The latest Education Next includes a shortened version of a chapter Checker wrote last year for Fordham's A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. It's a creative piece about the progress schooling could make over the coming 15 years or so in remaking itself into a modern analytic, innovative, and adaptive enterprise, by making maximum use of data, information, and technology. It's intentionally a bit wishful, as it's designed to awake us--broadly speaking--from our slumber so that we might create the future it envisions for schools. In that sense, it's optimistic, and I think usefully so. (Especially if you agree with Checker's pessimistic analysis of the current state of education reform, as he described in National Affairs last week.)
Try Ed Next version for the quick version, and if you're intrigued, read the longer original here (pdf).
Update 12/22/09: Greatschools.net gets into the futurist spirit, with six "contrarian" predictions for schooling in the 2010s, including robot teachers and the metric system. Personally, I think we'll have extraterrestrial teachers before Americans are comfortable with centimeters, but it doesn't hurt to dream.
-Eric Osberg
