Frederick M. Hess sat down recently with Education Daily to discuss the state of education reform efforts. The following are edited excerpts.

Resident Scholar Frederick M. Hess

Q: Whenever people talk about reform, they talk about fixing something that is broken. What's broken in education that needs reforming?

A: Schools do reasonably well with what they have been able to do. There is stuff that once made sense, such as the way we hire and pay teachers. We used to have our pick of the litter--women and African Americans who were college-educated and had few career choices.

Since the 1970s, that is not the world that we live in. People who were once really good teachers are now doctors and lawyers, and people change professions frequently.

We still use a talent model where we are fishing in a pond that's getting smaller and smaller. We need to reform it so we are fishing in a different pond, and we need to use different bait.

Q: What you are asking the country to do is something it has never done.

A: I find it unlikely that the country can or will do it. The way we usually have change is not that we all wake up and say, "OK, we're used to this, but we are going to throw it out anyway." People stay with things until much better options are clearly available somewhere else.

In liberally run schooling, the reality is that it is very hard for those alternatives to emerge.

We have got to create the opportunities for change to emerge so people can see there may be more attractive options. Then we need to provide the kinds of supports and infrastructure and talent to make them effective.

Q: Before the stock market declined, educators talked about how the federal government is going to fully reinvest in NCLB. Now, many say the new education secretary might want to have a conversation with Bill Gates or someone else in the private sector with deep pockets. Who is going to pay for the reform?

A: It's entirely unclear that we need more money to make any of this happen. You read about budget cuts, and you hear superintendents bemoaning that they have to shave 3 percent or 4 percent of their budgets. They are not actually shaving from last year's budget; they are shaving off the projected budget.

We've got enormous amounts of money tied up in personnel, benefits and facilities, and we are very heavy-footed when it comes to trying to pivot.

That notion of reform is, "We can only do it with new dollars." It's what we are watching the automakers go through right now. They are telling us how they have retooled and reengineered and renegotiated. The reality is that what they think of as wrenching change is, to an outside observer, pretty minimal. That's the analogy for schooling.

Q: You said superintendents don't know how much power they have to enact reforms and that some of the change they seek may already be at their fingertips.

A: John Deasy was a great example of this when he was at Prince George's County (Md.) Public Schools. People there wanted to do merit pay forever, and when Deasy came in, Maryland was a strong union state, but he said, "We pay teachers extra money for doing curricular design in the summer. Why can't we pay them more if they are at schools where kids are not doing better and the teachers volunteer to participate?" So he did.

He didn't need a memorandum of understanding, didn't go to arbitration, didn't go to mediation--he just did it. This is a grown-up endeavor, and we have to expect people to make hard decisions.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI.