You won’t find a team of people at The Next Wave that believe educational “drill and fill” is the answer to solving tomorrow’s problems. But, that’s what our schools have been reduced to. In poor urban districts, like Dayton’s, they bought chromebooks for a 1 to 1 initiative, but won’t let the kids take the computers home, won’t teach them to code, and won’t encourage media/content production, the keys to the future economy.
We want to see kids engaged in creative personal exploration, but the currently mandated educational standards are all modeled on tested proficiency of a “common core” which leaves little room for creativity. The district is plagued with funding issues, high teacher burnout/turnover and challenged to compete with charter schools.
Our Chief Creative Officer sits on the Technology steering committee, and has tried to push for open source tools, providing the infrastructure to bridge the “digital divide” and to make the district differentiate itself from charters. Somehow, the message just isn’t getting through, nor is the district capable of selling its strengths to the community, causing a loop of bad PR, lower housing values, lower property tax revenue, less resources, more bad PR.
We crafted a video giving an overview of our turnaround strategy- one that involves rethinking the school year, how we approach the common core, and how to sell our community on a different way to learn. We did this on our own dime. It started a conversation. We’ll see if the discussion moves forward.
