In education circles, when you say the word “innovation” you find yourself mired in a conversation about two things: curriculum and technology. There is an abiding, unexamined conviction among most reformers that the way to transform our sinking public schools is to invest in some magic combination of lesson plans and gizmos. Some believe if we can design the right curriculum and get the right hardware in the classrooms, kids will learn and thrive and eventually go off to college to become huge successes.

In short, what reformers these days are dreaming of is a teacher-proof program. All the system would require is an adult who is present, sober, and accounted for to show up in the morning, plug in the computers and pass out the worksheets. But, we all know it doesn’t work that way. Think back to your schooling, to the year you really made the biggest leaps intellectually – was it because of a certain textbook, or because of a piece of whiz-bang equipment that got rolled into your class each morning? Of course not. It was because of a teacher. Someone changed your life – probably a lot of someones – because he or she took an interest in you, figured out what you were doing wrong and showed you how to do it right. And you learned. Teachers teach – with great materials, if they have them, and with next to nothing if they don’t. That’s their defining trait, their essential skill set. My mentor teacher was fond of saying, “all Socrates had was good weather and some questions.”

My organization, ICEF Public Schools, has sent 100% of our three graduating classes to college and 99% of our students have been admitted to four-year colleges. ICEF has a phenomenal curriculum – our writing and thinking model is being copied around the country, and more importantly, our students are going off to college prepared to write college-level arguments. It was designed by some of my very best teachers and it is taught by hundreds of incredible teachers who get stronger in their craft each day. A measure of a strong curriculum is whether good teachers become great teachers in a few years rather than in 10 years. But our writing model itself does not teach students. It is not sufficient unto itself.

So the real innovation would be to figure out how to get the most talented and dedicated teachers into classrooms and then keep them there through higher pay, reasonable student workloads (no more than 110 students each), and strong support from the school’s administration. Get this right and then you have the preconditions necessary to develop an entire school of great and inspirational teachers who always find a way. It is my belief that teachers stay in the profession because they want to change the direction of students’ lives by imbuing them with a love of learning and because they esteem their colleagues. We are all proud to know and work with such a teacher.

Unfortunately, schools that are not successful have tough decisions to make. Getting the best teachers into the classroom means making room by getting ineffective teachers out. So how should we exit ineffective teachers? Wisely, we should counsel them out and sincerely thank them for trying to do one of the toughest jobs on earth. Alas, there are laws about letting ineffective teachers go. It turns out, you can’t. The unions claim that’s not entirely true. The union will allow teachers to lose their jobs once a principal can prove through “a system of due process enshrined in state law” that a teacher is ineffective. This system of due process enshrined in law is so labyrinthine and byzantine that it costs your neighborhood public schools as much as $750,000 and nearly three years to fire one poor performing teacher. So in effect, if you are a tenured teacher, you have a job for life. Well, what has this law wrought for our children?

20 years of reform by the numbers:

190 Typical number of students a middle school or high school teacher teaches each day at LAUSD

50:50 The odds of a 9th grader making it through and graduating from high school at LAUSD

<50 Teachers fired by LAUSD for Poor Performance

41 Billion dollars for LAUSD’s building campaign

38 To 1: Class size at LAUSD from grades 4-12

33 Percentage of third graders who can read at grade level in LAUSD

1 In 14: The odds of graduating from college if you attend an LAUSD high school in South LA

0 Number of teachers given a raise or a bonus for doing a great job teaching at LAUSD

With our current system, we are doing a better job of preparing our children for prison than for college. The prison industry uses third grade reading scores to forecast 10 years later how much capacity they need in California. With only 33% of third graders in LAUSD reading at grade level and fewer than 20% of all LAUSD students graduating from college, you do the math. Our current system is so harsh on the best teachers that it drives one out of every two teachers out of the profession within five years. It rewards indiscriminately good, average, and bad teachers with lifetime tenor.

Our lawmakers must change this and write policies and new laws that reward our great teachers, attract the best and brightest to the profession, and eliminate the ridiculous barriers that allow the prompt removal of those teachers who do not have the gift and aptitude to do the most important job in our society: teach our children to read, write, calculate, and think for themselves.

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You know what would be really innovative? Shorter blog posts. Meantime, there's a timely and thought-provoking article out right now in The American Prospect called The Innovation Administration that I would commend to all of those interested in (and in charge of moving forward with) innovative education solutions. It traces the history of innovation's current popularity, and quotes Eric Nee, managing editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review: "If all you did was go around innovating and didn't spend any time building, or following up, or doing incremental improvement, it would sort of be just chasing your tail." Indeed. With no expectation of convincing anyone in the near term, I will still sound the warning against fetishizing unproven, small-scale, marginal-benefit ideas. Innovation is not magic. Calling a program "innovative" does not make it any more effective, affordable, or scaleable.

We’ve talked a lot about innovation in general. But here I’d like to get more specific. Specifically, I’d like to share my favorite innovation strategies. These are the conceptual categories I use to create most of my innovations. But I don’t think they’re unique to who I am or to my life experience. I think any education innovator can use them.


Innovation by Optimization

This is my favorite approach because it’s the easiest to pull off. Many of the 100 or so innovations I’ve created have really just been optimizations of highly inefficient traditional practices. Take the teaching and learning of basic math facts, for example. I think of this as the total of all addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems with two integer operands in the range of zero to twelve. For multiplication, we sometimes refer to “times tables”. This is but one of four possible “grids”, each containing 169 problems, that kids have to master to make much progress in math.

Historically, this set of knowledge is taught problem-by-problem, often with flash cards, and then practiced or assessed with timed tests which allow between one and two seconds per answer. On average, about 50% of American public school kids master their math facts during 4th and 5th grade. But early in my career, I wanted 100% success, and I wanted it done by 2nd or 3rd grade. This required a highly optimized way of teaching basic math facts.

The approach I invented is not complicated or in any way difficult for kids or teachers to apply. It also takes advantage of four brain concepts most educators are at least dimly aware of: (1) Chunking; (2) Association; (3) Mnemonic devices; and (4) Improved memorization by reducing the likelihood of memorizing incorrect information.

In the traditional model, flash cards and timed tests encourage students to process problems faster than they really can. Often this results in kids memorizing wrong answers, answers which, after a certain amount of time, become extremely hard to unlearn. Chunking the problem set in a certain way reduces what we have to study to roughly 1/4th the size of the original. Association aids memorization and increases the reliability and speed of recall; Mnemonic devices also make memorization and recall more efficient. I also recategorize the problems into sets by degree of difficulty (not numerical order as with the traditional approach) so kids can experience immediate success and build confidence and momentum as they move toward more challenging problems.)

So if all I did was optimize a traditional practice, how much gain did I get? Well, let’s say that the traditional model works for 50% of kids after six years of school. My optimized approach works for 90% of kids after four years of school. That’s almost a 300% improvement. When you consider the fact that my optimized approach also takes less class time during math, that kids can assess themselves reliably and direct their own progress, and that teachers need do very little to keep things moving forward, one could argue that the optimization factor is over 300%. When you think that every child in the American education system must study this information, and that any teacher can teach it after reading a short article or receiving maybe 20 minutes of training, it’s easy to see how the system-wide effect of this optimization has the potential to revolutionize math instruction.


Innovation by Replacement

Tougher on teachers, but ideal for innovators, is the replacement approach. Put simply, one traditional practice is swapped out for an equivalent contemporary practice. In my career, I’ve created many replacement-based innovations for writing instruction. Why writing? Because of all the subjects, it is the most poorly taught and the least politicized. These factors make replacement viable: there’s less “old paradigm” garbage to fight through, and many teachers know they teach writing so poorly that there is little risk in trying something different.

For example, the American Language Arts curriculum has traditionally confused modes with forms. This leads to the traditional series of “old paradigm” assignments: the narrative essay, the expository essay, and the persuasive essay. But modes are not types of writing, they are techniques for creating arguments within types of writing. Most of the things we read use bits and pieces of all three, along with the occasional dash of description as well.

What I do is show teachers how to swap modes for forms. I swap out the narrative essay for the memoir. I swap out the expository essay for short-form non-fiction like news stories, magazine articles, policy briefs, research summaries, etc. And I swap out the persuasive essay for the Op-Ed, the political speech, or arts criticism via the review.

Why do teachers get better results teaching forms rather than modes? Forms can be found everywhere; models of the intended result can be shared with students, and expectations can be easily codified through criteria. Forms are clear; modal essays are fuzzy since no two people can agree on what an expository essay is. Forms encourage kids to write like real writers; modal essays encourage kids to use simple formulas which often produce sub-standard results. Finally, forms are real; modal essays are a contrived academic construct. In the 25 years that my wife and I have been writing professionally, no client of either of ours has ever requested a narrative, expository, or persuasive piece. The real world deals in forms, and kids are often inspired by authenticity in instruction and assessment.

The swap of modes for forms makes teaching and assessment easier. It also opens up the potential range of assignments teachers can create and the opportunities for choice kids can be given. Teachers learn more about how writing really works. And this leads to better instruction, from which students have a better opportunity to learn how writing really works, too.


Innovation by Change of Purpose

Picture this: a high school teacher writes me to share the good news that all of her 150 students have been given tickets to a series of four Shakespeare plays to be presented at two-month intervals during the school year. Shakespeare is not in her curriculum, but she thinks it’s a great opportunity to teach it given how excited her kids seem to be about going to the plays. So she asks me for a few teaching ideas. And I say, “What do you want your students to learn?” “Well,” she says, “I want them to learn about Shakespeare!” To which I reply, “Is there anything specific you would like your students to learn about Shakespeare?” Silence; she’s really thinking now. “Well,” she says. “Mostly I just want them to be exposed to Shakespeare.”

This is what I call “the exposure fallacy of teaching and learning”. It is one of the most dangerous fallacies we can buy into because it is based on complete self-delusion. Parents have an even tougher time with this one than teachers do.

Teaching for exposure happens all the time in almost every class and at almost every grade. It’s a noble and magical notion, but as an approach to ensuring learning, it is meaningless. Exposure can be positive, negative, neutral, or various-sized bits of all three. And because of this, we can’t predict, much less assess, what any student may have learned. What most students learn in a situation like this is that going to a play gets them out of a day at school, certainly not the teacher’s intent. But that’s just one more consequence of believing in and using the exposure approach – the teacher can’t form any intent other than exposure.

So what’s the solution? Innovation by Change of Purpose.

After explaining the exposure problem, I worked with the teacher to develop a set of learning goals that could be applied to her Regular English, Honors English, and AP English kids through any Shakespeare play. In the end we chose the following: expressive reading, determining the meaning of an unknown word through context, characterization via dialog, the uses of metaphor, and connections between the artist and his age (or how Shakespeare’s choice of subjects may have been connected to societal or political changes of his day). Shakespeare, it seems, offers us near-perfect content for the study of these five things – all of which are concrete, assessable staples of the American Language Arts curriculum.

I often encourage teachers to change their purpose for teaching something. Often, what results is, at least for the teacher, a legitimate innovation, one that almost always produces significantly more learning, and adds to the teacher’s instructional repertoire in other valuable ways. After doing this several times over several years, some teachers even construct the “new paradigm” equivalent of an “old paradigm” belief. In the old paradigm, teaching is self-justifying; it needs no rationale because everyone believes that teaching is inherently good and that the curriculum is inherently right. In the new paradigm, teaching is for learning. This means that learning goals are the only acceptable rationale. We also acknowledge that teaching runs the gamut from great to abominable, that curriculum is generic or random and almost never right for a given group of kids at a certain point in time, and that success depends on a variety of factors that we, as teachers, must strive to control in service of the learning we are trying to create.


