The February Problem

I have never once seen an education program fail in the way the research warns about.

What I have watched, more times than I can count, is February fatique.

A teacher is trained in August. She is enthusiastic, the materials are on her desk, and for six weeks she runs the thing beautifully. Then testing season arrives, two students move in, someone is out for a month, and the program quietly becomes a shorter version of itself. Fifteen minutes becomes eight. Twice a week becomes when there is time.

Nobody decided to stop. She is protecting what she is evaluated on, which is exactly what I would do.

The research says the same thing, less kindly

This is not just my impression. When researchers have looked at what happens to good programs as they spread into more schools, the same two culprits keep surfacing: teachers run short of time, and teachers modify the program to fit their circumstances.

Not class size. Not the materials. Not the room. Time, and adaptation.

And both get worse in exactly the schools with the least slack, which are usually the schools that needed the program most.

There is a related finding I think about often: programs that are simple and clear get delivered more consistently than programs that require interpretation. That is an uncomfortable idea for our field, because it means the most thoughtful curriculum is not automatically the one that survives contact with a real building.

What our own evaluation caught

When WestEd studied the original Mind Meets Music, they recorded something I did not fully appreciate at the time.

Across all four schools, urban and suburban and rural, in two states, the program was delivered twice a week with no site-specific modifications.

No February. Nobody trimmed it.

I would love to tell you that was the curriculum. It was not. It was the Master Teaching Artist standing in the room, a trained specialist we employed who showed up every week and made the lesson happen whether or not anyone had the energy for it.

That is why it held. It is also why it ended. Deploying our own specialists required grant funding most schools will never have access to.

What I removed

So the question I have been working on since is whether video can hold what the specialist held.

Ten minutes, twice a week, which is the same amount that was studied. That last part matters more than it sounds. If a program was researched at one dosage and you deliver less of it, you should not expect the published results to follow you.

The Kindergarten teacher presses play, and video instructors Miss Emily and Señora Ingrid deliver the lesson. Señora Ingrid leads the Spanish Language component. Teacher don’t need a background in music. Just press play. Ten minutes. Twice a week. No training day, which means nothing to forget by February.

“It was one click and go! Super user-friendly.”