Fifteen years have passed since Indiana took home the Fordham Institute’s “Education Reform Idol” crown, a recognition earned through a sweeping set of reforms that included an overhaul of teacher evaluation, an expansion of school choice, and major changes to collective bargaining. It feels like a lifetime ago, back when bipartisan education reform still had real momentum. That era came back into sharp relief for me while reading a recent Johns Hopkins University interview with my former boss and longtime friend Tony Bennett, who led education in Indiana and later Florida. Conducted by Jonathan Plucker, their conversation finds Bennett candid and clear-eyed about both the successes and shortcomings of that period. What stands out most, looking back, isn’t just how much reform happened, but how it happened—and how different that approach looks from the way reform is pursued today.
It wasn’t just a different political moment. It was a different theory of change. Education reform today is often myopic in comparison, in the sense that it organizes improvement around discrete levers that are expected to produce results largely on their own. A new reading law becomes shorthand for reading improvement. Private school choice stands in for systemwide change. Math instruction is treated as the primary pathway to stronger outcomes. What gets lost is the degree to which these levers depend on broader conditions (e.g., standards, capacity, accountability, execution) for their effects to materialize. This is not a universal pattern, and there are important exceptions (more on that below), but it reflects a gradual shift from comprehensive reform to piecemeal initiatives.
In the early 2010s, Indiana’s pursuit of education reform was not organized around any single policy. As Bennett describes it, the approach was explicitly coordinated across several fronts:
Our strategy was to pass all [of our reform] bills at once. This would force our opponents to oppose all of them so we could paint them as being for nothing and against everything. I worked with both House and Senate Caucuses and agreed to attend their town hall meetings, which were being flooded by angry teachers, to answer questions and take the wrath. This, along with the bully pulpit of Governor Daniels, gave them the cover they needed to pass [everything].
That effort was anchored by Bennett’s “90-25-90” goals: 90 percent of students passing the state test, 25 percent earning advanced credit or credentials, and 90 percent graduating from high school ready for college or career without remediation. Together, they defined what success meant in concrete terms and made the desired outcomes clear to one and all. No state had achieved them, and that ambition became an organizing force for everything that followed.
With these reforms codified into law and 90-25-90 as the North Star, the work shifted quickly from aspiration to implementation. It was propelled by a close relationship between Bennett and Governor Mitch Daniels, with the governor’s clout helping to recruit top talent to Indianapolis. An underlying sense of urgency, rooted in an understanding that there was a limited window to put the pieces into place, kept momentum from dissipating. Indiana’s agenda was a comprehensive one in which policy, people, and political will reinforced one another. The resulting academic gains were not the product of any single policy shift, but of a deliberate push across multiple areas—an approach that, over time, would prove difficult to sustain.
Important counterexamples remain today. Mississippi’s recent literacy gains, for instance, are often attributed to the science of reading, but closer analyses reveal a larger, coordinated effort spanning high expectations, curriculum guidance, teacher preparation, accountability, and sustained implementation support. And in Texas, the state’s data-driven education commissioner has treated accountability as a tool for driving managerial decisions that produce results. What distinguishes effective reform is whether those signals are paired with a system that turns them into action, along with leadership commitment and follow-through.
Bennett’s reflections are clarifying. One of the most widely cited concepts from that period is what he describes as “tight–loose–tight”: tight on goals, loose on means, tight again on accountability. It is a deceptively simple framework that depends on discipline at every stage. Over time, however, that balance has been replaced by something closer to “loose–tight–loose”: loose agreement on goals, tight constraints on implementation, and laissez-faire oversight on top—though in areas like curriculum, states like Mississippi and Texas have moved in the opposite direction, toward greater specificity and guidance. But an even deeper concern lies in how systems behave in practice. As Bennett notes:
[There were so many] times…when we asked districts, schools, and leaders to provide us specific and clear “red tape” that we could remove to make their jobs easier. We literally asked that question every year, and without fail, we not only got no real answers, but we also received reasons we should not remove that red tape.
Even when given the opportunity to reduce unnecessary constraints, practitioners chose to defend them rather than eliminate them.
This gets at the core tension in efforts to “return education to the states,” which assume that shifting authority downward will automatically improve outcomes. But systems shaped by decades of externally imposed rules, procedures, and oversight do not become more effective simply because that oversight is removed. Many reform efforts underdeliver because they rely on discrete levers rather than a comprehensive approach and assume that devolution alone will solve for execution.
Indiana’s reform idol victory feels today like an artifact of a bygone era, one that is unlikely to return anytime soon. Even so, one of the more counterintuitive reflections from Bennett is that the surface conditions for reform may be more favorable today than they were 15 years ago, particularly in red states. Choice enjoys broader public support, literacy policy is on stronger footing, and the level of personal vitriol directed at state chiefs appears to have diminished. Yet that improvement in climate has not translated into stronger academic performance. The explanation lies less in the atmospherics than in how reform is put together. Among the lessons from Bennett’s tenure, the most important for reformers today is that lasting improvement depends less on individual reforms than on whether they are part of a coherent whole. The challenge, as Bennett’s experience suggests, is sustaining that coherence over time.
