The rise of education entrepreneurship is one of the most promising developments in education in the past 25 years. But education policy should be reformed to allow for even more entrepreneurship, or the gains of the last quarter-century could be at risk. This much was made clear Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, which hosted a research conference on the state of entrepreneurship in K-12 education.

“So much of what’s exciting in education today is the work of entrepreneurs,” Rick Hess, an education scholar at AEI, said Tuesday. “We forget that some of the stuff we take for granted was brand new less than 25 years ago.” Hess, who was a high school teacher at the time, said that in 1990 there were no public charter schools, no iPhones or iPads for the classroom, and computers for the classroom cost $3,000 each.