Introduction
A practice that thrives in one district and dies in another is not a bad practice. It is a transplant that never took root.
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In 1922, the Swedish botanist Göte Turesson gave biology a word for something farmers had always known. He collected plants of the same species from very different habitats, grew them under the same conditions, and found that many held on to their local forms. He called these locally adapted populations ecotypes (Turesson, 1922). Same species. Different shape. The place had done the selecting.
Early in my tenure in San Francisco, we implemented a parent engagement model with strong results in a suburban district. Evening workshops, a polished curriculum, sign-in sheets at the door. Attendance was thin. The model wasn't wrong. It was built for families whose workday ended at five. Many of ours worked early shifts, late shifts, or two jobs, and the families we reached best, we reached on Saturday mornings, in their home languages, at the schools their children already attended.
Place Does the Selecting
I served as chief academic officer in two large urban districts in California and Oregon. Both districts did the work of schooling. Neither resembled the other. Each had adapted to its own conditions: the languages families spoke, the local economy, the geography, the politics, the history, and the institutions families had learned to trust.
Every district belongs to the same species. We share a public mission, common standards, and an obligation to every child who walks through the door. The differences among us are not deviations from some ideal district. They are adaptations.
Peter Senge (1990) argued that much of what leaders blame on individuals is actually produced by the structure of the system around them. Margaret Wheatley (1992) pushed further, describing organizations as living systems that organize themselves in response to their environment, not machines that run on command.
The Chicago research makes the point with data. Anthony Bryk and his colleagues followed 390 elementary schools over seven years and identified five essential supports for improvement, from school leadership to parent and community ties (Bryk et al., 2010). Schools strong in all five were at least ten times more likely to improve substantially in reading and math than schools strong in only one or two. The community is not the backdrop to the school. It is part of the system.
A Transplant Is Not a Strategy
From 1973 to 1978, Paul Berman and Milbrey McLaughlin led the RAND Change Agent Study, following federally funded innovations in districts across the country. The projects that lasted were not the ones implemented most faithfully. They were the ones where the program adapted to the local setting while the setting adapted to the program. The researchers called this mutual adaptation (Berman & McLaughlin, 1978). A decade later, McLaughlin (1987) concluded that local capacity and will, far more than the policy itself, determine what happens in classrooms.
Bryk's later work on improvement science reframed the central question. Instead of asking whether a practice works, leaders should ask what works, for whom, and under what conditions (Bryk et al., 2015).
That question changes how a superintendent reads failure. When a proven model stalls in your district, the honest diagnosis may not be weak staff or a flawed program. It may be the wrong ecotype.
Variety Is the Resilience
In nature, a range of local forms protects the whole species. A drought or a pest that wipes out one population rarely reaches them all. Districts work the same way. The variety of local adaptations across a state is not inefficiency. It is the system's insurance policy.
California learned what happens when that variety gets flattened. Proposition 227, passed in 1998, required most English learners to be taught in English and restricted bilingual programs (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010). The year before it took effect, about 30 percent of the state's English learners were in bilingual programs. Ten years later, about 5 percent were (Legislative Analyst's Office, 2016). I served those years as a principal, director, and chief academic officer in two California districts. One policy landed on communities that could not have been more different, and the districts that served their families best were the ones that found every lawful way to keep local knowledge in the classroom.
The danger runs the other way, too. An ecotype cut off from every other population grows inbred and fragile. A district that refuses to learn from anyone else mistakes isolation for identity. Senge and his colleagues describe learning that moves across nested levels, from classroom to school to community (Senge et al., 2012). Healthy districts need that exchange. They just have to re-root what they bring home.
Learn Across Districts. Root Locally.
The superintendent's job is not to clone a model across every school. It is to protect the species (mission, standards, values) while reading the local soil before planting anything.
So before you adopt the next program, the next framework, or the next vendor's promise, ask three things. What soil did this grow in? What does our soil require that theirs did not? And who in our community knows the answer better than we do?
References
Berman, P., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1978). Federal programs supporting educational change, Vol. VIII: Implementing and sustaining innovations (Report No. R-1589/8-HEW). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R1589z8.html
Bryk, A. S., Gomez, L. M., Grunow, A., & LeMahieu, P. G. (2015). Learning to improve: How America's schools can get better at getting better. Harvard Education Press.
Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Luppescu, S., & Easton, J. Q. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Gándara, P., & Hopkins, M. (Eds.). (2010). Forbidden language: English learners and restrictive language policies. Teachers College Press.
Legislative Analyst's Office. (2016). Proposition 58: English language education. https://lao.ca.gov/BallotAnalysis/Proposition?number=58&year=2016
McLaughlin, M. W. (1987). Learning from experience: Lessons from policy implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9(2), 171–178. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737009002171
Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. Doubleday/Currency.
Senge, P., Cambron-McCabe, N., Lucas, T., Smith, B., Dutton, J., & Kleiner, A. (2012). Schools that learn: A fifth discipline fieldbook for educators, parents, and everyone who cares about education (Updated and revised ed.). Crown Business.
Turesson, G. (1922). The genotypical response of the plant species to the habitat. Hereditas, 3, 211–350.
Wheatley, M. J. (1992). Leadership and the new science: Learning about organization from an orderly universe. Berrett-Koehler.
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DISTRICT LEADER PODCAST
Innovation Ecosystems: Why Systems Thinking Beats Siloed Problem-Solving
In this week’s podcast, Ilene Fischer, a veteran of Peter Senge's and Tom Peters's firms, makes the case that change fails when people don't feel safe enough to say what they think. With host Peter Winick, she explains why silos and one-problem-at-a-time thinking can't keep pace. In her conversation, she also demonstrates how to test whether an organization is ready before change begins. As in any ecosystem, changing how people work changes the culture.
EDUPRENEURS NETWORK • DEEP DIVE
Value-Based Procurement in Education: Moving Beyond the Lowest Bid
This week's issue argues that a program can succeed in one district and fail in the next because the place was different, not the program. In February, I made the procurement version of that case. The lowest bid rarely shows a provider's true cost, and it never tells you whether that provider fits your mission, your capacity to implement, or the communities you serve. The essay lays out how to judge fit through deeper reference conversations, outcome data broken out by student group, and the voices of the teachers who will carry the work. If you sell to districts, expect your clients to start asking where your product grew up.
From the Bookshelf - Thought Leadership
Thought Leadership in Education: A Comprehensive Exploration of Transformative Educational Ideas
Chapter 7: Building Networks and Communities of Practice
In Chapter 7, I write that the strongest educational ideas grow through communities that test them in many places, not through a single author handing them down. Two sections speak directly to this week's issue. In "Implementation Laboratory Strategies," I describe how Anthony Bryk's networked improvement communities test change ideas across diverse contexts and learn from the variation. In "Adaptation Documentation Strategies," I argue that educational approaches "inevitably require contextual adaptation," and that each adaptation teaches us where an idea works and where it stops. That is the ecotype argument in practice. The variation is not noise. It is the knowledge.
This week: Read the "Implementation Laboratory Strategies" and "Adaptation Documentation Strategies" sections in Chapter 7 (pages 159–161). Then ask yourself: when your district adapts a program, does anyone write down what changed and why, or does the lesson leave when the people do?
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