- Education
- Reforming K-12 Education
This essay is excerpted from Can’t Get There from Here: A Framework for the Start, Spread, and Scale of Bottom-Up Innovation in Education, published by the Hoover Institution’s Education Futures Council. Read the full report (with the author’s complete notes) here.
Teachers and administrators are the ultimate improv team, adjusting on the fly in response to everything from student reactions to lesson plans, who showed up for class, or whether the homecoming dance has stolen everyone’s focus. Contrary to the narrative that education resists change, the more accurate story is that the education practice is rooted in near-constant informal feedback and “being reinvented all the time,” just not according to any thought-out “macro planning.” And despite this day-to-day responsiveness, the release of the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores comes not as a wake-up call, but as terrible confirmation of what so many in education already knew: learners are not improving and, in fact, are performing worse than they did decades ago. These declines extend beyond math and reading to mental health, attendance, and engagement—all at historic lows.
Years of investment in innovation and reform have yielded little improvement but many lessons. Most findings indicate that the current education infrastructure prevents innovation from emerging, spreading, sustaining, and demonstrating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. A major 2025 consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found that “although a number of these innovations have had the potential to impact learners on a broad scale, that potential often remains unrealized” because of fragmented implementation and lack of systemic support, resulting in gaps in equitable impact.
Or, as Charles Payne stated in his book So Much Reform, So Little Change, “the essential problem in our schools isn’t children learning; it is adult learning.”
While researchers have long studied and documented top-down mandates, academic- or outsider-initiated transformation, and other large-scale reforms, we know relatively little in the education field about how to support and scale bottom-up innovation. If change is inevitable but not always impactful, and if even successful innovation often fails to scale or sustain, what conditions and mechanisms help or hinder growth of bottom-up innovation?
How to make change
Successful scaling of educational innovation involves three phases: the initial catalyst; adoption and adaptation beyond the original context; and eventual scaling and sustaining, often taking shape as a larger reform effort. The original education innovation arises from the interplay of a problem to solve, an idea to address it, and action to implement the idea. Many innovations stop after solving the initial problem. However, if the outcomes connect with conducive environments, networks, and infrastructure, the innovation may transfer to other schools or districts.
The potential for education innovation to emerge exists at all system levels—from classrooms to statehouses. Yet researchers note that it is “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.” The scarcity of bottom-up innovation being documented or researched may reflect that bottom-up innovations often appear banal and get overlooked; as David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) point out, blackboards and indoor plumbing were the hot innovation topics du jour in the 1920s.
Researchers are unlikely to pick up on or study seemingly mundane changes in schools as today’s equivalent of adding a blackboard to every classroom. It may be just as likely that a century-plus of a decentralized yet mandate-heavy and demoralized system stifles productive innovation growth and spread, offering little to study.
To understand where bottom-up change originates, we must ask: Where do teachers, school leaders, or district personnel get innovative ideas? How do these ideas spread from classroom to classroom and beyond? What makes them likely to be implemented locally? A bottom-up innovation does not appear out of thin air. Rather, it is a combination of needs, ideas, relationships, and exposure.
People power
Knowledge transfer and learning in organizations is a social endeavor, often informal, anchored in the exchange between an individual and their trusted networks. It comes as no surprise, then, that the genesis, growth, and diffusion of education innovations are deeply rooted in the teachers’ relationships, or what network theorists call “relationally embedded and context-dependent.” For example, a study of teachers in Norway found that “the most innovative teachers tend to have the largest personal networks . . . while also being highly interconnected.” Collectively, these knowledge-transfer and network-theory studies indicate that new information is a key innovation source, but specific training or formal exposure to outside ideas (e.g., required professional development) may not be as strong a catalyst as organic networks.
Innovative ideas tend to come from a relatively small number of well-networked or designated personnel at the local level, and they spread because other teachers have relationships with these insider innovators.
