The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform


Michael Hobbes details the rise and fall of small learning communities in the early 2000s to tell the story of a larger trend in American education reform. "The decisive factor isn't the Big Idea itself--splitting up dropout factories floor by floor--but the millions of little ideas that hold it together," Hobbes notes. He uses this one trend to discuss common denominators for student success and why schools have repeatedly failed to effectively scale promising solutions: "Every successive Big Idea in education reform has ended up in the same place. It works for one school and doesn't for another."

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