The Delta Issue #87

Jennifer Pahlka on the Implementation Chain

Most people agree government can be more efficient. But over the past year, we’ve seen how attempts to improve efficiency can go really wrong. That doesn’t make the idea inherently bad; it just means there are lessons to learn.

This week, Jennifer Pahlka —author of Recoding America and someone who has spent years inside and alongside the government trying to make it work better—published a piece using the Louisiana Department of Education as a case study to government cuts done right.

She traces a story we know well: how Louisiana moved from a fragmented system to a more coherent model tied to clear classroom goals, a defined implementation chain, and aligned systems, including the “Super App” (a name you might recognize).

We highly recommend you read the full piece, but here are our three biggest takeaways to start:

Start with what you want to see

“Before any of the restructuring, LDOE did something that sounds simple and proved to be extraordinarily difficult. They defined what they actually wanted to see happen in classrooms… The goal wasn’t ‘raise test scores’ but rather the specific student experiences that would have to be present before test scores could rise.”

I often talk to my team about the courage to think small, the discipline it takes to focus on what’s actually happening in classrooms, not just what we hope improves.

Louisiana did exactly that, defining success in clear, observable ways: students reading complex texts and writing about them, students working through math problems and explaining their thinking.

These may feel a little “duh,” but it turns out most systems don’t actually do this. And without a clear north star, there’s nothing to align funding, support, or priorities in service of kids.

You’re just layering priorities and hoping something sticks.

Get the order of operations right

“[The LDOE] defined what they actually wanted to see happen in classrooms in ways that everyone could understand and contribute to. The goal wasn’t “raise test scores,” but the specific student experiences that would need to be present for those scores to improve.

From that vision, they worked backwards through what Kaufman and Narechania call an “implementation chain”: what teachers need to do, what principals need to do to support teachers, what districts need to do to support principals, and what the state needs to do to support districts.

When it comes to government reform, coherence is an order-of-operations game. As Jennifer Pahlka puts it, you can’t eat dessert first. You have to do the hard work of defining the goal and building the system before you cut.

The implementation chain is what makes that possible. The implementation chain is how you move from a good policy idea to something that actually works in real classrooms. It’s what Jennifer Pahlka describes as “the most valuable contribution to the framework Andrew and I laid out.”

Once you know what you want to see in classrooms, you have to map what changes must be made to get there, at every level of the system. In order for students to have a different experience, what do teachers do, how do principals support, what must districts enable, and what can the state do to incentivize all these changes?

In Louisiana’s case, we got clear on what should happen in classrooms, built the system to support it, and only then removed what was no longer needed.

At Watershed Advisors, we talk about the implementation chain all the time because it works.

Fix the structure, not just the symptoms

“DOGE’s theory was that the incoherence was the product of too many people… Louisiana’s experience suggests the opposite: the incoherence was the product of a structure that pointed too many people in different directions.”

From the outside, it’s easy to look at systems like this and think the problem is just too much, whether that be too many people or too many programs.

What we learned in Louisiana is that fragmentation is much more a structure problem than a people problem. If you have teams doing good work but working toward different goals, you’re not moving in a shared direction or moving the needle for kids.

Until everything is aligned around a common goal, and a clear path for how that goal actually shows up in classrooms, changing headcount is no strategy for efficiency. It just moves the same incoherence around.