Tag: minnesota

In this report to Minnesota’s Association of School Administrators, the organization’s executive director wonders whether states need entirely new systems to meet today’s educational goals.

A senior administrator from a major public university said recently, about technology, “We could say we use technology, that it’s in all our classrooms and labs—we spend enormously on IT—but really it’s not an effective improvement.”

He was alluding to a point that there really are two fundamentally different ways of applying technology. The first is in support of existing practice. The second way to apply new technologies is to use them to enable fundamentally new kinds of learning. To be successful this often requires combining innovations in technology with innovations in school models.

In this budget climate the four-day school week is hot. Districts across the country are moving to it, in an attempt to cut costs. Instead of rethinking school, the four-day week represents a simple continuation of the squeezing of the five-day week. It is not strategic, and in fact decreases productivity - the worst possible outcome.

Yet the onset of the four-day week may have an entirely different effect, releasing students from 20 percent of their obligatory time to instead pursue learning in other areas.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) recently received a grant from the American Federation of Teachers (MFT) to develop a 501c3 to serve as an authorizer of chartered schools in Minnesota. AFT made the investment as part of its innovation fund. Some of the initial news reports stated the MFT itself will apply to become an authorizer and others reported it would make them the first union in the nation to do so.