Tinkering Toward Utopia

You do it across grade levels.

Our regular listeners will know that I love to reference David Tyack and Larry Cuban's book, Tinkering Toward Utopia, and one of their big points of analysis in that book.

is that reforms that make a difference, reforms that transform how we do school, are hybridized, right? That's the tinkering in their title.

And if you take this premise and say that the reforms that actually transform what we're doing in schools are always being hybridized, that that's one of the key elements, the potential for hybridization that enables ideas to make a real difference in education, then an idea that itself is not hybridizable to invent a new word there, is itself the challenge, right? It isn't necessarily that people are going to come out against it, because I think if DI could have been hybridized, and I think we could have a conversation about the ways in which it has actually been hybridized, just small d, small i.

So one thing that I think is worth talking about, and I'm going to come back to this, is...

the idea of the grammar of schooling, which comes to us from David Hayek and Larry Cuban through their fabulous book, Tinkering Toward Utopia.

I think that that's embedded in this idea about something becoming lodged in the systems and structures and culture of schooling and becoming very difficult to dislodge.

And I just want to also add in Baumgartner and Jones's punctuated equilibrium theory, which is, you know, that doesn't really roll off the tongue very