Building a League of Innovative Schools
March 19, 2012
The second meeting of the League of Innovative Schools will explore the League’s role in transforming the education technology market. Some of the League’s key initiatives will include:
- Speeding up the pace of education technology research. Companies like Amazon don’t wait for years of trials to be completed to determine if an idea has promise. They try things, assess them, rapidly iterate, and implement. The League is partnering with leading researchers to do the same in education so teachers, school leaders, and entrepreneurs have the tools to get rapid feedback on what works in the classroom.
- Sharing best practices on how to use technology well. Even promising technologies can be ineffective or counterproductive if not used optimally. League members and other schools are excelling in their use of technology in the classroom; we need to share the lessons they’ve learned, test new practices, tools, and teaching methods, and scale up what works.
- Transforming the market for learning technologies. With more than 14,000 school districts scattered across the country—many of which are saddled with outdated procurement systems—it’s difficult for entrepreneurs to break into the market and also difficult to achieve the critical mass of market penetration that’s needed to show that their products can deliver meaningful results. Meanwhile, the amount we invest in R&D in K-12 education is estimated to be just 0.2% of total spending on K-12 education, compared to the 10-20% of revenues spent on R&D in many knowledge-intensive industries such as software development and biotech. League members will work to create “smart demand” to streamline procurement and aggregate demand to help drive private-sector investment in innovation.
Building a League of Innovative Schools