As you may have noticed I really depend on finding new content and commenting on it. I may not be utterly original but I figure that’s ok if I can expose you to a piece of information that you might not otherwise have seen. That is really the beauty of blogging and of the Internet in general. An individual generates a degree of trust and you, the reader, use that trust to sift through the mass of content produced on an hourly basis. Of course that’s also the premise of what we are doing at PlansForUs.

In any event, I was doing some research on the NewSchools Venture Fund  a veritable hub of innovative educational organizations and came across a posting from the Huffington Post entitled “Get Out of Their Darn Way and Let Educators Innovate“. This posting caught my eye because I happen to think that teachers, empowered with information and support, are the key to success in evolving our educational system.

I am going to quote two particular lines that reveal clearly why we ought to stop with the notion of top down solutions and let educational innovation happen on the edge. Those edge innovations are then shared and efficiently distributed to the places where those innovations can have the most impact.

First:

Let’s also take as axiomatic that most teachers and school administrators would prefer that their students learn, grow in mind and heart, and succeed in life. Students, we can assume, would also like to grow and to succeed. So there is a general disconnect between what we want for students, what students want for themselves - and what students get out of the educational process.

Second:

Part of the resistance…Why would they approve somebody to start a middle school that might do better than theirs, and would make them look inadequate? The charter schools can be models for them, but in reality, they’d rather not see us exist, because if there’s a school that’s doing better than they are, it’s going to propagate the growth of the movement and make them look worse.

Who is the “they” that is resisting? I’ll tell you quickly, it’s not the teachers. Innovative educators and social entrepreneurs are spreading throughout the educational system. Some of their ideas will work, some won’t. What we need to do is support these efforts, because if teachers and administrators want students to learn and to grow, we can rest assured that even if an experiment fails, that student will still learn.

As for you innovators out there, PlansForUs can and wants to be your distribution point for virally spreading your teaching ideas, lessons and passions.

by Tyler, CEO