NewSchools Summit 2011 led the conversation about what’s new and what’s next in education. More than 800 participants joined sessions including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr, and DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, as well as Khan Academy’s Sal Khan, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. We’ll be releasing full-length video of Summit keynotes sessions in the weeks to come. Check back soon!

The NewSchools Summit, held in partnership with the Aspen Institute, brings together entrepreneurs, educators, and policymakers who are passionate about the power of entrepreneurs to transform public education for underserved children.

• Defer judgment
• Go for volume
• One conversation at a time
• Be visual
• Headline
• Build on the ideas of others
• Stay on topic
• Encourage wild ideas (“the good, doable ideas are next to the wild ones”)

Audience members then brainstormed solutions to challenges like recruiting better talent into the education sector and how we might make Advanced Placement classes more accessible to underserved students. Every group took a different approach. Some had everyone writing at the same time on the wall, while other groups fleshed out ideas through conversation and only wrote conclusions.

Rich and Adam concluded by discussing how to move on from a brainstorming session by selecting the most promising ideas. For ideation, select multiple concepts: the safe bet, long shot, and most meaningful. When selecting ideas, you should “use contrasting selection criteria to preserve innovation,” they explained, so that you don’t end up just with safe bets or long shots, but a mixture of these.

Melissa Wagasky and David Blake pitch their startup at Summit 2011

Summit attendees got a special treat this year: the opportunity to witness, participate in, and contribute to the next wave of entrepreneurial organizations poised to make a difference in the lives of America’s students at the EdTech Entrepreneurs Lab Pitch Session. Following the Summit’s theme of discovering what’s new and what’s next in education, the rapid-fire format gave entrepreneurs real-world experience pitching their ideas and raising capital—both essential to growing a successful start-up.

The EdTech Entrepreneurs Lab—a partnership between NewSchools Venture Fund, Teach for America, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford—empowers entrepreneurs to design and start technology-based solutions to transform public education. Hailing from diverse backgrounds in private industry, teaching, and academia, four teams of EdTech entrepreneurs pitched their ideas for new start-ups aiming to revolutionize the education space before a panel of entrepreneurial experts, including Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rob Waldron of Curriculum Associates, and Kim Smith of Bellwether Education Partners.

The goals of the session went beyond the immediate participants. I was inspired to observe the energy and practices of Silicon Valley directed at helping students inside (and outside) the classroom. Not only did the session allow for a diverse set of innovative ideas to receive early feedback, it also broadened the notion of who can make an impact in education.

Over three hundred attendees filled the room to capacity. While the atmosphere was friendly, the budding entrepreneurs took the competition seriously: one clever team pre-empted its pitch by scattering its website URL on all the chairs. Each team had about five minutes to introduce its members, explain their solution, and ultimately persuade the judges to say, “I would invest in you.”

The ideas were as diverse as the entrepreneurs’ backgrounds: from dailypage, which aims to transform reading with social technology to EdJigsaw.com, which aims to solve parents’ confusion over after-school activities with an online review website. Rounding out the line-up were two online crowdsourcing platform: Skoodio, a platform that gathers feedback on student work, and Scratica, which solicits and rates answers to students’ questions.

After each pitch, the judges gave their thoughts. Waldron admired dailypage’s spoken pitch: “I would want you to be my kids’ schoolteacher. People give to people and I think that part you nailed.” Addressing Skoodio, Lee also praised the delivery and challenged founder James Truong to address user adoption in a crowded space.

While the judges deliberated on the final winner, the audience shared its feedback by texting in its votes. Attendees also contributed their suggestions and questions to the teams, adding praise for their work. In the end, both the judges and the audience voted for EdJigsaw.com, the website of after-school activity reviews, believing it addresses a clear need in the market.

In their closing comments, the judges shared valuable insight into the landscape of education entrepreneurship. Lee emphasized the need to stay data-driven throughout the launch process, adding that the digital nature of the four start-ups reduces the people and resources needed to launch. Smith advised the entrepreneurs to look beyond the most commercial ideas to the most revolutionary ones, saying, “If everyone’s clamoring for it, that’s not where it’s the most broken.”

