Editor’s note: This is the third article in a series that outlines some foundational principles for successful adoption of innovative education reforms. The final post will look at the importance of location and defining success for innovation adoption.
Consider two education-related political campaign slogans:
- “Things at our schools are going to get worse before they get better.”
- “My education reforms are so innovative that they going to be YUUGGE, but…they could also be a major disaster. Only time will tell. Vote for [fill in the candidate’s name]!”
Can you imagine a candidate using either? Neither can I. Yet these two slogans represent two critical realities of innovation adoption.
As the first one indicates, innovations represent a change from the status quo, and these changes and transitions can be messy. In addition, as noted by Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation, the more disruptive an innovation, the more likely it is that the initial results or direction of the performance curve will be down, not up.
In many ways, the changes initiated when an innovation is adopted are reminiscent of cleaning out one’s garage. At first there you determine that things need to get better, and you’ve got a plan on how to proceed. Then, with that burst of energy and excitement, you jump in and start pulling things off the shelves. After thirty minutes, you start to look around the garage and realize (to your chagrin) that it now actually looks worse than when you started. You begin to wonder if it would have been better had you not undertaken the project in the first place. Yet you decide to keep pushing forward where you reach that tipping point when you begin to see the end result really is going to be worth the effort. Finally, you hit the final stretch and focus on really finishing the job, not just putting things back on the shelf haphazardly.
For the education reformer, however, this innovation adoption process presents some real public perception problems. Who wants to run on a platform that promises education innovations that are going to make things worse initially but, eventually, much better? That’s not a very politically comfortable position, especially knowing that the innovations’ opponents will use any perceived failure to advocate for returning to the status quo?
This was illustrated by the responses to recent studies of the Ohio and Louisiana voucher programs. While some of the previous voucher studies showed favorable results, the Ohio and Louisiana programs did not. Predictably, voucher opponents were quick to shout, “See, we told you that vouchers are bad and hurt kids!”
But if we better educated the public about how innovation works, an initial step back in results wouldn’t be a surprise.
Unfortunately lost in the conversation of the Ohio and Louisiana studies is that, contrary to what we should expect with that kind of an architectural innovation, vouchers have largely been a great success right from the start—and notwithstanding Ohio and Louisiana, this early success is a testament to vouchers’ immense potential to improve our educational outcomes for our children. Going back to the garage-cleaning example, our challenge now is to finish the adoption process.
The second campaign slogan speaks to the similarities between stock investing and innovations. Riskier investments have greater potential for significant returns—but they’re also more likely to be a major bust. This is also true of education reforms. But we must be mindful that, unlike financial investments, busts in education affect more than a school’s bottom line—they also affect its students.
For this reason, the most disruptive innovations will either have to start and be incubated outside the traditional education system, or tried in areas where the current educational results are so terrible already that there’s no where to go but up. Competency-based education, for example, would shift school structure and schooling so significantly that it ought to be incubated in one of these two ways.
These two innovation realities speak to why education reforms and innovations are best driven by those outside the political system, where donors and reform advocates have the ability to think long-term, and aren’t so affected by news and election cycles. And indeed, America’s vibrant philanthropic community has made it possible for such entities to successfully incubate innovations long enough to learn whether they work—and long enough to turn public opinion and enable politicians to turn the aforementioned slogans into winning reform campaigns.
Dr. Lyall J. Swim is the managing partner at Junto Strategy.
The views expressed herein represent the opinions of the author and not necessarily the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.