Physical space also serves as an innovation catalyst through informal exchanges in hallways, teacher lounges, and department meetings. Corridors, often underestimated as mere passageways, provide opportunities for encounters, learning, collaboration, celebration, and even disrupting the status quo. Despite the image of the teacher as a lone actor behind a closed door, schools are in fact “fairly porous institutions” that change over time to reflect broader culture, making osmosis a “powerful, if underappreciated, mechanism for change.”
Leaders and bureaucrats
School leaders can foster a culture that is conducive to innovation through professional learning communities that focus on collaboration, shared vision, learning, reflective inquiry, and transparent exchange of practices On the other hand, evidence shows that school leaders may have a tendency to squash a generative culture by pre-emptively placing restrictions on bottom-up innovation.
Whether real or perceived, the federal and state regulatory environment also shapes the culture for innovation. Bureaucracies like the centuries-old education system are optimized for control and efficiency, fostering rigid rules and rewarding compliance. This rigidity discourages “thinking outside the box” and cultivates a risk-averse culture among civil servants such as educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned educators to avoid failure, which can stigmatize schools and communities. As a result, new initiatives may evoke fear of failure and loss of the status quo.
In other words, teachers have been conditioned by the policy environment to avoid innovative practices in favor of business as usual. Bureaucratic structures naturally create environments hostile to the agility needed for innovation, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of resistance.
Where to start
Years focused on standardized testing, the pandemic, political upheaval, and the endless layering of new initiatives have led to high educator burnout and loss of collective efficacy. Adding innovation expectations without addressing existing overload can worsen outcomes, causing initiative fatigue and distrust. Consequently, “burnout-related resistance can occur as a way for staff to conserve their energy and well-being or even as an act of self-preservation.” Confusion, burnout, and exclusion are not a sound recipe to foster the spread of bottom-up innovation.
Many of us who have spent time coaching teachers have realized some version of “They’re only going to pay attention if I give them something they can use in the classroom tomorrow.” Research supports that this is not only a strong coaching approach, but it applies to nearly any kind of classroom change or innovation. Teachers embrace new practices that can be used immediately or easily added to existing methods, like chalkboards in the 1920s or overhead projectors in the 1980s.
Fostering meaningful bottom-up innovation that has the potential to scale and improve outcomes calls for major shifts across policy, practice, and research.
- Policymakers should build systems that reward leaders and educators who foster ambitious, adaptive teaching approaches. Bureaucrats can write regulations that maintain a clear call for positive outcomes; that still support flexible, context-sensitive implementation; and that avoid rigid replication mandates.
- Policy must move beyond window-dressing involvement of the people with intimate day-to-day knowledge of the classroom.
- Embracing “fail-forward” cycles—where ideas are tested, studied, and iterated—can prevent the rinse-and-repeat pattern of ineffective reforms. Without mechanisms to study, adapt, or abandon innovations, schools continue to use ineffective practices simply because they “feel” like they should work. Many innovations fail (and perhaps should!), but a system that learns from failure can still thrive and grow.
- Schools cannot be agile sources of innovation without a workforce that embraces inquiry and experimentation. The current profession attracts and rewards risk-averse individuals instead of those with experimental mindsets. Innovation will thrive if teaching is reframed and rewarded as an inquiry-based-improvement profession, not a compliance-and-delivery mechanism.
- Local diffusion thrives in environments that support collaboration, trust, and informal exchange. Building “collective capacity” is as important as the innovation itself.
- At any stage of growth, innovations must be accompanied by smart tools, training, and time to implement. Yet, even with the right tools, teachers cannot simply add new practices without support or letting go of other demands. Layering on new initiatives without adjusting existing practices leads to burnout and retrenchment.
Futures
Education change has long been held to slow and steady evolution, despite more than a century of attempts and promises to reform at a quicker pace. The coming artificial intelligence (AI) revolution far from renders the mechanisms of bottom-up innovation immediately obsolete.
Future research will benefit from a comparison of the new reality to the framework described here. This comparison will enable researchers to better evaluate whether the changes wrought by AI are truly seismic and durable—or just the latest blackboards to enter the classroom in a deeply entrenched and decentralized system.
