Phi Delta KappanVolume 99, Issue 8, May 2018, Pages 46-50

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Fragmento de: Jay P. Greene. “Learning from failure”.

Learning from failure

What can education leaders, advocates, and policy makers learn
from the failures of recent high-profile school reform initiatives?

By Jay P. Greene and Michael Q. McShane

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett

American education is littered with

failed reforms. Across the country, we
see charter schools that have been shut-
tered, federal funding streams that have
run dry, philanthropic initiatives that
never panned out, and brand-new teacher
evaluation systems that have already been
marked for the junkyard.
Of course, failure isn’t necessarily a bad
thing — when pursuing a goal as urgent
and complex as school improvement,
some amount of failure will be inevita-
ble. The problem, though, is that policy
makers, foundation officials, and pundits
have strong incentives to deny that their
favored initiatives have gone badly, and
they rarely acknowledge and learn from
those failures before moving on to the next
reform. As a result, they tend to repeat
their mistakes and make much less prog-
ress than they should.

JAY P. GREENE (jpg@[Link]; @jaypgreene) is

Distinguished Professor and head of the department
of education reform at the University of Arkansas in
Fayetteville. MICHAEL Q. McSHANE (mcshane@
[Link]; @MQ_McShane) is director of national
research at EdChoice, in Indianapolis, Ind. They are the
co-editors of Failure Up Close: What Happens, Why It
Happens, and What We Can Learn from It (Rowman
and Littlefield, 2018).

46 Kappan May 2018

Image: iStock
 Nor have past failings caused education reformers ing to ask scholars to criticize others’ mistakes, but
to slow down. The last few years have seen major we reasoned that it would be more productive to
new philanthropic organizations, such as the Chan ask them to reflect on failures that challenged their
Zuckerberg Initiative and the Emerson Collective, own beliefs — most of them did so.) The result was
enter the fray and make splashy investments in per- an edited volume, Failure Up Close, released in Jan-
sonalized learning, school redesign, and a host of uary 2018.
other strategies. Meanwhile, with every new legis- While the themes of these papers varied widely,
lative session, a raft of new policies, regulations, and their arguments tended to overlap in interesting
programs emerges from state capitals and trickles ways, suggesting that for all of the sharp disagree-
through public agencies, local school districts, and ments that have divided the field of K-12 education
eventually into schools. Further, because the Ev- in recent years, it may be possible to build a strong
ery Student Succeeds Act gives states more policy- consensus in some areas. As we describe below, many
making discretion than they have had in years, the pace of our authors and conference participants agreed
of experimentation will likely continue to increase. that school improvement cannot succeed unless
What can we do to make the next generation of policy makers, advocates, and educators are willing
reforms more successful than the last one? As the to make a few difficult trade-offs and observe a few
old proverb puts it, the best time to plant a tree is critical lessons.
20 years ago, but the second-best time is today. We Most important, our contributors voiced a strong
cannot go back and undo the mistakes that educa- consensus about the nature of education policy: Af-
tion reformers and policy makers have made over the ter years of treating school reform as a competition
last few decades — having to do with standards and among theoretical perspectives and technical strat-
accountability, teacher evaluation, and more — but egies, the time has come for all of us to recognize
we can learn from them. that education is an inherently political enterprise,
To acknowledge mistakes is not to malign those in which we all constantly struggle over how best to
who committed them. Some critics may choose to spend the public’s money and serve the nation’s chil-
portray the contemporary school reform movement dren. The sooner we stop trying to “get politics out
as a nefarious conspiracy on the part of evil plutocrats of education” — as though that were possible — the
hoping to destroy America’s schools, but in fact, the sooner we can engage in the real work of educational
vast majority of reformers (ourselves included) are improvement. Politics is about persuasion. Politics is
well-meaning people who are acting in good faith about interests. Politics is about consequences. Ed-
and trying to do right by kids. No doubt, we’ve done ucation policy cannot escape those dynamics, nor
many things wrong, but in addressing those mis- should it, because politics is the best tool we have
takes, it’s not particularly useful to focus on whose as a society to adjudicate competing values. It is also
side we’re on or what motives drive us. Rather, the the means by which we must navigate the following
question is, what lessons can we learn, so that we can trade-offs and learn the following lessons.
“fail better” in the future?
With that question in mind, we convened a confer-
ence in May 2017 in Kansas City, featuring a number Three trade-offs
of the country’s leading education scholars who rep- Those hoping to improve the education system
resent a broad range of perspectives on educational must be honest about the difficult trade-offs inherent
improvement: Larry Cuban (from Stanford Uni- in education reform. Very rarely are decision mak-
versity), Matthew DiCarlo (the Shanker Institute), ers presented with one option that’s clearly better
Anna Egalite (North Carolina State University), than all the others. Rather, they have to choose from
Rick Hess and Paige Wiley (the American Enter- among any number of competing philosophies, val-
prise Institute), Ashley Jochim (the Center for Re- ues, and beliefs about teaching, learning, and school
inventing Public Education), Matthew Ladner (the improvement. And when they make a specific choice,
Charles Koch Institute), Megan Tompkins-Stange it’s often because somebody — e.g., a state official,
(the University of Michigan), Martin West (Harvard the federal government, the head of a large philan-
University), and Daniel Willingham (the University thropic organization — has put their thumb on the
of Virginia). scale, using their influence to favor one approach at
We asked each to write and deliver a paper about the expense of another. Such trade-offs are inevita-
an education reform that failed, with attention to ble, and we ignore them at our peril.
the lessons learned from that experience. We didn’t
tell the participants what to write about, but we did #1: Urgency vs. prudence
encourage them to focus on a reform strategy with Sometimes, two conflicting arguments are both
which they were generally sympathetic. (It’s tempt- true at the same time. For example, it’s true that
V99 N8 [Link] 47
 The sooner we stop trying to “get politics out of education,”
the sooner we can engage in the real work of educational
improvement.

