Though I still have so much to learn, three fundamental truths are clear to me after a dozen years in education reform: 

1.)   There are no silver bullets capable of solving a problem as complex and devastating as the crisis in U.S. K-12 education.  How deep is this crisis?  A recent Annie E. Casey Foundation Report estimates that 50% of low-income 4^th graders are "below basic" in reading.

2.)   Despite truth # 1, popular sentiment in education reform swings to and from the latest, greatest silver bullet (basic math, whole language, smaller class sizes, etc.) with alarming frequency.  This trend is a serious impediment to real progress in education reform.

3.)   This "pendulum" of popular sentiment is currently swinging towards education technology as the next silver bullet to close the achievement gap in low-income schools.  This is a real cause for concern.

The last truth might strike you as odd coming from a guy who just joined an education technology company, but Innovations for Learning is not your typical education technology company.  Allow me to explain.

The increasingly pervasive idea that technology alone can fix public education in low-income communities where parents and other adults are often absent in--or detrimental to--the lives of children is misguided.  The reality is that the human resources in our communities and schools are more important than ever, and technology alone will never close the achievement gap between affluent and low-income schools.  Though I am absolutely thrilled by the prospect of what the technology of tomorrow might do to improve student learning--more specifically, the potential of developing adaptive learning platforms that are truly adaptive (they will know what kids know, what they don't know, and how they learn best)--my enthusiasm is grounded in my belief that the thoughtful combination of both humans and technology will ultimately do the most for students.

And while I can't claim it as a fundamental truth, I can honestly say that I believe that Innovations for Learning's Teacher Mate Handheld Computer System offers the most powerful marriage of people and technology presently available to low-income students, their teachers, schools, and families.

Though I'm told brevity is the key to blogging, for those who would care to read on for the back-story, I'm more than happy to elaborate.

My two years as a fifth grade teacher in a low-income community south of San Francisco were a humility contest.  My greatest challenge was figuring out how to effectively serve 24 students with 24 very different educational needs--one student at a kindergarten reading level, one student at an 7^th grade reading level, and 22 students who were somewhere in between.  The importance of differentiating instruction was constantly reinforced in the ten years that I led Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators (RISE), where we worked hard to recognize and retain teachers who were standouts early in their careers--teachers who knew what each of their students knew, what they didn't know, how they learned best, and differentiated their instruction accordingly.

That being said, Innovations for Learning's TeacherMate Handheld Computer System is a real step in the direction of our realizing the potential of both humans and technology to close the achievement gap in our low-income schools.  The Teacher Mate's powerful software delivers students early literacy and numeracy content that is tied to an individual teacher's curriculum and adjusted to an individual student's pace.  The TeacherMate provides teachers with numerous data points about student performance, which in turn allows that student's curriculum to be adjusted and revised, accordingly, and in real time.  All of this happens during the school week, alongside more traditional educational tools.  In this way, students that are ahead of the day's lesson can forge further ahead, while those that are behind have a powerful resource with which to signal their progress and get caught up.  The TeacherMate platform is currently available on a focused handheld device resembling a Nintendo Game Boy, and is coming soon to the Apple Operating System, Google's Android, and the devices of tomorrow.

In short, Innovations for Learning is harnessing technology's current capabilities to help teachers, tutors, and parents alike differentiate instruction--helping them know what kids know, what they don't know, and you guessed it, how they learn best. 

We at Innovations for Learning have a lot to learn ourselves, and like the students we serve, with a lot of hard work we will improve a great deal over time.  So please don't expect the TeacherMate or our next innovation to be perfect right away.  Doing so just might help send the pendulum back in the opposite direction towards another non-existent silver bullet.

But we need look no further than this blog for yet another powerful example of humans and technology.  To all the humans out there, thanks for reading [and I don't say that lightly given the (il)literacy statistic noted with truth #1 above] and thanks in advance for your thoughts. And to all the technology out there, thank you for delivering my message.

I am often asked, why is Innovations for Learning a nonprofit organization? It sells products and charges for services, why is it not a for-profit company?

Glad you asked, because I can utilize my 25 years of corporate law knowledge (now mostly lying fallow) to answer this.

The form of an enterprise should follow its capital needs. A mature business with enormous capital needs should be a public company. Public company shareholders require quarterly results that put these companies on the tightest of timetables. Companies with goals 3-5 years out can be venture-capital backed, for that is how long the VC will last before requiring a "liquidity event". Companies with multi-generation goals should be family-owned businesses. Nonprofits lie at the very end of this continuum: the "capital" it receives from grants is the most patient capital of all: it NEVER needs to be returned.

Why do education companies need such patient capital? Because the education marketplace is one of the most fragmented industries in America, and the sales cycles are brutally long. Almost all of the customers are themselves nonprofits, with various levels of bureaucracy impeding each sale.

For this reason, even the largest companies serving public education are often nonprofit. The larger for-proft companies have mostly merged or folded.

If we were for-profit, we would have likely folded by now as well. But we are here for the very long term, as are our customers, and as are our philanthropic funders. This alignment of our corporate form with our customers and funders fosters the sustainability we need to make long-term improvements in public education.

Innovations for Learning - "Tech Kids" from Innovations for Learning on Vimeo.

Administrators, funders, policy makers and educators often highlight the importance of "bridging the digital divide" and "making our students computer literate" to justify large technology expenditures in the schools.  Unquestionably, students need exposure to computers to prepare for the digital future, but how much technology needs to be purchased to accomplish this goal? 

And to what extent does focusing on this goal take away from the very real potential of integrating technology into the everyday curriculum of the classroom in service of basic literacy and math instruction?  

