Teachers, parents, schools, and accreditors

Thank you to everyone who has purchased copies of my new book, From Reopen to Reinvent. The response has been terrific, and I’m appreciative. As a reminder, you can buy copies at  Amazon (online here), Barnes & Noble (online here), and IndieBound (online here).

For those of you who have read and enjoyed it, I’d be very grateful if you’d post a review of the book at Amazon or from wherever you bought it (Goodreads works as well). Reviews help people learn about the book as they decide whether to buy it.

In that vein, there has been more media around the book that I’m excited to share.

Teacher Challenges and Opportunities

The recommendations from my book—specifically those around what parents want in their schools and how to redesign the role of the teacher—has implications for how schools and classrooms are designed. Education Market Association Essentials, a magazine for those suppliers that support school and classroom design, published a piece I authored, titled (Re)creating School for Every Child, that you can read here.

I also recommend checking out Irene Chen and Stephanie Banchero’s oped in Education Week titled, “It’s Time to Rethink the ‘One Teacher, One Classroom’ Model.”

In a similar vein of the challenges teachers are facing, Merlyn Mind just released a podcast episode in which I joined them as a guest. Merlyn Mind offers a digital assistant specifically for educators. You can check out the conversation, “The Opportunity at the Intersection of Innovation, Education, and Artificial Intelligence, a Conversation with Michael Horn,” here.

From Reopen to Reinvent Book Talk

Alison Griffin of Whiteboard Advisors also hosted a book discussion the day the book debuted. It was a robust conversation with several educators, which you can watch here. It also happened to be a lot of fun.

The Accreditation Bust

Switching from K–12 schools to higher education, a lot of advice tells students not to go to a college that isn’t accredited. On top of that, if you want federal financial aid to go to college, the institution you attend must be accredited or else it can’t receive federal financial aid.

Yet accreditation isn’t a good mark of quality.

My recent oped at the New York Sun delves into a recently released report from from Stig Leschly, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School and CEO of College101, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization, and Yazmin Guzman, a research and data analyst with College101. The study offers significant reasons to be doubtful of accreditation’s value to students.

You can read the article and more about their findings in my piece, “The Accreditation Bust,” here.

And while we’re on the topic of higher education, I caught up with my friend Jim Barrood on his podcast, “A Few Things with Jim Barrood.” We talked about how the pandemic has disrupted higher education; remote and hybrid learning; mental health; and future trends and forecasts. Check it out.

As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.