What Works May Hurt

Earlier this year I had the privilege of presenting at some conferences in Australia alongside Yong Zhao and have been thinking more recently about the warnings in his book titled: what works may hurt. His point in that book is simple but profound – there’s no such thing as a solution without side effects. Every intervention comes with trade-offs. And if we’re not careful, the very policies we celebrate as “what works” can end up causing long-term harm.

Zhao highlights three reminders that I find particularly relevant right now:

• Everything has side effects.
• Long-term outcomes matter as much as short-term gains.
• Average effects can hide serious damage to individuals.

That last one really resonates. If we design a system around averages, we almost guarantee that some learners will be left behind – or worse, actively harmed.

The promise and the problem of “what works”

The push for “evidence-based” education has always made sense to me. Of course we want policy and practice guided by research, not just ideology or hunches. But the danger comes when “evidence-based” becomes shorthand for one-size-fits-all prescriptions.

Take the U.S. No Child Left Behind initiative in the US which Yong highlights in his book. On paper, it was framed as a grand experiment in “what works.” Yong points out that in reality, it quickly became a political project – cobbled together by advisers and consultants chasing funding, not educators designing for learners. The side effects were severe: narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the test, and entire communities labelled as failing.

And here in New Zealand, I see worrying echoes of that pattern.

The New Zealand context

On taking up her role as Minister of Education Erica Stanford set out six priorities: clearer curriculum, evidence-based literacy and numeracy, smarter assessment, better teacher training, stronger learning support, and greater use of data. On the surface, it’s hard to argue with any of these. Who doesn’t want kids to succeed, teachers to be supported, and parents to have clarity?

But here’s where Zhao’s warning bites. What might the side effects be?

• Employability over personhood: The reforms lean heavily on aligning education with industry. Are we preparing citizens, or just future workers?
• Measurable at all costs: What counts is what can be measured – literacy, numeracy, qualifications. What gets pushed to the margins are things like curiosity, creativity, cultural identity, or civic agency.
• Reduced flexibility: Standardisation narrows choice. Fewer pathways, less room for students to follow their passions.
• Equity by tightening the screws: Instead of investing in support that meets diverse learners where they are, the bar is simply raised. Equity becomes about uniformity, not about fairness.
• A narrow definition of success: Success is framed as a qualification, not as a flourishing life.

It’s telling that when introducing these reforms the Minister said: “The single most important thing we can do is ensure consistency… The key here is, this is a one-size-fits-all approach.”

That, to me, is the problem in a nutshell.

The deeper issue: power

One-size-fits-all isn’t just a technical misstep; it’s a political choice. It privileges one way of knowing, one cultural perspective, one vision of success – and asks everyone else to fit into it. For Māori, Pasifika, and many others, that means leaving parts of themselves at the school gate. That’s not equity. That’s assimilation.

This is something I highlighted in a previous blog post. True equity isn’t about redistributing content. It’s about redistributing power. Power to shape what counts as success. Power to bring your own identity, culture, and knowledge into the classroom. Power to question and remake the system itself.

Breaking the cycle

The paradox is that many families and educators still defend the traditional model – even though it never fully served them – because they fear anything else might disadvantage their kids. I get that fear. When the stakes feel so high, who wants to gamble on change? But unless we have the courage to break that cycle, we’ll keep producing the same inequities we say we want to fix.

So when I hear political promises about getting “back to basics” or delivering “world-leading education,” I can’t help but ask: world-leading for whom? And at what cost?

If we take Yong Zhao’s warning seriously, the question isn’t only about what works? but who does it work for, and who does it hurt?

That’s the conversation we need to be having.