In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is education “innovation.”

—Rick

Rick: In these exchanges, you and I spend a lot of time talking about jargon, fads, and the need to distinguish the fashionable from the sensible. It’s a necessary exercise in part because of the allure of “innovation.” There are broad swaths of education where innovation is mindlessly celebrated. We have innovation zones. Innovative schools. Innovative practices. Prizes for innovation. It all suggests that the new and different should be preferred to the familiar. And that, if I can be blunt, is stupid.

The fascination with innovation is a huge problem. I think it distracts from what matters—whether a policy or practice makes sense—and instead puts the spotlight on whether it’s exciting and new. This fuels the spinning wheels of reform, frustrates educators who are constantly urged to embrace the new new thing, and creates a bias against time-tested practices. And it’s all rooted in a fatuous, half-baked understanding of innovation that applauds the innovativeness of innovations rather than whether they actually help solve problems or deliver reliable results.

If you think about it, this reflexive celebration of innovation is pretty odd. I mean, I don’t know anyone who walks into a car dealership or an Apple store and says, “I want your most innovative model!” What people actually ask for is an electric car with more range or a phone with a better camera. Now, it’s true that those advances can be understood as the product of innovation—but it’s the benefits that matter, not the innovation. If you wind up with an innovative car that has less range or a phone with a buggy camera, what you really want is a less innovative model that actually works.

But most of the jibber-jabber about innovation in education misses this, and that’s equally true of foundation glad-handers, ed. school professors, and district officials. This permits innovation to become an excuse for silly ideas. It also shifts the locus of decisionmaking from the practitioners, who have practical experience, to advocates and academics. This, in turn, helps fuel the head-spinning search for magical solutions—where one district is ditching practice A for innovation B, even as another is ditching practice B for innovation A. The result is that everyone spends a lot of money on innovative tech that’s glitchy, unused, or both.

Thanks for letting me rant, pal. All that said, I’m quite curious how you come down on this.

Jal: I agree with much of what you’ve said, Rick. From my perspective, we are obsessed with superficial innovation and, at the same time, resistant to the more fundamental changes we need. It’s the worst of both worlds.

The obsession with technological fixes, in particular, seems vastly out of step with our knowledge that learning, and the raising of young people, is an intensely human exercise. People at a certain kind of conference talk about the latest innovations with gusto, with no appreciation for what it actually entails to make something new work in practice. I’d bet on a highly experienced and skilled educator over the latest new innovative tool every time.

At the same time, in a more fundamental way, we are defending a flawed institution that needs to be reimagined. Education continues to be a largely passive enterprise centered on endless worksheets, trivial tasks, and teaching that does little to engage or interest students. Students take the same subjects, which are taught largely the same way, year after year, decade after decade. Charter schools, which were created for the express purpose of fostering innovation, have themselves fallen victim to what sociologists call “isomorphism”—the tendency of organizations to seek legitimacy by copying others in their industry.

As Larry Cuban and David Tyack pointed out 30 years ago in the book Tinkering Toward Utopia, efforts to move away from this core “grammar” of schooling are fleeting and often snap back to the traditional norm. COVID was a perfect example: At first, many schools simply transposed the worksheets they would have been doing in a physical environment into a virtual one. And then, despite the many calls for reinvention, schools immediately went back to doing what they had been doing before the pandemic.

Thus, I think the key distinction is between innovation—which is generally about adding an ornament onto the existing structure—and reinvention or transformation, which is about reimagining the core of schools in ways that work better for students and teachers. I will suggest what I think this looks like in my second response, but first, Rick, what do you think of that analysis?

Rick: I love the distinction between the slick promise of “innovation” and the disciplined work of rethinking. You know, in 2023, I penned The Great School Rethink, which wholeheartedly embraces your call to reimagine the core work of schooling while eschewing flimflammery.

Of course, for a lot of sensible educators and parents, that immediately raises the question of how we’re proposing to distinguish productive rethinking from the silly stuff. I mean, my inbox features a steady drumbeat of press releases that say things like, “We live in a digitized 6.0 AI-Bitcoin-Uber world, and schools need to compete by RETHINKING to leverage cognitive connectivity and hyper-personalized nanotechnology.” That stuff is not what I envision as rethinking, and I doubt it’s what you have in mind, either.

For me, the productive way to approach “rethinking” is by recognizing that schools are organized in ways that waste time, overburden educators, misuse technology, and alienate parents. Worse, as you note, schools too often take the most human and heartfelt of acts—the mentoring of kids and the sharing of knowledge—and turn them into drudgery.

Rethinking isn’t just about asking how to do things “better” but how to empower kids, educators, and parents while liberating them from pointless paperwork and ridiculous routines. It means asking how new tools can offer students richer experiences, how schools can better partner with parents, and how students can spend more time engaging with skilled teachers and stimulating mentors.

The key to doing this, I’ve found, is specificity. If we ask, “How can schools be better?” it’s easy to start offering a bunch of platitudes about personalization, engagement, and instructional alignment. And that’s fertile ground for “innovation” peddlers. But if the question is, “How many hours per year are students spending twiddling their thumbs, and what can be done to change that?,” we wind up talking concretely about what’s happening and about policies, routines, and practices that might help. That kind of focus invites insights from practitioners and those with a clear sense of how things work in practice, rather than those pitching PowerPoints and pablum.

I’ve often thought that students would benefit if we simply banned adults involved in education from using the term “innovation” and insisted they be specific about what’s not working and what needs to change.

Jal: So it looks like we are in agreement that there is a lot of snake oil posing as innovation. A big part of the problem is that many “innovations” are tools—technological and otherwise—that could be useful but are heavily dependent upon the people using them. The things that actually need to change, from my perspective, are things like the purposes we are aiming for, the subjects we are teaching, the way we divide up the day, and the amount of time students spend in the world rather than in school. But all of these things are necessarily political and value-laden, and they are not within the purview of companies, nonprofits, and academics that are developing the next “innovation.” Thus, the changes that we need require less outside innovation and more internal transformation.

What would these changes look like? This is a subject for another day, but one place to start is to clarify education’s purpose. I’m getting more interested in the idea of “human” schools, meaning that if we are going to have large taxpayer-funded institutions that house our young people for their entire childhood, the most critical thing we can do with these institutions is think about what they need as human beings. In a piece in Phi Delta Kappan, I proposed that we create a new social contract for schools grounded in three pillars: learners whose agency is respected, whose identities are deeply known, whose diversity is embraced, whose joy is nurtured, and whose growth is the central concern of those who care for them; learning that is purposeful, authentic, and connected to the broader human domains they are part of; and learning communities that foster meaningful relationships, cultivate democratic values, and guide our communities and world toward the kind of people and planet we want to become.

Those kinds of changes are more like transformation than innovation. But they are needed if we are really going to reimagine schools into the kind of institutions that we hope they can become.