One of the things that’s important in this field is to be flexible and to be patient and yet persistent and to be willing and able to figure out ways around obstacles. And the nature of the work out in the real world is that it just doesn’t work the way that the textbook says it should work.

We don’t talk to people enough about that when we’re designing research programs and so on. Things just don’t work the way you expect they’re going to work. And we’ve seen numerous times, we’ve had situations where we’d take five years to take a school from the bottom achievement-wise to having people focused on child and adolescent development, getting good outcomes from children or the predication that these kids can’t learn, to excelling.

And then have a new superintendent come in who doesn’t believe in this stuff, and you’ve got to be able to respond. In short, what I’m saying is that beware that the world doesn’t work the way it’s designed, and you have to be flexible. You have to adjust, and you have to be willing to wait and also to create what you need.

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