Populism and Education Reform

While I was travelling in the US this week I’ve had the opportunity to think more deeply about the current state of our education system -both in NZ and globally. I’ve been reflecting a lot on my experiences at the FullScale Symposium I attended, my visits to schools in San Francisco, and from reading about what was happening at the AEC “UpLiftEd” event in Wellington. In each of these I’ve seen evidence of these educational debates being increasingly polarised – evidence versus experience, experts versus “everyday wisdom,” and of what’s proven versus what’s popular.

An article I read during the week by Joseph Heath titled Populism, Fast and Slow offers an intriguing lens on this. Heath argues that populism draws on our intuitive, gut-level ways of thinking, while its critics rely on slower, analytical reasoning – and that the more experts criticise it, the stronger the populist views often become.

It’s a reminder that both intuition and analysis have blind spots. As educators and leaders, our challenge is to bridge that divide – to stay grounded in evidence, but also genuinely listen to the instincts and experiences that shape how people feel about change.

The Current Landscape: Rhetoric Without Reason

What troubles me most about the current reform discourse in New Zealand is not that change is being proposed, but rather the nature of how it’s being justified. Government communications increasingly appeal to populist sentiment, citing things like “common sense” solutions, appeals to parental frustration, promises to cut through bureaucracy and get “back to basics” for example. These messages resonate because they tap into genuine anxieties: concerns about literacy and numeracy outcomes, frustration with what feels like educational jargon, and a sense that schools have lost their way.

Yet when we look for the substantive case underpinning these reforms, we often find a vacuum. Where is the robustly argued evidence base that canvases all sides of the debate? Where are the longitudinal studies showing that the proposed changes will lead to better outcomes for our diverse student population? Instead, we get slogans and selective statistics that confirm predetermined conclusions.

The defence from those who oppose these reforms is equally problematic in my view. Too often, it amounts to a defence of the status quo rather than a compelling vision for a future focused solution. We hear that “evidence-based practice” supports current approaches, but this can sound like professional gatekeeping to parents and community members who see their children struggling. When educators respond to legitimate concerns with appeals to their own expertise, we risk widening the very divide we need to close.

Understanding the Populist Appeal

Heath’s framework helps explain why populist rhetoric about education proves so resilient. Intuitive thinking (what psychologists call System 1 thinking) is immediate, emotional, and based on readily available examples. When a parent sees their child unable to read fluently, when a community member recalls their own schooling as more rigorous, when a teacher feels overwhelmed by compliance demands, these experiences create powerful intuitive judgments.

Populist messaging works because it validates these intuitions. It says: “your concerns are legitimate, your common sense is right, and the experts who dismiss you are out of touch.” (A view expressed more than once by our own politicians or the ‘experts’ supporting them!) This is politically effective because it doesn’t require people to wade through complex research or understand the nuances of pedagogical theory.

The analytical response (System 2 thinking) requires effort. It asks people to consider complex evidence, to understand why simple solutions might have unintended consequences, to recognise that their personal experience might not generalise. This is a much harder sell, particularly when it seems to invalidate people’s lived reality.

The Expert’s Dilemma

As school leaders, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable position. We know that educational change is complex, that what works is often context-dependent, that there are rarely simple answers to systemic challenges. Too often we’ve seen initiatives fail because they ignored implementation realities or underestimated the importance of teacher expertise and professional judgment.

But when we articulate these complexities, we can sound defensive or evasive. When we point to research evidence, we can seem to be dismissing the legitimate concerns of parents and communities. The more we insist on the need for nuanced, evidence-informed approaches, the more we may inadvertently strengthen the populist narrative that “experts” are disconnected from reality.

This is Heath’s key insight: criticism from experts can actually reinforce populism rather than undermine it. When educational researchers and leaders critique simplistic solutions, it can be interpreted as professional self-interest – as defending a system that serves educators rather than students.

The Echo Chamber Problem

This dynamic became starkly visible to me recently at the two professional gatherings mentioned earlier. At the FullScale Symposium last week, I spent several days with education delegates hearing speakers and attending workshops that were largely focused on promoting evidence-informed practice in education. The quality of thinking was impressive, the research discussed was rigorous, and the commitment to student outcomes was genuine.

Yet as the days progressed, I became increasingly aware of what wasn’t being said. There was virtually no ‘counter view’ being expressed during the sessions – no voice representing the parent frustrated with progressive pedagogy, no perspective from the community member who thinks schools have lost their focus on fundamentals, no challenge to the prevailing orthodoxies of contemporary educational thought. Similarly, the AEC event (held in Wellington while I was away) featured a wide range of ‘experts’ whose views, however well-intentioned, could easily be construed by outsiders as professional self-interest.

The danger here is not that these gatherings happened – professional learning communities are valuable and necessary. The danger is that we immerse ourselves so completely in these self-reinforcing environments that we lose the ability to hear how our messages land with those outside our circles. We become fluent in speaking to each other while losing fluency in the language and concerns of the broader community.

When educational thought-leaders gather primarily to speak to each other, validating existing perspectives and approaches, we create the very conditions that make populist critiques more potent. We confirm the suspicion that ‘experts’ are disconnected from everyday concerns, that educational discourse is an insular conversation that excludes ordinary people, that professional recommendations serve professional interests rather than student needs.

This is not about abandoning professional spaces or dumbing down our discourse. It’s about recognising that if we only ever talk amongst ourselves, we shouldn’t be surprised when our carefully reasoned arguments fail to persuade – or worse, when they actively alienate the people we most need to engage.

