Month: June 2010

What you didn’t see on television

John Merrow media, Michelle Rhee, paul vallas

My colleagues and I have spent the past week or more putting the finishing touches on the last installment of our reporting from New Orleans and the Recovery School District there. In all, PBS NewsHour will have aired 12 segments about Paul Vallas and the RSD, and we also produced three other post-Katrina (pre-Vallas) segments. (Watch the full Paul Vallas series here.)

Paul Vallas in New OrleansThat’s 15 segments, each 8-10 minutes in length, a total of 2 hours of television, roughly. You might be interested to know what went into creating those two hours. Each piece generally entailed three days of shooting, perhaps 6 hours of videotape each day. That 6 (hours) X 3 (days) X 15 (segments) = 270 hours in all.

Our monumental task–15 times over–was to then take that raw material and edit and shape it into a short segment that would tell some part of the story of the effort to transform what was easily one of the worst school districts in the nation.

We produced more than our reports for PBS NewsHour: Each piece was accompanied by as many as four podcasts, usually longer interviews with Vallas, State Superintendent Paul Pastorek, various Teach for America teachers, parents, and so on. (Listen to the podcasts here.)

We’ve been doing the same job in Washington, DC, chronicling the efforts of Michelle Rhee to reform the schools there. We’ve made as many trips, shot as many hours of video, and spent as many weeks editing. We’ll present our final chapter from that city later this summer.

Did we get it right? Continue reading →

Game-changing innovation

John Merrow innovation, technology

Those of you who look at these posts with any regularity know that innovation is an interest of mine. I’m a fan of Clay Christensen’s observations about innovation being far more likely to succeed on the margins (where few are paying attention), but these days the margins in education are wide—because only math and English matter to the bean counters!

Innovation is education’s only hope. Even if more stimulus dollars become available, that will only put off the day of reckoning, unless educators wake up and act.

Happily, some are. Here are three examples. Continue reading →

Thinking out loud about remedial education

John Merrow innovation, teaching, technology

I’m in Seattle, where about 250 people, mostly grantees of the Gates Foundation, have gathered to talk about increasing the rate of success in higher education, especially among low-income students. My role is to lead a conversation with three individuals who represent three different slices of the industry: public community colleges, for-profit institutions, and on-line universities.

The Foundation was kind enough to suggest some opening questions, such as “How can we serve more low-income students better, faster and cheaper?” and “What do each of your institutions have to offer?” and “What will higher education look like 5-10 years from now?”

Maybe it’s because I am still medicated after my recent knee replacement surgery, but I find my mind wandering to other, perhaps more provocative questions. Continue reading →