Recognizing innovation and impact: the NewSchools Summit 2010 Awards
While much of the NewSchools Summit focuses on charting a path forward and taking a hard, critical look at the challenges and opportunities for this community in the future, it is also an occasion to celebrate the tremendous achievements of the education reform community. As such, NewSchools recognizes individuals and organizations that, through their embodiment of the spirit of […]
Breakout Session #2: Messages, Media, and Mindshare
As Walter Isaacson shared with the audience during the morning session at the NewSchools Summit, the world needs more storytellers – it has plenty of preachers. In the afternoon, participants dug into effective storytelling, particularly in terms of what it takes to enlist ambassadors as evangelists for a shared message and to engage the media. […]
Guest post: Going to NewSchools
This guest post comes from Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, the voice behind the must-read education blog Eduwonk.com and a prolific writer whose columns and articles regularly appear in U.S. News & World Report and many other publications. I’ve been lucky enough to attend NewSchools Summits pretty much since they started. [Editor’s note: we checked, and as of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Guest post: Time to get TEACHED
This guest post is from filmmaker Kelly Amis of Loudspeaker Films, who will be a speaker at NewSchools Summit 2010. TEACHED is her first film. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America, but here we are in 2010 and our education system is almost perfectly designed to ensure some groups will never perform […]
Telling stories with letters and pixels
All eyes are on education entrepreneurs these days. Parents and communities are watching to see whether chronically failing schools can be turned around by new operators, whether new charter schools will make a difference for low-income students, and whether new ways of preparing teachers and new tools for instruction will change the way classrooms work. […]