Last Thursday, Paul Peterson, Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and editor-in-chief of Education Next, treated a Heritage audience to a discussion about his new book Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. He was joined by an all-star panel of discussants, which included Susan Patrick, President and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL), Michael Horn, Executive Director of the Innosight Institute and co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, and Adam …
President Barack Obama announced Monday that $900 million in federal grants in the proposed FY 2011 budget would be available to school districts and administrators who work to transform roughly 5,000 failing school across the nation. While the proposal encourages transformation of the few thousand schools that produce half of America’s yearly 1.2 million high school dropouts, the reliance on federal government resources and direction to rescue America’s educational system falls short of true reform. The President’s proposal, detailed in a subsequent press release, encourages early intervention programs for students …
With over a week of in-class instruction lost to two blizzards and many Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland schools forced to contemplate longer school years, a few Maryland teachers found an effective, online alternative to letting snow drifts reduce student achievement. Even as record snowfalls threatened most lesson plans, online learning proved to be an efficient tool for academic instruction for the few students and teachers fortunate enough to participate. As The Washington Post reports, the accessibility of virtual chat rooms, whiteboards, and quizzes allowed some students to keep up …
