What we can learn from a dinner controversy in the desert

A few weeks back, I had the honor to emcee the closing awards dinner at the Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, Michael Horn reports on Forbes.com.  The evening took a sour note though as the dinner keynote, which Andy Kessler delivered, stunned and offended the majority of the audience by essentially arguing that as digital learning rises, we won’t need teachers anymore. The audience took to Twitter to voice vehement disagreement, and my co-emcee and I—we were just as surprised as everyone else—did our best to distance ourselves from the remarks and hit the reset button on the evening…

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Top quality education for everyone! But what’s ‘top quality’?

When 160,000 students registered for an online version of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course, many thought that the dream of bringing top quality education to everyone was within reach, Forbes.com reports. But do we really know what a top quality education looks like? This year, the number of unemployed people with college degrees surpassed the number of unemployed people with only high school degrees. That’s incredibly alarming. It means that even if we bring higher education to more people, they may not be able to find jobs and get a return on their educational investment…

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A Nation Still At Risk: How we can fix our schools

In April 1983—exactly thirty years ago—the famous report “A Nation at Risk,” warned that American education was a “rising tide of mediocrity,” Forbes reports. Since then, despite a tidal wave of reforms—more money, more standards, more testing, more technology, more affirmative action, more charter schools, more teacher-certification, more test-based accountability and more big federal programs (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top),  American K-12 education remains stubbornly mediocre. With American 15-year-olds ranking internationally 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math—trailing counterparts in such countries as Estonia and Poland—and one-third of entering college students needing remedial education, the report card is still poor…

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How to bring quality online education to a global student population

From the outside, it is a nondescript building in downtown San Jose, California. But inside, 20 ninth- and tenth-grade students and seven educators are creating a new educational paradigm, Salman Khan reports for Forbes. Armed with individualized plans, students leverage Khan Academy, a pioneer of internet learning, and other online resources to learn math at their own pace. They choose what topics they learn and when they learn them. Educators use real-time data to coach students and monitor progress, but students drive their own progress. When students get stuck they can attend a small group lesson led by a teacher, ask a peer for help, or connect with a teacher one-on-one. When they’ve mastered a set of concepts, students line up eagerly to prove their knowledge.  (Yes, they are lining up to take tests!) While this may seem like an unusual approach to learning, it’s a typical day in math class at Summit San Jose, a charter high school where a team of educators has constructed both a new classroom and a new model for teaching and learning math. At the heart of this model is a reimagined educational experience grounded in mastery-based, personalized learning. It mirrors our own objectives for education at Khan Academy…

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Atlanta cheating scandal ensnares ex-superintendent

As Atlanta gets set to host next weekend’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four, its scandal-plagued public school system steals the limelight, Forbes.com reports. According to Friday’s New York Times, 35 Atlanta educators have been indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in connection with the city’s notorious cheating controversy. Moreover, Dr. Beverly L. Hall, a former Atlantic school district superintendent, has been charged with RICO conspiracy — including theft, witness tampering, and making false statements — in the doctoring of student scores on the Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) in order to earn lucrative bonuses for herself and her subordinates…

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Universities on the brink

The ever-increasing cost of education is not sustainable, reports Louis E. Lataif for Forbes. Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges. Like many situations too good to be true–like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable. Just 10 years ago the cost of a four-year public college education amounted to 18% of the annual income of middle-income families. Ten years later, it amounted to 25% of that family’s average annual income. The cost of attending a private university is about double the cost of public universities. Think of higher education as the proverbial frog in boiling water. It feels very warm and comfy but soon will be cooked…

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The school that gives kids their own iPads

A private school in Scotland has given sleek new iPads to every single one of its pupils to use in class this year and to even take home, Forbes reports. It’s the brainchild of Fraser Speirs, the IT director of Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, who wanted to solve the problem of the school’s computer lab, which had 12 desktops and 12 laptops, constantly being overbooked. First, he thought of giving everyone iPod Touches, but that wouldn’t have allowed them to do serious work like writing essays. Then the iPad was launched, and it now takes care of 99 percent of the work the students need to do. Wrapped in a smart carry case, the students carry their iPads with them into math class, science, and art—and the teachers download the appropriate apps that allow the kids to draw on the touch screen, look at graphs, or go online. As far as Speirs knows, no other school in the U.K., much less the world, is deploying iPads to all its students in this way…

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Forbes uses online professor ratings to help determine top colleges

A small private Massachusetts college ranked first in a report from Forbes.com on the best U.S. colleges in 2010, beating Ivy League contenders such as Harvard and Yale—and the publication bases its rankings in part on ratings of professors online, Reuters reports. Williams College, with about 2,200 students, nudged past Princeton and Amherst, which came in second and third on the list compiled by Forbes. The United States Military Academy at West Point and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rounded out the top five, while Harvard came in at No. 8 and Yale just slipped into the top 10. Forbes and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C., compiled the list, its third, after considering the cost of tuition, the salaries of graduates, and students’ experiences. They also looked at how many faculty and students go on to win Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes, and used data from web sites such as RateMyProfessors.com and MyPlan.com to gauge how satisfied students were with their educational experiences. “Colleges that don’t saddle students with a lot of debt and places with small class sizes rank higher,” said David Ewalt, deputy editor at Forbes. The highest ranked public university is the University of Virginia, which was No. 44…

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