Homeland Offense: The Next Wave of Reform Legislation Author: Chris Whittle

In this Policy Perspectives paper, Chris Whittle, Edison Schools Founder and Chairman, calls for expanded education leadership and new investment at the federal level. Whittle’s proposed research and development agenda would focus on five initiatives in its first decade:

• Creation and launch of three major new K-12 school designs and the systems to support them. Each of these highly innovative designs would rank in size in the top 10 public school systems in the United States and would include school organization and staffing models, schedules, professional development programs, software applications, curriculum, and systems of support.
• Creation and launch of new principal universities. America must view the continued supply of school principals as a strategic issue. Principal universities would be the equivalent of the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, and West Point to our national well-being.
• Creation of five new teacher colleges. Companies, foundations, and universities would compete to create five new ground-breaking teacher colleges, strategically located across the country to showcase new designs for teacher education.
• Critical-components research. Whittle’s proposed agenda calls for research programs addressing critical areas of teaching and learning: student motivation, “no-failure-accepted” reading and math, science, core life skills, character education and discipline, and second language acquisition.
• Creation of school system “platforms.” Selected companies would be charged with developing an integrated suite of systems and services that a district could purchase independently but with the whole in mind. Components could include, for example, professional development, curriculum, assessment systems, information systems, school construction and maintenance, and staff recruitment.