The primary obstacle to faster progress in U.S. education reform is hard to put your finger on, because it's an absence, not a presence. It is not an interest group or a manifest social problem. It is the infrastructure we never built for identifying what works. It is the organizational framework we've not yet constructed for building consensus among education leaders across the country to identify what's working. In this report, the author asks readers to consider the following argument: (1) In education as in medicine, most new ideas will fail; (2) even visionaries need evidence to galvanize others; (3) grass-roots, small scale trial and error will never discern the effect sizes we should be expecting; and (4) federally-funded studies are great for informing federal policy decisions, but we need more investments in evidence by state and local decision-makers.