millions of American children are stuck in schools (1989) tugged on this thread a bit harder, arguing
that are not meeting their needs, and if we care about that central offices often struggle even to keep track
those kids, then we should fix their schools imme- of what goes on in such “coping organizations” on
diately. On the other hand, it’s also true that school any given day. As a result, trying to impose top-down
improvement happens slowly, in fits and starts, and policies on schools is fraught with challenges.
if we care about those kids, then we shouldn’t rush This hasn’t stopped policy makers from trying,
into anything. Often, when education reformers try though. Over the last decade, for example, many
to make quick, sweeping changes, they just make states and districts rushed to implement central-
things worse. ized teacher evaluation systems, even though critics
The desire to go big and go fast has its advan- warned, for good reason, that they wouldn’t provide
tages. Ambitious school reform movements create a valid or reliable measures of classroom practice. Sim-
sense of urgency, optimism, and emotional commit- ilarly, the federal government’s School Improvement
ment, and they tend to win the backing of powerful Grant program required applicants to choose from a
political leaders and the financial support of major list of highly prescriptive school turnaround models.
philanthropic organizations (who always make those Not surprisingly, neither of these reforms achieved
movements look great in their glossy annual reports, their intended results.
attracting even more supporters). Don’t get us wrong — “bottom-up” reform has
But going small and slow has its virtues as well. It is its challenges, too. Working to improve practice at
far easier to identify problems and make course cor- the school or district level is a messy and uncertain
rections to a program that serves 5,000 students than process, requiring coordinated efforts by disparate
one that reaches 5 million. Smaller, more cautious groups of people. The old adage “too many cooks
initiatives are far less likely to burn out their own spoil the broth” remains apt. Local politics is often
leadership or exhaust their teachers and staff. They dysfunctional, and relying on a grassroots political
are less likely to promise the moon and then, once process can seem like a painfully slow and inadequate
their lofty ambitions fall short, alienate the families way to address students’ urgent needs. On the other
and communities that were counting on them. And hand, without the buy-in, input, support, and elbow
when small initiatives fail, the effects are felt by a grease of the people actually doing the work at the
relatively modest number of students. ground level, no school improvement strategy will
To be sure, the ability to act on a large scale is one succeed, no matter how elegant its design.
of the chief virtues of public policy, but it is also a
danger. Whether it is “no-excuses” schools sucking #3: Politics as the cause of failure vs. politics as
up most of the charter school movement’s oxygen the solution
(and funding, and cap space) or the rush to adopt new It was no less a philosopher than Homer Simpson
classroom technologies before teachers are ready who came up with that memorable toast to alcohol:
(or want) to use them, reformers often get ahead “The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.”
of themselves in their quest for scale. If they hope If he were involved in school reform, he might just
to arrive at effective, widely adopted policies and as well have addressed his toast to politics.
practices, they must figure out how to balance their Politics certainly does cause many of the prob-
ambitions with a sense of prudence and a willingness lems we face in K-12 education. Thanks to political
to tinker and make adjustments along the way. pressure, for instance, state and district leaders often
cut promising initiatives and programs prematurely,
#2: Top down vs. bottom up before they’ve gone through the multiple years of
Nearly 40 years ago, Richard Elmore (1979) implementation, assessment, redesign, and improve-
pointed to what he called the “noble lie” of public ment that might have enabled them to succeed. If one
administration: Some organizations — schools, for political party backs a new program, then the other
instance — feature a large amount of ground-level party will try to kill it off at the first sign of weakness.
decision making that central planners simply cannot In lean times especially, partisans reach quickly for
control, despite claiming to do so. A decade later, the budget axe.
in his seminal work Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson But at the same time, politics is the lifeblood of
48 Kappan May 2018
school improvement. No new educational program might say the same of philanthropists, leaders of
can flourish without political support, and, in turn, charter school management organizations, technol-
no program can maintain that support unless it de- ogy entrepreneurs, and others) should behave not
livers on at least some of its promises. To borrow a like craftsmen but like gardeners — “not to shape
line often attributed to Harry Truman, good policy the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork,
is good politics. but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the
Perhaps even more important, politics is the final appropriate environment.”
arbiter of the success or failure of any given policy, State legislators do not operate schools, nor do
teaching strategy, or school improvement model. foundation executives, nor even school board mem-
Research findings, anecdotes, and test scores can in- bers. At best, they can create the conditions whereby
form the debate about whether a particular school thoughtful and talented educators can teach children
reform has worked or not worked, or whether it is the things they need to be successful in life. Focusing
a “good” approach or a “bad” one, but the decision on how to create those conditions, rather than on try-
to continue or abandon that approach will always be ing to engineer a particular outcome, will maximize
political in nature. the likelihood of long-term success.

