What-Works

You are completely replaceable, a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall. There is nothing that meaningfully differentiates you from anyone else. Functionally, you are hot-swappable for any other person. All “individual differences” are meaningless. There is nothing special or unique about you. You are a clone. This is the message of “what works” style educational research. It tells us that, if you are a middle school student learning math, you are just like every other middle school student learning math. If you are a 2nd grader learning to read English, you are just like every other 2nd grader learning to read English as far as educational research knows or cares. Because well-designed and well-implemented randomized controlled trials discover methods that “work.” For everyone. Period. That’s the entire point of having a “trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education” - if we didn’t have methods that work universally, we wouldn’t be real scientists. Each individual student is just another tiny, indistinguishable, interchangeable part of the universe over which proven methods “work.” Personal relationships with students are oxymoronic because all students are the same, and besides, personal relationships don’t scale and are superficial to learning. If this is really the way we’re encouraging educators to think about students, is it really a wonder that they hate school and apparently aren’t learning as much as their peers around the world?