WENDY KOPP: I mean I think all of us feel such urgency to stop this problem, and it is a true crisis, that we kind of lurch from one big idea to another. And the reality is that, you know, when we look at what is happening in the schools that are putting whole buildings full of kids on a path to graduate from college at the same levels as kids in much more privileged communities, when we really understand what’s happening there, what we realize is, this is about a group of people — teachers, school leaders — who have embraced the different mandate, and who are then pouring themselves into this work with the same level of energy, the same level of discipline that we would find in any high-performing organization where we’re trying to reach ambitious outcomes. And I think we tend to kind of try to oversimplify the problem. I mean if only it was as easy as pouring more funding into this.<\/p>\n
[KAI] RYSSDAL: You have actually a great example in the book. It’s in the chapter incidentally called “Silver Bullets and Silver Scapegoats.” You have this example, it’s this school of the future in Philadelphia. $62 million facility, technology provided by Microsoft, everything that the kids can want. And yet, on the Pennsylvania assessments, the school fails miserably.<\/p>\n