Lesson #2: You can’t make an end run around

Three lessons democracy
So how can policy makers, philanthropists, politi- If it’s true (as we describe above) that politics is
cians, school leaders, parents, and taxpayers navigate both the cause of and the solution to the problems
the contradictory world of education policy, balance we face in K-12 education, then reformers have no
these trade-offs, and maximize their chances of doing choice but to embrace the tensions of political life.
right by kids? There are no easy answers. If we’ve Ultimately, no policy can succeed without securing
learned anything from the last two decades of school a strong base of political support. And we’re not
reform, it is that education reform is hard, uncertain, talking about some “grass tops” agreement amongst
and often frustrating work. But, there are some les- elites or a law enacted hastily by a state legislature
sons that we can glean from past efforts. without much public input. Given American educa-
tors’ proven ability to resist top-down control, it’s
Lesson #1: Be humble pointless to try to impose decisions on schools from
Whether it is the 100% proficiency goal of No above. Ideas need to be debated in the open, the
Child Left Behind or the School Improvement proper channels need to be respected, and the hard
Grant program’s promise to turn around the bottom work of convincing people has to be done in earnest.
5% of schools, education reformers have wildly exag- There is simply no other way.
gerated the potential effects of their policy proposals. The Common Core State Standards offer a prime
Worse yet, supporters of these programs knew full example of how this can go awry. Supporters rushed
well, from the beginning, that these promises were the standards’ adoption, used whatever political chan-
ridiculous, but in hopes of scoring quick political nels were most convenient, eschewed public debate
wins, they were all too willing to say things that they and discussion, and in doing so triggered a massive
knew to be false. backlash that either caused states to reject the stan-
In the short term, this kind of bravado may have dards outright or led them to water down the ini-
helped reformers win support, but it also guaranteed tiative to such an extent that there’s little left of the
that their initiatives would be viewed as failures over original vision, which called for the careful alignment
the long term. When told to pursue unrealistic goals, of standards, tests, curricular resources, and teaching
schools and communities eventually lose faith, and strategies, all to be shared across state borders. To
programs die on the vine. Modest goals might not stand any real chance of success over the long term,
be as enticing, but they’re much more easily reached. that vision, and its tangible benefits, would have had
The need for humility extends beyond goal set- to be embraced by a real constituency.
ting, though. Every day, learning goes on in mil-
lions of classrooms at more than 100,000 schools Lesson #3: You can’t hide behind technocracy
across the U.S., and presiding over those classrooms If policy advocates cannot make an end run around
are millions of human beings, each with their own democracy, nor can they hide behind technocracy
thoughts, strengths, talents, and desires. Policy can (loosely defined as “rule by experts”). When trying
only do so much to compel those individual teach- to build support for a policy proposal, it’s always
ers to act in particular ways. Thus, as the economist tempting to claim “This is strongly supported by
Friedrich von Hayek (1975) put it in his acceptance the research” or “We’re seeking to implement evi-
speech for the Nobel Prize, governments (and one dence-based best practices.” The problem, though,
V99 N8 [Link] 49
 We hope that readers will examine policies with humility,
recognizing that even though policy has its limits, it can
positively affect outcomes.

