The New Yorker staff writer was asked in a Time Q&A, “If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools — what would you do?”
There’s precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I’d think of myself as a venture capitalist, fund as many wacky and inventive ideas as I could, and closely monitor them to see how they worked.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that in inner-city schools, the thing they do best is sports. They do really, really well in sports. It’s not correct to say these schools are dysfunctional; they’re highly functional in certain areas. So I’ve always wondered about using the principles of sports in the classroom. Go same sex; do everything in teams; have teams compete with each other. I’d like to try that. I don’t know whether it will work, but it’s certainly worth a shot, and we could learn something really useful.
Crunchy Con and Romenesko quote Gladwell’s advice to aspiring journalists, “stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school.”
The Tipping Point, published in 2002, is #5 on the NYTimes Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list this week. Outliers, published late last year, is #7 on the Hardcover Nonfiction list.