You Can’t Reform a System From Inside It

2026-03-08

Here’s a number that should make you angry: over $100 million. That’s what American Jewish institutions have spent trying to teach their children Hebrew over the past century. The result? Cole Aronson, writing in Mosaic, estimates that roughly 3% of day school graduates can hold a Hebrew conversation. After twelve years of schooling.

The instinct is to fix it. Hire better teachers. Update the curriculum. Add more hours. But here’s what I’ve learned from twenty-five years of building technology companies: you can’t reform a system from inside it. Not when the system’s incentives are designed to protect itself.

Uber didn’t fix the taxi commission. Netflix didn’t improve Blockbuster’s late fees. SpaceX didn’t reform NASA’s procurement process. They built something better, and the old way became obviously inferior. Customers — or in this case, parents — voted with their feet.

Jewish day schools are a regulated industry in all but name. Tuition has climbed to $40,000–$75,000 a year. The educational model hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades. And the results — by the community’s own admission — are embarrassing. The schools aren’t bad because the people are bad. They’re bad because the structure is bad. You can’t get 10x better outcomes by making 10% improvements to a broken model.

Meanwhile, Siegfried Engelmann proved fifty years ago that Direct Instruction — structured, scripted, mastery-verified at every step — produced the best outcomes in the largest educational experiment in American history. The education establishment ignored him. They preferred their own methods, their own autonomy, their own way of doing things. The evidence didn’t matter because the system wasn’t optimizing for evidence. It was optimizing for itself.

So what do you do? You stop trying to fix the old thing. You build the new thing. You make it so good, so affordable, and so obviously better that switching becomes inevitable.

That’s what I’m doing. Next in this series: I found the freight train.

If you’ve ever tried to reform an institution from the inside and hit the wall, I’d love to hear what happened. Email me.