Education Reform
Swear Fidelity to the Child, Not the Curriculum
Every generation, we reach for a new silver bullet — a new method, a new brand, a new program. But the children are still waiting. They were always the answer.
Walk into any teachers' lounge, sit through any district professional development day, and you will hear the same liturgy recited with devout conviction: We are a AVID school. We use SFA, Wilson, and Orton-Gillingham. We follow the PBIS Model, Reggio Emilia approach. These words are spoken like prayers — and that is precisely the problem. They are prayers. They are faith, not practice. And the children, meanwhile, are still waiting to be seen.
I know what it is to be that child. I grew up with dyslexia in a system that had no real answer for me — only half-measures, untested interventions, and the unspoken assumption that if I couldn't fit the method, perhaps I just wasn't trying hard enough. No one asked what I desperately wanted to read. No one noticed it was Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks — dense, complex, rich with imagination — that made me burn to decode the page. The curriculum came first. I came somewhere after.
We have spent decades perfecting our methods and forgetting our students. The restoration of education begins the moment we reverse that order.
The Brand Is Not the Answer
There is nothing wrong with Montessori. There is nothing wrong with structured literacy, or with the science of reading, or with any of the dozens of frameworks educators have developed over the past century. The research behind many of these approaches is real, the intentions behind them noble. The problem is not the methods themselves — it is the slavish devotion to any single method as though it were a universal key that will unlock every child.
The two-sigma problem — Benjamin Bloom's landmark 1984 finding that one-on-one tutoring produces learning outcomes two standard deviations above traditional classroom instruction — has never been seriously reckoned with. We know what works: setting clear goals for mastery, using every available modality, and moving forward only when understanding is genuine. Montessori understood this. The rule is elegantly simple: master it, then move on. And yet we have built systems that do the opposite — systems that move everyone forward on the calendar's schedule, regardless of what any individual child has actually learned.
Every Class Is a Different Classroom
In twenty-six years of teaching, I have never had the same class twice. Not once. Every room full of children is a new ecosystem — different needs, different struggles, different moments of sudden, startling brilliance. Some children will learn to read through song. Some through theater. Some through building, drawing, coding, or yes, through the particular magic of rolling dice and inhabiting a character in a story world. Some will learn today. Some will learn next spring. But they will learn, if we trust them, and if we trust ourselves enough to adapt.
That trust is what we keep refusing to extend. Instead, we reach outward — to the next curriculum adoption, the next edtech platform, the next research-validated program with its glossy sales deck and its promises. We map the spiral curriculum onto the wall. We write the standard on the board. We document fidelity to the program and call it accountability. But fidelity to a program is not the same as fidelity to a child, and we have confused them for far too long.
Curiosity Is the Curriculum
What would it mean to build from curiosity instead? Not to abandon structure — structure matters, especially for children who struggle, who need explicit instruction, who need to know that a caring adult has a clear plan for them. But structure in service of the child, not in service of the brand. It means a teacher who knows Orton-Gillingham and Montessori and Reggio Emilia and structured literacy — who holds all of these as tools, not identities — and who reaches into that toolkit based on what this child, today, in this moment, actually needs.
It means asking: What does this child find joyful? What makes them lean forward? What question do they keep returning to, even when we haven't assigned it? And then — this is the harder part — it means trusting that the answer to that question is a doorway, not a distraction. The child obsessed with insects is not avoiding literacy; she is telling you exactly how to teach her to read. The boy who will only talk about basketball statistics is not resisting mathematics; he is showing you where his mathematics lives.
The Teacher Must Be Trusted, Too
None of this works without trusting teachers. That is perhaps the most radical thing I can say in an era defined by teacher-proofed curricula, scripted lesson plans, and compliance checklists. We have systematically stripped educators of the professional judgment that good teaching requires and then expressed bewilderment when the results are mediocre.
Genuine teacher development does not mean training everyone to deliver one approved program with fidelity. It means building educators who are genuinely fluent in multiple approaches — who understand the cognitive science of reading, the developmental logic of Montessori, the relational depth of Reggio Emilia, the neurological reality of dyslexia — and who can bring all of it to bear on the particular child sitting in front of them. It means school cultures where teachers are given time, autonomy, and collegial support to figure out what is actually working, rather than simply documenting that they followed the script.
The child who can't be reached by your method is not a failure of the child. They are an invitation to grow as a teacher.
What Restoration Actually Looks Like
Restoring education does not require a revolution in funding, though more resources always help. It does not require a new federal initiative or a new state framework or a new branded program, though thoughtful policy has its place. It requires something simultaneously simpler and harder: a genuine reorientation of who we believe we are accountable to.
When a teacher asks Am I serving this child? instead of Am I following this program? — that is restoration. When a school celebrates a teacher who threw out the lesson plan because a child's question led somewhere extraordinary — that is restoration. When a parent is treated as a genuine partner in understanding their child rather than a recipient of reports — that is restoration. When a child with dyslexia is handed the book she desperately wants to read, and the teacher builds the lesson around it instead of around the scope and sequence — that is restoration.
None of these things require a new brand. They require the oldest commitment in education: the child comes first.
- Start with the child's curiosity, not the curriculum calendar
- Hold multiple methods as tools — Montessori, structured literacy, Reggio Emilia — not identities
- Define success as mastery, not completion; move forward when the child is ready
- Treat parents as co-investigators, not recipients of assessments
- Give teachers autonomy and time to observe, adapt, and reflect
- Ask "what does this child find joyful?" before "what does the standard require?"
- Measure whether children are learning — not whether programs are being followed
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