There’s a bitter irony I continue to see happening in education today: the very efforts designed to improve schools often guarantee their own failure. New initiatives are launched with great fanfare, invest significant resources in training and implementation, and then watch as they fade away within a few years, replaced by the next wave of reform. It’s a pattern that has happened again and again to the point that many veteran educators have developed a protective cynicism, adopting a “this too shall pass” mentality that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is not because they don’t want to improve or do better. It comes from a frustration that has developed over years of “yet another initiative” that overlooks the work they have done, and are doing, because, they are reminded, students aren’t succeeding as they should.
This is the sustainability dilemma—the paradox that our urgent desire to improve education often undermines the long-term thinking and patient implementation that real improvement requires. Initiatives that are introduced without long-term adaptive systemic change lead to wasted human and economic resources, staff change fatigue, and stagnant organisations.
The Tyranny of the Urgent
The sustainability dilemma begins with a fundamental misunderstanding of how lasting change occurs. In a culture where immediate results are expected and quarterly reporting shows the gains or losses of particular innovations, we’ve developed an expectation that meaningful improvements should be visible within months or, at most, a single year. In economics, making changes and sustaining innovation can be the difference between success and absolute failure – think Blockbusters and Kodak! This expectation creates what Stephen Covey called “the tyranny of the urgent”—the tendency to prioritize immediate pressures over long-term needs.
But educational change operates on geological time, not news cycle time or business quarterly reports. Building a culture of high expectations takes time. Developing teacher expertise requires sustained professional development over multiple school years. Shifting student outcomes demands consistency of approach that extends far beyond any single year or budget cycle. There is the need for reflection and refinement, collaboration and connection among teachers so that lessons learned can be implemented over time. It takes time to implement, teach, assess, refine, and reassess to see how any one program or adaptation is working.
The temporal mismatch between our expectations and reality creates a vicious cycle. When initiatives don’t show immediate results, they’re deemed failures and abandoned. New approaches are adopted with the same unrealistic timelines. The cycle repeats, creating what researchers call “change fatigue”—a state of chronic overwhelm that actually prevents the deep cultural shifts that lasting improvement requires.
The Human Cost of Perpetual Change
Change fatigue causes staff to disengage and negatively affects schools and school cultures, and the trend shows no signs of stopping. But this clinical description doesn’t capture the full human cost of the sustainability dilemma. Behind the statistics are real people—teachers who entered the profession to make a difference, administrators who genuinely want to improve outcomes, and students who deserve better than the constant disruption of their learning environment.
Consider Sarah, a fourth-grade teacher with fifteen years of experience. Over the past decade, she’s been asked to implement new reading programs, adopt different assessment systems, integrate various technologies, and adjust her classroom management approach. Each change required significant time and energy to master. Just as she was becoming skilled with one approach, another would arrive, making her feel like a perpetual beginner in her own profession. As she continues to adapt and implement, her belief in her own ability to successfully do what she is being asked has begun to falter. Her self-efficacy is being undermined which leads to greater self-doubt and growing anxiety and frustration as she struggles under the burden to meet the needs of her students while also meeting the constant change of demands being asked of her by her division.
The psychological toll is enormous. Teachers like Sarah begin to develop what researchers call “learned helplessness”—the belief that their efforts don’t matter because the rules will change before they can achieve mastery. This isn’t just demoralizing; it’s professionally devastating. Teaching is a profession that requires deep expertise, but the sustainability dilemma treats expertise as obsolescence. Teachers’ self-efficacy becomes eroded over time. According to Albert Bandura, self-efficacy is essential for setting and achieving goals, putting forth effort to achieve a goal, and persisting in an effort to achieve the goal. It is also the belief that one has the necessary abilities to successfully accomplish what one has set out to achieve.
