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 […]

Ted Talks at Google

Despite all of the attention being paid to innovation in public education today, educational entrepreneurs still face many obstacles to reaching children through their ideas. Unlike in fields like technology and medicine, where capital markets help entrepreneurs build transformative ideas, education entrepreneurs motivated to improve educational outcomes for students often find little support and even […]

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 […]

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: Of Evaluation and Transparency

Our latest guest blog post comes from Rick Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (and now also the blogger behind the eponymous “Rick Hess Straight Up” blog on Education Week’s Web site). The evidentiary standards for the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund have stirred much conversation. On those […]