During his recent keynote address to the State Educational Technology Directors Association, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent an unexpected shout out to the Open High School of Utah, spending about 30 seconds of his 30 minute talk praising the effectiveness and flexibility of our teaching model, and particularly emphasizing the individualized attention and personalized instruction our students receive. You can hear the Secretary talk about OHSU from approximately 14:45 – 15:20 in the video above.
This is a wonderful and very public affirmation of the OHSU approach (which is founded on open educational resources), and I hope it will spur additional interest in our model. Only 49 additional Open High Schools left to establish in the US… and then a few thousand or so throughout the world =)
Not sure Arne Duncan giving anything a shout out can be understood as necessarily a good thing. In my mind, his whole vision for K12 is more charter fodder and stricter idea of standards, testing, and even longer school days. What scares me a bit is the idea of alternatives that employ 24/7 learning, open licensed textbooks, etc., that reproduce the same factory models despite the promise of difference—and then the impulse to grow this model like global chain. It seems to me anything but education, but all about scale and imparting a global vision of what education needs to be that seems more about policy than pedagogy. I understand the two must be engaged in a dance, but the scooping up of these idea by the political machine of the DOE, which has gutted public education for the last 20 or 30 years cannot necessarily be understood as a win for education and these new opportunities—even if it is a win for the Open High School of Utah. And for that, congratulations.
Hi David.
I’m following your challenging adventure of OHSU from the beginning. From my …Italian point of view, what you’re doing is something astonishing!
Congratulations!!