Innovation by Abstraction

Intellectually, this is the approach that most excites me. Based on the architectural innovation of Christopher Alexander and the application of his “design pattern” approach to object-oriented computer programming, Innovation by Abstraction starts with the discovery of a set of related tasks that run up and down the grade levels and across the curriculum. I then look for an underlying structure (or “pattern”) that is common to each of these related tasks – or at least a very high percentage of them. Then I create a highly abstracted task that should, in theory, help kids learn how to perform all the other related tasks. The promise is that if kids can learn this one abstract skill very well, they will have a much easier time learning the 100+ related tasks the abstraction is designed to explain.

Think about the abstract skill of exposition, for example. We listen to expository arguments; we read expository texts; we write expository papers; and we produce, in oral and written form, expository answers. Fortunately, exposition has a simple underlying structure. By abstracting that structure and turning that abstraction into its own task, I give teachers and kids more leverage over large parts of the curriculum.

The upside here, of course, is efficiency. But there’s also a huge “cool” factor. In workshops and in classroom modeling sessions, I have heard a few teachers have those wonderful “Aha!” moments when the connection between the abstraction and the larger set of concrete instances snaps into place.

The downside is that this form of thinking is completely foreign to traditional teaching culture – even in subjects like math where abstraction is used all the time to solve common problems. To most teachers, teaching is always concrete. Abstraction simply doesn’t make sense. Interestingly, this kind of abstraction rarely bothers the kids. I merely run them through the tool I’ve created and show them how to apply it to a few types of assignments, and that’s typically all it takes. But teachers don’t come along as quickly or as easily, and often they don’t come along at all.

So even though Innovation by Abstraction is potentially the most powerful approach to innovation, it requires good training, great classroom modeling, and often a lot of miscellaneous hand-holding over weeks and months when teachers who want to get it just can’t.


Innovation by Student-Initiated Auto-Instantiation

Another way of describing this is “Real-Time Distributed Student-Created Innovation”. The most interesting thing about it is that instead of hoping that teachers will innovate or use the innovations of others, we take the teacher out of the innovation equation almost entirely and go right to the kid.

The way I do this is by teaching student self-assessment. Personally, I believe there is no single skill or crumb of content more valuable to our kids than the ability to assess their learning while they are learning.

Even though we find it comforting to believe otherwise, learning cannot be controlled; it’s messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. Much of it is achieved by cycles of trial and error attempts evaluated against a target or final destination. Showing kids how to do this isn’t hard. But it requires time and consistency.

For example, one of the things I have to remember and always apply is to never assess a kid’s work before the kid assesses the work. I also have to remember that in formal instances of assessment, we are using a 360-degree approach. This means the real learning comes not from haggling over threes or fours, or trying to justify Bs or Cs, but from analyzing the pattern of similarities and differences between the student’s assessment and the teacher’s assessment.

The payoff for teaching self-assessment can be huge. When kids are self-assessing, they become self-teaching as well. As the teacher, I don’t really need to assess assignments except in special cases where the learning is entirely foreign to the kids, I want to teach 360-degree assessment, or the material is completely foreign to me or the kids. Finally, self-assessment is a universally useful skill that can be applied to all aspects of life, not just to school work.

The self-assessing classroom is potentially the single most powerful innovation of all. It’s also the one that scares teachers the most. “Old paradigm” teachers regard assessment as not only their responsibility but their right. And few are willing to give up the satisfaction they derive by “holding kids accountable”. Sadly, they are not holding anyone accountable; that’s just an ed reform euphemism for threat and punishment. But many “old paradigm” teachers enjoy their power over kids so much, they will stick to the “threat and punishment” approach even though they admit it doesn’t work – and that it seems to work less and less with each passing year as our society becomes more diverse.


Innovation Innovations

The most promising step we might take toward education innovation is not the creation of innovations themselves but the creation of means by which the best innovations are created. Admittedly, this requires a bit more brain power up front. But we can spare it as so many smart people are now working in and around education.

Perhaps the best innovation we might one day develop is the innovation innovation. Great teaching is really just constant innovation. So is great learning. What if teachers were taught in their initial training how to innovate effective practice? What if kids were taught to innovate effective ways of learning based on the same theories?

In this truly reformed world of education, teachers and students would be working together using the same processes to reach the same goals. They would hold the same expectations of each other and speak the same instructional language. Much of the “old paradigm” culture of education would have nothing to hold onto. Teachers would be constantly changing and so would their kids. “New paradigm” ideas would have increasingly more space in which to flourish.

Finally, I would like to point out that I have written here only about a few ways to innovate at the classroom level. There are many other larger levels in which to innovate, each with their own set of innovation strategies. There are different education sectors as well, each of which could also benefit from innovation. If innovation could become a foundational aspect of education culture, we might reap near-permanent multi-generational benefits. Innovation is not the common path but the one less traveled by. And that’s what makes all the difference.

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I want to thank Mr. Shelton for bringing up two things: Atul Gawande’s work in medicine, and the potential of checklists. I’ve read Mr. Gawande’s books and many of his articles. His common sense approach to improving his field is often as brilliant as it is simple. As Mr. Shelton points out, Gawande is a fan of checklists, and has documented their power to improve medicine, and probably many other fields as well.

But not education. At least not without a few important changes.

Using Mr. Gawande’s example, Mr. Shelton offers this idea: “Simple innovations like the checklist could go a long way towards solving problems that we confront in education, but we currently do not have the infrastructure in place to identify these innovations and make sure teachers nationwide are using them.”

Actually, I think we do have the identification component in place; what we lack is an aggregation capability. And while Mr. Shelton is correct about the challenge of pushing even simple checklist innovations nationwide, we may be able to overcome this as well if we are willing to give up on metaphorical thinking like “education is a business”, learn to see school simply for what it is, and come to understand the scope of the battle that exists between two opposing forces which keep our schools locked in a perpetual stalemate.

As for checklists, the teachers in our organization use them all the time, and they certainly do work well for us and our clients; personally, I’d be lost without them in my own classroom work. While “checklisting” may not rate much interest among education researchers, teachers like checklists a lot, and in many cases use them as the primary tool for improving the daily procedures that form the basis of effective classroom management. Additionally, the most commonly used rubric form in American classrooms today is really just another kind of checklist.

Checklists are everywhere, all over our education system. They are also a large part of what is now a vast body of professional literature in education. This is not research. Instead, professional literature generally represents the most current and most effective practices of individual educators, vetted by peers and accepted by publishers. Professional literature is not rigorous science, but it does represent the single best source of useable high quality innovation available about teaching and learning because it’s often years ahead of academic research efforts – and because, when it is done well, it is created for educators by educators, a form of pseudo-professional populism fear-filled teachers seem to trust.

Professional literature is not created by university-employed Ph.D.’s, it’s almost never quantitative, and it isn’t typically funded directly by the government or by major philanthropic organizations. Nonetheless, professional literature represents a significant stream of packaged innovation. Since it doesn’t have anything to do with politics, policy, funding, or research, and because it operates on a very small scale, it’s easy to see how professional literature flies under DOE, philanthropic, and academic radar. But it’s there, nonetheless. And even though its collection and dissemination is essentially random, it has a much larger impact on schooling than most people think.

For example, my company has been creating and distributing professional literature for years – always for free. We’ve written hundreds of articles, dozens of packets, a few books, poster sets, handouts, other tools, etc., and have experienced hundreds of thousands of downloads from our website. The quality is uneven and the collection is undisciplined but we still get e-mails from educators all over the world – some even as well-placed as Ministers of Education – about how well the stuff works. We’re small and disorganized. But we still have some impact. Imagine what might be possible with a federal aggregation and distribution system, a hundred times the content – all high quality stuff, vetted in dozens of classrooms, kid tested, teacher approved, thoughtfully documented, etc. – and a subscriber list that ran to maybe a million and a half teachers and fifty thousand principals. This is do-able, and it’s probably the key to scaling school- and classroom-based innovations of the kind Mr. Shelton has in mind when he references the work of Atul Gawande. Such a system wouldn’t even cost much money relative to initiatives like i3, for example.

That’s the upside.

The downside of professional literature in education is that most of it isn’t very good. Most of it is also highly derivative of itself, meaning that it’s more like studios making sequels than indies breaking out of the box to produce the next Palm d’Or winner at Cannes. For better or worse, when it comes to finding true innovations in professional literature, a fair amount of culling is required, and the process is more intuitive than it is systematic. But this is the key to the innovation issue: we don’t need many innovations, we just need a few that work really, really well – and that most people will use. Fortunately, a small volume of high quality professional literature exists, and just as quickly as it falls out of favor, it tends to be replaced by even better material.

A small amount of today’s professional literature is of extremely high quality; we might even say that one or two books a year are truly innovative. Suffice it to say, no principal or teacher or consultant working in and around schools today has any excuse at all for not having a handle on current best practice. Want to learn how to teach really, really well? It’s all right there in black and white. Just pick your subject and go to town. Can you remember Stenhouse, Heinemann, ASCD, Jossey-Bass, and Scholastic? If so, you can pretty much find your way to anything you need. (My apologies to any other significant publisher I may have inadvertently left off this list. My point is that there aren’t very many.)

Every school I visit has a modest, and sometimes even large, library of professional literature. And there always seem to emerge certain “popular classics” in the genre like Ellin Keene’s “Mosaic of Thought” or Daniels, Zemelman, and Hyde’s “Best Practice” or, more recently, Lucy Calkins’ “Units of Study”. These texts are so commonly spotted on library, classroom, and principal’s office shelves that they might be considered touchstones of a sort.

Now here’s where I think Mr. Shelton is spot on regarding the challenges of disseminating innovation. Despite the market popularity of certain excellent ideas, few end up being applied. Even when almost every school has them close at hand, almost no one reads about them; and of the small subset of people who do, only a few of those understand them; and of this very tiny group, fewer still take what they’ve understood and turn that understanding into effective practice. The current “publish-to-practice” pipeline of professional literature needs a serious technological, intellectual, and cultural overhaul. However, like just about everything else in education, we could accomplish this if we really wanted to -- and in this case, too, it wouldn’t cost much money relative to other reform initiatives.

Perhaps worst of all, however, is the fact that even our small troupe of intrepid “innovator-applicators” is typically forced to drop the innovative practices they’ve intrepidly applied within two to three years because of social pressure from other teachers who have chosen not to innovate and now feel threatened, or school policies that make using innovative practices awkward or completely untenable. Think, for example, of an innovative research-based assessment and grading system wiped out by a district-wide purchase of a traditionally-oriented online grading program and a set of antiquated, anti-research grading policies like the traditional “point-percentage” method. Believe me, I’ve been there. Quoting chapter and verse from Robert Marzano’s “Transforming Classroom Grading”, or some of Thomas Guskey’s work, to an Asst. Supt of Assessment and Instruction will get you nowhere – and it will get you even less if she’s read the research, too, and knows you’re right.

