Rewarding terrific teachers should include rewarding them if they're willing to take on additional students and serve the students well, which will benefit the students while boosting productivity.

Frederick M. Hess introduces the concept of "greenfield schooling" and its potential to free-up schools to be more responsive to communities and kids.

Is greenfield schooling the breakthrough needed to reform our education system?

In his new Education Week blog, 'Rick Hess Straight Up,' Frederick M. Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, will tackle a variety of pressing topics relating to K-12 education policy and politics, data and research, and the challenges to school reform.

Greenfield school reform could encourage innovation in education and drive sustainable reform.

With top-down reform in bulky school bureaucracies failing, education reformers should focus on creating fertile environments for entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions.

The challenge of "greenfield schooling" is to cultivate environments that invite entrepreneurial ideas and to provide an infrastructure that allows those ideas to succeed on a wide scale.