Dive Brief:
- Laurene Powell Jobs, education philanthropist and widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has announced a new $50 million initiative to rethink how high school education is conducted.
- The program, called XQ: The Super School Project, is currently soliciting proposals for innovative high schools; a panel of judges will decide which ideas to fund next fall.
- Powell Jobs has funded education initiatives in the past, including College Track, a program to support low-income high school students applying to and entering college.
Dive Insight:
The idea behind the project is to test out new ideas for an education system originally designed last century for a very different society. “There is a huge gap between what students want for their future and what their schools are offering,” Powell Jobs told the New York Times. “Once you have liberation from a system that was designed for the beginning of the century, there’s nobody to blame.”
She’s not the first tech philanthropist to encourage new approaches at the secondary level. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg poured millions into an ill-fated effort to turnaround Newark schools, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has backed small school initiatives for high schools with mixed success. But Powell Jobs struck a more cautious note than the Gateses on charter schools, indicating that she wasn’t sure if the schools considered would exist outside of the traditional public school system.
