To cultivate a conversation about the critical challenges facing American education, Black Enterprise partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to host Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, a symposium to be held May 15, 2013. Its goal is to draw upon the resources of top leaders in business, philanthropy, and education to help find solutions and resources to the education crisis. The symposium will analyze the application of technology within education and investigate new learning models to engage and improve the academic performance of K-12 students, as well as prepare them for post-secondary education.
To this end, we’ve invited a number of experts and entrepreneurs in the hi-tech industry who have a dedicated interest in expanding and implementing new technologies in classrooms to assist teachers, inspire students, and sustain parents. Omar Wasow, 42, who co-founded Black Planet in 1999, will moderate the conversation. Wasow became one of the first African Americans to develop a social tool to demystify technology and help plug the digital divide between blacks and whites. Since he left the organization in 2005, Wasow became particularly interested in the charter school movement and helped launch the Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School in 2003. This month he is finishing a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies along with an M.A. in Statistics and Government at Harvard University, and then he will start working as an assistant professor at Princeton in the Department of Politics.
In this Q&A leading up to the symposium, Wasow explains why he is passionate about education; gives advice for tech professionals who want to give back to schools in their communities, and tells teachers and school districts what they can learn from the hi-tech startup culture.
What inspired you to help launch a charter school?
Almost everyone in my family is an educator. When I was an entrepreneur, charter schools were an ideal way to marry my commitment to improving the quality of education for low-income kids with my interest in innovation and new ventures.
What type of effort and preparation did that take?
We’ve had a lot of ups and downs on the way to our current success. We applied three times to start our charter school before finally getting approved. After we were approved, we struggled to find an appropriate building and a great principal. After completing a major renovation of a very rundown building and finding our principal, we still needed to get the test scores of our kids up to a high enough level so that our school could be renewed after five years. It’s been a tough journey but well worth it.
In what ways do you think technology and social media should intersect with education in the classroom?
In almost every educational setting, student ability varies greatly. This diversity of ability makes it very hard for any one teacher to give appropriately targeted instruction to everyone in a class. Well designed computer-based educational software allows highly personalized instruction to be delivered to each student. This allows each student to focus on the specific issues and challenges he or she faces and makes learning more engaging. Shifting from our one-size-fits-all model of education to a more personalized approach will be one of the most important ways tech transforms education.
What advice do you have for aspiring teachers and/or mid-career professionals who are currently working in the tech world but want to contribute in the classroom?
I’m on the board of a non-profit called Citizen Schools that allows professionals to offer apprenticeships to kids who might not otherwise get to see what it’s like to be a lawyer or a programmer or an engineer. I highly recommend volunteering for organizations like Citizen Schools that help students understand how their education can help them succeed in life. I also highly recommend getting involved with charter schools (either as a board member, volunteer, teacher or parent).
What can schools, principles, and teachers learn from the hi-tech startup culture?
High-tech startups are all about figuring out how innovation can improve the world. Education, by comparison, is mission driven but largely stagnant when it comes to innovation. Why the difference? For most of the last half-century, public education has essentially been a monopoly in which there are no rewards to improving outcomes and no penalties for failure. Part of the value of school choice is that it creates room for new entrants to do things differently and redefine what’s possible. As schools like KIPP, Achievement First and others show that low-income kids can perform at high levels, it raises the bar for everyone and we can all learn from their success. So the core lesson from the tech world is that it’s essential for public education to have laws that allow innovators to compete with the established players.