Blind Spots on Both Sides

The challenge for school leaders is that both intuitive and analytical thinking have genuine blind spots when it comes to education reform.

Intuitive thinking can lead us astray because education is a complex system where cause and effect are not always obvious. What “feels right” (i.e. more discipline, more testing, more homework) may not actually produce better learning outcomes. Our memories of our own schooling are notoriously unreliable, often romanticising aspects that were actually quite problematic. And individual experiences, however powerful, don’t necessarily translate into effective policy.

But analytical thinking has its own limitations. Research evidence is always incomplete, often contradictory, and rarely provides clear prescriptions for specific contexts. The quest for rigorous evidence can lead to paralysis or to over-reliance on what can be measured rather than what matters most. Academic discourse can become self-referential, more concerned with methodological purity than practical impact.

Perhaps more troubling is how research evidence can be weaponised in service of predetermined agendas. In the current climate, we see rampant cherry-picking of research – selectively citing studies that support a particular position while ignoring contradictory findings or broader contextual factors. This is populism dressed in academic clothing: System 1 thinking that has learned to drape itself in the legitimacy of evidence.

When government or advocacy groups cite research to justify reforms, we need to ask: “Have they engaged with the full body of evidence, including studies that complicate or contradict their preferred narrative? Have they considered implementation contexts that differ from the research settings? Are they acknowledging the limitations and caveats that researchers themselves would insist upon?” Too often, the answer is no. Research becomes a tool for confirmation bias rather than genuine inquiry – we see this when the same pieces of evidence are repeatedly cited while contrary findings are systematically ignored, or when complex, nuanced research is reduced to sound bites that strip away all qualification and context.

This selective use of evidence is particularly dangerous because it undermines the very foundation of evidence-informed practice. When research is treated as a menu from which we can select only the items that suit our taste, we destroy its credibility and reinforce the populist suspicion that “experts” simply use data to justify what they already wanted to do.

Further to this, there’s a deeper problem. In education, values matter as much as evidence. Questions about what we want our education system to achieve (its purpose), what kind of citizens we’re hoping to develop, what knowledge and capabilities matter most – these are fundamentally normative questions that can’t be resolved by research alone. When we pretend that educational decisions are purely technical matters best left to experts, we deny the legitimate role of democratic participation in shaping our schools.

A Path Forward for School Leaders

So where does this leave us as educational leaders trying to navigate reform in a populist environment resulting in polarized views?

First, we need to acknowledge that populist concerns often point to real problems, even if the proposed solutions are simplistic. Declining literacy rates, teacher burnout, excessive compliance demands, disconnect between school and community – these are genuine issues that deserve serious attention. Our response should start with validation, not defensiveness.

Second, we must resist the temptation to hide behind expertise. Yes, educational research matters and professional judgment is important, but these should inform dialogue rather than foreclose it. (How often have I heard a quote from John Hattie’s research fired off as a response to criticism as if that alone will be a convincing argument for example). We need to make our reasoning transparent, explain why we think certain approaches work better than others, and be honest about uncertainty and complexity without using it as an excuse for inaction.

Third, we should recognise that emotional and intuitive responses to education aren’t just noise to be overcome – they often contain important insights. A parent’s gut feeling that their child isn’t being challenged, a teacher’s instinct that a new policy will create unintended problems, a community’s sense that schools no longer reflect their values – these deserve serious consideration, not dismissal.

Fourth, we need to build what might be called “translational capacity” – the ability to move between different ways of knowing and talking about education. This means being fluent in research evidence while also being able to speak in the language of everyday experience. It means honouring both the systematic knowledge that comes from formal study and the practical wisdom that comes from lived experience.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must create spaces for genuine deliberation about educational values and purposes. Instead of treating reform debates as technical questions with right answers, we should facilitate community conversations about what we collectively want from our schools. This means slowing down, creating opportunities for diverse voices to be heard, and building shared understanding before rushing to solutions.

The Leadership Challenge

This is not easy work. It requires us to sit with tension and ambiguity. It means sometimes advocating strongly for evidence-informed approaches while at other times stepping back to listen and learn. It requires humility about the limits of our expertise alongside confidence in the value of careful analysis and systematic inquiry.

In the face of reform rhetoric that appeals to simplistic thinking, our task is not simply to mount a defence of evidence-based practice. It’s to model a different kind of conversation – one that takes both evidence and experience seriously, that bridges intuitive and analytical thinking, that honours complexity without becoming paralysed by it.

This means being willing to say “I don’t know” when we don’t, to admit when current approaches aren’t working, to engage genuinely with concerns rather than explain them away. It means building trust through transparency and consistency, demonstrating through our actions that we’re committed to the success of all students, not to defending professional territory.

The reforms currently being proposed in New Zealand may or may not prove beneficial – the evidence base is thin, and much will depend on implementation. But regardless of what happens with specific policy initiatives, the deeper challenge remains: how do we have better conversations about education that neither defer entirely to expert judgment nor surrender to populist simplification?

As school leaders, we stand at a crucial intersection. We can either retreat into our professional enclaves, defending what we know against populist critique, or we can step into the messy, difficult work of bridging the divide between evidence and experience, between analytical and intuitive thinking. The future of our education system may well depend on which path we choose.

The question for all of us in educational leadership is whether we can create the conditions for wiser collective decisions about our schools – decisions that draw on both the rigour of systematic inquiry and the wisdom that comes from lived experience. In a time of polarisation, this may be the most important work we do.

[Disclosure: I had help from Claude.ai and ChatGPT in the process of formulating this post]