We Keep Rolling Out Good Ideas Without the Story. That’s Why They Stall – The 74

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It’s Monday night, and over 100 people are gathered in a cafeteria-turned-school-boardroom.

The superintendent waits for her turn to step to the mic. She’s here to explain the district’s new artificial intelligence pilot: a tool teachers say will give them back an hour per day for one-on-one time with their students. She’s just two minutes into her explanation of how the tool will work, when the first parent stands up and approaches the mic. She’s followed by others, who form an increasingly long line. The first parent calls the tool “surveillance.” The second warns of “robots grading our kids,” and a third questions “what are we paying teachers for.” By the time the vote happens, the pilot is tabled. The tool hasn’t failed. The story has.

We’ve seen this movie before. In the 2000s, No Child Left Behind brought nationwide accountability; in the 2010s, Race to the Top accelerated standards and testing. But then Common Core arrived and, in too many places, the fight wasn’t about better learning but about who was in charge. A student data platform launched into a vacuum of trust. District tools that could lighten teacher workload get framed as replacements for teachers. In each case, a new idea walked into an old narrative, and the old narrative won.

This isn’t a communications problem at the end of the process. It’s a design problem at the beginning.

The education sector spends billions designing programs, products and policies but spends almost nothing designing the story that helps people understand what they are and what they do. When narrative is an afterthought, the public makes meaning on its own, using their most familiar, vivid and available shortcuts.

Those shortcuts are powerful:

• Top-down control: When reforms arrive without local authors, communities read them as done to them, not with them.
• Data equals danger: Years of breaches and sloppy practice have built a trust deficit with families.
• Tech replaces people: In schools, the default story about technology as substitution — a zero-sum trade against human connection and judgment.

The result is predictable: Good ideas stall not because they’re bad ideas, but because their stories arrive late, or not at all.

A Better Way to Build: Frame → Test → Iterate → Scale

Narratives can be built with the same rigor brought to product development. As researchers who’ve spent over two decades framing research across issues from health to early childhood, we’ve learned that meaning-making is designable — and testable — if we treat it like R&D. The key steps include:

Frame. Start by clarifying the story you want people to understand. That means articulating the core ideas — what you want people to know, feel connected to, use, and ask for — and mapping how your audiences currently make sense of the topic: their mental shortcuts, blind spots and sticking points.

Test. Turn those insights into values, metaphors and explanations that close gaps and avoid unproductive defaults. Pressure-test them: on-the-street interviews, small-group conversations, then survey studies that quantify “frame effects” on understanding, support and willingness to act.

Iterate. Use what you learn to refine and improve. Co-design with the people who will use the strategy — teachers, principals, parents, students — and embed short-cycle tests in real communications.

Scale. Package the strategy so others can pick it up: make-and-use toolkits, visuals, model language, and training sessions. Keep support alive with checklists, refreshers and coaching.

Done well, this cycle doesn’t just produce better talking points. It builds a shared narrative that prepares the ground so good ideas can take root.

A district hoping to reboot its approach to standards and testing, for instance, could map local mindsets and realize they were up against a consistent pattern of thinking: that standards are being read as a scoreboard for punishment, not a roadmap for instruction.

The team could reframe the work around “clear signposts for students’ future success” and swap abstract promises for concrete examples: student work samples, teacher-led walkthroughs, and community nights where families tried out classroom tasks. Instead of a press release about new assessments, the launch could lead with a values statement: “We need to give every student a fair shot and clear feedback.” The debate wouldn’t disappear, but it would move forward. People would begin to argue about how to do the work well, not whether to do it at all.

The same approach could work for a district introducing an AI pilot. Before getting started, district leaders could put four words on the whiteboard: Frame. Test. Iterate. Scale. Early on-the-street interviews would reveal the dominant default understanding: AI will watch our kids and sideline our teachers. So the team could test a different narrative: AI as a teaching assistant that handles routine tasks and frees teachers to do what only humans can do: build relationships, diagnose misconceptions and motivate.

What Works — and What Backfires

Through our work, we’ve distilled some key insights for education leaders trying to implement new approaches:

• Lead with widely shared values — like every student needs a fair shot and schools should equip young people to thrive. Start with why before what.
• Give the public a picture in their heads. Tested metaphors like “co-pilot,” “teaching assistant,” or “signposts” help people picture how a tool or policy works and what it changes.
• Explain the mechanism. Don’t just claim impact; show the steps from cause to effect (e.g., AI drafts feedback → teachers spend more time in 1:1 interactions → students revise more often).
• Show the humans. Center teachers and students explicitly; make technology the helper, not the hero.
• Name and neutralize risks. Address privacy, bias and misuse plainly and show your guardrails.
• Avoid traps. “Silver bullet,” “crisis-only” and “us vs. them” framing activates skepticism, scarcity and blame. They shrink your coalition and make backlash easier to trigger.

Public reaction to today’s ideas is shaped by yesterday’s scars. Communities remember when reforms felt like they arrived from far away, when data was used on them rather than for them, and when vendors treated schools like markets instead of partners. If we ignore that history, our messages will land as spin and we’ll just add to skepticism and doubt.

Trust is rebuilt through design choices: who authors the narrative, whose voices lead, what benefits arrive first and for whom, and how transparently we report what we learn. When communities that have shouldered the most underinvestment see themselves in the story — and see safeguards and benefits by design — support grows and sticks.

Innovation doesn’t lack for ideas. It lacks thenarrative infrastructure that makes them legible, trustworthy and adoptable. The fix is straightforward: put narrative prototyping on the critical path. Fund it. Time-box it. Test it. Ship it alongside the product or policy.

If we do, school board nights will sound different. Less rumor, more reasoning. Fewer boogeymen, more “show me how.” time on what matters most — students learning well, with adults they trust.

Let’s build the stories that give great ideas a chance to work.

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