Forced rhubarb (and the tyranny of short-termism)
Why do immediate pressures crowd out long-term thinking? How and why do we let that happen? Is it inevitable? Immutable? Can we... hack it?
This is the first in what I hope will be a series of reflections on the tendencies that stop us from addressing systemic issues (in education).
In a bid to explore some uncomfortable truths, I think I’m going to have to ask some really stupid questions. But my first question—the subject of this post no less—sounded soooo silly that this is now my third attempt to introduce this article.
The first attempt to write this was aborted because I just couldn’t move past how daft the question looked written down. My second attempt collapsed in frustration because I couldn’t find another way to start it. This third attempt opens with acceptance, and the question that kicked this all off:
Why does the immediate crowd out the important?
It feels like a silly question because the answer appears obvious at first. ‘Immediate’ is more urgent than ‘important’—so you do it first? (Duh!)
We experience this tension daily; whether it’s juggling work deadlines over long-term goals or responding to immediate crises instead of strategic planning. It's the kind of dynamic we know exists yet asking about it outright feels like a waste of everyone’s time.
But having dwelt on the question for some time now—mostly in frustration—I think the instinct to dismiss it highlights how deeply normalised this tension is. It feels too fundamental to interrogate. Immutable, even?
But why do we do it?
What drives us to prioritise immediate pressures over things that truly matter in the long term? Because we do care about the important stuff—else we wouldn’t call it that.
That’s what I’m curious about.
At this point, I think it’d be helpful to call to mind an example of something that happens in school where we routinely prioritise the immediate over the important. I’m thinking of situations where we relent—reluctantly or otherwise—and ‘play the game,’ if only for a little while.
Framed like this, the practice that most immediately springs to my mind is ‘teaching to the test’ and everything that comes with it: narrowing the curriculum, intensive half-term exam prep, prioritising students skirting pass/fail thresholds at the expense of others.
Last year, the IoE’s The SATs Effect report (produced in partnership with More Than A Score and Teacher Tapp) found that nearly a third of teachers (32%) believe that the pressure of preparing for SATs negatively affects student engagement. The same report highlighted how more than half of surveyed teachers felt compelled to narrow the curriculum. Also last year, and also based on a survey conducted by Teacher Tapp, the NSPCC reported that 91% of secondary school teachers believe that their students worry too much about the impact their exam results will have on their futures.
To be clear, the purpose of this article isn’t to judge whether the pursuit of success in standardised testing is right or wrong, necessary or sufficient, per se. But there’s clearly a significant opportunity cost in us doing so, and I’m curious about what informs those decisions.
So… Why does the immediate crowd out the important?
When consulting the literature on this, particularly around public service delivery, the notion of ‘democratic myopia’—that politicians and policymakers prioritise short-term wins to secure re-election—is well-trodden.
While some academics argue that democracies inherently favour short-term interests due to electoral cycles and voter preferences (see: de Tocqueville (1835), MacKenzie, 2013, and loads of people in between), others suggest that policy myopia isn’t inevitable but rather a result of specific economic and political conditions (what Aidt & Dutta (2005) call ‘second best policy myopia’).
Regardless, while I believe there’s an element of truth in those explanations, I don’t think ‘democratic myopia’ explains what happens in our schools.
Instead, I think the roots of short-termism in education run much deeper. I think it’s more cultural; I think it’s tied to the broader philosophies that underpin how public services are commissioned, managed and evaluated. Specifically, I’m talking about the legacy of ‘New Public Management’ (NPM).
Growing in prominence through the 1980s and 1990s, NPM was a response to economic crises and perceived inefficiencies in public services. It championed the adoption of private sector practices, such as performance metrics, competitive tendering, and contractual accountability. In education, this philosophy is manifested in our league tables, Ofsted inspections and, to an extent, funding models tied to narrowly defined outcomes.
The influence of NPM still looms large. Schools are commissioned to deliver results—results that are quantifiable and comparable. Success is defined by data: attainment, progress, attendance rates, and others. These metrics are not inherently bad; they provide accountability and a way to measure progress. But they also narrow the focus of what schools are incentivised to do.
The (unintended) consequence? What Jonathan White (2024) calls, ‘technocratic myopia.’ We prioritise what’s easy to measure over what’s most important. And when schools are judged almost entirely on academic attainment, broader objectives—like fostering creativity, well-being, or civic responsibility—are sidelined.
