Screw Business as Usual by Richard Branson

Author:Richard Branson [Branson, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2011-11-16T23:00:00+00:00

Another interesting frontier of opportunity is education. Long the domain of governments and some not-for profits, Jeff Skoll’s Participant film Waiting for Superman showed that there is a great need to reinvent educational systems. As the world has rapidly moved to new forms of information sharing, sadly education has often remained stagnant, but this is all changing through the vision of some inspiring entrepreneurs. An example from Waiting for Superman is KIPP, the successful network of public charter schools in the US. I am impressed by KIPP’s leadership model because KIPP school leaders are entrepreneurial and run social startups. First, KIPP identifies and recruits smart and passionate teachers who may not have had experience as principals but who have proven success at and dedication in the academic success of low-income students to start their own schools. These school leaders then participate in immersive hands-on residencies where they get direct leadership experience, are mentored by school leaders and learn from their mistakes. They then work with financial, real estate and operational teams to help them start and lead their own schools. KIPP schools start out small, adding one grade each year, and stay small and tight-knit so that everybody is accountable and so that the school leader has the freedom from bureaucracy to make decisions in the best interests of the children. It’s great to see that 88 per cent of KIPP’s students go on to college, twice the number from the average in New York City schools. These KIPP school leaders are true entrepreneurs – except that their bottom line is educating children to become adults who have meaningful, productive lives.

Jean sent me a link recently to a TED video with a simple note, ‘the education revolution starts here’. Intrigued, I watched the video and was totally inspired by what I saw. Sal Khan had created the world’s first free virtual school. Sal was a hedge fund manager who loved mathematics (I am always relieved that someone does) and played the role of tutor to his cousins. He started playing around with the idea that learning maths should be fun and made a few short videos – his cousins absolutely loved them. So he started to make more and load them up on YouTube.

Two thousand four hundred videos and seventy million and counting viewings later, the not-for-profit Khan Academy is well on its way to fulfilling Sal’s mission to democratise education, so that anyone, anywhere in the world, can have the same access to learning. Sal is now focused on partnering with schools so that teachers can use the videos in their lessons together with software that allows every student to progress at their own pace and use class time for interaction and projects. It’s a great way for young people to go at their own pace and, with the diagnostic tools that Sal has built, you can see where the child might be struggling. If Sal’s software and personal computers had been around when I was at Stowe who

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