The Leadership Transition Trap
The sustainability dilemma is exacerbated by the reality of leadership transitions in education. Superintendents average less than five years in their positions. Principals face similar turnover rates. Each new leader feels pressure to make their mark through visible change, creating what might be called the “leadership transition trap” in which leaders feel they need to demonstrate their merit for being in the position by introducing and leading a new initiative. Teachers are asked to once again shift from what they are doing in order to take on this new initiative.
This trap operates through predictable stages. First, new leaders conduct assessments that inevitably find problems with existing approaches. They propose solutions that distinguish their leadership from their predecessors. Previous initiatives are abandoned not because they failed, but because they’re associated with former leadership. Institutional memory is lost, and schools find themselves solving problems they had already addressed.
The trap is particularly cruel because it punishes success as much as failure. A reading program that was showing promising results under the previous principal may be abandoned simply because the new leader prefers a different approach. A professional development initiative that was building teacher capacity may be discontinued because it doesn’t align with the new superintendent’s priorities.
The Paradox of Measurement
The sustainability dilemma is complicated by how we measure success in education. Our accountability systems demand immediate, quantifiable results. Test scores must improve annually. Achievement gaps must narrow on predictable timelines. This creates pressure for quick fixes that often undermine long-term solutions. Yes, it is necessary to assess student growth. Yes, it is necessary to use this data to make adjustments. But this doesn’t mean programs in place aren’t working. With the constant change happening, it could be that the programs and initiatives haven’t had the time for refinement and collaborative exploration necessary to bring about gains and improvement.
Consider the difference between sustainable and unsustainable approaches to improving reading achievement. A sustainable approach might involve multi-year professional development for teachers, gradual curriculum alignment, and systematic support for struggling students. Results would emerge slowly but steadily, building on previous gains. There would be time built into the process for reflection and collaboration. Teachers would be provided opportunities to share their reflections and discuss how to make improvements. School teams would work together to develop a process that would allow individual students experiencing difficulty to receive the support they need. All this would take place within the context where teachers are the professionals who can make the necessary adjustments for students learning.
An unsustainable approach might involve adopting a new reading program with the promise of immediate gains, intensive short-term training for teachers, and dramatic interventions for low-performing students. This approach might show faster initial results but would be vulnerable to leadership changes, teacher turnover, and the inevitable challenges of implementation. Teachers, seen as being lacking, are trained in yet another initiative, forgoing their past experiences and expertise gained over time. This approach, as it continues to play out, eventually leads to “change fatigue” and “learned helplessness”.
Paradoxically, our measurement systems often reward the unsustainable approach because it produces the immediate results that politicians and parents demand. The sustainable approach, despite its long-term advantages, may be abandoned before its benefits become apparent.
The Innovation Fatigue Feedback Loop
The sustainability dilemma creates a feedback loop that actually prevents innovation from working. When schools constantly adopt new approaches, they never develop the implementation expertise that would make any single approach successful. This leads to poor results, which create pressure for more innovation, which prevents the deep implementation that would improve results.
These frequent changes create change fatigue, pressure and stress on both school administrators and teachers. Teachers become skeptical of new initiatives not because they oppose improvement, but because they’ve seen too many promising approaches fail due to inadequate implementation time and support. Teachers’ self-efficacy begins to erode as new programs, software, and curriculum is constantly introduced without being given the time to develop any type of expertise. Often, just as teachers become proficient with a program or software, a new one is introduced which begins the cycle all over again.
This skepticism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When teachers don’t fully invest in new initiatives because they expect them to be replaced, the initiatives are more likely to fail. When they do fail, it reinforces the belief that new approaches don’t work, making teachers even more resistant to future changes.
The Capacity Building Imperative
Breaking free from the sustainability dilemma requires a fundamental shift from implementing programs to building capacity. Instead of asking “What program should we adopt?” schools must ask “What capabilities do we need to develop?” Instead of seeking quick fixes, they must invest in long-term capacity building. This shift is fundamental to developing a school culture that is able to adapt and change in order to support student learning.