Until more powerful people in ed reform understand the perverse “adoption calculus” employed by most districts today, we will fail to sustain most new initiatives, especially those with the greatest potential for transformation. Anti-innovation, anti-research policies typically are devised by those who seek increased control and conformity over the people they manage. Many of these district-level policy makers know the research as well as anyone; they simply view contradicting it as a slam-dunk tradeoff for greater degrees of control. If we’re committed to positive change, we must always remember that innovation is the opposite of conformity, and that its application cannot easily be controlled within the hyper-localized structure of schooling in our country. Think of “tipping points” and viral phenomena on the Internet; a certain amount of chaos is inherent in dissemination, especially at the earliest and most crucial stages of adoption.

The key to moving innovation forward is to connect likely innovators with the highest quality innovations, and then organize these “early adopters” through virtual communities as a way of helping them push for adoptions in their districts – from the bottom up; for true innovation rarely runs top down.

Formal adoption, with school board ratification in some cases, is just about the only mechanism schools and districts use to scale and codify new practice. It’s far from a streamlined process but at least it exists. On the upside, the adoption process obviates most labor contract issues because most employees organized under collective bargaining agreements are required to use adopted district curriculum – whatever it is. Meanwhile, the government could be acting in the background, performing rigorous research on a small number of the most promising tools, using feedback from “early adopters” to guide their work and increase its efficiency. High quality tools, a community of passionate users, and good research – all aggregated in a powerful portal – could be the game-changing play in education innovation.

But we still have one huge problem to solve, a problem so intractable and enigmatic that if we don’t begin working on it soon, we might as well stop working on anything else.

Take a book like Daniels, Zemelman, and Hyde’s “Best Practice”, for example, or a smaller, roughly equivalent text like Thomas Armstrong and David Elkind’s “The Best Schools”. These books provide rock-solid research-based recipes for building great schools. They aren’t even very long, ten to twenty hours of reading at most. Yet they have almost no effect whatsoever on the quality of teaching, learning, and leadership in American education at any level from individual teachers to top academics to DOE and even the Secretary himself. Why?

Paradigm.

It’s starts with “p” and that rhymes with “t” and that stands for trouble right here in American ed reform.

From my vantage point, working in schools across the country, I think we’re innovating all over the place in education, and collecting these innovations, albeit haphazardly, in the professional literature of the field. We’re even packaging this stuff for replication, too, and sometimes rather smartly. Some day, someone may even cook up that portal I described and pull everything together. But even the best new ideas of the year gain little traction in our schools for one simple reason: the paradigm of education out of which they are born stands in direct opposition to the paradigm of education in which we hope they will thrive. Simply and sadly put: school is hostile to good teaching, great learning, and effective leading – by its own design. The dominant paradigm rules like Stalin over Russia, and all we can do is debunk the myths and dig up the bodies. But even this changes nothing.

To get a sense of what we’re up against, let’s go back to Atul Gawande’s world for a moment. Imagine a simple hand-washing protocol. Simple though it seems, codifying the best hand-washing procedure in a checklist, placing the checklist where people wash their hands, and using compliance personnel to increase the incidence of high-quality hand washing, improves patient outcomes. A simple innovation, broadly adopted, can have huge and virtually cost-free impact.

But what if the people who invented the checklist and the protocol – people who believed in the "germ theory" of disease, of course – attempted to propagate their innovation through a community of hospitals where people did not share the same “germ theory” paradigm? Perhaps these “old paradigm” practitioners believed in an older, mythical theory of disease causation. Even with the “new paradigm” protocol, the nifty check-list-labeled hand-washing stations, and a platoon of compliance officers, how likely would it be that “old paradigm” practitioners would adopt “new paradigm” practice? About as likely as finding phlogiston in your fireplace or re-discovering that the Earth really is the center of the Universe.

The problem I describe in the land of hand-washing and hospitals is miniscule compared to what we are dealing with right now in education. We have a serious “Paradigm Problem” on our hands – and I use the capital “P”s to indicate just how serious I think it is. Two books, in particular, the aforementioned “Best Practice” and “The Best Schools”, (along with Frank Smith’s more lyrical but less acclaimed, “Book of Learning and Forgetting”), describe the two competing paradigms in great detail, using easy-to-understand side-by-side comparisons. One look at the lists and you’ll instantly understand that a chasm exists in this country between what we’ve been doing, even in the last 15 years, and what we need to do to educate our children effectively. Even more frightening is the fact that this chasm is so big, it makes Evel Knievel’s jump across the Snake River Canyon look like a kindergartener hopping over a mud puddle.

The greatest barrier to innovation in education is paradigmatic – not economic (market-based, incentive-driven) or political (policy-based, program-actuated) or even structural (public schools, charter schools, big schools, small schools, inner city schools, rural schools, single-gender schools, etc.; no internal structure for a single school, nor any external structure for a school system even comes close to neutralizing “The Paradigm Problem.”) Fortunately, we know a bit about paradigms and how to shift them.

In his famous book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn told us two of the most important rules about paradigms and paradigm-shifts:

Rule #1. All “new paradigm” information can only be interpreted by “old paradigm” believers through “old paradigm” beliefs. So if you believe that diseases are caused by germs, and in my paradigm germs don’t even exist, there’s little chance of my using your hand-washing protocol even if you can show me data that it works. Worse yet, even if you show me something under a microscope called a “germ”, it isn’t likely that I will “see” it the way you do, such is the power of a paradigm. As most psychologists and neuro-scientists will tell you: seeing isn’t believing; believing is seeing.

Rule #2. New paradigms only replace old paradigms when advocates of old paradigms die or otherwise cease to practice. I suppose, then, that if you wash your hands all the time, and I don’t even believe in germs, that I am likely to die sooner regardless of the paradigm I hold. But this is small consolation, and of no relevance where education is concerned because the old paradigm of school is so deeply sewn into our culture that it rules us from the past.

What Kuhn understood about the nature of scientific progress was that the scientific method and scientific culture would eventually win out, and that some kind of revolutionary thinking would begin to gain a foot hold, first within the scientific community, and later perhaps within the public at large. But in education, we have a problem: teachers tend to teach the way they were taught. That is to say, unless I get a new paradigm during my teacher training (highly unlikely), I will probably teach high school English more or less the way Mrs. Smith taught it to me; and she will have taught it more or less the way Mr. Jones taught it to her. So even though Mrs. Smith and Mr. Jones may have ceased to practice, or even to exist, decades ago, their ideas and ideals live on without them, preserved and propagated by any of their students who become future teachers, principals, district office staff, consultants, state education leaders, federal education leaders, education philanthropists, etc. This is why 9th graders still read “Romeo and Juliet” -- whether they can actually read it or not. There’s no research-based rationale; it’s just the way it’s always been done. Even really smart, really young, really committed teachers are still highly likely to teach out of the old paradigm. In fact, these folks may be more likely to teach out of the old paradigm because the old paradigm validated them so thoroughly when they were in school.

Educational innovation exists, but it does so in a paradigmatic standoff (or, more accurately, a massacre). Even worse, the numbers are not in our favor. “Old paradigm” educators probably outnumber “new paradigm” educators by at least 100-to-1, probably more. This is why education changes so little over time, why the profession is so resistant to change, why reversals of progress happen so readily, why teachers feel that education swings like a pendulum, and why some district, state, and federal policies inadvertently send us scurrying back to the old paradigm just as we seem to be making a go of things.

For example, high-stakes testing ironically sends education backward toward the old paradigm with more force than its “new paradigm” data-driven nature can propel us into the future. Why? Because high-stakes testing policies don’t take into account the preternaturally risk-averse tendencies of education culture. High-stakes testing works only at first, when the fear factor is at its maximum and most schools are performing so poorly they have little to lose by trying something new. After this period, however, high-stakes testing renders teachers and administrators increasingly less tolerant of innovation. Why? Because for every unit of progress they make out of fear, the more they fear losing the progress they have made. Instead of moving briskly forward with the next change initiative, they hunker down and become ever more averse to what now seems like the irrational risk inherent in innovation. At this point, the desire to conserve progress precludes the ability to progress much further. This is why so many states have to lower their standards to keep scores moving up. On their own, scores would flatline at most schools within 5-7 years, or the equivalent of, at most, two multi-year change initiatives.

Why do some education policies inadvertently move us away from better education? Because they are based on “old paradigm” principles. As Ms. Ravitch pointed out, many people working in ed reform today have never worked in a school. This means their paradigm is likely to be shaped almost exclusively by their own school experience when they were young and by their interpretations of their kids’ experience if they have them. For Baby Boomer ed reformers, it’s possible to hold the equivalent of a 1950s view of school, updated, of course, to take certain 21st century contingencies into account like new technology and increased globalization. But we can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse with minor temporal and cultural updates; this new information is simply swallowed whole and immediately turned into waste by an “old paradigm” digestive system.

People who haven’t had much direct experience at the building or classroom level, may not have a complete paradigm at all. This may explain the popularity of metaphors, like the “education is a business” metaphor, in so many ed reform discussions, and in the design of so much education policy. Metaphors provide explanatory leverage; the less I know about something, the more I need them. If I don’t understand education empirically, and I can’t or don’t want to get the empirical experience I need, my best chance of understanding it better is by comparing it to something else I understand. But since all metaphors are false by definition, the ideas they encourage are often inaccurate or inefficient.

So how do we beat the “Paradigm Problem”? How do we cheat Thomas Kuhn’s immutable principles so we don’t have to wait so long to make significant progress? Why are we slowly but surely clawing our way back to the Eisenhower Era in our schools? And most important of all, how do we keep education’s past from continually undermining its present and its future?

The most practical short-term option is to apply "The Theory of Creative Destruction" to small but foundational aspects of the old paradigm. To use a military metaphor (handy, but probably just a little bit wrong), let’s cut the enemy’s supply lines, and as their soldiers begin to starve, we can begin feeding them the food we hope will become their new diet. This is not paradigm shifting of the kind to which Kuhn refers. It’s more like paradigm paralysis. We can’t get rid of the old paradigm because the people who established it died long ago and left it to us as a perpetual inheritance. But we can begin to disable it piece by piece until it lacks the force to blunt innovation and to stifle positive change.

If an army marches on its stomach, education marches on its traditions, its myths, and perhaps most powerful of all, its belief in the inherent rightness of conformity. For example, the old paradigm holds that “instruction is undifferentiated.” In short, everybody does the same thing, the same way, at the same time, on the same day. This conformist ideal can be extended from a single classroom to a grade level to a school and even to an entire district. Theoretically, with national standards, national tests, and a consistently high threat-level applied to teachers, children, and schools, we could possibly birth a generation of young lemmings.

The new paradigm, of course, states just the opposite: “instruction MUST be differentiated”. This is true because one of the most common observations about classrooms full of kids is that no matter how tightly we track them, or how successfully we segregate them, there always exist different levels of ability and different attitudes about school such that differentiated instruction is required in order for all students to make good progress. Differentiation levels the playing field; traditional undifferentiated practice tilts the field in favor of the white, the wealthy, and the already well-educated. In the “old paradigm” undifferentiated approach, the smart get smarter and the dumb get poverty. By contrast, the “new paradigm” approach offers kids of all ability levels, attitudes, and family backgrounds a chance to realize their full potential.

Sounds rather democratic, doesn’t it? One of the top “new paradigm” goals is to create young adults who can function effectively in a democracy. The new paradigm is the path to both career and citizenship. The old paradigm is the path to economic, intellectual, and civil destruction because future-generation kids can’t live on the reassuring myths and past-generation pap of nostalgic yesteryears.

