“Innovation” is a hot word everywhere these days, including in schools.

But, as a recent report finds, it often doesn’t work.

The ‘dirty secret’ about educational innovation is an excellent article at the Hechinger Report. It summarizes a new federal report detailing the results of the Education Department spending $1.5 billion on “innovation in education.”

It’s isn’t a pretty picture, as you can tell from the quotation at the top of this blog post.

However, the article also does a good job explaining why that catchy statistic at the topic might not tell the whole story.

That’s why I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Understanding How To Interpret Education Research.

You might also be interested in a recent NY Times article, End the Innovation Obsession.

Here’s an excerpt:

True innovation isn’t just some magic carnival of invention, like a Steve Jobs keynote with a pretty toy at the end. It is a continuing process of gradual improvement and assessment that every institution and business experiences in some way. Often that actually means adopting ideas and tools that already exist but make sense in a new context, or even returning to methods that worked in the past.

It goes on to offer many specific examples…