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i3: Anyone got a match?

For everyone who’s up late or early putting the finishing touches on an Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund application, this coffee refill is for you. Those i3 applications are due at 4:30 pm Eastern time tomorrow, May 12, so if you sneak out of Summit at 3:45, we’ll know why. (Yes, the due date got moved to May 12; it used to be May 11.) All the details are at http://www2.ed.gov/programs/innovation/, though […] Read more

Teaching as Entrepreneurship?

Over lunch at the NewSchools Community of Practice event this afternoon, Teach For America’s Steven Farr, author of Teaching as Leadership, and Uncommon Schools’ Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, talked about what they are learning (and sharing, through their books) about the practices of effective teachers. It turns out that a lot of the characteristics are similar to those […] Read more

Inventing the future: students and technology

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – computer scientist Alan Kay Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were 21 and 22, respectively, when they started coding a new search engine. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was 20 when he launched the service from his Harvard dorm room. But the next generation of technology innovators may well be teenagers or even pre-teens, if you play out the trends teed up […] Read more

Guest post: Closing the Achievement Gap – The Edupreneur Way

This guest post was written by  Ellen Winn of the Education Equality Project, a national, bipartisan advocacy organization dedicated to closing the achievement gap. The recent death of achievement-gap closing hero Jaime Escalante (whose story was brought to life via the film “Stand and Deliver”) has got me thinking anew about how we can close the achievement gap. If Escalante did one thing, he debunked the myth that “those” kids – the […] Read more

Help welcome first-time attendees feel welcome at the NewSchools Summit

A whopping 25%. That’s the percent of people attending this year’s NewSchools Summit for the very first time. If you’re among that 25%, welcome! We look forward to meeting you. If you’re among the other 75% — and especially if you’re one of those longstanding, card-carrying members of the entrepreneurial education movement who has attended the NewSchools Summit for many years — we’d like to ask you to lend a bit of your […] Read more

Fueling the entrepreneurial fire

In a new Education Next article excerpted from his latest book, education scholar Rick Hess recounts the skepticism that the entrepreneurs behind KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) and Teach for America (TFA) encountered when they set out to drum up financial support for their then-nascent ventures. The KIPP founders fired off more than a hundred letters to local corporations, while TFA’s Wendy Kopp wore a former presidential candidate down with some youthful persistence. Little […] Read more

Guest post: Out of the shadows

This guest post is from Bill Jackson, founder and CEO of GreatSchools, who was one of the very first entrepreneurs to receive an investment from NewSchools Venture Fund. This year’s NewSchools Summit focuses on the promises and perils of education entrepreneurs going mainstream. Thanks to the Obama Administration, education entrepreneurs are no longer toiling off in the corner – they’re being asked to run the show. I see a lot of opportunities […] Read more