Readers of Lewis Carroll know that it may be easy to pass through the looking-glass to the other side, but a disconcerting reality lurks there: objects come to life, flowers begin to talk, and you have to keep running just to stay in one place, so different this universe is from ours. Like all grownups, I now go through the looking-glass very rarely–and even more rarely in a work context. But it so happens, from time to time, that certain circumstances may offer us the rare privilege of following in Alice’s footsteps and–though all grown up we may be–discovering the flip side of what we assume to be immutable reality. I had just such an experience recently. On assignment in Ouagadougou to help prepare Burkina Faso’s request for a Global Partnership for Education grant, I spent more than two hours meeting with representatives of the country’s teachers’ unions. While discussing reforms in the Burkinabe educational system that have been introduced in recent years, we hit upon the topic of students repeating a year of school. Although this practice is expensive and educationally inefficient, it remains widespread in francophone educational systems for cultural and historic reasons. The Burkinabe government made lowering the repeater rate a key objective of educational system reform, achieving remarkable success in a short period of time by bringing the repeater rate down to a residual level in just a few years. But if we take a closer look, we find that the Burkinabe repeater rate is at a residual level only in the magical world of statistics. As I shared with the teacher representatives the genuine enthusiasm I felt over these results, I sensed that they were embarrassed, perhaps even amused. One of them then spoke up and explained to me, in front of his approving colleagues, that the practice of having students repeat a year of school may indeed have disappeared from the statistics, but remains very much a part of the classroom and schoolhouse reality. Teachers continue to hold students back in a rather high proportion, but designate them administratively (and thus statistically) as having gone on from one grade to the next. Now, some might take umbrage and see this as a sign of conservatism, decried as rampant in the teaching profession on every speck of land between the North and South Poles. What I see, for my part, is the need to open a meaningful and transparent dialogue, and to maintain it diligently, with those who show up at school, day in and day out, and who know what really goes on, what the practices and the arrangements are, and how people feel. In other words, a dialogue with the only people capable of turning a reform into reality and of explaining why and in what ways, irrespective of a particular reform’s actual virtues, it is likely to encounter resistance–and in what form. Only by working with the entire education community can we possibly succeed. Later my thoughts returned to Alice, and I found myself wondering how she made it through the looking-glass. “Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through….” And then, a moment later, “Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.”[1] To see the flip side of things, to discover the world in different ways, and–childlike–to see truer than life, then really and truly, as I now recall, goodwill and willingness are all that we need. [1] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter One.