(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Don Soifer has a very interesting piece on how the Yuma Elementary District is going all in on personalized learning. Yuma of course is also the home of Carpe Diem, so the district is getting in on this trend. This bears watching. The reason you get to do something other than subsistence farming is because people figured out how to leverage technology in order to improve the productivity of farmers. It sure would be helpful if someone figured out how to do something similar in education-especially in Arizona.
Arizona is a relatively poor state with an unusually small working age population and a vise that looks to tighten in future years. Having lots of people too young to work or else on fixed incomes is not a recipe for lavishing money on schools, but it just might make pretty good primordial soup for innovation. We have public school teacher shortages, which starts with the fact that only 19% of the public school Class of 2006 earned any kind of BA degree in six years.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 