Not since the publication of the first Harry Potter novel has there been a response to a book (yes, a book!) as we’ve witnessed with the publication of ‘Fire and Fury’, by Michael Wolff. Its anecdotes and rumours will give satirists abundant material with which to poke the hapless leader of the free world. But, while we laugh along with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, we in the UK should remember two things: 1. Without Brexit, we would probably not have seen The Donald in the White House; 2. Our own administration has been behaving in a remarkably Trumpian fashion …
The past few days have seen the opposite (if not equal) reaction to the recent emergence of the #EducationForward campaign. With scant regard for factual accuracy, various bloggers and tweeters (since they crave attention I’ll anonymise them for now) have attempted to summarise the Education Forward book, without the tiresome task of actually reading it. One, describing #EducationForward as ‘Education Backward’ (witty), linked EF to Class Action, the recently created magazine ‘by teachers for teachers’ (wrong). Others questioned how EF is funded (it isn’t). But the biggest (though I suspect knowing) misconception has been to cast Education Forward as promulgating …
Days 4 & 5 of our study tour of future-focused schools took in three very different schools (for details of previous schools visited, see the last blog post). Our first stop was New Roads School, a K-12 school, in Santa Monica. As the inspirational Principal Luthern Williams explained, New Roads is unique: an independent school entirely committed to social equity. In practice, this means that parents who can afford their fees know that 50% of those fees enable kids from under-privileged areas of Los Angeles to attend. You might think with such a disparity of backgrounds there’d be two distinct …
For the past three days, I’ve been taking a group of school leaders and teachers around some of the most innovative schools in the United States. We curated the visit to concentrate upon Silicon Valley, primarily because the startup culture and spirit of enterprise that has made this region boom, has impacted upon the re-design of education – so long as you know where to look. It’s also a place where the jobs of the future are being created in the knowledge economy. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this spirit of innovation is found more commonly in independent schools. I wish that were …
