Could It Happen Here?

England has made great strides in aligning its education system with cognitive science. Why hasn't the U.S.?

Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

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Nick Gibb—now Sir Nick Gibb—has written a book that describes, as the subtitle explains, why and how English schools have improved since 2010. Gibb should know, since he was the government official who was most instrumental in sparking and guiding that improvement.¹

The book’s title, Reforming Lessons, appears to be two-fold. England reformed the “lessons” delivered in its classrooms. Gibb also hopes other countries will derive “lessons” from England’s reform experience so they can replicate its success.

I’m happy to accept that challenge, at least in terms of figuring out why education reform appears to have succeeded so spectacularly in England but bombed in the U.S. to the point that few people even talk about improving public schools anymore.

Comparing education systems internationally is a tricky business because contexts vary widely. But England and the U.S., along with some other countries, have long shared a similar problem: Education orthodoxy conflicts with what cognitive science tells us about teaching and learning.

Orthodoxy vs. Science

In both countries, prospective teachers have been told they should serve primarily as facilitators, allowing children to direct their own education as much as possible through inquiry, discovery, and free choice. It’s considered more important for students to acquire skills—for example, in reading comprehension or critical thinking more generally—than to acquire any particular knowledge. Some argue that requiring students to retain factual information is not only unnecessary but harmful.

Cognitive science, on the other hand, indicates that when learners are new to a topic, what works best is explicit instruction that incorporates lots of teacher-directed interaction with students. And studies show that learners need to acquire knowledge through a content-rich curriculum in order to apply “thinking” skills. The more information you have about a topic stored in long-term memory, the better able you are to understand a text on that topic or to think about it critically.

As a result of the divergence between education theory and scientific evidence, schools in both England and the U.S. have a history of failing the most vulnerable students. Those who end up thriving—mostly the students from more highly educated families—are the ones who would probably do well in any system.

Change in England

Gibb, who was Schools Minister under the Conservative government for over 10 years, off and on, details how things have changed in England since he first stepped into that role.² Children’s foundational reading skills have clearly improved: on the international PIRLS test, given to fourth-graders, England rose from tenth place in 2011 to fourth place in 2021, out of 43 participating jurisdictions.

While the country’s own testing data haven’t yet shown such dramatic results across the country, schools that have aligned their curriculum and instruction to cognitive science have achieved remarkable results, especially with students from lower-income families.

And the spread of cognitive science knowledge among the country’s teaching force has been dramatic. Ten years ago, concepts like cognitive load theory were almost unknown. Today, one headteacher told Gibb that he “would struggle to employ a newly trained teacher who had not heard “ of it.

Suffice it to say that’s not the case in the U.S. Most states have now paid some attention to the evidence from cognitive science that supports systematic phonics instruction. An increasing number of states and school districts are implementng elementary literacy curricula that build the kind of knowledge that enables reading comprehension. But only a relative handful of educators—and few if any policymakers—have demonstrated awareness of or interest in cognitive science beyond that.

Why the difference between the two countries? It’s certainly not that the U.S. lacks researchers in and advocates for cognitive science. But a number of them enjoy far more acclaim in England than in the U.S.

Why the Difference?

There’s a lot of rich material in Gibb’s book, and I could go on at length about similarities and differences between England and the U.S. But I’ll try to focus on the ones I find most salient.

First, Gibb—and some other British government officials, like his erstwhile boss Michael Gove—delved into complex education issues far more deeply than the vast majority of American politicians and policymakers are likely to do. While out of office, Gibb served as “shadow schools minister” for years, visiting schools, speaking with educators, and reading authors like E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Daniel Willingham. That enabled him to reject the arguments of “experts” from within the education world who relied on longstanding philosophical positions rather than science.

Maybe it would help if the U.S. had a similar system of “shadow” officials, but there are no guarantees. Even American philanthropists and foundation officials, who presumably have more time than politicians to learn about the root causes of education dysfunction, have generally left matters of curriculum and instruction to the presumed education “experts.” It’s rare to find someone in a position of power as willing as Gibb has been to buck orthodoxy and persevere despite vituperative pushback.³

In any event, it’s clear from Gibb’s book that while it’s important for government officials to understand what needs to happen in classrooms, their advocacy alone isn’t be enough to create change. Neither is pointing to scientific evidence.

“It took an unusual type of teacher to base their practice around research papers, effect sizes, and randomized controlled trials,” he writes. “The evidence that most teachers care about is what other schools are doing.” To change teacher practice, it’s crucial to be able to hold up alternative models that are working better.

