There’s an old adage that it’s better to build a sturdy fence at the top of a cliff than station an ambulance at the bottom. This wisdom has been conveyed through a variety of metaphors, but the underlying lesson is the same: preventing problems before they occur is almost always more effective than responding after the damage has been done. Yet K–12 education too often embraces the opposite instinct. For instance, schools aren’t held accountable for reading and math outcomes until the end of third grade, even though many of the conditions that shape student success take hold well before then. The result is a cascading series of downstream consequences, from the overrepresentation of Black boys in special education to the shunting of less effective teachers to the early grades.
My colleague Mike Petrilli recently argued that high school foreign language requirements are another example of education’s too-little, too-late tendency. He’s right. If the goal is for students to become proficient in another language, beginning in middle or high school is an awfully inefficient way to get there. If schools were serious about teaching students a second language, the more sensible approach would be to start earlier, when students have far more time to build fluency, and sustain instruction over many years. This points to a broader truth: timing shapes what schools can reasonably accomplish.
Foundational reading skills and automaticity with basic math facts are also worth prioritizing while students are young. Both are harder, sometimes impossible, to pick up later if they’re missed early. Students who fail to master the basics can struggle to keep up in class, require progressively intensive remediation, disengage from school, and eventually drop out. The fact that many middle schoolers still have not fully recovered from the pandemic underscores the point. The longer gaps are allowed to fester, the more difficult—and costly—it becomes to get students back on track.
School discipline further illustrates this dynamic. Much of the debate focuses on the higher rates at which Black students are suspended compared with White students. But by the time a student has misbehaved himself into suspension, expulsion, or involvement with law enforcement, the school is often dealing with behavior that has escalated over months or even years. As researchED’s Tom Bennett has written, schools need to establish clear routines, expectations, and boundaries before problems arise. “It’s all about building that fence.”Waiting until behavior has deteriorated before responding consumes more energy and effort than consistently enforcing clear expectations from the start.
So why do schools end up reacting to problems rather than heading them off? Part of the answer is that prevention is less tangible. A student who is failing or repeatedly disrupting class creates an immediate problem that demands attention. One who learns to read well in the early grades may never need tutoring, but there is no obvious crisis to point to as evidence that the early instruction worked. Similarly, schools that establish and enforce clear routines and expectations may never have to suspend a student, but there’s no way of knowing which disciplinary problems never materialized. The way education data is gathered reinforces this bias. Students who fail or misbehave show up in the numbers; students who never reach that point do not. As Mitch Daniels often says, “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.” Prevention is therefore inherently counterfactual. It’s easier to point to an ambulance that saved someone than to a fence that kept someone from falling.
There’s a broader institutional challenge here too. Education has a powerful bias toward preserving the status quo. “We’ve always done it this way” is a familiar refrain in struggling schools and districts. My former boss, Tony Bennett, often talked about how the traditional system is organized around adult comfort rather than what’s best for children. As frustrating as this inertia can be, it is also understandable, even rational. A school can see the disruption caused by changing how it teaches reading or enforces its student code of conduct. The benefits of change, on the other hand, are longer-term and far harder to grasp. And so the ambulance light spins on and on.
The point isn’t that every problem can be headed off. Sometimes the ambulance is exactly what’s needed. Tier II and Tier III supports matter. And high school foreign language courses can still give students valuable exposure to another language and culture, even if they are unlikely to produce fluency on their own.
For policymakers, the question is not only what schools should achieve, but when they need to act to make that outcome possible. What needs to happen early? What can wait? Where is the cost of waiting likely to be especially high? And what do schools need to be able to do before a problem becomes harder to address? The alternative is to keep asking schools to solve problems after they’ve become intractable.