Jean J. Lu, CFA, is a recent MBA graduate of the UC Berkeley-Haas School of Business, working as an investment consultant to endowments and foundations in Boston.

I was standing at the back of the room on Wednesday for the closing ceremonies of the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit 2011, a location that felt oddly appropriate.  The focus of the conference was on innovation, and with education technology and private-sector leadership in lights—Joel Klein, Reed Hastings, and Mark Zuckerberg each anchored sessions – the idea behind Blue Engine, an innovative national service model that channels human capital (with teams of tutors) to high-need schools, played second fiddle.

New technologies, from gaming to personalized instruction to social networking and online tutorials hold extraordinary promise, but equal attention—if not more—should be directed to the human capital implications required for any “innovation” to increase student achievement.  New technologies are not solutions.  They are mechanisms that have been shown to help some kids do better in one classroom while gathering dust in another.  To help students in measurable ways, new technologies depend, inherently, on the web of human relationships that govern their use.

Two challenges come immediately to mind on the human capital front.  The first is the impact of new technologies on teachers.  Do they want them?  Will they use them?  Can we use technology to make the job of teaching more sustainable by helping teachers teach and spend less time on busywork?  Technology holds power here (IMPACT in New York City and, more recently, Drop the Chalk), but as a former teacher who used a pencil-and-paper grading book (in the 21st century) and whose row of shiny Mac Pro desktop computers sat idle at the back of the room for the year (I didn’t know what I should be doing with them), I would like to see tech evangelists grapple as much with behavioral economics—the science behind why people do what they do—as with the gadgetry behind the next big product.

The second challenge will involve rethinking how human capital is deployed in schools. Technology does not just exist and create change in a vacuum. Some of the most promising and talked-about technology innovations in education—including School of One and Rocketship Education—all require reconfigurations of human capital. At School of One, teachers still teach, but they are supported by a range of other actors including teaching assistants and tutors, both online and in-person, and software-based lessons.  All of these actors support the system together and make it run. Rocketship Education is a non-profit elementary charter school network that is creating a hybrid school model, combining a traditional classroom setting with tutoring, both online and offline, and online technology. Like School of One, these tutors are the human capital “glue” that helps Rocketship’s innovative financial structure fly.

If the goal is to accelerate academic performance for all—or, more realistically, to achieve dramatically greater good for greater numbers— then we must find ways of moving beyond the current, industrial, 30:1 student-teacher ratio in brick and mortar classrooms. This is a laudable goal.  But, at the NewSchools Summit this week, the answer seemed to be:  let’s ramp up our use of technology in schools, let’s align private-sector incentives with market opportunities in K-12, and boom, learning outcomes will spike nationwide.  In most sessions, there was little mention of actual teachers, teacher training, professional development, and the political will required for new technologies to benefit real kids in real districts in real classrooms.

Technology and human capital innovation are not opposing concepts, but we must do more to integrate the conversation.  Only then will students benefit from the “promise of technology” that we’ve been promising for so long.

Few innovators have changed our daily lives as much as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and venture capitalist John Doerr. In conversation at Summit 2011, they offer insights on what it takes to make innovation and entrepreneurship succeed.

Yes, there were some marquee names.

Mark Zuckerberg. John Doerr. Joel Klein. Sal Khan. Kaya Henderson. Reed Hastings.  As Tom Vander Ark noted, “We don’t have many rock stars in education, but most of them were on the stage at the Summit.”

But it was more than just star power that people were talking about in the hallways at Summit 2011, and in their Facebook posts and tweets. It was a spirit of honesty, and an excitement about the change that’s possible through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Every year since 1999, when a then-fringe idea drew about 200 attendees, NewSchools has thrown a Summit to unite, inspire, and grow a movement of education entrepreneurs.  This year, we worked in partnership with the Aspen Institute to create our largest event yet, with some 800 entrepreneurs, policy makers, philanthropists, scholars, journalists, and others in attendance, including nearly 300 first-timers. In all, 75 speakers participated in 17 sessions—easily double the offerings of any previous Summit.

