When AI Aces the Test: Why Schools Need More Odyssey of the Mind

 Building a Better Mousetrap: Why Odyssey of the Mind Is the Antidote or Bulwark to AI-Era Education 

Dedicated to Lexi 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: 

"Odyssey of the Mind offers the blueprint for AI-era education. Learn how collaborative problem-solving competitions develop skills AI can't replicate."

"When ChatGPT can ace homework, we need new teaching models. Discover how Odyssey of the Mind develops collaboration skills AI cannot replace."

"AI can do homework. But it can't collaborate. See why this 45-year-old competition is the future of education in an age of artificial intelligence."

How a 45-year-old creative problem-solving competition offers the blueprint for teaching in an age when ChatGPT can ace your homework

The Paradox of Progress

We stand at an peculiar crossroads in education. Artificial intelligence can now write essays, solve calculus problems, generate computer code, and even create art with a few keystrokes. Students can outsource their individual homework to algorithms that perform these tasks faster and often better than they can. Meanwhile, employers consistently report that what they desperately need are workers who can collaborate, think critically, communicate effectively, and persist through complex problems—precisely the skills that AI cannot replicate and standardized testing rarely measures.

Enter Odyssey of the Mind (OM), a program that has been quietly solving this puzzle since 1978, long before anyone worried about ChatGPT doing their homework.

What Exactly Is Odyssey of the Mind?

Odyssey of the Mind is a international creative problem-solving competition that places teams of up to seven students in front of long-term problems that would make most adults wince. These aren't your typical "build a bridge out of popsicle sticks" challenges. OM problems are deliberately complex, open-ended, and demand months of collaborative work.

Consider a typical structural problem: teams must design and build a lightweight balsa wood structure (often weighing mere ounces) that can support hundreds or even thousands of pounds. But here's the catch—the structure must also be integrated into an original theatrical performance with costumes, sets, and a storyline. Oh, and everything must fit within strict cost limits, usually around $145 for the entire solution.

The problems change annually across five categories: technical, structural, classics, performance, and vehicle. One year might require a device that launches tennis balls while performing Shakespeare. Another might demand a vehicle powered by nothing but mousetraps that must navigate an obstacle course while the team acts out a murder mystery.

The rules are Byzantine in their specificity, yet liberating in their openness. Teams must solve everything themselves—this is the sacred covenant of OM. Coaches, parents, and teachers can provide materials, transportation, and moral support, but they cannot offer solutions, suggestions, or even encouraging nods that might influence the team's direction. The penalty for adult interference? Potential disqualification.

The Spontaneous Problem: Thinking Under Pressure

If the long-term problem is a marathon, the spontaneous problem is a sprint on fire.

At competition day, teams face an additional challenge they've never seen before: the spontaneous problem. They're ushered into a room with judges, given 15 minutes (sometimes less), and must immediately begin solving a hands-on or verbal challenge with zero preparation.

A hands-on spontaneous might provide teams with random materials—rubber bands, straws, paper clips, tape—and ask them to build the tallest possible structure in eight minutes, with the remaining time for testing. A verbal spontaneous might pose a rapid-fire question sequence: "Name things that are red but shouldn't be. You have two minutes. Go."

Judges score not just the solution quality, but the collaborative process. Are all team members participating? Are they building on each other's ideas? Can they disagree productively? Do they manage time effectively? Can they pivot when the first approach fails?

This is where the dialectic becomes visible. Observers watch students negotiate, debate, synthesize opposing viewpoints, and forge consensus under pressure. There are no individual scores—the team succeeds or fails together.

The Finnish Connection: Craftsmanship as Character Development

The philosophy underlying Odyssey of the Mind finds an interesting parallel in Nordic education, particularly Finland's sloyd tradition (käsityö in Finnish). Finnish schools maintain robust handicraft programs where students spend years learning woodworking, metalwork, textiles, and other practical skills—not to produce craftspeople, but to develop what Finns call sisu: perseverance, determination, and resilience.

When a Finnish eighth-grader spends weeks designing and constructing a wooden jewelry box, they're not just learning carpentry. They're learning to plan long-term projects, maintain high personal standards, recover from mistakes, manage frustration, and experience the satisfaction of completing something genuinely difficult.

This is precisely what happens in Odyssey of the Mind. When a team's meticulously constructed balsa wood structure collapses during testing two weeks before competition, they don't get to restart the assignment or take a different test. They must problem-solve their way forward: Was it a design flaw? A construction error? A material failure? The team must diagnose, debate, and rebuild—often multiple times.

The structure problem becomes a crucible that reveals and refines character. Which students can push through repeated failure? Who maintains standards when exhausted? Who can receive criticism constructively? These aren't soft skills—they're the fundamental competencies that determine success in virtually every adult endeavor.

The Mixed Team Magic

One of the most interesting aspects of successful OM teams is their heterogeneity. The most effective teams aren't composed of seven valedictorians or seven engineering prodigies—they're mixed teams that leverage diverse strengths.

A typical championship team might include:

• The visionary who generates wild ideas that initially seem impossible
• The engineer who figures out if those ideas can actually work
• The artist who makes everything look spectacular
• The actor who can sell the performance
• The organizer who keeps everyone on schedule
• The diplomat who mediates conflicts and ensures everyone's voice is heard
• The wild card who brings unexpected perspectives

Importantly, successful OM teams often include students who struggle in traditional classroom settings. The "rascal" who can't sit still during math lectures might be the kinesthetic problem-solver who intuitively understands structural forces. The special education student who struggles with reading might have extraordinary spatial reasoning. The quiet student overlooked in class discussions might blossom when given thinking time and a team that values their contributions.

This diversity isn't just inclusive—it's strategically essential. Complex problems require multiple cognitive approaches. A team of seven identical thinkers will produce narrow solutions. A team that must negotiate between different thinking styles will generate more creative and robust solutions.

Why AI Makes This More Important, Not Less

Here's the uncomfortable truth: for many traditional academic tasks, AI has surpassed human performance. ChatGPT can write a more grammatically perfect five-paragraph essay than most high school students. Wolfram Alpha can solve differential equations instantaneously. DALL-E can generate illustrations faster than any human artist.

But AI cannot collaborate. It cannot negotiate conflicting viewpoints with emotional intelligence. It cannot persist through months of frustrating setbacks with teammates. It cannot learn to value perspectives radically different from its own algorithmic logic.

When a student asks ChatGPT to write their essay, they're outsourcing individual work that AI can do competently. When seven students huddle around a failing balsa wood structure at 9 PM in someone's garage, debating whether to restart completely or try to reinforce the design, they're developing capacities that no algorithm can replicate or replace.

This is the profound insight that Odyssey of the Mind has embodied for decades: the future doesn't belong to people who can perform tasks that machines can do better. It belongs to people who can work in teams to solve problems that no one has solved before.

The Coach's Dilemma: The Discipline of Non-Intervention

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Odyssey of the Mind is the coach's role—or rather, the deliberately limited nature of that role. Coaches can:

• Provide materials and workspace
• Arrange transportation to competitions
• Manage schedules and deadlines
• Offer general encouragement
• Ask open-ended clarifying questions (sparingly)

Coaches cannot:

• Suggest solutions or approaches
• Demonstrate techniques or methods
• Build, paint, sew, or construct anything for the team
• Make decisions about the team's solution
• Offer opinions that might influence the team's direction

This is excruciating for educators accustomed to teaching. Watching students pursue an approach you know will fail requires almost superhuman restraint. Seeing them make obvious mistakes that you could correct in seconds feels like educational malpractice.

But this restraint is precisely the point.

