American education is a vast junkyard of curricular innovations that in their own heydays were promoted as panaceas for much that ails the schools and society. It's not that good ideas and usable methods were lacking there. It's that they live in a culture where people expect too much, in too short a time, for too little an investment in resources. How might educators go about assessing what is promoted as a best practice, even if they do not personally possess the expertise to finely evaluate the techniques or technologies involved? Looking back over the junkyard of educational innovation--and considering the countless wasted hopes it represents--it is clearly foolish to trust someone merely on his claim to be an expert. What recourse have they, if they lack specific knowledge to evaluate a proposed practice? This article discusses some common-sense measures they can take. For instance, they can evaluate a proposed intervention or practice by looking for certain positive characteristics and being on the watch for certain warning signs. (Contains 11 notes.)