Instructional Drift is the Real Crisis

There’s a lot of noise right now. Funding cuts. Policy shifts. Political theater around what education should or shouldn’t look like. And soooo much more geopolitical hot mess, but my expertise is K-12 education, so that will always be the focus here.

Now, while none of the noise is irrelevant, I assure you, in the K-12 education space, it is not our most pressing problem.

Our most pressing problem is what’s happening in classrooms right now, today and everyday of the school year.

Because, students are still showing up. Teachers are still teaching. And leaders are still responsible for whether the effort it takes to teach is actually producing learning.

That responsibility doesn’t pause for budget cycles, budget cuts or budget crisis.

So here’s the question that remains, the only question that never goes away, the only question that will always be the single most important question:

Is instruction actually producing the learning required to prepare young people for success? In the next grade, after high school, for life? #adulting

Because when resources tighten, school systems go (back) into survival mode and (further) lose sight of the single and most important imperative: Are students learning?

Instructional drift continues to be the crisis we do not talk about.

And my research confirms that this drift began decades ago, around the time of Brown vs. Board. And has been persistent and resistant to all attempts at education reform; federal, state, and district level. In fact, the only pockets of success we see are in exceptional classroom, and if we are lucky, exceptional schools. *But no exceptional school districts or states.

The stats don’t lie.

Instructional drift is the slow and stealth departure away from grade-level rigor.

It has been the single most expensive form of instructional failure, decades in the making due to decades of neglect; normalized and accepted incompetence at every level of our education systems.

Instructional Failure

Instructional Drift doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up in a single bad lesson. It accumulates. A task that’s loosely aligned. A question that’s a little too easy. An activity that keeps students busy but not thinking. Repeat that pattern across classrooms, across months, across decades and you have a growing gap between what students are supposed to learn and what they’re actually learning.

And make no mistake there are levels to the instructional drift crisis; from subtle and isolated pockets of instructional failure to egregious spirit murdering incompetence that defaults to narratives of deficits to explain away systemic instructional failure.

You might be wondering, how can one tell instruction is drifting away from the grade-level rigor required for students to be successful?

Look at what students are being asked to do.

• Are they thinking deeply?

• Discussing meaningfully?

• Producing evidence that learning actually happened?

• And critically, are they being given the time to do the heavy lifting of learning?

Let me be clear, most systems aren’t struggling because people aren’t working hard. They are struggling because there is no consistent, shared understanding of what evidence of learning should actually look, sound and feel like. Not in frameworks. Not in theory. In the work students produce.

Without that clarity, instructional drift is inevitable.

And we can no longer accept this inevitability, because we literally can not afford to continue not addressing instructional failure.

next up: When historically marginalize and underserved populations get rained on, everyone gets wet!

Warmly demanding your attention to this matter. I’ll see you in the comments.

~ Dr. O

Summer Skool for Classroom Teachers serious about becoming High-Quality Facilitators of Learning

Sunday Co-Planning sessions for Classroom Teachers who need a consistent, lightly structured, supported space to plan for High-Quality Instruction

Individual and Team Coaching Cycles with Dr. O for Classroom Teachers dedicated to looking at evidence of student learning improve their Instructional Practice

dro@apa-education.org

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