When teachers swoop in to prevent failure, they rob students of the most valuable learning experience: recovering from failure. When adults provide solutions, they deny students the struggle that builds problem-solving capacity. The coach's discipline of non-intervention creates the space where genuine learning occurs.

One experienced OM coach described it this way: "My job isn't to help them succeed at this competition. My job is to create conditions where they learn to solve problems they've never seen before—because that's what their entire adult life will be."

Metacognition in Action

Odyssey of the Mind is fundamentally an exercise in metacognition—thinking about thinking. Teams must constantly reflect on their process:

• Why did this approach fail?
• What assumptions are we making?
• Are we stuck in a mental rut?
• Who hasn't spoken in a while?
• Are we listening to each other or just waiting to talk?
• How do we make decisions as a team?
• What happens when we disagree?

This metacognitive awareness doesn't emerge naturally—it develops through practice and sometimes through painful failure. A team that loses a competition because two members dominated decision-making while others disengaged must confront that dynamic. A team that produces a brilliant solution but fails spontaneous because they couldn't think collaboratively under pressure learns the limits of individual preparation.

The competition structure provides immediate feedback on both the solution and the collaborative process. Teams can't hide from their dysfunction—the results expose it clearly.

The Classroom Revolution: Structuring School Like OM

So how do we take these principles and transform everyday education? What would school look like if we structured learning environments around Odyssey of the Mind principles?

1. Replace Some Individual Assessments with Team Challenges

Not every assessment needs to be individual. Complex problems could be assigned to small teams (4-6 students) who must collaborate over several weeks to produce solutions. Teachers assess both the final product and the collaborative process through observation, peer evaluation, and reflection journals.

2. Embrace Productive Failure

Create assignments where initial failure is expected and built into the process. A science class might challenge teams to design water filtration systems, expecting that first prototypes will fail. The grade depends not on immediate success, but on the team's ability to diagnose problems, iterate, and improve.

3. Build Heterogeneous Teams Intentionally

Stop grouping students by ability level for complex projects. Deliberately create diverse teams that mix academic profiles, learning styles, and strengths. Teach students to leverage diversity rather than work around it.

4. Develop "Spontaneous" Practice Sessions

Regularly give students short, novel problems they must solve collaboratively in real-time. Make the collaborative process visible by having teams reflect immediately afterward: What worked? What didn't? Who participated fully? Who dominated?

5. Teach the Teacher Restraint

Professional development should include training teachers in when to intervene and when to step back. Create a culture where teachers asking "What have you tried so far?" is valued more than teachers providing answers.

6. Make Process Visible

Use video recording, reflection journals, and peer observation to make collaborative processes visible to students. Help them see patterns in their own teamwork that they can't perceive in the moment.

7. Establish Real Constraints

Give teams actual limitations: budget constraints for materials, time limits, size restrictions, weight requirements. Real constraints force creative problem-solving in ways that open-ended assignments often don't.

8. Celebrate Sophisticated Failure

Change the culture around failure. Recognize and celebrate teams who fail spectacularly while demonstrating excellent collaboration, creative thinking, and resilience. Make "productive failure" a badge of honor rather than a source of shame.

The Counterargument: What About Individual Accountability?

Critics reasonably ask: In an age where AI can do individual work, shouldn't we focus even more intensely on individual assessment to ensure students aren't outsourcing their learning to algorithms?

This instinct is understandable but ultimately self-defeating. It's an arms race we cannot win. Assessment security measures—lockdown browsers, plagiarism detectors, AI-detection tools—are perpetually one step behind. Students will always find workarounds.

More fundamentally, doubling down on individual assessment optimizes for a world that no longer exists. We're preparing students for a future where they'll work in teams on problems that no individual can solve alone, yet we assess them primarily on individual performance on problems that individuals could solve (or that AI can solve for them).

The Odyssey of the Mind approach offers an alternative: make collaboration itself the competency we're developing and assessing. Make the work so inherently collaborative that outsourcing to AI becomes impossible or irrelevant.

Can AI help an OM team? Potentially—teams might use AI to generate initial design ideas or research historical context for a performance. But AI cannot negotiate between seven different design preferences. It cannot practice a theatrical performance until timing is perfect. It cannot rebuild a structure at 11 PM when everything has gone wrong. It cannot develop the relational trust that allows teams to disagree productively.

The solution to AI isn't more policing of individual work—it's designing learning experiences where collaboration is essential.

The Long Game: What These Students Become

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the OM approach comes from longitudinal outcomes. While rigorous research is limited, anecdotal evidence from coaches, parents, and former participants suggests that OM alumni develop distinctive capabilities.

They become the adults who can:

• Walk into a room of strangers and quickly form functional working relationships
• Persist through extended setbacks without becoming demoralized
• Disagree with colleagues productively without damaging relationships
• Recognize when a problem requires diverse expertise and assemble appropriate teams
• Accept criticism of their ideas without taking it personally
• Generate creative solutions under severe constraints
• Manage complex projects with multiple interdependent components

These aren't academic skills in the traditional sense—they're life skills that determine career trajectories, relationship quality, and life satisfaction.

One former OM participant, now an engineering director at a major tech company, reflected: "I use almost nothing from high school chemistry. But I use what I learned in Odyssey of the Mind every single day—how to work with difficult teammates, how to recover when everything breaks, how to be creative within constraints, how to stay focused on a goal across months of work."

The Implementation Challenge: Starting Small

Transforming entire educational systems overnight is impossible, but individual teachers can begin implementing OM principles immediately:

For elementary teachers: Create monthly "team challenges" where students work in small groups on open-ended problems. A third-grade class might challenge teams to build the longest possible paper chain with limited materials, or create a play about the water cycle using only items found on the playground.

For middle school teachers: Dedicate one day per week to team-based project work. A math class might have teams design amusement park rides that meet specific mathematical constraints. An English class might have teams adapt short stories into podcast dramas.

For high school teachers: Replace some traditional unit exams with team projects that require applying concepts to novel situations. A biology class might challenge teams to design ecosystems for Mars colonies. A history class might have teams role-play historical negotiations, with each team member representing a different stakeholder.

For administrators: Support teachers who take risks with collaborative assessment. Create professional development opportunities for teachers to observe OM competitions or talk with experienced coaches. Consider piloting OM as an after-school program or elective course.

The Deeper Truth: Preparing for Unknown Futures

Here's what keeps thoughtful educators awake at night: we're preparing students for careers that don't yet exist, to solve problems we can't yet imagine, using technologies that haven't been invented.

The traditional response has been to teach "foundational skills" and hope they remain relevant. But what if the foundations are shifting? What if the most foundational skill is the ability to collaborate with others to figure out what to do when you don't know what to do?

Odyssey of the Mind has always operated from this premise. The specific challenge—whether building a structure or creating a performance—is ultimately arbitrary. The real objective is developing the collaborative problem-solving capacity that allows teams to tackle whatever challenge emerges.

This is why OM remains remarkably relevant 45 years after its founding, and why it's more essential now than ever. The specific technologies change—teams now use laser cutters and 3D printers alongside traditional tools—but the core challenge remains constant: can you work with others to solve a problem that's genuinely difficult?

Building the Better Mousetrap

So what would education look like if we truly took Odyssey of the Mind as our design principle?

Classrooms would be noisy with productive struggle. Failure would be frequent, expected, and analyzed rather than stigmatized. Teachers would spend more time designing complex challenges and less time delivering lectures. Assessment would focus on process as much as product, on collaboration as much as individual mastery.

Students would regularly experience the full arc of extended projects: initial excitement and overconfidence, the middle slog where nothing works and teams fracture, the desperate late-night push toward deadline, the performance or competition moment where preparation meets reality, and the reflection afterward on what was learned.

