Yeah, it seems almost as if a lot of people look back at their experiences of U.S. schools in the 90s, and assume that the schools in 2025 must not have changed one iota. While obviously I can't speak for every school district (nor can anyone), many of the criticisms I've heard seem disconnected from the schools I'm familiar with. (Not that they aren't subject to newer criticisms!) Is my personal experience a big outlier, or are people just extrapolating from the past? It makes me worry that school districts will greatly overcorrect in their efforts to ward off the old criticisms.
I went to school in the early 1990s! The progressive approach to education was already orthodoxy when my teachers were trained. It has been around a long, long time and has been the prevailing belief in education for half a century or more.
The situation is almost paradoxical: you have generation after generation of people saying that education needs to be reformed to eliminate rote learning and focus on understanding concepts, and where did they learn this orthodoxy? In school, from their teachers.
I suspect it has something to do with how teenagers experience school. No matter the pedagogical approach, if kids are distracted with their social lives and normal adolescent stuff, they experience any attempt to teach them as dry and rote.
