Discord in the USA's schools is caused by warring factions of profiteers whose sole innovation is ever more clever means of fleecing tax payers. The dashed hopes, dreams, and prospects of students, parents, teachers are just collateral damage in the pursuit of more pork.
Whenever someone gins up a controversy, or pimps yet another new education meme, first ask who is getting paid, second how much.
I suspect that the same root causes of our political discord, are also the root causes of our lack of educational consensus.
For example, on the other side, if one wanted to show evidence that schooling effects are just signalling anyway, one might start here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/04/links-1016-new-urleans/
Your turn.
Is that your site? I approve of lesswrong, Brookings Institute, the Atlantic... And reviewing your comment history, I'm going to gamble on the hope that you're persuadable. You kinda "sound" like a libertarian, so you might enjoy this publication from criticalthinking.org:
http://atom.curtin.edu.au/SAM_Ed%20Fadsopt.pdf
First hit when I google "fads in education". Result! The intro is better than I could have said it:
"The history of education is also the history of educational panaceas, the comings and goings of quick fixes for deep-seated educational problems. This old problem is dramatically on the increase. The result is intensifying fragmentation of energy and effort in the schools, together with a significant waste of time and money. Many teachers become increasingly cynical and jaded.
It is time to recognize that education will never be improved by educational fads, and that the manner in which educational trends are marketed guarantees that they will be transformed into fads. Fads by their nature are fated to self-destruction. Parents, educators, and citizen activists need to understand the problem of educational fads so that they can effectively distinguish substantive efforts at educational reform from superficial ones. Hence the motivation for this guide."
It includes many fads I hadn't heard of. Its also about 10 years old, and it focuses on the classroom, so it doesn't include more recent nonsense like Common Core, Race to the Top, charter schools, most recent attempts of educational software, computers in the classroom, standardized testing, ranking teachers... Need I go on?
---
What this paper, and many others, leave out is the role of procurement as the engine behind the fads. A lot of money is in play. The best public example I can think of is Dr Richard Feymann's anecdote about buying school books. I'm sure there's similar accounts for every failed fad, if I bothered to look. Especially all this standardized testing, which is the most efficient money extraction scheme cooked up to date.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-the-...
This is surprisingly well sourced:
Standardized Testing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k
---
Any way. I'm glad I did this. A trip down memory lane. My boss's boss was Dr John Goodlad. Here's his obit:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/...
Dr Goodlad was a great guy, he did great works. Practical, pragmatic, diplomatic, wicked smart, no bullshit. But education reform is like fighting a mob. Everyone's an expert; calm, rational people get shouted down or mowed over.
Oh well. I have many friends who still work in education and reform. The fight goes on.
Large populations of people believe all kinds of crazy stuff that most of us prefer not to help propagate with our tax dollars.
I grew up in a town where the entire population, at the last census, was a bit over 11,000 people. It would've taken probably two hours or more each way to provide bus service to the local "big city" (a whopping 50,000 people!).
How would you support multiple schools offering real choice in approach in a community that size and that spread out? And then how would you scale it to work in all the other places in the US which are like this?
Just... Build schools.
Of course, all of this requires some investment and planning. The political fix would be to buss the students to far-flung schools.
In the U.S., there's a decades-long consensus that schools should be better, along with heated, unresolved debates about all the details: discipline (including physical discipline), religious instruction and history, evolution, violence and bullying, homework, sex ed, sports, civil rights history, vocational training, school district borders and school assignment, arts and music, financial literacy, dress codes, cafeteria menus, disabilities and mental health issues, handwriting, testing, student transportation, animal dissection... The list goes on and on, and the battle lines are more complex than red versus blue.
Since there's no agreement, but everyone thinks they know part of the solution, politicians (and voters) at every level of government attempt to impose their will on the schools, meaning more and more regulations for educators and students.