Ammar A. Merhbi wrote a Substack article titled The Empty Review Dilemma.: Why is Education Addicted to Unproven Pedagogies (18 June 2026).
« In healthcare, if a team of prominent specialists proposed a sweeping new clinical protocol based entirely on an appealing philosophical concept, rolled it out to millions of patients globally, embedded it into university medical schools, and secured millions in grant funding, all without a single randomized controlled trial verifying that it actually cured the disease, the medical community would call it malpractice… In education, we call it a standard Tuesday. »
« We are deeply addicted to noble intentions and intensely hostile to rigorous empirical accountability. A devastating case study of this exact phenomenon has just emerged in the journal “Review of Education”, authored by Clarence Green and Iain Giblin (2025). It serves as a stark warning for anyone committed to true, evidence-based instructional design. »
« In 1996, an elite group of international literacy scholars known as the New London Group published a foundational manifesto: “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures.”… It argued that in a rapidly globalizing, digital world, instruction must expand beyond traditional print to embrace multimodal communication (visual, audio, spatial, and digital text production) while actively leveraging the diverse cultural realities of students… Over the next 30 years, this framework reshaped international curricula, dominated teacher-training programs, and shaped public policy across the UK, the US, Australia, Canada, Singapore, and beyond. Proponents confidently declared that the pedagogy was well-tested and highly effective at raising literacy outcomes. »
« To audit these claims, Green and Giblin conducted an exhaustive Narrative Synthesis Systematic Review. They cast a massive net, screening 20,581 studies published over three decades. They applied a baseline criterion standard for what constitutes an “evidence-based” practice: the study had to be an experimental or quasi-experimental classroom intervention measuring K-12 literacy outcomes against a valid control or comparison group… Out of 20,581 papers, exactly zero (0) studies met the minimum empirical criteria required to establish educational effectiveness. Thirty years of widespread international implementation have occurred completely detached from experimental validation. »
« Ideological Immunity to Cognitive Science… The multiliteracies framework… foundational texts famously attacked structured, explicit reading instruction—such as phonics—labeling it “authoritarian”… This ideological shield allows a pedagogy to comfortably ignore decades of robust, empirical research regarding how the human brain actually processes text and manages cognitive load. »
« Noble intentions are the starting point of instructional design, not the finish line. If we want our classrooms to be truly evidence-based, we must demand that our most cherished theories survive the scrutiny of a controlled trial. Until we do, our curriculum choices will remain driven by ideological fashion rather than proven impact. »
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