a highly permeable system — one in which ideas can enter and scale rapidly, often long before their effectiveness is firmly established.
Moral urgency. Education is not a typical service sector. It concerns children’s lives and futures, and that reality creates a constant sense of moral urgency. If a proposal claims it might help struggling students succeed — especially disadvantaged children — the pressure to act is immense. Waiting for perfect evidence can feel ethically unacceptable; trying something new, even with incomplete proof, feels compassionate. This isn’t foolish or irresponsible. It’s what happens when moral responsibility collides with uncertainty. But it creates a powerful bias toward action — and, by extension, toward constant change.
Taken together, these forces produce a system in which reform cycles are not accidental but predictable. Slow, ambiguous evidence makes it hard to know what is working. Leadership incentives reward visible change. New ideas face little resistance to adoption. Moral urgency pushes systems to act rather than wait. Under those conditions, stability is not the natural condition. Change is. Indeed, stability can easily be mistaken — and often is — for complacency or indifference.
The problem is not that education experiments with new ideas. Some experimentation is necessary and healthy. The problem is that the system struggles to sustain success once it finds it. Schools that improve often do so through unglamorous means: adopting a coherent curriculum, building teacher expertise, reinforcing consistent instructional routines and maintaining focus over time. None of this is flashy. None of it lends itself to prizes or glowing media profiles. And all of it is fragile.
Recent reforms in Houston’s schools offer a useful contrast. Rather than chasing novelty, the district has focused on something far less glamorous: tightly specified lessons, routine checks for understanding and instructional systems designed for the teachers schools actually have — not the ones reformers wish they had. Whatever one thinks of the model (and its critics are many and voluble), its premise goes against the grain of the broader system.
Elsewhere, I’ve argued that the real miracle in education is not that some schools succeed. It’s that any manage to keep succeeding. The four factors enumerated above help explain why.
The solution for breaking the cycle is not to scold educators for chasing new ideas. It is to realign incentives so 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, but because the system makes standing still look irresponsible — even when standing still is exactly what success requires.
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