In an effort, then, to neutralize the old paradigm piece by piece, we might work to destroy certain foundational elements like the belief in the correctness of undifferentiated instruction. This part of the old paradigm must be weakened before we can begin to replace it with the opposite “new paradigm” belief of differentiated instruction.

This form of piecemeal paradigm-disabling via creative destruction could be accomplished several ways:

1. Via the bully pulpit. The Secretary of Education could talk about this in all his speeches, bring it up as an obvious issue of basic fairness, and promote it with confidence as an inevitable result of his own progressive education policy. He could even make differentiated instruction a goal of his administration. I submit that such an emphasis would have a greater long term effect than RttT and i3 combined because even if these two programs produce many new and interesting innovations, “The Paradigm Problem” will keep those innovations from propagating through the system. Of course, focusing RttT and i3 grants on research that produces innovations in differentiated instruction would be the best of all possible worlds.

2. Via methodological endorsement. The workshop method of instruction, most frequently associated with reading and writing but applicable in any subject, has been in use for approximately 30 years. More professional literature exists about workshop-method teaching than about any other named instructional method. Best of all, the workshop method has differentiation built into it by definition, thus saving teachers from the fear and complexity of learning how to differentiate unit-by-unit or lesson-by-lesson on their own. Endorsing the workshop method, at least in reading and writing, would make a big difference in shifting the differentiation component of the old paradigm toward the new. Again, focusing federal dollars on the study and development of the workshop method would simply help a good thing go faster.

3. Via scientific research. Here, as I’ve said before, we must be careful about the level of granularity. Differentiation occurs at the classroom level by individual teachers so this is where it must be studied. We must also be willing to admit that the most useful research in this area will combine both qualitative and quantitative methods. Quantitative methods alone will not get the job done because differentiation – like virtually all aspects of good teaching – has a significant qualitative component. In particular, standardized multiple choice tests are not the best way to measure the effects of differentiation. In fact, this type of testing is a major component of the old paradigm. We desperately need to develop “new paradigm” measures if we want “new paradigm” practices to flourish in “new paradigm” schools. “Old paradigm” measures will tend to validate “old paradigm” practices, thus tightening the already-powerful grip of the past on the schooling of the present.

The challenge in replacing one paradigm with another is daunting. Kuhn himself suggests that it is essentially impossible short of one generation, grounded in the new paradigm, rising up to replace “old paradigm” advocates only after the traditionalists have died or otherwise ceased to practice. Much as we are forced to agree with Kuhn’s analysis, as his work remains the “paradigm of paradigm-shifting”, we must pursue strategies like the ones I articulate above in order to have a chance of beating the education system at its own game. We can force teachers to teach to whatever standards and tests we devise. But if we don’t change how teachers teach, the only learning that will accrue is the learning we’re getting now – simplistic, incremental, test-prep-influenced, often-illusory, and ultimately so fragile it is as easily blown away by the political winds of change as it was encouraged by political means in the first place.

But battling the “old paradigm” beast may not be as difficult as it appears. There are still those among us who believe that the government can do big things. And I suspect, where education is concerned, that even people who might swing right of center on other issues, also wouldn’t mind if the feds played a bigger role in shaping education reform, especially if more of the things our government did began producing better results. The most important thing to keep in mind is what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be reforming education for the future, not codifying into law an educational form from the past. To "reform" in this case means to "establish a new form", and that will require us to establish a new paradigm. What we truly want is for education itself to become an innovation, and innovations are not to be found in the “good ol’ days” or the “good ol’ ways.”

Just as contemporary construction experts have developed a new paradigm for bringing down old buildings through the strategic deployment and precisely-timed detonation of explosives, we must be strategic about destroying the old paradigm of school. Attacking the old paradigm at key points – like it’s belief in undifferentiated instruction – is not only effective but also efficient. If that belief falls, many others will fall with it because the notion that teaching can or should be undifferentiated forms the foundation of a host of other “old paradigm” practices, including ineffective approaches to grading, planning, management, lesson delivery, curriculum development, and even discipline.

To get the education system we want, we need to seize the worst parts of it by eminent domain and raze a few old buildings. The undifferentiated instruction building is an important structure in the old paradigm of school. It is also an aspect that is held sacred by almost all teachers at all grade levels and in all subject areas. Furthermore, it even transcends the belief systems of educators who work with and often advocate for students of different racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds as well. Undifferentiated instruction is everywhere. That’s why it’s such a big building in the land of the dominant paradigm.

The precise place to begin our assault is in reading and writing with the workshop method. Workshop already has a foot hold, a track record, some history, and a lot of professional literature; few people – even those who dislike it fiercely – can make a good argument against it, especially for kids at grades K-8. Even better than that, there exist tools for teaching Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop that don’t even require teachers to embrace the workshop method fully right off the bat. For example, our company has created many so-called “bridge tools”. We tell our clients all the time that if they don’t feel comfortable with workshop, they can start with “bridge tool” techniques in their traditional classrooms. It’s the “bridge tools" that make it possible for “old paradigm” teachers to walk across to the new paradigm. And it is in the research and development of highly accessible “bridge tools” that we should be focusing our work in education innovation.

As we move ahead with “new paradigm” literacy, we must also begin some heavy duty research to create a systematic approach to differentiation in math – not an easy task by any means as math has for generations been dominated by textbook-driven programmed instruction, the exact opposite of differentiation. Difficult as this task will be, I know it’s possible because I’ve done a little of it myself, I’ve observed it in classrooms, I know schools that have done it, I’ve studied some of Robert Kaplan’s “Math Circle” work, and some of Stanislas Dehaene’s work on numerical cognition. MetaMertics’ Quantile assessment framework also looks promising in this regard. Needless to say, differentiated math instruction is well within our grasp. But until we begin to chip away at undifferentiated, textbook-driven, programmed math instruction, there will be no “paradigmatic space” in which to insert innovative approaches.

There is no shortage of innovation in education. Much of it is even neatly captured in the professional literature of our field. Unfortunately, most goes for naught, even when it works. While gathering, researching, and vetting the best innovations we can find, we must simultaneously attack the problem of propagation. Yes, there are “supply chain” ideas we can exploit. Yes, there are “incentive systems” we can use. Yes, there are “human capital” strategies we can deploy. But until we start breaking down “old paradigm” notions of teaching, learning and leading, we will continue to labor like the mythical Sisyphus, rolling the boulder of reform up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this process for eternity.

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A brief correction to my comment below: Jim Shelton is not at IES but in the Office of Innovation and Improvement. Mea culpa! In his comment earlier today, Shelton asks whether we need to emphasize accessible procedures more than big-system governance issues. Shelton’s instinct to focus on potential procedural changes inside schools and classes is likely to be correct, in part because the governance issues are attractive and easy to target and historically more successful (if “surviving to be regretted within 80 years” is a measure of success). On the other hand, changing what happens in classrooms is hard. Many years ago, Doug and Lynn Fuchs worked hard to develop a prereferral intervention program for intermediate and middle-school grade students with troubling behavior, and after several years of boiling down the intervention to a simple behavioral contract approach that a coordinator at any school could manage, they accumulated evidence of significant reduction in behavior troubles and referrals to special education. The school district they worked with dropped the program as soon as the research grant funding (and technical assistance and social pressure of teachers’ having agreed to work with the program) evaporated. So much for the hope that rigorous research will lead to lasting changes in schools (not that I expect many readers of this blog to believe that might have been true).

One problem is the presence of constant distractions in school systems: pay attention to test scores! teen violence and crime! the science curriculum! technology integration! graduation rates! fine arts! character education! costs of student transportation! class sizes! a foundation grant for ripping up and rewriting your entire curriculum! football! drug abuse! segregation of students with disabilities! teen suicide! statistical derivative of test scores! a foundation grant for distance learning! teen parenting! SAT/ACT scores! teacher scandal du jour! Homecoming! Should we be surprised at a lack of focus when the routines and politics of education—including the “plethora of programs” Diane Ravitch identifies—are almost perfectly designed to disorient any administrator?

In addition, the background discourse on innovation is not encouraging, in part because teachers have too much experience with the education equivalent of “yesterday we told you that apples are good, but now we know that apples will give you cancer.” Every one of my masters students in the last few years who has read Jeffrey Henig’s Spin Cycle has nodded her or his head and said something like, “Yes, of course I know the presentation of research is biased. I don’t trust news about education research, because everyone picks and chooses the facts they want to believe.”* One of the most important reasons to have a Devil’s Advocate Bureau inside IES (see my earlier comment) is to battle the cynicism of classroom teachers about research and reform. Anyone who says the entire problem is the mythical public-school monopoly, unions, or another single-cause factor (take your pick) hasn’t listened very closely to teachers about how they view education research and anything called innovation or reform.

(* - Henig ends Spin Cycle more optimistically than do many of my students who read him.)

Finally, John Easton is correct that the rhetoric of reform assumes a single relevant time frame (a few years) when the most important time frames are both longer and shorter. On one end of the time scale, lasting structural changes take years to come to fruition, and we often forget the subtle effects they can have. In the mid-1980s, for example, states began increasing the number of math and science courses required for standard high school diplomas. When I graduated in 1983, I needed to have taken no more than two semesters of math, and obviously neither had any of my elementary school teachers, who had graduated at least a generation before. The raising of course requirements raised high school graduates’ experience in math, shrank the gender gap in high school math enrollment, and thus also raised the math education of the next generation of elementary school teachers. Yet no one talks about this generational change when discussing the long-term upward trend in elementary math NAEP scores; it’s always the last few years’ policies that must be the critical issue. But for issues such as the basic education level of potential teachers (especially in content expertise), the most important time scale is the generation.

On the other end, annual test scores and turnaround-style policies are not fast enough for individual children, for whom waiting a year for better education is too long to wait. There is no national, state, or local policy that will guarantee an intervention fast enough for individual children. In many cases, the most effective advocacy for individual children’s needs is at the school or classroom level. The underlying structure built over years matters—the timelines for assessment in federal special education law, for example—but anyone who claims that either new competition or new Washington, Tallahassee, or Tweed Courthouse mandates can change the lives of my children’s or their friends this year, this month, and this week is bloviating.

Back to the research the Fuchs conducted years ago: what would be necessary to make sure there is one person in every elementary and middle school who has enough knowledge and formal or informal authority to consistently suggest behavioral contracting as one tool to address troubling behavior? I can’t imagine competition to get schools to pay attention to that level of procedure. Nor would duplicating and distributing the federally-funded manual or the 1990 article in Intervention in School and Clinic to schools do much by itself. Maybe one of you could think of a social marketing campaign for this equivalent to the “Back To Sleep” anti-SIDS campaign, but I haven’t. More realistically, the information needs to be embedded in broader parent education (or advocate education) and teacher education, in ways that make the research credible and understandable and clear enough that this should be part of a school’s toolbox of approaches. I know that sounds so boring and mundane compared with the cool whiz-bang jargon-laced reform talk you may have read, but only with that long-term focus can there be feet on the ground to suggest something that might work on the day it’s appropriate for an individual child or teacher.