Why do we let this happen?
This is a big question. Here is an incomplete answer.
Part of the answer lies in the seductive simplicity of metrics. Numbers offer clarity in a world of complexity. They provide an illusion of control—if we can measure it, we can manage it, we say.
But this fixation on data can also lead to what Meyer & Gupta (1994) dubbed the “performance paradox”: the more we rely on metrics to evaluate success, the more those metrics distort behaviour. Teachers teach to the test. Schools prioritise interventions that will improve annual metrics (because that’s schools’ de facto performance cycle)—even if they don’t benefit students in the long term (though, to confuse matters, sometimes they do 🙃).
Again, while not sufficient, I think there’s merit in this analysis. For me, this is where the age-old structure vs. agency debate looms into view.
Are schools merely responding rationally to the structures they operate within?
Or do we—leaders, teachers, policymakers, funders—have more agency than we think, subtly reinforcing short-termism through the decisions we make, even when we claim to resist it?
This is where I’ve always got stuck.
Can we hack it?
What if the answer isn’t to resist, but to hack the mindset? What if the problem is the solution?
If the problem is that ‘we prioritise what’s measurable,’ perhaps the solution is to measure more things—to introduce so many variables into the system that the dominance of any single one is diluted.
If the fixation on narrow outcomes distorts behaviour, maybe an abundance of metrics could create a kind of overload that forces a broader, more balanced approach? That sounds dizzying but perhaps a richer, multidimensional measurement system would encourage trade-offs rather than singular optimisation…
Or is that just wishful thinking?
Maybe that’s just another layer of the same problem.
I think it’s a question worth sitting with, however, because there are interesting analogous examples from other fields. Sometimes, literally.
🧑🌾 In agriculture, monocultures are fragile.
They’re optimised for maximum growth of a singular species but are highly vulnerable to disease, pests and other shocks.
I learnt about forced rhubarb this week (from a rugby podcast of all places!). Grown in complete darkness and harvested by candlelight, the process is optimised for rapid, tender growth. But this artificial acceleration weakens the plant, making it fragile and dependent on controlled conditions. Without intervention, it doesn’t survive.
Perhaps our reliance on narrow performance metrics creates a similar fragility. By optimising for a singular, immediate outcome, we risk producing a system that lacks resilience. Maybe a richer, more diverse set of indicators would create a more adaptive, (bio)diverse system—one that values not just speed of growth but depth of roots?
📊 In financial markets, investors reduce risk by diversifying portfolios.
If schools were evaluated based on a portfolio of outcomes rather than a singular focus on academic attainment and progress, perhaps this would reduce the impact of the ‘performance paradox.’
📈 But, in typical coldwater fashion, the dismal science brings us ‘induced demand.’
My favourite example of this concept comes from urban planning where building more roads is often seen as a solution to congestion. But, sometimes, more roads induce demand, leading to more traffic. So, if we flooded schools with too many ‘lanes’ of measurement, would we create more traffic and noise, or more routes to success?
I don’t know. As ever, I’m sure the devil is in the detail.
⚖️ Not more—but more balanced?
Perhaps the key is introducing more balanced metrics—rather than just more for more’s sake. Metrics that encourage a broader view of human flourishing over a longer period of time.
The (im)patience problem
Even if we could reimagine how we measure success, one major barrier remains: timing.
Education is a team sport and a long game. The decisions we make today—how we teach, what we prioritise, the culture we build—take years and years to fully bear fruit. But the way we monitor school effectiveness operates on a completely different timeline. Schools are judged on annual data cycles. Leaders, teachers, and policymakers feel the pressure to demonstrate impact within tight accountability windows that rarely stretch beyond a single academic year.
This mismatch creates a fundamental tension. If the things that really matter in education—things like character development, creativity, deep learning, and life outcomes—take years to materialise, but we insist on evaluating progress in one-year increments, then we’ll keep prioritising short-term gains. The system is built to favour what’s immediate over what’s important.
So if we truly want to embrace more balanced, long-term measures, I think we need to align these timelines accordingly. That doesn’t mean abandoning accountability, but it does mean rethinking what we measure, when we measure those things and over what periods, and what we deem success to be.
It means creating space for patience, resisting the urge to optimise for the immediate, and trusting that the most important changes—the ones that truly transform children’s lives—don’t fit neatly into annual performance reviews.
Maybe that’s where this conversation needs to go next…
Thanks for reading 🙏