fewest private resources to use in pursuing education, those who are most resistant to the “liberating” effect of education, and so on. It is also likely that the system will focus more on relatively small operational innovations that can be easily mounted, and quickly and straightforwardly evaluated, and less on the institutional innovations that could create more innovators on one hand, and more innovative organizations and systems on the other. These biases may slow the rate of innovation and learning below what might be needed to move the performance of the system forward on all dimensions of performance including but not limited to individual learning and development. This suggests that some special efforts might be needed from the “center” or “off on the side” (anywhere but in the middle of the existing system) to authorize, financially support, and evaluate those innovations that might be important to achieving both individual and system level goals. A useful analogy might be to the tri-sector health system which does an excellent job in developing innovations in medical treatment for the most common diseases, but struggles when it faces serious problems experienced only by some, or only by those who do not constitute a large market for drugs and medical treatments of acute conditions. That system also struggles when it is forced to pay attention to inequalities in access to preventive and curative medical services. To ensure an adequately broad and deep array of experiments be undertaken, it is important to begin with a clear eyed view of the overall performance of the system (see principle 1 above). That perspective should include an accurate and relatively complete picture of what innovations are now being tried, and exactly where they are testing the existing system in terms of improved social performance. But it should also attention to the problems that have been set aside because they are “too hard,” or those big and small glimmers of ideas which have not yet been developed. In short, it is important to understand what exactly is in the “risk portfolio” for experimentation, as well as what is currently being done, and to ensure that we have been neither too reckless nor too conservative in our search for solutions. The role of developing and managing the education risk portfolio is currently played more by educational research centers and philanthropic foundations than by commercially motivated investment funds. But one has to worry about the degree to which any of these sources of strategic judgment, financing, and evaluation of educational innovations possesses the appropriate analytic frameworks and capacity to find or develop the innovations that would have important systemic effects. This calculation is particularly hard when one recognizes that the “important systemic effects” could come from many different sources such as: 1) the widespread diffusion of small but important operational innovations; 2) the development of larger institutional innovations that could increase the number and location of innovators in the system; 3) the innovativeness of the systems themselves; and 4) the evaluation criteria and methods that could stimulate and discipline the learning of the system as well as the current performance. This last point – the importance of innovations in how the system as a whole can distinguish important innovations from less important ones is taken up immediately below. Principle 5: Organizing the Demand Side of the Educational System to Distinguish Valuable Innovations from the Fads, and to Scale the Valuable Efforts at the Expense of the Less Valuable The value of the innovation portfolio for the educational system ultimately depends not only on the number and quality of innovations being developed, but also on the discriminating processes that allow the system as a whole to recognize the good innovations from the bad, and diffuse and scale the good innovations to replace their less successful forerunners.