Two points I want to make about policymakers. One is that when I wrote my first major book about our school work, it was ’83, I believe, the publisher said, “We’ll publish it because we think this is important, but nobody will read it, because nobody’s interested in education.”

We’ve gone from no interest in education as late as 1983 to an almost panic about education in 2007. And all of a sudden you’ve got everybody doing everything, and you have policymakers who are not well grounded themselves in knowledge about child and adolescent development.

That’s no fault of theirs; it just didn’t happen because it wasn’t there in their training and preparation. And so you have to find a way to help those policymakers understand while at the same time recognizing their constraints. And so it's a challenge, and you have to persist and understand.

The other thing that’s very troublesome, when you begin to get people to understand, and get policymakers to understand, legislators to understand and they put money into it, all of a sudden everybody comes with an approach. And all the approaches sound the same, and so then you’re going to be in competition with people selling their approaches.

That’s troublesome for me, because I don’t like to sell. I think that the work should speak for itself and the outcomes should speak for themselves. You have to educate policymakers about that, also.

That it’s not what people say they can do, it’s their track record, it’s the outcomes that they can produce and show you, it’s how long they’ve been at this job, and whether they’re just talking or whether they really have something solid. And the policymaker has to be helped to see that that’s what they should look for.

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