States Should Build the Infrastructure for Innovation While Washington Debates

As state legislatures convene across the country, education policymakers face an unfamiliar scenario: Federal oversight has been weakened structurally and operationally almost overnight. Ongoing efforts to restructure the Department of Education and talk of new mandates that will reinforce some of the administration’s priorities have created unprecedented levels of uncertainty about the federal role. State leaders may be inclined to tread lightly until the dust settles.

This would be a mistake.

Students and families cannot afford to wait. Scores on the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and indicators of student mental health, attendance and engagement are all at historic lows, confirming what educators and many families already knew: Student performance and well-being continue to decline. Those learning losses will continue to have profound impacts both on the students themselves and on the nation’s broader economic prosperity. Meanwhile, decades of top-down reform efforts have yielded disappointingly little improvement, despite massive investments and constant policy churn.

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State policymakers have a better path forward, one that doesn’t depend on federal direction: creating the conditions for bottom-up innovation to emerge, spread and scale within their own education systems.

As the Hoover Institution’s Education Futures Council has documented, the current education infrastructure actively prevents innovation from emerging, spreading and generating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. Years of investment in top-down innovation and reform have yielded many lessons but little actual progress.

A new white paper from the Hoover Institution reveals why this approach matters. “Can’t Get There from Here,” synthesizes decades of evidence on education innovation, as well as organizational, network and diffusion theory. By dividing the growth of innovation into three clear phases — start, spread, and sustain — the paper’s framework illustrates clear actions and decision points in which policymakers and education leaders can either help or hinder innovation.  

We know that the most scalable and sustainable improvements emerge from the needs and problems that practitioners define and from the solutions they help develop. Yet, as a recent research study finds, it remains “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.”

The framework identifies obstacles that prevent good ideas. At the earliest stages where bottom-up ideas might start, rigid bureaucracies foster risk-averse cultures among educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned teachers to avoid failure, making new initiatives seem high-risk, low-reward. Many principals preemptively block innovation due to perceived regulatory barriers even though research shows these barriers are often negotiable or misunderstood.

When innovations do emerge, they struggle to spread. Teachers attempting to implement new practices face unfamiliar partnerships with district administrators, intermediaries and policymakers; they receive little preparation or support for managing these relationships. Schools, already overwhelmed with mandates and regulations, lack the basic administrative infrastructure and tools to disseminate ideas effectively. 

Perhaps most critically, the education sector lacks a robust knowledge ecosystem to capture what works, determine when replication is more sensible than adaptation and analyze whether and how an innovation fits in different local contexts.

At the scale phase, accountability systems emphasizing narrow metrics actively discourage ambitious teaching. Policymakers tend to be “failure-avoidant, linear thinkers” while innovations need trial-and-error cycles. The bias toward quick wins denies innovations time to demonstrate impact.

The result? A system where constant informal change happens in classrooms daily, but meaningful and potentially impactful innovations rarely spread beyond individual teachers or schools, and students’ outcomes continue to stagnate or decline.

The good news is state legislatures don’t need permission from Washington to address these barriers. The framework identifies specific policy levers that state lawmakers control:

• Invest in knowledge ecosystems. Bottom-up innovations often fail to expand, not because they don’t work, but because there’s no infrastructure to capture what works, why it works and how to adapt it to new contexts. States should fund networks connecting innovative practitioners, support rapid-cycle evaluation and incentivize “fail-forward” learning. Most knowledge sharing networks are led by intermediaries, such as NASBE and KnowledgeWorks’s High School Transformation State Network,  The Imagine Network, Future of Learning Council in Michigan and NHLI’s Future Learning Pathways. One state example comes from Nevada, where the Department of Education and the Center for the Future of Learning jointly lead the  Nevada Future of Learning Network to support pilots, create tools for community engagement, and develop case studies to inform practice.

• Genuinely engage educators in policymaking. Innovations spread when they align with teachers’ values and address immediate classroom needs. Yet teachers are routinely shut out of policy development. States should remove procedural barriers and invest in the time and capacity needed for front-line educators to shape policy, not token teacher advisory councils, but an authentic partnership. Examples such as Georgia’s Teacher Policy Fellowship brings 21 classroom teachers annually into direct engagement with state and federal policymakers; and North Carolina’s Education Policy Fellowship Program has graduated over 800 fellows who continue to influence education policy statewide. 

• Support flexible implementation. Innovations that require strict fidelity struggle to spread; those that offer clear principles with room for local adaptation thrive. State policy should embrace “tight-but-loose” frameworks that maintain core commitments while allowing schools to adapt. Part of this flexibility entails states offering stronger scaffolds for novice teachers while giving more seasoned practitioners greater latitude to exercise professional judgment. Since 2016, North Dakota Department of Public Instruction has taken this approach for supporting personalized, competency-based change.

• Provide adequate, sustained resources. Unlike businesses, which can attract investment capital, educators must develop their own infrastructure before scaling. Federal funding historically has been scarce and short-term as in the case of the Education Innovation and Research grants. School-level innovators often come to rely  on local or regional education foundations to provide seed funding for new models. In 2015, for example, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation committed more than $16 million to support innovation efforts across five New England school districts. For over a decade, North Carolina has offered smaller innovation grants as part of its ongoing Digital Learning Initiative and New York State offers Learning Technology Grants that develop, implement, and share innovative programs. Generous and sustained support can rarely be counted on, but states can fill this gap by ensuring innovations have the financial runway needed to develop tools, train educators and demonstrate impact over time.

Do we want to spend another session waiting for Washington to solve problems it hasn’t solved in decades? Or are we ready to build infrastructure that enables teachers and school leaders — the people closest to students — to innovate, learn and improve?

The evidence is clear. Bottom-up innovation, when properly supported, can transform education. States have the authority and the tools to create supportive conditions. What they need now is political will. 

Our students can’t wait for federal certainty. State policymakers should give them something better: a system designed to foster, capture and spread the innovations that will actually improve their learning. The framework exists. The session is starting. It’s time for states to lead.