I confess. I have a edu-man-crush on Cory Booker. I met the energetic and committed mayor of Newark years ago when he was just beginning his political quest (and what a quest it was/is). Now he is in a position of considerable influence among the Democratic party and I like how he is using it. Today, he put his name on the an LA Times editorial, “Better education through innovation” along with John Doerr and Ted Mitchell. The piece, I believe, is right on the money and it just may be the guiding star for the reauthroization of NCLB in 2009 and 2010.
Read it, let it sink and give me your thoughts on it.
“Historically, the federal government has constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the next president should take.The first is to expand innovation incentives and free them from the earmarks and conditions that have blunted past initiatives. Too many innovators spend too much time and energy raising money to stay afloat and expand. Adequate incentives, coupled with rigorous accountability, would remedy this. We should include two complementary programs, a “Grow What Works” fund and a fund to provide research and development money for promising early stage initiatives. Today, the federal government invests less than $1 billion annually in education innovation — a paltry 0.2% of our $500 billion total national spending on education. Compare that to the $28 billion we spend on biomedical innovation, a full 1% of our $2.6 trillion on healthcare.Beyond new funding, the federal government must use its influence over state and local policy to sweep away regulations that hamper innovative thinking, such as caps on the number of public charter schools allowed and excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and credentialed. In addition, it can use the power of the purse to direct competitive funds to states that embrace urgent innovation. States control 70% of public education funding; a push for state support of entrepreneurial education efforts could have a huge effect.”
