Prologue toImpediments to Scaling Up
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"Impediments
to Scaling Up" is a chapter in a book that my son Kurt and I did
for the RAND Corporation, Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms.
The message that the chapter develops is fairly simple: the more details
an approach requires, the greater the probability that a school or district
will not "adopt it." Implementing a full-school, full-immersion
DI model the way the National Institute for Direct Instruction does it requires
the school to change just about everything. The idea is to maximize all
the variables that account for the acceleration of student performance.
Currently, none of them are maximized in a failed school.
So if the choice for the school is between a model that requires many changes versus a model that promises acceleration of children through very few changes, schools would overwhelmingly tend to choose the model that creates less disruption. It would be something like the choice between being required to walk barefoot across hot coals and walking across warm sand. Understand that the school is probably ignorant about the monumental differences in what children and teachers learn if the school implements the NIFDI model. So they are not being irresponsible, just supremely misinformed. The RAND Corporation originally positioned this book as one that addressed problems with upscaling. In the final version (downloadable at www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND_MG248.pdf), I think ours was the only chapter that was not a "case history" of the authors' models. That's unfortunate because models like America's Choice and the Edison Project still attract large numbers of schools (particularly those in districts that have ex-military personnel as "CEOs"). Unfortunately, these models have no substantive data of effectiveness, and they are ill conceived from the standpoint of student learning or of teaching to accelerate the cognitive growth of children. Anyhow, I think that it's a pretty good article. |