Why Real Change Can't Grow Inside Schools

Most people believe that big crises lead to big changes. We think that when a system is shocked, it will finally be forced to fix its long rooted problems.

When the world stopped in early 2020, I was one of those believers.

I thought the pandemic was the "great reset" for education. I thought that because the walls of the classroom had literally disappeared, the old rules of the classroom, the way it existed, would disappear too.

I was wrong.

By the end of last year, I have been forced to face a hard truth: a crisis does not make a system change. It makes a system retreat to its safest deepest corners.

To understand why, you have to look at what happened to us last year. Back in March, right before the lockdowns, I traveled to Utah and I met with a visionary district superintendent of a large school district and he saw the same future I did. He knew that test scores were not enough. He wanted his students to graduate with grit, focus, and the ability to solve real problems.

We shook hands on a plan to bring our 21st-century skills platform to his district. It felt like the moment we had been building toward for several years.

Then, the world shut down.

At first, I was optimistic. My team and I spent the summer working harder than ever. We launched 21CS in June making it ready for the trial. We thought, "Now is the time." If teachers are already teaching through a screen, why not give them better things to teach? If parents are seeing their kids' lessons every day at the kitchen table, surely they will want to focus on life skills over standardized drills.

But as the new school year began in the fall, I watched the "immune system" of the school district kick in.

In the human body, the immune system is a marvel. It identifies anything that doesn't belong and it attacks it. It doesn't care if the new thing is "good" or "helpful." It only cares that the new thing is different. It wants to return the body to its normal state.

School systems had the exact same response. In 2020, the "normal state" of a school was stability and compliance. The system’s survival depended on making sure every kid had a laptop, every teacher knew how to use Zoom, and every attendance sheet was filled out. These are operational tasks. They are about keeping the lights on.

When we showed up with tools to measure "student participation" or "creative growth," we were treated like a virus. We weren't a threat because our ideas were bad. We were a threat because we were extra.

I remember talking to administrators who were exhausted. They told me, "Avneesh, we love what you are doing. We need this. But right now, I have five teachers out sick, three hundred families with no internet, and a school board demanding to know why test scores are dipping. I can't ask my staff to think about 'grit' right now. I just need them to survive Tuesday."

This is the "Hard Standstill." It is a quiet, polite rejection.

I realized that we were trying to plant a garden inside a building with no windows.

You can have the best seeds in the world. You can have the most expensive fertilizer. You can spend all day watering the dirt. But if there is no sunlight, nothing will grow. The environment determines the outcome, not the quality of the seeds.

The "sunlight" in a school system is what the system values. Right now, the system values two things: ranking and safety. It ranks students against each other so they can be sorted for colleges. It provides a safe, predictable place for children to be while parents work. These two goals are what keep the building standing.

If a school principal decides to stop focusing on rankings to focus on creativity, the building starts to shake. The "windows" close even tighter. Parents get nervous because they want their kids to get into good colleges. The state gets nervous because they want high test scores to justify funding. The immune system doesn't just push back against the innovator; it threatens to shut down the innovator’s career.

This has been a lonely realization for my team. We have spent years building for over 600 schools. We have seen teachers do heroic work. We have seen them stay late and spend their own money to help a single child. But a hero cannot change the physics of a building.

A teacher can be amazing, but they still have to turn in the same grades at the end of the semester. They still have to follow the same bell schedule. The structure is the boss. And for better or for worse, the structure is built for a world that no longer exists.

I see now that I was trying to make the "horse cart" better. I thought if I made the wheels smoother (better UX) and the seats more comfortable (better engagement), the cart would eventually become something else. But a horse cart will never be a car. If you keep adding parts to a horse cart, you just get a heavy, complicated cart that is even harder for the horse to pull.

To build a car, you have to leave the cart behind. You have to understand that the engine of a car works on different rules than a horse.

This is where I am on Feb, 2021. I am standing in the middle of a standstill. I have the tools, the vision, and the data. But I am starting to admit something that is very hard for a founder to admit: You cannot fix a system from the inside if the system’s survival depends on the very things you are trying to change.

The school system isn't "broken" because it's failing to change. It is "successful" because it is resisting change. It is doing exactly what it was built to do: maintain the status quo at all costs. The problem is that its doing it for a world that existed in last century and we are moved on to the next.

If we want to see our children grow into the inclusive, creative generation we know they can be, we have to stop trying to pry open the windows of the old building. We have to look at the world outside the walls. We have to ask what happens if we build a way to learn that doesn't need the old building at all.

This doesn't mean I have the answer yet. I don't. But I know that "better software" is no longer the mission. The mission is finding a new way to win the game entirely.