Reinventing American education may sometimes look like an intellectual exercise, but it’s ultimately a practical one.
Would-be reformers are bursting with visions for the future of teaching and learning. Some of their ideas reinvigorate old methods of instruction, such as classical education; others seek to unlock new technologies or devise novel learning environments. The three of us have each written about what ambitious reinventions could look like. But all this vision amounts to little absent an ability to translate the ideas into practice.
Of course, that is where so many generations of well-meaning education reformers have fallen short. That’s why we prefer to eschew aspirational exhortation and instead ask concrete, practical questions.
What’s it take for schooling to use time, talent, and technology in more powerful ways? For the student experience to be more personal, rigorous, and engaging? For assessment to measure competencies and knowledge rather than simply to batch-process students? For curricula that build mastery rather than fill a set number of instructional days? For practitioners to have the room and ability to refine new approaches?
The answers to such questions are not uniform. And the unfortunate reality is that those who have the most insight into these puzzles tend to be far removed from the realms of analysis and policymaking. Why?
Because they’re busy doing this work.
Meanwhile, analysts, academics, and advocates tend to focus on the conceptual rather than the concrete. They emphasize analogies and intriguing examples rather than the day-to-day hassles of, say, negotiating with teachers unions or pitching products to curriculum committees. This has predictable consequences. It means that those writing and speaking about education improvement often pay more attention to policy than to the messy realities of practice.
To help address that imbalance, we’ve just published a volume that spotlights those who’ve been busy doing the practical work. Our aim was for them to share real takeaways, challenges, opportunities, and lessons they’ve learned, giving us a clearer sense of what reinvention really looks like from the inside. It’s worth highlighting five insights that have emerged from that effort. We’ll address each in turn.
