Rebecca E. Wolfe, PhD joins School Reboot to discuss why bottom-up innovations in education rarely spread, even when they demonstrate strong outcomes. Drawing on a paper she just released for the Hoover Institution entitled Can’t Get There From Here: A Framework for the Start, Spread, and Scale of Bottom-Up Innovation in Education, she outlines a framework for catalyzing classroom-born ideas, supporting adaptive spread, and building the infrastructure necessary for sustainability and scale. The episode examines the shift from compliance-based accountability to outcomes-based and reciprocal accountability, the importance of expanding educators’ professional networks, and the need to reduce burdens that crowd out innovation. The central message: if we want school improvement that endures, we must design systems that cultivate teacher agency, continuous improvement, and local adaptation while maintaining strong guardrails for equity and student outcomes.