Why School Reform Structures Rarely Change Classroom Teaching

School reform often makes its biggest moves where they’re easiest to see: governance, class size, curriculum standards, technology, and school choice. But decades spent teaching, leading districts, and researching classrooms have left me skeptical that these structural changes reliably alter what happens between teachers and students.

That shift in perspective began with experience. For nearly 15 years as a teacher, I believed new school designs could change common teaching practices and help students learn more, faster, and better. Examples included non-graded schools, new district and school governance arrangements, small high schools, block schedules, and student learning communities.

I came to see that these structures may create conditions for improvement, but rarely change instruction on their own. Watching colleagues and examining my own teaching gradually challenged my earlier view. Later, research into the effects of Progressive reforms in the early 20th century and standards and accountability policies in the early 21st century reinforced that conclusion.[i]

Why structural reform keeps its appeal

Policymakers continue to favor structural changes because they’re visible. Reducing class sizes, setting national curriculum standards, opening small high schools, and providing one-to-one laptops all signal action to voters and school communities. Their visibility can suggest that leaders are addressing problems, even when the link to classroom practice remains uncertain.

The same logic shapes current policy efforts. Some urban districts have shifted authority from elected school boards to mayors. State and federal policymakers have promoted systems that evaluate and pay teachers based on students’ test scores. Others have expanded publicly funded options such as charter and magnet schools or built high-tech schools where each student has access to devices and software.

These policies rest on an assumption: change the structure, and teachers will change their practice, raising student achievement as a result. Research, mine and others’, has weakened confidence in that direct connection. New arrangements can matter, but their effects on everyday instruction are limited when they don’t address what teachers know, believe, and do together.

Improvement has a better chance when schools work directly on teaching: strengthening individual and shared norms, and expanding teachers’ knowledge and instructional skills. That approach is harder to sell than a new building, program, or governance model. It also asks policymakers to attend to classroom routines, where change is less visible and takes sustained work. Evidence that challenges familiar policy instincts has often been set aside, so shifting attention toward teacher capacity will be difficult.

Teachers remain central

One belief has held steady: teachers are central to student learning and school performance. Years spent teaching, visiting classrooms as a superintendent, and studying instruction have deepened my conviction that teachers shape students’ minds and lives. My measured optimism about what schools can accomplish rests on teachers who make a lasting difference for individual students.

Recent research has also affirmed teachers’ influence on academic outcomes and students’ lives. For many educators, the findings echo what classroom experience has long suggested: evidence and professional conviction can reinforce each other.

Yet anti-union rhetoric aimed at teachers, along with policymakers’ condescension toward experienced educators who remain in classrooms, weakens public respect for the profession. That treatment risks eroding gains in recognition teachers have made over past decades.

What schools can still make possible

These reflections draw on nearly half a century of experience and research. They point to both the limits and the promise of public schooling, especially in cities. Many schools, though far from all, have skilled and knowledgeable teachers who can help young people develop civic, scientific, and mathematical literacy; prepare for college; make independent decisions; and engage in thoughtful debate.

Schools do this work within a three-tiered system that reproduces long-standing social inequalities, as discussed in Part 1. That context makes the quality of teaching and the conditions that support it all the more consequential. Structural reform may open a path; lasting improvement depends on building the teacher knowledge and shared practice that change what students experience in class.

Part 1 appeared October 20, 2026. These reflections were included in Richard Elmore’s I Used to Think… And Now I Think (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

[i] See How Teachers Taught, second edition (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993), and Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). Other researchers reached similar conclusions about the limited influence of reform structures on classroom practice. See Richard Elmore, “Structural Reform and Educational Practice,” Educational Researcher, 24(9), 1995, pp. 23–26.