A Different Perspective
Instead of continuing to tinker within the current structure, we need to rethink how we operate our schools. Education reform efforts over the past half century have aimed to enhance or improve various aspects of the public education system while retaining the essence of its institutional structure. These reforms have included add-ons of various types, regulatory constraints designed to prevent poor outcomes, and expansions of existing operations that, even when viewed as promising, have failed to yield the expected or hoped-for results. Their collective failure accentuates the need to look at the problem differently and to pursue fundamental institutional change.
The dynamics of education policy development further illustrate the problem. Even when a school policy succeeds at scale, with validated performance outcomes, states and school districts have not rushed to adopt it. Consider the incentive-based teacher compensation systems introduced in Washington, D.C., in 2009 and Dallas, Texas, in 2013. These reforms show that when teachers are evaluated and paid based on their classroom effectiveness, student scores increase significantly. Yet, because these innovative incentive systems are alien to the way most districts write contracts and operate, few districts have copied their approaches. It is not that teachers and principals do not want higher achievement but that competing priorities appear to supersede any quest for improved achievement.
Efforts to introduce significant teacher and administrator incentives into schools face strong headwinds, but at times these efforts prevail. The attempt to do so under the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, launched in 2009, led to strong backlash and was explicitly prohibited by subsequent legislation. Yet the intense fight to introduce performance pay in D.C. eventually succeeded, leading to strong student-achievement gains—and it has remained in effect under a series of new superintendents. The introduction of altered evaluation and pay systems in Dallas took years of planning and preparation but has also survived multiple new superintendents. Dallas-like systems have in fact expanded in Texas because of grants enabled by the Texas legislature to support any district willing to change its evaluation and pay systems. By 2025, 809 districts—approximately two-thirds of all Texas districts—had applied to participate. Following state takeover, Houston, the largest district in Texas, and several others are moving rapidly to follow.
A structure that incentivizes and more consistently promotes higher achievement will require altered roles for both state and federal policymakers. A recent proposal from the Hoover Institution’s Education Futures Council, for which I was an adviser, provides one example of how the public school system might change. The council’s report highlights the importance of maintaining a focus on student outcomes, incorporating incentives for the desired outcomes, and recognizing that local capacity and local demands vary so much that broad-based mandates and regulations from above thwart innovation. Because schooling is locally administered, the federal role should center on support, not control, including activities such as data collection, research, and incentives to promote innovation and improvement instead of mandates and regulations. States, in turn, should strive to enable local implementation without treating all districts the same. For example, a state could give wide operational latitude to districts that demonstrate high performance while deploying closer constraints and stricter guidance for less successful districts.
If policymakers do choose to revamp our education system, they will have many alternatives available to them, but history suggests that they should favor a new, outcome-based design over small tweaks to our current stagnant system.
