Day: June 14, 2023

Adapted with permission from Hess, F. M. (2023). The Great School Rethink (p. 11-15). Harvard Education Press.
The easiest thing in the world to do is talk about improvement. It’s vastly tougher to actually do it. But, if you’re busy doing it without thinking long and hard about what you’re doing and why, mammoth efforts can yield meager gains. As the British philosopher Bertrand Russell once put it, “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
I’ll try to put this more plainly. Think of a scrum of little kids building a sandcastle at the ocean’s edge. They can shovel, scoop, hustle, and hurry, only to see their project be repeatedly washed away.
Don’t get me wrong. Hard work matters. Careful execution matters. Elbow grease matters. But, if we think about that sandcastle, the big problem is that the kids are building it in the wrong spot. If they paused and moved 20 feet up the beach, the exact same effor..