Common Sense in Education Reform

While schools in lower-income areas face the steepest hurdles, transformation is entirely possible. Every school can grow. The real challenge lies in finding the exact tools, resources, and community support needed to spark true improvements. So, what can we do to make schools better?

This is a question that people have been asking for a very long time. Education reform is based on the answers and, as many teachers would tell you, sometimes the answers are just wrong. So, what do we do? If traditional answers are not working, we must rethink our entire approach to educational reform.

One person who did that is M. Night Shyamalan. You may know him as a movie producer but he is also a concerned citizen who wanted to help improve our educational system. In his book I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap (2013), Shyamalan looked at what works and what doesn’t work in education. How did he decide? Data. He had his team look at all the research to see what educational reforms proved to be statistically significant.

As you might guess, their findings challenge popular assumptions. For example, there is no statistical proof that smaller class sizes improve student achievement. Do you want to know what else doesn’t work? Increased school funding, school choice, integration, degrees and salary as well as general accountability. That is what his team of researchers found when they did a five-year deep dive into any and all research done in the field of educational reform.

Instead, the research identified five mandatory tenets for success: robust teacher evaluations, strong instructional leadership, frequent feedback, smaller school communities (capped at 600 students), and extended school hours and the number of school days. Crucially, Shyamalan emphasizes that these variables cannot be implemented in isolation.

Much like public health, the benefits are cumulative. Let me explain further. Maintaining optimal physical health requires a combination of adequate sleep, a balanced diet, regular exercise, stress management, and tobacco avoidance; neglecting any single factor compromises the overall outcome. The same principle applies to education: true systemic improvement requires the simultaneous execution of all five tenets. I love this comparison. There isn’t one singular answer. Educational reform is a complex problem that needs a creative and complex solution.

While Shyamala’s book faced criticism and is now over a decade old, his central ideas still merit serious consideration. I would like to suggest that his ideas about your health are even more important for you as you read this. Are you sleeping and eating well? Do you exercise and not smoke? I hope so. Do you have good stress management? This may be the hard one. Let me suggest that as you think about how we can improve education and better serve your kids, you also keep focusing on improving and maintaining your health. Thanks for reading! kim