Educational Leadership

start fresh, taking advantage of the labor force that exists today and new patterns of behavior and new tools of communication and technology to solve problems. But the reality is, up and down school districts and states and the education system, it is very difficult for educators or providers from outside the schools who are trying to solve particular problems to get the resources they need.

So what the federal government could do is address the things that get in the way of these problem solvers. That involves striking away barriers to entry that are both formal, as in law, and informal, as in the way business is done.

You often use the term entrepreneur in the book, but it’s not a word that we hear much in education. How should readers respond to this?

Sometimes folks are thrown by the term entrepreneur. They think it just means for-profits or folks coming from outside the K– 12 world. But an entrepreneur can be anyone who has an idea for how to solve a problem better—and who wants to solve it in a lot of places in order to aid a lot of kids or educators.

What are the formal and informal
barriers that hinder would-be entrepre-
neurs in education?

The formal and informal barriers in play are manifold, depending on the kind of problem one’s trying to solve. One way to think about this is the typology I use in the book: school builders, people who want to build new schools; tool builders, people who want to provide tools that will aid systems or educators or parents; and talent providers, folks who want to recruit or train school leaders or educators.

One obvious formal barrier for talent
providers is state licensure systems. If
somebody retires from the University of
California Berkeley or from the Univer-
sity of Michigan and has a PhD in
physics but isn’t licensed to teach K– 12,
and a local school has trouble filling an
advanced placement physics slot, it can’t
even consider this person as a possible
hire. This is a frustration that bedevils
programs like Teach for America or the
High Tech High Graduate School of
Education in San Diego, which is the
United States’ only school of education
based at a K– 12 high school. These
programs have to spend lots of time and
money and sweat equity finding a way
to either clear the state licensure system
or partner with programs that are
already approved by the state licensure
system.