List of abandoned education methods

This is a list of education practices (sometimes called fads) which have been replaced by or abandoned in favor of newer (or older) practices. To maintain a balanced point of view, each example should provide a source showing that the practice was abandoned or replaced. A practice abandoned by one school, for example reform mathematics, may still be in adoption by other schools, so opposing methods may both appear on this list at different times or locations.

• New Math:^[1][2] abandoned and discredited by the late 1960s. The 1989 NCTM standards have been called the "new new math".
• Reform mathematics: created in 1989 to elevate equity as a central goal of teaching mathematics, using a constructivist model. Some texts such as TERC's Investigations in Numbers, Data, and Space contained little or no instruction of traditional arithmetic methods. While as of 2006, the 1989 NCTM standards were still widely accepted and schools were still adopting aligned curricula, many schools and states have effectively rejected the standards, changing to or adopting texts such as Saxon math in Tacoma, Washington, and the California mathematics standards have switched back to traditional rigorous fact-based standards, citing low math test scores.
• Open classroom:^[3] some schools still use this model, but no longer as predominant as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

• Initial Teaching Alphabet: this regularization of standard English spelling was intended to permit exception-free learning of the rules, yet was strongly reminiscent of traditional spelling, and permitted easy transition to the latter.

Notes