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component:when.leading-change
Charter heroes at Charter School Growth Fund
Charter heroes Mike Feinberg, Chris Barbic, and Ref Rodriguez participated on a Kevin Hall moderated kick off panel at a Charter School Growth Fund meeting in Denver. On the subject of growth: MF: Growth is a function of people quality not powerpoint quality CB:…
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…
Unleashing Knowledge and Innovation
There is little R&D in education—not enough public or private investment, limited research into the great challenges of our time, and limited innovation in a sector bound by local, state, and federal regulation. Larry Stupski wants to change this. His foundation is sponsoring a conference—Unleashing Knowledge and…
5 big questions in American education
I led a Q&A session this morning in NOLA around the big questions in American education. Here’s a summary: 1. Are national standards a good idea? They are the best way to end the race-to-the-bottom and speed development of next gen content and assessment. However, we run…
Schools that foster innovation
In my first month as superintendent, Tacoma superintendent Rudy Crew told me to send my leadership team to Harvard to visit Tony Wagner. They came back and said, “there’s this guy who sounds like you, but we understand him.” For 15 years Tony has been a mentor and…
Parent engagement as innovation?
Advance Innovative Education, a Baton Rouge based human capital group, hosted an innovation panel discussion today as part of their alternative principal certification program. I came prepared to dive into adaptive content and the principal candidates wanted to talk about parents. Nearly all of the candidates work in…
Dropouts: Attitudes and Antidotes
I have to admit that I didn’t fully appreciate the dropout crisis while a serving as a public school superintendent. While budgeting for my third year, I recall asking why there were fewer students in each class from 9 to 12—the drop off seemed to be higher than…
Innovating or incrementing?
The NYTimes asks Can governments till the fields of innovation? The story profiles John Kao who recently launched The Institute for Large Scale Innovation (ILSI) founded to address three key questions: · How can innovation be fostered most effectively at a societal level (country,…
New Leaders for New Schools
Secretary Duncan recently visited high performing North Star charter school in Newark New Jersey. He’d like to see states and districts close the lowest performing schools and replace them with more schools like North Star. The first big challenge is getting state and district officials to…
The need for edu-innovation
The US won’t spend or reform its way to high and equitable educational attainment. The basic model of age cohorts slogging through print-based content with ability tracking (with equates to race and income tracking) is obsolete, expensive and unjust. Young people in emerging and developing economies (which…