To highlight the concern that technology is underused in schools to improve basic education, I created this short video.  Please share with your friends and colleagues, and let me know what you think.

Apple Inc. is one of the most admired companies on the planet. Count me as one of its top admirers. What I admire most is the way Apple considers holistically the entire experience of owning and using a computer. Apple has painstakingly thought through the buying experience, the training experience, the support experience, the maintenance experience, and the user experience. By providing the hardware and the software, the services and the support, Apple can provide the consumer with a total experience that far surpasses the competition.

Somewhat ironically, given Apple's historical strength in the education market, Apple does not extend this holistic experience to the classroom. While Apple serves the adult consumer with Apple software (from the iLife and iWork suites), it does not serve the instructional needs of schools. Instead, Apple relies on third parties to develop applications that are used by students in schools.

It's too bad, because the same logic that extends to the adult consumer experience applies with even greater force to the young student experience. The appropriateness and effectiveness of the software is greatly influenced by the design of the hardware, as well as by the support and training.

Hence Innovations for Learning. We have one focus: early elementary classrooms. We have tailored our hardware, our software, our training, and our support to the unique needs of little hands and the short attention spans of students as well as to teachers' hectic schedules, their need for integrated curriculum, and their limited appetite for computer troubleshooting.

We are a service company, not a product company. Our service is designed to improve the entire teaching and learning experience through innovation that is intensively researched and developed and effectively implemented on a scalable basis.

When people remark that TeacherMates are the 'iPods of education', I consider them right in more ways than they know.

Open Learning Exchange (OLE) is committed to universal access to basic education by 2015.

Over one billion school-aged children in more than one hundred countries lack access to even the most essential learning opportunities. Enabling them to acquire at least a basic education is not charity - it is a universal right. Every child is entitled to an opportunity to develop an intellectually and economically strong life consistent with their abilities. This ultimately benefits all of us.

And it is now possible as never before. The global reach of the Internet, low-cost laptops and other information technologies, combined with a greater awareness of the importance of universal basic education, make it possible for this to be achieved by the UN Millennium Goal of 2015.

From time to time, a reporter, prospective funder, or administrator will come to one of our classrooms for a site visit. Most often, the first questions will be addressed to the teacher, but, after awhile, the interviewer will turn to the students. Invariably, the first question to the students is "what do you like about TeacherMate?" Expecting the answer to be "it's fun!" the interviewer is always surprised when the response is either "it helps me learn to read" or "it helps me with math."

Suspicious that perhaps the activities are not as fun as they first appear, the interviewer will then ask: "which do you like more, TeacherMate or Nintendo?" Nine times out of ten, the student chooses TeacherMate.

Disbelief on the part of the interviewer ensues.

Trust these children. Playing at home, they prefer Nintendo. But they know when it's time for pure fun and when it's time for fun to be subservient to learning. They know how little they learn with workbooks or by sitting in the back of a large class, when they are bored and acting out.

Our goal as educators is to tap into a child's natural desire to learn; to stoke it, and make it habitual before that desire is snuffed out by the hardships of growing up, hardships which are accentuated in low income communities. Technology can serve that goal, if the program designers keep that goal in the top of their minds.

The kindergarteners and first grade students in the schools I was providing technical support to were just as endearing, full of energy and desire to learn as any you would meet anywhere. So many of the teachers were hardworking, engaged, warm and truly inspirational, and some evinced a patience and wisdom that are wondrous and rare wherever they are found. But some teachers were struggling, and their struggles were inscribed on the culture of their classroom.

Most of the schools I would enter would show signs of parents and educators doing their best with limited resources to make their school bright, fun, and stimulating, and to demonstrate to their children the commitment that the community feels for them. But some buildings told a different story. Temporary structures in constant use for decades, starving for maintenance, lacking resources, tell a story of the appalling negligence of the wider society. I think that the lesson that some students learn from that story is that the people outside the neighborhood really do not care about us, because they are really not a part of our community.

Some of the five-year-olds who joked with me in the classrooms I visited may be entering college soon. If so it says great things about their individual characters, their parents and the commited adults who taught and encouraged them. I would never claim that any educational technology program would have more than a modest supportive role in such an achievement, but just maybe just a little bump, making reading just a little easier, school a little more fun, giving the teacher a little help, a little extra time, tilted the trajectory and maybe the oddity of some strange guy from somewhere who kept showing up in the classroom, fixing the computers and leaving them with new games, might plant the suspicion in a child's mind that the community is larger than they ever imagined.

The first school that used our reading software was in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, which in the early 90's had deteriorated into one of the nation's worst urban slums. Cabrini Green has since experienced a rebirth with new housing and new facilities, but, back then there was unfathomable decay in every direction.

I would drive to the school in the morning, observe the students using our software, and then head downtown to my law firm's offices in the Loop financial center. One day, as I was getting into my car in the Cabrini Green parking lot, a particularly sad song started playing on the radio. The mood of the song resonated with the depressing surroundings.

I drove out of the school parking lot and proceeded down LaSalle Street. In less than five minutes, I arrived at the office parking lot in my firm's gleaming high-rise tower. What struck me so forcefully was that the same song was still playing on the radio. Only now, the song completely was at odds with the vibrancy of the Loop environment I had entered.

While I always knew that the poverty of Cabrini Green was physically near the wealth of the Loop, traveling between both places in the duration of one short song created a cognitive dissonance that has never left my head.

How can we in America, a country founded on equality, abide by this vast disparity among neighbors? What role can - and should -- education play in eradicating this inequality?