Marc Andreessen is a pretty influential dude and a midwesterner. Then he started blogging, which has only increased his influence in tech circles. While Marc is unimpressed by my choice of major, Political Science, he has been posting some interesting thoughts on career planning, which I would encourage you to check out on his blog.

As you know, PlansForUs is working in education because we think that we can help solve a problem for teachers and that education is on the cusp of a major transformation, of which PlansForUs intends to play a significant roll. So, I will set the stage with Marc’s quote and then add a few figures which I think are worth considering.

If you are young and want to have an impact, you want to be in an industry where there is a lot of growth and change and flux and opportunity.

As an industry ages, the vitality drains out until all that’s left is a set of ossified remnants in the form of oligopolostic entities of which you would find being a part to be completely soul-killing.

The exception comes when an industry has gotten so old and ossified that the clear opportunity exists to up-end it and introduce a new order, a new way of doing things, and therefore a new set of companies.

In some industries this happens routinely — e.g. every 10-20 years. This is the case in technology, for example, and financial services.

It doesn’t seem to happen ever in certain other industries which I won’t name for fear of being permanently cut off from my necessary supply of oil, gas, music, and movies.

and this

Once you have picked an industry, get right to the center of it as fast as you possibly can.

Your target is the core of change and opportunity — figure out where the action is and head there, and do not delay your progress for extraneous opportunities, no matter how lucrative they might be.

Here are a few interesting figures and thoughts:

• 2.4 million new teachers in the US by 2012
• Record enrollment in K-12 schools through 2015
• 93% of classrooms are connected to the Internet
• 15-35 million new teachers needed by 2015
• Continuing decline in the cost of computer hardware
• Potential for Democrat led Executive and Legislative branches of the US government
• A major rise in innovative philanthropic/social entrepreneurship engagement in K-12 education

Education is on the road to change and improvement and at the center of that change and improvement is none other than teachers. PlansForUs is happy to be working on the platform that can help teachers. I hope this has provided some insight as to why in the world we have made the choice to be a K-12 education start up company….a sector that has brought down many a talented (and I’m a poli sci major) entrepreneur.

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.

So as some of you may know Yahoo has been working on a tool for teachers for a little bit now. As many more of you know Yahoo is a big, heavy duty, Internet company whose homepage delivers a ridiculous amount of traffic to those sites and links that have the good fortune of being on that page.

Yahoo presented its Yahoo Teachers tool at the recent TechCrunch40 and according to the folks of TechCrunch it was a pretty neat product for teachers. They even introduced a new feature called Gobbler which sucks content from the web into your lesson plan.

The net net for PlansForUs is that we took notice, but the proof is in the pudding, and that pudding won’t come out till 4th quarter or early 2008. I also still wonder why everyone wants to add so much stuff on to these apps. I think that simplicity may still rule the day, at least that’s Google’s lesson to us. The net net for teachers is that this is great as building lessons efficiently and increasing the fun your students are having in the classroom is great. Competition also brings out the best in everyone, so expect PlansForUs to continue to work our butts off to make you love us more than Yahoo.
Back to work.

I must admit that this entry is a little disjointed, but read on for a few choice nuggets.

PlansForUs was founded on this statement “Creation through Collaboration”

It is the simple statement that we think encapsulates all that we intend to do at PlansForUs. I was reading a piece by Jay Matthews on the happenings at the KIPP School Summit and was enjoying his description of the collegial and collaborative atmosphere that KIPP was creating between its 57 schools and then was walloped by these excerpts:

…All the speeches, all the panels, all the training sessions were about getting better. The most overcrowded rooms had KIPP teachers running the sessions. It was standing room only at a day-long presentation by the World Class Writing Project…The three instructors gave a sample from a seventh-grade KIPP student’s essay on the Elie Wiesel book “Night”…They compared this to a sample of a private school 9th-grader’s essay on the Robert Frost poem “Design”…They asked the assembled KIPP teachers if the KIPP student was really just two years away from reaching the level of the private school student…But most of the audience agreed that if that was going to happen, they had to do a much better job teaching critical thinking, sophisticated syntax and vocabulary and all the other tools their student would need.

