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.

Get Clear on What’s Changing and Why

In schooling, we don’t spend enough time identifying the problem to solve or clarifying what precisely will change—and why. This lack of common understanding can easily stymie improvement efforts. Scott Ellis, founder and CEO of MasteryTrack, points to the importance of a shared understanding of both objectives and the practices required to get there. He argues, for instance, that it’s not enough to just say the words “mastery learning” and expect that everyone knows what it means. Teachers need to understand what mastery is for each objective and that students are either “ready to move on to a new learning objective or they need to keep working on the current one.”

Adam Peshek, a senior director at Stand Together, contends that being clear about the goal of a particular change can enable compromises that are critical to make progress—without losing sight of a longer-term objective. Moreover, he reminds us that the ultimate goal of reform is not a specific policy, but what the policy enables. All too often, advocates for rethinking education get stuck thinking their way is supreme, or they let their allegiance to a particular approach blind them to the need for multiple solutions and iteration over time.

Take Things as They Come

Peshek’s reminder that compromise can be an important tool for progress raises another essential point. Reinventing education is hard work, and it’s folly to try to do everything all at once. Staging change—no matter how you tackle it—is important.

Amplify CEO Larry Berger and Chief Product Officer Alexandra Walsh put a fine point on just how much inertia exists in schooling. One of the underappreciated challenges of education reform is that dreaming up new curricula or school models is stimulating and relatively easy, whereas putting visions into practice is another story. The dreamers tend to underestimate the barriers to entry and real change. Berger and Walsh point out that education has many stakeholders and that decisions are often made by committees. All these stakeholders have a say, which raises the cost of change.

Berger and Walsh explain what it takes to sell programs to curriculum committees: “If half the room intensely loves your core curriculum program and half the room intensely hates it, committee dynamics will likely cause you to lose to the program that everyone tepidly tolerates. As soon as you think of your audience as a committee, there is pressure to write more defensively—with an eye toward the impossible goal of pleasing everyone.” The work of change is hard, expensive, and exhausting.

As a result, it’s important to focus on what you can control. One of the things our new book makes clear is how much improvement is possible under today’s conditions. Rick has written about this at length in his Cage-Busting Teacher and Cage-Busting Leadership books. While we shouldn’t ignore problematic laws or policies, we should devote more energy to tackling challenges that can already be addressed within existing structures. Amid all the hand-wringing about staffing shortages and teacher pay, for example, Brent Maddin, who serves as the executive director of the Next Education Workforce at Arizona State University, makes clear that there are better ways to hire, support, utilize, and pay teachers even absent new laws or funding streams. For instance, his venture has developed a team-based model that provides new teachers with more support, accomplished teachers with more opportunities to take full advantage of their skills, and school leaders with new flexibility when it comes to addressing teacher shortages.

This type of rethinking requires a commitment to taking advantage of existing levers rather than imagining how much better things could be in a perfect world. Waiting for things outside of your control to change ultimately leads to excuse making, not reinvention.

Embrace the Human Dimension

Schooling is an irreducibly human endeavor. For instance, when deploying AI as a tool, it’s crucial to ensure that the human dimension of the work is front and center. A team from Khan Academy—founder Sal Khan, chief learning officer Kristen DiCerbo, and chief of staff Rachel Boroditsky—offer a terrific illustration of what this looks like for AI tutoring. “To really act like a human tutor, interactions with a generative AI tutor should create a sense of familiarity, as if the tutor understands the student,” they note. For a student who is passionate about soccer and is learning about probabilities, an AI tutor “provides extra support for solving the problem” and “seamlessly tailors the problem to revolve around the likelihood of your favorite team winning the World Cup.” Sure, that’s “innovative” in the sense that it’s a new and noteworthy technology, but its success is predicated on a focus on individualized teaching and learning. In other words, AI is getting us back to basics.

Similarly, the teaching profession itself is ripe for rethinking—requiring a focus on the human beings at the center of teaching and learning. Over the past half century, efforts to improve teaching have typically taken the teacher’s role as a given and then adopted a “more, better” response: giving teachers more training, paying them more, or hiring more of them. Many of the contributors to our volume imply the need for a more fundamental rethinking of what teachers do and how they do it. Nowhere is this clearer than in Brent Maddin’s chapter, where he explores the Next Education Workforce model. In making his case, , Maddin focuses on much more than achievement scores. He notes that teachers in team-based staffing models report “significant[ly] higher levels of self-efficacy and better relationships with students.” His chapter reveals that the team-based model makes teachers “more likely to recommend teaching to a friend or family member” and “more likely to be retained as teachers in the district in the following year.” Maddin also notes that educators in these programs take fewer days off and have higher evaluation scores than their one-teacher, one-classroom counterparts.

This all makes intuitive sense, as the limitations of the traditional model are all too familiar. And Maddin’s description of how teachers can operate under team-based approaches can seem frighteningly commonsensical:

Ms. Adams is a third-grade teacher with fifteen years of experience. She is a great reading teacher but has admitted on occasion that she “isn’t really a math person.” She is a collaborator and a natural leader who is looking to earn a bit more money and have a greater impact, but she doesn’t really want to be an administrator. . . . Mr. Harris is a math person. In fact, for the last ten years he worked as an electrical engineer, but he recently moved to a new community and struggled to find work. . . . He is interested in teaching high school math, but he is uncertified and has commitments to the community college on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He admits he is a bit worried about classroom management with high schoolers.

Finding a model that accommodates both Ms. Adams and Mr. Harris while taking advantage of their complementary strengths seems like the most obvious solution in the world. For readers who wonder why such an approach is even classified as a reform rather than an overdue adjustment, we’re right there with you. The bottom line, though, is that being a successful advocate for change does not require shouting about your work and marching forward. It requires helping human beings make progress together.

Turn to Policy Only When There’s No Other Way

There are times when policy looms as an insurmountable obstacle. But that’s not necessarily the place to start. And policy is the culprit less often than the policy community imagines.

There’s a tendency to approach education reinvention as a crusade, pitting would-be reformers against the entrenched education interests.

When advocates begin with the presumption of conflict and indulge in rhetoric to that effect, the heat of battle can inject an unhelpful adrenaline rush into the conversation. All too often, we think in talking points and solutions—and then try to work it out from there.

A useful corrective is to start by focusing on the problems we need to solve. Some simple questions can help supply the requisite focus. Are the rethinkers learning the right lessons as they stumble? Are they adapting to changing technologies? And can we objectively assess our ideas based on how they will impact students, teachers, and parents?

At the end of the day, reinvention is the work of solving problems, not dreaming up cool-sounding ideas or marketable catchphrases. Rolling up one’s sleeves and digging in may not have the same cachet as a dynamic TEDx talk. But it’s the doing, not the talking, that matters.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next. Michael Horn is co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and an executive editor at Education Next. Juliet Squire is a senior partner in the Policy and Evaluation practice area at Bellwether.