Guest Post: What’s smoking got to do with ed reform?

By Ellen Winn, Executive Vice President, 50CAN: The 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now Education advocacy is the hot item of the year. After years of focusing almost solely on educational practice and structure (and amassing a serious list of “what works”), there is consensus in our field that if we don’t get serious about removing […]

Guest Post: The New Normal Summit

This Summit will be different.  It’s the first Summit held under “new normal” conditions.  We went over the cliff.  We are getting ready to live with less and many have more cuts to come.  The hangover of the Great Recession took its toll on education, but for some leaders it forced a new round of […]

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 t

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 […]

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 […]

The innovation mismatch: “Smart capital” and education innovation

One of the most poignant summaries of the market for innovative technology solutions in education is that it is forever in its infancy. That statement was true 30 years ago, when the Apple II was introduced into schools and I first started working in education technology, and it is true today.

Education reform: Getting personal

I felt a lot less melancholy about the future of US public education after having coffee a few days ago with Joel Rose, the founder of the path-breaking New York City experiment called School of One.

Keep subgroup mandates in ESEA, civil rights groups urge

No one seems to have much love for the No Child Left Behind Act these days. But everyone seems to agree on the best feature of the law: Schools now have to show how student subgroups that historically were ignored (English-language learners, racial minorities, economically disadvantaged students) are doing relative to their peers.