So that is the setup. You can read the article to catch the details, but suffice to say the talented KIPP 7th grader has a long way to go to be as prepared as that private school 9th grader. However, the really interesting part comes here:

Unafraid of stomping on KIPP icons, Witney gave a short sample lesson that was almost a parody of KIPP’s fondness for movement and excitement in learning…Then Dolan taught the same lesson in a less physical, more nuanced way, and many in the room indicated he was showing them the way they all had to go.

KIPP has made a name for itself by outperforming many of its peer schools through its rigorous curriculum and according to this piece, refusal to accept that best practices are indeed best practices. The luxury that KIPP has is that it is a self-contained organization of 57 schools that can bounce ideas off of itself at the KIPP Summit.

We have a number of KIPP teachers in PlansForUs and I look forward to seeing their work on PlansForUs. However, I also want PlansForUs to be like a Digital KIPP Summit for those teachers who don’t have access to KIPP’s organization. Every one of you is having an impact on students everyday. Sometimes you teach a lousy lesson that doesn’t connect and students are bored…and you learn from that experience and tweak your lesson to improve it. Some of you are riding a string of great lessons that are really engaging your students; seems like Dan Meyer is having a great run. The point is everyone of you is contributing, but unlike the structure of KIPP, you are not able to collaborate and learn from one another. PlansForUs, admittedly still a few features short of replicating the KIPP experience digitally, is focused on enabling to simply share information and plans that through the power of social networking and community connectivity can approximate these summits.

Summit’s are great, but we are very busy people and can only go to summit’s once or twice a year. Digital Summit’s are accessible to you whenever you are ready, so join PlansForUs, write your lesson here (good, bad or indifferent) and let the community come together and learn from one another.

For those of you with really heavily formatted lessons, we will continue to improve our word processing capability, but please share your ideas, since humans are really efficient at scanning text (see Google).

The answer to what digital collaboration looks like…PlansForUs.

Class Struggle is a column written by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post. Reading Jay reinforces my original plan to sell our free service to teachers and let teachers sell to other teachers, rather than sell PlansForUs to administrations and have it filter down by mandate.

A recent Jay Matthews post produced the following distillation of his favorite passage from the book “Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade“. A book which I am picking up on my way home today.

“Passing through the gym, where kindergartners wafted a colorful parachute in the air and scampered under it in turns, Leone said of the teacher, ‘I can’t see his goal.’ In prekindergarten, where Leone saw not only ’sight words’ like is and and but also the MSA scores displayed on the wall, she said, ‘I love the way these are all posted.’ In fifth grade she was dismayed to find Mrs. Williams’s students sitting at their desks reading books while others finished a test. She encouraged McKnight to come up with a school-wide protocol for spending time after completing a test, one that didn’t include free reading.”

PlansForUs posits that teaching is contextual to a classroom and that while there can be certain universals, the means by which teachers deliver these universals should be at the teachers discretion. With that said, Leone’s ideas could have merit if properly expressed.

Best of luck to all of you teachers in the coming years and please join the growing community of teachers collaborating at PlansForUs.

So, as you may imagine I read an awful lot about educational technology. The fact of the matter is there is a lot to read, but I am utterly despondent by the massive administrative clutter that obscures the central issue: teaching kids by engaging them in the classroom. That theme comes up again and again with the teachers I speak with about what matters most to them. This is obscured by certain administrative mandates–but at PlansForUs this is not obscured. We are about simplifying and streamlining collaborative lesson planning.

I found this piece recently entitled “The transformation of educational publishing: the emergence and growth of a teacher-centered, learning-object environment”. It was written in 2002 and is essentially a puff piece for a company called OnCourse. This particular quote got to me:

Provide exchange services–Extensive exchange forums to make collections, supported by turnkey lesson plans, that allow school, district, regional, and national peer sharing across education resources. Exchanges require a quality control review system and an extensive rights management and tracking system (mentioned above) in order to consistently audit usage among all educator/consumers who offer collections across the school network. Exchanges promote a “Build Once–Use Many” environment to create and exchange teacher-created resources contextualized to actual classroom conditions.

Now OnCourse may be a great company and some of the user testaments seem to be really excited about the program. It sounds like a great program in how it synthesizes all of the required formats into a lesson plan. It acknowledges that you do not want to repeat work, but no teaching strategy is universally good. Every strategy is contextualized to a single classroom, not just actual classroom conditions.

