Teachers carry around a certain kind of frustration. Something more subdued, almost philosophical, rather than the kind that results from challenging pupils or unrealistic schedules, though those are real enough. It’s the sensation of having discovered something that actually works, seeing how your students react in ways that even surprise you, and then realizing that learning ends as soon as it leaves your classroom. It doesn’t go anywhere. No one is able to scale it. It is absorbed by the system in the same way that sand absorbs water.
Hoover Institution researchers have been grappling with that issue for some time. Rebecca Wolfe attempted something uncommon in education policy circles earlier this year with a white paper that built on the Education Futures Council’s “Ours to Solve” study: an honest structural explanation for why locally developed, teacher-originated innovations hardly ever travel. The paper, “Can’t Get There from Here,” comes at a time when the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress has confirmed what many had suspected: that student outcomes have either stagnated or gotten worse as a result of decades of top-down reform. That’s a big compromise. It’s a reckoning.
Because Wolfe’s diagnosis is so familiar, it isn’t especially consoling. Teachers don’t have the time, connections, or real support to try new things. Playing it safe rather than taking a chance has been subtly rewarded by the culture established by years of compliance-focused accountability. It feels safer to obey an order from above, even if it’s a bad one, than to stray in the direction of something better. Ineffective policies frequently remain in place long after the evidence has changed against them, wasting resources that could be used for other purposes. In other words, it’s a system that is structured around its own continuation rather than its own advancement.
The AVID example Wolfe uses is remarkable because of how uncommon it is. Advancement Via Individual Determination began with a teacher from California, thirty pupils, and what may seem like a typical goal. It now operates in 47 states after 40 years. That trajectory—from a single classroom to a nationwide presence—is truly remarkable in American education, which may help to explain why the same narrative is repeated so frequently. There aren’t many options similar to it.
It’s worth reading in conjunction with Frederick Hess’s sharper, more skeptical perspective from the American Enterprise Institute, which surfaced last year and made a slightly different argument: that the problem lies in the education sector’s fixation with innovation. Not all new things are worthy of celebration. Hess is direct about this: districts are constantly switching between practice A and practice B, purchasing malfunctioning technology that no one uses, and mistaking innovation for advancement. Once you see the pattern clearly, it has an almost exhausting quality. The enthusiasm for “innovative practices” and “innovation zones” usually benefits enthusiasts more than students.
Wolfe’s demands seem more realistic. There is actual precedent in other fields for the “tight but loose” implementation framework she suggests, which maintains fundamental principles while permitting local adaptation. It’s how prosperous organizations disseminate ideas without stifling them. It is genuinely unclear if American school systems, with their unique combination of political pressure, bureaucratic inertia, and actual underfunding, can truly adopt that posture.
There is at least one reason to keep trying, according to research from New Zealand. Between 2020 and 2023, the Better Start Literacy Approach reached over 3,000 teachers in 819 schools, resulting in quantifiable improvements in early reading that were not significantly influenced by gender, ethnicity, or income. That’s significant because it shows that implementing evidence-based strategies on a large scale is not impossible; all it takes is preparation, funding, and active community involvement. In theory, simple things. incredibly challenging in practice.
After reading all of this, the honest conclusion is that there isn’t actually a lack of innovative ideas. There aren’t enough systems made to transport them everywhere.