It’s not easy to draw a single theme from so many conversations. In trying, probably the most vivid comparison came from Doug Crets (who did a remarkable job summarizing the day in real time). In a Fast Company post, he likened Summit to “walking into the Mormon Tabernacle and rejoicing in hope and the potential for change.” And, while others chose different metaphors, the point rang true—the day was filled with a hopeful feeling about what innovation can do to improve education for low-income kids.

Perhaps the headiest moment of the day—and surely the most crowded—was the headline-grabbing keynote with John Doerr and Mark Zuckerberg. In a fast-moving conversation with Doerr, Zuckerberg emerged as open, personal and often funny. On his way to describing his passion for education, he talked about when he wrote his first computer program (sixth grade), his feelings about his time in college (“awesome”), relationships (“No one teaches you how important friends are”), and his annual challenge for himself (“It turns out you cannot learn Chinese in one year”). But the conversation soon moved to the serious, and to Zuckerberg’s thoughts on what it takes to make innovation successful. Zuckerberg pushed back against a focus on the individual leader, and toward crediting his leadership team; a quarter of his time, he said, goes to recruiting, internally and externally, and he advised, “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to work for.” He pushed the crowd to think about how to learn from their peers, and talked about his own habit for keeping time free for spontaneous discussion by barring planned afternoon meetings. And to make innovation work, he advised, “Give people the resources they need to explore–and get out of the way.”

The same excitement over the possibilities of innovation extended to a pitch session for up-and-coming entrepreneurs, and to a talk by innovation guru Steve Blank (“Startups are not smaller versions of large companies… Creating something new is an art.”) But complementing the excitement of the new was the notion of honesty about both success and failure as an essential element of innovation. That candor started early, in a good-hearted and fast-moving conversation between Joel Klein, who recently left his post as Chancellor of the New York City schools to join News Corporation, and Sal Khan, author of more than 2,000 free, virally popular instructional videos. In the session, moderated by NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell, Klein and Khan debated what the future of education will look like, as honesty mixed with early-morning good cheer. To laughs, Klein admired Khan’s ability to attract tens of thousands of users to “a site on the internet that doesn’t sell sex,” but the balding veteran chastened Khan about the realities of systems change:  “If you spent the last 10 years the way I did, you’d have the same hairstyle.” Truth-telling also characterized a session called “Inside the Entrepreneur’s Studio,” as KIPP’s Richard Barth offered a warts-and-all progress report on graduation and college completion.  And deep and sometimes emotional moments of honesty punctuated a session called “Learning from Success and Failure,” featuring half a dozen leaders from government, philanthropy, and entrepreneurship. As one attendee tweeted, “Powerful candor at the failure panel on personal regrets.  Touches my heart. Goose pimples.”

The day ended with surprise fireworks, at the conclusion of the day’s last keynote, where DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and Netflix founder and education activist/philanthropist Reed Hastings squared off on what it will take to bring change for large numbers of underserved students. Ellen Winn of 50CAN captured the feeling of the session in a tweet: “Reed Hastings: Are we just treating symptoms & not the problem of #edreform? We’ve been doing this for 50 yrs, not enough change.” By the session’s end, Henderson and Hastings had reached enough common ground for Hastings to make what we heard as an offer to fund Rocketship Education’s entry into DC, as long as Henderson provides the space (stay tuned).

Oh, and the muffins. A day with 1500-plus tweets was sure to have some off-message good humor, and Stanford student Andrew Humphries stole the show with his muffin updates:

9:16 AM Lots of freely available muffins.

9:20 AM Just saw Rich Crandall from @stanforddschool. Says he’s prepared for his session. Was aware of muffin surfeit.

9:33 AM Big TVs showing curated tweets. Want on but think focus on muffins is poor plan. All first timers have yellow lanyards (me).

10:47 AM Muffins replaced with apples and bananas.

But in a thousand words, we’ve just scratched the surface. We’re looking forward to offering much more from this extraordinary day—pictures, video, materials, and reflections—in the days and weeks to come. Watch this space.

