Posts by Guest Author

Leadership

Forming an Entrepreneurial Mindset in K-12 Students

By: Ryan S. Olson. Perhaps the most important question of our time is, Are we forming young people who will thrive in these times? Parents must address this. So must educators, who significantly form children. But educators fail students if they foster only technical skills and textbook knowledge

Ed Policy

Why Public Schools Struggle to Innovate

By, Michael B. Horn. It’s not because they are public per se. Private schools struggle with certain kinds of innovation, too. Embracing new forms of blended learning or offering a lower-priced education have been difficult for independent schools, for example.

Personalized Learning

The Bond Between Charter Schools and Digital Learning

The bond between charter schools and digital learning is one of the great stories in American education reform. The partnership of these two powerful forces has already benefited countless numbers of students, parents, teachers, and the entire U.S. education system. And it’s only getting started.

Ed Policy

Cage-Busting for Smart Cities

Creating a great education system isn’t just a matter of practice, because rules, regulations, contracts, and cultures can stymie even the most committed educator. But it can’t just be a matter of policy, because what really matters is what educators do in schools—and policies can make people do things but they can’t make them do them well (see school turnarounds, teacher evaluation, et al.).

Leadership

Moving Towards Next Generation Learning

We are, let’s face it, a Tower of Babel when it comes to defining what we’re all doing here. That sounds disparaging, but I don’t actually mean it that way. Re-imagining the desired outcomes and the common student experience of America’s public schools is a messy, chaotic business – and that’s what real change looks like.

Personalized Learning

The Path to Systemic Innovation

The era of standards-based reform has brought significant progress to America over the last 25 years. Especially in states that pursued it with consistency - Massachusetts, Maryland and Texas, for example - the results are clear. The Common Core and its associated assessments might be seen as the culmination of that phase of US educational development.