Happy browsing and reading!   

• A Good Time for the Truth, edited by Sun Yung Shin
• A Joyful Pause by Nicole Taylor
• A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-one Writers of Color on the New American South, edited by Cinelle Barnes
• A Promised Land by Barack Obama
• A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K–12 Education by Pedro Noguera and Federick Hess
• Acts of Faith (Daily Meditations for People of Color) by Iyanla Vanzant
• All Students Must Thrive by Patrick Camangian, Tyrone Caldwell Howard, Earl J. Edwards, Andrea C. Minkoff
• Always Running by Luis J Rodriguez
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
• Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
• Awakening the Natural Genius of Black Children by Amos N. Wilson
• Becoming by Michelle Obama
• Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and It’s Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude Jr.
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
• Better Allies: Everyday Actions to Create Inclusive, Engaging Workplaces by Karen Catlin
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Boundaries by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend, with accompanying workbook
• Brave, Not Perfect by Reshma Saujani
• Brown is the New White by Steve Phillips
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
• Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham
• Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola
• Charter Schools and Their Enemies by Thomas Sowell
• Churchill by Andrew Roberts
• Citizen by Claudia Rankine
• Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
• Color of Law
• Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism by Ann Todd Jealous
• Courageous Conversations About Race by Glenn E. Singleton
• Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy by Gholdy Muhammad
• Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
• Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
• Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva
• Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock
• Despite the Best Intentions by Amanda Lewis & John Diamond
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen
• Educated by Tara Westover
• Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 by James D Anderson
• Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
• Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
• Everyone Communicates, Few Connect by John C Maxwell
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Richard Harries, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Ola Rosling
• Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
• Four Winds by Kristin Hannah
• Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis Givens
• Gather by Octavia Raheem
• Ghosts in the Schoolyard by Eve L. Ewing
• Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman
• High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
• Home Body by Rupi Kaur
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
• How Children Succeed by Paul Tough
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
• How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
• Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
• Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg
• Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute
• Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading by Heifeta and Linsky
• Leapfrogging Inequality by Rebecca Winthrop
• Looking Like A Language, Sounding Like A Race by Jonathan Rosa
• Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall
• Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children by Marjorie Ingall
• Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
• Moral Leadership by Thomas Serviovanni
• My Grandmother’s Hands by Reesma Menakem
• Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen
• No Justice in the Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants by Alina Das
• Panther Baby by Jamal Joseph
• Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique Morris, EdD
• Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach
• Radio Golf by August Wilson
• Raising Free People by Akilah S. Richards
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
• Reading With Patrick by Michelle Kuo
• Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
• Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan
• See No Stranger by Valerie Kaur
• Shifting by Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden
• Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks
• Subtractive Schooling by Angela Valenzuela
• Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle
• Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
• Teaching with Fire by Sam M. Intrator
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Diana Chapman, Kaley Klemp, Jim Dethmer
• The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
• The Black Excellence Project: Bard Early College D.C. written by 9th and 10th grade students
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
• The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict by Thomas Hatch
• The Element by Sir Ken Robinson
• The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your Life by Helen Palmer
• The Essential Conversation by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot
• The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
• The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
• The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E Baptist
• The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Purpose through Nature, Ritual, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Some
• The Inequality Machine – How Colleges Divide Us by Paul Tough
• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Leavers by Lisa Ko
• The Lost Education of Horace Tate by Vanessa Siddle Walker
• The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G Woodson
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• The Power Within Me: The road back home to the real you by Dr. Annice E. Fisher
• The Price of the Ticket by James Baldwin
• The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs
• The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t by Nate Silver
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
• The Sum of Us by Heather McChee
• The Sun Does Shine: How I found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton
• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• The Universe Has Your Back by Gabrielle Bernstein
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
• The World According to Fannie Davis by Bridgett M. Davis
• There There by Tommy Orange
• Think Again by Adam Grant
• Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice by Dennis Kimbro, Napoleon Hill
• This America: A Case for the Nation by Jill Lepore
• Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Waking Up White by Debbie Irving
• We Got This by Cornelius Minor
• We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• We Want to Do More Than Survive by Bettina Love
• What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young
• What I Know For Sure by Oprah Winfrey
• Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele
• Who Do We Choose To Be? by Margaret Wheatley
• Who Gets In and Why by Selingo
• Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
• Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Tatum
• Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas
• Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby
• Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This will be an exception.

For the last eight years, Julie Landry Petersen has served as the scribe to our movement, as well as our supporter, muse, and conscience. She joined NewSchools in its toddlerhood, as a former high-tech reporter who would collect, sift, and make sense of the ideas of a fast-growing sector, while fighting a daily war against misplaced apostrophes. She’s done all that, making sure that the movement for entrepreneurial, results-oriented education reform could back up its results with intellectual heft. She has explained not just NewSchools, but a whole family of work and ideas, to the world. If you’ve ever read anything with our name on it, chances are she played an important role in shaping it. She built a whole communications world (including the blog you’re reading now), and helped translate dozens of individual organizations and efforts into a powerful network.

