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When George Soper approached Mary Mallon, he made a mistake that education companies still make today. He arrived with a solution that began by telling its intended recipient that she was the problem.
I was reading Anthony Bourdain's Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, which does something Mary Mallon herself was rarely afforded in life. It treats her like a person and puts her choices in context. Mary was a hardworking Irish immigrant, a skilled cook, and a single woman making her own way in an unforgiving world where survival was never guaranteed. Cooking gave her an unusual amount of independence, and she was proud of being good at it. That pride mattered. Her skill was tied to her income, her identity, and her ability to survive.
When George Soper identified Mary as the likely source of several typhoid outbreaks, he seemed oblivious to what his accusation would mean to her. Imagine being healthy and strong, supporting yourself through skilled work, and having a strange man appear to tell you that your work was killing people. Soper did not begin by recognizing her expertise, asking what she had observed, or trying to understand how she made sense of what was happening. He did not approach her with empathy or curiosity. He approached her as a problem to identify, contain, and correct. Then he seemed surprised when she refused to cooperate.
Teachers know this feeling.
Too often, a new curriculum or technology enters the classroom in much the same way. No one starts by asking teachers what they know, what they need, or what they have already tried. Instead, someone announces that a problem has been identified and presents a product designed to correct it.
Teachers are obviously not Typhoid Mary, and struggling schools are not outbreaks to contain. The comparison is about the approach. Education companies often enter classrooms with a solution that quietly identifies the intended user as the problem.
The message is rarely stated outright, but teachers hear it clearly: The problem is your teaching. You are not competent enough to solve it. We are here to fix the education crisis by removing your judgment and, as much as possible, you from the equation.
The new curriculum will determine what you teach and when. The platform will deliver the lesson, assess the student, prescribe the intervention, and monitor whether you followed its recommendations. Your role is no longer to observe, interpret, and respond as a skilled practitioner. Your role is to implement someone else's solution with sufficient "fidelity." If that solution fails, the explanation is rarely that the product misunderstood the classroom. It is that teachers did not use it correctly.
When Mary Mallon was eventually released from quarantine, health officials prohibited her from returning to cooking and found her work as a laundress instead. Keeping an identified typhoid carrier away from food preparation was a legitimate public health necessity. The problem was not that officials wanted to prevent another outbreak. The problem, at least for the purpose of this comparison, was how little attention they paid to what would happen to the person whose life they had upended. Laundry work was harder, paid less, and made little use of the abilities or professional identity Mary had spent years developing. The solution protected the public by removing her from the work she knew, but it made no meaningful use of what she knew.
Education companies often make a much less extreme version of the same mistake. They retain teachers to perform the labor of instruction while designing systems that push aside much of what makes teaching professional work. A teacher's knowledge of the students in front of them, including their histories, misconceptions, languages, personalities, motivations, and needs, is treated as less reliable than a standardized sequence developed somewhere else. Like assigning a skilled cook to the laundry, the system keeps the worker while sidelining her expertise.
Education companies may know things the individual teacher does not. They may have access to research, large data sets, specialized technology, or instructional models that could genuinely improve student learning. That expertise is valuable. It just does not make the expertise already present in the classroom irrelevant. When companies approach teachers as obstacles to overcome instead of professionals to consult, they should not be surprised when teachers are skeptical.
The hidden work of an easy implementation
From outside a classroom, adopting a new curriculum or technology can look deceptively simple. Attend a training, create the accounts, and start using it. From the teacher's side, every new initiative arrives as a bundle of new responsibilities, and it almost never replaces an equal amount of existing work.
Teachers first have to learn the system themselves, often through a short professional development session before they have had a chance to try it with actual students. Then they have to make it work. They reorganize lessons, prepare materials, transfer rosters, create accounts, distribute login information, teach students how to navigate the platform, and troubleshoot the inevitable problems.
Once students begin using it, the teacher becomes the product's unpaid technical support. A forgotten password, an uncharged device, a broken link, a missing assignment, or a student who has clicked into the wrong screen is not just a technical inconvenience. Each problem competes for the attention of the only adult in the room. While the teacher helps one student log in, another has stopped working, two are talking, someone needs the bathroom, and the rest of the class has realized that the lesson has stalled.
I have been that teacher. There is no clean pause button while you solve the problem. The rest of the classroom keeps happening.
