Pro-Innovation Bias in Education: Any Old Innovation Will Do and Adventures in Educational Fadsurfing

As wave after wave of educational reform has hit our educational shores, one thing becomes very clear: the field of educational leadership and education has what is often called an “pro-innovation bias.” While innovation can obviously be advantageous when it addresses specific problems, having this “pro-innovation bias” often only means there is a great deal of promoting of new programs or new technologies and little serious examination and critique of the possible side effects or unintended consequences of these. If you are the critic who starts asking difficult questions about these potential problems, you are most often accused by those promoting the innovation as anti-progress or pro-status quo. Critical examination of all these new-fangled innovations is stifled immediately by those who simply want their brand of innovation accepted—consequences and side-effects be damned.

In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, critic Evgeny Morozov writes:

“Innovation might be one of the defining buzzwords of our times, but it has not received the critical attention it deserves, and we usually take its goodness for granted, oblivious of how obsession with innovation twists our accounts of the past.” (2013, p. 167)

Innovation is the educational buzzword of this decade. Everyone is talking of its inevitability and necessity, and have been crowing loudly since the advent of the great technological wonders of the personal computer and hand-held devices.

There were those Technological-Promo videos plastered all over YouTube warning educators to get on the “Tech-Express” or be left wallowing in irrelevance. There were the “tech-evangelists” pushing salvation through technological innovation. Everyone then and now talk of “innovation” as if any Old innovation will do, just do it. But there lies the problem: as history has pointed out to us, when educators adopt innovation uncritically, the unintended consequences usually take quite some time to overcome.

Morozov (2013) points to the difficult of innovation's problems by pointing out that most innovations and inventions don’t have consequences, but those that do require significant repairs, maintenance, and resources to keep working. For example, take the use of value-added measures, or VAMs, in education. To maintain VAMs as a viable educational tool, countless hours and resources must be spent on test development and testing. Administrators have to spend hours engaging in rituals of preparation required to make the value-added system function properly. Then there’s the money spent on VAMs themselves and for the use of a company’s algorithms. One of the consequences and side-effects of VAMs is a culture where a child’s test score matters the most. Other innovations like 1:1 schools also require a great deal of maintenance and resources to try to make them work. Budgets are busted in purchasing computers and in the creation of plans of technology-sustainability, as well as technical support systems. VAMs and One-to-One computer initiatives are only two current “innovations” being done to school systems, and both require an immense amount of resources that have grown scarcer since the Great Recession of 2008.

Even if one of willing to set aside the issues of the resource-intensive nature of innovations and their side-effects, as school systems jump from innovation to innovation, they are engaging in a type of “fadsurfing in the schoolhouse” that was described so aptly by Eileen Shapiro in her book Fadsurfing in the Boardroom: Managing in the Age of Instant Answers. In her book, Shapiro (1995) writes: “Fad surfing is the practice of riding the crest of one the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations” (p. xiii). Educational leaders engage in this practice of “riding the crest of the latest educational panacea.”

In my career, I’ve seen too many to count. Early in my career there was block-scheduling, multiple intelligences, CRISS, reading for learning, writing for learning, school-based decision making, tech-prep, Deming’s Total Quality Management, thinking maps, critical thinking, age of accountability and testing, NCLB, ESSA, Ruby Payne, Emotional Intelligence, SEL, Grit, Growth Mindset, Brain-based teaching and learning, inquiry-based teaching, thematic teaching, multiculturalism…and the list is endless just for my 29 years as an educator. Will the current buzzwords such as “coding” and “personalized learning” be added to this heap of innovations?

My problem isn’t with any of these, for many of them may have merits in a given school or classroom. My problem with this list is what it represents: a search for a panacea that will once and for all resolve our education problems. Shapiro’s (1995) advice to business is apropos here to educators seeking the golden fleece of educational innovation. She reminds leaders,

“The hard truth is that there are no panaceas. What is new is the sheer number of techniques, some new and some newly repackaged versions of older methods, that are now positioned as panaceas” (p. xvii).

There are no panaceas for all that ails us in education either, no matter how many salespeople knock on our doors trying to sell us their product or their program. Many of the new-fangled products and programs are just repackaged older "innovations." It's time to recognize that "Education is just damn hard work! That’s it." There are no easy paths. What works at one school does not necessarily mean it will work at all at another. There are no programs that will work accross all schools not matter what that consultant says. Our schools exists as complex entities in complex systems within a complex world. To think that if I apply this product, program or method to my school or school district and B will happen is simplistic thinking.

There are factors that affect education that are outside our control, because schools exist in a world system, a very complex world system. Before the pro-innovation crowd start accusing me of “excuse-making” which is where this conversation usually goes, let me make something clear: Recognizing reality is not excuse making. Recognizing that our schools in this country operate in a very unfair and unequal society where many get the advantages is not making an excuse; it is recognizing a fundamental social problem that impacts what we do no matter what program or innovation we implement. Our schools suffer from inadequate funding in a society that distributes advantage to those who often already have the means to be successful. There is no panacea or bootstrap mentality that is going to fix that problem.

To conclude, I would add that many educational leaders and educators suffer not only from an “pro-innovation bias,” but they also suffer from simplistic thinking and from wearing self-imposed blinders that prevent them from seeing the reality of an increasingly unequal and inequitable society.

Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything click here: The folly of technological solutionism. Public Affairs: New York, NY.

Shapiro, E. (1995). Fadsurfing in the boardroom: Managing in the age of instant answers. Perseus: Cambridge, MA.

What Do Education Leaders Really Learn from Business Leadership and Management Gurus?

