In 1895, a man named Joseph Malins wrote a little poem that has somehow stayed relevant for 130 years. It goes like this.

A town sits at the top of a beautiful cliff. The view is gorgeous — and people keep falling off the edge. So the townspeople gather to do something about it. Someone proposes building a fence at the top of the cliff. Reasonable. Cheap. It would stop the falling.

But then the conversation drifts, the way these conversations do. Someone points out that the people who’ve already fallen need help right now. Someone else notes how good it would feel to have a shiny new ambulance, staffed and ready, waiting in the valley below. And by the end of the meeting, the town has voted — overwhelmingly — to fund the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of the fence at the top.

The poem’s punchline is that everyone in the room knew the fence made more sense. They said so out loud. They built the ambulance anyway.

If you’re a math coordinator, you have lived this poem. You just didn’t know it had a name.

The Tier 1 Fence Everyone Agrees On — and No District Ever Builds

Here’s the version that plays out in K–12 math, and I’d bet you can map it onto your own district in about four seconds.

Kids are struggling in Algebra. So you stand up an intervention block. You buy a supplemental program. You hire intervention staff, or pull your strongest teachers off Tier 1 to run small groups. You build a credit-recovery pathway. Every one of those is an ambulance in the valley — and every one of them is genuinely necessary, because there are real kids falling right now and you can’t just let them hit the ground.

But notice what almost never gets funded with the same urgency: the fence. Coherent Tier 1 instruction. A shared instructional vision K–8. Teachers deepening their own mathematical understanding so that the foundational concepts actually land the first time. The upstream work that would mean fewer kids reaching the edge of the cliff at all.

It’s not that anyone disagrees the fence matters. In every planning meeting I’ve been part of, people nod vigorously when you say “we need to fix this at the source.” Then the budget gets allocated to the valley anyway. The ambulance wins.

The question worth sitting with is why. Because it’s not stupidity, and it’s not bad intentions. It’s something more structural — and more fixable — than that.

Why Math Intervention Always Wins the Budget

Schoenfeld’s first and innThe downstream fix wins for three reasons, and they’re worth naming plainly because you can’t fight a force you haven’t identified.

It’s more visible. An intervention block is a thing you can point to. It shows up on a master schedule, it has a roster, it has a room number. “We strengthened the conceptual coherence of our Tier 1 instruction” doesn’t fit on a slide the way “we served 240 students in intervention this year” does.

It’s more fundable. Ambulances attract money. Intervention dollars, grant lines, emergency allocations — they flow toward the visible crisis, not the quiet prevention. A fence is a one-time line item that’s easy to cut when the budget tightens. An ambulance feels like a moral obligation.

It’s more politically satisfying. When a board member, a parent, or a superintendent asks “what are we doing about math?”, the ambulance is the answer that lands. It signals action. It signals care. The fence — slow, upstream, invisible for a year or two — signals nothing in the short term, even though it’s the thing that actually drains the river.

So smart, caring people, working hard, keep choosing the ambulance. Not because they’re wrong about the fence, but because the system rewards the rescue and ignores the prevention.

Sustainable Math Improvement Is a Measurement Problem in Disguise

Here’s where it gets interesting for math leaders specifically, because the ambulance trap is really a measurement trap wearing a budget costume.

Think about how most districts measure whether their math improvement work is working: year-end state or provincial test scores. That’s a lagging indicator — it arrives months after the instruction happened, it’s shaped by dozens of variables outside your control, and it shows up far too late to course-correct anything. It’s like trying to improve your diet by stepping on a scale once a year.

When your only feedback signal is that slow and that noisy, you literally cannot tell whether the fence is working. The fence takes a year or two to show up in test data, and by then you’ve stopped paying attention. The ambulance, on the other hand, produces immediate, countable, visible numbers — students served, sessions run, programs deployed. So you keep funding the thing you can see moving.

Leading vs. Lagging Indicators: Why You Can’t See Tier 1 Working

The way out is to measure the fence directly. Stop waiting for the lagging scale and start watching leading indicators — the upstream instructional shifts you can actually observe in classrooms next week, not next spring. Is task selection improving? Is mathematical discourse increasing? Are teachers using representations more flexibly? Are kids getting conceptual foundations before procedures? Those are observable now. Build a walkthrough tool, take a baseline in September, return in January, return in May. Suddenly your fence becomes as visible as your ambulance — and it can finally compete for the budget.

Building the Fence Is Slow — and That’s the Point

There’s one more reason leaders abandon the fence, and it’s the most human of all: it’s slow, and that feels like failure.

The research is sobering here. The work of Yoon and colleagues, in a study for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (you can find it through ERIC, ED498548), found teachers who received an average of 49 hours of sustained professional development saw their students gain about 21 percentile points, while one-off workshops showed no measurable effect.

Building the fence is exactly that kind of work. Putting the system in place to support sustained professional development is not sexy or flashy.  It compounds slowly and then dramatically — but the “slowly” part is where most districts lose their nerve, climb back down into the valley, and start staffing the ambulance again. This is the flywheel-versus-pendulum problem in one sentence: the fence is flywheel work, and the ambulance is what you reach for every time the flywheel feels too slow to be working.

It is working. It just doesn’t photograph well in October. You just don’t measure the right things to tell you so.

How to Shift Your Math Budget To Top of Cliff This Week

You don’t tear down the ambulance. Let’s be clear about that. There are kids in the valley right now, and pulling them up is non-negotiable — abandoning intervention to go build a fence is its own kind of malpractice. This is a both/and, not an either/or.

But this week, you can start tilting the balance upstream:

• Find one ambulance line in your budget and ask the fence question. For every dollar going to rescue, is there a proportional dollar going to prevention — to Tier 1 coherence, to teacher content knowledge, to a shared instructional vision? If the ratio is 95/5, that’s your signal.
• Make one fence indicator visible. Pick a single top of cliff or upstream instructional shift, build a way to observe it, and start reporting it with the same confidence you report intervention numbers. Give the fence a slide of its own.
• Name the trap out loud in your next planning meeting. Tell the ambulance story. Watch the room nod — and then ask the question that breaks the spell: “So why does our budget say the opposite?”

The town in the poem never built the fence. But you’re not the town. You’re the one person in the meeting who can see the whole cliff — and who knows that the most important math work you’ll do this year is the work that, for a while, no one will be able to see at all.

Curious where your system is gaining traction and where it’s still spinning? Take our District Math Improvement Assessment — a short screener that gives you a free, customized plan across the six areas that matter most for sustainable math improvement. 

And if you want the simple decision-making tool we use with districts across North America to keep everyone aligned, grab the free Math Coherence Compass template