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Questions:

How can we allow the students who would benefit from a more self-regulated education to go at their own speed without putting other students at a disadvantage?

What kind of roles do our schools play in developing civil society, democracy, or the future workforce, or in reproducing inequalities?

What extra tasks are urban schools saddled with and how can we better equip these schools to deal with these tasks?

Why did inner city communities during the 1930s-50s adopt the idea that education matters? How is a child's educational path affected when success in school is discouraged by peers or at odds with the child's identity?

How can we toy with the roles of market competition and government support to encourage "distributed, open and flourishing educational ecologies"?

Are "market forces" really so simple? What detrimental effects does switching schools have on students? When and why do parents not act in their (genetic) self-interest? How does the social capital of the parents (i.e. knowing how to lean on school administration) affect the educational prospects of the child?

In what ways does the current educational system exhibit historical/transitional stickiness? In what ways is it "suited for an uniform agrarian society, not the fast-moving 21st Century, Internet, globalization, diversity"?

How can we change the government's role from market regulator to market catalyst, so that it "stimulates activity, innovation, and directs efforts rather than dictates them"?

"How could open source, cooperative strategies change the incentives and achievements within the educational system?"

How can educators and administrators better share practicies/programs/policies that work within the US and internationally?

Links to further reading:

Daniel Dennett on the importance of knowledge sharing and "pathfinding through the forests of information," from the EDGE 2006 questions

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#dennett

Roger Schank on why schools are bad for children, from the EDGE 2006 questions

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#schank

The Pressured Child : Helping Your Child Find Success in School and Life (Amazon)

http://tinyurl.com/8stq8

The Social Challenge - a good article from the America School Board Journal, describing the effects of poverty

http://www.asbj.com/specialreports/1203Special%20Reports/S3.html

Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform

http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327809jls0604_5;jsessionid

About the Land-Grant Colleges of the late 19th century

http://www.wvu.edu/~exten/about/land.htm

About the GI Bill of 1944

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1944gibill.html

Quotes from Cognitive Apprenticeship, Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989)

mathforum.org/~sarah/Discussion.Sessions/Collins.html

Wikipedia article on Cognitive Apprenticeship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_apprenticeship

Learning 2.0 Video Podcast

http://learning2.0.ottergroup.com/blog/_archives/2005/11/3/1339491.html

Pacoima Beautiful, a non-profit that addresses environmental health, educational, and political http://disenfranchisement in a distressed area north of LA

pacoimabeautiful.org/

http://kitode.typepad.com/photos/diagrams/pacoimabeautiful001.html

http://NYTimes article: Florida Supreme Court Blocks School Vouchers

www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/national/06florida.html

Department of Education: What Works Clearinghouse: collects, screens, and identifies studies of the effectiveness of educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies)

http://www.whatworks.ed.gov

RAND's Promising Practices Network: summaries of programs and practices that are proven to improve outcomes for children

http://www.promisingpractices.net/

Shame of the Nation: Jonathan Kozol documents the reappearance of separate and unequal schooling in our nation's educational system

WGBH Forum - http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=2004