Some students would thrive who currently struggle. Others who excel at individual academic work might face uncomfortable challenges working with peers. Every student would develop capacities that standardized testing cannot measure but that adult life constantly demands.

Is this the complete solution to education's challenges? Of course not. Students still need to learn content, develop individual skills, and master foundational knowledge. Not everything can or should be collaborative.

But in an age when AI can ace your homework, when individual academic performance is increasingly easy to outsource to algorithms, when the real challenges of the 21st century are all fundamentally collaborative—climate change, public health, technological disruption, social fragmentation—maybe we need to think seriously about programs like Odyssey of the Mind not as extracurricular enrichment, but as models for the core educational experience.

The better mousetrap isn't more sophisticated AI detection or more secure testing environments. The better mousetrap is designing learning experiences that develop the uniquely human capacities that no algorithm can replicate: the ability to work with other imperfect humans to solve problems that actually matter.

That's what Odyssey of the Mind has been building for 45 years. Perhaps it's time the rest of education caught up.

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About the Competition: Odyssey of the Mind competitions occur locally, regionally, and internationally, with World Finals typically hosting over 800 teams from across the globe. Teams qualify through performance at local and state/regional competitions. For more information about participating or coaching, visit odysseyofthemind.com.

Ethiopia Transformed Deserts by Trusting Farmers. Why Won't We Trust Teachers?

 From Desert to Classroom:

What Ethiopia's Land Restoration Miracle Teaches Us About Educational Reform

Why Teacher-Led Solutions Must Replace Top-Down Mandates

Introduction: Two Systems in Crisis

Over the past two decades, Ethiopia has achieved what many deemed impossible: transforming over one million hectares of degraded, desertified land into productive green landscapes through community-led restoration projects. Meanwhile, in the United States, decades of expensive, externally imposed education reforms have consistently failed to produce meaningful, sustainable improvements in student outcomes. These parallel stories reveal a profound truth about systemic change—real transformation cannot come from outside experts imposing solutions; it must come from those who know the ground, understand the context, and will remain committed long after the consultants leave.

This article explores the remarkable parallels between Ethiopia's land restoration success and the urgent need for educational restoration in America. Both systems faced decades of degradation. Both experienced the failure of expensive, large-scale interventions designed by distant experts. And both discovered that the only path to genuine, lasting restoration runs through those closest to the problem: in Ethiopia's case, the farmers and local communities; in education's case, the teachers.

Part I: The Ethiopian Miracle—When Communities Lead, Systems Heal

The Crisis: Desertification and Degradation

Ethiopia, once known as the 'Garden of Eden' with 66% forest cover, had seen its forested land plummet to just 3.1% by 1982. The devastating famines of 1982-1985, which filled Western television screens with images of starvation, were not merely natural disasters—they were the predictable consequences of severe land degradation, soil erosion, and deforestation. Over 90% of rural households depended on agriculture, yet more than three-quarters of Ethiopia's land had become degraded, reducing crop productivity and trapping communities in cycles of poverty and food insecurity.

The water crisis was particularly acute. Springs dried up as deforestation progressed. Annual floods that once nourished floodplain agriculture ceased. Communities that had developed intricate agricultural systems over millennia found their survival strategies collapsing under environmental destruction accelerated by unsustainable practices, population growth, and climate variability.

The Failed Solutions: Top-Down Interventions

The international development community responded with characteristic enthusiasm and resources. Large-scale infrastructure projects, primarily massive dam constructions, were proposed as technical solutions to Ethiopia's water and energy needs. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), begun in 2011, became emblematic of this approach—a colossal engineering project that would transform the nation through centralized infrastructure.

However, these mega-projects consistently encountered serious problems. Research documented how political imperatives for rapid development bypassed technical expertise in state agencies, leading to inefficient design, cost overruns, massive debt burdens, and lengthy delays. The Gilgel Gibe III dam devastated indigenous communities in the Lower Omo Valley, ending millennia of annual floods that supported diverse livelihoods. The Ethiopian Sugar Corporation seized tens of thousands of hectares for sugarcane plantations. As one indigenous leader stated simply, 'After the dam, nothing is good.' These large-scale projects were also plagued by corruption, with centralized decision-making concentrating power without adequate stakeholder input, particularly from affected local communities.

The critical flaw in these interventions was their fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Degradation wasn't a technical challenge requiring engineering solutions imposed from above. It was a local, context-specific crisis that required intimate knowledge of terrain, watersheds, soil conditions, and community needs. National governments couldn't dictate solutions for each plot of land; every hectare had unique characteristics requiring locally adapted approaches.

The Restoration: Community Knowledge, Local Action

The breakthrough came when Ethiopia shifted to community-led approaches. Beginning in the Tigray region during the 1980s, communities mobilized to restore degraded lands through practical, locally-adapted techniques: terracing steep hillsides to prevent erosion, creating water harvesting structures to capture rainfall, establishing area closures (exclosures) that excluded human and animal interference to allow natural regeneration, and planting drought-resistant native tree species.

The results were transformative. Communities moved an estimated 90 million tons of soil and rock to restore about one million hectares. The Tigray region became known globally as the 'gold standard for landscape restoration.' The Humbo Mountain Afforestation Project demonstrated the power of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR)—a remarkably simple approach of identifying living stumps, selecting shoots to regrow, and protecting them. This community-managed forest generated $84,000 in carbon credits that cooperatives invested in grain mills, storage infrastructure, and market transportation.

By 2023, Ethiopia had planted over 32 billion seedlings, increased forest cover from 15.5% to 23.6%, and become a net food exporter—a stunning reversal from famine victim to agricultural producer. Communities gave restoration programs meaningful names: in Oromia, they called it 'fayyissa' (healer); in Amhara, 'yemeret abbat' (father of the land). As one farmer eloquently explained: 'SLMP is more than a father. A father cannot feed his children when there is no food. Our community now considers SLMP as the savior of our land; it conserves soil as the flesh, trees as the bones, and water as the blood.'

The Key Lessons: Why Community-Led Restoration Succeeded

Several critical factors explain the success of Ethiopia's community-led restoration:

Local Knowledge and Context-Specific Solutions: Farmers understood their land intimately—which slopes needed terracing, where water naturally flowed, which native species thrived in specific microclimates. No external expert could possess this granular knowledge accumulated over generations.

Ownership and Long-Term Commitment: When communities designed and implemented restoration, they had direct stakes in success. This wasn't a temporary project with external funding timelines; it was their land, their water, their future. Studies showed locally-led restoration projects were 6-20 times more likely to achieve long-term success than externally imposed programs.

Adaptive, Iterative Approaches: Community-led projects could adjust quickly when techniques didn't work. Rather than rigid implementation of predetermined plans, farmers experimented, observed results, and modified approaches based on actual outcomes.

Integration of Traditional and Scientific Knowledge: The most successful programs combined farmers' indigenous knowledge with research insights, creating hybrid approaches more powerful than either alone. University researchers worked alongside community members, learning as much as they taught.

Social Capital and Collective Action: Restoration required coordinated community effort. Farmers formed cooperatives, established bylaws for forest management, organized fire prevention, and created systems for granting forest access. This social infrastructure proved as important as the physical restoration work.

Part II: The American Education Crisis—Decades of Failed Reform

The Degradation: How We Lost Our Way

American education, like Ethiopian land, has undergone decades of degradation—not physical erosion, but systemic deterioration of learning environments, teacher morale, and educational outcomes. While the 'Nation at Risk' report of 1983 sounded alarms about educational mediocrity, the subsequent forty years of reform have often worsened rather than improved conditions.

