Education
Wendy Kopp founded Teach for America as a college student, and has helped the organization change America's educational system. Now, she hopes to expand that model to the international stage. Read more...
What if the gap between the haves and have-nots opens up earlier in life than we ever expected? Dr. Jack Shonkoff says a child's success in school depends on her earliest stages of development. Read more...
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick tells us about his new Pre-K policy initiative that takes cues from research in early childhood development. Read more...
What if peer pressure could fix everything from health to education? MacArthur genius grant winner Tina Rosenberg says peer pressure can have some unlikely upsides. Read more...
What were the biggest and most influential innovations of 2013? Kara Miller looks back on her top picks with WGBH Morning Edition host Bob Seay. Read more...
Think about your high school. No matter what city or town it was in, it likely grouped students by age. And offered an eerily similar menu of subjects — biology, math, history, Spanish — which met for 45 minutes or an hour. But why? Sal Khan has been asking some tough questions about education, and he's bent on re-inventing our system, one student at a time. Read more...
In our continuing series on American competitiveness - and whether America will still be the place where great innovation occurs - we’ve looked at transportation with Former Governor Ed Rendell and education with Professor Paul Peterson and former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn. Today we ask: how desirable are American workers? And is that desirability threatened by gridlock in Washington? Read more...
Harvard Professor Paul Peterson and Former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn have been studying the American education system for a long time. What they've observed is a disturbing trend.
"We had the greatest schools in the 19th century and the early 20th century," said Peterson. "We had elementary education before any other country. We had high schools before any other country. We built colleges before any other country."
But in the 1970s, the momentum changed.
Will the new face of college be a computer screen? We asked a panel of educational pioneers about the university of the future on this special edition of Innovation Hub, taped at Suffolk University’s Modern Theater in downtown Boston. Read More...
Seth Godin is a fantastically successful entrepreneur who — in his own words — has been thrown out of offices, looked at like he’s crazy, and generally refused to follow the crowd. It’s the personal history you might expect from someone whose latest book, “The Icarus Deception,” argues that those who don’t innovate and think creatively will be left behind by the Internet generation. In 1998, Yahoo paid $30 million for the marketing company Godin started on a shoestring and made him a Vice President. But Godin soon left Yahoo, wrote bestselling books about the new innovation economy and spoke at companies like Disney, Amazon, and Google — and he wants American education to encourage similar risks.
