Learning from failure 

American education is littered with failed reforms. Across the country, we see charter schools that have been shuttered, federal funding streams that have run dry, philanthropic initiatives that never panned out, and brand-new teacher evaluation systems that have already been marked for the junkyard.  

Of course, failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing — when pursuing a goal as urgent and complex as school improvement, some amount of failure will be inevitable. The problem, though, is that policy makers, foundation officials, and pundits have strong incentives to deny that their favored initiatives have gone badly, and they rarely acknowledge and learn from those failures before moving on to the next reform. As a result, they tend to repeat their mistakes and make much less progress than they should. 

Nor have past failings caused education reformers to slow down. The last few years have seen major new philanthropic organizations, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Emerson Collective, enter the fray and make splashy investments in personalized learning, school redesign, and a host of other strategies. Meanwhile, with every new legislative session, a raft of new policies, regulations, and programs emerges from state capitals and trickles through public agencies, local school districts, and eventually into schools. Further, because the Every Student Succeeds Act gives states more policy-making discretion than they have had in years, the pace of experimentation will likely continue to increase.