The Education Evolving Blog

David Brooks wrote a New York Times column last December about facets of an innovation agenda for economic reform.

Check out the seventh item: encourage regional innovation clusters.

Said Brooks, “Innovation doesn’t happen at the national level. It happens within hot spots — places where hordes of entrepreneurs gather to compete, meet face to face, pollinate ideas. Regional authorities can’t innovate themselves, but they can encourage those who do to cluster.”

It's interesting to...

Editor’s note: Each Friday we feature guest bloggers that are involved in rethinking what is possible with schooling and the education system.

At bat this week are Dan French and Lynn Nordgren, who during an Education|Evolving meeting last June expressed their support for moving control over school form and function out to the front-line units, including teachers.

Dan French is director at the Center for Collaborative Education in Boston. He argues that, “only when you create schools that are empowered in that way do...

There is a lot of talk about ‘innovation’ in education, with a lot of varying ideas about what it is. Our view is that serious innovation examines alternatives to the present way of doing things. Innovators look at the roots of problems, question whether present efforts can best address them, and do things completely different if necessary.

It is okay to try new things that are not yet ‘proven’ by documentation and study. In order to get big improvements people have got to move beyond the idea that everything must be ‘evidence-based.’

Evidence-based looks toward the past as...