CURMUDGUCATION: 5 Causes of Ed Reform Fails

CURMUDGUCATION: 5 Causes of Ed Reform Fails:

5 Causes of Ed Reform Fails

Robyn Schulman is a Forbes contributor covering "the intersection of education and entrepreneurship." She the senior editor of thought-leadership for 51talk, "a leading education startup in China." So she's not necessarily the kind of person I'd be inclined to pay attention to. But her new Forbes piece is a worthwhile read.

The Top 5 Reasons EdTech Startups Fail And How To Avoid Them lists five problems that most classroom teachers will recognize. Only they aren't confined to ed tech start-ups. Or even ed tech, which is just one brand of ed reform-- and ed reform shares many of these fatal flaws.

1) Lack of understanding the education ecosystem.

Just because you went to school back in the day does not mean you know how schools and education  work today. This leads ed tech folks to develop programs that don't actually fit the needs of people in the field. In the ed reform biz, this leads to repeated calls to reform practices that stopped being the norm decades ago. Teachers have not been told to make their students do rote memorization for years, and most of us are entirely familiar with computers.

If you don't know what our challenges and problems are, there's no way you can help us deal; with them.

2)  Edtech startups lack critical teacher input and transparency.

Indeed. You would think that people who want to influence the world of education would talk to the people who devote their entire professional lives to the classroom. But no-- some folk remain convinced that not only do they not need to talk to teachers, but they should actively avoid it. Many an edtech promoter has taken the position that their program would work great if not for those CURMUDGUCATION: 5 Causes of Ed Reform Fails: