Education policy is prone to extremes. Cozy bipartisan cooperation brought big, messy compromises like the Bush-era “No Child Left Behind.” Then, an oppositional fervor stoked by Tea Party-flavored federalism attacked the Common Core, and now bitter battles with big labor consume the school choice movement. Even education reformers who’ve been around long enough to witness cycles of sweeping top-down reforms fail to weigh in the lessons of the last go-round. Can adults do what we so often ask children to and actually learn from our missteps?

Rick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute, seems to believe so. His new book, Letters to a Young Education Reformer, (and his entire career, for that matter) is premised on the belief that incremental reforms, carried out thoughtfully and deliberately, have the power to transform schooling. He differentiates between an ambitious and abstract “big-R reform” (like No Child Left Behind) and a focused and intentional small-R reform, favoring the latter—drawing valuable lessons from a quarter century’s experience. While an obsession with saving the world steers the big-R mindset, a small-R reformer will be humbled by history. “By ignoring centuries (or even millennia) of backstory, reformers are continually surprised by ineradicable tensions that aren’t surprising at all,” he writes. (The nothing-new-under-the-sun theme builds on an ed policy book also by Rick Hess: The Same Thing Over and Over.)