The Imaginary One Size Fits All Education

It is one of the most-repeated myths of public education critics. Here's Linda McMahon spouting it again last summer:

We reject the one size fits all education approach. Parents, states, and local leaders know what’s best for our students! The Trump Administration is returning education decisions to those closest to our children. https://t.co/ItvHS7JxvB

— Secretary Linda McMahon (@EDSecMcMahon) July 10, 2026

"We reject the one size fits all education approach." 

You and everyone else, ma'm. The American school system is not one size fits all. It is structured in a way that makes one size fits all functionally impossible. There are roughly 13,000 public school districts (plus private schools, plus charter schools) and each is controlled by its own local board, with each board making its own set of decisions that are then filtered down through individual building administrations. That's a whole lot of different sizes of education.

Which was, of course, the central complaint of the standards movement-- that there were too many districts and buildings and teachers doing all sorts of different things, and why don't we impose one size for all? Common Core was their best, biggest attempt to inflict OSFA on the nation, and it failed, a big clunky wave that shattered and fragmented on the individual rocks of a fragmented system. People with power tried, really hard, to make one size fit all in US education, and it didn't work, not even when the standards went into witness protection and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. 

One size fits all for education in this country??!! When I was still teaching, I wasn't even one size fits alling it for a single day. Each class needed its own fit. My vocational students didn't need to master MLA research format and my college bound students didn't need to wrestle (yet) with resumes and job reports. Certain students needed a different approach, and certain other students needed an even more different approach. And that's before we get to the occasional special class, like the class I once taught that was 75% teen moms. 

Nor was I one size fits all from year to year-- every year involved more fine tuning and editing and reframing what I had done before. 

One size fits all schooling is right up there with hasn't changed in a century schooling and factory training schooling-- they are all glib criticisms effortlessly deployed by people who don't actually know what goes on inside actual schools. These are also the same folks who think that one size fits all schooling is a great idea if they get to pick the size ("If all teachers did X, then all students would learn Y") and then get pissed off that they can't make the same t-shirt fit on every single teacher and student in the country. 

One size fits all education is, in fact, a terrible idea. Fortunately, it's an idea to which education is highly resistant. Unfortunately, it's an idea that amateur education reformsters never tire of A) leveling as an accusation or B) trying to impose.