For decades we've been studying, experimenting with, and wrangling over different approaches to improving public education, and there's still little consensus on what works and what to do. The one thing people seem to agree on is that schools need to be held accountable - we need to know whether what they're doing is actually working. But what does it mean in practice? High-stakes tests. Lots of them. And that has created a crisis in American schools....

Innovation expert Ted Dintersmith took a trip across America, visiting all fifty states in a single school year. He originally set out to raise awareness about the urgent need to reimagine education to prepare students for a world marked by innovation -- but America's teachers one-upped him. All across the country, he met teachers in ordinary settings doing extraordinary things, creating innovative classrooms where children learn deeply and joyously...

What makes a school a "good" school? It's hard to say, and our current methods of measuring school quality are crude and often misleading. Parents who face the problem of where to matriculate their children are often left to surf websites that only offer one or two metrics by which to measure school accomplishment. Or they ask around among neighbors, work colleagues, and so on; the problem, of course, is that nearly everyone thinks the school their...