It is difficult to imagine doing things differently in schooling, perhaps because we are so used to the factory model or perhaps because there is no one clear alternative. This is unimaginative. Instead the future will require a new way of thinking: more decentralized, more professional roles for teachers, more innovation.

The future will require new and fundamentally different models. The task for reform efforts is not to find the magical new technology, nor to find the one new model that will be the future—but to put in place the conditions that make it most likely technologies will be taken up and applied to improve learning and contain costs by remaking schooling.

At the system level this will require continuing to open public schooling to innovators and establishing and safeguarding autonomy for schools that seek to be different.

At the school level this will require new forms of management that increasingly place teachers in positions of authority, empowering the ‘users’ of public education to drive innovation.

Follow examples of improved productivity from across the country on E|E’s blog, Education Innovating.