Here at TED we love innovation.  826 was developed through Dave Egger’s innovative rethinking of how tutoring centers can work.   But many people wonder, where is the innovation in America’s public school system?

Cory Booker (the mayor of Newark, N.J),  John Doerr (a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), and Ted Mitchell (chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund and president of the California Board of Education) recently wrote an editorial exhorting the next president, whoever he may be, to support “educational innovation and ‘scale up’ proven experiments and novel ideas that work.”

The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in education is compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and accountability…They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.

[...] To call these solutions a drop in the bucket, as some critics do, is to miss the point…historically, the federal government has constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the next president should take.

The first is to expand innovation incentives and free them from the earmarks and conditions that have blunted past initiatives…Beyond new funding, the federal government must use its influence over state and local policy to sweep away regulations that hamper innovative thinking, such as caps on the number of public charter schools allowed and excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and credentialed.

[...] Finally, two efforts already underway must get a strong push from the next administration. One is the move toward a common set of standards for what students should be expected to know and be able to do: Every American child deserves to be educated to the same high standard, and innovators everywhere require a common target. Then, to make shared standards work, a national data infrastructure must be built to assess educational progress.

The authors steer away from taring down the current system.  Rather they emphasize that problems can not get solved simply by continuing to do the same thing.  Just like in business, they want to see energy placed behind ideas that have promise to see if they can become a broader part of the solution to America’s education woes.  The American spirit is tied up with entrepreneurship; American education can be as well.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:18 am and is filed under Dave Eggers' Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.