What is Your Theory of Change?

BY STEVE NUZUM

“Certain ideas, you can have a theory… put it into practice, and suddenly it changes everything.” -Former South Carolina Freedom Caucus Chair Adam Morgan

As I was drawn more and more into organizing and advocacy efforts over the past half decade, the smartest organizers I met would often mention a “theory of change”. At first, I wasn’t totally sure what they meant.

According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “A theory of change is both a conceptual model and a concrete product that reflects the model. A fundamental component of any large-scale social change effort, theory of change can help teams strengthen strategies and maximize results by charting out the work ahead, what success looks like and how to get there.”

The way I understand it, if you buy into the idea of a theory of change, you have a good starting point for considering the problems facing your community, your workplace, your country, etc., and asking yourself vital questions like:

• What is the current situation?

• What change is needed to improve the situation?

• What do I think actually causes changes to occur?

• Can I do what needs to be done to promote those changes?

A coherent theory of change

I’m not sure many of the people and organizations with the largest impact on school policy in South Carolina-- or perhaps in America at large-- have a coherent theory of change. 

That isn’t necessarily because they aren’t smart or passionate or dedicated, but because human beings aren’t inherently logical creatures.  Without discipline and practice, we tend towards decision-making that is emotionally-driven, spontaneous, and sometimes deeply irrational. 

From school administrators to nonprofits to legislators, I’ve talked with a large cross-section of people who have a vested interest, for better or worse, in shaping what our public schools look like. 

Most of these people and organizations, in my experience, have fairly clear beliefs about change: Perhaps efforts to create change should be led by experts.  Perhaps they should be shaped by “taxpayers”.  Perhaps change, itself, should be approached cautiously, after much discussion. Perhaps efforts to create change have to capitalize on the strong feelings of the moment (what classical rhetoricians call kairos). Perhaps change is best avoided, in order to conserve what is good (or profitable) about the status quo. 

But these aren’t really theories of change, because they aren’t invested in fact-based, cause-and-effect investigations of how particular changes could be achieved, or in the most likely outcomes of those changes.  

And in fact many of our leaders seem allergic to discussions of theories of change.  Often, a change to the status quo would mean a change to their own role, or even the end of their own career.

Conceptual frameworks that involve a theory of change-- Critical Race Theory, for example-- might scare organizations like the Freedom Caucus and Moms for Liberty less for what their actual “tenets” are (CRT, as envisioned by its founders and proponents, doesn’t have a lot of these, because it is more an ongoing academic discussion than a set of ideological certainties), than because it provides a framework for understanding why society might be the way it is, and how it might be changed, and because it suggests compelling, plausible reasons for why people who are already in a position of power might be systematically biased towards maintaining the current situation that provided them with that power. 

This is certainly what former Freedom Caucus chair Adam Morgan seemed to be telling my students when he visited my classroom a few years ago.  Morgan at one point gave my students a fairly involved deconstruction of what he called “Cultural Marxism” (which he presented, itself, as a kind of theory of change, though it has been labeled an antisemitic conspiracy theory by some observers, including the Southern Poverty Law Center). As part of this deconstruction, Morgan suggested to my students that what was really bad about “CRT” was that it rested on the assumption that society should be continually critiqued and improved. 

(“Cultural Marxism” is, vaguely and inconsistently, the belief that The Frankfurt School, a real, loose connection of mostly Jewish intellectuals who fled Europe in the wake of the Holocaust, are somehow the villains behind the alleged indoctrination of students and general destruction of society today.) 

Small-d democratic theories of change.

Labor unions, traditionally, operate on pretty clear theories of change, whether they’re stated or not.  They operate, for example, on the assumption that workers will likely (or perhaps certainly) be exploited if they don’t gather the leverage to compel their employers to bargain with them. They rest on the theory of change that many workers, working together, can create leverage that none of them could create individually. 

Whether you agree with this theory of change or not, it is founded in experience, logic, an acknowledgment of the history of the labor movement in America and around the world, and a specific understanding of cause and effect. For example, the 1834 and 1836 strikes by young female factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, are generally understood to have ultimately brought about significant improvements in pay, particularly because the workers became more organized by building on early failures, because they had clear goals in mind and formulated rational plans for achieving those goals, based on what they believed about their employers.

Lowell factory workers, ca 1910-15 (public domain), via the National Parks Service.