Teachers report the teaching profession is 'at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.' Uncertified, undercertified, and emergency-licensed teachers increasingly staff classrooms, particularly in schools serving low-income communities. Teacher education enrollment has declined sharply. Meanwhile, standardized testing has metastasized, consuming resources and instructional time while providing limited useful information for improving teaching and learning.

The degradation manifests in teacher burnout, student disengagement, narrowed curriculum focused on test preparation, and widening achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Like Ethiopian land where natural processes were disrupted until ecosystems collapsed, American education has seen its organic processes—teacher professional judgment, student curiosity, learning for understanding—systematically displaced by mechanical compliance with external mandates.

The Failed Reforms: Top-Down Mandates and Market Solutions

The response to educational crisis has paralleled Ethiopia's failed mega-projects: expensive, ambitious, externally designed interventions imposed from above without meaningful teacher input or trust in professional educators' knowledge and judgment.

No Child Left Behind (2001) promised transformation through annual testing, rewards for rising scores, and punishment for low performance. It was based on claims of a 'Texas miracle' that subsequent research revealed was illusory. Nevertheless, every public school became subject to expensive testing regimes not found in high-performing nations. As education historian Diane Ravitch observed, the strategy of 'testing, competition, and punishment' proved 'ineffective and harmful.'

Race to the Top (2009) doubled down on this approach, offering states financial incentives to adopt quantitative teacher evaluation systems linking teacher performance to student test scores. The result was predictable: teachers began focusing on test preparation over genuine learning, and talented educators fled schools serving struggling students where even extraordinary teaching gains wouldn't produce proficient test scores.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's billion-dollar Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Initiative exemplified well-funded failure. After seven years, the RAND Corporation's 500-page evaluation found the initiative failed to improve student achievement, teacher effectiveness, or dropout rates. Similar patterns emerged with charter schools and voucher programs, which frequently underperformed public schools despite claims they would revolutionize education.

These reforms shared fatal flaws: they were designed by economists, policy analysts, and philanthropists rather than experienced educators; they assumed teachers were the problem rather than the solution; they treated education as a closed system amenable to business management techniques rather than an open system responsive to countless environmental variables; and they systematically excluded teacher voice from design and implementation.

As Merrill Vargo, former CEO of Pivot Learning Partners, observed: organizations champion top-down reform because that's what works in the closed system of business environments. But public education is an open system where variables shift constantly through environmental interactions. The problem is that reformers pushing these initiatives aren't learning appropriate lessons from their failures—a disheartening irony given the subject at hand.

The Missing Element: Design Thinking and Empathy

Stanford's design thinking process offers a powerful framework for understanding why education reforms failed and what restoration requires. The methodology centers on five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. The critical first stage—empathy—means immersing yourself in users' experiences, observing their work, understanding their needs and pain points, and setting aside your own assumptions to gain genuine insight.

Education reform has systematically skipped this crucial step. Policymakers rarely spend significant time in classrooms observing teaching realities. They don't deeply investigate why specific practices persist or what constraints teachers navigate daily. Instead, they assume teachers are recalcitrant obstacles to improvement rather than professionals with valuable expertise about what works and what doesn't.

This absence of empathy leads to solutions addressing the wrong problems. A teacher evaluation system might be designed without understanding that teachers already know which colleagues are effective—the issue isn't identification but how to support struggling teachers' improvement. Standards might be created without recognizing that teachers already want students to learn challenging content—the question is how to help diverse learners reach high standards.

The design thinking framework emphasizes that empathy allows problem-solvers to understand the problem correctly before generating solutions. Ethiopian land restoration succeeded because farmers understood intimately what their land needed. Education restoration requires similar deep understanding of what teachers and students actually experience, need, and can realistically accomplish.

Part III: The Finnish Alternative—What Teacher Trust Produces

The Finnish Model: Building Teacher Expertise and Autonomy

Finland offers compelling evidence that teacher-centered approaches produce superior outcomes. Thirty years ago, Finland's education system resembled America's: top-down, heavily tracked, and dependent on test scores to measure effectiveness. Then Finland made a concentrated reform effort, and the results speak eloquently.

Today, Finland's education system is recognized globally as among the world's best, characterized by high student achievement, low achievement gaps, and—remarkably—high levels of student and teacher satisfaction. Finnish students spend less time in school and receive less homework than peers in other OECD countries, yet consistently perform at the top in international assessments.

The foundation of this success is teacher education and trust. In Finland, teaching is a prestigious, demanding profession reserved for the most talented and hard-working. Only one-fifth of applicants to primary teacher education programs are admitted—it's harder to become a teacher than a doctor or lawyer. In 2016, the University of Helsinki's teacher education program had a 6.8% acceptance rate, compared to 8.3% for law and 7.3% for medicine.

Research-Based Preparation: Teachers as Problem-Solvers

Finnish teacher education requires a master's degree—not just any master's degree, but a research-based degree including a thesis based on original research. This requirement fundamentally shapes how teachers approach their work. They're educated as teacher-researchers, trained to identify problems, analyze evidence, design interventions, and assess outcomes.

The curriculum integrates deep subject matter knowledge with pedagogy and educational science. Student teachers study for five to six years, completing year-long practica combining classroom teaching with university supervision. They work daily with mentor teachers in regular schools and university teacher educators, gaining extensive hands-on experience while developing theoretical understanding.

This research orientation creates teachers with 'profound knowledge'—understanding not just what strategies work but why they work, when to apply them, and how to adapt them for different learners. As one analysis noted: 'Because teachers in Finland hold master's degrees and are trained in educational research, they are well-prepared to reflect critically on their practice and apply new knowledge in practical ways. This creates a culture of continuous improvement, where professional growth is self-directed and meaningful.'

The Power of Professional Autonomy and Trust

Finland's education system is guided by a national core curriculum, but local municipalities, school administrators, and teachers have broad autonomy to adapt education to local needs. Teachers decide timetables, what tests to give, and how to evaluate students. There are no mandatory national standardized tests for pupils in basic education; teachers themselves assess their subjects.

This autonomy doesn't mean chaos or lowered standards—it means professional responsibility. Teachers are trusted as experts who understand their students' needs and can make sound pedagogical judgments. This trust is paired with accountability: teachers know the future of children lies in their hands, and society expects them to fulfill this responsibility.

The structure creates what researchers call 'autonomous and agentic teachers'—educators who make independent decisions about classroom, school, and professional matters, both individually and collectively. They feel empowered to innovate, experiment, and adapt practices based on student responses rather than external mandates.

Teachers report high job satisfaction and Finland has relatively low teacher burnout compared to other systems. When teachers feel valued and supported, they stay in the profession and bring energy and creativity to classrooms. The country's political consensus regarding education and societal trust in teachers reinforces this virtuous cycle.

Part IV: The Parallel Lessons—From Land Restoration to Educational Restoration

The Problem of Expertise: Who Really Knows?

Both Ethiopian land degradation and American educational decline resulted from systematically ignoring or devaluing the knowledge of those closest to the work. In Ethiopia, international development agencies and national governments assumed they knew better than farmers how to restore land. In America, policymakers, philanthropists, and management consultants assume they know better than teachers how to improve education.

This reflects what organizational theorist Russell Ackoff identified as a fundamental management error: leaders making decisions without understanding the systemic nature of their organizations or listening to workers who actually perform daily operations. As Ackoff warned: 'Until managers take into account the systemic nature of their organizations, most of their efforts to improve their performance are doomed to failure.' Dr. W. Edwards Deming similarly emphasized that leadership excluding worker input leads to poor decisions, inefficiencies, and poorer results.

The irony is that those imposing solutions often possess genuine expertise in their domains—engineering, economics, policy analysis—but lack expertise in the specific context where solutions must function. An engineer may understand dam construction but not how dams affect indigenous agricultural systems developed over centuries. An economist may understand incentive structures but not how teacher motivation actually operates in under-resourced schools.

