The Compliance Spiral (Or How Systems Grow Barnacles)
Last week I spent some time with an organization that’s taking a refreshing and long-overdue approach to teacher professional development. There are no theatrics or shiny new frameworks; instead they offer a clear theory of what teachers need to improve their practice, and a willingness to reorganize time, authority, and resources around that goal. Those conversations have lingered with me because it highlights a pattern that has shaped U.S. public education for decades: when trust in a system is low, organizations substitute rules for judgment and activity for progress. Compliance becomes the dominant logic, and everything else (money, innovation, even the rhetoric of reform) organizes around it. Over time, low-trust systems metastasize. They grow layers, usually in the form of new rules, reporting requirements, or safeguards, that seem rational in isolation, but collectively they distort the original purpose.
I’ve started thinking of this as a ‘compliance spiral,’ a mechanism that explains why reform often produces motion without improvement. As someone who is deeply rooted in the history of education reform, I have an ongoing interest in how we approach innovation, especially when it comes on the heels of an emergency. So let’s dig into a few examples, for comparison purposes.
Emergency Language, Divergent Responses
In 1983, A Nation at Risk declared in a very dramatic fashion that if a foreign power had imposed our educational system on us, we would consider it an act of war. The language was existential by design. Since then, the U.S. has faced at least two other crises that were likewise framed in existential terms: the attacks of September 11th and the COVID-19 pandemic. What’s striking about these examples is the response patterns used in each.
After 9/11, we centralized authority, created new agencies, redefined purpose, drafted new regulatory frameworks, and spent enormous sums in service of redesigning our national security apparatus. We can debate the merits of individual decisions but the posture was unmistakable: the system mattered, and it was worth strengthening.
Education has taken a different path (we always do). Despite the alarmist language, our response to A Nation at Risk was not system fortification but fragmentation. Base funding was constrained. Teacher professionalism was questioned. Alternatives grew quickly, typically involving shortcuts to existing systems: fast-track preparation programs that reduced clinical practice, alternative licensure routes that sough the path of least resistance rather than value, lowered diploma requirements built, and standardized tests used as proxies for accountability rather than instruments for systemic improvement. Each gave the impression of progress without reinforcing the core public system. The assumption underlying modern reform has never been that the system required investment, but that it could not be trusted with it.
COVID relief spending exposed the same dynamic in a new form. Unprecedented sums flowed to states and districts with minimal guidance about purpose, long-term capacity, or structural redesign. Reporting requirements and timelines dominated, leaving implementation intact but system improvement largely unaddressed. Money preserved what existed and compliance dictated how it was spent.
The Compliance Spiral
Chronic distrust produces predictable behavior. When policymakers do not trust institutions to exercise professional judgment, they write ALOT of rules. Rules require oversight. Oversight requires staff. Staff require documentation. Documentation becomes proof of seriousness. Over time, the system devotes increasing energy to managing its own defensiveness rather than advancing its mission.
David Graeber’s bookThe system generates work that feels essential to those performing it—but primarily signals compliance rather than producing real instructional improvement. Bullshit Jobs captures this logic perfectly: many modern roles exist not to produce value but to signal the legitimacy of the role itself, manage risk, and stabilize the system. Education is no exception.
As reporting, audits, and requirements continue to accumulate, districts expand their administrative offices. This is not done to improve instruction but to survive oversight. Bureaucratic bloat leads to administrative bloat. Instructional time always comes second to documentation. Teacher expertise can’t compete with compliance officers. Bureaucracy is typically cited as inefficiency, but it is better understood as adaptation to a system designed around low trust. Like barnacles on a ship, each layer begins as protection but gradually slows movement, obscures design, and requires constant maintenance just to keep the vessel afloat.
Title II and the Professional Development Paradox
Title II spending provides another handy example of the trend in action, and exemplifies the compliance spiral. Roughly $2 billion flows annually to teacher professional development (or improving teacher quality), yet decades of research show us that most PD as currently implemented has minimal effect on classroom practice or student learning. The spending persists, largely unchanged or unchallenged.
