The Same Thing Over and Over:
How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas
By Frederick M. Hess
Harvard, 304 pages

Frederick M. Hess has written an important book that seeks to bring sobriety to an education-policy realm too often besotted with the panacean, the faddish, the naive, and the antiquated. His book is called The Same Thing Over and Over, and the title is spot-on.

The “same thing” to which Hess, an education analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, refers comprises three things, really. First are the fanciful expectations that “education reformers” have of their innovative education-policy elixirs—grand solutions that frequently do little solving. An example is what Hess calls the “small-school crusade of the early 2000s,” a movement spurred by the conviction that dividing large high schools into smaller units would enhance student aptitude. But boundless hype and some $2 billion of Gates Foundation money could not hide data showing that pupils in these newly created smaller schools were actually faring worse than their peers in larger institutions. And so the crusade was abandoned.

While the small-school zealotry has yet to re-emerge, many otherfailed education ideas, such as reducing class sizes, have been plucked from disrepute two, three, 20 years after their collapse and reintroduced as universal remedies. Related to these but different are obsolete educational dogmas—that more money makes a better school, say—that originated in a time long past and have stayed alive despite the evidentiary salvos launched against them. Thus, the second sense of the “same thing”: musty education ideas that are simply recycled or recurring.

Finally, there is the endless squabbling over relatively tepid tweaks (like dividing one school into three) when what is actually required is nothing less than systemic overhaul. Though education policies are perpetually changing, Hess writes, “we have rarely dug deeply enough into the underlying system of districts, schools, and teachers to start reshaping the educational landscape.”

Consider, for instance, how the nation staffs its schools. As Hess notes, the way in which the teaching profession is currently structured is largely a decades-old response to a “captive pool of female labor.” In the mid-20th century, even the most talented women were generally considered for only a few occupations, and teaching was among them. “In the 1960s,” Hess writes, “when only about one-tenth of young women had college degrees, over half of working college-educated women were teachers”; but by the 1990s, “just one-sixth of working, college-educated women” were at the head of a classroom. Today, unlike in the 1950s, the teaching occupation competes with other fields. No longer are smart women compelled to become educators; they can be doctors, lawyers, or scientists and, in so doing, earn more respect and compensation than teachers currently do.

Yet the education decision makers have largely ignored these developments. Rather than creatively lure savvy people to schools, rather than hire talented teachers, districts have merely hired more teachers. In the second half of the 20th century, as unions pushed to shrink class sizes and boost their membership rolls, the number of American teachers tripled while student enrollments grew just 50 percent. Thus, at the same time that intelligent women were forgoing teaching for other careers, the ranks of K-12 educators were burgeoning. The predictable result has been a dilution of talent. Hess reports that in the 1960s, nearly a quarter of new female teachershad scored in the top decile of their high school graduating class. In 1992, only 10 percent had.

How to halt this cognitive dissipation? Not by tinkering, Hess says, but by wholly redesigning the frame on which the teaching profession is constructed. “Continuing to accept the notion that one is either a ‘teacher’ or is not” is anachronistic and unhelpful. A district might, instead, ask its sharpest educators to spend half their time in the classroom and half developing curricula or training new teachers. Schools could also consider ways to involve other professionals from their communities in student instruction.

But this sort of innovation occurs rarely and sporadically. The old rules reign. One wonders why, in the 21st century, teachers are still promoted and rewarded in a lockstep way. Why they receive tenure after two years. Why they are still represented by collective-bargaining agreements, still prepared by education schools, and still maintained by defined-benefit pension plans designed for a world in which workers stayed with the same employer for 30 or 40 years. In 2011, what sense does any of this make?

The “reformers” recognize these problems. But as Hess describes, their “efforts to reform school staffing, teacher recruitment, and teacher preparation represent nothing more than repackaging outmoded assumptions in the hopes of seeing dramatically different results.” An illustration is the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s November 2010 report, “Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice,” which compiled the recommendations of yet another “blue ribbon panel” and called for “turning teacher education ‘upside down.’ ” Alas, the report will do no such inverting. It bursts with predictable platitudes about revising curricula, refiguring incentives, and increasing accountability, but contains few specifics or actionable plans and will lead to no useful transformation.

This sort of faux reform happens in the other education-policy realms as well. As a result, in one corner are the unions and their allies, who not only resist change but also attack it as antithetical to some vague, bygone conception of public schooling. And in the other corner are the “reformers,” most of whom are, as Hess aptly puts its, “as myopic as their opponents, casually swallowing intact the familiar assumptions of districts, schools, age-graded classrooms . . . and then imagining that the addition of merit pay, value-added metrics, and fanciful turnaround plans will be enough to set matters right.”

Hess does his best to end the book with a more buoyant tune. In an epilogue titled “A Few Thoughts on Making This Work,” he outlines some productive school-betterment tacks, such as organizing education online, focusing on the unique needs of individual pupils (by ceasing to clump everyone in classes organized by age rather than by ability), and, generally, “revisiting our notions of what schooling is and should look like.” And in the book’s final line, he writes that finding “the strength to free ourselves from the heavy hand of the past” entails, first, making a “choice . . . whether or not to do so.”

But the choice has already been made. The ideas that Hess puts forth in his epilogue are promising—and they are not new. The education world knows about them. It also knows the power and ferocity of the armies ready to fight those ideas, and so it has chosen not to pursue real transformation but, instead, to continue doing the same thing, over and over. Perhaps this will change. But not just yet.