Real expertise in complex human systems requires combining specialized knowledge with contextual understanding. Ethiopian restoration succeeded when researchers worked alongside farmers, blending scientific insights with indigenous knowledge. Educational restoration requires similarly combining educational research with teacher knowledge of how learning actually happens in specific classrooms with specific students.

The Question of Trust: Do We Believe in Capacity?

Simon Sinek's work on purpose and motivation illuminates another crucial parallel. Sinek's 'Start With Why' emphasizes that great leaders and organizations begin with purpose—their core belief about why they do what they do—rather than what they do or how they do it. This 'Golden Circle' model places 'Why' at the center, surrounded by 'How,' with 'What' on the outside.

Ethiopian restoration began with a clear 'Why': communities wanted to feed their families, secure water sources, and pass productive land to their children. This intrinsic motivation drove sustained effort through challenges. The restoration methods—the 'How'—emerged from this fundamental purpose.

Similarly, teachers enter education with powerful 'Why' motivations: helping children learn, nurturing intellectual growth, preparing the next generation for meaningful lives. Yet education reform typically operates at the 'What' level—imposing specific programs, curriculum packages, evaluation systems—without honoring teachers' fundamental purpose or trusting them to determine appropriate 'How' methods.

The question of trust is fundamental. Do we believe teachers, like Ethiopian farmers, possess the capacity to solve problems if given appropriate support, resources, and autonomy? Finland answers 'yes' by investing in rigorous teacher preparation and then trusting teachers as professionals. American reform answers 'no' by creating elaborate systems to monitor, control, and regiment teacher behavior.

This distrust becomes self-fulfilling. When teachers aren't trusted or prepared as reflective professionals, they don't develop those capacities. When they're treated as interchangeable workers following prescribed scripts, they can't demonstrate professional judgment. The system creates the incompetence it fears.

The Reality of Context: No Universal Solutions

Ethiopian restoration taught a crucial lesson: every hectare of land has unique characteristics requiring adapted approaches. What works on steep hillsides differs from flat valleys. Rocky soil needs different techniques than sandy soil. Rainfall patterns, local ecology, community social structures—all affect what restoration methods will succeed.

Education is equally context-dependent. What works in affluent suburbs differs from urban schools serving immigrant communities or rural districts with sparse populations. A literacy strategy effective with native English speakers may fail with multilingual learners. Classroom management approaches suitable for small classes break down with 35 students.

Yet education reform consistently seeks universal solutions: one evaluation rubric for all teachers, one set of standards for all students, one curriculum for all schools. This denies reality's complexity. As Ethiopian experience demonstrated, successful change requires locally adaptive approaches informed by intimate contextual knowledge.

This doesn't mean every teacher invents everything from scratch or that there's no role for external knowledge. Rather, it means teachers need the professional capacity to assess which research findings apply to their context, adapt proven strategies for their students, and judge when new approaches are needed.

Part V: The Path Forward—Principles for Educational Restoration

Principle 1: Start With Empathy—Understand Before Prescribing

Educational restoration must begin with genuine empathy for teachers' experiences, constraints, and knowledge. This means policymakers, administrators, and researchers spending significant time in classrooms, not as evaluators but as learners seeking to understand teaching realities.

Apply design thinking's empathy stage rigorously. What do teachers actually need? What obstacles prevent them from teaching effectively? What works in their context and what doesn't? What knowledge do they possess that isn't being utilized? What support would actually help rather than creating additional burdens?

This empathy work reveals that many assumed problems are misdiagnosed. Teachers don't need more evaluation systems; they need time to collaborate and improve practice. They don't need more prescribed curricula; they need resources and flexibility to meet diverse student needs. They don't lack motivation; they lack respect, support, and professional working conditions.

Principle 2: Invest in Teacher Capacity—Research-Based Preparation

Follow Finland's lead by requiring master's degrees for teachers, specifically research-based degrees developing educators as reflective practitioners and problem-solvers. This isn't credentialism—it's building the professional capacity necessary for teachers to analyze classroom challenges, design evidence-based interventions, and continuously improve practice.

Teacher preparation should integrate deep subject knowledge, pedagogical training, extensive supervised practice, and research methodology. Graduate teachers should understand learning theory, know how to assess student thinking, design effective instruction for diverse learners, and critically evaluate educational research to inform practice.

This preparation must be selective and rigorous, as in Finland where teaching is competitive and prestigious. When society's most capable people choose teaching and receive excellent preparation, the profession can bear the weight of significant autonomy and responsibility.

Principle 3: Trust Teachers as Professionals—Autonomy With Accountability

Replace surveillance and control with professional autonomy. Teachers should make key decisions about curriculum adaptation, instructional methods, assessment design, and student support based on their professional judgment and knowledge of student needs.

This doesn't eliminate accountability—it redefines it. Professional accountability means teachers are responsible for student learning and must justify their pedagogical choices based on evidence and student outcomes. It means peer review, collaborative examination of student work, and continuous improvement through professional learning communities.

Eliminate or drastically reduce standardized testing that consumes time and narrows curriculum without providing useful information for improving instruction. Teachers can assess student learning more validly through classroom-based assessments, portfolios, and authentic demonstrations of understanding.

Principle 4: Create Collaborative Structures—Collective Professional Growth

Ethiopian restoration succeeded through collective action—communities working together with shared purposes. Educational restoration requires similar collaborative structures where teachers work collectively on improvement.

Provide dedicated time during the school day for teachers to collaborate: examining student work together, observing each other's teaching, discussing instructional challenges, analyzing assessment data, and planning improvements. This collaborative time is professional work time, not an add-on to teaching responsibilities.

Foster professional learning communities focused on student learning rather than compliance with mandates. These communities should have autonomy to identify problems, design solutions, implement changes, and assess results—the complete improvement cycle.

Principle 5: Support Adaptive Innovation—Context-Specific Solutions

Recognize that educational improvement requires context-specific solutions developed and adapted by teachers for their particular students, schools, and communities. National standards and research findings provide important frameworks, but effective implementation always requires professional adaptation.

Create systems supporting innovation and experimentation. Teachers should be able to try new approaches, learn from failures, and refine practices based on student responses. This requires protection from punitive accountability that discourages risk-taking.

Share promising practices laterally among teachers rather than imposing top-down mandates. When teachers see colleagues succeeding with particular approaches, they're motivated to learn and adapt those methods. This organic diffusion respects professional judgment while facilitating improvement.

Principle 6: Provide Resources and Support—Conditions for Success

Ethiopian farmers couldn't restore land without tools, seedlings, and technical support. Teachers can't transform education without adequate resources: reasonable class sizes, current materials, technology, support staff, safe facilities, and time for planning and collaboration.

Invest in teacher salaries competitive with other professions requiring similar education, making teaching economically viable for talented people. Provide ongoing professional development chosen by teachers based on identified needs rather than mandated training disconnected from practice.

Address working conditions systematically. Teachers can't exercise professional judgment when they're overwhelmed with administrative tasks, excessive class sizes, or inadequate support for students with special needs. Creating sustainable professional environments is prerequisite to restoration.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

Ethiopia faced a stark choice: continue pursuing expensive mega-projects designed by distant experts, or trust local communities to restore their land using adapted traditional practices combined with scientific knowledge. They chose community-led restoration, and their land responded—over one million hectares transformed from degraded desert to productive green landscape.

American education faces an equally stark choice: continue cycling through top-down reforms designed by policymakers and philanthropists who distrust teachers, or fundamentally shift toward teacher-led restoration modeled on Finland's success. The evidence is clear. Forty years of top-down reform have failed. The billion-dollar initiatives didn't work. The testing mandates didn't work. The teacher evaluation systems didn't work. The charter schools and vouchers didn't work. They didn't work because they began with the wrong assumptions about who holds the knowledge necessary for improvement and who should be trusted with the work of restoration.