In the process, she became a trusted friend to everyone inside our walls, and to many, many people outside. She was never afraid to tell the truth: when ideas didn’t match, when arguments didn’t make sense, when the words weren’t right, and even when the formatting was lame or the slide was cluttered. Yet she matched her candor with support and kindness. People will tell you that after working with her, they didn’t just end up with better ideas; sometimes, they ended up better people.

Julie leaves us tomorrow. She and her family are moving to the sunny climes north of the foggy Bay, and she’s taking the opportunity to hang out her shingle as a communications consultant. She’ll be great at it, and for the many organizations on the cusp of developing a communications strategy, you should call before she’s fully booked.

Since we are an organization that supports entrepreneurs, we all ought to be delighted that Julie is becoming one herself. But it’s hard to deny that the excitement for her next step is mixed, for all of us around here, with a twinge of sadness that we won’t see her when we come in to work next week.

Julie, good luck, and don’t be a stranger.

Participants at NewSchools Summit got a sneak preview today of  three new documentary films that highlight both the failure of public schools to serve minority students and the efforts of visionary entrepreneurs to provide underserved children with a first rate education. Waiting for Superman, Teached and The Lottery are set to hit the big screen later this year and catapult public education into the public spotlight.  Today’s NewSchools Summit panel – including John Schreiber, who produced Superman, (as well as An Inconvenient Truth and Food, Inc) for Participant Media Co., Kelly Amis, a teacher turned film maker who has directed  the new documentary Teached, and Eric Alter  from SEED Charter Schools in Baltimore and Washington  DC, whose students and teachers appear in Superman,  discussed how documentaries can be leveraged to build momentum for education reform.

Moderator Kira Orange- Jones who now runs Teach for America in New Orleans spoke about her own experience with film: “I started using documentary film as a medium to give my students a voice, she recalled, “my students and their families were not being heard or represented in the media they were  watching every night at home.”   She invited the panel and the audience to explore the unique power of film to capture the experiences of children, families and school innovators and inspire the public to demand great teaching and great schools for all kids.

Schreiber gave us a mini preview of Waiting for Superman, the new documentary by Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim that won the Audience Award for documentary film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  Participant Media, says Schreiber, tries to “make films with meaning and use them to harness the power of the audience to make change.” “ Our goal,” he said “is to make education top of mind for a lot more people and hopefully, to motivate millions of people to take action based on the film,” as they did in the case of Inconvenient Truth.

Amis spoke about her motivation for making “Teached,” a documentary meant to focus attention on the poor quality of teaching to be found in far too many inner city schools. “It was hard for me to make an emotional connection with all the statistics we use to demonstrate the need for education reform,” said Amis. “Even educated people can’t fathom that there are teachers who aren’t teaching or teachers telling kids they’re stupid.  I wanted to tell those stories and I think film is the best way to do it.”

Eric Alter also talked about the emotional power of film in response to Orange-Jones’ question about what motivated him to participate in the production of Superman.  “There are many reasons we participated,” said Alter, “but the main reason is that people are going to see this film and they are going to fall in love with these kids and they are going to want good things happen to them—very very much. No one is going to walk out of theater who does not CARE and I think that will motivate them to do something.”

Film maker Madeleine Sackler whose film The Lottery will be released on June 8^th, made a surprise appearance at the session.  Her film, too, focuses on 4 inner city families and their efforts to overcome the obstacles to enrolling their children in top-rated charter schools.  Sackler made an eloquent plea to the audience to make sure the films are seen.  Echoing her words, John Schreiber summed up the film makers’ hopes that “if we can get these films in the market and get them seen,  then we’ll be able to create a national conversation about education reform that will take on a life of its own and last long after the films have left the theaters.”

Resolved: Entrepreneurs and Systems must Partner to Achieve Widespread Improvement

This afternoon, a spirited oxford-style debate took place to examine this resolution.  Under the direction of moderator Mashea Ashton, CEO of the Newark Charter School Fund, the panel examined whether partnerships with districts and states were necessary for the success of entrepreneurial education organizations and ideas.  Panelists discussed whether partnerships helped spur further innovation or whether they lead to reversion to the status quo.