"...Management theory is an immature discipline, unusually open to charlatans, or semi-charlatans, and congenitally prone to fads." Adrian Wooldridge, Masters of Management

Wooldridge (2011) writes that “management theory is an immature discipline” (p. xviii). This is true also of educational leadership or educational administration as a discipline. It too, is still an “immature discipline” as well, in spite of its existence since the turn of the 20th century, It lays claim to being a positivistic, emancipatory science very often, but at its core, it still struggles with a means to tell the truth about itself and about how to lead schools. It longs for first principles, but they are scarce. 

And, like management theory, it too is “open to charlatans” and fads. Administrators at every level of the educational system often jump on the latest fad that crosses their desk, uncritically and without question. Just look at the educational administration literature that's coming out. There's books that tell administrators how to win with "mindsets," "grit," "empowerment," "teacher-leaders," etc. What's missing is a true critical examination of these ideas as well. Leadership also requires forcing those selling these wares to go beyond their comments of being "research-based" or "proven-to-work." After all, the snake-oil salesmen of the 19th century made those claims too. There needs to be much more critique of these fads, educational leadership literature, and even our still immature discipline.

What’s even worse, in their quest for short-term goals, such as increases in test scores, they do not adhere to these faddish ideas long enough to really make a difference. When administrators obsess over short-term measurement, they turn their institutions into institutions powered only to exist in the short-term.

The truth is that often there are administrators whose vision is more about their own careers than about seeing their schools through innovations and changes that can have impacts beyond their own lives. That might explain why most administrators don't stay in the same place very long. Our education system mirrors the business environment in this sense. Its innovation and creative endeavor is expended on what can raise test scores in the short term. Short term, non-visionary strategies like eliminating the arts, music, and true authentic learning are too often looked upon as valid strategies. These become casualties in the ever insistent search for higher test scores so that administrators can feel like they are having an impact. In truth, every educator who has had an impact on my life changed me in some ways that became evident much, much later in my life. 

Like management, educational leadership is going to remain an “immature discipline” as long as it continues to borrow so heavily from management theory. It is going to remain focused on short-term visions and goals, because the business world is mostly incessantly focused on short term profit and share-holder interests in the now, not making an impact that outlasts us. I submit as well, as long as administrators remain focused, as business CEOs and managers often do—creating their personal path to professional nirvana—there will be no maturity ever in our field of educational administration. True leadership is sometimes realizing our endeavor as educators reap benefits far after we're gone.

Wooldridge, A. (2011). Masters of Management: How Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World--For Better and For Worse. Harper Collins: New York, NY

Expanding Education Leadership Innovation and Imagination by Valuing Art and Literature

I am going say something direct to those think the arts, literature, and even philosophy are frivolous and "impractical" for 21st century schools. We need these as educational leaders more than ever. 

This is because the only "truths" about leading schools are not going to be found in books located on the bookstore racks of the latest business management and business leadership, but somehow we unquestionably believe that the answers to our problems are found and can be resolved by the discourses of business management and business leadership.

Education leaders in the past 25 or 30 years have appropriated the latest book titles of authors like John Maxwell, Stephen Covey, and John Kotter (anyone else notice that these are "white" males as I do?) as if these business leaders offer the "gospel truth" regarding how to best lead schools or any organization. Schools are still struggling to find the golden fleece of reform while those peddling these "business discourses of leadership" have continued to fleece school systems out of uncounted sums of money. About the only thing the field of education leadership has to show for it is the improved bottom lines for those offering books, conferences, and official training sessions to administrators and school leaders who are genuinely searching for answers to the problems they are facing in the schools and districts where they work.


In reading Hofstadter, I stumbled across an idea and thought that I say has a lot of wisdom about being an intellectual leader of a school.

In his book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter (1962) was writing about the limitations of thinking when we get caught up with the idea of limiting our thoughts just to the practical. He describes a physicist who discounted the invention of the telephone as a "bore." But Hofstadter points out that physicist James Clark Maxwell was limiting his imagination because he was only using "physicist-thinking" or physicist mind, and that was limiting his "vistas of imagination." "For him," Hofstadter writes, "thinking as a physicist, the new instrument (the telephone) offered no possibilities for play."

When we set limits on our thinking and imagining by requiring that it be "practical,""relevant," or "data-based" we destroy the playfulness of possibility. We restrict our own "vistas of imagination" and perhaps miss being truly creative and innovative. Fruitful and innovative ideas are found beyond the edges of the limitations that shackle thinking. The answers to 21st century problems to education may lie elsewhere.

Perhaps we as school leaders need to think like poets, like novelists, like artists, like sculptors, and even life musicians, in other words, become "intellectual leaders" instead of dismissing such as "impractical" or "fluff." History is full of inventive minds who worked beyond the margins of the acceptable, For example, Leonardo Da Vinci, considered by some to be the symbolic embodiment of innovation, had an enormous horizon of imagination, and the result was inventions in both art and science that did not exist before.

As educational leaders, the first step to really addressing the problems of our times might not always be checking the latest "scientific research." The answers to our current problems in education could lie in Shakespeare, Mozart, or even Rembrandt. Limiting our "vistas of imagination" to that which fits the scientific method and the education sciences, means our imagination for the possibilities of education are shackled. So, as education leaders, go see a Shakespearean play, listen to a Mendelssohn concerto, or read a Thomas Wolfe novel. We can't really be innovative and truly creative leaders and problem-solvers unless we're willing to break free from the limits of practicality and "science" and expand the "vistas of our imaginations."

Hofstadter, R. (1962). Anti-intellectualism in American life. New York, NY: Vintage Books.