When Education Reform Loses Touch With Reality

For the past twenty years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about—and advocating for—accountability in public education. I wrote about some of that experience in my recent paper, Inside the Mississippi Marathon, in which I chronicle Mississippi’s twenty-year climb from worst to first, when adjusting for demographics, in reading and math outcomes. Education advocates like me frequently talk about what adults in schools and positions of leadership should be doing (or not doing), and how we should hold them accountable for it. We rarely talk about what accountability means for most of the people generating education policy ideas.

Now that I have joined the ranks of national education reformers, I am thinking more and more about that question.

"The farther advocates move away from the children we seek to serve, the more misaligned the incentives become."

I have strong feelings about the responsibilities of policy wonks for good reason. Years ago, I was working on a major piece of education legislation in Mississippi, one of the many I worked on over the course of my career. A person from a national organization came down from Washington, D.C.—we will call this person “The Snob”—and met with several policymakers about the bill. I do not recall exactly how I came to be in this particular private meeting between The Snob and Mississippi Senate Education Chair Gray Tollison, but I do recall that it was not quite clear to me why The Snob had come down. She did not represent any constituency that was critical to the passage of the bill, nor did she have the standing in Mississippi to matter too much one way or another. And though she was on our side of the debate, we also did not need any more “experts” from D.C. I had already mastered the ins and outs of the legislation after spending years reading all the credible research and talking to other specialists and practitioners.

All of this would have been news to The Snob, though, who clearly felt her opinions were of the utmost importance. The meeting went off the rails almost immediately after finishing the usual niceties. “I totally disagree,” The Snob emphatically declared when we explained why one section of the bill did not exactly match the theoretical ideal that she believed in. We tried, very diplomatically, to explain again that this was an aspect of the bill that had been a source of enormous trouble and that it had taken significant work to find a solution palatable to everyone involved. “Well, I get to say whatever I want because I’m not from here,” she sniffed. “I can go back to D.C.”

It was a shocking thing to say, especially with the tone she took. Had she shared either her critique of that portion of the bill or her belief that she could bear no consequences for her words either in public or to any other Mississippi legislator than the one sitting beside me, I likely would have had to spend the next month trying to salvage the bill from the jaws of death for the umpteenth time. It took everything in me not to yell at her from across the table. The best I could do was shoot her a Julia Sugarbaker-worthy death glare.

Tollison, though, with the aplomb of a legislator quite used to people at the Capitol having no social or self-awareness, gracefully moved the conversation along. The Snob went back to D.C.—praise the Lord—and we were able to forget all about her opinions and pass the bill after several more weeks of effort.

But that interaction stuck with me.

In the years since, I have seen advocates, usually national, get a state to pass a bill stuffed with their Ivory Tower ideas, check it off the map, and decamp, leaving the locals to flail about in the aftermath. When the idea as originally conceived will not work in practice, the failure becomes the fault of the locals—not the “experts” from out of town who pushed it.

Politicians must face voters at the ballot box—and state legislators also see their voters in their daily lives quite often—but who are advocates accountable to? When I led a state-based organization, I implicitly knew the answer to that question. I was accountable to my children, my neighbors and their children, the children I had taught, my extended family members, the people I had grown up with, the Mississippi teachers and educational leaders who had to implement my ideas, even the strangers I met in the grocery store. These were people I was in community with, had been in community with, and would be in community with for many years to come. If something I had fought for did not work, I could not get on a plane and absolve myself of the consequences. This sense of responsibility is one of the reasons I worked so hard to implement the laws I advocated in the legislature and why I was willing to amend them whenever it was clear we had not quite gotten something right.

I am not in community with the people affected by my ideas in the same way now because I am no longer engaged in the day-to-day work of solving specific problems in a particular context. Previously, I had a front-row seat to how policy was translated into action and an extremely large network of colleagues that I regularly called—or who called me—to talk about how things were going and what we could do better. That constant push-and-pull sharpened my thinking and made me a better policy wonk and advocate for Mississippi’s children. Now, I have to be very proactive if I do not want to become either stuck in a bubble or trapped in my own past. I suddenly understand how The Snob might have developed her mentality, even if she started her career with the best of intentions.

The farther advocates move away from the children we seek to serve, the more misaligned the incentives become. I have been struck by how many times in the last year I have encountered people who have clearly never had to take responsibility for the impact of their ideas on real people. When outcomes are harder to trace to their source, other measures—like being at the center of the zeitgeist, having the ear of wealthy donors, increasing one’s proximity to power, or cultivating personal fame—can begin to look like success, regardless of whether the lives of any children actually get better. 

After a year of thinking about this, I am still not quite sure what the solution is. It seems too Pollyannaish of me to hope that the national community of education reformers spends more time reflecting on whether our own quests for relevance drive some of the destructive policies (and policy churn) we see at the state level. Perhaps humility is too much to ask of advocates in any field, as it is a profession far too prone to the adage “sometimes wrong, never in doubt.”

In the absence of a structural solution, I can only make a personal commitment to seeking accountability through new ties to the children, families, educators, and local advocates across the country affected by the ideas I advocate. Consider this answer a work in progress.

Rachel Canter is the Director of Education Policy for the Reinventing America’s Schools project at the Progressive Policy Institute. She founded and led Mississippi First for sixteen years.