Why Is Dysfunction the Norm in Education?

When I first became a teacher, I couldn’t believe that anyone thought it was a good idea to leave me alone in a room with 30 nine-year-olds. I knew that at any moment, the class could spiral into chaos. 

I had learned enough from student teaching to know that I should begin the school day with routines I taught explicitly. But my management unraveled as the day went on, and by the time the final bell rang, I’d look at the mess my students left behind, my incomplete lesson plans, and the stack of grading piling up, and I couldn’t fathom how I could teach another day.

But I kept coming back. I developed routines to ensure there were always sharpened pencils, papers were distributed quickly, and transitions were calm. At some point, I realized that my students wanted things to go well, and I began to enlist them in problem-solving. Some of their solutions were ones I didn’t care for — they wanted to compete for table points whereas I wanted them to subsist on intrinsic motivation. But I realized that classroom routines needed to work for my students, and no one was going to check my teaching against anything I had declared while in teacher-prep.

I came to see that a large part of teaching is identifying where things could start to go wrong, and building a procedure to prevent it. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my informal introduction into Implementation Science (opens in a new window), the study of what goes right and what goes wrong when we attempt to implement a good idea in the real world. 

There’s actually a science for this

Implementation Science emerged from decades of research on why evidence-based practices fail to take root in real-world settings, like healthcare, social services, and yes, even education. It identifies three levels where implementation succeeds or fails — the practitioner, the organization, and the system — and it includes tools to help systems ensure the three levels work together.

Teaching happens inside a system (whether we know it or not)

I didn’t think of myself as working within a system. I taught in my classroom, socialized with the teachers at my school, and noticed when things made my job easier or harder. But I didn’t have the perspective needed to see the gears of the public school system.

Now I can see the gears, moving slowly, stopped, or even grinding in opposite directions. Implementation science calls these gears “implementation drivers” — the mechanisms that determine whether a practitioner can do their job well. Implementation Science organizes these drivers into three categories: the competency of practitioners, the quality of leadership, and the systems and policies that support our work.

Implementation Science calls them “drivers” because they’re supposed to propel the work forward. But they do that so poorly in education that teachers often experience administrators and their policies as getting in the way of our work with children.

For years, I couldn’t even see the implementation drivers. I didn’t understand the structure of the administration at my school or in the district office well enough to know how they were supposed to support my work. I felt nothing drove my teaching forward other than the accrual of my own years of experience.

Competency: teaching alone

For many years, I thought that a school system must depend on the quality of individual teachers. I knew from my experience as a student that teachers varied in quality, but I didn’t stop to think that the public school system needs to be built in a way that ensures a baseline quality of teaching. I didn’t consider that the burden of making my own instruction good shouldn’t rest solely on my shoulders. 

I’ve always been fiercely determined to be the best teacher that I could be, but according to implementation science, no single driver is sufficient — practitioner competency alone can’t fix a broken system and now I understand the cause of the frustration I’ve often felt.

Leadership: nuts and bolts

For most of my years as a classroom teacher, I saw the principal of my school as the person who made administrative decisions; scheduling assemblies, signing off on field trips, leading the “nuts and bolts” discussions in our staff meetings. She didn’t influence what or how I taught other than to sign off on my class’s field trips. Like most principals I’ve known, she had no experience teaching young children to read and so she intentionally steered clear of academic decision-making. She was, in the simplest sense, an “administrator.” And we had no instructional leader at our school.

Organization: a collection of classrooms

I rarely concerned myself with the decisions made at the District Office. They adopted new curricula and, like most teachers in my district, I hardly attempted to teach it. We had no district-wide data collection other than the summative assessments required by the state and so there were very few ways to evaluate instruction or course-correct. 

I didn’t see administration supporting teachers and students because it so rarely did so. I never stopped to think that I work in a public school system that is supposed to make my success — and every other teacher’s — guaranteed with a reasonable amount of effort on our part. I accepted that teaching is a nearly impossible job and decided it was my own responsibility not to burn out.

So, what now?

For so many teachers, the structures that should connect us, support us, and hold us accountable simply don’t exist. We don’t teach in a school system. We’re alone in our classrooms.

In the posts that follow, I’ll examine what was missing from my preparation as a teacher, the lack of leadership above me, and the structures that were never built. I don’t want to complain, but rather to explain where things go wrong — my hope is that once we can see where our systems break down, we can make plans to fix them.