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While everyone else has been thinking both grandiose big-picture thoughts or (conversely) how to get teachers to do the education equivalent of washing their hands, I’ve been thinking about the place where Shelton and Easton now work, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Let me make two small-dollar proposals for a structural modification in IES. First, IES needs a Devil’s Advocate Bureau staffed by a combination of postdocs and midcareer district and state staff with a range of technical backgrounds. This guaranteed-critique shop should supplement the existing R&D research programs at IES, which supports classroom research from exploration to scaling up and requires that recipients make research reports available publicly. But publishing reports is not enough. Anyone receiving federal support to develop or evaluate programs in Goals Three (Efficacy/Replication) or Four (Scale-Up Evaluations) should be required to provide raw data that a Devil’s Advocate Bureau can reanalyze, projects chosen either by an advisory board or by the staff.

To go along with a group dedicated to body-checking research, in general there should be more emphasis on open access to data collected with federal support. The federal government has a history of national evaluations of programs, evaluations usually contracted out to single entities that hold onto (or worse, destroy) data. What is more important than one good pair of eyes (a researcher contractor)? Making the data collected available to many good pairs of eyes (researchers), even if only one is paid for an evaluation contract. Data collection at the local level should also be more transparent. Jay Pfeiffer describes the efforts of the Florida Department of Education to make longitudinal data available. As he notes, it is not perfect, but it is more transparent than the vast majority of school systems, both state and local.

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Several participants raise the question of what innovation is and take a shot at defining it. Nelson Smith makes the case that innovation should be defined in terms of the results that it produces rather than the form it takes. This seems useful, because an innovation may be the new solution itself, but it may also be a new way of getting that solution out to a much broader audience or getting better outcomes in less time. It’s not necessarily something old or new, big or small, but something that is currently not used widely that could help us be better and faster.

Atul Gawande has written in the New York Times about the power of a simple checklist in medicine: when doctors used basic five-step checklists in prepping before placing large IV lines into patients, they were able to cut infections by two-thirds and, over the course of 18 months in ICUs across Michigan, save more than 1,500 lives and $200 million. The steps on the checklist were not revolutionary, not even new. Among others, they were things so simple that doctors may have forgotten them or ignored them: washing their hands and putting on a sterile gown and gloves. All the materials necessary to catalyze the change, minus the checklist, already existed in every hospital. This innovation was the essence of simplicity, yet if we define the power of innovation in terms of results, as powerful as many of the technological miracles in modern hospitals.*

Simple innovations like the checklist could go a long way towards solving problems that we confront in education, but we currently do not have the infrastructure in place to identify these innovations and make sure teachers nationwide are using them. However, even if we did, simple solutions are not enough. Other sectors have had to develop complex, systemic solutions to improve quickly. These solutions require deep analysis to identify the capabilities they need to possess, training so that practitioners can use the solution, and feedback and long-term evaluation to make sure the solution is continually improving and responding to emerging needs.

There are resources spread across the country, such as the students and faculty at graduate schools of education, IES, NSF, and the Department of Defense, that are working on these problems. We should have a continual stream of solutions emerging that we can test and, if beneficial, implement in schools and districts across the country. So how do we identify, develop, and disseminate both the simple and the complex solutions? What are the specific roles that existing institutions can take on to help make this happen?

*Ultimately, Gawande writes that use of the checklist was stopped because it ran afoul of scientific ethics regulations – so the barriers to innovation unsurprisingly extend beyond just education.

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In reading all 16 comments already posted, it is easy to see the lack of agreement on many vital educational issues, including the value and meaning of innovation, the role of 'competition,' and I think the purpose(s) of education.

I want here to simply point out that the most common metric of success, in education or educational innovation, is a test score. But we now know that state test scores are terribly inflated by teaching to the test.

We also know that the tests do not measure most of what most folks would reasonably consider 'higher order thinking' – whether students can use their minds well in and across subject areas and other valuable areas of life parents and the public have repeatedly indicated they want youth to explore and learn (see Rothstein's "Grading Education").

So having one metric won't work, and our most common metric type is far to limited and too polluted to be of much use. A new set of 'common tests' will provide no solution.

Reaching agreement on a range of plausible goals (if we do as public opinion seems to want) requires developing a range of useful indicators in each goal area, hopefully ones that do not get too polluted by accountability measures. That means also changing the punitive approach to accountability. Only then can we tell if 'innovation' – or indeed education - has succeeded, that it has led to progress on worthwhile goals without undue expense and damage – perhaps even benefit – to other worthwhile goals.

Perhaps the federal government can fund local and state efforts to develop and try out a range of indicators, evidence of learning and other valued attainments, that can signal a wider range of valued goals and provide evidence on a wider range of important outcomes than can scores on mainly multiple-choice tests. That is what the provision in the Miller-McKeon draft NCLB reauthorization bill to allow states to develop local and state assessment systems would have done, at least in part.

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I think Tom nails it below when he talks about incentives. There are very few incentives on the part of the demand side (i.e. SEAs and LEAs) to innovate, and that's a big part of the problem. There are a bunch of reasons, and I'll touch on three.

First, making anything happen within school systems is difficult, let alone something new or unique. The processes are arcane, and inertia favors inaction. Whether it's budget, contracts, acquisitions, procurement, or some other operational dimension, it will always be difficult to get stuff done.

Second, there is a perverse mantra in education, which I often hear in reference to new initiatives: "Failure is not an option." Failure is a regular - and meaningful - part of innovation in the private sector, yet the tolerance for failure is much lower in the public sector. There are good reasons for this, and we certainly can't take willy-nilly bets with public money. The reality, however, is that failure isn't just an option, it's an everyday reality in many of our schools and school systems. We shouldn't let fear be an excuse, because the status quo is inexcusable.

Finally, we don't have reliable metrics. Even if something truly revolutionized our approach to a systemic problem (i.e. dropouts), there would be plenty of debate over whether or not we were measuring the right outcomes. We need a standardized way of measuring success. (Put a nickel in the "standards" jar!) In the private sector - where barriers to entry are lower and outcomes are clearer - the market tends to reward innovation. It's just not the case in education.

So, I realize this is supposed to be a solution post, not a problem post. I outline the problems to suggest that the federal government lower the risk threshold, for both the supply and the demand sides of education. Change the incentive structure to incentivize innovation. Give districts and states the political cover and the leverage they need to engage in promising innovations. Folks will argue that government shouldn't invest in "unproven" practices, but there's no plausible argument that what we're doing now works, especially in our failing schools and districts. We can do this with financial incentives for doing good stuff and stopping the flow of federal money to stuff that we know doesn't work.

Second, we should set out with a problem to solve. "Education reform" is too nebulous. Pick an issue - like turning around failing schools, for instance. Then create a big reward for the first organization - LEA or non-profit - that closes the achievement gap in a cluster of schools that they manage. Then encourage more entrants into that space with incentives.

Finally, the federal government should help innovations be more scalable and portable. These things are intertwined, because the markets in which many innovations operate are too small for meaningful scale. Add to that the radically different operating conditions that exist across LEAs/SEAs, and you have a recipe for really limited scale. Giving states and districts the flexibility and incentives to expedite the adoption of models that were successful at solving problems in other jurisdictions will help.

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Mike Antonucci argues that school systems have “fallen into the trap of funding great ideas instead of great results.” So let’s extend his metaphor just a little farther: we know miracle diets (read: silver bullets) don’t work in the long run, and will end up leaving our unhealthy schools even more sick and bloated. But like dieters, education reformers want fast results. And while this impatience may be unrealistic, it is justifiable. After all, waiting four years to see the results of even the most promising new curriculum or teacher induction program can feel like an eternity; that’s a high school graduating class, come and gone.

So how do we connect the dots between innovation and research? How do we keep innovations from being “rejected out of hand” at schools weary of the “plethora of programs showered upon them by non-educators,” as Diane Ravitch argues. We do it by actively engaging practitioners—not just by telling them what to do with data and what to learn from our rigorous studies, but by asking practitioners to let their experience shape our research agenda, and as part of that engagement, to help test and improve promising innovations. If we want schools to be stable, coherent organizations, then we should model that goal in our research. We don’t want to invite schools to the table only to offer them one meal; we need to work together to create a menu of healthy options.

To that end, Steve Peha weighs in with a means for bridging the disconnect between schools and R & D. We agree that education researchers need both technical experience and grounding in school practice. We also want our research to create those “good tools” for principals and teachers and kids, so we have a vested interest in striving for the “right level of granularity.” Finally, we know that the principal is a key lever for school improvement, so it makes sense to make the Principal’s Office an important pipeline for research and innovation .

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What about the possibility that innovation is over-rated and that high quality implementation of simple ideas is the real thing we need more of? Health care organizations have learned the immense power of extremely simple tools like mosquito nets, home visits, water filters, cell phones, and small loans. Why can't education do the same? On our current path, I worry that we'll end up with too many wild-eyed innovations and another distracted decade. Innovation is already losing its meaning, and its prominence is distracting educators, lawmakers, and the public from simpler, more immediate things like getting better-trained teachers in front of low-income students and ensuring that schools are reaching a wide variety of kids.

Why do new practices and technologies have to be “crammed” (to use Clayton Christensen’s pungent term) into the $600 billion enterprise of public education, when every other sector is voracious for anything that will improve performance?

I’m with VanderArk and Keegan in believing that the bureaucratic, non-competitive K-12 system inhibits early adoption. If a teacher is hungry to learn a new skill, what autonomous funding can she invest in the training, and how many permissions does she need? If a principal spots a new platform for self-paced instruction, how long will it take to persuade the district to adopt it, factoring in lengthy debate by a politically-elected school board?

This is where charter schools should have a tremendous advantage, what with their curricular freedom and site-based budgets. In fact, the preambles that explain the purpose of many state charter laws include a reference to innovation. But realizing that purpose is complicated.

First, there’s misunderstanding of what “innovation” means. It shouldn’t connote inventing something that has never been seen before on the face of the earth. It can well mean packaging effective practices together in a new way and coming up with a solution that didn’t exist before –which is how many successful charters have created their models. And it ought to be focused on results rather than gizmos. Putting a great school in a neighborhood with failing ones is one hell of an innovation in the lives of kids.

Second, some of the most important innovations in the charter sector are in areas like finance and governance, making them hard to adopt in systems that are centrally-managed. The notion of “charter” itself is a huge breakthrough: a contract that conditions the right to manage a school upon evidence of performance. This is a fundamental shift away from the notion that a public school is part of a permanent civic structure that owns, manages, and oversees the entire enterprise. The new concept has taken root in the broader education sphere – consider NCLB’s restructuring provisions, or Arne Duncan’s “turnaround” proposals – yet it is rarely credited as a charter-led innovation.

There are many more examples in this vein: merit pay schemes made possible by charter autonomy; the idea of governance by a school’s own board of trustees; longer school day and year; virtual charters and state-based authorizers that supersede the traditional idea of geographic districts. These are not necessarily brand-new concepts, and some have existed in private schooling or in other sectors, but this is the first time they’re being implemented in a rapidly scaling sector of public education.

Third, there isn’t any current vehicle for identifying, evaluating, and disseminating innovation in a movement of nearly 5,000 individual schools. The best charter networks are starting to replicate their models at greater scale, but three-quarters of charters are not affiliated with networks and many have no intention of growing beyond a single campus. Yet some are doing amazing things in the classroom, the board room, and the business office, and there is no public or private agency trying to harvest these innovations. So we need to do the “R” and research what’s working; and then we should radically rethink the “D,” replacing the show-and-tell approach to “dissemination” with a new set of incentives so that the best innovations get into the cycle of new-school creation -- and help shape a new generation of great public schools around technologies, practices, and habits of mind that build student success.