The path forward requires courage—the courage to abandon failed approaches despite their intuitive appeal to those unfamiliar with educational realities. It requires humility—recognizing that teachers, like Ethiopian farmers, possess irreplaceable knowledge about their work. It requires investment—building teacher capacity through rigorous preparation and ongoing support. And it requires trust—believing that well-prepared, supported teachers can and will do the work of educational restoration.

Simon Sinek reminds us that transformational change begins with 'Why'—with core purpose and belief. Teachers' 'Why' is powerful: helping every child develop their full potential, nurturing intellectual curiosity, preparing young people for meaningful lives and democratic citizenship. When we honor that purpose, invest in teacher capacity, and trust teachers to determine the 'How' and 'What' of effective instruction, restoration becomes possible.

The Ethiopian miracle wasn't really miraculous—it was the predictable result of trusting those closest to the problem, providing them with support and resources, and allowing them to apply their knowledge and commitment. The same miracle awaits American education. We don't need another reform. We need restoration. And restoration, as Ethiopia demonstrated, cannot come from outside experts with perfect plans. It can only come from teachers, working collectively with autonomy and support, healing the educational ecosystem one classroom at a time.

The land knows what it needs. The teachers know what students need. The question is whether policymakers, administrators, and society at large have the wisdom to listen, the humility to learn, and the courage to trust. Ethiopia chose wisely. Will we?

References

Ethiopian Land Restoration: AFR100, WRI, UNDP Climate Promise, Plant With Purpose, World Bank SLMP, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change

Ethiopian Dam Projects: Global Development Institute Manchester, African Arguments, Brookings Institution, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Finnish Education: World Bank Education Blog, Education Finland, Finland Toolbox, NCEE Empowered Educators, ResearchGate Teacher Education, ERIC

U.S. Education Reform Failures: TIME Magazine (Diane Ravitch), Big Think, W. Edwards Deming Institute, The 74 Million, Education Week, RAND Corporation

Design Thinking: Stanford d.school, Interaction Design Foundation, Empathize IT

Simon Sinek: Start With Why, The Golden Circle, TED Talk 'How Great Leaders Inspire Action'

Ethiopia Moved 90 Million Tons of Soil by Hand.

What They Learned Could Save American Education.

Ethiopia had a crisis.

Decades of drought. Massive desertification. Forest cover collapsed from 66% to 3.1%. Over 90% of land degraded. Millions starving.

The international community responded with what it always does: expensive mega-projects. Giant dams. Billions in development funding. Engineering solutions designed by distant experts who'd never farmed a day in their lives.

They failed. Spectacularly.

Projects ran over budget. Dams displaced indigenous communities, destroying livelihoods perfected over millennia. Centralized decision-making bred corruption. Communities who actually understood the land weren't consulted.

Then something remarkable happened.

Local communities took over. Farmers used simple, traditional techniques combined with scientific knowledge: terracing hillsides, harvesting rainwater, protecting natural regeneration, planting native species. They moved an estimated 90 million tons of soil and rock.

The result? Over one million hectares transformed from barren desert to productive green land. Forest cover jumped from 15.5% to 23.6%. Ethiopia became a net food exporter—from famine victim to agricultural producer in two decades.

The secret wasn't better engineering. It was trust.

Trust that the people closest to the problem—the farmers who knew every slope, every microclimate, every water flow—understood what their land needed better than any outside expert ever could.

Sound Familiar?

Now look at American education.

Forty years of reform. Billions spent. No Child Left Behind. Race to the Top. The Gates Foundation's $575 million teacher effectiveness initiative. Charter schools. Voucher programs. Teacher evaluation systems tied to student test scores.

All designed by economists, policy analysts, and philanthropists who don't teach. All treating teachers as the problem to be controlled rather than professionals with solutions. All imposed from above without meaningful teacher input.

The result?

Teacher morale at 50-year lows. Mass exodus from the profession. Emergency-licensed and uncertified teachers filling classrooms. Curriculum narrowed to test preparation. Kids who hate learning. Achievement gaps widening. Zero sustained improvement despite four decades of expensive interventions.

When a RAND Corporation study evaluated the Gates Foundation's billion-dollar initiative after seven years, they found it failed to improve student achievement, teacher effectiveness, or dropout rates. Similar patterns emerged across reforms: expensive, ambitious, and ineffective.

We keep building educational dams when we need educational terracing.

Meanwhile, Finland Quietly Built the World's Best Education System

How? By doing exactly what Ethiopia did—trusting the people who do the work.

Finland made teaching highly selective. The University of Helsinki's teacher education program has a 6.8% acceptance rate—harder to get into than law school (8.3%) or medical school (7.3%). Only the most talented, committed people become teachers.

Then Finland requires all teachers to earn research-based master's degrees. Not just any master's—degrees including original research, thesis writing, and problem-solving methodology. Teachers are educated as teacher-researchers who can identify challenges, analyze evidence, design interventions, and assess outcomes.

Most critically, Finland trusts teachers. They have broad autonomy over curriculum, instruction methods, and student assessment. There are no mandatory national standardized tests. Teachers make professional judgments about what their students need and how to teach them effectively.

The results speak for themselves: consistently top international performance, low achievement gaps, high student satisfaction, and teachers who love their work and stay in the profession.

The Lesson Is Clear

You cannot restore degraded systems from the outside.

Ethiopian farmers knew their land—which slopes needed terracing, where water naturally collected, which native species thrived in specific microclimates. No external expert, however credentialed, could possess that intimate, accumulated knowledge.

Teachers know their students—who struggles with fractions, who needs movement breaks, which examples resonate, when to push and when to support. No policymaker in a distant capital, however well-intentioned, can script that knowledge into a curriculum package.

Both Ethiopian restoration and Finnish education share critical characteristics:

They trust practitioners. Ethiopian communities designed restoration approaches. Finnish teachers design instruction.

They invest in capacity. Ethiopia provided tools and training. Finland requires rigorous master's-level preparation.

They enable autonomy. Farmers adapted techniques to local conditions. Teachers adapt instruction to student needs.

They support collaboration. Communities worked together on restoration. Finnish teachers collaborate on continuous improvement.

They think long-term. Both recognize that sustainable change takes years and requires committed people who'll stay with the work.

What We're Missing: Design Thinking's First Principle

Stanford's design thinking process begins with empathy—deeply understanding users' experiences, needs, and constraints before designing solutions. It's about setting aside your assumptions and genuinely learning from those who live with the problem daily.

Education reform systematically skips this step. Policymakers rarely spend meaningful time in classrooms observing teaching realities. They don't investigate why certain practices persist or what constraints teachers navigate. They assume teachers are obstacles rather than professionals with valuable expertise.

This absence of empathy leads to solutions that address the wrong problems. A teacher evaluation system gets designed without understanding that teachers already know which colleagues are effective—the real question is how to support improvement, not how to identify weakness.

Ethiopian restoration succeeded precisely because it began with empathy—listening to farmers, understanding their knowledge, respecting their judgment. Educational restoration requires the same foundation.

We Don't Need Another Reform. We Need Restoration.

The parallel between Ethiopian land and American education is precise:

Both experienced decades of degradation that worsened over time. Both received expensive interventions designed by external experts. Both saw those interventions fail because they ignored the knowledge of practitioners. Both discovered that restoration requires trusting those closest to the work.

Educational restoration means:

Investing in rigorous teacher preparation. Following Finland's model: highly selective admission, research-based master's degrees, extensive mentored practice. Teachers as educated professionals, not compliance workers.