This shift requires what researchers call “absorptive capacity”—the ability of an organization to recognize valuable new information, assimilate it, and apply it to improve performance. Schools with high absorptive capacity don’t just implement new programs; they adapt them to their specific contexts, integrate them with existing practices, and build on them over time. There is a fundamental shift that takes place in these schools that sees any new change, not as a threat to what they are doing, but as an opportunity for them to improve.
Building absorptive capacity requires several key elements:
Professional Collaboration that enables teachers to collaborate on improving their practice over time, rather than just learning new techniques in isolation. This time is dedicated to teachers working together to develop skills and strategies for improvement.
Distributed leadership that doesn’t depend on any single individual, so that changes can survive leadership transitions. New ideas and programs aren’t adopted because of new leadership but because, as a school, they are deemed to be necessary for students success.
Systems thinking that helps educators understand how different initiatives connect and support each other, rather than treating each change as isolated. This requires teachers to see learning as a progression over time and requires developing systems to support students over time.
Continuous improvement processes that enable schools to learn from both successes and failures, adapting their approaches based on evidence rather than abandoning them at the first sign of difficulty.
The Patience Paradox
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of addressing the sustainability dilemma is what might be called the “patience paradox.” The urgency of educational problems—achievement gaps, teacher shortages, student disengagement—demands immediate action. Yet sustainable solutions require patience and long-term thinking. It requires seeing students learning as a continuum that stretches through time and is only partly linked to what happens in school. It shifts from trying to address “urgent problems” to examine how such problems and issues can be addressed over time.
This paradox is particularly acute in high-need schools, where students can’t afford to wait for gradual improvement. The pressure to show immediate results is both understandable and necessary. But the sustainability dilemma suggests that urgent action without sustainable thinking often makes problems worse, not better. The resolution lies in what researchers call “planned incrementalism”—making immediate improvements within a framework of long-term sustainability. This approach recognizes that schools can and must improve quickly, but not at the expense of building the capacity for continuous improvement over time.
The Culture of Continuous Improvement
The ultimate solution to the sustainability dilemma is not just sustaining individual programs but creating a culture of continuous improvement that can adapt to changing circumstances without losing its essential character. This culture has several key characteristics:
It values learning over implementing. Rather than focusing on faithfully executing external mandates, it emphasizes learning from experience and adapting based on evidence.
It builds on strengths. Instead of constantly trying to fix weaknesses, it identifies what’s working and finds ways to do more of it. There is a focus on strengths of individuals and how to use those as impetus for improvement.
It protects core practices. While remaining open to improvement, it protects the essential practices that define its identity and effectiveness. Schools take time to identify these core practices and guard them as foundational for learning.
It thinks in decades, not years. It makes decisions based on long-term consequences rather than short-term pressures. There is a need to make changes in the short-term but these are done within the context of a long-term vision.
The Wisdom of Restraint
Creating sustainable change requires what might seem like a contradiction: the wisdom of restraint. In a culture that demands constant innovation, the most innovative thing schools can sometimes do is to stop innovating and start implementing well. This requires courage because it means resisting the pressure to be constantly new and different. It means resisting change without first taking time to determine what change needs to be made and then determining how to best achieve the change.
But restraint doesn’t mean stagnation. It means being strategic about change, choosing innovations carefully, and committing to them fully. It means understanding that the goal is not to find the perfect program but to build the capacity to implement any program well. It means providing individuals with the necessary tools and training to be successful during implementation so they can persist when the eventual dips and struggles do arrive.
The sustainability dilemma reminds us that in education, as in life, the race is not always to the swift. Sometimes the most urgent thing we can do is to slow down long enough to build the foundation for lasting change. Sometimes the most innovative approach is the one that honors what is currently working while adapting thoughtfully to what is new. It takes time to ensure the people doing the implementation have the skills and tools necessary to successfully begin the new program and can sustain through the difficult times.
The quest for more in education must become a quest for sustainable more—improvements that energize rather than exhaust, innovations that build rather than tear down, and changes that last long enough to make a real difference in the lives of students and teachers.