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Imagine if, when medical students went to medical school, their professors, instead of teaching about organs and chemicals, told them that there is no “right way” to perform medicine. Instead, each student would be taught a form of individualized, un-peer-reviewed research and told that they would be responsible for discovering what methods of treating their patients worked in their own practice.

Would we call that an individualized, patient-centered, data-driven practice? That is exactly what is happening in education.

This is would be an inane proposal for the medical and law fields, and yet we teach this mindset in educator training programs in colleges and universities around the United States.

Here is the reality. There are teaching techniques that work better than others, and those techniques change according to the content. There is some content that is most effectively taught through group exercises, and some that is most effectively taught individually. There are some ideas that necessitate a lecture, some that are best reinforced with a worksheet, and some that require frequent, regular verbal reiteration.

But in education we have no clue what any of those best practices are, because for all our talk about being data-driven, education as a field has entirely failed to canonize what works into a coherent volume of techniques that can be tested, studied, and refined.

The result is a free-for-all in our classrooms. Some teachers research deeply and provide in-depth background, and others don’t. Some create their own worksheets while others rely on notes. Some lecture while others pass out worksheet packets. Some create engaging group lessons while others hardly do anything at all.

I recently started physical therapy for my shoulder. The doctor, by having me go through a battery of motions to test my range of motion, was able to diagnose exactly what muscle was inured and to what degree. Then he prescribed a set of exercises that specifically target my deficiency.

That doesn’t happen in our classrooms. We don’t have deficiencies in literacy categorized. We don’t have tests that can pinpoint those deficiencies. And we don’t train teachers on how to administer specific treatments developed to meet those deficiencies, even though categories of misunderstanding and targeted strategies for intervention obviously exist.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, the education system is supposed to find alignment because we have Common Core Standards. The idea that Common Core can single-handedly unify our painfully disparate patchwork of classroom instruction is misguided. We have to create a more comprehensive and unified body of knowledge within educator training programs. We cannot win the war against ignorance with no organization and only an order to “win every battle” using whatever tactics we individually figure out.

Naysayers to this idea will say that I am advocating a universally scripted curriculum. I am not. I am advocating studying and training teachers, as we do doctors and lawyers, on what has been proven to work, and to have them act on that body of knowledge. We can give teachers options and allow them to augment strategies, but right now, teachers don’t even have a blueprint from which to work.

So the question remains, what would it take to make education a high performing industry with the kind of knowledge, organization, and alignment that the medical or legal fields employ?

In a word, investment.

If we look at investment in monetary terms, we have to consider how much money flows through an industry as a percentage of the whole economy, not just spending. Government spending isn’t even the tip of the iceberg when we start talking about how much money is swirling around the medical field with its private practices, hospitals, medical schools, medical journals, research and development, insurance, and lobbyists.

The same is true of law when you consider how much is invested in private sector lawyers in every sub-field from real estate to international trade to hammer out the most obscure possibilities and interpretations to every single written piece of policy ever created. The body of knowledge and level of expertise within the medical and legal fields would have never evolved absent the industries they inspired.

I’m not saying that money, in and of itself, is the solution. I’m saying that because of the monetary-centered nature of the U.S., money is an indicator of how much psychic energy Americans have invested in something. And if we follow the money, our interest is in law, advertising, sports, the music and movie industries, investment banking, energy, the military, transportation, technology, the medical industry, and social media.

While the federal and state government may spend more dollars than other nations funding education as a form of childcare, those dollars do not equate to the amount we invest innovating and developing education as a science.

The intellectual capital we have invested in the development of a field reflects our priorities, and until we make it a priority to develop education to the same level of refinement as we have other disciplines, we will continue not to live up to our full potential.

Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.