If Silicon Valley is to become the Las Vegas of Innovation it has to improve the local public schools

Beware, look very very carefully when Corporate America starts its
harangues about the "failure" of U.S. schools and how the "education
system is broken," and how educational vouchers and standardized
testing are the prime remedies.
Look closely, and you'll find that the business class actually
wants to sow widespread and severe doubt about public schools so that
this institution will become easier to dismantle and privatize, to
the benefit of the corporations (like Cisco) that supply the kind of
technology and schooling services that would be in greater demand.
Privatized schools would be restructured, too, employing a few well-
educated managers who'd oversee large ranks of less-trained
associates (with certificates from Teach for America, no doubt) who
could be paid much less than what fully-trained teachers earn today.
The corporate elites also want to school the bulk of children as
cheaply as possible, precisely for the kind of unthinking, rote-
driven, repetitive, and uncreative jobs that Corporate America has in
mind for the future. This crowd's emphasis is not on fostering
independent thinking or "well-rounded" children, not on critical
thinking at all. Instead, its goal is to create a mass of workers
ready and willing to put up with the crappy jobs that Corp. America
will have to offer them as it marches off to battle in the
"globalized marketplace of the future."
The spearhead of this disastrous scheme, naturally, is Bush's No
Child Left Behind act, which calls for endless "high-stakes" testing.
But the hidden agenda of this scheme is to make more and more schools
appear as failing, no matter how hard they try, and thereby open the
doors to massive and massively undemocratic change.

There is nothing wrong with U.S. schools that fuller funding and
more and sincerer attention from government and communities could not
fix. Children are not stupid: They see full well how poorly this
society pays its teachers, how badly the largest (aka urban) schools
are maintained (leaky roofs, wrecked bathrooms, dangerous hallways),
and what awful jobs are available to even college graduates, and so,
children don't take school that seriously. They see, too, that the
main place to get a real education - the kind that opens doors to
well-paying jobs, for instance - is to be had mainly in private
schools, safe from government testing and safe from poor colored people.

For a very disturbing essay about this situation, I would highly
recommend Jonathan Kozol's piece in the current Harper's Magazine. He
shows that racial apartheid is now in full force within America's
schools and that this is laying the groundwork for some very bad
times ahead.

And for a more radical and revealing look at the myth of education,
run, don't walk, to read Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling Society.

John you make some great points and the whole philosopy(ies) of education seem very numerous. I know nothing about education, in any trained manner. I am a parent and have two kids in two excellent public schools--but that is rare.

As a parent I saw how much parents could do when they became involved with their school. If we can tighten that connection/communication between the schools and their students/relatives/employers it can only help.

A Craigslist type thing centered around each school, or school district would be simple and tremendously effective and extremely cheap. [hey, Craig are you listening..? ;-)

There are a ton of problems to fix but I think something as simple as this could be very effective at helping schools do what they need to do.

Without waiting for government or outside reform, let our communities become involved to the fullest extent that our innovative technologies allow them to and within the current school framework and regulations.

Hey Tom,
I would question how wonderful the public schools your kids attend really are - I know, since my son and your daughter were in the same class last year! That school failed to pass a parcel tax and this year they are cutting in-class music and art, and band and choir are only half funded.

Certainly the problem is money, but that is really only half the problem. The other half is one-size-fits-all, standards-based, least common denominator, centralized administration. What schools could learn from Silicon Valley is ... decentralization. Separate pieces loosely joined. More engineers (teachers) and fewer managers (administrators). You can't create innovation from the top. Etc.

On the contrary, schools and school districts need freedom to innovate, need to meet the needs of each individual kid, need to provide teachers a solid framework and then allow them to figure out what works, need to look more at teacher evaluations than standardized tests, need to teach how to learn more than what to learn, need to integrate the arts with English and math. Responsibility only comes with authority.

Sorry to say I agree with Tom's assessment of the public school situation, but I fear that this is not new and although well meaning people have been sounding off on the topic since I moved to the Bay Area in 1988 (newly married and childless) nothing has changed. So in 2003 my wife and I with 2 elementary age kids in tow, left the Bay area, schools and housing were the drivers.

When good Los Altos friends sold and moved to Los Altos Hills for good schools it confirmed that the real estate/education/lifestyle value is just not there. ..and we are not the only to leave the Bay Area all together, taking our tech talents elsewhere.