The Quiet Success We Ignore: A Critique of No Adult Left Behind and many other education books

When reading No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids, I was struck not by what the book got wrong, but by what it left unsaid. Like many contemporary education books, it builds a compelling case about how adult incentives distort public schooling—but in doing so, it largely misses a quieter, more hopeful story: the thousands of places where education policy is actually working.

While both the education establishment and its fiercest critics trade sweeping claims about systemic failure, the real progress in American education is happening quietly—state by state, district by district, and school by school. These are the stories we rarely hear because they don’t fit the “broken system” narrative.

No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids (by Vladimir Kogan, 2025) contends that in U.S. K-12 public education, the fundamental governance structure is mis-aligned with the interests of students. He argues that although schools exist to educate children, they are democratically governed by adults (via elections, boards, local politics) — many of whom have no children in school, or whose primary concerns are not student academic outcomes. American public schooling is governed via local democratic control (school boards, elections) yet the voting constituency is adults, many without direct stake in K-12 outcomes.

1. This leads to a misalignment: the priorities of adult voters/interest groups often diverge from the priorities of students (learning, attainment, cognitive growth).

2. As a result, policy decisions—governance, budgeting, closure/expansion decisions, accountability systems—often favour adult interests (jobs, unions, property values, identity-politics) rather than child-centric outcomes.

3. The book provides empirical and case-study evidence of how this happens (board politics, union influence, election dynamics, school closures) and argues it’s a significant part of why U.S. schooling under-performs.

4. Finally, Kogan offers reforms aimed at realigning governance with student interests: higher turnout in board elections, improved accountability metrics that reward progress, credible school choice, and reconsideration of the assumption that local democracy is always optimal for schooling governance.

Here's the key gap that I see in this interesting book. Charters and private schools already test alternatives — and they prove that removing elections doesn’t guarantee better alignment with student outcomes. Instead, it just changes who the powerful adults are:

• In district systems, it’s voters, unions, and local officials.

• In charters, it’s boards of appointed members and CMOs.

• In private systems, it’s donors, owners, and parents-as-clients.

In each case, the incentives still run through adults — just different adults.

Reinventing the Wheel, Again

One of the strangest ironies of education reform is how often it “discovers” solutions already being implemented. Calls for governance reform, data-driven decision-making, or evidence-based practice sound revolutionary—but they’re often echoes of ongoing work.

Education is one of the few major policy domains where researchers, not practitioners, dominate the public conversation. The result is that many “big idea” books are written from macro-level or comparative theory, rather than from deep empirical engagement with state or district-level implementation.

For example:

• An academic identifies a governance misalignment (e.g., local democracy serving adult interests) — but overlooks that Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee already re-engineered their accountability systems to respond to precisely that problem.

• Or a scholar calls for evidence-based practice, seemingly unaware that federal and state programs from the Institute of Education Sciences like the WWC, Regional Educational Laboratories, and many SEAs’ evidence clearinghouses have been doing this work for 20 years (with varying success, but still robustly institutionalized).

• Or someone argues for data-driven decision-making, without acknowledging the long history of state longitudinal data systems (SLDS), ESSA school dashboards, and NWEA/Ed-Fi interoperability projects already addressing that issue.

For example, the book highlights problems with accountability and adult-centered governance, yet states like Colorado, Tennessee, and Massachusetts have already re-engineered their accountability systems around student outcomes and school performance frameworks. Plenty of charter schools and school systems have unelected boards. Federal and state initiatives—the What Works Clearinghouse, the RELs, ESSA evidence tiers, SLDS systems—are decades-deep efforts to make research and data actionable.

The issue isn’t that these structures don’t exist. It’s that their quiet, incremental successes are overlooked by macro-level analyses written from 30,000 feet.

Why the Disconnect Persists

This “reinvention” problem happens for structural reasons:

• Disciplinary Silos: Many books are written by economists and political scientists who view education as a governance or incentive problem, while practitioners know it’s an implementation problem.

• National Framing: “Education policy” in America is not a single system—it’s fifty different systems plus D.C., each with its own history and governance model.

• Publishing Incentives: Sweeping claims about “a broken system” sell better than nuanced stories of slow improvement.

• Ahistoricism: Education debates recycle ideas every decade—merit pay, accountability, local innovation—without acknowledging the accumulated lessons from previous attempts.

What No Adult Left Behind Gets Right—and Misses

To be fair, Kogan’s central thesis is insightful: adults too often shape policy for their own comfort, not for kids’ outcomes. But he underplays where those very misalignments have already been addressed in part.

Take:

• Colorado’s performance frameworks and unified improvement planning

• Tennessee’s Achievement School District and teacher residency programs

• Massachusetts’ tiered accountability and charter renewal systems

• North Carolina’s early college high school network

• Florida’s A+ Plan and literacy interventions

These aren’t theoretical reforms—they’re real, functioning systems that have evolved over years of evidence-based iteration. The lesson isn’t that the system is broken beyond repair; it’s that the tools for improvement already exist and are quietly succeeding.

The Paradox of Quiet Success

Here’s the paradox: in education research and media, failure is interesting; success is invisible. Working systems rarely make headlines or generate grant funding. Yet the most sustainable educational change has always come from local innovation amplified by evidence and state support—not from wholesale condemnation of the “institution.”

When scholars and pundits overlook these successes, they reinforce the very cynicism that keeps policymakers from scaling what works.

The next wave of education policy thought needs to stop reinventing the wheel and start studying where it’s turning. That means:

• Synthesizing what’s already working across states and districts

• Bridging research disciplines and practitioner experience

• Recognizing the infrastructure built since the 1990s—data systems, accountability models, teacher residencies, and improvement networks

• Focusing on political durability and implementation, not just on bold conceptual fixes

The future of education reform won’t come from another book declaring the system broken. It will come from researchers, educators, and policymakers learning from the quiet places where it’s already being rebuilt.