If education research is “weak and sloppy,”
then we should be cautious about all claims of certainty.
Not just the ones we don’t like.
You can’t dismiss CRP, SEL, and UDL as “unproven”
while treating explicit instruction and retrieval as settled science.
“In fact, there is surprisingly little hard evidence that any of these approaches, on their own, are effective in shrinking academic disparities. To do that, teachers should consider augmenting their equity initiatives with explicit instruction, regular feedback, and lots of retrieval practice, all of which have been shown to help struggling learners.”
Bingo! This is the core issue. It’s the opportunity cost of investing time, resources, and money on what has yet been proven to work and not what has been proven: explicit instruction, retrieval practice, and formative assessment with feedback.
Teachers, schools, and districts only have so much bandwidth and frequently it is not spent on what decades of research show work to help all students learn.