Labor unions also traditionally hold the same theory of change behind democratic movements in general, which tend to rest on the assumption that there is strength in numbers, and that solidarity among workers or other groups of people is necessary to ensure that the will of the people ultimately carries more weight than the preferences of small elites.

Many political caucuses operate on the assumption that they are more likely to create policy changes if they gain more members. (An alternate assumption might be that they are more likely to create them if they bargain more effectively with other caucuses.)  Their theory of change may be that they have to, for example, redraw voting districts to make more legislative seats easier to win for their members. (An alternate theory of change might be that they need to put forth policies that would help them win in a fair, democratic contest.) 

SC Senate majority leader Shane Massey famously told his colleagues that he believes only parties who “win some freakin’ elections” have a role in setting the policy agenda, and that he is “not a lowercase D democrat”— suggesting that in his theory of change, the only role of voters is to vote, and to then shut up and wait for the next election while our betters (elected officials in the majority party) do whatever they want.

He is correct; this is an ultimately antidemocratic theory of change. 

I believe that in order for us to effectively improve schools, we have to adopt a clear and coherent theory of change.  

But the operative one during my career as a teacher seemed to be that winning over state legislators was the best way to convince them to adopt policies which education experts, including teachers, wanted.

To put it as charitably as possible, I haven’t seen that approach work.  To be sure, many advocates are on good terms with legislators.  And often legislators will tout their conversations with representatives from teacher organizations when promoting education policy. To give just one recent example, Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver tied the state’s new cell phone policy to feedback from teachers (although she has a long history of ignoring similar levels of feedback from teachers when it does not align with her policy goals).  

In a state where leaders like Massey and Weaver (who notably ended a 50-year relationship with the state library association explicitly because of feedback it gave a state special committee devoted to teacher retention) control the largest levers of power, it seems disconnected from political reality to form a theory of change primarily around making nice with politicians. (This is not to say that there isn’t value in maintaining legislative relationships, when doing so doesn’t interfere with the larger goal of improving schools.)  

The reality is that South Carolina has, over the past several years, adopted a sweeping and unpopular voucher scheme, seen that law rejected by the state Supreme Court, immediately passed a second and more sweeping voucher scheme, refused to reduce unpopular state testing, refused to do more to retain teachers, refused to do more to hire school counselors and social workers, and generally ignored all but the most of superficial requests by advocates.

I don’t think the work of those advocates has been in vain, but I do think sometimes it acts as a shield between the public and legislators. Rather than influencing the actions of elected officials, it allows those officials to say that their actions-- no matter how controversial-- were undertaken after they spoke with teachers. It allows them to present the illusion that they are engaging with a democratic process, when in fact they are generally passing laws-- on vouchers, book bans, and other controversial issues-- that were written, not in cooperation with the people of their state, but by out-of-state, moneyed special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. 

In this way, I wonder if we-- and I include myself specifically, because I have spent plenty of time talking with elected officials in the hope that I could win them over-- are unintentionally enhancing the palatability of controversial policies that are opposed to our own interests.

Instead, I think we need to look to history and current events as we formulate a more effective theory of change. And for me, at least, that history tells me that effective movements to change entrenched policies rarely begin by cooperating so closely with the people who entrenched them. 

In practice, this means never treating voting like the last word in public policy.  When it comes to education, we should certainly support candidates whenever possible who take healthy positions on education policy, but the important work comes when we hold them to the promises they made. That means being engaged in whatever way we can, from emailing, to attending committee and board meetings, to marching and rallying, to, when that all fails, considering actions like the ones the Lowell mill workers took.  

The gains made by the labor movement-- child labor laws, a limit to the number of hours an employer could require an employee to work, safety regulations, the five day work week, and many more-- rarely happened because workers asked employers or public officials nicely. They happened because workers joined together to do things that would get an individual employee fired. And it is no coincidence that in states with strong labor organizations and histories of labor organizing, teachers have comparatively better and fairer contracts. 

When 10,000 teachers and education supporters attended a rally at the South Carolina State House on May 1, 2019, many were only able to attend because their districts knew they couldn’t fire everyone for doing so. While participating in labor organizations is protected under state law, South Carolina public employees (including teachers) also do not have the right to collectively bargain. But by adopting a coherent theory of change-- at least for one day-- educators knew that in the midst of a worsening teacher retention crisis, the state and districts simply couldn’t replace thousands of teachers. 

If we apply that same theory of change to the larger picture-- to policies that harm teachers and students-- imagine what we might accomplish. (Or, instead, look to history to see what similar movements have accomplished in the past.)