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.