is that educating children is not like solving an engi- included!) and to ask whether the subject they’re opin-
neering problem, and the research rarely generates ing about is one that they actually understand.
clear evidence that a particular teaching strategy or
educational model works. In fact, we have no common
agreed-upon definition of what it even means to say In closing
something “works” in the classroom, or that it might The world of education reform needs to get more
be replicable. More often than not, research can only comfortable with complexity. More often than not,
help us understand the various trade-offs at play in contextual factors affect the implementation of pol-
any decision we make about policy or practice — it icies and even the definition of success and failure.
might tell us, for example, that a particular approach This is not a bad thing. We live in a big, diverse,
has worked for some students and not others, or that it pluralistic nation that draws tremendous strength
has led to student improvements on a certain measure from the wide spectrum of ideas and opinions that
but only when implemented in a very expensive way. our citizens possess. Our political process, frustrat-
That is, the evidence provided by educational research ing though it may be, winnows and refines ideas, and
doesn’t tell us which course of action we ought to take; our decentralized, federal system allows for experi-
at best, it helps inform our all-too-human process of mentation and pressure-testing. All of this informs
choosing one option over another. and shapes policy, and, when channeled to produc-
It is also worth noting that the “expertise” that pol- tive ends, makes policies better.
icies rest on can be an awfully thin reed. For example, We do not want people to walk away from this
researchers with deep expertise in one area are fre- article as nihilists. The purpose here is not to ar-
quently asked to weigh in on another. And studies of gue that nothing will ever work or that all sins can
“best practices” may simply call attention to a smatter- be washed away by saying that success is context-
ing of things observed at successful schools, without dependent. Rather, we hope that readers will examine
asking whether the same things might also be going policies with humility, recognizing that even though
on in less successful schools. In short, it’s always wise policy has its limits, it can positively affect outcomes.
to be skeptical of education experts (present company We hope they will also have more faith, and invest
more time and energy, in our political process to put
policies through the necessary paces and get them
enacted with real support. We hope that they won’t
pooh-pooh small innovations like a one-off charter
school with a unique design, a teacher evaluation
tool that a school district has worked hard to create
and implement, or a set of standards that a commu-
nity has created to reflect its values. Rather, we hope
that they will agree that small improvements can and
should be woven into our broader understanding of
educational improvement and can help our school
system move forward.  K

References

Elmore, R. (1979). Backward mapping: Implementation research

and policy decisions. Political Science Quarterly, 94 (4), 601-
616.

Von Hayek, F.A. (1975). The pretence of knowledge. The

Swedish Journal of Economics, 77 (4), 433-442.

“My book report got a rejection slip.” Wilson, J.Q. (1989). Bureaucracy. New York, NY: Basic Books.

50 Kappan May 2018