High Accountability, High Autonomy

In England, the government didn’t dictate any particular instructional approach—with the exception of phonics, which Gibb deemed too important to leave to experimentation.⁴ For everything else, the mantra was “high accountability, high autonomy”—or as Gove, the Minister for Education, put it, “let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Gibb admits he worried that some of those flowers would turn out to be the same old poisonous ones that had blossomed before, possibly in an even more toxic incarnation. Following the model of American charter schools, the government made it easier to open new schools or convert old ones so that they were freer from oversight. And initially, there were indeed a few schools that took “child-centered” education to an extreme.

But “high accountability” eventually took care of the excesses engendered by “high autonomy.” When the government publicized test scores of individual schools, it was clear which ones were succeeding—and they were virtually all schools that had aligned their instruction to cognitive science. The low-scoring schools withered away or, in some cases, were shut down.

Wait, that sounds familiar! Wasn’t that the theory behind both No Child Left Behind and the American charter school movement? Publicize test scores, highlight the schools that are doing well, sanction or close the ones that aren’t—or just rely on parents to vote with their feet—and voila, you’ll have a functional education system.

Except it didn’t work out that way here. One big reason, I suspect, is the difference in the measures that were used for “accountability” in each country—in other words, testing.

What You Measure Matters

In the U.S., we put great emphasis on standardized reading and math tests from third to eighth grade. On the reading side, these tests are supposed to measure abstract comprehension skills like “making inferences.” That has led schools to focus inordinately on those skills while downplaying or eliminating subjects like social studies and science, which generally aren’t tested.⁵

That focus might boost scores in the short-term, at lower grade levels, but it backfires when students reach higher grades. That’s because as grade levels go up, the texts increasingly assume readers are familiar with academic knowledge and vocabulary. Students who haven’t been taught anything about history, geography, or science often lack that knowledge and vocabulary, which means they’ll hit a wall.

In England, accountability is also based on test scores, but the measure used is “Progress 8,” introduced in 2013. That metric is based on students’ scores on GCSE exams, which are generally taken at age 15 or 16.⁶ Progress 8 includes scores not only in English and math but also six other subjects, all of which relate to content they’ve actually been taught.⁷

In addition, Progress 8 doesn’t just look at a students’ GCSE scores. It measures how much they’ve improved based on their level of achievement at the end of elementary school. In other words, it measures the value added by a student’s secondary school.

The lesson I take from all this is that the measure you use for accountability makes a huge difference. The U.S. measure, which is premised on the mistaken assumption that reading comprehension skills can be assessed in the abstract, has created a significant obstacle to aligning education to cognitive science—and condemned many students to failure in the process.

The English measure seems to reliably identify schools that teach in a way that enables students to succeed. One “free school” in London that serves low-income families and is fiercely committed to a knowledge-building approach has topped the Progress 8 rankings for three years in a row; it has about the same percentage of top-scoring students as the uber-elite Eton College boarding school.⁸

There are many more initiatives that the English government took under Gibb’s leadership that moved the needle—including helping to foster a grassroots movement among teachers—and I encourage anyone in the U.S. with an interest in education reform (perhaps a dwindling group) to read the book.

But I’m not sure any of the other important things would have happened without an assessment system that uncovers instructional methods that not only align with science but actually work—a system the United States sorely lacks.⁹

1. I recently met Gibb in New Zealand and Australia, where we were both giving presentations at conferences.

2. England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are all part of the U.K., but they have separate education systems. So Gibb’s authority extended only to the English system.

3. For example, one professor of education charged that Gibb’s new elementary curriculum “abolishes childhood.”

4. To ensure phonics instruction, the government instituted a phonics screening check for all children at the end of Year 1 (equivalent to kindergarten). The government also created an approved list of phonics programs and provided match funding for resources or training in those programs.

5. This isn’t solely due to testing. The focus on reading comprehension skills also dovetails nicely with the theory that content knowledge is less important than “thinking skills.” But reading comprehension tests have exacerbated the problem.

6. GCSE stands for General Certificate of Secondary Education. Some students leave school after taking GCSE exams while those who want to attend universities continue for another two years.

7. Students are required to take the English GCSE, which—like American reading comprehension tests—appears to test them on passages from texts they’ve never read before, ostensibly to measure their general comprehension ability. There is also an English Literature GCSE, which covers specific texts they have read.

8. That school is the Michaela Community School, which I’ve visited and written about, for example, here.

9. At the state level, reform in the U.S. has recently focused on requiring or incentivizing school districts to choose from a list of curricula that the state has deemed effective for teaching foundational reading skills like phonics and/or for building knowledge. Except for phonics, that kind of reform has been notably absent from the approach in England.

England does have a required national “curriculum,” but it’s more like what Americans would call “standards”—a general framework rather than a detailed syllabus with lesson plans, etc. English schools or individual teachers have been expected to create their own detailed instructional resources. The success of reform in England might suggest that externally created detailed curriculum is unnecessary, but in fact it takes a big load off of teachers’ shoulders. Gibb’s book indicates that such curricula are beginning to be developed in England, and that there’s significant demand for them.