No promises on muffin updates.

The 2011 award winners are:

Entrepreneur of the Year

Alex Grodd, BetterLesson
Boston, MA

Alex Grodd, a former Teach For America corps member, founded BetterLesson in 2008 to equip educators with the tools to create and deliver the highest quality instruction. He believed that high-performing school systems need easy ways to organize, disseminate, and continuously improve their curricula, and that teachers need easy ways to access, share, organize and store materials. Over the last two years, BetterLesson has grown from an idea to a site with 9,000 teachers registered as users, and partnerships with some of the best-known school networks, including KIPP, Achievement First, and Rocketship. Betterlesson not only provides access to materials, but also enables teachers to find and share the highest-quality materials – at least one ingredient schools need to drive student achievement.

“Alex has worked like a dog, dug into his own savings, and yet always maintained a sense of optimism that motivates those around him,” said NewSchools partner Jordan Meranus when presenting this award. “For aspiring entrepreneurs who want to create companies that make a real difference for students in underserved communities, the impact of Alex’s vision, hard work and persistence shows that it is possible.”

Entrepreneur of the Year

Alexandra Bernadotte, Beyond 12

San Francisco, CA

Two years ago, as an entrepreneur-in-residence at NewSchools, Alexandra Bernadotte began building Beyond 12, an organization rooted in the belief that all students are capable of graduating from college. By pairing students with college “coaches” – themselves recent college graduates – Beyond 12 acts as a bridge between K-12 and higher education, while giving both systems access to data about how best to prepare and support low-income students of color. In the coming academic year, Beyond 12 will coach over 500 students and will track the progress of 4000 college students. Alexandra’s team launched an alumni tracker last year that high schools are already using to track data about their students’ postsecondary progress. The team recently launched a Facebook application for students, and is developing an “early warning system” that will help universities maximize the impact of their student support services to prevent dropout. In addition, working with several charter schools and charter management organizations, Alexandra and her team recently signed contracts with the San Francisco Unified School District, San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco.

“These are the first steps toward the realization of Alexandra’s goal to shift the national paradigm from college access to college success,” noted NewSchools Partner Deborah McGriff when presenting this award.

Organization of the Year

The Achievement Network

The Achievement Network (ANet) builds school level capacity to use real-time data to improve instruction and close the achievement gap. The organization provides and scores standards-aligned assessments, holds timely data analysis meetings with instructional leaders, and helps schools develop the internal structures and practices necessary for effective data use. ANet team members help educators acquire, review, understand, discuss, and make concrete and measurable plans based on data.

Beyond impact, ANet has demonstrated the role that entrepreneurs can play in driving change. The organization was started by John Maycock in 2005, and initially served approximately 10 schools in its first few years. Ted Preston joined as CEO in 2008. This year ANet served 160 schools touching the lives of nearly 45,000 students. Next year, as an i3 winner, ANet will serve over 260 schools in 8 states. Revenue has grown by over 400% in 3 years, and earned revenue covers over 70% of costs, a level of discipline that will ensure sustainability of this important nonprofit organization.

New Market Maker

John Danner, Rocketship Education

Palo Alto, CA

In the summer of 2006, NewSchools’ CEO Ted Mitchell recruited John Danner to become an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at NewSchools. John and his co-founder Preston Smith established Rocketship Education, a network of free, public K-5 college prep elementary charter schools. Rocketship opened the nation’s first hybrid elementary school in 2007. By fall 2010, Rocketship operated three schools in San Jose and was the leading hybrid charter school management organization in the nation dedicated to disrupting the current system.

Today, it is nearly impossible to search literature on hybrids and come across an article that does not feature Rocketship’s pioneering Learning Lab, exceptional classroom teaching, personal growth and gap-closing outcomes for low-income English language learners as well as other underserved children.

“Rocketship’s unique hybrid model is transforming elementary education, scaling a 21st century education market, and earning John the title of founder of the hybrid school movement,” said NewSchools Partner Deborah McGriff when presenting this award.