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This is such a big topic. I’ll offer a few thoughts related to what I think the Federal Government should do in relation to this issue.

Who is responsible for what?

Shelton and Eston ask: “What are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole?”

I think there is danger that the current flurry of activity at the Federal level could lead people to (mistakenly) believe that the Federal government and states are responsible for education success in America, not parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, and (gasp!) local school boards.

I suggest that the Federal government clarify its intended relationship to K-12 education. People need to hear: “Hey everyone, we know it is you folks out there who make education successful. Our goal is to support you. You know better than we exactly what will work for your child/classroom/school/community. We’re here to help but you’re not off the hook!”

In this way, we can counter a trend that I see cropping up in the trenches: a sense of resignation that all of us out here beyond the beltway are just pawns in a grand scheme being run from Washington. I don’t think that’s what the folks in Washington have in mind; we need to nip this in the bud.

Education system design

Second, I think the Federal government needs to use it leverage to remove local system barriers that prevent innovation from taking hold.

I give it an ‘A’ for this so far this year!

Research & Development

I agree with several others on this board that we need to up the ante in this area. The “Kress-Ravitch Principle” makes sense to me. More good research conducted by people with direct experience of the problems. Three fertile areas:

• Defining effective teaching. I spent a fascinating day at the New Schools Venture Fund Community of Practice last week learning about recent R&D in this area conducted by the New Teacher Project, DC Public Schools, Teach for America and PUC Schools, among others. There is growing R&D activity in this area. The Federal government could lead.
• English language learners. Educators need lots of help here.
• Assessments. If “what gets measured gets done,” then let’s get better at measuring what’s most important. (Great to see positive movement on this front at the Federal level.)

And there are many other areas.

The purposes of education in 21st century America

Finally, I’d suggest that there is a Big Topic that the Secretary and President need to weigh in on.

Chad Wick at KnowledgeWorks makes an interesting point. There is no “shared vision” for education in America….”until we answer the deeper question about the core purpose of public education and establish a vision that aligns our efforts, innovation will never be 'organized, prioritized, or leveraged for maximum impact'."

Well, I think that this is a good thing to a certain extent. If we’re going to invest “locals” with a lot of control, then we can expect them to make different choices about what they want. That’s good.

But I think we have a bit of a crisis of confidence at the national level that is being brought on by economic tough times and global shifts in the balance of power. Thomas Friedman is crying out that the World is Flat. China is standing up. Even college-educated kids are having a tough time getting jobs these days.

Given that the world is changing, exactly what kind of education do we need our children to get? To what level do they need to demonstrate competence on a multiple choice test? At what point should parents/ teachers/ principals/ school boards stop worrying primarily about driving those scores higher and start worrying about how to develop children’s minds and character in ways that will manifest results in other ways?

In other words, given that our kids are headed into a different world, how do we prepare them for it? And how do we know if we’re succeeding?

In my experience, the discussions on this topic beyond the beltway often get reduced to “more testing in English and math” vs “a more expansive view of education.” I think that is a false choice and we need leaders in all sectors, including the Federal government, who can help parents answer this question in more sophisticated and compelling ways.

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I'm a little late to the party, but think most of you have missed the boat on this one--it's an inefficient market that it dampens R&D investment and innovation diffusion. While a couple large-scale well organized government efforts would reduce the random inapplicability that characterizes most education research today, the real solution lies in getting the incentives right. There’s no lack of investment and innovation in other sectors—this problem is peculiar to education and stems from the history of local control and limitations on private sector involvement.

Billions of dollars flowed into clean tech in the last three years wtih the expectation of changing consumer expectations and government incentives. The Department of Energy recently released $500 million in grants—all to private companies. Unlike Energy, Defense, Health, or Transportation, the Department of Education does not have (or has not exercised) the same authority.

This problem runs deeper than USED authority, it’s a fundamental governance problem. The combination of local control intertwined with antiquated labor contracts reduces performance and innovation incentives. We won’t fix the investment and innovation problem without creating performance-oriented employment and governance. When investors (philanthropic and venture) see some hope of innovation diffusion, they will invest.

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Our special guests post excellent questions, ones that I will answer below. But right off the top, I would like to thank Ms. Ravitch for her position. It is one we would all do well to address, whether we agree with it or not, because at its core lies a fundamental question: How does knowledge of education inform the form of reform? Or, to put it more plainly, can something be changed successfully by people who have little or no direct experience with it?

(The short answer is “no”. The long answer follows.)

In almost every school where I consult, I am routinely characterized as being radical (and all this time, I thought I was being innovative). In reality, my radicalism is based on practices that are 20-30 years old, a huge base of published professional literature, and technique used by literally hundreds of thousands of teachers. As for proof of effectiveness, I’m always happy to walking into any classroom and prove their value in front of real kids – which is often what I do before I run a training session in order to minimize the potential for disputes about effectiveness.

Yet, there are always disputes even years later after rock-solid achievement data has been earned and analyzed. The argument is most often ended in favor of maintaining the status quo and against new and proven and practice. That a so-called “radical” can be defined as a person who uses practices that are 20 or 30 years old, may give those of you who have not spent much time teaching or training teachers a different perspective on the what the word “innovation” means in education. Depending on your belief system, innovation in education is either a chimera or the devil dressed up in disaggregated data.

The problem isn’t that I’m a radical – politically I’m a slightly-left-of-center; educationally I’m a pragmatist; and by vocation I’m an entrepreneur – it’s that people with little or no knowledge of teaching practice or education history are rendering the judgments. To them, I appear radical because their conception of schools and schooling comes largely from nostalgic reminiscences of their own childhood experience. If you went to school before the 1970s, if you learned to read with Sally, Dick, and Jane, if you actually grew up with someone who reminds you of The Fonz, it’s likely your feelings about education were formed at a time when teaching practice was based on myths and traditions, some dating back to Plymouth Rock. No wonder teaching from the 70, 80s, or 90s seems shocking – and why any idea birthed in the 21st century would appear more like dangerous magic than the simple integrated approach to literacy instruction I suggest.

Ms. Ravitch reminds us all that just because everyone has been to school, it doesn’t mean they should be deciding what happens there. My corollary to her argument is that even people with decades of school experience often have avoided most contemporary knowledge of their profession. In recognition of Ms. Ravitch’s position, we might do well to adopt the following notion: “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. And don’t try it if you’re already predisposed to knocking it.” This is how the best ideas are killed and the worst ideas, their hour come ‘round at last, slouch toward Bethlehem to be born.

(SCORE: School 1, Innovation 0)

The second thing I’d like to talk about is what I call the “systemic fallacy of education.” For better or worse, the rhetoric of reform has always been national. Hence, the famous, an famously histrionic, report title “A Nation at Risk”. But, as Tip O’Neill might remind us, all education is local. Districts, schools, and teachers determine what happens and what does not. States pick up most of the tab, and run ineffectual and modest Departments of Public Instruction, but don’t assert themselves effectively into what has always been a local venture.

This means that we do not have one school system; at the district level, we have fifteen thousand and one. As such, there is no “U.S. Education System” and this is what, I imagine, often frustrates people who work at the federal level, as well as many national education policy leaders, the Secretary of Education, the President, and perhaps even some members of Congress. This historical state of affairs may also explain why most federal education policies don’t seem highly congruent with the way school works on the ground. And, finally, why innovation doesn’t spread through the system – how can one thing spread through another thing that doesn’t exist?

(Score: School 2, Innovation 0)

Many of the countries whose test scores we lust after have national education systems. So it’s not surprising that they seem more focused and less fractious than we do – and that they seem more willing and able to institute practical and promising reforms. Our hyper-local structure gives us that wonderful “live free or die” feeling written in our American DNA. But at the local level, we lack the knowledge, the resources, and most significantly the will to make even modest changes.

(Score: School 3, Innovation 0)

Our guest questioners rightly ask, “What are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole?” The answer, of course, is not a set of capabilities but a structure. We need a federal education system. But this will never happen.

(Score: School 4, Innovation 0)

It seems that many of us in reform like to apply the business metaphor to education. Most educators react badly to this. After all, education is not a business. But, having worked in both education and in business, I believe there are some lessons to be learned through this linguistic sleight of mind – as long we don’t forget that it is merely a metaphor and not the truth. And this is where I think we’re struggling with the notion of “innovation.” We keep thinking about it in terms of the “education is a business” metaphor. Unfortunately, these two aspects, in particular, are not parts of the metaphor we should be using.

So let’s get some perspective on innovation in education. The most recent successful education innovation that scaled to a national level and improved student achievement was the blackboard. According toWikipedia, the “chalkboard” was introduced in 1801. But it didn’t catch fire until the 1930s or so. Since this surge of innovative acceptance early in the 20th century, the blackboard has evolved only slightly into the whiteboard, the spandrel-like overhead projector, and in a very small number of classrooms into the computer projector, smartboard, or document cam. Note that none of these post-blackboard “innovations” can be shown to have made any significant increases in student achievement beyond that achieved by the original which really did change the way teachers taught and students learned.

(Score: School 4, Innovation 1)

Not only is education fragmented by its hyper-local structure, and hamstrung by its anti-innovation culture, it is also highly resistant to viral change. (The revolution will not be broadcast via Twitter; I guarantee it.) Think about this: When the electric typewriter arrived on the scene, how long did it take companies to say, “Hey, I just heard they got one of these new-fangled electro-typer-thingamajiggers over at MegaCorp and that they’ve cut the size of the typing pool by 50%. Let’s get us a thousand of ‘em tomorrow!” Education does not work this way. Why? The business metaphor gives us the answer: the cost-benefit analysis of change versus no-change always pencils out to no- change as the smarter play. Apple could rain iPods down upon every school in America and this would have no effect whatsoever on academic achievement. Kids would use the phones and download the apps but the local school board would just as quickly ban iPod use anywhere in the district (and probably try to convince the mayor that since “pod” starts with “p” and that rhymes with “t”, well, you get the idea). This is not just hyper-parochialism; it really is the smarter play locally (not for the kids, of course, but for the adults who don’t want to worry about what “cute pix” Janie just sexted Johnny, or whether every kid in the junior class has downloaded “How to Cheat on Your Trigonometry Final”).

(Score: School 5, Innovation 1)

But enough of constraints and failures. Let’s talk about solutions.

We have a simple rule here at Teaching That Makes Sense that says: nothing new gets perpetrated upon our clients unless it can be found to be BOTH better for kids AND easier for teachers. At this moment in educational history, teaching is simply too hard. So asking teachers to do more – even if it would benefit their students – is not going to work. In fact, we must insist that teachers do less, and we must provide the innovations that make this not possible but preferable.

Classroom innovations – the only kind that will actually improve student achievement over the long haul – must be based on the notion of increasing of “Educational Efficiency” or “Learning divided by Effort over Time.” So, the only innovations that will improve education will be those that produce more learning in less time with less effort on the part of teachers. Have we had any of those recently?

(Score: School 6, Innovation 1)

At Teaching That Makes Sense, we have made some interesting discoveries in this area. For example: (1) We have an approach to teaching early literacy that is 5-8 times more efficient than traditional models especially when it comes to helping children reach the early rungs on the reading latter; (2) Some teachers are 10 to 20 times less efficient than others; but (3) Even highly inefficient teachers can be made significantly more efficient with just a few small changes in what and how they teach. This tells us that increasing educational efficiency is the “sweet spot” for educational change. And that most of our innovations should be targeted in this area.

