A new white paper from the Hoover Institution shows how locally developed teacher-originated educational innovations can successfully emerge, spread, and achieve lasting impact at scale. The report builds on a study from the Education Futures Council (EFC), Ours to Solve, Once—and for All,
“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 reinforces that top-down reform has failed to improve—and in many cases worsened—student outcomes for decades.
“Teachers are innovating every day in their classrooms, but those innovations rarely spread,” Wolfe says. “The system is optimized for compliance, not improvement.”
Key white paper findings:
- Teachers don’t have the time, networks, and support to try new approaches—and often feel totally shut out of improvement planning.
- Top-down mandates create a risk-averse culture that makes it safer to maintain the status quo instead of trying something new.
- Innovations spread better when educators adapt them to local needs rather than follow strict, one-size-fits-all playbooks.
- Scaling what works requires knowledge-sharing systems that don’t exist today, so schools repeatedly relearn the same lessons from the same mistakes.
- Failed policies remain in place for years, wasting time and misplacing focus long after it’s clear they aren’t improving outcomes.
Actionable recommendations for policymakers include:
1) shift accountability structures to reward adaptive teaching approaches;
2) include meaningful educator input in policy development; and
3) build infrastructure for continuous improvement.
Wolfe recommends practitioners embrace “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 says. “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.”
The Hoover Institution
