Giving Compass' Take:

• Randy Weiner, writing for EdSurge, discusses moral questions for educators, innovators, and funders that focuses on how to bring about ethical change to the education system. 

• How can education funders gain insight from questions on morality in education innovation?

• Here are five ideas for education innovation in 2019. 

As a humble participant in a range of education reforms, I am aware of reformers’ less-than-stellar-track record. It is tempting to stop trying to bring about change within educational and political systems that are not designed to produce and absorb innovation. To date, I’ve chosen otherwise, concluding, like so many others, that no matter how unlikely the chances are of meaningful reform at scale, maybe an educational black swan will glide into the next school year’s pond.

Whether such a radical departure from our history comes to pass or not, I submit that there is a moral imperative for reformers—from designers to adopters to funders—to apply a deeper understanding of the history of educational reform in our work.

I keep a running list of questions that we might pose much more frequently in reform-minded conversations. The following is only a subset of a longer list, but it illustrates opportunities to bring morality into our education innovation consciousness.

  • How does the history of education reform inform our proposed innovation?
  • Should we give up our focus on a tiny number of moonshots, and concentrate instead on a larger number of more achievable, if smaller impact, implementations?
  • Does evaluating an innovation’s potential in terms of scalability obstruct the design and development of smaller, easier to adopt and implement innovations? If we could guarantee a 1% improvement in student outcomes, would we be willing to trade that for repeatedly failed attempts to achieve a 20% improvement?
  • How do we justify designing an innovation for a system that is likely not designed to take advantage of the innovation? What if our innovation vision unreasonably, and ultimately, inequitably, fails to acknowledge the constraints of the current system?

Read the full article about moral questions for education innovation by Randy Weiner at EdSurge.