Big Ideas and Reform Fatigue

Working With Educators to Redesign Learning

By Lisa Petrides

Since Horace Mann introduced the common school in the early 19th century, the United States has been no stranger to big ideas in education. In the last century, the introduction of the GI Bill and the creation of community colleges expanded access to higher education and helped fuel a century of economic growth and prosperity. And in recent years, too, big ideas have swept the field, from the development of standards-based reform and the expansion of charter schools to dozens of other improvement strategies that have captured the imagination of their funders, but been met largely with shrugs and mistrust from educators.

Reform fatigue is so prevalent that if we could create a utopian school system tomorrow, many educators would be likely to greet it with more skepticism. They have been subjected to so much policy churn, and seen so many fads enter and exit the system without impact, they would rightly say, “This too shall pass.”

How can educators come to embrace new—and potentially transformational—ideas? One way is to invite them to help create solutions based on their own experiences. Another is to bring them into contact with other educational innovators from the United States and abroad, and with change-makers and big thinkers from creative and high-tech fields, to engage in a process of identifying, designing, prototyping, and scaling up new concepts for...