I’m reading Frederick M. Hess’s new book, Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling, in which he calls for liberating school systems from the encrusted rules, contracts, statutes, antiquated technology, and recalcitrant cultures that impede creative education providers from implementing new strategies.

Hess writes, for example, of a group called Citizen Schools that aims to increase instructional time (mostly after school or joining with schools to offer a longer school day) and quality (by recruiting professionals, such as engineers or chemists, to offer courses). The success of this program depends on eliminating contractual and statutory impediments.

Greenfield is a term usually employed by investors or builders to designate a wide-open terrain amenable to entrepreneurial, effective new approaches. Hess’s point is to supplant what he calls the currrent “bureaucratic, rule-driven systems” rooted in outmoded factory management by “a world that helps these people succeed.”

Hess is clearly right that a greenfield culture — which would, for instance, allow unlimited charter schools and permit alternative teacher accreditation — would foster competition and make room for successful schooling to take root.

But, as Hess asks, just “how fearsome are the political and institutional barriers” to the seeding of greenfield? Fearsome indeed, methinks.