Technology creates new classroom management demands too. Teachers have to monitor whether students are using the program appropriately, staying on task, opening other websites, guessing their way through questions, or letting a friend do the work. A product can promise to reduce instructional labor while quietly increasing the surveillance and behavior management required to use it.
The work continues after the lesson. Teachers may be expected to review another dashboard, interpret another set of data, identify students for intervention, document usage, communicate results to families, and incorporate the product's recommendations into future instruction. If the platform does not align with the school's grading system, curriculum sequence, accommodations, or assessments, the teacher has to reconcile those differences too.
Curriculum adoption brings its own version of this burden. Teachers have to study unfamiliar materials, find and prepare resources, learn new routines, anticipate where students will struggle, and adapt lessons for multilingual learners, disabled students, and children working above or below grade level. At the same time, they may be warned that too much adaptation will compromise "fidelity." A curriculum can be described as ready to use, but no curriculum enters a real classroom ready to meet every child in it.
None of these tasks is enormous by itself. That is part of why the burden is so easy to dismiss. Together, they consume time, attention, and emotional energy that teachers are already rationing. Education companies tend to measure what their products give teachers: a lesson, a dashboard, an assessment, or a recommendation. Teachers have to calculate something else. They have to calculate everything the product will require them to learn, organize, monitor, repair, interpret, and sustain.
When teachers seem unenthusiastic about the latest solution, it may not be because they resist change. They may have correctly recognized that the solution has arrived carrying another job, and no one has told them which of their existing jobs they are now allowed to stop doing.
When support starts to feel like supervision
The burden is not only practical. Every new initiative communicates something about whose knowledge matters and whose judgment can be trusted.
Teacher autonomy is sometimes described as a desire to teach without standards, evidence, or accountability. That is not what professional autonomy means. It means being trusted to observe students, interpret their responses, draw on training and experience, and adjust instruction when a standardized approach does not fit the person in front of you. We expect that kind of judgment from other skilled professionals. Teachers need it too.
Many education products narrow the space where that judgment can operate. Scripted curricula tell teachers what to teach, which words to use, which questions to ask, how long a discussion should last, and when students should demonstrate understanding. Digital platforms can deliver the instruction, score responses, group students, prescribe interventions, and generate recommendations.
Meanwhile, the teacher may know that a child rushed through an assessment after an argument at home. They may know that another child misunderstood the directions because they are still learning English, or that a frustrated student started clicking random answers. The dashboard knows only the score.
Data can be incredibly useful, but it does not interpret itself. Yet when a product's recommendation conflicts with a teacher's professional judgment, the teacher is often expected to defend the discrepancy while the product is treated as neutral and objective. The burden of proof falls on the person who knows the child rather than on the system that reduced the child to a set of measurable responses.
The same technology used to monitor student progress can monitor teachers. Administrators can see whether a class logged in, how many lessons students completed, whether the teacher followed the prescribed sequence, and how many minutes students spent on the platform. Those measures may be intended to support implementation. To teachers, they can feel like a digital time clock attached to their professional judgment. What is easiest to measure slowly becomes what counts. The less visible work of teaching, such as building trust, noticing confusion, keeping a child from shutting down, or changing direction when a lesson is not working, disappears from view.
The current conversation around the "science of reading" may be the clearest example of how legitimate research can become a test of teacher compliance. I want to be clear here. There is strong evidence for explicit instruction that connects sounds with letters and teaches students to decode words, especially for beginning readers. There are also valid criticisms of practices that encouraged children to guess unfamiliar words from pictures or context instead of attending to the letters in front of them. Phonics matters. None of that requires us to accept the simplified history that has grown around the issue.
In that version of the story, teachers were not teaching phonics at all. They were clinging to ineffective practices because those practices felt familiar, and a national literacy crisis followed. Then "the science" arrived to correct them. But phonics was present to some extent in nearly every elementary classroom I encountered.
My experience is not proof of nationwide consistency, but it is not an anomaly either. A 2023 nationally representative survey found that at least two-thirds of K-5 teachers reported frequently engaging students in foundational reading activities. The real questions were whether instruction was explicit enough, systematic enough, cumulative enough, and responsive enough for students who needed more intensive support. Improving an existing practice requires a very different approach from telling an entire profession that it failed to perform one of its most basic responsibilities.
Instead, an almost bulldog-like atmosphere has developed around the term "science of reading." Teachers and literacy professionals who question a particular curriculum, sequence, pacing requirement, assessment, or implementation decision risk being treated as if they oppose research itself. Their concerns are reduced to wanting to use inferior methods because those methods are comfortable. The phrase becomes a conversation stopper. The product is aligned with "the science," so questioning the product must mean questioning science.
But the science of reading is a body of research. It is not a single curriculum, commercial product, or implementation plan. Research can tell us a great deal about how children develop phonemic awareness, connect sounds to print, build fluency, acquire vocabulary, and comprehend text. Teachers still have to interpret that knowledge in relation to an actual child, classroom, language background, and instructional context. Evidence that one part of literacy instruction has been neglected does not mean every product marketed in its name is equally effective. It certainly does not mean teachers should surrender their judgment about how those products are used.
Under those conditions, hesitation is easily labeled resistance. A teacher who questions a recommendation is "not data driven." A teacher who adapts a scripted lesson lacks fidelity. A teacher who questions how a science of reading initiative is being implemented is accused of opposing best practice. The possibility that the objection is informed by expertise, or that the product simply does not fit the students in front of the teacher, often gets left out of the explanation.
What resistant teachers remember
Teachers do not encounter each new initiative as a blank slate. They remember the curriculum introduced as transformational and abandoned three years later. They remember the platform that consumed hours of training before its contract expired, the assessment system that generated mountains of data no one had time to use, and the intervention that was mandatory until leadership quietly moved on. They remember rebuilding their instruction around each new priority, only to be told that the next priority required them to rebuild it again.
I have spent years being asked to learn new curricula and technologies that were eventually dropped for lack of success. That history changes the way a teacher hears the next promise. When you have lived through the cycle enough times, skepticism is not stubbornness. It is pattern recognition.
Teachers have learned that every "transformational" initiative arrives with confident promises, additional work, and an expectation of enthusiasm. What it does not always arrive with is lasting support or evidence that it will remain long enough to justify the investment. A skeptical teacher may be highly skilled at recognizing the difference between meaningful change and another temporary solution looking for a classroom in which to prove itself.
If education companies want teachers to invest in something new, they cannot treat this institutional memory as an attitude problem. They have to show that the product respects teachers' judgment, addresses a problem teachers actually recognize, and removes enough work to justify the work it creates. Teachers' questions are not barriers to adoption. They are information about whether the product can survive contact with a real classroom.
Buying a product is not the same as using it
Education companies also tend to seek buy-in from the wrong people. They persuade the superintendent who approves the contract, the principal who announces the initiative, or the instructional coach who leads the training. All of those people matter. They can find funding, make time, communicate expectations, and offer support. None of them can make a product work inside someone else's classroom on a Tuesday morning.
A principal may see a demonstration where the platform works smoothly, the lesson fits neatly into the allotted time, and the dashboard produces clear data. The teacher gets the same product alongside absent students, missing passwords, interrupted schedules, dead devices, accommodations, and twenty-five children who do not respond like the children in a demonstration. The buyer evaluates what the product is designed to do. The teacher has to determine whether it can actually be done.
Instructional coaches are closer to classroom reality, but their support cannot replace teacher participation either. A coach may know the curriculum deeply and provide excellent modeling. They usually do not carry the daily responsibility for maintaining that classroom's routines, managing its behavior, grading its work, communicating with its families, and keeping instruction moving when the product breaks down.
Adoption is not one administrative decision. It is a series of small decisions teachers make every day. Do I open the platform? Do I trust this recommendation? Do I follow the script or adapt it? Is the information in this dashboard worth the time it takes to collect? A principal can require compliance. Compliance is not the same thing as meaningful adoption.
By the time teachers are introduced to a new initiative, the important decisions have often already been made. The contract is signed, the rollout is announced, and the training is scheduled. Teachers are invited to provide "feedback" about a decision they have no power to change. When they raise concerns, those concerns can sound like negativity because taking them seriously would require someone to reconsider a commitment already made.
Training is not consultation. Mandated use is not buy-in. If teachers are expected to supply the judgment, labor, troubleshooting, and persistence that make implementation possible, they need a meaningful role before the district commits to the solution.
What listening would actually look like
The answer is not a more persuasive rollout. Teachers need to be involved before there is a product to defend, a contract to justify, or an implementation plan to enforce.
