The US has been focused on K-12 education reform for over two decades, with mixed results at best. One reason why progress has been slow is that the fundamental nature of pedagogy has largely been unchanged. Increasingly, however, a number of high schools are using information technologies (IT) to redesign schools in fundamentally new ways.
In How IT Can Enable 21st Century Schools, Tim McDonald and Ted Kolderie of the Education|Evolving, a Minnesota-based group of thought leaders in education reform, discuss why the school reform movement has stalled, how IT can enable the emergence of fundamentally new kinds of schools and what the states and the federal government can do to drive the emergence of these new ways of educating our nation’s future generations. The report recommends that:
• States should establish state-level NewSchools organizations, with the power and authority to realize a program of school innovation enabled by IT.
• The Obama Administration should become a champion for IT-enabled school redesign and the creation of state NewSchools authorities.
• Congress should create a NewSchoolsAmerica Fund to encourage state legislatures to create these specialized organizations that are autonomous from the management of traditional schools.
• Congress should allow new innovative schools to be evaluated outside the framework of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
