Unpopular Teaching Opinions | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about teaching?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (or at least heavily contested) opinions about teaching that frequently surface among experienced educators but tend to get shouted down in public discourse:
- Homework is largely a waste of time for most students. Decades of research (e.g., Harris Cooper’s meta-analyses) show tiny or nonexistent academic benefits for elementary students and diminishing returns in high school unless it’s very targeted. Many teachers assign it anyway because parents expect it and it serves as a behavior-management tool.
- Teacher certification and education degrees don’t predict classroom effectiveness. Studies (e.g., Teach For America evaluations, Goldhaber & Brewer) repeatedly find little to no correlation between having a teaching credential or an ed-school degree and student outcomes. Subject-matter knowledge and raw intelligence matter far more.
- Class size reductions have been oversold. The benefits are real but small and extremely expensive. Tennessee’s STAR study is often cited, but the effect sizes shrink dramatically when you look at long-term outcomes or when class sizes go from, say, 30 to 22 instead of 30 to 15.
- “Engagement” is overrated; sometimes boredom is fine. Not every minute needs to be fun, interactive, or “student-centered.” Direct instruction, practice, and even rote memorization still outperform most trendy active-learning methods for novice learners (see Kirschner, Sweller, Clark 2006 on cognitive load).
- Many “best practices” pushed in professional development (learning styles, growth mindset interventions, SEL curricula, restorative justice discipline) have weak or mixed evidence and often crowd out time that could be spent on actual content.
- Grade inflation and the elimination of failure are harming students. Refusing to let kids fail a grade, a class, or even an assignment removes the most powerful natural feedback mechanism we have. “Everyone gets a trophy” culture in schools produces graduates who can’t handle real-world consequences.
- Parents are a bigger problem than administrators or politicians. Helicoptering, entitlement, refusal to enforce consequences at home, and treating teachers like service workers undermine education far more than budget cuts or testing regimes in most schools.
- Teaching is not harder than most other professions; it’s just different. The “teachers are heroes working 80-hour weeks” narrative is exaggerated. Many teachers work intense hours during the school year but have summers and long breaks that balance it out. Burnout is real, but so is the comparatively light yearly hour total compared to medicine, law, finance, etc.
- Ability grouping (tracking) works and should come back. Comprehensive reviews (e.g., Steenbergen-Hu et al., 2016 meta-analysis) show academic benefits for high-achieving students and little harm to others when done flexibly. Mixed-ability grouping is often justified on equity grounds but hurts the top third the most.
- Most ed-tech is a solution in search of a problem. Billions spent on devices and software have produced almost no measurable learning gains outside of a few specific programs (e.g., targeted math tutoring software). Laptops in class are frequently a net distraction.
These opinions tend to be unpopular because they clash with dominant narratives around equity, child-centeredness, teacher martyrdom, and the idea that more spending/resources always equals better education.