Innovation in the Face of K-12 Bureaucracy

Steven Hodas, former executive director of New York City’s iZone, the city’s Office of Innovation, and in 2015 practitioner in residence at CRPE.org, says innovation in schools starts by asking the people doing the work what gets in their way.

Start with the people closest to the work

“The easiest point of entry is just to ask the people doing the work (kids trying to learn, teachers trying to teach, administrators administering, parents parenting, etc.) what difficulties they’re encountering and proceed from there,” Hodas said. One of the biggest mistakes in schooling and in government, in his view, is “allowing the people at the top to believe they can understand and speak for the people closest to the actual work.” Going to those people first “makes it more likely you’ll be working on a real problem in an authentic way.” With open and humble minds, room for “non–traditional solutions and providers” and iteration along the way, “you’ll almost always end up with something better then what was in place before.”

Expected demand, predictable pushback

Hodas expected “a huge pent–up demand on the part of practitioners (including central office bureaucrats) for new ways of going about their work,” and found it. “There really weren’t any surprises,” he said: the buy-in and pushback “were fairly predictable if you were familiar with how people think about their work and what is rewarded in large organizations.”

Leaders who model smart risk

What large school systems reward, Hodas said, is “the core of what needs to change.” In his words: “People take their cues from their leaders, so if a school board and superintendent model smart risk–taking, transparency, empathy, and the difference between ‘responsibility’ and ‘blame’ (which are the key ingredients of innovation) that’s what you’ll get in your district.” Rewards need not be financial. People “would much prefer a stimulating, problem–solving work environment and to be acknowledged for their initiative (especially when it doesn’t turn out as hoped) than to receive some token monetary reward.”

Dynamism in a public system

Public education can become more dynamic, Hodas said, “though it will never look like innovation in the private sector.” He prefers the word “dynamism” to “innovation,” and most of what it takes, he said, “is to remove constraints on practitioners and encourage people’s inborn desire to tinker with the tools and conditions around them.” Encouraging people to try new things “and then spreading the word about what works and what doesn’t gets you pretty far down the road.”

Faced with procurement rules, tight budgets and state and federal wrangling, Hodas would keep going: “I believe we should continue to swim upstream, to make the stream by paddling, to be the fish we want to see in the world.” He is “not a big fan of opting out of or evading stupid impositions if there’s any possibility that by engaging with them imaginatively and constructively you can fix them a little bit.” He supports alternatives such as charters, “but I also really want to fix the dominant provider itself.”

The operating systems of districts

On whether leaders should be trained to put innovation into practice, Hodas said: “Absolutely, for me this is at the heart of why all the trying of new things over the past fifteen or more years hasn’t led to dynamic districts or practices at scale.” New policies such as data systems, tablet deployments and, to some extent, the Common Core have “wrecked on the shores” of district practice. “It’s not so much that schools do the wrong things but that they do things wrongly,” he said, because most leaders do not want to get their hands dirty with “the Operating Systems of districts like procurement, contracting, IT, HR, etc.” Unless those are right, “it really doesn’t matter what your policies are because it’s through those arcane, non–sexy functions that policy gets made real.”

This interview was first published in the “Down the Hall” column of Scholastic District Administration.

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