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Mark Zuckerberg, John Doerr, Joel Klein, Sal Khan, Kaya Henderson, Reed Hastings to headline Summit 2011

Get excited.Today, we are rolling out the final agenda and speaker list for Summit 2011. May 18 is going to be a great day. (And do click on the links… they’ll take you to our new website!)Since 1999, NewSchools has been holding the Summit as a way to gather and grow a movement of passionate entrepreneurs dedicated to improving public education for low-income children. This year, we are holding it for the […] Read more

Joel Klein and Sal Khan announced as speakers at Summit 2011

Adding to the list of innovators and entrepreneurs at Summit 2011, we are delighted to announce that the day will open with a conversation between Joel Klein and Sal Khan. Klein, the former Chancellor of Schools in New York City, recently joined News Corporation to lead education innovation there. Sal Khan is the hedge fund analyst-turned video impresario behind Khan Academy, which has received enormous attention for its virally popular instructional videos. […] Read more

Kaya Henderson, Reed Hastings announced as keynote speakers at Summit 2011

Reed Hastings got the idea that became Netflix on the way to the gym. It was 1998, and Hastings owed the video store $40 in late fees on an overdue VHS cassette of Apollo 13. The problem, he realized, was that he was paying by the rental — whereas at the gym, he paid the same amount no matter how much he used it. His epiphany became Netflix, a household synonym for […] Read more

Roxanna Elden: “What kind of jerk wants to leave children behind?”

Participants at this year’s NewSchools Summit will have the opportunity to hear from a young teacher named Roxanna Elden, who has gained a sudden cult following through observations like, “If you sit through one of the new district-mandated trainings on the importance of rigor–and I don’t recommend it–you may notice that the concept would be better described as ‘not sucking at teaching.’” Roxanna’s Summit session will offer up her unique perspective on […] Read more

A new website!

To say that your website is your calling card in the digital age is to use a metaphor that’s either archaic or very deeply retro. But it’s true. Whether it’s the people who do business with you every day or the ones who are just trying to figure out if they’d like to get to know you, the world learns who you are, more often than not, by the way you present […] Read more

Rethinking the for-profit model

For many years, for-profit education organizations have faced fairly pervasive skepticism. Why? In part, you can blame the very mixed performance of for-profit school operators. Some, understandably, wonder whether every possible dollar is being directed toward the benefit of students (although it’s important to note that for-profits typically have to raise private funding, which results in more dollars over time being used for education). Yet for all that skepticism, it’s seems there’s […] Read more

The cover of…Failure Magazine?

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all-in which case, you fail by default.” — JK Rowling, in a speech to Harvard graduates A whole lot of years ago, when I was a junior in college studying sociology, I took a course that was cheerfully titled Organizational Disasters. Taught by business school icon Charles Perrow, the […] Read more

Rich Crandall Wants to Help You Discover Your Inner Innovator

It’s not often that you’re told to embrace mistakes, but that’s one message that Rich Crandall likes to give everyone he meets. Rich is the K-12 Lab Director at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school), where courses and classes are based on a process called “design thinking.” According to fans of this process, design thinking can transform the way organizations and individuals see the world and their work within […] Read more

Reimagining education

How would your students reimagine education? Calling all public school students/recent graduates: how would you “re-imagine education”? Education leaders and the press have a lot to say on what needs to be “fixed” about public schools—paying teachers based on how their students perform, better use of technology, smaller classes, more money—but what do students think? On May 18th, NewSchools Summit will bring together leaders in the education, business, policy and nonprofit fields […] Read more

Supporting Superman (and Woman)

How does NewSchools support education entrepreneurs?  I get this question more than any other and not just from those outside the education community so I wanted to give some real examples of how NewSchools helps entrepreneurs. Education venture philanthropy came on the scene in 1999 when then Stanford GSB student Kim Smith, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a few others (including Brook Byers and Dave Whorton) incubated the […] Read more