Need a Job? Invent It.

Need a Job? Invent It.

by | Apr 25, 2013 | Leadership News

WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.” This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do. That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one...

Universal Tuition Benefits: The Answer to All our Problems?

by | Apr 16, 2013 | Blog

If you ask any international or independent school educator about the benefits of teaching at their school, you’re likely to hear about free tuition for dependents.  Before I had any kids myself I thought little about this benefit for obvious reasons, but also because I’ve taken for granted the relatively great education I received in US public schools.  It wasn’t until I started working at a K-12 international school that I realized the enormous benefit of working at a great school with excellent teachers who would one day teach my children. If you’re like me, a product of the US public school system, then you grew up in the same classroom as the children of the school’s secretary, principal, and custodian.  However, in international schools this isn’t as a common.  Instead of extending tuition benefits to all employee’s dependents they are often only extended to the faculty.  Even in many NAIS schools you’re unlikely to find the custodian or lunch personnel receiving this benefit.  In a recent conversation with an independent school administrator, he laughed (and cringed), at the feeling that his children had been providing the social economic diversity to a school filled with much wealthier students. This isn’t to say that there aren’t good reasons to limit tuition benefits.  For many schools, allowing even one or two students per staff member could balloon the school population by hundreds.  In international schools the difference between host culture curriculum and international school curriculum could cause some major hiccups in the school learning environment.  Furthermore, universal tuition benefits could lead to great divides and more cliques in the school.  Not...