Largely, though, what killed mastery learning, 1920s style, seems to have been simple inertia and resistance to new and threatening ideas. In a truly shocking 1989 study, it was concluded that between 1893 and 1979, “instructional practice [in public schools] remained about the same” (and it really hasn’t changed from 1979 to 2012 either)!3 To be sure, some very innovative groups of teachers and schools have been experimenting with new techniques within their classrooms, but the mainstream model did not change in any appreciable way. Did no one notice how much the world was changing, and how
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