Come on. Teaching, while it no doubt has certain requirements, is about connecting ideas to students. In fact a classroom is composed of multiple students with varied learning styles. A lesson planning system, installed by Oracle, costing $20,000-$60,000 a year and consisting of a cascading series of drop down menus does not inspire a student and it certainly will not inspire a teacher.

PlansForUs is a growing community of educators. This community turns a basic web word processor into a powerful idea connector. That’s it. We are not planning to add anything to our product that doesn’t make finding good ideas easier. We do not have a huge number of options. We are an idea exchange tuned to support teachers. Join us and spread the word. There are 3,500,000 K-12 in the US, 8 million K-12 teachers in english speaking countries and 65 million K-12 educators worldwide. There are myriad connections between many of you, PlansForUs is a platform to find them.

PlansForUs aims to get as many of these teachers on board as possible. Does that mean PlansForUs will be immensely successful? Yes it does. But imagine what a positive force we can be if we turn our earnings into funding for teacher driven causes. Teachers change the world. PlansForUs provides an opportunity to aggregate and intensify your world changing voice.

In today’s WSJ is an editorial entitled “Not By Geeks Alone” about the need to maintain a liberal arts education in our K-12 schools. It is premised on the fact that there is a huge push by the US Government to bolster our competitiveness with Asian countries in the subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Consequently there has been overwhelming support for the America Competes Act which will focus on funding those programs and institutions that show MEASURABLE success at increasing our STEM aptitudes.

The authors acknowledge that increasing our STEM aptitudes will have positive benefits, as our country will most likely close the gap with our Asian competitors in these aptitudes. The question they pose is an interesting one: What is the net effect of deemphasizing liberal arts?

As someone who graduated with an economics minor and has been enjoying Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics over the past week, I am hyper aware of the laws of scarce resources. If we spend more time on STEM subjects and rigorous testing, we will have to take time away from our study of liberal arts courses. Like the authors I believe that the ongoing success of our economy rests not only with our ability to be technically proficient, but with our ability to discover non-linear economic activities. Apple, Google, Sam Adams, Starbucks…PlansForUs. America’s success derives from those who seek solutions to problems that have non-linear economic outcomes. The skills required to identify those outcomes are described by the authors as “…creativity, versatility, imagination, restlessness, energy, ambition and problem-solving prowess.”

An engineer can have these skills, but only if that engineer spent some time thinking non-linearly. Maybe it was a class on Greek Comedies or on the Rise and Fall of the Qing Dynasty, but one must be intellectually flexible enough to absorb the huge amounts of data input that our world is constantly creating. We will never match up to countries like China and India on a pure technical basis. Sheer numbers make the probability of our success impossible. The way to maintain the success of the US amidst world competition is to generate non-linear economic thinking. Solve a problem that only you have perceived and then get funded by the incredibly flexible market system that we have constructed. Have your company destroyed by an upstart and do it again. This is the reality of our global markets, we no longer have any more access then any other country, therefore we cannot engage in an intellectual arms race.

Competitiveness, technical understanding, technical skills are important…hugely important. Now overlay that with the liberal values described by the authors above and lets keep cranking.Well rounded students are our best bet at success, so lets stop trying to churn out cogs of consistent shapes and sizes…We may all be cogs, but there is no reason that our myriad sizes and shapes can’t work together in a most harmonic way.

By the way, China is feeling like they need to bolster their liberal arts education. If you have NY Times Select (worst idea ever, glad it is being removed) look up the article “Re-Education“.

What started with the intent of being a comment to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s post on “It Is Still About the Learning…” has now turned into a full post of my own. The numerous blog posts and comments that Sheryl highlighted got me thinking and wondering whether teachers are more apprehensive toward technology than any other group of professionals? And, if so, why? I think there are two aspects to this topic: 1) teachers using technology for their own use and 2) teachers incorporating technology into the course material they teach. Number 2, although not always, could be a natural progression from number 1.

Problems with the adoption of a new product or new piece of technology are not unique to the teaching community. From my experience, a majority of people feel as though they lack the necessary and desired amount of time it takes to become comfortable with a new technology. It was a common complaint that I heard while working with support teams for a couple different credit card processing companies in the past (and these were teams of people dealing with complex software everyday). However, I think, as a software developer, that the technology needs to be more intuitive - especially in the education industry. It is completely unrealistic to place software in the hands of a teacher and expect them (during their off hours) to figure out how to derive value from its use unless it is intuitive enough to require nominal to no training. That same software should also have a clear, positive result from its use - that is, it should either produce enjoyment from its use or produce a higher quality of work in the same or less amount of time.

