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Lately, I'm seeing reforms celebrated more for their "boldness" than for the likelihood that they'll work. This impatience could do much more harm than good in the end.

Take, for example, recent reactions to the Race to the Top winners. The winning states (Tennessee and Delaware) turned in good proposals, some bloggers argue, but they weren't as bold as, say, Florida or Rhode Island. The reviewers placed far too much stock in consensus and buy-in from teachers and other groups that will have to put the reforms in place, we're told. Instead, Arne Duncan could have tipped the scales in favor of big, swift changes.

But isn't buy-in from teachers and other stakeholders important if we want reforms to work? And are we really so confident that the bold reforms spelled out in Race to the Top will work? Let's not forget that the evidence for reforms like merit pay or school reconstitution is meager at best. Is it wise to rush at a handful of reforms whose success is anything but assured? A brief ideological victory for some might well become our Waterloo in the end.

If you want bold changes, look no further than Florida. A bill racing through the Florida legislature would base teachers' evaluation and pay mostly on test scores and forbid school systems from taking experience or advanced degrees into account when setting teachers' pay. Revolutionary? Oh, yes. Good Policy? Not really.

Last fall, the National Research Council warned that large-scale merit pay programs just aren't ready for prime time, because they:

(1) ...have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals and (2) ..face substantial practical barriers to being successfully deployed in an operational personnel system that is fair, reliable, and valid.

And if you're not convinced by leading researchers, consider the issue from teachers' point of view. Many feel like guinea pigs in a grand experiment that has dim prospects for success. They see their fates--and those of their students--tied to a set of tests they don't trust. And new teachers worry that their salaries may fluctuate with test scores and stagnate over the long run. The last thing we need is bold reforms that drive people out of teaching.

It's always a bit risky to raise questions about "bold" reforms. It's easy to seem complacent, insensitive to the grave inequities in our school system. But we really do have to balance a keen sense of urgency against the need to be deliberate and thoughtful about what we do.

Tony Bryk offers a useful caution in the most recent Phi Delta Kappan:

A belief in the power of schooling and in our ability to improve this institution must also coexist with a modicum of doubt — a critical perspective — about the wisdom of any particular reform effort. Virtually every initiative involves at least some zone of wishful thinking, and even good designs typically require executing a strategy for which there is no established game plan.

As one of the nation's leading ed researchers, Bryk knows whereof he speaks. The recent book he co-authored with colleagues in Chicago found that successful schools tackled reforms in five key areas: "school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, student-centered learning climate, and instructional guidance." None of these things seems particularly "bold." We've known about each for a long time.

But the book's authors draw the bold conclusion that we need to pursue all these areas at once to improve schools. Take just one of these items out of the mix, and see your results plummet. It's no accident that collaboration--among school staff; between schools and communities--is a central theme of the book.

That's a lesson the Race to the Top reviewers seem to have taken to heart. Is that such a bad thing?