If you've read my article, When Doing Nothing Isn't Doing Nothing, then perhaps you'll understand how my hours following Internet links on education reform isn't doing nothing! This morning, for about four hours or so now, I've been mostly doing just that--following rabbit trails. Through a Facebook link from New Schools Venture Fund (nsvf), whose primary goal is funding "education entrepreneurs," I found this video from their New Schools Summit 2011.
Now you likely won't have an hour to sit and watch this awesome discussion between Kaya Henderson, Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings...BUT if you do, I'd highly recommend it. In short, they agreed on about 80% of what needs to change in education. Mr. Hastings, however, is committed to making those changes primarily through growing charters across the country and world. I was impressed with the somewhat controversial Ms. Henderson (who is Michelle Rhee's successor in D.C. after Ms. Rhee resigned due to allegations of cheating). She basically stated that she is interested in providing a high-quality, equitable education by any means possible: district, charter, virtual, or ???
The highlight of the video is a final question from an anonymous audience member (this is the part where my 14-year-old son got a 10 minute impassioned lecture from me on curriculum design). The question can be summarized as:
There are three important questions around education: What do students need to know? How are we going to teach that? Where are we going to teach it? We spend an awful lot of time on 2 and 3. What about question 1?
Bravo, anonymous audience member! We can't even begin to look at testing, teachers, or anything else until we figure out "what do adults of 2025 and beyond need to be able to know and do?" Then we can figure out how, who, where and how much. Basic curriculum design, folks.
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