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If you want to insult people, really cut them down, call them "incrementalists." For those of you who aren't education wonks, an "incrementalist" is someone who is happy to take baby steps towards school reform. It's someone who doesn't lose much sleep over the thousands upon thousands of kids who, in the meantime, are dropping out of school or graduating without the skills they need. Often, the label gets applied to people who are skeptical about charter schools or merit pay.

But even the boldest reformers can sound like "incrementalists" when they see the early results of their reforms. They often find themselves pleading for more time and understanding. That's not an entirely bad thing--as long as we never lose the urgency of our mission to improve schools.

Take, for example, the case of Chicago Public Schools. The Chicago Tribune just ran a piece laying out the tepid results of CPS's "Renaissance 2010" reform plan. The Trib article is important, because Ren2010 has been touted as a model for bold national reforms: Open to doors to more charter schools, rebuild struggling schools from scratch, and close failing schools altogether. Defending reforms in the city and the nation as a whole, a spokesman hits some familiar notes. "Renaissance 2010 and Race to the Top both reflect a willingness to be bold," he says, "hold yourself to higher standards and push for dramatic change, not incremental change."

But if CPS is willing to be bold about the means of reform, it seems quite incrementalist about the ends. Like so many before them, they're begging for patience. "[CPS head Ron] Huberman cautions against tossing out the entire strategy, a reflex typical in education reform." They're eager to track their early progress using measures other than test scores. "They say attendance rates, parent satisfaction and student engagement are higher. And they point out that expecting significant gains from startup schools is unrealistic."  Now it's the executioners who are asking for a stay of execution.

And they're right. It would do precious little good to shut things down and lurch towards the next set of reforms. CPS has to build on early signs of success. It has to find what's working and spread it to new places. It has to define increments of progress that are both ambitious and reasonable.

This is not to argue that we should brush off reformers' impatience for real change. The Trib is picking on Ren2010, because Ren2010 has reached its own expiration date. Goals 2000 got a similar reaction ten years ago. (Let's hope Delaware's Vision 2015 fares better.) You can't blame people for wanting big, visible changes to how we do things. It is this desire that prompts many policy makers to see mass firings as step one in any school turnaround process. It's far too easy to pay lip service to change without really doing anything different.

But we take a big risk when we make fetishes out of a small number of dramatic reform strategies. We're on even thinner ice when we raise hopes for their overnight success. I fear that the media have made reforms like charter schools into silver bullets, even if many charter advocates are more circumspect.

Oddly enough, the Trib article offers a case in point. It points to charter schools run by The Academy for Urban School Leadership as "bright spots" in among CPS's Ren2010 schools. Fair enough, but the Trib makes no mention of traditional public schools that have made similar gains . For example, most of the ten struggling schools working with the Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) have made impressive gains in the past few years. Two participating elementary schools apparently made the largest gains of 473 elementary schools in the system. And they did so without firing staff or teachers.  The story may lack front-page drama, but the results should pique our interest.

At the end of the day, it's not the "boldness" of the reform that I care about. It's the effectiveness of what goes on in and around those schools, charter or traditional, that succeed. Those schools make big changes: They change their curriculum, change how they support their teachers, change how they reach out to families, change how they engage communities, change how they use data, change how their staff work together, change how much time their students spend on the task of learning.... And the list goes on. These are in fact bold changes, but they make newspaper editors' eyes glaze over.

So several things do keep me up at night:

• Will the media's thirst for drama will actually distract people from the real changes that should be going on in schools?
• If dramatic changes don't lead to dramatic results overnight, will the public lose patience with reform?
• How will we know that schools will actually make the changes they need to make, regardless of who governs them?
• How do we keep a healthy dose of incrementalism without abandoning ambitious goals for schools and children?

(For other takes on the Tribune article, see Joanne Jacobs and Mike Klonsky.)