Why? Because Title II funds are easy to specify, purchase, and audit. They generate activity that can be documented without demanding coherence. Seat time and hours on task instead of mastery, vendors instead of internal expertise, workshops instead of system-wide instructional design. Compliance, not learning, drives resource allocation. Some groups out there have figured this out, and they make a fortune out of our current system (they also happen to have alumni who, more and more, are leading state education offices and have zero incentive to question whether their parent organization is efficient or effective).
Professional development is not failing because teachers or districts lack motivation or even options. It is failing because the system treats activity as a proxy for improvement. That is the compliance spiral at work. Meanwhile, the very educators who most need meaningful support and guidance are often trapped in this cycle, with attention and resources absorbed by documentation, reporting, and compliance rather than actual growth. And since needs are going unmet, the demand on the system stays as strong as ever,
Empathy Without Action
Modern reform culture is leaning heavily into empathic processes like listening tours and narrative collection. But listening is not the problem; listening without actionable decisions is. Too often, the system channels energy into documenting experiences and validating perspectives, producing reports, presentations, and committees that look productive on paper but rarely change authority, resource allocation, or incentive structures. In Graeber’s terms, some of this work resembles “bullshit jobs”: labor that feels essential and important, but exists primarily to signal seriousness rather than deliver impact. In education, that means hours spent convening focus groups or synthesizing stakeholder feedback without the authority or resources to act on what is learned. In engineering terms, we’ve confused diagnostics with repair. Empathy feels moral while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged.
This procedural empathy is a branch of the same spiral: labor exists to satisfy perception and documentation requirements, leaving teachers and students constrained by the very bureaucracy meant to support them. Teachers and students remain constrained by outdated structures, while energy and attention are absorbed upstream by processes designed to show care rather than create it. I recall being in a meeting at a state agency once where I was told, “Sometimes you act like we’re not trying,” to which I replied, “I’m certain the struggling students in this state could care less about our effort and would very much prefer programs that lead to results.” Listening may feel ethical, but without action it simply preserves the status quo. The very people who need guidance, support, and professional growth are trapped in a cycle of compliance-driven activity, left with the hollow satisfaction of being “heard” while nothing structurally changes around them.
Choice Is a Signal, Not a System
Parental choice is growing, and there are many good reasons for its popularity. Families are responding rationally to uncertainty and uneven system performance. Choosing alternatives is predictable. But choice is another example of feedback, not infrastructure. It reallocates students without redesigning instruction and creates pressure without professional coherence. Choice can generate new roles, programs, and oversight mechanisms, but that may signal action without strengthening the underlying system. The choice movement is likely to be swallowed by the same compliance spiral: labor exists to manage or respond to perception, risk, or demand, rather than to improve teaching and learning.
When choice is the primary reform lever, it reinforces the same pattern: bypass instead of build. Families exit, and attention is diverted to managing movement rather than building capacity. In this sense, choice functions like a diagnostic signal, telling us where trust is weak but failing to answer the much harder question: what does a public education system worth trusting actually look like, and how do we resource it accordingly?
Choice raises flags rather than laying foundations; it signals dissatisfaction without addressing structure.
The System Is Not a Scapegoat
Blaming “the system” is lazy when done vaguely, but ignoring it is negligent when the system is the main constraint. Forty years of reform suggest we do not treat public education as critical infrastructure. If we did, we would design it like one: coherent, trusted, and oriented toward capacity rather than appearances.
Until we do, money will flow, bureaucracy will balloon, savvy “disruptor” groups will siphon millions in public money, listening will continue without decisions, and reform will focus on motion over improvement. Compliance will dominate unless we analyze the intent behind compliance systems. The larger system will accumulate layers like barnacles, and professional development (our $2 billion annual signal of “trying”) will remain evidence of activity rather than growth.
This may sound cynicism, but it is actually pattern recognition. Trying isn’t enough. We need to demonstrate we are willing to design a system worth trusting. Until that happens, the compliance spiral will continue to dictate both the work we do and the results we get.
