Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Report: Half trillion needed to update schools

Horror stories abound about schools with roofs that leak, plumbing that backs up and windows that do little to stop winds.

America’s schools are in such disrepair that it would cost more than $270 billion just to get elementary and secondary buildings back to their original conditions and twice that to get them up to date, a report released Tuesday estimated. In a foreword to the report, former President Bill Clinton said “we are still struggling to provide equal opportunity” to children and urged the first federal study of school buildings in almost two decades.

Clinton and the Center for Green Schools urged a Government Accountability Office assessment on what it would take to get school buildings up to date to help students learn, keep teachers healthy and put workers back on the jobs. The last such report, issued in 1995 during the Clinton administration, estimated it would take $112 billion to bring the schools into good repair and did not include the need for new buildings to accommodate the growing number of students.

The Center for Green Schools’ researchers reviewed spending and estimates schools spent $211 billion on upkeep between 1995 and 2008. During that same time, schools should have spent some $482 billion, the group calculated based on a formula included in the most recent GAO study.…Read More

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Can green tech operate under Moore’s Law?

Doubling the performance of clean-energy technologies every 18 months, as the semiconductor industry has seen with Moore’s Law, is a tough goal to hit. But executives from General Electric and Intel say the same technical and business concepts that underpin Moore’s Law can play out in green tech, CNET reports. Green technologies are following the same type of cost curve as Moore’s Law did in semiconductors, says Steve Fludder, vice president of Ecomagination at GE. In the case of solar, higher volumes of manufacturing of silicon cells have steadily cut costs every year, while newer thin-film technologies pave the way for lower prices and jumps in performance. The same is happening in wind power, where the quality and reliability of turbines has improved as the industry has ramped up in the past decade. Now, the industry is looking at direct-drive turbines for a boost in performance, Fludder said. Organizations can save a significant amount of money by reducing the energy consumption of their data centers, which has an environmental benefit as well. But some of the biggest challenges are institutional, not technical, experts say. The technology is readily available and the economic incentive is there, but IT managers’ performance historically has not been measured based on energy consumption, said Chris Mines, senior vice president and research director at Forrester Research…

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