In a city like New York, with its 1,400 public schools, new-school innovations can seem like pebbles tossed into the ocean.
Beginning in 2013, and continuing with a second cohort in 2017, experienced Independent school principals in Victoria, Australia, work with researchers from Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, to identify leadership practices necessary for planning and implementing school innovations for 21st century learning.
Of particular interest to those, like me, who served on the City Council's Middle Schools Task Force is the significant improvement in the scores of eighth-grade students, who have evidently benefited from some of the middle-school innovations of the last two years.
Chevy also looked back at old-school innovations like built-in tool boxes over the rear wheel wells, which for decades had been common on pickup trucks.
In the report, Inspired by Technology, Driven by Pedagogy: A Systemic Approach To Technology-Based School Innovations, (2010b) The OECD noted that although access to new digital technology has increased measurably in the past ten years, this technology, "has not been adopted as quickly and intensively as expected despite policy efforts to promote and support technology-based school innovations".
Developments in the capabilities and availability of technology add possibilities for making whole-school innovations more effective, less expensive and earlier to train and monitor.
Vinig and Rijsbergen (2009) in their study of innovation universities in developed countries have shown that the choice of such a tool of technology transfer, as the creation of small innovative companies, is determined by development of high school innovation infrastructure (business incubators, technology parks) but not a high level of entrepreneurial culture.
Geoff Mulgan points out that America has committed $650m to a schools-innovation fund; Britain has allocated £200m to health.
The winner will be announced at the J-School Innovation Showcase before graduation.
Kelvin and his team were winners of Global Minimum's Innovate Salone 2012, the inaugural high school innovation challenge in Sierra Leone.
Those reforms, embraced by Republicans and Democrats, encourage charter school innovation, improve teacher quality, support community colleges and simplify finances for college students and war veterans.
