STANFORD, CA — Educators on the ground often come up with new ways to drive student achievement, and many of their ideas succeed at the local level. But those innovations don’t spread beyond the school or district. One look at America’s dismal education statistics shows why this needs to change.
A new white paper from the Hoover Institution, building on a study from the Education Futures Council (EFC), Ours to Solve, Once—and for All, provides the first comprehensive framework for understanding how locally developed teacher-originated educational innovations can successfully emerge, spread, and achieve lasting impact at scale.
“Can’t Get There from Here: A Framework for the Start, Spread, and Scale of Bottom-Up Innovation in Education” by Rebecca E. Wolfe arrives as the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress confirms that decades of top-down reform have failed to improve—and in many cases have worsened—student outcomes.
“Teachers are innovating every day in their classrooms, but those innovations rarely spread,” Wolfe said in reference to her paper. “The system is optimized for compliance, not improvement. We need to fundamentally rethink how we support and scale practitioner-driven change.”
Drawing on research in organizational change, network theory, and education reform—including the forty-year success story of AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), which grew from one California teacher serving thirty students to a program operating in forty-seven states—Wolfe explains why scaling locally sourced innovation so often falls short in education. The paper's findings directly support the EFC’s call for restructuring accountability systems to reward adaptive teaching approaches rather than narrow compliance metrics.
Key findings:
- Teachers lack the time, networks, and support to try new approaches—and too often feel shut out of improvement planning altogether.
- Top-down mandates have created a risk-averse culture where maintaining the status quo feels safer than trying something new.
- Innovations spread better when educators can adapt them to local needs rather than follow rigid, one-size-fits-all playbooks.
- Scaling what works requires knowledge-sharing systems that don’t yet exist, leaving schools to repeatedly relearn the same lessons from the same mistakes.
- Failed policies stay on the books for years, consuming time and focus long after it’s clear they aren’t improving outcomes.
The paper offers actionable recommendations for policymakers aligned with the EFC’s state-led approach, including shifting accountability structures to reward adaptive teaching approaches, meaningfully including educators in policy development, and building infrastructure for continuous improvement. For practitioners, Wolfe recommends embracing “tight but loose” implementation frameworks that maintain core principles while allowing contextual flexibility.
“If we don't change the barriers to an education-innovation ecosystem in a significant way, we will find ourselves ten years from now making the same complaints about the same problems,” Wolfe concludes. “Change will occur, but any significant shifts will be a result of local happenstance or continued regulatory strangulation—and neither scenario will produce the positive impact on learning that our students need.”
Rebecca E. Wolfe is an education innovation and systems scholar whose research and initiatives have advanced equitable, personalized, and competency-based learning nationally. She is the founder of Threadwell Solutions and formerly served as vice president of impact and improvement at KnowledgeWorks and as associate vice president at Jobs for the Future. She holds degrees from Harvard and Stanford.
The full white paper is available here.
For media inquiries, please contact Meg Cotter Mazzola at mcotter@stanford.edu.
About the Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University is a public policy research center devoted to the advanced study of economics, politics, history, and political economy—both domestic and foreign—as well as international affairs. Hoover fellows research public policy issues, engaging in scholarship that generates ideas for promoting the social, economic, and political well-being of the United States and other nations.
About the Education Futures Council
The Education Futures Council brings together education leaders, policymakers, and researchers to develop actionable solutions for improving K–12 education outcomes. Through research, convenings, and coalition building, the Council works to advance state-led innovation and outcome-based accountability.