Trusting professional judgment. Give teachers autonomy over curriculum adaptation, instructional methods, and assessment design. Replace surveillance with professional accountability through peer review and collaborative improvement.

Creating collaborative structures. Provide dedicated time for teachers to work together examining student work, observing teaching, analyzing challenges, and refining practice.

Supporting context-specific solutions. Recognize that effective teaching requires adaptation to specific students, communities, and contexts. Enable teacher innovation rather than mandating standardization.

Providing adequate resources. Reasonable class sizes, current materials, competitive salaries, time for planning. Teachers can't restore education while drowning in impossible conditions.

The Question That Matters

Simon Sinek teaches that transformational change begins with 'why'—with core purpose and belief. Teachers' 'why' is powerful: helping every child develop their full potential, nurturing curiosity, preparing young people for meaningful lives.

Ethiopian farmers had equally powerful motivation: feeding families, securing water, passing productive land to children. That intrinsic drive powered the sustained effort that moved 90 million tons of soil.

But motivation without trust is useless. Ethiopia had to trust that farmers knew their land. Finland trusts that teachers know their students.

So here's the question:

Do we believe teachers—properly prepared, adequately supported, and genuinely trusted—possess the capacity to restore American education?

If we answer 'no,' we're trapped in an endless cycle of failed reforms, each more expensive and demoralizing than the last.

If we answer 'yes,' we have to make radically different choices: investing in teacher capacity instead of surveillance systems, creating professional autonomy instead of scripted curricula, building collaborative time instead of adding more tests.

The Land Responded. Students Will Too.

When Ethiopian communities were trusted with restoration, their land responded. Springs returned. Trees grew. Soil held water. Crops flourished. Not because of engineering marvels, but because people who understood the land were empowered to heal it.

When Finnish society trusted teachers with education, students responded. They learned more, achieved more, and—critically—loved learning more. Not because of magic curriculum packages, but because professional educators were empowered to teach effectively.

The same can happen in American education. But it requires something we've lacked for four decades:

Humility to recognize that distant experts don't have all the answers.

Empathy to genuinely understand what teachers experience and need.

Trust that well-prepared, supported teachers can and will do the work of restoration.

Courage to abandon failed approaches and try what actually works.

Ethiopia chose wisely. They trusted their farmers, and their land was restored.

Finland chose wisely. They trusted their teachers, and their education system became the world's best.

Will we?

___

What do you think?

• Can education be 'restored' rather than 'reformed'?

• Should all teachers have research-based master's degrees like Finland?

• What would change if we truly trusted teachers as professionals?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

___

About the Author

Sean David Taylor was a member of the first cohort for the EU Multicultural Education Master's program in Sweden (1998-1999), where he researched the acculturation of sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern immigrants into Swedish schools. This experience shaped his understanding of education as a complex system requiring contextual, practitioner-led solutions rather than top-down mandates.

Read the full research article with detailed analysis, case studies, and six principles for educational restoration at [INSERT LINK]

The Math Education Crisis: How We Lost Our Way and How to Find It Again

 The Math Education Crisis: How We Lost Our Way and How to Find It Again

A 25-Year Teacher's Perspective on What Went Wrong and What We Can Learn from Countries That Got It Right

By Sean Taylor, M.Ed.

Twenty-five years of teaching has taught me this: we're failing our children in mathematics, and it didn't have to be this way.

I've watched students enter fourth grade unable to subitize—a skill kindergarteners should master. I've seen the light go out in their eyes when faced with abstract concepts they have no concrete foundation to understand. I've held progress monitoring assessments like the Brigance Inventory of Basic Skills in my hands and seen the same devastating patterns year after year: children who should be thriving are instead falling through the cracks.

The data now confirms what teachers like me have been witnessing in our classrooms. According to recent national assessments, nearly 40 percent of eighth graders are scoring below basic levels in mathematics—meaning they struggle with fundamental concepts like using similarity to find the length of a triangle's side. Even more alarming, 45 percent of high school seniors scored below basic achievement on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the highest percentage since 2005. These aren't just statistics. These are our children's futures.

But here's what keeps me up at night: this crisis didn't begin with the pandemic. Math scores began their decline in 2013, plateaued, and then fell off a cliff. The gap between our highest and lowest performers has been widening for over a decade. And the students hit hardest? Our most vulnerable—those with disabilities, those learning English, and students from underserved communities.

The Revolving Door of Educational Carpetbaggers

After a quarter-century in education, I've witnessed something that would be laughable if it weren't so tragic: the endless parade of "ultimate systems" that promise to fix everything. Every two to three years, districts adopt new programs, new curricula, new processes—each one marketed as the silver bullet that will transform math education.

These aren't educational reforms. They're business cycles driven by funding processes that have left schools devastated in their wake.

We've abandoned what works for what sells. We've replaced teachers with technology. We've prioritized EdTech software over hands-on manipulatives. And when it inevitably fails, we blame the teachers, the kids, the parents—everyone except the system itself.

Meanwhile, countries that consistently outperform us—Finland, Singapore, Japan—don't have this revolving door. They stick with what works. Finland's national math curriculum for grades 1-9 is a concise 10 pages. Ours? The Common Core State Standards for math K-12 run 93 pages. Finland gives teachers broad guidelines and trusts them to get there. We give teachers prescriptive mandates and then wonder why they're fleeing the profession.

Singapore has maintained curricular consistency that allows for deep, sustained learning. Their approach emphasizes procedural fluency built on concrete understanding—exactly what research tells us works. And their results speak for themselves: Singapore scores significantly higher than all other countries in mathematics on international assessments.

The Common Core Catastrophe

Let me be clear: the adoption of Common Core State Standards marked a turning point—but not the one its proponents promised. Research from California, which had strong mathematics standards before Common Core, tells a devastating story. Students performed significantly better under California's pre-Common Core standards. The hardest hit? Our most vulnerable students.

Before Common Core, California made immense progress getting students to take Algebra I in eighth grade—a critical gateway to higher mathematics and college readiness. In the decade following California's 1997 math standards, the percentage of eighth graders taking Algebra I soared from essentially zero to significant numbers. This wasn't just about acceleration; it was about equity. Early algebra was no longer the privilege of the few and the affluent.

Then came Common Core, which expects Algebra I in ninth grade. Within four years of Common Core implementation, the number of eighth graders taking Algebra I in California dropped precipitously to 19 percent in 2017—taking California back to where it was around 1999, when early algebra was indeed the privilege of the elite.

The architects of Common Core math standards—Rhodes Scholars with no experience teaching elementary school students—created standards that prioritize concepts over procedures, understanding over fluency. It sounds progressive until you realize they've ignored decades of cognitive science research about how children actually learn.

Young children love memorizing and systems. Their brains are geared for it. They want to learn how to do things. But Common Core tries to teach concepts first, to incorrectly-aged students. The result? Students losing procedural proficiency, struggling with basic math facts, and developing math anxiety at unprecedented rates. It's now generally accepted that only honors compression or outside tutoring achieves the STEM-readiness that used to be accessible to any motivated and capable student.

The Missing Foundation: Concrete to Abstract Learning

When I first started teaching, we used Everyday Math, which was packed full of hands-on manipulatives and games. I watched even my self-contained students with developmental delays and cognitive impairments not only love math but achieve strong results on assessments like the Brigance Inventory of Basic Skills, especially for computational math and number sense.

Then the University of Chicago Everyday Math program was changed. The deep spiral was gone. The tubs of math manipulatives disappeared. Student performance declined.