Sitting on the relatively more comfortable side of the debate, the team in support of the resolution, not surprisingly, held the majority vote of the audience from the outset.  Nevertheless, in addition to compelling opening statements, John King, Co-Founder of Roxbury Prep Academy and Senior Deputy Commissioner for P-12 Education for the NY State Department of Education and Chris Gabrieli Co-Founder and Chairman of the Massachusetts 2020 Foundation were not above resorting to audience flattery to ensure their continued success.  They opened by outlining five key constraints entrepreneurs face if they attempt to achieve change without partnership: limited scale (only 3% of NY students are enrolled in charter schools), limited reach into rural districts, the challenge of sustainability, limited pace of growth relative to the great need, and fidelity to universal opportunity for children (all children means all children).

Arguing against the resolution, Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Ellen Moir, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the New Teacher Center, had a more challenging road.  Recognizing that the debate was an intellectual exercise and meant to challenge our thinking, not reflect the reality of Rick and Ellen’s daily work, they bravely tackled the more uncomfortable role of very honest and open discussion of the barriers to successful partnership.  These include the difficulties of working within a system which incents anti-entrepreneurial action, has an ever changing leadership roster and set of priorities, lacks buy in and ownership around implementation of innovations (together with a tremendous deficit of entrepreneurial minded human capital on the ground) and has few proof points of successful change to offer.   For those examples we might point to Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein’s work. They argued that they represented instances of takeover by entrepreneurs, not true partnership.

By the close of the session, Rick and Ellen successfully swayed a few people to their side (oops, did we really mean to do that?!).  Tom Boasberg, Superintendent of Denver Public Schools offered some additional commentary and urged entrepreneurs to serve the system as thought partners in building solutions and as active participants in changing and developing policy.   In the real world, the middle ground of today’s debate is where we spend our time.  What we came away with is the reminder of what drives all of our work: kids need adults to put them first.  As we’ve heard in other sessions today, we don’t have time to waste.  We have to move as quickly as we can to serve as many as we can.  The panel also left us with the reminder that we cannot ignore our failures.  Entrepreneurs and systems have both run bad schools.  We must be brutally honest with ourselves, wherever we sit in this movement, about the progress we’ve made and the road we have yet to travel.

There was a tangible excitement in the room this morning. The breakfast presented a networking opportunity for the 161 first-timers (1/4 of all Summit attendees!) to this year’s Summit, giving them the chance to meet with veterans in the education movement and share their own hopes and expectations about today”s event. Participants mingled over coffee, fresh fruit, and pastries, and shared with each other how they became involved in education.

After introducing herself and the NewSchools team, April asked everyone in the room to stand if they’d been involved in education for more than 3 years. Nearly everyone in the room stood up. Next, she asked those who have been involved in education for more than 5 years to remain standing. Only one or two sat down. Ten years? A handful of people took their seats. There’s a tremendous amount of experience in the room today.

Welcome to Summit 2010! You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nsvf. We’re using the hashtag #NSVF.

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – computer scientist Alan Kay

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were 21 and 22, respectively, when they started coding a new search engine. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was 20 when he launched the service from his Harvard dorm room. But the next generation of technology innovators may well be teenagers or even pre-teens, if you play out the trends teed up by the opening speakers at this morning’s NewSchools Community of Practice event. The event convenes NewSchools’ entire portfolio, plus a handful of other education entrepreneurs, on the day before the NewSchools Summit each year. This year’s topic is the use of technology in “super-charging” student achievement and accomplishing ambitious goals, in an era where costs have been driven down dramatically due to the rise of open-source software, cheaper hardware, and new ways of using putting sophisticated tools to work to improve student learning.

Harnessing the power of technology begins early – or should, according to Gary Knell of Sesame Workshop. He traced the venture’s roots from the early development of Sesame Street from “two television producers who didn’t know much about education” into an international learning phenomenon, and explained its future plans to expand into pre-K curriculum and its belief in the importance of media literacy to help kids cope with and manage the increasing amount of information they encounter.

By middle school, most students have been plunged knee-deep into technology, and two new experiments are trying to turn that development to their advantage by building rich learning environments that make smart use of technology and data. Inside the New York City Department of Education, Joel Rose has been creating School of One, an innovative approach to “mass customization” of student  learning that seeks to break out of the “one teacher, 20 kids in a box” model by matching vast troves of student data with heaps of tagged instructional content to deliver unique “playlists” to each student. Walking through a school day in the life of students Kofi and Maya, Quest to Learn founder (and former game designer) Katie Salen illustrated how this “school for digital kids” merges technology-specific learning with innovations like a custom social network called BeingMe that connects students’ school lives with their home lives (and feeds into teachers’ understanding of student needs and preferences – and their curriculum).

Ultimately, argued Milton Chen of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, it’s all part of making sure that school life comes closer to approximating real life – an idea that dates at least as far back as John Dewey in 1899.