Teachers and administrators in American public schools have felt a certain kind of frustration for decades, but they haven’t been able to put it into words that are clear enough to describe it. When a teacher comes up with a new way to teach or a small change to the way she does things, her students respond. Scores on tests change. Engagement gets better. The word gets passed along the hall and maybe even to the next building. Most of the time, the idea stops after that. It doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t get bigger. When that teacher moves schools, retires, or just gets tired of pushing it, it goes away quietly.
A brand-new white paper from Stanford’s Hoover Institution tries to figure out and stop this quiet death of good ideas. The paper “Can’t Get There from Here: A Framework for the Start, Spread, and Scale of Bottom-Up Innovation in Education” was written by Rebecca E. Wolfe, an education innovation scholar who has worked at KnowledgeWorks and Jobs for the Future. It may be the first serious attempt to map the whole lifecycle of teacher-driven educational change. Not only how new ideas start, but also why they stop moving forward and what conditions might allow them to grow.
The timing isn’t a mistake. The 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is the most reliable test of student learning in the country, confirmed what many teachers already knew: decades of reforms from the top down have not made things better. Most of the time, they’ve made things worse. Orders come down from above, people follow them, but no results happen, and the cycle starts all over again. When you read Wolfe’s research, you get the impression that the system was never meant to be better. Order was built into it.
With Wolfe’s framework, the ground floor is what makes it stand out. She uses research in organizational change and network theory to build on a study by the Education Futures Council called “Ours to Solve, Once and for All.” Her main point is that innovations created by teachers have always shown the most promise, but it is hard to make those innovations happen on a larger scale because teachers are often alone, have a lot of time pressure, and are afraid of taking risks because they have been held accountable for years. She says that teachers often feel left out of the planning processes for classroom improvements that have the most impact on them.
It says that AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is one of the few cases where something important was shown to be true. It all began in a classroom in California with one teacher and thirty students. Now it’s in forty-seven states. That story is interesting not because it was simple, but because it shows that big things are possible when things are set up right. AVID did well in part because it wasn’t forced to follow a rigid, one-size-fits-all model. It gave schools the chance to change it. That adaptability wasn’t a flaw; it was how it worked.
This way of implementing Wolfe’s framework is called “tight but loose”: stick to the main ideas but let practitioners make changes that work for them. It’s a good idea, but it’s surprising how little that philosophy has been used in American school policy. At the policy level, there is a natural tendency toward standardization, which makes sense given how big the system is, but this always backfires when it comes to teaching.
One of the more insightful points of the paper is about institutional memory. When policies don’t work, they stay in place for years after it’s clear they aren’t, she says, taking up time and attention that could be used for something better. Because there aren’t any real ways to share what works or keep track of what doesn’t, schools keep making the same mistakes and learning the same lessons over and over again. It looks like an individual problem, but it’s really a structural problem.
It’s still not clear if this framework will be taken seriously in the policy discussions that make school systems work. Frameworks tend to stay put on shelves. But Wolfe’s warning at the end of the paper feels like it was well-deserved: the same complaints will be around in ten years if the things that stand in the way of a real education-innovation ecosystem don’t change in a meaningful way. We are not pessimistic. I see a pattern there.
