Where Are the Educational Innovations?

By Robert Tinker

Education cannot thrive without innovation, but effective innovations do not just happen. They need to be based on solid ideas, they need to be developed by a talented team with diverse skills, and they need to be widely disseminated.

This issue of @Concord is dedicated to exploring how innovative materials are developed and disseminated. We document several different decade-long paths from research to practice (see “How Do Innovations Travel from the Lab to the Classroom?” on page 14). The lesson is that the development of powerful ideas is a good investment and that no one dissemination strategy is best.

The balance of this newsletter provides a detailed review of an important innovation created by our Seeing Math project. This is a cutting-edge approach to teacher professional development based on online courses featuring video case studies and interactive software. The courses are a unique blend of resources carefully crafted into powerful learning experiences. They are now available nationwide.

Our greatest concern is that the pipeline of educational innovations in math and science is drying up. Nationally, there are too few innovations such as the ones reported here. Funding cuts are causing us, and others like us, to dismantle our teams and reduce our capacity for innovation. The priority has shifted to having teachers and university faculty innovate locally. Of course, these efforts seldom have the resources needed for a major impact. Instead, education funding is being dissipated on a broad portfolio of programs that are well meaning, but unfocused. The focus should be on visionary innovations and national dissemination of the best of these.

Imagine that the U.S. had decentralized NASA the way it has decentralized education. The entire NASA budget would be block-granted to the states, which are required to distribute $1M per year to each of 17,000 local rocket clubs. The primary responsibility of NASA headquarters would be to require continuous improvement as part of a “no club left behind” (NCLB) initiative.

The result would be 17,000 tiny rocket clubs, tremendous duplication of effort and no innovation. The clubs would probably manage some areas satisfactorily, but there would be virtually no space program. Expensive innovations that require the best minds and resources in the nation would be missing. There would be no moon landing, no GPS, no Hubble, no satellite imagery, no Cassini-Huygens mission—no significant innovations. The U.S. space effort would lag behind Singapore, Bulgaria, and many other countries.

This is the situation in science and math education. Our radically decentralized system is duplicative and inefficient. When pushed by standards and possible sanctions, it may be able to do some things adequately, such as basic literacy and numeracy, but it fails in science and math education because these areas are complex, ever changing, and difficult to teach. Local and state agencies cannot fund large-ticket items, such as a new curriculum, and they cannot innovate. We are far behind many countries with more centralized educational systems.

Educational technology has a huge potential for innovations that could remake math and science education. Using technology, traditional content can be taught better, more deeply, and sooner. Technology can be used to assess students as they learn and keep teachers informed in real time about student progress and difficulties. More importantly, technology can support new approaches to learning. However, funding for technology-enhanced educational innovations has almost completely evaporated. Less than 1% of federal education funding goes into exploring educational applications of the computational and communications capacity of modern computers or handhelds.

It seems obvious that both NASA and education need centralized R&D for just those items that states and districts cannot undertake: bigticket innovations. This is not happening. Math and science education in the U.S. is severely under-investing in significant innovation and is failing to take advantage of our lead in technology. As a country that relies heavily on innovation and technology, the U.S. seems averse to educational innovations that could have a national impact. This aversion is undermining our future.

Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org) is President of the Concord Consortium.