Why Schools Do Not Innovate

This post is in response to Scott Swindells' post of "Where's the Innovation?".

A recent blog post by Seth Godin really resonated with me as to a school district's reluctance to innovate.  He writes:

It's impossible to have a coin with only one side. You can't have heads without tails.

Innovation is like that. Initiative is like that. Art is like that.

You can't have success unless you're prepared to have failure.

As soon as you say, "failure is not an option," you've just said, "innovation is not an option."

This is precisely why most schools systems are institutes of non-innovation. Innovation within a school system(okay, within all systems) frequently involves money.  A district doesn't want any money they spend to result in a failure, since taxpayers demand a constant "positive return on investment" (that phrase mixed with education makes me cringe, so I'll only use it once).  Nobody wants to anger our taxpayers by spending money on something that fails.  

This is the failure is not an option approach.