(I don’t know who wins this round. Educational innovators don’t seem very excited about creating classroom practice innovations, yet these are the only ones that will make a big difference. On the other hand, teachers aren’t nearly as resistant to such innovations as most people think, providing that innovators follow the basic rule set forth above that anything new must be BOTH easier for teachers AND better for kids.)

This is where Sandy Kress’s point comes in. He’s right, of course, that innovation begins with research. But we have to be very careful about research in education because it has historically been so fraught with problems. This is another one of those places where the business metaphor does not apply – and where its inappropriate application has caused serious problems, or at least wasted a ton of time and money.

In this regard, Reading First should always be remembered as the ultimate cautionary tale Bad research, initially generated by reading researchers, then meta-studied by Marilyn Adams (herself not a teacher of reading), and finally by blessed by NIH (any reading teachers there?), lead to the proliferation of an incorrect model of early reading, which then lead the government to spend billions of dollars on something that could never have produced the intended result. I actually believe Reading First worked. RF kids are better word callers than non-RF kids. And this is completely consistent with the scientific model upon which RF was based. Never in education history has more research been conducted, considered, and codified. Reading First was the result of the most significant education research base ever analyzed. And it produced nothing useful in the end except the woeful validation of its own shortcomings.

(Score: Reading First 0, American Public minus $5.4 Billion)

So, there’s a leak in the R&D pipeline – and most of it is coming from the “R”. I believe this originates from a simple problem of perspective: we tend to research things at the wrong level of granularity. For example, with Reading First, we shouldn’t have researched phonics or phonemic awareness or fluency, etc, because these are merely the decontextualized subskills of reading and not reading itself – the level of granularity was too small. Instead, we should have researched reading comprehension – and backed the constituent pieces of the solution out from there. At the other end of the spectrum, we shouldn’t be researching concepts like the high school drop out rate or the Achievement Gap or Charter Schools, we should be researching specific practices that would effect positive change such that the drop out rate is lowered, the Achievement Gap is closed, and high quality school models (charter or otherwise) are quickly codified and easily replicated. Intellectually, this is a simple problem to solve. Culturally, it’s a little harder. But I have faith that another decade or so of research-to-market blunders funded by he federal government will wise us all up to the point where we decide to play right game by the right rules.

For me, this is where Mr. Kress and Ms. Ravitch intersect. Ponder this Reading First counterfactual: Imagine that Regie Routman had done the metastudy research and written “Beginning to Read” instead of Marilyn Jaeger Adams? Why would this matter? Because Ms. Routman has actually taught children to read; Ms. Adams has not. Would a text on reading by someone who had actually taught children to read been a different text? I think so. For one thing, it probably would have drawn the explicit connections we so dearly needed between sound-symbol learning and true reading comprehension. This might have tipped government policy toward comprehension as the end result. And the end of that result might have been a Reading First program that actually helped kids learn to read. Furthermore, the programs created to qualify for Reading First money may have been significantly more innovative in their approaches. Had Reading First been a true success, and actually helped kids learn to read, true innovations may have been developed, and eventually delivered down the line to classrooms all over the country.

(Score: one half point for potential innovation that went awry through no fault of its own but simply via poor selection of people involved in the process.)

So while Mr. Kress is correct that more and better research is required. Ms. Ravitch is also correct that we can no longer tolerate education policies created by people with little or no direct experience of education. Hence, what I will come to call “The Kress-Ravitch Principle of Education Innovation”. The solution here is the creation of a new generation of education researchers and a true renaissance in education research (along with a new set of professional ethics, of course). This renaissance requires three components:

1. Individuals who are both well-trained and thoroughly-experienced in educational practice and experimental design.

2. Studies targeted at proper levels of granularity. Once again, researchers who have actually worked in education will have a much better view on which problems should be studied. In general, the closer people are to actual school experiences like teaching and learning, the more their research tends toward solving real school problems. Sadly, so little research is done these days at this level.

3. The government must stay in the business of evaluating research (IES Gold Standards + What Works Clearninghouse) but must get out of the business of conferring approval on the products and services of for-profit corporations and the setting out of large pots of money (as in Reading First) for organizations that meet certain criteria. This will end the ridiculous and utterly unethical practice of education publishers creating the own conveniently flattering research.

Education itself must decide the winners and the losers in the innovation adoption industry. If good research, properly reviewed by the government, leads to legitimate innovation that makes things easier for teachers and better for kids, schools and districts will take it up – so long as we have good measurement systems and markets of perfect information.

(Score: a potential point for innovation if we apply the “Kress-Ravitch Principle” as a means of catalyzing a renaissance in legitimate education research.)

The market for innovation must be free, open, and above reproach. Currently, it lacks all of these qualities. Mr. Kress is right to insist that innovation begins with research. Ms. Ravitch is right to insist that people with real-world educational experience must be involved in these efforts. And no one wants the government to pick winners in an ed R&D horserace.

So let’s step ahead now to a time in the not-too-distant future where the R&D component has been fixed. New and legitimate innovations have been identified. But how do we roll these innovations out? Or, to use the business metaphor again, how do we optimize the supply chain so innovation leads efficiently and inexorably to student achievement? By identifying the optimal point of influence in the supply chain and creating policies that improve the “value-add” their contribution.

(Score one more potential for innovation. I think we might be onto something.)

At my company, almost every change we’ve successfully directed through a school or district has eventually been undone by specific administrative action or clearly calculated inaction. This is neither corruption nor incompetence, it is simply the cost-benefit analysis at work. For example, if half the teachers in a school or district suddenly become more effective through training, the other half of the teachers tend to become angry, afraid, or both, thinking they may eventually be forced to teach this way, too. In this situation, most administrators will rationalize that it’s much better to knock out the successful new program than it is to deal with 15, 50, or 500 angry activists threatening to make life miserable for years to come.

So what is the optimal point of influence in the education supply chain? Principals. Why? Two reasons:

1. Numbers. We have 50 million kids and 5 million teachers in the US. But only 100,000 principals. This makes reaching a large percentage of them significantly easier by comparison. Aiming for the principal’s office is like the David of reform capping the Goliath of the human capital problem with an amazingly accurate slingshot. Principals are easy to find and easy to influence. After all, they in charge of their schools and most are “at will” employees of the districts they serve.

2. Leverage. Even though 99% of them don’t, virtually all principals possess both the right and might to change the way their teachers teach. Actually, all they have to do is ask in most cases – albeit repeatedly. This means that changing 100 principals could affect the learning lives of ten to fifty thousand kids. Not bad for a day’s work, eh?

If you think my theory daft, naïve, or just overly simplistic, consider this counter-factual: Virtually no reform whatsoever has been targeted at the principalship. And I would argue that this is one of the biggest reasons why reform isn’t moving the way it could. You want innovation to take hold? Get it to principals. And then get them the courage they need to push it down to the classroom level.

(Score: many points for innovation!)

Finally, let’s apply our thinking here directly to the questions put to us:

1. What are the essential components of an effective innovation, research, development, and dissemination infrastructure in education?

For research, apply the “Kress-Ravitch Principle”; for innovation, work at the proper level of granularity, close to the classroom, on ideas that make things easier for teachers and better for kids; for development, conduct extensive prototyping and real-world piloting before pronouncing something ready for prime time; for dissemination infrastructure, focus on the principalship – and on making sure principals develop the social-emotional competencies of leadership that will help them push innovations into the classroom.

2. How can we tap into the collective expertise of practitioners when designing and refining new school programs?

Apply the “Kress-Ravitch Principle” and just start tappin’ away.

3. Finally, what are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole?

As noted above, it is a matter of structure not capabilities. We need a more federalized system of education. Since this will never come about, we must make due with what we have. Couldn’t IES become more than just a research organization? Couldn’t it become the national nexus for innovation? Why couldn’t we “fake” a national system of education innovation by turning IES and the What Works Clearinghouse into a portal for principals? (One that actually works this time.) The best R&D would funnel in; IES would validate it (or not), and then IES could push out information to principals on the latest and the greatest stuff available for their schools. Districts might even be able to track the use of such innovations on a school-by-school basis.

(Score: School ?, Innovation 100!)

I think this would work. And, frankly, I don’t even think it would be hard. It would, however, require something we have yet pull of in American education reform: a willingness on the part of everyone involved to put aside their pet projects and political ideologies, and concentrate on simple problem-solving instead. Study what makes sense. Make good tools for teachers and kids. Use the Principal’s Office as the pipeline. That’s how we roll.

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To me the single most important part of the question posed was the statement, “These disconnects demand a new vision…” I fully admit to being influenced by Peter Senge in my response, so credit his thinking with this reply.

First, it is simplistic to think of education innovation in the same way we think of marketplace innovation. The education sector is part of a large and complex social system. There are many forces at play and from multiple levels. That’s not the case in business. But while this is an important point, it is a sideline issue.

The real issue about why we don’t seem to sustain education innovation is that as a country we have no shared vision for what we want…no mental model. We have not asked, let alone answered the much deeper question, “What is the core purpose of public education in America today?” Until we have a shared vision, we operate out of many visions. For instance, do we want a “world of schools,” even high-performing schools like KIPP, and make that approach our vision, or do we want a “world of learning,” like New Tech, Big Picture and Envision and have that approach define our vision? We have not yet addressed the most basic question: “schooling” or “learning.”

It’s a given that research and data will be important to ultimately support success; however, until we answer the deeper question about the core purpose of public education and establish a vision that aligns our efforts, innovation will never be “organized, prioritized, or leveraged for maximum impact.”

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Over the past few decades, virtually every sector of our society has experienced a revolution in the way it operates and achieves success – except for education. Meanwhile, the graduation rate stagnates at 50% in many of our urban districts, and our students continue to fall behind their peers across the globe.

We can no longer hesitate to try radically new approaches and tools to improve teaching and learning. But as we do so, we must adhere to the exacting standards that characterize research and development teams in medicine or industry. We need to introduce innovative practices strategically, with rigorously designed pilots to evaluate the effectiveness of new programs before they are expanded. This approach will enable us to identify the best strategies to improve student achievement, to determine whether particular interventions yield better outcomes for particular students, and to measure the cost-benefit impact of different strategies. We can then make informed choices about replicating policies and programs that work given diverse student needs and budgetary realities that demand tough choices.

To be successful districts will need access to a rich trove of student data to support careful research and evaluation of new programs. In 2008, New York City introduced the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS), which synthesizes unprecedented levels of student information within a single database. ARIS provides a detailed understanding of each of our students’ performance while supporting rigorous, empirical analyses of innovative programs and existing practices in our schools.

None of this is to say that innovation only takes place at the level of educational policy. It also occurs daily in creative lessons delivered by talented teachers and in schools where principals introduce new programs that build student achievement. We need to focus on improving instruction in every classroom and every school, fostering opportunities for educators to share best practices and engaging lesson plans proven to improve student outcomes. For this reason, ARIS also includes an online library of instructional resources as well as collaboration and social networking tools that allow educators to share ideas with colleagues within their school and across the city.

New York City is proud to be at the forefront of the movement to ensure that educational innovations are conducted with the tough-minded, scientific approach required to truly transform our educational system for the better. And I’m delighted that the U.S. Department of Education is not only working to spur innovative educational practices, but also to identify proven solutions to improve our schools and ensure that every student at last has the opportunity to succeed.