I had the unfortunate experience of watching my fiance go through a 3 day training seminar on how to use a new IEP management system her school was deploying this past fall. She and her fellow resource teachers were instructed on which error messages they should ignore and how to properly interpret the different status messages. This was absurd! And, it’s no wonder that some of the teachers refuse to use it. Technology must serve a visible purpose if you ever expect non-techies (for the lack of a better word) to naturally adopt to it. When easy-to-use, productive technology becomes the norm rather than the exception, you will see more teachers willingly (and eagerly) use and promote it. Once this happens, it becomes a natural progression for technology to be incorporated into the daily lessons they teach.

There are early adopters in all aspects of life, and the active teachers in the blogosphere are those people. They are more willing to deal with buggy software; more willing to spend a weekend learning how to install widgets on their blog; more willing to read a manual and figure something out on their own. This, in my opinion, is as much related to one’s personality as it is to the generation in which you were raised. Rather than focusing a school’s hopes and efforts on new teachers or on mid-career teachers, why not place it in the teachers who have shown a propensity for being an early adopter? Why not place it in the teachers who are highly respected by their peers and tend to have their actions followed? These are the people who will help force the technology to evolve into a usable tool for the rest of the teaching community. These are the people who will push the envelope and help create a more effective and efficient educational system. These are the people that PlansForUs would love to talk to while we try our best to release an intuitive, easy-to-use, productive utility for the teaching community.

Let me know if you think I am way off base here. Not being a teacher, and not working on a daily basis in a school setting, it’s quite possible that there is a dynamic to the situation that I’m just not aware of…

Will we lose the collected wisdom of retiring teachers?

Many teachers will be retiring over the next 10 years. In fact, of the ~4 million teachers teaching now, nearly half are over the age of 50. Check out the National Center for Education Statistics for this info and a mountain of other interesting stats; I can assure you, the PlansForUs team is combing through these stats right now. While the impact, as Brett Pawlowski points out, of the changing demographics of teaching will be significant, the PlansForUs team is concerned about losing the amazing accumulation of knowledge that is bound up in our retiring teachers.

PlansForUs is the solution for capturing this knowledge. At PlansForUs, the knowledge becomes evergreen the minute that the ideas, lesson plans and feedback are entered into the system. While styles of teaching evolve, the essential knowledge gained through 30 years of experience is captured and passed on to generations to come. (If any teachers need help moving this knowledge from their hard drives, either computer or brain, please contact us, we would love to help you make this content available.)

PlansForUs is the place for teachers to come, to plan, to learn and to share their collective experience. It is a place where an idea can impact a classroom a world away or a door away. Education is our most important cultural asset, lets make sure that nothing is lost in this demographic transformation occurring in teaching.

Speak to you soon.

Nicole, my fiance and member of the Resource Department at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, brought home a letter she had received during her latest weekly staff meeting. It was from Susan Carter, a high school teacher in California for 33 years, who was spreading the word about a teacher’s inability to receive social security in some states simply because he or she was a teacher.

When my husband died in April of 2006, I contacted Social Security to find out how to proceed to obtain his social security. My husband contributed to SSI for forty years. The woman with whom I spoke told me I would be receiving fourteen hundred plus dollars a month. As we spoke, I shared with her that I was a teacher. She said, “You’re a teacher?” When I responded in the affirmative she told me I would be getting nothing.

Apparently, there are two federal laws that make this possible: 1) the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and 2) the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) under Title II of the Social Security Act. Mrs. Carter is trying to bring attention to this unbelievable situation by spreading the word about it to anybody and everybody she can. Her letter, the one Nicole brought home, was sent to the National Education Association (NEA), so, rather than doing an injustice to her work and effort by paraphrasing the letter, please take the time to read it yourself. As you will see, she already has Senator Dianne Feinstein and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s support but needs more.

After you read what she has to say, and if you feel the same as she, please take the time to place a phone call and show your support. Call Senator Baucus (D-Montana), Finance Committee chair at 202-224-2651 or Senator Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Finance Committee at 202-224-3744 and tell them you support S.206.