The Wall Street Journal ran an article in May suggesting that the term “innovation” has been overused to the point of
being cliché. The report showed the word was used 33,528 times in Security and
Exchange Commission filings, an increase of 64% over the last five years, and
that Amazon.com had 250 books released between February and May 2012 with the
work “innovation” in the title.
It’s a subject Jason Tomassini of Education Week has
been thinking about for a while. Tomassini followed up a blog on the influx of
“innovation officers” in education by gathering responses he received from people
who write about and study educational practices on his first post and the WSJ
article.
“It’s not that our education system doesn’t desperately
need to be shaken up. But as the WSJ article makes clear, we are applying these
adjectives without any analysis, without any reference to history,” wrote
Audrey Watters, an education technology writer and blogger for Hack Education.
“It’s just marketing schtick and sloppy thinking—and I think that’s both
disappointing and dangerous when we want to see substantive change in education
and are stuck instead with seeing the mediocre and the mundane touted as
transformative.”