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Improvement of student outcomes in public schools is particularly vexing to many in the Washington, DC policy community who although they mean well have not had the effect on public education they seek. The Washington based policy and research community, including the US Department of Education, has two profound problems that cause them to repeatedly stumble when trying to implement innovations. First they persist in one size fits all innovations even though schools vary greatly in nearly every aspect . Second many innovators have a political and ideological agenda, rather than an educational agenda. The most visible of the political innovators, including at times the U. S. Department of Education, seek to move public education from a public good to a private good.

The implementation of NCLB has definitively demonstrated that one size innovation doesn’t fit all.

Research seeking data to support a political agenda is as old as politics, but has been polished into a high art by the Washington think tanks and foundations and to its discredit every department of education since the formation of the U. S. Department of Education. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if teachers, principals and superintendents whose business is education, see through politicized research and reject the proposed solutions. In fact it is may be a violation of the act creating the department of education for federal employees to try to direct critical processes of public schools, and if it isn’t it should be.

People seeking to foster innovation ought to be able to see both the common threads and the many differences in people, capacity, resources and culture in local public schools around the country. Although Milbrey McLaughlin’s seminal research on change in school districts identified potential pathways for innovation years ago, seeing complexity and commonality simultaneously has eluded folks from Washington.

Fortunately seeing commonality and complexity simultaneously has not eluded everyone studying learning and the organization and facilitation of learning. Similarly excellent research is being done studying policies that will likely result in application of the state of the art knowledge about learning and the organization and facilitation of learning. The work of the policy research group at Arizona State University under scholars like Gene Glass and David Berliner is a good example of good work providing solid guidance to the complex task of applying research to schools where individually unique students and teachers work influenced by their unique communities. This is as complicated as rocket science and curing cancer and ought to be treated with the same rigorous approach as figuring out how to apply research in physics to send rockets into space or and biomedical research to treating a individuals cancer. At 30,000 feet it sounds simple, but once you get to children, who are all one of a kind, it gets much more complicated. Getting innovation right is made more difficult if the research data have been rigged to fit a preconceived political conclusion.

Funders of innovation, scholars and school people need to collaborate, following the tried and true methods of applying scientific knowledge to real life situations like student learning and the organization and facilitation of learning. Sure it’s complicated, expensive and time consuming but the benefit in improved student learning and educational outcomes will more than offset the expense and time invested. The children in public schools deserve no less.

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We need to get some thinking about the purposes of it all--or as Mike Rose's recent book puts it: Why Schooling. If we agreed with the late Ted Sizer--it's to help young people learn to use their minds well--that we have to "align practice to such an end. Horace's Compromise is precisely, as Sizer reminded us 25 years ago, to abandon such a goal for those with the least power and resources to get there on their own. What we now call "achievement" hardly gets us even a quick gimpse into how students use their minds well--as they learn to check boxes. We need forms of assessment that trust educators and the public to make judgemens about students through the work of the students themselves. We must read, hear and see their minds at work. We need schools in which students are exercising good intellectual habits in the presence of adults who do the same--being transparent to students about what it means to think well about important matters. Small class sizes and small schools can assist, but they are only means to an end. Democracy itself was born of the desire to achieve public accountability, and if we, in Jefferson's words, have lost faith in the "discretion" of their families and teachers, the answer does not lie in taking such discretion away from them, but in creating schools that offer an education for all its participants. Schools must be held accountable for being places of learning for adults and children. And if the most advantaged think this take $20,000 per child, than that's what should be spent on the least advantaged--at least; ditto for class size, school facilities, etc. If schools are to serve the purpose of making the vocation of citizenship equally accessible to everyone, then every aspect of school should be aligned to the means and ends of democratic life.

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I think the single most important thing for us to do in this regard would be for everybody to get a new copy of Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and re-read it over the holidays. Get the Reader’s Digest version…it’s quick but you will find it refreshing.

All of our efforts to regulate, certify, and guarantee quality in the education industry will only be successful to the degree we underpin the industry with competition. The basic lack of choice in schooling is a foundational flaw that we must correct.

We can’t go on blithely ignoring this. By continuing to assign students to schools without regard to their specific needs as it relates to a school’s specific strengths, we evince a belief in our own ability to match every child with exactly what they need… without knowing the child or the school.

Come to think of it, get a Hayek two-fer for the holidays…add “The Fatal Conceit” to your reading list.

There is not one best way to learn. There are myriad examples of successful practice, multiplying faster than ever in this technological age. The incredibly rich amount of data we have available on success is a potential wealth to the system. But it does no good to try and efficiently foist it on those who need not seek it.

A single school choice, made by millions of parents on a daily basis, becomes a massively influential feedback mechanism for the larger system, far more powerful than the best public report card.

In a truly competitive education system, the need to know what excellence looks like and how to create it is very real. And today, we lack that essential force everywhere but at the margins.

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I'm delighted that Easton and Shelton have posed this week's question. It's an important one, and the two of them actually will have a lot to do with how it's answered in the field. It's great that they're open to others' opinions, and the way they pose the various parts of the question suggests that they're on the right track to good answers.

The answers, I think, begin with the importance of solid, rigorous research. Continuing to make big spending decisions on innovation and much of everything else without resort to this sort of research is unacceptable. And that's so both for new programs that are proposed with all the excitement of the innovator who proposes them as well as those existing practices that are defended by the forces of the status quo with equal verve. They all must be scrutinized with the basic attitude, "prove it works!"

I would even say, yes, we must talk about scientific research. That does not necessarily entail "gold-level" research, but, as in the IES practice guides, it does mean a reliable level of strong research upon which practitioners can reasonably base decisions.

This research, second, must be conducted primarily in the areas where practitioners are most in need of solutions. That sounds kind of silly to say. One might think it's obvious, but Easton and Shelton are right - there has too often been a disconnect between research and practice. We must respond to the needs of educators and other decisionmakers in the field. Helpfully, we now have rich data from assessments and other sources that make graphically clear what those problems are.

How do we prevent dropouts? How do we achieve higher levels of proficiency in reading? How do we best help students navigate the journey from arithmetic to algebra? How do we best bring English language learners to proficiency, especially in academic English? What is leadership, and how is it best manifested in schools? What makes for truly effective teaching? How do we turn around struggling schools?

We want "innovation" to solve these and other major problems. But - much more - we want effective practice that is tied to research-based solutions. Sometimes we may find that the best "innovation" is a return to practice that had given way to the last "innovation."

If, as I expect they will, our two questioners use their offices and their tools wisely, in coordination with the states and districts and alongside educators, then we may make good strides to their goal, to "ensure that all students can benefit from well-designed and thoroughly tested best practices."

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It is the responsibility of the federal government to fund and disseminate research. It is not the role of the federal government to dictate "solutions" that are not based on research or court orders.

Since at least 1867, when the U.S. Office of Education was established in the federal government, it has been the responsibility of the federal government to gather information and report to the public on the status and progress of education. Since the creation of the National Institute of Education (NIE) in 1972 (and even before then), the federal government has been responsible for funding research and evaluations, and promulgating research findings.

We now seem to be in an era where education decisions are made and imposed by non-educators, who look to the business world for answers. Education and business work under such different principles that this is not a useful model. The endless pursuit of innovation is typical of the business world-who can come up with the newest slogan, the newest packaging, the newest shape, the newest of the new?.

Educators do not need to reinvent the wheel. They need schools that are stable, a curriculum that is coherent and balanced, sufficient resources to do their job, and a host of other uncontestable features that are invariably found in excellent schools. What they do not need is a plethora of programs showered upon them by non-educators who know everything about how to "turn around" a failing school (but have never done it themselves), who know everything about how to teach (but have never done it themselves), and who know everything about school leadership (but have never done it themselves).

Diane Ravitch

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My response is from a limited perspective - that of a person who was involved in developing and deploying, and who tried to help policy makers capitalize upon, a statewide longitudinal education data base which connected to related social services, and importantly, to data about in-school and out-of-school employment.

These types of connected, longitudinal education data systems provide at least one avenue to begin answering the questions.

Florida was one of the first states with a P-20 data capability, for this reason, the system is among the most "mature," including data back into the 1990s. One consequence is that the system has attracted the attention of many researchers seeking access to detailed data housed within. In the 1990s we treated requests for access as requests we would support if we could muster the necessary staff time to provide assistance (so long as requests for access observed several protocols related to privacy protection and responsible handling). With the dawn of the 21st century however, it became increasingly clear that we should treat requests as opportunities to leverage research around state education policy, evaluation, and the identification of successful practices. We instituted agency-wide, (interagency, where appropriate) weekly reviews of requests involving partners from P12, community colleges, universities, and workforce preparation programs. We established criteria for reviewing and prioritzing requests. We regularly informed higher level policy makers of research requests "in the queue." We regularly sought policy-maker direction and decisions. At several junctures, we produced "hit lists" of research topics of priority interest to the Department, the State Board, legislators, and the Governor's office. Often, as a result of our review process, we negotiated with researchers around proposed research so that it focused more on prioirty topics.

The type of research access I am describing was far from perfect. But it was based on the idea that the agency had developed an important administrative data base that provided a substantial foundation that could support policy research and evaluation that the agency was insuffciently staffed to support on its own.

These connected data systems are being constructed throughout the country. A major part of their conception should be researcher-access similar to that I have described. It should not be "willy-nilly" access, rather access that provides results that assist state and local agencies identify, implement, and share important findings that will improve education.

A major problem faced in Florida was a growing queue of requests that worked with sloth-like speed due to antiquated technical approaches to providing restricted access to detailed data. This resulted in the loss of important opportunities to leverage the data. On oaccasion, it resulted in poor relations with researchers and their funders whose requests could not be supported in a timely manner.

These state data systems provide at least one avenue that could be pursued in finding answers to the posed questions. The U.S. Department could provide support and guidance to assist states in managing the "queue" of requests for access as well as identifying national priorities for policy research and evaluation. The Department should also recognize that there are challenges to connecting education data to other important data bases, such as those dealing with employment, and take assertive, appropriate, and in some cases, controversial action to help guide state efforts that make important data connections.

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These are such Big Questions, I feel a bit silly trying to answer them. It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch, "How to Do It" -- "Here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases."

I think we're starting from a faulty premise - that education resources need to be "organized, prioritized or leveraged" into something "cohesive," "collective" and will "fit together into a coherent whole." The problem with this approach is obvious: We don't all agree on priorities, or needs, or desires, or even the definitions of success and failure. It's inevitable that reforms will be championed and funded according to the priorities of the people putting up the money. In the case of the government, those priorities might not even have anything to do with education.

This problem certainly isn't unique to education, but the public school system seems to have fallen into the trap of funding great ideas instead of great results. It's human nature. It explains why your local bookstore has volume after volume about how to lose weight by eliminating carbs, or eating only raw food, and hardly any that say, "Eat sensibly and exercise more often." We all want the magical solution - whether it be parental involvement, merit pay, class size reduction, charter schools, or higher spending - instead of the simple solution that might require hard work and sacrifice.

Instead of developing a Grand Plan, the best way to promote innovation is to stop quashing it. If I suggested the best advice we could give governments and entities with a stake in education is "Don't just do something, stand there," would it be considered an innovative idea because it hadn't been tried before, or would it be rejected out of hand because it denies those organizations an active and direct role in the education process and suggests they are currently doing more harm than good?

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