The Status Quo Must Be Carefully Surpassed, Not Disrupted
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues against the 'disrupt everything' mentality in education, advocating instead for careful improvement of existing practices.
Key Takeaways
- Disruption destroys what works - Blowing up existing systems eliminates proven practices along with the flawed ones
- Surpass instead of disrupt - Build on what works rather than starting from scratch
- Chesterton's Fence applies - Understand why current practices exist before replacing them
Transcript
The status quo is not something to disrupt.
I think we get this wrong in our thinking about educational change and improvement.
We want things to be better for students, but the idea that we can just disrupt what we're already doing and that will automatically be better, I think it's not just very logical.
I think we've got to really think a lot more deeply about what the status quo is because Whenever we've done something for a long time across great expanses of geography, when a lot of people have done things a certain way for a long time, there probably is some wisdom in that.
Now, that does not mean that it is the best possible thing we could do.
And certainly the status quo has included lots and lots of terrible things that we should have stopped doing long before we actually stopped them.
So I don't want to defend any particular bad strategy.
status quo practice, but we have to understand what we're dealing with when we're dealing with the status quo.
The status quo is proven in some way.
It does some sort of job.
Chesterton's fence is the idea that before you take something away or replace something, you should understand what jobs it's doing, right?
Like if you see a fence in a field, There might be a bull in that field that that fence is keeping in.
So like find out before you take that away.
And when it comes to disrupting the status quo, I see just a complete lack of interest in figuring out what jobs is the status quo doing and is what we're trying to disrupt it with actually going to be better?
And this is where we go wrong.
Right.
We don't see the status quo as a bar to jump over.
Right.
As a kind of a minimum threshold, like our new thing has to be at least as good as the old thing or we shouldn't do it.
We don't see it that way.
So we just disrupt the old thing and realize too late that that was a mistake.
And this is happening all the time with discipline.
Right.
Like discipline is.
unpleasant and it doesn't feel that effective it feels like we could do a lot better with discipline but when we don't hold ourselves accountable for actually surpassing that bar you know like in the pole vault you got to raise the bar if what we're doing that's new does not actually surpass the status quo we shouldn't switch we should not disrupt the status quo we should appreciate and understand the status quo and then by understanding it more deeply we can probably get better ideas about how to get better results and if we are going to replace the status quo with something else we can understand what jobs that new thing will have to do in order to take the place of the old thing that was also doing those jobs.
So I think a lot of our problems that we're facing in education now come from a misunderstanding of the status quo and seeing it as just a bad thing or seeing it as the enemy and not appreciating the job that it's doing and again not to defend any indefensible status quo but i think we've just got to do a lot more understanding to begin with and then a lot more kind of scientific experimentation like we've got to hold the new things accountable for being as good as the old thing and there's another industry that's actually much better at this than education and that is advertising right if there's a successful ad like you know in magazines especially at the back of magazines there are ads that have been running for years and in some cases decades those are what's called in the advertising industry controls those are ads that predictably perform well and they don't disrupt them do you know why they don't disrupt those ads do you know why they spend tens of thousands of dollars every month to continue to run those ads year after year after year because they work.
They run them until they find something better.
They don't say, oh, this ad is old.
We've been running it forever.
We've spent millions of dollars on it.
We need to disrupt this status quo ad.
No, they try new stuff.
And if the new stuff does better than the old stuff, that's when they disrupt the status quo.
And I think that's what we've got to do in education.
Let me know what you think.