Here's what's fascinating: almost every single math manipulative in use today can trace its heritage back to Montessori math manipulatives—the original concrete, hands-on mathematics developed by Dr. Maria Montessori over a century ago. These beautifully crafted materials allow children to experience abstract mathematical concepts through sensorial exploration. They progress deliberately from concrete to abstract, from highly transparent representations to more abstract ones over time.

Research consistently shows that children who attend high-fidelity Montessori programs demonstrate higher mathematics achievement. Why? Because the approach aligns with how children actually learn. Begin with concrete materials. Use them consistently over time. Avoid distracting irrelevant features. Explicitly explain the relation between manipulatives and mathematical concepts. Then—and only then—fade to abstraction.

But Montessori, for all its brilliance, lacks one critical element: cooperative learning structures. This is where frameworks like Kagan cooperative learning and whole brain teaching come in. Combine the concrete-to-abstract progression of Montessori with the engagement strategies of cooperative learning, and you have a powerful combination.

What the Data Really Tells Us

The numbers are stark and getting worse:

•       American fourth graders' math scores on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study fell 18 points between 2019 and 2023; eighth graders fell 27 points—the biggest drop since the United States began participating in 1995

•       On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 22 percent of 12th graders performed at or above proficiency in mathematics

•       The lowest-performing 25 percent of students have shown marked declines since about 2015, while higher-achieving students began rebounding after the pandemic in 2024

•       Over half of fourth graders with disabilities and three-quarters of eighth graders with disabilities scored below basic on the 2024 NAEP

•       More countries are now edging ahead of the United States in math achievement, including Japan, Singapore, Korea, Finland, Estonia, and many others

But here's the most critical insight from my years using progress monitoring tools: it costs four times as much to do intervention in fourth grade as it does in kindergarten and first grade. Yet we continue to neglect early foundational skills—number sense, numeracy, subitizing—in favor of racing through content or implementing the latest EdTech solution.

A Personal Story That Changed Everything

When I took over the K-5 self-contained class at Liberty Elementary School, I asked how I was supposed to teach such a wide range. The answer was simple but profound: do your lesson, make it short, then get out the games and play all the different games.

Luckily, I had tubs of games from kindergarten through fifth grade. I was shocked by what happened. The kids loved math. They were engaged. And when I did progress monitoring using the Brigance Inventory of Basic Skills, the kids were thriving academically and mathematically. There was an absolute love of math.

They even wanted to go home and play the games. That's the greatest indicator: when something is worthwhile, children want to continue it beyond the classroom.

This wasn't a fluke. This was concrete-to-abstract learning in action. This was building number sense through hands-on manipulation. This was mathematics as it should be taught.

The Path Forward: Learning from Success

We don't need to reinvent the wheel. We need to look at what works. Finland, Singapore, and Japan have figured this out. They haven't abandoned their approaches every few years. They've refined and improved them over decades.

Finland's Approach: Decentralized management, teacher autonomy, minimal standardized testing, and a focus on equity over competition. They give teachers broad objectives and trust them to determine how to get there. Teachers are highly trained (only the top 10 percent of applicants are admitted to education schools) and well-respected.

Singapore's Success: Highly structured curriculum with low variance across schools, ensuring all students receive the same foundational knowledge. Emphasis on procedural fluency and fact recall to automaticity. High-quality resources provided to teachers, allowing them to focus on how to teach rather than what to teach.

What They Share: Curricular consistency, concrete-to-abstract progression, highly trained teachers, and a commitment to equity. They don't chase the latest trend. They build on proven foundations.

Most importantly, they understand that good instruction beats good technology every time. Research shows that one of the best ways to prevent math anxiety is good instruction that solidifies foundational skills. High expectations coupled with attentive teacher support ensure students don't fall through the cracks.

Concrete Solutions for Today's Classrooms

Based on my 25 years of experience and what successful countries demonstrate, here's what we need to do:

1. Return to Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract Progression

Start with hands-on manipulatives. Progress to pictorial or graphic representations. Only then move to abstract symbols. This isn't revolutionary—it's how children's brains actually develop mathematical understanding. The Montessori materials provide an excellent framework, as do traditional manipulatives like base-ten blocks, fraction bars, and algebra tiles.

2. Build Number Sense from the Beginning

Number sense and numeracy can't be shortcuts. Students need subitizing skills—the ability to instantly recognize quantities without counting. They need to understand the 13 mathematical heuristics that serve as problem-solving strategies. These foundations must be in place before we rush to procedures and algorithms.

3. Use Progress Monitoring Effectively

Tools like the Brigance Inventory of Basic Skills aren't just for special education. They help identify missing keystones—the foundational skills students need before they can build higher. Use these assessments to understand what students actually know, then fill the gaps systematically.

4. Integrate Cooperative Learning Structures

Combine the self-directed, concrete materials of Montessori with structured cooperative learning strategies. Kagan cooperative learning structures and whole brain teaching techniques increase engagement and help students articulate their mathematical thinking.

5. Stop the Revolving Door

Adopt a coherent curriculum and stick with it long enough to properly implement it, train teachers, and assess results. Stop chasing the next shiny EdTech solution. Invest in proven approaches and give them time to work.

6. Invest in Teachers, Not Just Technology

Finland and Singapore make teaching prestigious and rigorous. They train teachers extensively and pay them well. We cannot fix math education by replacing teachers with software. We fix it by empowering teachers with the training, resources, and autonomy they need to be effective.

The Stakes Couldn't Be Higher

Recent research from the Urban Institute reveals that math achievement is more predictive of earnings at age 30 than reading scores, peer relationships, or even health outcomes. Students who pass Algebra I attend college at almost twice the rate of students who don't take or don't pass it.

This isn't just about test scores. It's about life trajectories. It's about equity. It's about whether our most vulnerable students have access to the same opportunities as their more privileged peers.

And right now, we're failing them. The achievement gaps are widening. The lowest-performing students are falling further behind. And we continue to implement the same failed approaches while expecting different results.

A Call to Action

After 25 years in education—as a self-contained special education teacher, an LD resource teacher, and a classroom teacher—I've seen what works and what doesn't. I've watched programs come and go. I've seen students thrive under hands-on, concrete instruction and struggle under abstract, disconnected approaches.

The solution isn't complicated, but it requires courage. We need to:

•       Admit that the revolving door of curriculum changes has failed our students

•       Acknowledge that Common Core, while well-intentioned, has not delivered on its promises and has actively harmed progress in states that had stronger standards

•       Return to concrete-to-abstract instruction with hands-on manipulatives

•       Build foundational number sense and numeracy before rushing to procedures

•       Learn from countries like Finland and Singapore that have maintained consistency and achieved results

•       Invest in teacher training and autonomy instead of EdTech solutions

•       Intervene early in kindergarten and first grade, where it costs a quarter of what it does in fourth grade

We owe our students better than the current system. We owe them the kind of math education that builds confidence, competence, and a genuine love of learning.

I've seen it work. I've watched students with significant learning challenges master mathematical concepts when given concrete materials, patient instruction, and engaging activities. I've seen the joy on their faces when they finally understand. I've witnessed them wanting to take math games home to play with their families.

That's the standard we should aspire to. Not higher test scores driven by drill-and-kill worksheets. Not EdTech solutions that replace genuine understanding with gamified compliance. But genuine mathematical competence built on solid foundations, coupled with the joy of discovery that makes students want to continue learning.

The data is clear. The research is conclusive. The successful models exist. All that's missing is the will to learn from our mistakes and the courage to implement what actually works.

Our children deserve nothing less.---

Sean Taylor holds a Master of Education and has served for 25 years as a special education teacher, LD resource teacher, and classroom teacher. His experience spans self-contained classrooms, resource settings, and general education, with a particular focus on mathematical instruction and intervention for students with diverse learning needs.