Districts should include classroom teachers when they identify the problem, evaluate possible solutions, and decide whether a purchase should move forward. The group should represent the students who will actually use the product across grade levels, subjects, language backgrounds, disability needs, and school contexts. Teachers should also be paid for that work. Meaningful consultation is professional labor, not one more responsibility to squeeze in after school.
That is not just a courtesy. The Education Endowment Foundation's implementation guidance describes implementation as a collaborative and social process and emphasizes engaging people so they can shape what happens.
Education companies need to send people into schools who are not there to close a sale. A sales representative asks, "How can I convince this district that our product works?" Someone who is there to listen asks different questions. What is already working? Where does the current process break down? What work are teachers doing that no one sees? What would this product add? What would it actually take away?
Those conversations need to happen before a polished demonstration narrows the discussion to the company's preferred solution. Representatives should observe real classrooms and learn how teachers already work. They should listen without treating every concern as an objection to overcome. Then they need to come back and show that the conversation mattered: This is what we heard. This is what we changed. This is what we could not change, and this is why.
Products should be piloted in a small number of real classrooms before a districtwide rollout. A successful pilot should measure more than student scores and login rates. How much preparation did the product require? How often did teachers have to troubleshoot it? Did it eliminate work or duplicate work? Could it accommodate different learners? Did teachers keep using it when no one was watching? A product that produces attractive data while consuming an unsustainable amount of teacher time is not a successful product.
Teacher feedback should continue after the purchase through paid advisory groups, accessible feedback channels, and regular product reviews. Companies should be able to show how teacher input changed the product. Teachers should have influence over what the product becomes, not simply receive advice about how to implement it more faithfully.
The products themselves should support professional judgment. Teachers need tools they can adapt. They should be able to adjust pacing, choose among materials, override a recommendation, and export useful information without being trapped in another dashboard. A strong product does not need to anticipate every classroom. It needs to expect variation and help teachers respond to it.
AI that gives teachers more room to teach
Artificial intelligence could be especially useful here if companies resist the urge to turn it into an automated teacher. I would rather see AI used as a teacher-facing planning and discovery tool, something like an on-demand librarian and instructional guide.
That basic principle is consistent with the U.S. Department of Education's guidance on AI in teaching and learning, which calls for keeping humans in the loop and teachers at the center of instructional decisions, technology selection, and evaluation.
Imagine that a teacher could enter the standard they are addressing, the decoding skills students have learned, their approximate reading levels, and the subjects currently fascinating them. The system could search a vetted collection for authentic texts and decodable materials that fit those needs. It could explain why each selection might work and help the teacher plan a coherent lesson around it.
If a class is fascinated by storms, immigration stories, insects, or the neighborhood surrounding their school, the tool could help locate texts that connect required skills to those interests and lived experiences. It could suggest vocabulary support, background knowledge, discussion questions, audio, visual scaffolds, translations, or more accessible formats. The goal would not be to prescribe the same lesson for every classroom. The goal would be to make responsive teaching more possible by reducing the hours teachers spend searching, sorting, and adapting.
Of course, a tool like that would need safeguards. It should use trustworthy, legally available sources, identify where its materials came from, protect student information, and leave the instructional decision with the teacher. It should not assign a child a fixed identity based on a score or quietly strip the substance from a text in the name of accessibility. It should expand the teacher's ability to choose, not hide the choice inside an algorithm.
That is the difference between using technology to remove teachers from the equation and using it to give them more power within it. The best education products would not try to standardize away teachers' knowledge of their students. They would combine that knowledge with resources no individual teacher has time to find, evaluate, and adapt alone.
George Soper approached Mary Mallon knowing what he needed her to stop doing. A more humane and probably more productive approach would also have asked what she knew, what she needed, and what possibilities remained available to her. Education companies should start there. Stop asking, "How do we make teachers use this?" Start asking, "What are teachers already trying to accomplish, and what could we build that would genuinely help them do it?"
Sources and further reading
• Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical by Anthony Bourdain
• Typhoid Mary's life sentence in quarantine, PBS NewsHour
• State of the American Teacher Survey: 2024 Technical Documentation and Survey Results, RAND
• A School's Guide to Implementation, Education Endowment Foundation
• Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning, U.S. Department of Education
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