Abstract This case study highlights the critical role of ethnography for social impact investors operating in fields where the exercise of human intelligence is key to achieving desired outcomes. It points toward a broader framework for impact investors to discern when and how ethnography is relevant for evaluating investment targets, ensuring that solutions foster sustainable positive impact without compromising the vital social conditions that underpin their intended benefits. Using primary education in the United States as an example, we show that large‐scale, prescriptive teaching solutions designed to improve student outcomes can undermine the individual and social exercise of intelligence among teachers that is required for cultivating professional expertise, identity, and community. Since teacher quality directly influences student learning, such solutions risk limiting their own impact. Instead, our ethnographic approach revealed opportunities to guide and cultivate teacher intelligence rather than eliminating the need for it.
Casciola et al. (Sat,) studied this question.