The Role of Information Technology in Creating New Kinds of American High Schools

The United States has been focused on K-12 education reform for over two decades, with mixed results at best. One reason why progress has been slow is that the fundamental nature of pedagogy has largely been unchanged. Now in this decade, a small, but growing number of American high schools are using information technologies to redesign schools in fundamentally new ways.

In a new ITIF report, How IT Can Enable 21st Century Schools Tim McDonald and Ted Kolderie of the Education|Evolving, a Minnesota- based group of thought leaders in education reform discuss why the existing school reform movement has stalled, how information technology (including computers, software and communications) can enable the emergence of fundamentally new kinds of schools, particularly middle and high schools, and what the states and the federal government can do to drive the emergence of these new ways of educating our nation’s future generations.