What will be the ‘shipping container’ of Edu2.0?
Forty years ago the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted a standard size container and it revolutionized shipping—investment in common infrastructure went up and the cost of goods shipped went down. Wal-Mart and globalization happened. We need a digital content standard to launch the second…
What if Charles Murray is right?
Murray has made a career of the contrary. He just loves to piss people off and that can make it easy to miss or ignore important truth in his suppositions. AEI reviewed his newest book, Real Education, and outlined his four points: Ability varies…
Preparation is the new equity issue
The terminal indicator of the American achievement gap is the graduation gap and its cousin the college gap. African American and Hispanic students are twice as likely to drop out of high school than white students and less than half as likely to earn a college degree.
Progress with Partnership for 21st Century Skills?
The National Journal asked whether after a decade and lots of supporters the Partnership for 21st Century Skills had succeeded. As a number of C21 critics have pointed out, good schools have long taught critical thinking and enough content to think about. What’s missing from this thread is the…
2 speeches
The text of President Obama ‘controversial’ speech is out. It’s full of old fashion values. He’ll suggests that students should fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put…
Education Needs to be Turned on Its Head
A Leo Babauta post (via Milton Ramirez tweet) recites the failings of the age cohort-batch process-compliance rewarding system knows worldwide. The system fails to prepare about two-thirds of American kids–all but the compliant and well supported. And, as Leo points out, while we talk about innovation and creativity, we still have…
UK opens 200th sponsored academy
One of Tony Blair’s reforms that I’m fond of is the Academy program–the equivalent of a sponsored charter school in the US. The BBC reports that the 200th opened with 67 more to come this year. They’re dropping a feature that I liked–the requirement to invest at least 2 million…
Rock-Solid Hunches
I received a mailer from a research firm suggesting that innovation must be based on “rock-solid evidence.” They were obviously offering to conduct this research and were quoting Jim Shelton in a recent webcast where he was discussing i3 grant criteria. Jim was speaking specifically about grant requirements…
The role of the private sector in edu
The WSJ reported that “The US government doled out $502 million for a dozen wind and solar energy projects.” The big winner was Iberdrola, a Spanish wind giant. Coming in second was Horizon, a subsidiary of a Portuguese firm. Third place went to a UK owned firm.
Athletes making a difference
I miss basketball season. Remember all those touching NBA Cares commercials where a 20 year old millionaire showed up at school and they made a commercial out of it? Fortunately there are dozens of current and former athletes that are making a real difference in their communities.